The Auschwitz-Birkenau Sign Stolen..?!?
 

What the fuck? Why don't they just burn those god-awful camps to the fucking ground and forget about all this mess in the first place. I don't understand the morbid curiosity of keeping these fucking horrible places alive as disneylandesque memorials..



For Jews, let that shit go.. for the rest of us, why would we bother?

Personally, I think they leave the camps up as bragging. I think in Germany the camps stay up just like in the South Confederate flags still fly high (to shame!!)...

The Germans want the whole world to forever remember and brag about one of the worst nightmares in human history..

we should fuck those Nazis out of their scumbag heritage and burn that shit down... fe real!

having actually been to auschwitz and also having worked as a tour guide at sachsenhausen near berlin i can chategorically state that in no way are these places 'disneylandesque memorials'. they are kept as poinent reminders that the holocaust did very much happen and that no one should ever forget that. maybe you need to get over yourself before making anymore flippant comments regarding the deaths of millions of people.

Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.

Personally, I'd just as soon not repeat this part of history.

We should forget Auschwitz. And slavery. And the potato famine. And the Armenian genocide. And Cambodia. And the crusades. Sierra Leone, DRC, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Turkmenistan, Georgia, Rhodesia - forget about it all. Because it's really important that people get over themselves. Heads down everyone, history doesn't matter. Stiff upper lip and that. We don't need to remember, we can just keep our heads down and maybe history - living history - will cease to matter.

The sign was stolen for the metal, which is worth a lot of money.

walt disney was a fascist

Was he a fascist? I thought he was just anti-semitic.

'Just anti-semitic' seems like a preposterous sentence.

something to that effect.

did anyone see that recent walt disney doc? it looked interesting, but i can't be sure

I never said lets forget about history, how could we forget about such a horrendous situation as the Holocaust and WWII?

BUT, there is thin line between commemoration and commercialization. As a professionally trained historian, you can remember history without necessarily preserving the worst aspects of our humanity for the world to gawk and open-mouthed..

again, I say it, the people who perpetuate these camps are bragging, even if inadvertantly, and I will pray a thanksgiving prayer the day an arsonist burns them to the ground the way they tried to get the Hollywood sign last year...

How is it 'bragging' to lay bare the architecture of what amount to the 20th-century's epitome of despair? I'm not saying there weren't equal or possibly worse tragedies, but you're on astonishingly thin ice to say that it's 'bragging'.

i suggest you go to one of those places, i worked in one as a tour guide so take it from me there is no 'bragging' and they are in no way commercialised. many of them are free admition. i really dont think that you know what your talking about here. two people tried to burn the remaining parts of sachsenhausen down in the 80's. i think there is something very wrong if you would rejoice at the burning down of a museum to the holocaust.

It is bragging in the same sense that the Confederate flag as the state flag of three southern states is bragging. The DeathCamps are a powerful visible symbol of the merciless power that the Nazis exercised..

to leave them is the same as leaving the Pantheon in Rome, it is a visual reminder of the achievements of the previous empires, and in this instance, the achievement is nothing to keep around. To keep the buildings alive and standing is to keep the Nazis alive..

as a tribute to the ELEVEN MILLION people who perished in those camps, they should be burned and leveled to the ground, and a lovely cemetery put up in its place. I have seen several holocaust memorials that perfectly capture this feeling, and so honestly, I think leaving the camps up is redundent and ineffective.. The american sponsers and the jews who fund these things to keep open want to give the Germans an eternal black eye, but if you ask me, I think those whose grandparents and parents in Germany perpetuated this crime, can't help but look back with a bit of accomplishment, just as today southerners look back to the Confederacy as some kind of glory days..

Slave castles and concentration camps have no purpose once you rid yourself of slavery and genocide. They simply extend the wound, like wearing a band-aid to visibly exaggerate and show off a scar..

In this instance, I feel that the Germans leave these camps up the way a soldier or a fighter BRAGS about his battle scars, and Jews and Poles, Slavs and Czechs, (5 million NONJEWS were also killed, its not just a jewish thing but a European thing) keep picking at the scab..

Lets actually HEAL these wounds. NEVER forget, but please, remember with taste and dignity.

why do westerners need reminders that genocide is wrong? oh wait i'm sorry, nazi genocide was wrong, not our own, which is still ongoing, we just don't speak of it. man i knew people in school who visited there and came back with their humanist horror stories that somehow use the genocide at auschwitz as a justification for the genocide that was world war 2. as if it takes one to stop one. i agree with suchfriends about burning it down.

so by your understanding anything like that should be levelled so the ppyramids should be flattened too huh? your argument is is flawed to say the least but i guess thats what i excpect from someone who says that aushwitz should be torn down and ends that sentence 'fe real'.

once again i say you should go to one of them and then say the same thing. idiot.

thank you. ni'k, I would like to say that it has been very refreshing to reason with you on the last couple of threads.. very substantial, I miss that about the internet. All the intellectual and theological boards I used to reason on are all out-of-commission, so I am left here, one of Sonic Youth Gossip's lone resident Historical Theologans ;)

stop being rude, I never was rude to anyone on this thread. This is a serious, no joke thing! If those who liberated themselves from slavery in Egypt burned down the pyramids like those who liberated themselves from the slavery of Moses's Judaica didn't bother to rebuild Herod's Temple, would we honestly be so upset?

