Conservatives visit Auschwitz and Birkenau

Nadine Dorries MP has been blogging and taking pictures of her visit today with Baroness Warsi, Eric Ollerenshaw, Andrew Robathan MP, amongst others.

It was planned before the silly hype about such trips supposedly being called gimmicks. Here are some highlights from each post:

• "I am leaving now after 1.5hrs sleep and I will get back home at midnight. If anyone calls this a ‘jolly’ I will flatten them... I will be blogging live with photographs once I arrive. As living witnesses diminish in numbers, it is important that others learn and tell the story of that terrible place."
• Mother's letter: "I am taking you, Mirele, to the back entrance of dear, brave Hermann's grocery and the child rescuers will be waiting there for you and the thirty two other children under the age of three. They'll inject you with a sedative so you won't cry and then they'll slip off in the pre-dawn with you - my life, my love, out of this barbaric country to safety..."
• "The feeling which overwhelms you, as you walk through the gate of Camp 1, is the desire to leave. I'm finding it difficult to write as this place leaves you stunned. I didn't want to go into the gas chamber, but of course I had to, I had a choice."
• "The Nazis then destroyed the cemetery, which in itself was symbolic, as in Judaism death is regarded as part of the cycle of life. The Nazis then lined the streets with the gravestones. No Jews live here now. The cemetery is locked overnight, since two swastikas were painted on the cemetery walls."
• "They were asked which of their children were aged over 14 - a mother's first instinct was to keep all her children together, so that she could look after them. She would tell the guards that children as old as 15, 16 and even 17, were under 14. All children under 14 went straight from the train in through the doors of the chamber."
• "Birkenau is vast, cold, oppressive and eerie. I want to leave now and come home - I have never been anywhere so depressing."
• Is this necessary or relevant after 60 years? Anti-Semitism is on the increase, even in England, with attacks on Jewish cemeteries reported regularly - denial of the Holocaust has become an almost accepted academic position.

Comments

[Comstock]

Link doesn't work. Try cutting and pasting this into your browsers http://dorries.org.uk/Blog.aspx

seems to work for me.

[Malcolm Dunn]

'Denial of the holocaust has become an almost accepted acedemic position'. Really? Which acedemics? Other than David Irving who for many years has been regarded as a sick joke by historians I'm not aware of anyone. I hope you have sources for that statement Nadine.

[Editor]

Apologies. Link corrected.

[Tony Makara]

It would be apt to see a delegation from the Conservative party take part in a rememberence for the victims of the allied fire bombing of Dresen during world war two. This could be done with the CDU as a sign of Anglo/German friendship. Several times when watching England football matches I've heard idiots in the crowd singing songs about bomber Harris and the bombing of Dresden. This anti-German racism goes unchecked and is even deemed as acceptable by tabloid editors. Those who engage in such anti-German racism cannot claim this is motivated by WW2 because the current generation of Germans had nothing whatsoever to do with that war. While it is right that victims of genocide are remembered we must not forget that the Germans suffered an attrocity at Dresen. One that by any measure of warfare trangressed accepted standards of behaviour towards civilians. The tragedy of warfare is suffered by all nations.

[Veritas]

Look. We British did not create the Holocaust, we were instrumental in bringing about its ending. I get heartily sick of the way it gets rammed down our throats in this country as if there is something for which we should apologize. How about a recognition of what we did to end WW II and oppose dictatorship and tyranny. Such pathetic stunts as this to curry favour with a vociferous minority do the Conservative Party no credit.

[Yet Another Anon]

While it is right that victims of genocide are remembered we must not forget that the Germans suffered an attrocity at Dresen.
A lot of Germans died in the bombing of German cities and indeed a lot of Japanese died in bombings of Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki; they were not genocide or atrocities, they were perfectly justified in what was targeting of German and Japanese industry and striking a psychological blow to end the war. Indeed British and American POWs died in the bombing of Dresden too, kurt Vonnegutt's book Slaughterhouse Five was based on his experience as a POW in Dresden.

The German Baedecker bombings though were a deliberate attempt to destroy British heritage, the concentration camps had nothing much to do with war and most in the camps were non-combatants, they were about pursuing Nazi race and ethnic theories which killed 5 million Jews and 500,000 Roma and Sinti, also hundreds of thousands of Slavs - important to remember that it wasn't just Jews who the Nazis were trying to exterminate, also those Roma and Sinti who were considered to have been impure and Slavs who the Nazis considered racially subhuman, which was also the Japanese attitude towards the Chinese.

[Keith Bedson]

Tim,

Did you post this to make the pro-German lobby go into spasm again?

