Holocaust Memorial Day

[Del Usory]

wtaf?


One in 20 in the UK deny the Holocaust existed, one in 12 think it was exaggerated?

We allow these people to vote, people.

[Snake Plissken]

And they get invited on to the news. And paid multiples of the average wage to write columns in newspapers.

There is your damned problem.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Tbh, I'm almost relieved the figures are that low, given the quality of most people's thought processes and the unstoppable torrent of lies on social media on anything political.

[Nefertiti2]

Agreed. 5% is Ok.

[Satchmo Distel]

I assume that most are antisemites who use denial insincerely as an excuse to attack or cause emotional pain to Jews; and most of the others have an attraction to conspiracy theories or just want to draw attention to themselves.

What I'm sure they're not, except for a handful, are people who have any familiarity with the overwhelming proof, having somehow managed to avoid any TV documentary ever made on the subject or even wondered why all these people keep grieving for lost relatives.

OTOH some people deny that two planes hit the Twin Towers in 2001, despite the fact that it was on live TV followed by years when all that was at the site was a massive gap where two towers used to stand. And again those grieving relatives whom the deniers must assume are actors.

[Nefertiti2]

chttps://twitter.com/jsternweiner/status/1089581033094144000

[Patrick Thistle]

Anne Frank would have been 89 today.

It's not that long ago that it all happened, really.

[Nefertiti2]

true Satchmo

It's amazing how many who insist the Holocaust didn't happen seem to be rather keen on it as a concept.

[Duncan Gardner]

Every time I've passed her house there's a queue outside. No wonder the Germans etc etc

A large proportion of the population are cheerily ill-informed and uninterested in historical and political events. Separate from the racists and trolls mentioned above

[tee rex]

"The trust’s poll also found that 83% of those questioned said it was important to know about the Holocaust, and 76% believed more needs to be done to educate people." (Guardian)

I'd have predicted lower numbers for both those questions. So that's pretty positive overall. The 5% is probably the minimum rump for any question: "moon made of cheese" would still get that.

I'd like to claim I heard about it first from school or a searing documentary, but I think it was actually Meryl Streep in Holocaust on TV. Not the ideal way to learn history, but in a three-channel world it did the job, even for snotty kids like me.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

chttps://twitter.com/jsternweiner/status/1089581033094144000

I've got to say that perhaps it's no harm that people are starting to forget the Battle of Britain myth. it's nearly as destructive and misleading as the blitz myth. As early as 1941 they were pushing the line that the battle of britain was won by a few brave pilots against overwhelming odds, whereas the fighting was a multinational effort, and it was a war of attrition that England was always going to win, thanks to their much larger, and more efficient industrial base, a highly technically trained workforce, and essentially a command economy, and a really well organized airforce, and carefully thought through air defence network. . Oh, and every time the RAF shot down a german bomber the germans lost five trained aircrew, whereas if a british pilot was shot down, and he managed to get out of the plane, he could be flying again the next day. Essentially the RAF was twice as big as the Germans thought it was, and could build planes and train pilots twice as fast as the Germans thought they could, while the Luftwaffe was half as big as the British thought it was, and built planes and trained pilots at half the rate the British thought they could.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

their much larger, and more efficient industrial base.

It all sounded so well-informed up to that point.

[MsD]

Just on subject of people refusing to believe evidence, there is still a fair number of people who believed hundreds died in Grenfell, that there were body bags laid out along the railway track, and it’s all been hushed up. I was angrily unfriended by one whom I’d thought fairly sane. (He had some connection to GT but so do several other friends, and they accept the numbers.) This despite evidence from reliable sources (unless you believe the all emergency services have been gagged) in real time.

You’re never going to convince everyone and some people just like being contrary, it makes them feel like a free-thinker.

[Jah Womble]

Let's remember the dead by conducting a survey to determine how many don't believe it ever happened. Lovely stuff.

And they get invited on to the news. And paid multiples of the average wage to write columns in newspapers.

There is your damned problem.

This, absolutely.

[Satchmo Distel]

I agree it would have been better for the thread to have been titled in a way that exclusively referred to the survey rather than have the survey stand for the whole of the remembrance.

Even more regrettably, I think there's an assumption by the papers that the survey is better clickbait than an article about the remembrance.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

It all sounded so well-informed up to that point.

