[vasco]

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.

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/lying-about-ausc...

[_2d30]

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.

[vasco]

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.

[froh]

wow. TIL.

[taneliv]

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.

[_2d30]

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!

[froh]

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.

[_2d30]

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.

The closest thing I can find is here: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deceiving-...

And this film was never even shown broadly as it was made near the end of the war. Also, it's technically for a ghetto and not a concentration camp.

No AI I've asked and no links I've found suggest that concentration camps were broadly propagandized as anything similar to "wellness farms".

[vasco]

What about this article from AP, Monday, April 24, 1933, doesn't say wellness farm, but it also isn't very accurate. Was a cursory search of contemporaneous articles and that popped up, probably not impossible to find more with similar descriptions. Enough to at least understand the message at the time was much softer than reality.

> Some 18,000 Germans from all walks of life are being held in the political concentration camps in various parts of the country.

> Wilhelm Frick, Prussian minister of the interior, explains that they will be kept there until they become "fit citizens," reconciled if not converted, to the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.

> Sanitary conditions generally are described as excellent. There are doctors at each camp to care for the health of the inmates, and some of them report that the political prisoners are adepts [sic] at getting on morning "sick call."

> The physical culture includes morning setting-up exercises, football matches and similar group games. The manual labor is mostly tidying up the camp premises and barracks, but there are odd Jobs too, such as sewing or painting swastika emblems on confiscated Communist flags.

> Taeglische Rundschau sees political ideas of tomorrow coming from the concentration camps of today. Quoting a prisoner as saying "Sure we'd like to get out; but this is a good enough place to think things over," the paper comments:

[0] https://newspapers.ushmm.org/historical-article/1933-camps-u...

[_2d30]

LOL yeah this really paints them in a positive light. If this is the best resource you have for how the Nazis propagandized their concentration camps (this is literally right after the earliest ones opened so you would expect whatever propaganda to be as strong as possible then) as “luxurious” then I’m going to land on that not being the case.

> At most of the camps privileges are few. Major Kauffman, head of the big Heuberg camp in Wuerttemberg, said his prisoners were allowed to write one letter a month. There are no visiting days there.

It literally even calls them political concentration camps in the article.

[froh]

there was "exemplary" KZ Theresienstadt which was used to pretend these camps were educational facilities, quite successfully so for some period of time.

[_2d30]

Fascinating. Never heard of it. What did you think about the source I linked to?

[Fluorescence]

>> 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.

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

[froh]

I only have nightmare memories, I was way too young to process what I saw :-(

I also found the Reichsparteitagsgelände (Nazi Party Rally Grounds) permanent exhibition the most useful content I was exposed to: they really show how fake news on all available channels and mega-church style mass entertainment were key to overturn a democracy and enable the atrocities. that and first bullying and then eradication of opposition.

I'd really hope US up their resistance and democracy protection game at this point in time. I'm afraid. As in existential fear.