Perhaps the pyramids are equally part of this process of bragging rights, did you ever stop to think that the pyramids are a central theme in world history because those victors who write history and shape the present wanted to brag as much as the Nazis or Confederates do today? After all, those majestic pyramids were half buried in sand until Napoleon's expedition began to uncover them.. maybe the desert was trying to bury the blackeyes of the past the same way we should burn those camps?

Today, big buildings in downtown skylines are the pyramids and camps of the past, the tangible creations, the visible and operative symbols of the greedy, power-hungry corporations who perpetuate war, slavery and suffering across the world.. and when our civilization inevitable collapses, will our future remember the truth about how and what built all those lovely buildings or will they get a glimpse of the suffering that built them and feel as repulsed as I do by the camps?

"Assuredly I say to you, not one of these beautiful stones shall be left standing on another!"

To answer your rhetorical question, I WOULDN T DARE enter such an evil and cursed ground as Auschwitz, its not my business to fuck with my heart, just remember that tragedy is hard enough, let alone to go attempt to experience it directly..

go on a pilgrimage to a holy city, go on vacation of a tourist trap, but stay the fuck out of the Holocaust, it is fire, and fire is not partial to them even that burn fire, seen?
fuck it, burn the pyramids down too then!

The Confederate flag is re-appropriated as an atavistic symbol of 'better times'. The thrust towards Arcadia, the idealised past, or the Garden of Eden, a time of innocence, is a common subterfuge in society. I think it's larger than nostalgia, which is a relatively modern construction. The point of the Auschwitz (and other) memorials is precisely the opposite - it's there to remind people that these places are miserable holes. I've never heard of anyone re-appropriating Auschwitz as a site of glory. What's most common in neo-Nazism, ultra-conservativism and racist far-right movements is precisely the opposite - holocaust denial, or revisionism. The concentration camp memorials stand precisely and exactly in opposition to the analogy you've drawn. You may have made a mis-analogy, but I maintain you're on exceptionally thin ice. You might have a point if you proposed pulling down the Reichstag, or the White House, or Red Square, or the Houses of Parliament [etc].

Do you propose that the remaining bits of the Berlin wall be torn down, or should they stand as a monument to the previously-divided Germany? I sometimes wonder if there's such a radically different feeling about history in the USA precisely because it has very little of it, and a tendency to pull things down rather than leaving them to fester (I'm not, of course, referring to the slums and social housing deprivation, which is an entirely different matter). As you probably know, we all live in castles with moats with islands with more castles on over here. Can't move for bloody history.

You should see the memorial to the war dead in St Petersburg. Genuinely, terrifyingly sublime. Great hills of corpses.

You can't be 'one of' and 'lone'; first, because it's syntactically poor form (a crime a true historian would never commit). Second, because I qualify as well.

having lived in germany for a number of years and having visited poland many many times i have never seen any bragging in relation to the holocaust. germans are not felt to be victimised in relation to the holocaust.

so are we to tear down the railroads that built america becuase they could be seen as bragging about slave labour. sitting in your home and commenting on a place you have never been to and seemingly know nothing about are rude.

hence "one of the" ;)


you miss the point.. It is not that there are people literally bragging with their mouths, its that the existence of these things themselves is bragging on their behalf!

You are continuing to be even sillier JonBoy, but you obviously have some emotional attachment to this topic, so it is easily forgivable, but please, contribute something to the reasoning without name calling and a bunch of "if only you.." sayings..

you don't need to point the finger at me, I didn't build the fucking things, they just offend me to see they still exist. If i can't be offended at the symbols of such horrible suffering, what is offensive then?

I will say though, I'm sure you noticed that a lot of younger Berliners (and possibly other Germans) seem to feel that there's a sense that the international sense of the war being the German's fault shouldn't be transmitted onto their generation. Not quite 'let's forget about it' but 'this was a long time ago'. Did you find that?

this thread has too many words to sift through.

has it been mentioned that the sign was found several days ago?

yes, I just have been festering over this for the week, and finally it broke through to the surface so I posted this thread to discuss, and I am very pleased with the discussion it has sparked :)

Why would interrupt a perfectly good thread with pointless information like that?

ITT: tl;dr - some bullshit.

I think Jon fully appreciates the necessity of sensitivity in not prescribing what should and shouldn't be done to memorialise something that killed millions of people. I-man is all well and good, but regardless of claims to universalism of human nature, it's very dangerous to claim the best way to mourn (and I'd say that equally if you were Jewish, Catholic, Gypsy, disabled, gay, communist or dissenter, to cover the larger groups affected by the holocaust).

right, i suppose being annoyed by someone saying that they would rejoice when someone burns down auschwitz is a bit too far right?

once again i think you have very little idea what your talking about.

i did certainly. i know that many people still become very upset when talking about the war, especially the holocaust. there is also a sense that 'you cant keep brining things up because it really wasnt anything to do with me'. being english we know what thats like.

