I wasn’t going to comment any more on this. But perhaps I could clarify something for you:

“However I can understand why people doubt it, given the way that the crimes of yesterday are exploited to justify the crimes of today:”

Well there is all that of course and lots of other things you could mention, such as WMDs and all sorts of other bullshit the powers that be require me to believe in.

They bullshit too much, and I’ve got a long memory.

But my view point is:

Why should I take anything on trust?

Why should I have faith in someone’s opinion?

Why shouldn’t I be able to question anything at all?

amie said I outed myself as one of the ‘just saying tendency’. Absolutely, and why not?

What is in it for me to just blindly believe and repeat the mantras the powers that be tell me I should believe and repeat, when plainly so much of what is received opinion is bullshit. And what is more, is bullshit that often does not serve the interests of me and people like me. I am talking generally here, and not specifically about the matters discussed on this thread. For example:

Why should I believe and repeat that globalization is great when I see all around me, and have seen for a long time jobs disappearing to China and India?

Why should I believe and repeat that ‘mass immigration and diversity are great’ when I have quite a bit of personal experience that tells me otherwise.

Why should I believe in man made global warming? Lots of boffin’s don’t.

Etc…

The powers that be, and authority figures, or people who would like to be authority figures, clearly do not give a shit about me or people like me. And they lie and lie and lie some more.

Why should I believe that something is so, just because my social betters say it so?

I don’t tug my forelock to anyone. Not to Guessedworker or Gordon Brown.

If they paid me to I might. But they aren’t going to do that are they?

Here is a way at looking at things that perhaps somewhat ironically I picked up from an overwhelmingly Jewish organisation:

There are 3 layers of reality.

1. Stuff you can trip over or bump into.

2. Stuff that physics tells you is there – you may not be able to see it but you’d better believe in it.

3. Opinion.

If someone makes an assertion, lets see it argued, and see who has the better argument.

However I can understand why people doubt it, given the way that the crimes of yesterday are exploited to justify the crimes of today:

Aren’t people so understanding? Ken Loach understands anti-Semitic attacks in Europe following the conflict in Gaza. Internationalist understands holocaust denial. There is every reason for it of course.

So if my little Johnny didn’t want to go to his new school because he was horribly bullied at his old school, and was also sulky and unco-operative in his new school that would somehow prove he wasn’t horribly bullied in his old school after all? Of course. It would be the first thought you would have.

This type of anti-Semitism is wonderful, how it links cause and effect. The anti-Semites, either attacking Jews in Europe or denying the holocaust, are understood so well. Loach and the Internationalist know exactly how they feel.

Nobody ever claimed Jews were the only victims of Naziism, and Stalinism either for that matter. They were, how ever, singled out in a way matched only perhaps by the extermination of the even smaller community of Roma and died in numbers vastly disproportionate to any other community.

I hope David or Gene check this thread out and see some of your bile immediately above and send you packing, supposedly anti-racist bigot, along with Atilla.

Well Attila, I live in Germany and in the nearest town alone about 250 Jews were rounded up and deported in 1940. Most of them were eventually murdered. It happened.

However I can understand why people doubt it, given the way that the crimes of yesterday are exploited to justify the crimes of today:

- The denial of the right to return for Palestinians
- The frequent Israeli invasions of neighbors
- The use of allusions to Nazism (“he’s the new Hitler” – how many times have we heard that one?) to justify bombing and murder

>>> “However we should not forget that 40 million people were killed in the wars in Europe 1939-1945, not six million.”

>>>>> Abso-f*cking-lutely mate.

Including relatives of mine.

And Palestinians are still the innocent victims 64 years later.

I’m sorry but this blokes story doesn’t stack up to me.

It would have been preferable for you, whether or not you think you’re Joe Public, to have checked your assumptions with the historical record before deciding whether or not it was feasable that a boy could have been sent from Bergen Belsen to a death camp and returned six times.

The bureaucratic process at all Nazi death and extermination camp pivoted on the concept of Selektion, that is the assignment of which prisoner would be exterminated and which would be worked until death or extermination. Auschwitz-Birkenau for example had two centres of authority empowered by the Reich to make a Selektion with respect to any given prisoner.

Please take a moment to carefully consider the testimony from the Belsen Trial of Josef Kramer, Kommandant of Birkenau, deciding whether or not it was feasible that an eleven year old boy could have been seen fit by one centre of Selektion authority (say the Kommandant of Auschwitz 1, who was also the overall Kommandant of the camp according to Kramer’s testimony) for one track, say the gas and crematoria extermination track and contradicted by a second centre of authority, (say Auschwitz Birkenau Medical Authorities) who wanted the boy sent on a slave labour track for the time being and his extermination postponed and left undetermined unless and until until a subsequent Selektion deemed him ready to be murdered.

The Political Department which was in every camp had a card index system of prisoners and was responsible for personal documents and for any sort of transports or incoming prisoners. At Auschwitz the Political Department was also responsible for all the selections from incoming transports for the gas chamber. In the crematorium the S.S. and prisoners — Sonderkommando — were under the command of the Kommandant of Auschwitz, Hoess. As the place where the transports generally arrived was in the middle of my own camp I was sometimes present at their arrival. The people who took part in supervising and who were responsible for the security were partly from Auschwitz No. 1, and partly from my own camp at Birkenau, but the selection of these people who had to supervise was done by the Kommandant of Auschwitz No. 1. The actual selections of the internees were made only by doctors. Those who were selected for the gas chambers went to the different crematoria, those who were found to be fit for work came into two different parts of my camp, because the idea was that in a few days they were to be re-transferred to different parts of German [sic] for work.

Take careful note of the final sentence and especially that prisoners deemed by Doctors fit for the slave labour track were in a few days “re-transferred” not within the Death Camp itself, but “to different parts of Germany”

Could this have occurred six times to a boy held prisoner within the Nazi Selektion bureaucracy? Well I can’t see any prevailing reason why it couldn’t over a period of time. So I remain both uncertain of the accuracy of Moshe Peer’s recollection and equally uncertain of those sneering at the feasibility of his recollection.