[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.

[vasco]

You seem to treat this topic with a strange lightness.

[_2d30]

My "LOL" is at people condescendingly trying to prove things like "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" with sources which repeatedly don't do that in any way.

[vasco]

I guess anything we don't agree with can sound condescending but I assure you I thought I was relaying accurate information gotten at the place the things happened. I saw the pool and the guide had a whole bit about the Germans doing news stories there to prove how good it was. Maybe the guide was politically motivated, I guess, and I was just gullible, but the second article I shared definitely seems to paint a much rosier picture of the camps than starving people fighting for survival every day. And it doesn't sound surprising to me that people would lie about it being nicer? Is there maybe some deeper point that is annoying you in this imprecision that I'm missing?

[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?

[froh]

the source is good, the book it reviews is abysmal. spreading it, publishing it and writing it constitute crimes according to German penal code.

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

this legislation is a consequence of the paradox of tolerance.

[_2d30]

I literally have no idea what you're talking about. This is what I linked to: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/deceiving-...

Which if you had clicked and read you would see comes from the US Holocaust museum and is heavily focused on Theresienstadt. I was making a point that you're not really interested in engaging with anything I'm writing and are instead focused on just getting your own point across as evidenced by your use of "Theresienstadt" as a point in reply.

[froh]

srry for the confusion.

the 2010 "source" further above is abysmal Holocaust denial.

your source (ushmm) of course is not.

I got confused on the small smart phone display about who I was responding to.

apologies again.

[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.