We are the last generation who can hear from these survivors directly. Do not take that lightly. Do not waste that opportunity. Do not forget your freedom isn’t infinitely guarenteed. And do not, do not, let it happen again.
Really truly, watch the video, reblog it. Teaching about the holocaust is so necessary for our generation before it slips under the rug and people forget about it.
In 1941, Manfred Lewin (left), a young Jewish man living in Nazi Berlin, made a small book of poems and pictures. He gave this book to his boyfriend, Gad Beck (right), as they waited out an air raid together.
Today, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a beautiful online exhibit where you can view this book in its entirety, along with translations and additional information. It’s a wonderful little piece of queer history, and I encourage you all to check it out here.
“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”
Quote from Traudl Junge, Hitler’s private secretary from 1942-45:
Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn’t able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn’t personally to blame and that I hadn’t known about those things. I wasn’t aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.
“In the spring of 1940, when the Nazis overran France from the north, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country towards the south. In order to cross the border, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and together with a flood of other refugees, tens of thousands of Jews besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get that life-saving piece of paper. The Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion.
The Portuguese government—which had little desire to accept any of these refugees—sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had a deep reverence for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.”
—Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
Ben is very upset about private corporations being able to decide what content they allow on their platforms. What’s wrong, Ben? I thought you liked free enterprise!
Thing is Hitler did some good for the german ppl, thus the immense support for him. The orange idiot however doesn’t do anything but playing Golf and approval ratings are decreasing. So, there’s that.
Literally shut the fuck up the only good thing Hitler ever did was put a bullet in his own brain
😂 Look, i hate him, too. But he created jobs. You think Hitler would have had the following he had being an angry men shouting at the clouds? He was a vile being and deserved more than the outcome he got.
Yeah, you’re right hitler created a lot of new jobs
I WONDER HOW HE DID THAT
THIS JUST IN
SLAVERY COUNTS AS JOB CREATION
uh yall do recall that he saved germany from the great depression and regardless of he fact that he was a mad man he did pull of a fairly decent socialist state before the whole “kill the jews” thing came up hell he didnt even want to do that
PUT YOUR FEET IN A WOODCHIPPER
not to be all like “read the thickest book i own six times over like me” but @msdancealot and @shotbythewolf have added some of the wrongest things ive ever read in my life soooooo
1-most of the make work programs of the first few years of nazi germany were created and budgeted for by the weimar government. after this like damn near every job created “by hitler” involved manufacturing weapons of war or extraction of resources to make weapons
2-its important to realize much of the world was leaving the great depression at the exact same time. a global economic recovery ‘saved’ germany, not hitler. theres alot of pretty solid evidence hitler destroyed germany and its economy actually, by running the domestic/consumer economy into the ground to make war
3-“fairly decent socialist state” the nazis were fascists. any sort of nazi social welfare programs didnt come from the same line of thinking as a socialist state. the nazi state was a ramshackle mess, rationing was commonplace, constant financial crisis
4-hell he didnt even want to kill the jews—-this is wrong. hitlers ideaology was so steeped in the idea of a “global jewish conspiracy” he wanted to kill every single jewish person on the planet. he wanted to do that. there wasnt a moment where he said “well shit guys looks like we have to kill the jews now” he wanted to do that for a very long time
For seven decades, “never forget” has been a rallying cry of the Holocaust remembrance movement.
But a survey released Thursday,
on Holocaust Remembrance Day, found that many adults lack basic
knowledge of what happened — and this lack of knowledge is more
pronounced among millennials, whom the survey defined as people ages 18
to 34.
Thirty-one percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millenials, believe that 2 million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust; the actual number is around six million. 41% of Americans, and 66% of millenials, cannot say what Auschwitz was. And 52% of Americans wrongly think that Hitler came to power through force.
Really look at that last part. The majority of Americans think Hitler came to power through force…because they don’t want to recognize how close our current political climate is to what happened then. They don’t want to believe they’ve elected anyone dangerous.
wupacing 