In 1939 this was true. You don't think the Nazis were any good at running an economy do you? In large part the battle of britain was won because the UK were able to make a hell of a lot of spitfires and hurricanes in a hurry, because not only did the UK have a large number of specialized machinists, but relatively speaking they had a large number of engineers, and their industries were organized along vaguely rational lines. Even the Americans were using your airplane engines. Turning on the Jews and the intellectuals, and making shit of the universities did nothing for Germany's stock of Human capital, and German industry was starting from a relatively low base after the weimar years.. The upturn in the German economy under the Nazis wasn't the result of carefully planned development and enlightened macro and micro economic policies. They Just borrowed a fuck load of money and also burned through their foreign currency reserves, to fund the building of a large army. If they'd waited to 1940 to start the war, they'd probably have gone bankrupt, and would have been unable to import raw materials.

in the 1930's Germany was a second tier power, who simply started preparing for the war a lot earlier than everyone else, and the battle of France was ultimately a fight between two armies that hadn't really done anything serious in 20 years, against an army that at this point had already occupied Czechoslovakia, and Austria, which taught them a lot about the difficulties of moving an army around unopposed. Then They had also invaded poland, and suffered severe casualties, which wiped out a large part of the 'elite' of their army. Had the Russians not stepped in to finish off the Poles, then it's unclear how long it would have taken the Germans to invade France. This caused them to restructure and rethink huge elements of how they did things, with the result that they had worked out an awful lot of the problems by 1940. That's what they were doing in the 8 months between the invasion of poland and the invasion of France. By contrast the French and the BEF were just sitting on their holes, content that whatever untested methods they had of doing things were going to be just fine. But even then they were better equipped than the germans were. They simply didn't really know how to use them very well.

Everyone else had caught up to the Germans by 1942 in terms of tactics and training, and were starting to pull well ahead in production of just about everything.

Ultimately given all of the nonsense that has been talked about the second world war, and how it has been used in the interim to reinforce certain attitudes, and given the parlous state of the political culture of the UK, 95% awareness is really good.

[NickSTFU]

It appears to be generally accepted amongst historians that Nazi Germany's industrial base wouldn't have been on a total war footing until 1943. By which time of course, the war was lost.

I agree with a lot of TAB says, but the bit about training RAF pilots during the period of the battle I'm not so sure about. It's one thing to train someone to fly, but another thing totally to train them to fly operationally. By 1940, the Luftwaffe had a better ratio of operationally trained and experienced pilots. It's no coincidence that the top Luftwaffe 'aces' had operational experience in Spain, Poland and France. The Luftwaffe also had the better tactics.

Of course, the RAF had a pool of trained pilots in the Poles and Czechs and other exiled nations and racism and xenophobia prohibited their participation earlier in the battle. Having said that, it has been reasonably argued that the 'new' allies had to learn new procedures and RT discipline first. But, the Eastern Europeans, and particularly the Poles were, to put it mildly, discriminated against at all levels.

As for the Holocaust. I discussed it last week with my learners as part of the Equality and Diversity discussion we have to hold periodically. They were all aware of the Holocaust and a discussion was developed about the wider mass deaths of the 30s and 40s written about in 'Badlands' by Tim Synder.

Sorry to be such a bore.

[Nefertiti2]

not a bore. OTF at its best.

[San Bernardhinault]

It's good stuff this, and disabuses me of what I was always taught: Which was not that Britain actually had a superior industrial base, but that Britain basically just got lucky that the Graf Zeppelin was screwing its own detectors when it was on a spying mission to see if Britain had radar yet. That one spy mission convinced the Luftwaffe that Britain didn't have radar. The fact that the British always had aircraft in the air ready for battle gave a false impression of how large the RAF was and caused the Germans to shift from the Battle of Britain - where they believed they couldn't destroy all of the RAF's aircraft - to the blitz. Which, of course, is another British myth that people urgently need to forget about.

But the version I was taught, while not quite the common Brexiter fever dream "Britain was superior because of the maverick brilliance of RJ Mitchell and the pluck of our pilots", still implies plucky little Britain standing up to the Industrial Might of Johnny Foreigner through our science, their incompetence and the grace of god. It's only now thinking about it that I realise that it still looks like classic British myth-making .

[ursus arctos]

Pretty much all versions tend to downplay just how many Johnny Foreigners flew for the RAF, too.

[Gangster Octopus]

One of the many reasons to hate that German bombers song.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

It appears to be generally accepted amongst historians that Nazi Germany's industrial base wouldn't have been on a total war footing until 1943. By which time of course, the war was lost

hah, that's one of hangovers from the previous war, because they were terrified of a collapse in morale in the home front, so they basically tried to make guns and butter when they actually had the capacity to produce neither satisfactorily. . The other hangover was the Tendency to respond to any sign of resistance by killing an entire village, which isn't even a Nazi thing. It's a Prussian thing, and a hangover from the franco prussian war, where they had a particularly difficult time with partizans. (Which explains a lot of what happened in belgium in the first couple of weeks of WWI) This Phobia of partizans really messed them up in the invasion of Russia where you had hundreds of thousands of armed men wandering around behind the lines. Their brutality meant that the Encircled russian soldiers generally kept fighting, and it meant that by the time they made it to the outer limits of Moscow, they were in pretty terrible shape.

