This was written in the book Star Trek Memories by William Shatner and made me pause. But today we are seeing it happen in real time in America and yet no one is truly trying to stop it. So with this we can see exactly how it could happen then.
Hell the media alone refuses to acknowledge we have Concentration Camps in the states.
Sorry, I am German, and this might be one of the stupidest takes on the causes and history of the Holocaust I’ve ever heard.
Mustache man himself specifically cited the US’s ethnic cleansing of native/First Nation peoples as an inspiration.
But that’s not about the concentration camps dustyData was talking about, but about the “Lebensraum” doctrin to conquer the eastern European areas.
Completely different thing.
Concentration camps have been around in Europe already decades before the Nazis came to power, take the Russian Gulags for example.
Even the name the Nazis used is not new, the first camps called “Konzentrationslager” (the German name for concentration camp) were situated in the German colonies in Africa during the Herero massacres already in 1904, while the segregation into ghettos in Germany and much of the rest of Middle Europe, especially regarding the Jews, goes back to the Middle ages.
What dustyData proclaimed is just plain wrong and one of the fake ideas that might in some form be used to relativise, downplay or pass of guilt. Just the kind of buzz that current day fascists like the AfD in Germany are happily spreading.
It is absolutely about concentration and relocation and systematic murder of people, though. That’s what the Native American genocide essentially entailed.
It also entails some of it, but it was not “the inspiration for the creation of concentration camps”.
That sentence is the wrong one which is the point I was getting at.
The Holocaust as the Nazis did it wasn’t just some established and common concept copied from somewhere else, but to 99% the work of the German people themselves.
There is no easy exit for the history-revisionist from the far right.
Thanks for your insight on this and for calling it out (and quite civily, I might add, well, once you started explaining at least haha.)
Partially inaccurate truths might as well be lies, with how they distort our understanding of the actual course of past events.
Thanks, I guess I should have explained it a bit more early in my original comment.
But I sometimes forget that the the more detailed knowledge about the Nazi rise to power and the Holocaust is naturally not as common outside of Germany (where it is e.g. an extensive part of school curriculums).
I would even say they are often worse than lies, as spiked with some surrounding facts, the lies at the core can hide themselves. They then appear plausible, and if done right even more convincing (or at least, alluring) than the hard and inconvenient truth.
It’s true they were inspired by Jim Crow as well.
I don’t know why you have been getting downvoted, as that part seems to at least have a core of truth, as I just checked.
While not the inspiration for the pogroms themselves, the US segregation laws seem to have been at least reviewed while drafting the texts of the Nürnberger Gesetze, which would become the legal framework for persecution of Jews and other persons based on race in the Third Reich.
I think I’ve angered a Lemming somewhere because all of my comments are being downvoted. Some people have a lot of time on their hands I guess?
Well, guess that happens. People are not always rational.
At least fits this threat, as this quite probably also is one of the main factors in the rise of fascistic regimes.
I’m sorry, I forgot that on the internet nationality is a source of expertise. Sure, a German would hold that view. Because governments have never steered public opinion through education to hide facts.
EDIT: Sorry for the pedantic answer. Yes, segregation and concentration camps have been around since forever. But “my racism is older than your racism” is not a flex. It takes way more nuance to understand the underlying sociological sources of racism and extremist violence. But, there’s documented evidence that US segregation and racism (specially Jim Crow laws), as well as other international events were quoted directly by Nazis as the source of inspiration, specifically, for using certain social oppression tactics to facilitate the holocaust. This in no way diminishes the historical responsibility of the Nazi and the people involved in committing this violence. Nor does it erases other more internal sources of racism and extremism.
As you yourself have discovered in this thread, there are things about the general world that not everyone is taught. I commend the effort of the German education system to prevent the repeat of the holocaust. But that doesn’t mean they are not biased, have conflicts of interest or warp a bit the reality either by omission or convenience. Case in point, the support of the German government of the genocide of Palestinians by Israel,
It is dumb but it’s also true. History tends to do that a lot, actually.
Nope.
Konzentrationslager (concentration camps) have been a tool for the Germans under that exact name since colonial times.
Segregation of the Jews into Ghettos (and frequent blaming them for stuff and even killing them in local pogroms) has been common practice since at least the Middle ages in Germany, centuries before the US even existed.
A tale like “we only got the idea because we were inspired by the Americans” is not only wrong, but also dangerous, as it plays right into the hands of the far right, which is currently actively trying to downplay the Holocaust and the responsibility of the German people during the Third Reich.