would you, in the context of fascist Germany or other totalitarian regimes with concentration camps, not understand the quoted text as cynical euphemism for such camps?
this understanding of metaphors is not that it was used then. the understanding happens today a contemporary application of historical knowledge.
It's not after that fact, or any euphemism - this is the exact way the regime tried to pass them off at the time. Germany called the concentration camps luxurious places to hangout and learn skills and rehabilitate, with post office, frequent movie screenings, a swimming pool, nice beds. The reality was much different as we know. They did have a small pool on the grounds for show.
Your source for this is an article that takes down a description from a book that was written in 2010. Not sure if you quite caught that on your thorough reading of it.
I just wanted to find some supporting information, what I know about this I know from visiting the camp myself so I didn't have an amazing source at hand.
Good for you! If only things like this were taught in schools so that by the time people find Hacker News, they'd already know about them. We would be having entirely different conversations.
Seems like a waste to update the curricula every few years to include, for example, some random lady who published a holocasut denail book in 2010 as referenced in that source. Doesn't seem very useful pedagogically!
this gets me the wrong way. see, I live in Nuremberg, Germany. I went to school here, "higher education". I've learned a lot about fascism, how it lured voters into electing them, how they grabbed and secured power, how they introduced concentration camps ("animal protection" legislation, prohibiting kosher butchering, introduced the camps as punishment for those insisting on kosher law. twisted)
I've visited two concentration camp memorials, with their cynical writing at the gate.
I've read the Auschwitz documents edited by 2001 Verlag. I've watched the Holocaust movie series of the 1970s (way to early)
nonetheless, I was not aware of concentration camps being labeled as recreational leisure camps of some sort by the nazis.
my point being: it was no lack of education to not know that additional aspect of systematic brain sick evil.
AFAICT, this wasn't actually how the Germans framed the concentration camps at all. The article you responded to is about how a woman described them in 2010.
>> I've watched the Holocaust movie series of the 1970s
Do you recall Karl is sent to Theresienstadt where the art studio secretly paints the holocaust?
That is the "paradise ghetto", the potemkin village concentration camp the Nazis created to give tours to international observers to fool them about conditions. Sometimes called a retirement village or the gift of the Fuhrer to the Jewish people but of course, just a temporary pause for transports going further east to the death camps.
But if you still mean that the specific term "wellness farm" COULD have been used as a euphemism for concentration camps (regardless of whether or not it ever was), then what's the point? Like people also COULD have used the term "suburb" as euphemism for a concentration camp. Should we also be skeptical of anyone who says they want to build suburbs? What's even the point of of saying that a term COULD have been used as euphemism historically?
this understanding of metaphors is not that it was used then. the understanding happens today a contemporary application of historical knowledge.
and honestly, it's obvious.