[mtempleton]

>Interesting to note that nazis killed as much ethnic poles as polish jews

Wow. Why is the holocaust taught with such a focus on one ethnic group of victims? I thought Jews were the only significant group of victims, but that's clearly not true.

It's also interesting to note that one legitimate government still exists in the world that funded the genocide of what many estimate to be a larger number of people than were killed in the Holocaust, but it's commonly not referred to as a genocide. Instead, it's "wartime deaths," or something else.[1]

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_tol... 2 - http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-california...

[dang]

I'm going to assume that you're commenting in good faith but this is painfully close to trolling, so please don't do it here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14191667 and marked it off-topic.

[mtempleton]

This comes across as unreasonable to me. Of course I am not trolling. I am responding directly to the comment above me, and I'm not aware of why you would say something so accusatory. Yes, I could be wrong about this, and I'm aware this is a controversial topic now, but I'm not sure what you are asking me to "not do." I think disagreement should be met with facts to support why you disagree, not with insults.

[adrianm]

Please don't jump to conclusions based on a misinformed comment on the internet. You can't compare the number of dead and conclude anything meaningful from that alone. Hatred of Jews in particular was a cornerstone of Nazi philosophy and they made the unique persecution of them a priority in government. From the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, to the Nuremberg Laws, to Kristallnacht, to complete disenfranchisement and seizure of all Jewish property and rights, to widespread European collaboration with the Nazis throughout the war which led to the extermination of countless Jews who were betrayed by their fellow citizens, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, to Zyklon B, and the systematic extermination of the Jewish people. If you want to learn more, visit a Holocaust museum. Better yet, talk to survivors. They are still here in NYC and around the world. But they won't be for much longer.

[mtempleton]

>You can't compare the number of dead and conclude anything meaningful from that alone.

Of course you can. The number of innocent people murdered is a very meaningful number.

I never disagreed with the rest of what you said. I don't disagree with you that Jewish hatred was not a cornerstone of Nazi philosophy and that other European countries did not collaborate in anti-antisemitic policies.

However, it's not appropriate to just throw aside the number of lives lost as "not meaningful alone." What other single metric would you select to be considered to be more meaningful?

[DanBC]

> What other single metric would you select to be considered to be more meaningful?

Genocidal intent; proportion of the group killed.

[kasey_junk]

I certainly learned about other groups when I was taught about the Holocaust in high school. Other groups are mentioned in the Holicaust museum in Washington DC. I've seen movies about other persecuted groups & read books about them as well.

Is it possible you are just not well versed on the subject?

Further, any discussion on the topic requires special treatment of the Jewish holocaust because of its scope and how central it is to the politics of Naziism.

[mtempleton]

>Is it possible you are just not well versed on the subject?

Well I took required history classes in high school and university and scored well enough in those courses. This is what I was taught. That's what my statement is about. I was aware that other ethnic groups were targeted, but did not know the numbers in some cases were similar to those that Jews suffered. I had a very real understanding they were, by a far margin, the largest group to suffer.

[kasey_junk]

Asking "Why is the holocaust taught with such a focus on one ethnic group of victims" is different than asking "why did my education not discuss victims of the Holocaust other than Jews".

The latter is an interesting question and could potentially lead you to a better understanding of subjects you've missed. The former implies a systematic bias in the education about WWII history and assumes it based on a data point of one that goes against other data points (for instance my own).

Another thing you may not be well versed on, implication of a systematic bias in teaching the Holocaust is a standard part of the bag of dirty tricks that many neo-Nazi, white nationalist and other anti-semitic groups employ to paper over the Holocaust. They trot it out in venues where more extreme versions of Holocaust denialism or outright Holocaust justification won't fly.

[mtempleton]

OK I can see now this is going down a dark road to that line of thinking and that was not my intention. This is a very controversial topic* and I wasn't aware of this. I didn't mean to open up a bucket of worms. I'm still a bit perplexed. Since reading here I've done some research and learned the Cambodian Genocide claimed around 1/3 the death toll of The Holocaust, yet I'd bet most people haven't heard much, or anything, about it. Could you name the leader in charge of it, or how it came about? What about: how can we avoid it from happening again? Keep in mind, it happened much more recently.

