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Thailand was fairly complicit. I mean, what the hell did they do to try and stop it? Not a damn thing. I think Thailand should pay several billion dollars to Israel, for starters.
If that is supposed to be some cynical comparison to the swiss connection - it fails. The swiss-nazi connection is well documented, mostly involving financial and trade support. Specifically, Nazi Germany sold gold, plundered and stolen from Jews that died in concentration camps, to Swizerland. Switzerland also restricted jewish emigration from occupied countries, which essentially blocked the easiest route from a jew to seek safety, thus condeming millions to death.
Perhaps NONE of the countries were more willing to send the Jewish people to the death camps then the Poles. The movie done by Steven Spielberg called "Shoah" had interviews with older Polish women who were young women at the time of the Nazi occupation. They gladly pointed out the Jewish people in their towns. ironically the reason she personally cited was that their husbands were more attracted to the Jewish women than their own. Based on what I saw I can see how that would be. Those women were NOT attractive and that is being kind.
i m very intersted in this theme - also searching for many years for the big "why".
There is a simple answer - every nation was involved by killing the jews and other groups ( Chipsys, Comunists, Gays and so on ).
Every occupied nation/society delivered the jews by ACTIVE work. It is a myth that this crime was only done under german pressure. After the fall of the iron-curtain started a discussion about the own role in that period. The Results are widely ignored, cause it shows that the system was only working by active collaboration of the normal people. Not only in the east - every nation was involved. The only one which were activ in saving jews were the danish population ( on a wide scale ).
The neutrals made the business of the history ( especially switzerland ), others killed by ignorance and the allied played their role by closing the borders for refugees - but only for the poor. For example - in Poland and Rusia many jews had to die after the germans were gone.
I guess it will take another generation ( or two ) before the discussion about the massacre can be done in a historical-neutral way.
It is a world-wide shame. We should also keep in memory that there were millions of chipsys, gays, handicaped, POWs, opponents and others which had to die in that period.
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Originally Posted by guyfromgermany
i m very intersted in this theme - also searching for many years for the big "why".
There is a simple answer - every nation was involved by killing the jews and other groups ( Chipsys, Comunists, Gays and so on ).
Every occupied nation/society delivered the jews by ACTIVE work. It is a myth that this crime was only done under german pressure. After the fall of the iron-curtain started a discussion about the own role in that period. The Results are widely ignored, cause it shows that the system was only working by active collaboration of the normal people. Not only in the east - every nation was involved. The only one which were activ in saving jews were the danish population ( on a wide scale ).
The neutrals made the business of the history ( especially switzerland ), others killed by ignorance and the allied played their role by closing the borders for refugees - but only for the poor. For example - in Poland and Rusia many jews had to die after the germans were gone.
I guess it will take another generation ( or two ) before the discussion about the massacre can be done in a historical-neutral way.
It is a world-wide shame. We should also keep in memory that there were millions of chipsys, gays, handicaped, POWs, opponents and others which had to die in that period.
I agree with this post. All countries are essentially responsible, because the Shoah was occurring and it was not stopped in time by any country. We must never forget, and always remember that all countries are responsible for the Holocaust, because they did either nothing or not enough.
IBM, FORD, General Motors, etc.. also Hollywood who were ardent Holocaust deniers and anybody that attacked Hitler (like Chaplin) was accused of being a communist and expelled from the country.
I agree with this post. All countries are essentially responsible, because the Shoah was occurring and it was not stopped in time by any country. We must never forget, and always remember that all countries are responsible for the Holocaust, because they did either nothing or not enough.
Particularly Thailand right? You pretty much shot your credibility in post 10, probably wise for you to just step out of the thread at this point in time.
For the rest - we can simply expand the OP's intent with a blanket statement saying "all of mankind is to blame". But let's put it into a reasonable scope. The OP discussed countries that directly aided the nazi's, or committed attrocities themselves. Poland and some of the slavic provinces of Russia were mentioned and I would agree with that - as usually local authorities (local police and government authorities) cooperated with the nazi's. What is ironic is that the nazi's then turned around and exterminated most of them when their work was done on the jews.
We must never forget, and always remember that all countries are responsible for the Holocaust, because they did either nothing or not enough.
"All countries?
Very well, could you tell us what percentage of the overall blame falls on Costa Rica and what Costa Rica might have done to stop the Holocaust which it did not do? How many people might have been spared had Costa Rica acted rather than staying on the sidelines?
Also, what is the difference between "never forget" and "always remember?" that we need to do both rather than just one?
Perhaps NONE of the countries were more willing to send the Jewish people to the death camps then the Poles.
I think that's a BS statement. I don't think that the Poles were any more especially complict in the extermination of the Jewish population than other Nazi-occupied nations like the Netherlands or France or Germany's allies like Hungary. And it's not accurate to say that the Polish people specifically sent Jews to the death camps. The Germans established huge Jewish ghettos in Poland early in the occupation--later they made the decision to transport Jews from Poland and other nations to the camps. There were never any Polish guards at any of the death camps--it wasn't the Poles sending them to the camps. The area around Auschwitz was devoid of Polish citizens who had been forcibly relocated from the surrounding villages.
Unlike a lot of other Nazi-occupied nations, there was never any official colloborationist government with the Germans--in fact the Polish government-in-exile never officially surrended.The Polish Resistance was one of the strongest partisan forces in Europe against the Nazis, furthermore Poland was the only nation in occupied Europe where a resistance organization existed to help rescue it's Jewish citizens. In fact if it wasn't for the Polish Resistance's intel, the Allies wouldn't have had information that Auschwitz even existed. As well as the fact that the Polish Catholic members of the Resistance fought alongside Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The price for hiding or aiding a Jew in occupied Poland was death to you and your entire family--and many Poles were killed for this. In fact after the state of Israel was created the most people awarded the medals of the "Righteous Among the Nations"--for those Gentiles who assisted the Jews during the Holocaust--were Poles. And many of these were themselves murdered killed by the Nazis. Even many Catholic clergy members(who themselves were a target of the Nazis) helped out and tried to hide Polish Jews.
There was anti-Semitism in Poland to some degree--just as there was in most countries in Europe at the time and it was bad to some degree in the 1930s. There were acts of violence or betrayal by some Poles against the Jews, especially in Eastern Poland. But to paint the whole nation with one broad brush that they somehow were the most responsible for the Holocaust is a misnomer. The Poles were the first nation to stand up to the Nazis and unlike some other nations, we never stopped fighting.
And I've been to some of the camps in Europe--there were plenty of Polish Catholic names in those books as well. The Poles as a whole were murdered at a higher rate by the Nazis than any other occupied nation outside of the Ukraine and Russia. There was no cozy co-existance with the Nazis like "ze French". Many of my Polish ancestors perished fighting the Nazis(and the goddamn Russians) long before the US could be motivated to get off their ass or had any interest in the fate of the Western Europe.
First, I think I read somewhere that Facist Italy (Mussolini) at first refused to give the Jews over to the Nazis. They later caved in, presumably as Italy began to weaken. Does anybody know if this is true?
Second, I have never read anything about what happened to the Jews in neutral Spain and Portugal. The Jewish populations were probably not that high in these countries but I am still wondering what the attitudes of their governments were --- especially Franco in Spain.
Third, what happened to the Jews in Finland? German ally in WW2 but stil independent.
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