A bigger factor though was their refusal to implement the command economy within the armaments industry that the British did on the first day of the war. All of these companies were competing against each other, and weren't co-operating with each other. That wasn't the nazi way, which was everyone at each others throats like supermen. It meant that they were pursuing a huge range of projects that were essentially replicating each other, and stretching their limited supply of engineers and trained workforce incredibly thin.

I agree with a lot of TAB says, but the bit about training RAF pilots during the period of the battle I'm not so sure about. It's one thing to train someone to fly, but another thing totally to train them to fly operationally. By 1940, the Luftwaffe had a better ratio of operationally trained and experienced pilots. It's no coincidence that the top Luftwaffe 'aces' had operational experience in Spain, Poland and France. The Luftwaffe also had the better tactics

Sorry, I should have been a bit clearer. The whole thing only lasted about 3 months, which is a very short period of time to do anything. The RAF took one look at the remilitarization of the rhineland in 1936 and started training thousands of pilots and building radar stations. They were so serious about it that they recruited people on merit rather than the more traditional british methods, and had 9,000 trained pilots by the start of the war. And 20% of them were involved in training.The proportion of them that had got full fighter training was much smaller than that, but they had over 1,000 fighter pilots at the start of the battle, but they had an awful lot more pilots in the pipeline, who could already fly and were getting fighter specific training. They were inexperienced, but generally reasonably well trained. When the RAF were talking about running out of pilots it meant that they no longer had 3 pilots for every two airplanes per squadron. The RAF had so many pilots that they were able to rest pilots and send them on leave. The Germans had one pilot for each plane, and at a relatively early point they were heavily reliant on methamphetamine to combat tiredness. it's great for keeping you awake, but aside from that one crucial aspect, it's not very helpful.

The other challenge faced by the Luftwaffe was that Nazi Doctrine held that the bomber as an offensive weapon was ideologically the most important, so the best pilots were sent to the bomber squadrons. Which is.... stupid. Whereas it was the other way around for the RAF. The Stuka had to be withdrawn from the battle by the middle of because so many of them were shot down and they were haemorrhaging their best pilots, and another couple of weeks and there wouldn't be any stukas left to attacking Russia. The Advantage in tactics and experience was heavily offset by the fact that the RAF knew the Luftwaffe were coming, and where they were, so they were usually ambushing them, which is a massive advantage. The other thing was that because the RAF had more pilots than planes, they could rest their pilots, whereas by the halfway point the German pilots had been flying pretty much non stop, and were relying on Pervitin to keep them going. Methamphetamine might help keep you awake, but it doesn't help in any other way, and goes a long way to explaining why so many german planes were lost while trying to land.

Something that is generally left out of the battle of Britain story is that most of the RAF aircrew killed during the battle of britain were bomber crew, and I suspect that they had left that out because by the time the blitz started in early september, the RAF had been bombing german cities pretty indiscriminately, and fairly ineffectively for four months. I mean it is a justifiable decision to make, but it does make the Blitz less..... unique, and somewhat undermines the narrative that was built up around the Blitz. The Blitz was horrible (and killed my granny, and made an infant refugee of my dad) but on the scale of bombing that happened later it was relatively small scale, and it wasn't even the first example of indiscriminate bombing of the war. The weirdest thing about the Blitz was that it took so long to happen.

The Battle reached a peak in the middle two weeks of August, and the RAF were starting to worrying that another couple weeks of this and they were going to run out of pilots and planes. What they didn't know was that the Germans were going to break first, which was a big factor in the switch to nighttime bombing. The other thing is that their plan to attack RAF airbases was kind of pointless, because basically a lot of them were little more than big fields with a few nissen huts in them, and a few corrugated iron hangars. If you bombed one of them to pieces, it would be operational again within 24 hours.

It's not clear exactly what the Germans thought they were doing, then again Goering was a dangerous idiot. Had the Germans just focused on bombing shipping, they might very well have succeeded in strangling britain. but Goering wasn't very interested in that.

Of course, the RAF had a pool of trained pilots in the Poles and Czechs and other exiled nations and racism and xenophobia prohibited their participation earlier in the battle. Having said that, it has been reasonably argued that the 'new' allies had to learn new procedures and RT discipline first. But, the Eastern Europeans, and particularly the Poles were, to put it mildly, discriminated against at all levels.