The Native American genocide is barely recognized as even being real (and never officially in the US), even though it was directly funded (paid dollars per head killed--pretty blatant, isn't it?) by the US and California governments.

And for God's sake I'm not trying to say anything in support of racism or Nazis, as you alluded to, that's ridiculous and awful.

I find that in mentioning atrocities we don't even recognize as ever happening (Native Americans) as a really hard mental gymnastic maneuver required. How is it logically any different than Holocaust denial? I literally never covered the Cambodian or Native American genocides in school. I find it hard to believe others have had much different experiences in their educations as mine was very vanilla at large public schools and universities, but I would certainly like to know if that's the case or not.

I don't have any tolerance for racism myself, and please stop speaking in a condescending tone. It's unnecessary at this point as you've already made yourself clear that you view yourself as righteous and my comments as uneducated, and further doing so is not productive.

Can't we do more for Native American peoples? Isn't this a step in the right direction away from racism? Or, is their attempted-genocide deserving of continued denial? What do you think?

1-reloading the page shows karma is changing rapidly with a consistent average

2-http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-california...

[kasey_junk]

> Since reading here I've done some research and learned the Cambodian Genocide claimed around 1/3 the death toll of The Holocaust, yet I'd bet most people haven't heard much, or anything, about it. Could you name the leader in charge of it, or how it came about?

Pol Pot? This was something that was literally covered in my World History class in high school. I remember that mostly because we watched "The Killing Fields" and I was happy to have what I assumed would be an easy week, but that movie is pretty profoundly impressive.

We also covered Native American atrocities and read "A People's History of the United States", which at the time (20 some years ago) might have been out of the norm but now seems relatively common.

None of this is to condescend to you or to suggest you are uneducated generally, but rather to point out that something you are extrapolating as systematic in education is not. And for what it's worth I went to public high schools and public college in a not too progressive place.

I also didn't mean to imply you were aligned with anti-semitic groups, rather that anti-semitic groups use that misunderstanding as propaganda and you should probably be aware of that.

[mtempleton]

I'm also aware of Pol Pot, but to be honest, I have to admit I don't really know a lot about his rise to power and the genocide of ethnic groups in Cambodia. I would bet money most people don't know who Pol Pot is. I don't remember covering it.

The US stance on the Native American genocide(s) is basically denial that it happened, or at minimum, failure to admit it.

[tptacek]

The Killing Fields won 3 Oscars and was nominated for best picture. We watched it in Junior year history in high school. I don't think you can get out of an American high school without learning about Pol Pot.

More importantly: recognition of human suffering isn't zero sum. Acknowledging the scale of what happened to European Jewish people doesn't take away recognition of what happened to Native Americans --- in fact, in my experience, the genocide of Native Americans and European Jews are usually the two textbook examples of nationally-sponsored genocides.

Finally, I'll observe that nobody has condescended to you here.

[pcwalton]

> I don't think you can get out of an American high school without learning about Pol Pot.

I didn't learn about the Khmer Rouge in school (high school in Texas, graduated 2004). But I learned about it quickly afterward.

[mtempleton]

Hi, I can't respond to your comment below. I just want you to know it's not correct. I also learned of the Trail of Tears, but the US Government paid per head for killing Native Americans, and never formally recognized or apologized for it. It has never been recognized as an attempted genocide. It's not an "internet argument," it's a fact.

[tptacek]

They were the largest group to suffer, by a factor of 3.

[dspillett]

> > Interesting to note that nazis killed as much ethnic poles as polish jews

> Wow. Why is the holocaust taught with such a focus on one ethnic group of victims?

A large part of that is because they were deliberately and very specifically targeted, particularly with regard to the use of camps and gas (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution). A lot of the other groups were either attacked for more general reasons (being allied to the "wrong" group, not being Aryan enough, speaking against the Nazi regime, to give three examples) or abused generally simply because many the Axis command structure where generally abusive and encouraged that sort of behaviour further down the chain.

