Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "History on YouTube" channel.

Sad fate. She was both a butcher and a victims. She was pressed to do a job no one else wanted because she had lowest status and for that she got the severest punishment and was senteced to death. Trying to always escape from your past and feeling shame and guilt was probably more burdensome than the death sentence. I think of child soldiers in Africa and the teenagers who ran the concentration camp in Pol Pots Cambodia, they were bullied and peer pressured into torturing and killing people. And they feared that they also would become killed if they refused to participate in the barbarity. So are those children criminals or are they victims? I think they are both.
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Well they did not manage to hide all of the bodies. And they were caught barehanded in places like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen with dead bodies everywhere.
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That is partly the truth I think. However, I also think that the nazis was amateurs at the beginning. At first they did only do some small scale killings and used very ineffiecent methods. They killed handicapped people with morphine overdoses and poison gas stored in bottles and such. And hiding their crimes was not so difficult then. And nor did all the dead bodies in mass graves cause poisoning of the ground water. But as the nazis started to kill people by hundreds of thousands and millions.. then did things like this become a big problem. Even with excavators like at Treblinka do I think that it would in the end become a problem to find places dump all the dead bodies that did not lay too far away from the death camp. And the health of the nazi guards became threatened by the ground water that was being poisoned by thousands of dead bodies. And new methods of killing people had to be developed. Germany could not produce enough morphine for killing people when it was fighting a war and needed all morphine it could get to give german soldiers pain relief after they had been shot or had a leg blown off. And having rooms in mental hospitals rebuilt into gas chambers was ineffiecent and could not fill it with much people, and after people had died did it take much time for the gas to leave the room and the dead bodies had to be carried a long way. And once that had been done and the room had been cleaned up so the next group of unsuspecting victims could go in there... then had much time passed. The Germans realized that they needed new methods that was more effiecent. Most victims of the holocaust died in mass shootings like Babij jar. However this method wasted much ammunition that was needed in the war, and the nazi killers suffered from mental stress and alcoholism by having to do the awful job of killing innocent people day in and day out. So a new method where they did not have to see their victims in their eyes before killing them was developed. And the nazis solution was the gas chambers. By transporting people into the isolated forests in Poland could Europeans not know what happened to the jews. And the jews were unaware of that their train ride to Polands 6 death camps would be their end - so they did not pantic and desperatly tried resist the germans even if the odds were hopeless, and that made the job easier for the Germans to do their final solution. The specialized gas chambers also allowed people die in many hundreds at the same time. Pumping in gas from car engines or using insecticide powder was also much cheaper than using the old method of taking gas from glass bottles. And burning the bodies in ovens allowed to germans to hide their crimes as their were no longer any bodies and mass graves to hide. All that was left was ash - which the germans could dump into river or use as fertilizer to grow trees - like they did at Sobibor. And jewish slaves was forced to do all the awful job so that the nazis themselves were spared most of the psychologically painful work. Like carry out all the dead bodies from the gas chambers and burn the bodies. Or crushing all skeleton bones left from the cremation and make it into a powder that germans could spread out so that no one would find out about their crimes. So I think that the decision to go over to burning bodies, had mostly to do with the Germans step by step becoming better at killing people at an enormous scale through learning by doing.
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I guess that they returned to the ghetto to warn their own people about what was going on. Its also a place where they most likely would get help and somewhere to hide. After that was done, would I have tried to flee from the ghetto as fast as possible. Preferbly into the woods and into a neutral country. hiding with some family or in the forest would be plan B. Trying to get to the russians might be plan C. Die while fighting back against evil might be plan D.
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The Kremlin are repating the same stuff as the mid-century Germans did. They have definatly learned from history as they before the invasion had prepared lists of intellectuals and people in leading positions in Ukrainian society. And the military had been provided with crematorium trucks. Kremlin was even too lazy to come up with any intelligent new excuse for invading another country but just pulled out the same arguments as the man with the small mustasch and said "retake muh historical lands" and "protecting the opressed minority in another country that speaks the same language as us". And then was russian speaking towns like Mariupol, Charkiv, Odesa and others bombed into dust and rubble by the "liberators".
