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POTUS at Buchenwald

The news is giving a lot of air time to the President's visit to Buchenwald, near Weimar, and his great uncle having witnessed a sub-camp after its liberation in WW2.

I visited Buchenwald on Sunday, 2 Dec 1990. It was cold, windy, threatening snow but only blowing a damp sleet which chilled to the bone. The sky was a low, leaden grey, and there was a platoon of Soviet soldiers using one of the two classrooms located just outside the main entrance to the former KL (konzentrationslager) for their indoctrination class on the dangers of capitalism and how that had led to WW2 and the Holocaust.

There were few visitors to the KL, but the classrooms were quite busy - and the reason my partner and I were there as monitors for the first all-German elections since 1932 was due to the second of the two indoctrination classrooms being used as a wahlzentrum (polling place) for the gemeinde in which the camp was located.

There was also a pair of two-story, stuccoed block apartment buildings next to the KL - actually located between the KL and the monument (a typical and artistically crappy piece of communist-styled sculpture) to the horrors of Buchenwald. These buildings were occupied because they were two of the best built buildings in the area - they had also been the barracks for the SS TKV garrison which manned Buchenwald - and some of the few buildings in the area which had survived the liberation.

We spent half the day there before moving on to Leipzig - the heldenstadt for the movement which had eventually ended the Soviet occupation and division of Germany - and continuing our monitoring duties there.

Traveling to Buchenwald from Weimar required you to drive through an area where several large Soviet armor and mechanized infantry bases were located, and the area around Buchenwald itself felt and looked a lot like driving out to the far side of Fort Bragg because the area was a maneuver training area for those Soviet and East German units.

And Weimar itself, suffering nearly five decades of occupation by the Soviets, looked and felt like an old, sepia-toned postcard from around 1937 - like something out of a Twilight Zone episode where a city and its people were stuck in some sort of time warp and could never leave.

The experience that day was a surreal one for me and one I'll not forget. I'd wager the POTUS's memories of the place are much different than mine, and our memories are nothing like those of his great-uncle or the man who acted as guide for the latest Presidential photo-op - Elie Wiesel.

RIP to all those who suffered there.

Richard's $.02 :munchin

The POTUS will be going to Normandy with a tradition to uphold. Its been stated, primarily by Fox News, that Obama is well aware of the moving speeches given by other Presidents at this hallowed site. Especially moving is the one given by President Reagan at Point du Hoc on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

It has been said by reporters that were there for that speech that President Reagans honoring of U.S. Troops on that day brought tears to your eyes. It is felt that President Reagan delivered his speech with Honor, Respect and Humility.

Can Obama come near this type of speech? I dont think so. In my opinion he posesses little or none of the qualities embodied in Reagans speech at Point du Hoc.

In the early 80's I was part of a unit that had set up an ATH on the grounds of the German Military Medical School, and spent about two weeks as an instructor for all allied medical forces in Europe. It was a great copule of weeks, except for the day we decided to visit Dacahu.

It was the only bright sunny day of our deployment. By the end of the visit.....well, even the sunshine did not help. One thing that struck me was the back wall of the camp. It was a simple brick wall about waist high. There was no barbed wire used there, and prisioners could have easily gotten over the wall. There were guards there, or course, but few even attempted. Most were so starved they simply did not have the energy to hop the short wall and run........

So along with the work detail, gas chambers, ovens and such, all awaited their personal fate in a state of starvation and completely exhausted. I don't believe many, our current POTUS included, can fully understand what went on in camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald and other such places.

The other place I visited and can't get out of my head was The Anne Frank house......just so much suffering and death!

May all who suffered and died in such places Rest In Peace.

RF 1

So along with the work detail, gas chambers, ovens and such, all awaited their personal fate in a state of starvation and completely exhausted. I don't believe many, our current POTUS included, can fully understand what went on in camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald and other such places./quote/RF1

In the mid 50's while stationed in Germany,I had an opportunity to have visited both death camps.........:( It's quite an experience.......I remembered the stories that were told,especially the one regarding the "bitch of buchenwald". I've got four tattoos,all airborne,I'd make a great lamp shade for her.....;)

GB TFS :munchin

In the late 60's my wife and I spent the day at Dacahu. By the end of the day we were both emotionally spent. On the train ride ride back to Munich, we hardly said a word to each other. It was an experience that neither of us will ever forget!

It is to bad that many who disbelieve what happened in these 'camps' can't spend a day walking around inside one of these camps.

In 1965, I had the duty to deliver a military prisoner to the confinement facility at Dachau. It was in June and the blossums were out on the warm Summer day that we arrived in the former KL city. You could smell an atrocious odor from all of the bodies that had been buried at the site. The prisoner was quiet and somber when we left him.

