Completely apart from what is happening in Israel, which is rooted in the same kind of murderous ethno-religious purist desire ... but yes you should take it seriously.
The forced labor and the concentration camps were not the same. My late father, as a teenager, and my grandfather and others, were initially forced laborers, ie slaves, taken to Austria around 1944. After the substandard diet made them ineffective at digging etc, they were shipped to a concentration camp in 1945, which was an entirely different operation. In some of those camps, the relatively "lucky" ones, the inmates were simply neglected and left to rot, and many did survive (barely). Others, like Auschwitz, nobody our family knew of returned from. The "ovens" were to scale up the disposal of the bodies of those already dead, regardless of the method by which they died - whether starved, shot, or poisoned.
A peculiarity of that episode of genocide was that surprisingly detailed records were kept, compared to similar modern episodes in semi-literate peasant societies. Both by the victims (eg my grandfather, previously a doctor, carried around papers of the names of those from his small town that he knew were killed, and of course after the war the reunited communities figured it out in detail) - and also by the operators of the concentration camps, as they initially had other purposes besides wholesale ethnic cleansing, and when repurposed to "neatly" dispose of masses of human beings, the bureaucracy that counted everyone still remained. It is remembered, among many things, as a reminder of what ordinary people are capable of (not in a good way), if and when things go wrong. Germany was, after all, considered one of the most "civilized" in the west in culture, science, rule-following, etc.
As for Israel, today they're very disgustingly hiding behind this entire history, to stifle criticism of today's episode of ethnic cleansing and mass murder in Gaza (likely to accelerate from mere thousands, into tens or even hundreds of thousands, as the lack of fuel and clean water etc eventually kicks in) - all the while Israeli leaders claim victimhood -- which is not the case at all in today's balance of power. Regardless of the instigating cause, what is happening is quite deliberate, and a direct expression of the strategic end state the Israeli far right has consistently wanted.
You are misunderstanding my post, it seems. I do NOT state that there was a "paradigmatic" genocide; I consider that view false (as you do). I state that the Holocaust is very often treated as such (yes, that is still a fact).
Completely apart from what is happening in Israel, which is rooted in the same kind of murderous ethno-religious purist desire ... but yes you should take it seriously.
The forced labor and the concentration camps were not the same. My late father, as a teenager, and my grandfather and others, were initially forced laborers, ie slaves, taken to Austria around 1944. After the substandard diet made them ineffective at digging etc, they were shipped to a concentration camp in 1945, which was an entirely different operation. In some of those camps, the relatively "lucky" ones, the inmates were simply neglected and left to rot, and many did survive (barely). Others, like Auschwitz, nobody our family knew of returned from. The "ovens" were to scale up the disposal of the bodies of those already dead, regardless of the method by which they died - whether starved, shot, or poisoned.
A peculiarity of that episode of genocide was that surprisingly detailed records were kept, compared to similar modern episodes in semi-literate peasant societies. Both by the victims (eg my grandfather, previously a doctor, carried around papers of the names of those from his small town that he knew were killed, and of course after the war the reunited communities figured it out in detail) - and also by the operators of the concentration camps, as they initially had other purposes besides wholesale ethnic cleansing, and when repurposed to "neatly" dispose of masses of human beings, the bureaucracy that counted everyone still remained. It is remembered, among many things, as a reminder of what ordinary people are capable of (not in a good way), if and when things go wrong. Germany was, after all, considered one of the most "civilized" in the west in culture, science, rule-following, etc.
As for Israel, today they're very disgustingly hiding behind this entire history, to stifle criticism of today's episode of ethnic cleansing and mass murder in Gaza (likely to accelerate from mere thousands, into tens or even hundreds of thousands, as the lack of fuel and clean water etc eventually kicks in) - all the while Israeli leaders claim victimhood -- which is not the case at all in today's balance of power. Regardless of the instigating cause, what is happening is quite deliberate, and a direct expression of the strategic end state the Israeli far right has consistently wanted.
You are misunderstanding my post, it seems. I do NOT state that there was a "paradigmatic" genocide; I consider that view false (as you do). I state that the Holocaust is very often treated as such (yes, that is still a fact).
Thank you.
I've deleted it.
My apologies.
No problem!