There is an image of Jews going tamely to slaughter in the Holocaust. And it is true, for various reasons, this did happen all too often. But some Jews stood up and fought, even at times defeating the Nazis at least for a time. Throughout the Nazi era, there were always Jews who stood up and fought, and we should not forget those fights.

Sobibor was one of the Nazi death camps. Not just a run of the mill, as it were, concentration camp. But a full out Death Camp whose sole purpose was the death of Jews.

Jews so thoroughly trashed the place that the Nazis did all they could to eliminate every memory of the place. I want to REMEMBER Sobibor, just as much as the Nazis want us all to forget it. In honor of the Jews who rebelled at Sobibor, here is a song written by someone in the Vilna Ghetto, inspired by the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, honoring those who stood up and fought. It is sung in this case by Paul Robeson, who does it full justice:

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Recently I got into an argument on Room 8 with a Holocaust denier who at least was willing to admit some aspects of the Holocaust happened, but denied that there ever were actual gas chambers and crematoria. Like arguing with Creationists, 9/11 Truthers and Global Warming deniers, arguing with Holocaust deniers is frustrating work...and never gets you very far. Yet I am the sort who cannot stand letting lies and misinformation stand unchallenged.

The misconception that concentration camps didn't have gas chambers, Stormfront holocaust denial aside, first arose because people expect all concentration camps to be the same. Since many concentration camps have no sign of gas chambers, people started to believe that none of them did. The gas chambers were part of the dedicated extermination camps where work was only secondary and extermination the primary role of the camp. Many concentration camps reversed that priority...death of the inmates was considered a good thing, but using them as slave labor was primary. Gas chambers were used at the extermination camps. These were mostly in the East in places like Poland, so the main US, UK and French military advances liberated mainly concentration camps where slave labor and oppression were the dominant themes while the Soviets liberated most of the extermination camps. Neo-Nazis often claim that Eisenhower, Churchill and de Gaulle never mentioned liberating gas chambers and claim that shows they didn't exist. This claim completely ignores that it was primarily the Soviet army that liberated the extermination camps that had gas chambers. So that Neo-Nazi claim is easily contradicted.

A breakdown of the main concentration camps and their primary purposes can be found here:
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/othercamps/index.html

The definitive book on Nazi Germany is the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. I recommend this book to ANYONE who wants to know just how and why Hitler's regime could come into existence. Shirer was a direct witness to some of the rise of Hitler and he describes the era in extreme detail, including the evolution of the concentration camps from mainly housing political prisoners to ultimately being part of the Final Solution, complete with dedicated extermination camps with gas chambers. Shirer's analysis used every scrap of evidence available at the time, meaning the one flaw in the book is that Soviet records were not available at the time, giving the Eastern Front a more sketchy coverage than what happened in the West and in Germany itself. But it still gives most of what you need to know about the policies towards the Jews. Even though I am up on my history of Nazi Germany I learned a lot from this book.

There are two main sources of evidence in any crime scene, and the gas chambers were, quite simply, massive crime scenes. Those types of evidence are eyewitness testimony and forensics. Good criminal cases are built up using both.  read more »

Many of us have been angry at Fox News for years for their constant comparisons between liberals and Nazis, a completely irresponsiible and stupid comparison...not to mention DEEPLY offensive to Jews and other groups who were targeted by Nazi genocide.

Now some of the top rabbis in America are finally fed up with Fox News and its offensive trivialization of the Holocaust. From the Washington Post:

A coalition of rabbis wants Fox News chief Roger Ailes and conservative host Glenn Beck to cut out all their talk about Nazis and the Holocaust...

The ad is signed by the heads of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements as well as Orthodox rabbis.

"We share a belief that the Holocaust, of course, can and should be discussed appropriately in the media. But that is not what we have seen at Fox News," says the ad, signed by hundreds of rabbis and placed by the Jewish Funds for Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group. Earlier this month, the group organized a letter-writing campaign asking Murdoch to remove Beck from the air.  read more »

Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. By sheer coincidence, or through some sort of subconscious trick, I just finished re-reading the book Voyage of the Damned, the story of the ship carrying Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in 1939 that was refused entry into Cuba or the United States and so most of the refugees were returned to Europe...mostly to their ultimate deaths in concentration camps. I want to mix in my thoughts on Voyage of the Damned with something I wrote last year on Yom HaShoah, and remind us all that "Never Again" has yet to be achieved and that we bear a responsibility to not fall into the same trap that people fell into in the 1930's and 1940's.

And the anti-immigration mood in the United States of the late 1930's bears a considerable resemblance to the anti-immigrant mood today, and Voyage of the Damned is as much a condemnation of the inaction of the United States as it is a condemnation of what was happening in Europe.

It is Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the time we remember the 11 million people (including he 5 million non-Jews too often left out of our remembrance) who were killed by the Nazis in WW II.  read more »

As I recently wrote, I will soon be visiting an area of Germany once known as Hesse-Darmstadt where my ancestors on my father's side came from.

By sheer co-incidence, while doing web searches about other subjects, I came across a website from the Technical University of Darmstadt with virtual reconstructions of Jewish synagogues that had been destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. This is particularly appropriate since today is Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). From their website:

Since 1995 synagogues that were destroyed by the Nazis in 1938 have been reconstructed on the computer in the Department CAD in Architecture at the Technical University of Darmstadt. The project stems from a student initiative in 1994, a year in which hostility towards foreigners and anti-Semitic commentaries noticeably increased. It was also the year of the arson attack on the synagogue in Lübeck.  read more »