PARENTING FREEDOM

I suppose I have to give you a warning about the abortion picture in this post.

Life goes on oustide the Nazi gas chambers

Living alongside horror

Watch the video of the following transcript here:
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/ssalbum/video/

Rebecca Erbelding:
In December of ’06 I received a letter. I opened it up and the first sentence said “I would like to offer the Holocaust Museum a chance to review some World War II era photographs in my possession.” In beginning- or mid- January a bubble-wrapped package arrives on my desk. I open it up and the first page says “21 June, Auschwitz,” and so that was the point when we knew we might have something here.

Many people think that they have photographs of Auschwitz, and very few people actually do.

Because of the overwhelming evidence of what we know was going on in Auschwitz, it kind of makes it even more chilling that they were having so much fun doing it.

Judy Cohen:
It would be nice to figure out at some point who these women are, if these are wives…

Erbelding:
Can we look at this page here?

Cohen:
There’s relatively little material that was taken in Auschwitz, other than mug shots. The most famous are the large collection of photographs documenting the deportation of Hungarian Jews in May 1944.

Erbelding:
And these are specifically the officers who are in charge of that deportation, who are in charge of the arrival of 437,000 Hungarian Jews in a span of 55 days. The vast majority of them did not survive. These are the men who did it.

Peter Black:
The importance of finding out who the original owner was, was vital to authenticate the artifact itself, and also to locate it in time and place.

Erbelding:
In the album, only 3 people are actually identified by name in the captions. Mengele I knew on sight, but for others we needed to look at lapels, we needed to look at where they were standing, what their uniforms looked like, what event this might possibly be, to determine who they were.

Cohen:
We noticed that it’s the same person who appears over and over on almost every single photograph. And he often will caption photos as “Me with” so-and-so, but he never identified himself by name.

Black:
He was seen frequently in the presence of someone of higher rank, and we also knew from the photograph album that both men were promoted, to different ranks, on June 21, 1944.

Here’s the listing of Karl Höcker’s name, and you can see by the notation of his rank and the date of promotion, June 21, 1944, as indicated in the photo album.

Cohen:
One of the two was Karl Höcker, who was the adjutant to the commandant. And then the light bulbs went off and we said, “Oh, it would make sense that he would be always standing next to the commandant,” and we noticed that in a number of pictures he has an adjutant cord, which is a cord that you wear over your shoulder, which really clinched the identification.

Erbelding:
Karl Höcker was an Obersturmführer. He was a career concentration camp officer. He went to Auschwitz in 1944. It was a fairly big deal to establish that it was Karl Höcker’s album because his proximity to power was extreme.

Joseph White:
Auschwitz wasn’t just a series of concentration camps, it was also a German community. And the fact that you have this resort…

Cohen:
Solahütte was the SS retreat, and was within the grounds of Auschwitz. That people go on vacation is not a surprise. That they felt a need to go to a retreat where SS personnel can frolic at the same time that they were murdering the Jews of Europe, and to build it as part of the same complex, is an amazing thing.

Erbelding:
There’s one photograph, it’s a sing-along picture. And along the bottom are 7 of the highest-ranking officers in Auschwitz. Just leaning back smiling, while the men behind them sing. Höcker is there; Otto Moll, the supervisor of the gas chambers; and [Rudolf] Höss and [Richard] Baer and [Josef] Kramer; and Franz Hössler, who was the head of the women’s camp at Birkenau; and [Josef] Mengele. To have them all together is such a rare photograph. And then to have them enjoying themselves all together, it’s really frightening.

White:
Here we have a case where people we investigate and research all of a sudden, we’re seeing them, in some cases for the first time.

Cohen:
There are the photographs of the Helferinnen, of the female auxiliaries that came…

Erbelding:
And they were female auxiliary officers who worked the telecommunications between Auschwitz and Berlin and Auschwitz and the other camps.

Cohen:
They’re young and they’re out for a good time.

Erbelding:
And there’s a series of 6 photographs where Höcker is handing out blueberries, bowls of blueberries, at Solahütte.

Cohen:
And one young girl is pretending to cry. No more blueberries, and she’s making mock tears.

White:
This is at a time when Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi and so many other Holocaust surviving victims were in a part of the Auschwitz complex.

Cohen:
The last series of photographs that are in the album are ones of a funeral of, it’s called a “terror attack.”

White:
“Terrorangriff” — “terror attack,” underneath, that was the Nazi code language for bombing.

Erbelding:
There’s a color guard. There’s a parade for these men. There are women and children there mourning them with flag-draped coffins. This was three weeks before the end. It tells us they still hadn’t come to grips with the fact that it was over.