[David]

"We British did not create the Holocaust, we were instrumental in bringing about its ending. I get heartily sick of the way it gets rammed down our throats in this country as if there is something for which we should apologize"

We are all human beings. The Holocaust is a visible manifestation of just what civilised people are capable of in the right circumstances. Reducing it to British v German misses the point spectacularly.

[Tony Makara]

"pro-German lobby"

Keith Bedson, I find the anti-German sentiment in our country quite shocking, it can't be blamed on being a war prejudice either because the Italians and the Japanese do not suffer the same abuse as the Germans. People in our country forget that we stem from Anglo/Saxon roots, our language is principally Germanic as are our traditional festivals, although mixed with the Christian tradition. Why is there such bad feeling towards Germany? Isn't it time it stopped? When the Germans see the tabloid type abuse they receive they are very puzzled as to why such an immature attitude exists among the English.

Yet Another Anon, the firebombing of Dresden was a war crime, no matter how it is dressed up. The target are was civilian, was known to be civilian, and the desired effect was to inculcate terror among the German population. It was a war crime, just in the way that German raids on civilian areas in our country was a violation of the rules of combat. My point is that both countries should look to the suffering that both suffered and remember it. If such violations of warfare are not remembered the chance of them being repeated is more likely.

[Yet Another Anon]

The target are was civilian
The bombings of Dresden and other German and Japanese cities targeted port facilities, railway infrastructure, munitions factories, barracks, airports - a lot of people lived around such installations and got caught up in it. Most of the German bombing in allied countries similarily targeted such facilities, however many of the German raids targeted what they saw as culturally significant targets, there were heavy German losses and for strategic reasons they abandoned this and switched back to aimaing at mainly military targets.

There is no doubt that a lot of self-indulgent targeting of what were seen as culturally important buildings backfired on Nazi Germany. Affecting public morale of an enemy is an important part of war, if the UK was in a war in which nuclear weapons were deployed one aim is to terrorise an enemy into submission, in WWI in a situation in which Germany was largely holding position the war ended because of a civil war in Germany. Obviously a hope in 1944 and 1945 was that the war might come to an early end due to an uprising inside Germany.

[Joe James Broughton]

I agree, I think, with quite a lot of what Tony Makara says here (although not all of it).

It is unforunate that his really quite obsessive views on Capital Punishment and abortion (threads elsewhere) make it hard to see him as entirely rational any longer.

But I am a strong friend of Germany - and we have a good deal in common with them.

[Tony Makara]

Joe James Broughton, can two people ever completely see eye-to-eye on every subject? While we may not share similar views on other subject matter I'll gladly shake your hand, als ein ganz ausdrücklich Pfand der Freundschaft, if you are a strong friend of Germany. As I write this I'm listening to Deutschlandfunk, a station I've listened to more or less every day for the last thirty years or so. Although these days the luxury of high-speed broadband connection makes listening a lot easier than it was a few years age when I had to wait for the sky to go dark in order to get a rather inclement signal. Thank heavens for the boffins who invented the internet...I've read it was the brainchild of the pentagon!

[Alex Swanson]

We should certainly know about and remember the Holocaust. That's why on visits to Germany in past years, I personally have visited Belsen and Dachau.

We should also remember the victims of Stalinist atrocities, especially since the people responsible for them have not been brought to justice, and were defended by socialists in the West, including this country, just as the Castro regime is still being defended.

[SG]

"We British did not create the Holocaust, we were instrumental in bringing about its ending."

We should be proud that Britain and America ended the Holocaust. We should regret the fact that it took so long.

[Richard]

"Keith Bedson, I find the anti-German sentiment in our country quite shocking"

That may be so but you seem to take the typical left-liberal do-gooding position of "something must be done!" i.e. a state-backed remembrance day motivated by a desire to make people think like you. Personally I object to the government telling me how I should and shouldn't think. As far as I'm concerned it should defend me from foreign invasion and from criminals and otherwise leave me alone.

[David Gold]

I, too, have visited Auschwitz and share Nadine's emotions. Even though the camp was liberated so long ago the feeling of utter misery survives and hangs in the air in a way which only someone who has visited can truly understand. For me, the dark grey lake, coloured by bthe tonnes of human ashes which were poured into it from the ovens, is one of the most vivid memories of my visit.
I agree with some of the previous comments - the Nazi Holocaust is not the only major genocide and there are many other horrific events which should be rememebred and taught in schools. However, the Holocaust was a European campaign which came very close to our own shores. I think for that reason it will always remain in people's consciousness. Furthermore, the death camps were the end product of a campaign of hate and victimisation which was firmly established among 'ordinary' Germans in the early 1930s. it was not only the Nazi seniors or the German Army who carried these crimes out. Proof, if it is needed, that racism of a very low grade can quickly escalate to become a deep rooted culture.