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There is an understandable buzz when a historical event as well known and deeply investigated as \u00a0the<\/a> Holocaust<\/a><\/strong> has suddenly been found to have been underestimated by an order of magnitude.<\/p>\n From The New York Times<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n ….As early as 1933, at the start of Hitler\u2019s reign, the Third Reich established about 110 camps specifically designed to imprison some 10,000 political opponents and others, the researchers found. As Germany invaded and began occupying European neighbors, the use of camps and ghettos was expanded to confine and sometimes kill not only Jews but also homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe. The camps and ghettos varied enormously in their mission, organization and size, depending on the Nazis\u2019 needs, the researchers have found.<\/strong><\/p>\n The biggest site identified is the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, which held about 500,000 people at its height. But as few as a dozen prisoners worked at one of the smallest camps, the M\u00fcnchen-Schwabing site in Germany. Small groups of prisoners were sent there from the Dachau concentration camp under armed guard. They were reportedly whipped and ordered to do manual labor at the home of a fervent Nazi patron known as \u201cSister Pia,\u201d cleaning her house, tending her garden and even building children\u2019s toys for her.<\/strong><\/p>\n When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing \u2014 first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.<\/strong><\/p>\n The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, \u201cGermanizing\u201d prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.<\/strong><\/p>\n In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.<\/strong><\/p>\n ….The lead editors on the project,\u00a0Geoffrey Megargee<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Martin Dean<\/a>, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a\u00a0multivolume encyclopedia<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Read the rest here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Perhaps some of you will recall the controversy in the late 1990’s surrounding the release of Hitler’s Willing Executioners<\/a><\/strong> by Daniel Goldhagen<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0where Goldhagen argued that Nazi<\/strong> genocide was only possible with the widespread complicity and often enthusiastic participation of “ordinary Germans” who were not themselves Gestapo<\/strong> agents or Nazi fanatics. \u00a0One of the primary charges against Goldhagen by academic historians was his generalizing indictment of a generation of Germans for Nazi policy that was, for all intents and purposes, officially a state secret. \u00a0After all, the closest thing to a “public” discussion in the Third Reich<\/strong> of the Final Solution was a terrifying speech<\/a> by SS-Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler<\/a><\/strong> at the Posen Conference<\/a><\/strong> to an assembly of Gauleiters<\/strong> <\/a>\u00a0and<\/a> Reichsleiters<\/a><\/strong> who constituted the aristocracy of the Nazi Party.<\/p>\n The sheer geographic density<\/a> and social ubiquity<\/a> of the Nazi machinery of repression and genocide documented by researchers severely undermines the critics of Goldhagen. While it is well documented that most Germans, unless they were political opponent or social misfits, did not personally feel the heavy hand of the Gestapo in the way Soviet citizens experienced the NKVD<\/strong>, Germans during the war years irrefutably lived cheek by jowl with the miserably wretched slaves of the Reich.<\/p>\n Some of the shock produced by this investigation is due to an artificial “parsing of genocide” by historians into distinct categories of death-dealing instead of looking at Nazi democide as a whole cloth or continuum.<\/p>\n In the immediate aftermath of the war, there was little interest beyond the Nuremberg\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/a>Tribunal<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>in delving into the depths of Nazi crimes. Reconstruction of Europe and “getting on with life” or the exigencies of the Cold War<\/strong> and the ominous threat of the Soviets took far greater precedence. Even among Holocaust survivors themselves, there was initially an effort to “move on” from the unimaginable, or to make a anguished pretense of so doing, as expressed in the critically acclaimed Rod Steiger<\/strong> film, The Pawnbroker<\/a>. <\/strong>When historians began more serious examinations of Nazi crimes in the 1960’s and 1970’s, there was a tendency to separate the Holocaust from related or similar atrocities due in part to the overriding ideological emphasis the most extreme Nazis placed upon the total and absolute elimination of all Jews – every last one – at all costs,. Even over and above winning the war.<\/p>\n However, that genocidal crusade by the SS<\/strong> against the Jews also facilitated the deaths of millions of others – including the Gypsies<\/strong> (marked for nearly complete extermination<\/a>), the “useless eaters<\/a>“, some 700,000 Serbs <\/a>to please the Ustase<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>puppet regime, political opponents who disappeared into the Night and Fog<\/a>, and a vast democide of Slavic peoples to feed the Third Reich’s inexhaustible need for slave labor. Albert Speer<\/strong> wrote that Himmler coldly planned a further massive reduction of the Russian and Ukranian populations west of the Urals<\/a> to build a post-war Nazi racial empire in vanquished Russia.<\/p>\n The scale of murder by totalitarian governments in the 20th century approaches the mythic, a phenomena for which the Holocaust has become a totem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is an understandable buzz when a historical event as well known and deeply investigated as \u00a0the Holocaust has suddenly been found to have been underestimated by an order of magnitude. From The New York Times: The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking\u00a0 ….As early as 1933, at the start of Hitler\u2019s reign, the Third Reich […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[232,216,46,845,334,483,485,873,425,165,294,51,296,814,717,784,295,486,153],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-20th-century","category-academia","category-analytic","category-antisemitism","category-europe","category-extremists","category-genocide","category-germany","category-government","category-historians","category-historiography","category-history","category-hitler","category-holocaust","category-judaism","category-memory","category-nazis","category-state-terrorism","category-wwii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19607"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19611,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19607\/revisions\/19611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n