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Heydrich died in the middle of 1942 when Germany was at the height of her power and when the holocaust was in its most deadly episode 80% of the victims that died in the holocaust died in this year. So I do not believe in theory. Nor do I consider Heydrich a moderate, but rather a childish hateful antisemite that preferred the most brutal solution to the jewish question. He did however at first run into opposition. Some were upset that the war industry would suffer when Germany's best most experienced jewish workers did not get any exception from the list of people who would die - But Heydrich did not care. One nazi who wrote the Nuremberg laws and put much of his time in his life to put togheter the Nuremberg laws, found his life work torn apart in just a few minutes during the Wansee meeting. Heydrich did however not care about such details. Both jews and half-jews would be killed. Even jews who had served Germany bravely during war and distinguised themselves with medals would be killed. And so would also patriotic jews who had helped Germany with science and money in the past. Doctors, engineers, and scientists would all be killed. Even people who only partly had jewish blood would be killed on Heydrich orders. And it did not matter if someone had converted to another religion - they would be killed anyways. And it did not matter if someone was totally unreligious and saw themselves as Germans first and foremost - because to Heydrich theses were just jews anyways. Some other protests were also made. Some people advocated forced sterilization instead of mass killing, but Heydrich hated the idea and wanted to use gas chambers instead. And forcing people to move to Palestine or elsewhere was a halfassed plan that Heydrich now finally gave up on in 1942, when the jews in German occupied areas had grown by millions after all new lands conquered. And the war had made it impossible to put them all on a boat to Madagascar or Palestine. And no other country in the world wanted them. And just leaving the jews alone was not an option either from the radical nazis point of view. As the ghettos spread diseases due to poor hygiene and undernurished people that were easy victims for the spread of diseases. And the smuggling of food was also seem as a problem, because the nazis thorught that German soldiers and the German people better needed that food. And the growth of a black market was also seen as a problem by the nazi state. So I would say that Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann were among the worst radicals that participated in the Wansee conferance. While Wilhelm Stuckart, Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, and Roland Freisler looked more like moderates by contrast.
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@owensomers8572 I think that the nazis had come to more over to the idea that they would move the jews to the killing site, than doing the opposite and transport germans to the place they lived and then shot them. The germans wanted more secrecy in their killings, instead of having people taking photos and eating ice cream while massacres like Babij jar took place. So transporting people by train was essential from now onwards - which had been decided at the Wansee conferance in january earlier that year. And perhaps even earlier than that as some death camps had already been put to use before that conferance. So it would make sense to burn the bodies and clean up the mess after themselves. Many experimental methods was probably also used as this stage. It was not until say 1944 that the germans had finalized and perfected their killing methods with the creation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. But before then in 1942, was Germany trying everything it seemed. Progroms and lynching, starvation, working people to death, sterilzation experiments, gas vans, mass shootings, lethal injections, gas chambers and different types of gases, etc etc. So to me it makes sense that they tried the same thing with the disposal of bodies - they tried many methods. Pyres, cremation ovens, mass graves dug by the jewish victims themselves, excavators at Treblinka, bone crushers, dumping ashes into rivers, using ashes as fertilizer to grow birches etc etc. The nazis had not yet decided which method was most effiecent for their needs so they tried out different methods to see what did work and which did not work.
