----- Original Message ----- From: "Gautam Mukunda" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, March 17, 2003 4:54 PM Subject: Re: Corrected French history (was RE: Deadlier Than War)
> --- 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. I also am discussing many different levels of resistance. >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 think that is a valid statement. But, that also means that failure to meet my standards is worse than failure to meet Gautam's. I allow that people can often do only little things >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. I wonder about passive resistance. Is it possible that the relatively low numbers of deaths in France is due to people happening to lose documents, not do their job well, etc. when asked to help with the roundup of Jews. Is the lower amount of resistance in Western Europe as much a matter of the behavior of the Nazis as the nature of the conquered country. I do remember seeing a history of WWII that indicated that the Nazis were first greeted as liberators in the USSR, until their behavior turned people against them. If they were as generous with terms of occupation in the USSR as they were in France, would the citizens of the USSR have fought as hard? >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. I certainly wouldn't argue that anti-Semitism had a lot to do with it. > 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) One possibility is that the government in France was evil too; so that it was harder to save the Jews without heroism. Is it possible that there were French who helped to hide the Jews in plain sight by passively resisting the Vichy, and that had something to do with the relatively low numbers of deaths? Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
