It has nothing to do with anti-semitism, and in fact nothing to do with ethnicity at all.

Conversely, the people who today don’t protest against the Palestinian Genocide would not have protested against the Holocaust.

  • dustyData@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    That’s nation-state apologia. They just ignored all the evidence because genocide wasn’t even defined yet in International Humanitarian Law, they just didn’t care. Remember that even the US had concentration camps inside the US for foreigners, almost all of them Japanese people. They just felt this was a normal thing armies did to control populations deemed risky (see the ghettoisation of black communities, history of segregation and the systematic wipe out of indigenous tribes). They knew, armies even went directly to the locations of the concentration camps, they already knew where almost all of them were. Like, inside Germany it was not entirely a secret either. German officials boasted about the whole thing in international forums and in propaganda.

    The term Genocide, even, was coined by a polish-Jewish lawyer in 1942, Raphael Lemkin precisely because of what was known at the time of what the Nazis were doing against Jewish people and his own experiences surviving the Holocaust.

    • Deceptichum@quokk.au
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      13 hours ago

      He saw genocide as an inherently colonial process, and in his later writings analyzed what he described as the colonial genocides occurring within European overseas territories as well as the Soviet and Nazi empires

      Based.

      Honestly it sounds like we need to go back to his definition of genocide. So many have since been led to believe it can only look like a Zyklon B shower.

    • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
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      13 hours ago

      Concentration camps yes, but Death Camps with gas chambers and crematoria, not intended to hold people for any longer than it took to “exterminate” them, were new. Even slave-labor camps of the sort where inmates were starved and worked to death were frowned upon, not considered normal. That’s why the Nazis lied, and created false camp films for propaganda.

      Edit to add this from the article about the Rosenstrasse protest:

      Goebbels swiftly realized that to use force against the women protesting on the Rosenstrasse would undermine the claim that all Germans were united in the volksgemeinschaft. Using force against the protestors would not only damage the volksgemeinschaft, which provided the domestic unity to support the war, but would also draw unwanted attention to the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. Stoltzfus wrote: “A public discussion about the fate of deported Jews threatened to disclose the Final Solution and thus endanger the entire war effort.”[18]

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        Agree, but it was just how normalized internment camps were (Hitler claimed he got inspired by US ideas of population control). Which facilitated the German use of propaganda. If you said, “they are killing everyone there, my family died in there”, no one would believe you even if you were an eyewitness. Although there weren’t executions in the US camps, the conditions were so bad that at least 1800 out of 120 thousand people died. Even today, some people don’t believe the testimony of the families of Japanese victims of the camps and trivialize and downplay their suffering.