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The common red thread I see with men like Hitler, Milosevic and Putin are that they are ethno-nationalists and imperialists. They are not moderate patriots that loves their own country and are happy at that - like the Ukrainian people are. Nope. These guys are supremacists that thinks their own people are better than everyone else. They are inherently good by definition, which makes every action they make justified no matter how evil it is, or rather that is only just how they sees it. Everyone else sees these men are evil monsters and warmongers. They are willing to use war as a mean to redraw borders, and ethnic cleansing is just another means to an end as they sees it. For those who have studied history of ideas, I think its very appearant that these men are all stuck with ideas from the 1800s, when a country's only measurement of success was the size of the military and the land mass it conquered. Gobineaus silly ideas of race was copied by Hitler. And building colonies and empires was seen as a must, a country had to eat others or get eaten itself. And many Germans believed after world war 1 that they lost the war and could not develop as much economically as say USA, Britain and France because it lacked colonies. So conquering russia therefore became seen as necessary. And today are Putin seeing retaking the lands lost in World war 1 as important, and taking Ukraine is vital for russia if it wants to restore the Soviet union and remain a relevant world power. Or that is at least how Putin sees it. They seems to totally have ignored the fact that countries could become economic success stories even without having to occupy resource rich areas. Indeed post-war Japan have been able to trade to get all the resources it needs and become an extremely succesful country. Same goes for South Korea. Indeed Frederick the Greats Prussia could be another example of a country with few natural resources that succesfully became a rich economy with a strong manufacturing base. I think that nationalism is an ideology for good. I put it in the same camp as patriotism. I think that having the same culture is good for creating a healthy society that is held togheter, instead of being divided and filled with hatred. Having common values, traditions and laws and such are good things. That is what I mean when I talk about "culture", and not food, music, poetry, art, dances and such. Because of course can people eat pizza, kebab or noodles also here in Sweden if they like. But I happily keep values like gender equality and such and do not wanna replace such values with anything else. With that said, could my nationalism be described as "civic nationalism" that is based on values. And everyone regardless of race can become a Swede. Ethno-nationalism on the other hand is based on blood and belonging to an in-groop. Like belonging to the Serbian minority in Yugoslavia and seeing themselves as better than anyone else of the peoples that also lived in Yugoslavia, and therefore thinking that they have the right to rule over others. The same behaviour balkanization could also be seen among ethnic minorities such as blacks in America or muslims in Europe, or among Scots in Britain or Catalans in Spain.
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The nazis tried to hide that it ever happened. And they almost succeded in hiding their crimes. Think about it. Only 2 people managed to survive the death camp Belzec where half a million people died. And the same is true for Chelmno. Its like a lottery chance of winning if you would survive a trip there. If the nazis had been able to be equally succeful at destroying all buildings, paper documents and kill all witnesses... then I think that many people today might have doubted the holocaust ever happened. A very scary thought. Say that only 2 people survived from Germanys 6 death camps... that would only make say one or two dozen survivors. And the survivors would likely have been seen as crazy people by society for saying the things they had seen. One can just look at Cambodia, where not even the children of the extremely few survivors of S-21 concentration camp do believe their fathers story he have told about what happened. Instead do the Camodians say their genocide never happened. Or that it happened and that it is somehow the fault of CIA or Vietnam that did it - because all Camodians are good people and would never do such horrible things.
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But the Germans had 5 death camps running, so they could probably easily have closed down one camp and sent all victims to another camp instead while all work with burning bodies were going on. Belzec was a small and a very primitive camp, but still hundreds of thousands perished there. So the Germans could probably easily have opened a new such camp in a short period of time I guess. Treblinka also used pretty primitive technologies and still took the lives of perhaps 900.000 people. And when Auschwitz came into use in 1944 it was able to replace all the other 5 death camps, because its killing capacity was so enormous that no other camps were needed. It killed more than a million people. Most common number mentioned is 1.1- 1.2 million dead. But its own commendant bragged that 4 million people died there. The Germans could however been able to kill even more people there if they had wanted to. But by 1944 was there not much left of Europes jewish population so there was no need to keep all the other camps opened. The camp was if I remember correctly also able to gas much more people in a single day, than what the ovens could burn. So the cremation was probably what limited the capacity of this camp. However when the Germans were in a hurry to kill as many Hungarian jews as possible in a short period of time in 1944, could the ovens not burn people in the large numbers fast enough.. so some bodies were burned outside - which could be seen at photos preserved from that time.
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Given that 30.000 concentration camps were in use would I not be surprised if hundreds of thousands of Germans were involved in the holocaust in one way or another as guards, policemen, gestapo members, einsatzgruppen, crews of locomotives, engineers of cremation ovens, workers of chemical factories that sold gas, car manufacturers that built gas vans, buraucrats and paper pushers... So therefore do I think that those big organisations had enough members to find a few highly educated among them. Oftentimes lawyers that did the planning at Wannsee. However the dirty work in practice was often done by low educated simple germans, like female hairdressers that ended up as camp guards.
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