Translation: SuchFriendsAreDangerous knows nothing about mainstream German culture.


Coincidently, I heard pretty much the same sentiment against holocaust memorialization but from the claim that its exploited for Zionist political currency.

dude, come off it already! Why do you feel so strongly about these death camps remaining? Is it really that offensive an idea to burn them down? I honestly don't understand why you are taking so much offense to me wanting to get rid of such horrible places, I can understand that you and other people feel solace and commemoration in leaving these up as memorials, but is it really such a far fetched idea to replace them with conventional memorials? After all, MOST of the camps HAVE BEEN burned down, destroyed and replaced with less appalling memorials.. why do these few remain?

who is talking about mainstream? I know very well that the VAST majority of germans and the world are not bragging, just as the Confederate sympathizers of today do not represent the majority or even minority of Americans.. but to those few idiot contemporary confederates, it is plain and out-right bragging.. and for those few Germans who perhaps still harbor nazism and nazi sympathy, the camps remain so.

Do you honestly think that EVERY German is some-how miraculously full of guilt for their parents and grandparents and for those old enough, even their own actions in the holocaust? If not every american is ashamed of slavery or genocide of the indians, I am sure that there are those germans who harbor the same kinds of backwards sympathy and revivalism.. in fact, last time I checked Neo-nazism was on the rise in our generation of germans and oddly enough some youth in eastern european countries.. you should not think I am as ignorant as you all wish ;)

Rest assured there are still Germans who wish the holocaust was a success, and seeing those buildings and camp remain standing is like a statement which says, "hey, at least we were close! Look at how close we came! Look at how much we achieved!"

Regardless of what we innocent folks and survivors make of these camps for commemoration, the simply and obvious fact remains that they were places of wholesale mass murder and horrible inhuman suffering, and whatever we think of them, the fact that they remain means a little piece of that suffering continues..

well, in that case, you should be far more incensed that it's been cut into three pieces. even if they weld it back together, it's bound to never be the same.

and granted, every white man on the planet is a racist twat, but from all accounts it sounds as if the men who took the sign were idiots who did it to make a quick euro.

the fact that the sign was recovered so quickly only points toward bungling opportunism.

carry on, soldiers.

You've said it yourself. They are appalling. That's the point.

I stopped reading here because

"The Germans want the whole world to forever remember and brag about one of the worst nightmares in human history.."

Not a radical fringe of Germans, not some portion of Germans, "THE Germans."

sorry, my implication was "The Germans (who harbor nazi sympathy and neo-nazi sentiments)"

is the clarification better?

I get that.. but my point is that perhaps they are bit too appalling, and lack class, sensitivity, taste or dignity which are ESSENTIAL characteristics of ANY memorial?

The last class I took at university was a Genocide and Holocaust class, and we discussed this several times. My Jewish studies professor who has taken dozens of trips to these things explained all the angles you guys are presenting to me, but just still don't buy into it. At the end of the class, even he conceded that a) many people are not going there as reverently as others (ie, some are just macabre tourists) and b) true, they can serve as potent symbols for neo-nazis.

And if you were to say that we should expunge a Civil War battlefield memorial because it was a the spot of a Confederate victory and can serve as a sight of pride for a few Confederacy worshipers, I would oppose you there, as well.

In all, SuchFriends, you often come across as a spiritual fascist.

I wonder if we might want to forget the crucifixion of Christ because there are still some people out there who harbor anti-Christian sentiments.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWl1XG8PFnY

this has nothing to do with spirituality. this is reality. I'm sorry if this comes off as an offense, but truly I loathe such places, and hope earnestly that my grandchildren do no have the opportunity to walk in the exact same camps that hurt and killed so many people. We can remember, we can commemorate, but we should to preserve evil out of political correctness or misplaced sympathies.. I am sure that in the end, no one would regret or miss those camps after they are gone, which is why all in all this is a silly debate. I will back off it, I have said enough already. I see all of your points, I just can't empathize with them. I don't necessarily want to convert you all into my opinion or belief, I am very content just to have these discussions in the first place. Much love to you all!


Don't be so naive. As a Christian I do not need to see the actual cross of Jesus, nor do I need to see that actual places of the Martyrs.. I don't need to see the burn mark on the floor where they burned Joan of Arc to remember, seen? In fact, I wouldn't WANT to see such a thing, the memory is harsh enough. In Rwanda they left bodies in the field to decompose in plain site as a reminder, which is sad to me. Bury the dead, put up headstones, signs, memorials etc, but discard to machetes that did the deed, do not honor the weapon of destruction, honor those destroyed.

this was written based on thread title alone.

I'm busy trying to purge the smell of burnt pancakes from the house and blindly assumed you were mad that some racist fucks desecrated a historical monument.

my bad.

are you high??

the shit isn't there for bragging rights. it's to remind everyone that blind faith in man leads to ruin.

what in the fuck is going on in here??

Again: you can't prescribe for other people's mourning. Which is why Bradders has just called you a spiritual fascist.

Bradders just called you a spiritual fascist. He's editing his posts quickly though.