[DanBC]

The Nazis practised their methods of genocide on people with learning disability or severe mental illness in the T4 programme.

Gas chambers disguised as showers, with nozzles that dispensed gas not water, were first used on people with learning disability.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/nazi-persecution-of-the-...

> The doomed were bused to killing centers in Germany and Austria walled-in fortresses, mostly former psychiatric hospitals, castles, and a former prison — at Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Hadamar, and Brandenburg. In the beginning, patients were killed by lethal injection. But by 1940, Hitler, on the advice of Dr. Werner Heyde, suggested that carbon monoxide gas be used as the preferred method of killing. Experimental gassings had first been carried out at Brandenburg Prison in 1939. There, gas chambers were disguised as showers complete with fake nozzles in order to deceive victims — prototypes of the killing centers' facilities built in occupied Poland later in the war.

> Again, following procedures that would later be instituted in the extermination camps, workers removed the corpses from the chambers, extracted gold teeth, then burned large numbers of bodies together in crematoria. Urns filled with ashes were prepared in the event the family of the deceased requested the remains. Physicians using fake names prepared death certificates falsifying the cause of death, and sent letters of condolences to relatives.

> Meticulous records discovered after the war documented 70,273 deaths by gassing at the six "euthanasia" centers between January 1940 and August 1941. (This total included up to 5,000 Jews; all Jewish mental patients were killed regardless of their ability to work or the seriousness of their illness.) A detailed report also recorded the estimated savings from the killing of institutionalized patients.

[6d6b73]

"A large part of that is because they were deliberately and very specifically targeted, particularly with regard to the use of camps and gas "

What about other groups that were deliberately target like mentally retarded, Roma, homosexuals etc?. Why they are less important in this discussion? Is it only because they still have no voice in our society, and (baring killings) we don't treat them any better than Germans did?

[dspillett]

In part at least: numbers. The patients killed in the earlier "experiments" numbered tens of thousands, perhaps close to a hundred depending which figures you count (not all the records are meticulously kept at the time and some were destroyed later so some guesswork is involved). The number of jewish people killed (I'm not sure if this is just in the camps or more generally) is counted in millions.

Regarding the "killed as much ethnic poles as polish jews" comparison I was initially responding to, you can slice and dice the figures a great many ways to find such similarities. I'm not sure "polish jews" isn't too specific a category to be considered valid as a single absolute number. What are those figures as proportions of the all Poles and Polish+Jewish populations respectively? I suspect that the proportion of the European Jewish population is going to be a lot higher.

Yes thinking in pure numbers can seem somewhat heartless, and I fully understand if some groups feel unduly ignored, but it isn't being done to deliberately hide or discount the effect on those other groups. The groups that get a lot of the attention do so because the effect on their population was proportionately much higher then most (all?) others.

> (baring killings) we don't treat them any better than Germans did?

Two points there:

1. That we treat them as badly is IMO simply wrong. When making statements like that you need to provide evidence to back it up. Society doesn't treat minorities as well in a great many cases, but I would say the orders of scale are not close to similar. Maybe as a white middle class male I'm misunderstanding the scale of something I myself don't suffer from, but if that is the case please show evidence to correct my understanding instead of a single vague (and potentially inflammatory) statement.

2. I recommend not using "Germans" in such statements, use "Nazis" instead. Many German people suffered too, and far from all the perpetrators were German, so the choice of word will to many flag your statement as unfairly targeted.

[dang]

Your comments in this thread stand out as provocative and inflammatory, as do some others'. We need you and everyone else not to comment this way on HN—not on any topic and especially not this one.

HN is for reflective conversation. If we're going to talk about the Holocaust we need to do it that way, not this way ("what about", "didn't lift a finger", etc.)

[6d6b73]

I don't see what's wrong with reminding people that there were other groups of people that we killed in WW2. I'm also surprised that "didn't lift a finger" is considered inflammatory.

I admit that I allowed myself to be little provocative but I think it would be better not to censor comments, but instead moderate non-technical links from the forum before inconvenient discussions take place. If this is not a place for discussions like that, it's also not a place for links to articles that will start such discussion, right?

