Quote:
Originally Posted by Carleton Hughes
When I left Watchmaker's school my first job was working for a guy who had been in a camp,had the tattoo on his arm.
After I knew him well I asked him about his experiences.
His version{to which the usual disclaimers apply}was that he recalled no mass slaughter or systematic extermination,all were used for munitions and war material assembly.
Toward the end of the war the slender food resources had to be prioritised for the troops in the field and the civilian population,hence the pictures of rail-thin,corpse-like men and women.
According to him dysentery and starvation were the real culprits,believe what you will,but this has been repeated by other camp survivors I have been priviledged to know.
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My uncle, law degree from Harvard, '38, was an infantry officer in Europe from shortly after D-Day until well after the end of the war. Aside from (or in addition to) his combat experiences, he was on-hand for the liberation of one concentration camp toward the end of the war. He immediately volunteered to become an investigator for war crimes and helped prepare cases against a number of suspects. Having spoken to the old fart about his own investigations, I have no problem at all believing that terrible, unspeakable crimes occurred as an intentional aim of the Nazi government.
I think what you'll find is that experiences varied according to dates of internment, location of internment, capabilities of the prisoner, and needs of the regime. The Nazis kept volumninous records that are still extant concerning disposition of the prisoners -- we needn't take the word of prisoners or guards or liberators or townspeople. We have Nazi records which were used as evidence at trial and were uncontested by the defendants -- hence the "following orders" defense rather than "never happened" defense.
So the memory of a particular prisoner, like the memory of a particular soldier, does not describe the experiences of many people to any degree of accuracy. In contrast, the great detail of teh Nazi regime's OWN records give a detailed and systematic description of their own efforts in that regard.
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