Documentary /archive.org /or area
Night Will Fall is a 2014 documentary film that chronicles the making of the 1945 British government German Concentration Camps Survey. During the World War II, children were especially vulnerable to death under the Nazi regime. Some 1.5 million children, nearly all of them Jewish, were deliberately murdered in the Holocaust – including 66,000 dead, 133,700 wounded, 50,000–200,000 kidnapped, 694,000 captured Polish children, were murdered, either directly or as a direct consequence of totalitarian actions.
The Lidice massacre was the complete destruction of the village of Lidice in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now the Czech Republic, in June 1942 on orders from the Nazi leaders. Approximately 340 people from Lidice were murdered in the German reprisal. After the war ended, only 143 women and 17 children returned.
„The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during the Nazi reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.” /nytimes/
My person was born in Czarnowasy, the place in Poland is around 80 km from Auschwitz. During my childhood up to the age of eight, I was exposed to the beautiful landscapes of this area. Endless groves of cherry trees, fragrant meadows, cats and wolves lurking in the undergrowth. It was a simple time in socialism, good friendship and warmth.
However, there was often something disturbing, hidden and frightened in the expression of the eyes of Polish people, a deep sadness emerged from the friendly faces of my childhood. What shocks me most today is the Auschwitz concentration camp. I now have no words for the Nazi alcohol addiction, forced labour and extermination camps.
The place commemorates about 300 people killed by the Gestapo in Bittermark city forest and in the Rombergpark between March 7 and April 12, 1945. The people killed were forced laborers from France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Poland and the Soviet Union, members of the German resistance, as well as ordinary people whose careless utterance was judged to be “the dissemination of the opinion about the futility of the war”.
The Banality of Evil and the Final Solution
„The Nazis cannot be compared with Genghis Khan or other horror figures from history. Totalitarianism cannot be found in dark chapters of history or in politics. There have always been wars of aggression, the extermination of entire peoples like in Australia, America and Africa is nothing new, and there has been no lack of megalomaniacal and bloodthirsty dictators in human history. As terrible as these earlier inhumans and atrocities were, one can still somehow understand them, that is, one can discover motives, even if they are only such base, primitive drives as naked greed or sheer hunger for power.
– Annihilation ⋅ 2018 –
However, this is no longer the case with the Nazi death factories. Common sense is confronted here with complete senselessness. And the place where this absolute senselessness was practiced most horribly was the concentration camps. The inmates could no longer even see their torment as punishment for any guilt. In this system, it didn’t matter at all whether a real criminal or a completely innocent person was sent to the gas chamber. The annihilation happened to human beings who were practically dead – deprived of their rights and dignity. These crimes were more about meeting certain extermination quotas.”
Hannah Arendt & Alois Prinz
– In remembrance of Hiroshima ⋅ 1945 –
There are currently over 12,800 operational nuclear weapons on the planet. “The German people are therefore committed to inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every human community, of peace and justice in the world.” Article 1 paragraph 2 Basic Law (Grundgesetz). Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals. plants and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let other kill, and not to support any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, and in my way of life ⋅ སེམས གཟིགས
Creating Dehumanized Enemies of the State
»Among the operational principles we must add to our arsenal of weapons that trigger evil acts by ordinarily good men and women are those developed by nation-states to incite their own citizens. We learn about some of these principles by considering how nations prepare their young men to engage in deadly wars while also preparing citizens to endorse engaging in wars of aggression. A special form of cognitive conditioning through propaganda helps accomplish this difficult transformation.
Images of the enemy are created by national media propaganda (in complicity with govern-ments) to prepare the minds of soldiers and citizens to hate those who fit the new category „your enemy.” Such mental conditioning is a soldier’s most potent weapon. Without it, he might never put another young man in the cross hairs of his gun sight and fire to kill him. It induces a fear of vulnerability among citizens who can imagine what it would be like to be dominated by that enemy. That fear becomes morphed into hatred and a willingness to take hostile action to reduce its threat. It extends its reaches into a willingness to send our children to die or be maimed in battle against that threatening enemy.
In Faces of the Enemy, Sam Keen shows how archetypes of the enemy are created by visual propaganda that most nations use against those judged to be the dangerous them, outsiders, enemies. These visual images create a consensual societal paranoia that is focused on the enemy who would do harm to the women, children, homes, and God of that nation’s way of life, destroying its fundamental beliefs and values. Such propaganda has been widely practiced on a worldwide scale.
Despite national differences in many dimensions, it is still possible to categorize all such propaganda into a select set utilized by homo hostilis. In creating a new evil enemy in the minds of good members of righteous tribes, the enemy is: aggressor, faceless, rapist, godless, barbarian, greedy, criminal, torturer, murderer, an abstraction, or a dehumanized animal. Scary images reveal one’s nation being consumed by the animals that are most feared: snakes, rats, spiders, insects, lizards, gigantic gorillas, or even octopi.
A final point on the consequences of adopting a dehumanized conception of selected others is the unthinkable things that we are willing to do to them once they are officially declared different and undesirable. More than 65,000 American citizens were sterilized against their will during an era (1920s-1940s) when eugenics advocates used scientific justifications to purify the human race by ridding it of all those with undesirable traits. We expect that view from Nazi Monster but not from one of America’s most revered jurists, Oliver Wendell Holmes. He ruled in a majority opinion (1927) that compulsory sterilization laws, far from being unconstitutional, were a social good:
„It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” (From Harry Bruinius, Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity – New York: Knopf, 2006) Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, Investigating Social Dynamics, 2007, Page 312«