Cohen:
We all know that monsters do monstrous things. But when you see people who look like they’re nice guys, in a fairly benign setting, and we know for a fact that they were doing monstrous things, then it raises all sorts of questions about what’s man’s capacity for evil. In a different setting would they still be monsters?

White:
They were all too frighteningly human.

Erbelding:
It makes you think about how people could come to this. That they don’t look like monsters. They look like me. They look like my next door neighbor. Is he capable of that? Am I?

Hat Tip 1: http://www.conversiondiary.com/2008/11/how-would-you-know.html

Hat Tip 2: http://realchoice.blogspot.com/2008/11/something-for-all-of-us-to-chew-on.html

From R.C. Sproul:
http://www.abort73.com/HTML/III-E-4-hell.html

“The world still recoils in horror at the reality of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. Yet I believe we are in the midst of a new and more evil holocaust, which sees the destruction of 1.5 million unborn babies every year in the United States alone. This situation calls to mind the words of a German pastor imprisoned for opposing Hitler. Martin Niemoller said,”

“‘In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. They came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came fore me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.’”

“If you care about the slaughter of the innocent, then for God’s sake, speak up. Speak to your family. Speak to your neighbor. Speak to your friend. Speak to your doctor. Speak to your minister. Speak to your congressman. Let your voice be heard in a chorus of protest. Yours is only one voice, but it is a voice. Use it.”

From John Piper:
http://www.abort73.com/HTML/III-E-4-hell.html

“I am frustrated that I have only one life to live for Christ. This morning after breakfast I was again distressed, very distressed, at the thought of the thousands of unborn children that are legally crushed to death by sterile medical instruments. I lay down on my bed and stared at the ceiling. The immensity of the horror of bloody little legs and arms and heads dismembered and piled on a clinic mat returned again and again.”

“For three years Noël and I lived a few miles from Dachau, the concentration camp outside Munich, Germany. Today it is open to the public. There are pictures. It is only because there are pictures that we believe it happened. Without the photographic record there would be no belief. We walked through the terrible chambers. We walked through the oven rooms. We walked between the stacked bunks. But that is not real. They are like props. It didn’t really happen here in this very spot. Not really.”

“Then we saw the pictures. The pictures don’t lie. Everything can lie but the pictures. We can escape anything but the pictures. Worldwide indignation came from the pictures. Without the pictures it is unimaginable; it couldn’t have been like that. Or, yes, it could have, but I can’t come close to feeling what I should feel-not without the pictures.”

“So it is with abortion. It is the pictures that stun me this morning-the incredible scenes from Eclipse of Reason and the photographs of legally mangled corpses. What shall I do? Would petitions and prayers really have sufficed in Nazi Germany?”

“Then I think of the immensity and horror of the sin of disbelieving God. I think of the offense against his immeasurable honor. I think of the reality of hell and the word pictures in the Bible: ‘And the smoke of their torment goes up for ever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night’ (Revelation 14:11, RSV).”

“Suddenly, it hits me what an utter inconsistency it is to feel indignant as a Christian about the Holocaust of the Jews and the holocaust of abortion, but not about the holocaust of sinners perishing in unbelief. Killing babies is a horrendous evil and their destruction is hellish. But not trusting God is a more horrendous evil, and the destruction of unbelieving people is not hellish but hell. Therefore I am frustrated that I have only one life to live for the glory of Christ. One life should surely be devoted to stopping the carnage (we must speak graphically or we lie) of abortion. Another life should surely be devoted to saving people from hell.”

“What shall I do? What is the solution to my frustration? The solution is the diversity of the members of the church of Jesus Christ. I cannot go to all the unreached peoples of the world with the good news of salvation from sin. I cannot spend all the time I would like writing, speaking, traveling, and agitating for the cause of threatened children. The only solution I know is you! Which horror in the world today makes you ache most? Where will you pour yourself out in the few years you have before you give an account to the righteous Judge of all the earth?”

Nazi Germany

North America Abortion

And, in this week’s news:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iRxZox4GFoIweckPDP1oRhKBlHOwD94CCDU00

A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

“We can’t be lulled into complacency,” Broun said. “You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I’m not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential.”

Edited to add: I don’t think Hitler was elected, but the general idea is still valid.

Edited again: During the evening of the day I posted this, I watched The Diary of Anne Frank which happened to be on TV.

Edited November 14, 2008 to add:
Australian Committee Proposal to Pay Mothers Late Abortion Cost for Disabled Babies Compared to Nazis
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/nov/08111305.html

This entry was posted by Carol on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 10:37 AM and is filed under Abortion, Politics Barack Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.