This was particularly puzzling because these pilots were knocking around for ages. The czechs had fled in 1938, and the poles not long after that. The primary stated reason was that there were language problems, which may actually be a reasonably valid reason. Polish and Czech are really far removed from English, and it takes quite a while for people to get up to speed. Though there came a point where this became moot. The Eastern european pilots were given Hurricanes and one of them Joseph frantisek had 17 confirmed victories, which was more than any other pilot in the battle. He flew in The mostly polish 303 squadron who were the most effective hurricane squadron in the RAF, and they were the fourth most successful squadron in term of confirmed victories, which is a bit more impressive when you consider that they only started a week after the peak of the fighting.

That said, the rather impressive battle of britain memorial down on the Victoria embankment isn't slow to commemorate them. I really didn't realise that it was less than a year old when I saw it. It's very moving.

[NickSTFU]

"The other challenge faced by the Luftwaffe was that Nazi Doctrine held that the bomber as an offensive weapon was ideologically the most important, so the best pilots were sent to the bomber squadrons. Which is.... stupid. Whereas it was the other way around for the RAF. The Stuka had to be withdrawn from the battle by the middle of because so many of them were shot down and they were haemorrhaging their best pilots, and another couple of weeks and there wouldn't be any stukas left to attacking Russia. The Advantage in tactics and experience was heavily offset by the fact that the RAF knew the Luftwaffe were coming, and where they were, so they were usually ambushing them, which is a massive advantage. The other thing was that because the RAF had more pilots than planes, they could rest their pilots, whereas by the halfway point the German pilots had been flying pretty much non stop, and were relying on Pervitin to keep them going. Methamphetamine might help keep you awake, but it doesn't help in any other way, and goes a long way to explaining why so many german planes were lost while trying to land."

The best fighter pilots were posted to Me110 squadrons, while the best bomber pilot's were indeed posted to JU87 squadrons. However, the main problem with Nazi doctrine was the tactical nature of the Luftwaffe. It was seen as flying artillery to support ground forces and not a strategic force, like the RAF's Bomber Command. This is one of the reasons why the ground offensives in Poland and Western Europe was so successful. The RAF may have known the Luftwaffe was coming, but it didn't always know where and in what strength. Primary Radar, wasn't and still isn't an exact science. There are plenty of first hand accounts from RAF pilots who were sent to wrong vectors, or where bounced from above by the Luftwaffe fighter escort. So, while Radar gave a tactical advantage, it relied on a combination of factors for a successful intercept and when successful, usually put the RAF at a height disadvantage. In affect, the Luftwaffe fighters actually ambushed the RAF on many occasions.

"

Sorry, I should have been a bit clearer. The whole thing only lasted about 3 months, which is a very short period of time to do anything. The RAF took one look at the remilitarization of the rhineland in 1936 and started training thousands of pilots and building radar stations. They were so serious about it that they recruited people on merit rather than the more traditional british methods, and had 9,000 trained pilots by the start of the war. And 20% of them were involved in training.The proportion of them that had got full fighter training was much smaller than that, but they had over 1,000 fighter pilots at the start of the battle, but they had an awful lot more pilots in the pipeline, who could already fly and were getting fighter specific training. They were inexperienced, but generally reasonably well trained. When the RAF were talking about running out of pilots it meant that they no longer had 3 pilots for every two airplanes per squadron. The RAF had so many pilots that they were able to rest pilots and send them on leave"

The RAFVR trained about 6,500 pilots before the war. Like I said though, theses pilots were trained to fly. This is different to being trained to fly operationally. It's an important distinction to make. These pilots were mobilised at the start of the war and operational training started then. It actually took 12-18 months to become a fully operational pilot. This includes learning to fly at 300-400mph while shooting straight. Again there are plenty of first hand accounts of pilots firing their guns for the first time while engaging the enemy. So, while we talk about a lack of trained pilots, we're talking about pilots who are fully operationally trained and not blokes who have done a few circuits and bumps. Leave was a matter for squadron commanders. There is plenty of evidence of squadron commanders sending inexperienced and half trained pilots on leave, because they presented more of a danger in the air to their squadron mates than to the Luftwaffe. It has been suggested that the brunt of the battle was fought by a hard core of experienced pilots in each squadron, because less experienced pilots were sent back for further training (Jonnie Johnson for example, the top scoring British ace of the war) or were given ground jobs while training took place within the squadron. In short we have to be careful when discussing numbers.

[Bored Of Education]

I was sent some lesson ideas, plans and resources based around Holocaust Memorial Day last week but was told that it was up to us as to whether we used them as it wasn't on the curriculum. I was depressed about this as I had just heard the stats mentioned in the opening post. Upon posting my disappointment on FB, I was somewhat heartened for my primary-centric view to be corrected by responders who informed me that it is actually on the secondary curriculum.

As I mentioned on the Generational Trauma thread, there are many who are indirectly affected by the Holocaust - along with, of course, those survivors who are directly affected - today but, with time, these carriers of the living history will decrease and the historical remembrance will become more and more important.