[dang]

Obviously that phrase isn't inflammatory in itself; no phrase is. It's the angry, grandiose condemnation I was referring to.

The first principle of HN is that it's not just a technical site. Please (re)-read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

There's no substitute for commenters learning the ropes of how to self-regulate in discussions here, technical or non. One of the ropes is not to comment out of fury.

[rangibaby]

The American extermination of the Indians was Hitler's inspiration for his plan to exterminate the Slavs and take their land (Lebensraum). He wrote about it in Mein Kampf

[tptacek]

Possibly because the Poles were killed largely in genocidal military operations, such as large scale bombing of cities, and not (in numbers comparable to the Jewish people) in death camps.

[6d6b73]

How about the fact that Polish Jews were Polish citizens. Why are people keep separating these people from their country? If something similar were to happen in the US, would we be talking about Jews, or Jewish Americans?

These Polish Jews were as much citizens of the country are all other minorities. They were part of Poland for close to 600 years. Poland lost 20% of population during WW2. The fact that half of the lost population were of a different religion does not make them any less Polish.

[tptacek]

I'm not sure I understand the argument here. I agree: Polish Jews were Poles. It's possible we don't disagree at all.

If you ask me why, at least in the US, there's so much attention paid to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, then the answer I'll give is that the Germans killed far more Jews, but also did so more deliberately and carefully, thus supporting that narrative.

I didn't go to US public school --- I went to Catholic school --- but we were always taught about the other victims of the Holocaust. At 12 I'd have told you the Nazis targeted not just Jewish people but also "gypsies", gay people, and communists. We were, for instance, taught about Maximilian Kolbe, a name I remember principally from the story I was taught in grade school.

[6d6b73]

My problem with your previous comment is that you claim that polish losses were mostly to "genocidal military operations, such as large scale bombing of cities".

See, the thing is, since Polish Jews were part of the country, were scientists, doctors, blacksmiths, or just regular farmers they were also killed by these bombings, and other forms of killings. The other side of the equation is that these people who died in the concentration camps were mostly Polish citizens. They count towards "polish losses". It's unfair to separate people simply because of their religion, and make it look like being killed by Zyklon B is so much worse than being torn apart by a bomb.

It's just sad that we even have discussion on this and that some people still think that one for of killing is "better" or "worse" than the other (and I'm not saying that you think that, but other commenters in this whole thread did.)

[tptacek]

This is going to sound snarky but I don't mean it that way: I agree that it's unfair to separate people based on their religion, but I think you want to take that complaint up with the Third Reich. We've come to a point in the conversation where I felt the need to write the sentence "European Jews were deliberately, carefully, and systematically targeted by the Third Reich", which suggests to me that something has gone wrong either in our dialog or the thread.

[6d6b73]

"gone wrong either in our dialog or the thread." Possibly both :)

[mtempleton]

OK, well I don't claim to be an authority on this subject. It just really appears to look like two methods that reached the same result; though one sounds more unnatural than the other to us (i.e. in 2016 the US dropped 26,000+ bombs on Muslim-majority countries, but we have very few places resembling death camps, and none of them are--at least in name--racially motivated).

Anyways, both I think we can all agree are bad. I just didn't know so many non-Jews died in the holocaust.

[2muchcoffeeman]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_the_Polish...

I only skimmed it but maybe because Jews suffered relatively more.

> Note: Polish losses amount to 11.3% of the 24.4 million ethnic Poles in prewar Poland and about 90 percent of the 3.3 million Jews of prewar times. The IPN figures do not include losses among Polish citizens of Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnicity.

Maybe I an interpreting that wrong. But really not many Jewish people globally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population_by_country

[6d6b73]

What you don't consider is that these Jews were Polish citizens. They lived in that country for hundreds of years and became an integral part of the culture, science and economy. Do you consider Jewish-Americans not Americans? When you talk about people lost in 9/11 do you split people by race or religion?

Now, when you consider that these 11.3% of the 24.4 ethnic Poles and 90% of 3.3 mln POLISH Jews died, can you still say that Polish losses were smaller?