tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post3353366502229255743..comments2023-10-05T04:00:39.089-05:00Comments on Kingdom of Chaos: Obama's Auschwitz MomentEl Jefe Maximohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-36136826566319196922008-05-28T12:31:00.000-05:002008-05-28T12:31:00.000-05:00Buchenwald was primarly a forced-labor camp and he...Buchenwald was primarly a forced-labor camp and held, as you say, quite a few political prisoners.<BR/><BR/>Interestingly, the place wound up in the Soviet occupation zone, and was handed back to them by the US -- and the Soviets used it for its own political prisoners from 1945-50. . .which in a few cases might have had a certain amount of poetic justice.<BR/><BR/>Buchenwald was not explicitly an extermination camp, but 60,000 or so people died there, mostly of starvation (the forced laborers -- who were pulling 20 hour work days at hard physical work with the German 4F guards and other kapos standing over them with stock-whips -- were not fed much and essentially worked to death). About 9,000 Soviet POW's were shot there. <BR/><BR/>Things did get worse near the end, but I don't know if I'd distinguish meaningfully among the camps in terms of general lethality -- the prisoners were beyond the reach of law and the SS killed them, tortured them or performed medical experiements on them (lab for that purpose at Buchenwald) as it found convenient.<BR/><BR/>The extermination camps proper -- designed and built for mass murder (although Auschwitz, the biggest, also had a slave labor section) -- were all in Poland proper (the so called "General Government" part) or parts of Poland annexed to Germany. They were: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmo, Belzec, Majdanek (this one had factories also), Sobibor and Treblinka. There were some others, but these were the biggies, and the German paperwork and bureaucracy distinguished between these camps and the other, regular camps, that could still kill you just as dead.<BR/><BR/>Auschwitz was huge. The death camp itself was started around a former Austrian cavalry barracks. Besides the death camp there was a vast factory complex, all folded into something called the "Auschwitz Interest Area," and probably the largest construction/industrial project in German occupied Europe. The SS used it -- and the slaves -- to become a serious economic player. The Germans built from scratch a big chemical complex there -- largest synthetic rubber plants in Europe, among other things. All built and run by slave labor, beyond the range of the allied bombers.<BR/><BR/>Synthetic rubber is still produced in the plants there - was something like 5 percent of world totals postwar, for a good period.<BR/><BR/>I have never ever thought they hung anywhere near enough of the people who built, administered and ran this system.El Jefe Maximohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14661511063910659377noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8632546.post-24903802906970036162008-05-28T11:59:00.000-05:002008-05-28T11:59:00.000-05:00imo, and i'm sure EJM I the historian will correct...imo, and i'm sure <I>EJM I</I> the historian will correct me, but auschwitz is simply NOT buchenwald.<BR/>buchenwald was established to hold political prisoners. <BR/>you know, where people like me will be sent when hussein is coronated.<BR/>auschwitz, birkenau, majdanek, theresienstadt, were extermination camps. created primarily as part of the final solution.<BR/>Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen became death camps LATER in the War. but only due to conditions in the camp and people simply being worked to death.<BR/>now another point if i may.<BR/>hussein has constantly criticized people who are critical of his past associations.<BR/>what, he asks, does something that someone did twenty years ago have to due with me today?<BR/>simply put, what does something that someone he didn't even know that was done 60 years ago have anything to do with him today?<BR/>he's a jooish pandering empty suit.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com