--- Jon Gabriel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >How many non-Jews were sent to concentration camps > for helping the Jews? > >How many were put to death? If I read Gautam > right, many people did fight > >the Holocaust with relatively minimal risk. > > If that's what Gautam is saying, then I think I'll > probably disagree. 6 > million Jews and 12 million non-Jews died. I will > hunt for online > statistics on how many of those non-Jews were killed > for helping Jews and > let you know what I find. > > Jon
I wouldn't go so far as to say _minimal_ risk. What I was saying was that there was minimal risk to declining to actively participate in the Holocaust. That's the truly shocking thing. Even in Nazi Germany, if you wanted out of the mass execution squads, (einsatzgruppen, I think, but I bet Damon will correct me) all you had to do was ask. It's just that people didn't. I was further arguing that in Vichy France (for example) there wasn't much risk to helping people escape because the Germans _weren't there_. There were a few officers, certainly, but the occupation of Southern France didn't occur until after Operation Torch. But risk or no risk, I'm probably holding people to a more exacting standard than Dan is. I believe that it is better to be dead than to consent to some things, even if consenting is no more than _passively_ consenting and failing to actively resist. When the Danes succeeded in doing what they did it's not as if the Germans put all of Denmark to the sword - by the standards of what they did to the rest of Europe, they didn't do much at all. My argument is that - given the multiple successful examples of resistance - more should have been done. Dan seems to think that I think it was because of cowardice. There may have been some of that. I think the major reason was that it was Jews who bore the brunt of it, and they didn't really care. Had it been Catholics (for example) I think things might have been different. But we have a relative scale here, in terms of most effective to least effective resistance: Serbs and Russians (militarily) Danes (saving their Jews) and, at the bottom, France (which did neither). Given that some people did manage to do it, what's your explanation for why others, in basically the same circumstances, failed? Gautam __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop! http://platinum.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
