The amount of SS troops who ended up unable to continue due to the mental after effects is staggering.
I’m interested to learn more about this, could you point me in the right direction?
neidu3@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Possible, but highly unlikely.
For starters, if that many were killed, I think it’d be really hard to keep a lid on it these days.
Secondly, I’ve done a lot of reading on the atrocities of WW2, and two immediate constraints come to mind:
- Bodies. While possible, disposing of that many bodies without anyone noticing will be really hard.
- The gas chambers of ww2 were only planned during the Wannsee conference in 1942, long after the holocaust actually started. The gas chambers were built because the original plan was not sustainable: People killing other people at an industrial scale. No matter how vile a person is, the human mind was not built to deal with having to mow down swathes of humans with a gun. Even the worst SS troops largely couldn’t deal with killing that many defenseless people, even if they were convinced it was “for the greater good”. The amount of SS troops who ended up unable to continue due to the mental after effects is staggering.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 2 days ago
solrize@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin
Blokhin was selected for the position by Joseph Stalin in 1926 and led a company of executioners that performed and supervised numerous mass killings in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s reign, mostly during the Great Purge and Eastern Front of World War II.[1] Blokhin is recorded as having executed tens of thousands of prisoners by his own hand, including his killing of about 7,000 Polish prisoners of war during the Katyn massacre in spring 1940, making him the most prolific official executioner in recorded world history.[1][2][3] Blokhin was forced into retirement in 1953 after the death of Stalin and condemned during de-Stalinization shortly before his death in 1955.
notabot@piefed.social 2 days ago
two immediate constraints come to mind:
- Bodies. While possible, disposing of that many bodies without anyone noticing will be really hard.
They’re already using military cargo planes for “deportation” flights. Maybe some don’t have any live passengers, and they just dump the bodies mid-ocean. No need for mass graves, just load cargo containers onto a cargo plane and off it goes. If it lands with one or two fewer than it started with, that’s just a paperwork issue.
dan1101@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yes. And based on everything else that MAGA and billionaires have been caught doing and defending, I think there is almost certainly widespread sex trafficking and abuse of the detainees. Why else would the administration try so hard to prevent Congress from observing the facilities?
If the Trump thugs act this badly on the streets then how horribly much worse do you think people are being treated I’m these secret detention facilities completely hidden from public view? This IMO will be seen as one of the worst chapters of our country once all the truth comes out.
Bad enough to end the Republican party in the long run? Hopefully.
DoubleDongle@lemmy.world 1 day ago
ICE has always “lost” suspicious amounts of children.
Apytele@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
A lot of the times our hospital security show up to my deescalation classes after leaving a job in corrections. One of the things we often commiserate on is that they got into corrections and I into the state hospital to try and help other people grow and heal but what happened is that we got caught in a loop of “what am I going to see next that I’m going to have to report?” I’m now working for a psych unit in a regular hospital which still has it’s flaws but none comparable to the state.
First you see a patient spit in the face of a staff member who has to be physically held back from hitting them (they actually told us we’re allowed to restrain our coworkers if that happens), then you see a staff member get called racial slurs and they get up in the patients face and yell at them and you have to get between them and tell your coworker to take a walk but it’s hard to get them to do that because it’s 2am and there’s no other techs on the unit and they know the nurse isn’t gonna come out to help you before it’s too late. And those reactions make sense and you wonder why they’re packing you in with so many patients that your coworker can’t just walk away. And then you see somebody posture and yell at a patient who’s just all around rude but again it’s 2am and you can’t make it to 7 with just one tech.
And you also know that you’re going to need to choose the moment that it’s too much and that’ll be the end. Because if you stay after that you become the “them” in the “us vs them” and one day you’re going to face a violent patient at 2am and the tech who’s with you will leave you alone with that patient because “I don’t want you to report me too.”
And if you’re smart, you get out before it gets that far. One day a nurse asked me what I’d seen happen and I told them (truthfully) that I’d been at lunch and had no idea what they were talking about and they cut the conversation off. And I had no idea what patient or staff member it would’ve been about (as far as I could tell all of the patients were the same as before I’d gone to lunch) so I couldn’t have reported anything anyway. But I had to ask myself if I had seen something what would I have been asked to cover up?
And anybody who’s worked corrections or for the state will tell me something similar happened to them, or worse. And I just… You either get out or something awful happens. I’m so grateful I was able to get out before I personally got pulled into something. You think you’ll be able to be different but that system is just so much bigger than you.
And people who are outside of it living their happy lives will tell you they want a better system, but they will never truly be willing to put in the work needed to change it or even give you the resources to do it yourself. Like I’d been a patient at that state hospital previously and went back as a staff member to try and help and being a staff member was just so much worse somehow. I’m grateful that it gave me the experience to do what I do now and be an authority / teacher in the management of violent patients but it was hell while it was happening. No one who’s never been through that will ever really understand.
tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Nazis weren’t able to fly easily over the ocean during WW2. You wouldn’t be able to reach Holocaust numbers with a plane, but I think “deporting” people but dumping them into the ocean could be possible and seems easy to hide.
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Death flights have quite a long history, sadly, and were a favourite of far right South American dictatorships promoted by the USA…
GalacticGrapefruit@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Bodies would be washing up on shore or limbs would be showing up in the stomachs of fish.
Taniwha420@lemmy.world 1 day ago
It’s worth remembering that something like 5% of the population is sociopathic. That’s a lot of people who are morally compromised.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 5 hours ago
More of them are sadists, as in nothing wrong with them, they just choose evil every day.
Strider@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think you underestimate the creativity and power of these people.
It’s exactly like ww2. People just didn’t want to see it. It will come out at some point. I am certain the USA is already using German KZ methods.
black_flag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
I’m not sure that your second point is still a constant, though this is just an opinion and I’m open to discussion on this. They seem to have solved the problem of people not being up to mass killings, through desensitization through social media (I’m thinking of telegram groups specifically). There have been a lot of cases shown recently of people taking outright glee in their and others’ grotesque murders, en masse.
black_flag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Actually this is pretty good evidence they haven’t started doing that yet. There would be leaks.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 days ago
to add to this point, they have driven cars through protestors and approved of people doing so.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I’d like to add that these people are evil, but also monumentally stupid. If anything like that happened you could be sure that the perpetrators would brag about it on social media.
anomnom@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I think that’s why they’re letting measles spread in the concentration camps. They want them dead, but it has to look like an accident.