A year later, I had the opportunity to take a tour of the KL. There were no displays of anything except huge photos of eye glasses, hair, teeth and suit cases in the receiving hall. There was no talking from anyone who was on the tour as we walked through the barracks, the gas chambers and looked at the metal work above the gate..."Arbeit Macht Frei". It was an unforgetable experience.

Die Konzentrationlager

I visited Dachau as a young GI around '81 or '82. It was on the list of things to see while on a three day vacation at the Armed Forces Recreation Hotel in Munich. Anyone remember that place? I wonder if it's still open. On Dachau, you kind of get an erie feeling as soon as you walk through the gates and begin walking across the grounds. If I'm not mistaken Dachau was the first camp that was opened by the Third Reich and it didn't house Jews in the begining but mostly Germans who were political oponents of Hitler.

I also had the opportunity to visit Buchenwald when I was working in East Germany about ten years ago. If not for it's history it would actually be a beautiful place. It sits on high ground just a short drive north of Weimar. I went in the summer and the views of the surrounding Thuringian countryside from there were beautiful. One thing that impressed me was the fact that there were allied POWs, mostly pilots, that were kept somewhere near the main camp. I saw pictures of them on the walls in the museum. There were also something like 8,000 Soviet POWs who also died there. If you have the choice to visit either of the former camps you should probably visit Buchenwald.

Weimar is looking much better than it was only a few years ago because of the billions that the German government is spending on economically developing the former DDR. As Richard stated, going to the former DDR is like going back in time but it's getting better every year. I know because I go every summer for vacation.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mojaveman (Post 268524)

I visited Dachau as a young GI around '81 or '82. It was on the list of things to see while on a three day vacation at the Armed Forces Recreation Hotel in Munich. Anyone remember that place? I wonder if it's still open. On Dachau, you kind of get an erie feeling as soon as you walk through the gates and begin walking across the grounds. If I'm not mistaken Dachau was the first camp that was opened by the Third Reich and it didn't house Jews in the begining but mostly Germans who were political oponents of Hitler.

I also had the opportunity to visit Buchenwald when I was working in East Germany about ten years ago. If not for it's history it would actually be a beautiful place. It sits on high ground just a short drive north of Weimar. I went in the summer and the views of the surrounding Thuringian countryside from there were beautiful. One thing that impressed me was the fact that there were allied POWs, mostly pilots, that were kept somewhere near the main camp. I saw pictures of them on the walls in the museum. There were also something like 8,000 Soviet POWs who also died there. If you have the choice to visit either of the former camps you should probably visit Buchenwald.

Weimar is looking much better than it was only a few years ago because of the billions that the German government is spending on upgrading the former DDR. As Richard stated, going to the former DDR is like going back in time but it's getting better every year. I know because I go every summer for vacation.

I have been back several times. The bulk of the US Recreational facilities have been returned to the Germans. There is only one remaining Hotel in B'garten; Walker Hotel and adjacent grounds have also been returned to the Germans.

I have only visited Dachau once. On return visits to Bavaria, family members have visited the facility I just could not return there, they will not either.

Teddy, you got there a lot closer to the "flame" than I did, I can only imagine how that was just a few years after the fact.

Be well all! Remember those who sacrificed thier lives on D-Day, and all of our conficts.

RF 1

I went there in November.

If you ever go, you'll never forget it.

I have two grandparents on my father's side that survived the war, and left the DP camps for the US in 1949. One was at Auschwitz and survived two selection lines. The stark difference between life in the US and Poland is simply remarkable. My grandmother told me that when she moved to Tennessee in 1949, she recalls African Americans stepping off the sidewalk so she could pass, giving up seats in buses to her, ect. The change must have been like living in an alternate universe.

Both my grandparents are still kicking. In fact, just video skyped me the other day.

There are still some serious problems in Europe.

My brother was an exchange student in high school and went to Germany for a couple of months. His host family took him to Auschwitz, he said when you arrive there you get this chilled, overwhelming mournful feeling and to this day (30 some odd years later) he remembers it vividly.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trip_Wire (Post 268498)

About two years ago my wife and I spent a day at Dachau and had a very similar experience. We spent about 6 silent hours and were emotionally drained. I was priviledged to meet William Guarnere and Babe Heffron of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. It was a day I will never forget.

And a still complicated issue.

Richard's $.02 :munchin

Quote:

ROOSEVELT AND THE JEWS
David Shribman, uExpress, 6 Jun 2009

Seventy years ago there raged in Washington one of the most portentous, and least known, debates in Western history. World War II had not yet begun. The full extent of Hitler's maniacal plan to wipe Europe free of Jews was not yet known. The United States hadn't taken even the first steps toward the informal alliance against Nazi Germany that the Lend-Lease Act symbolized.

For decades historians have suggested that Franklin Roosevelt was aware but not much moved by the danger that Jews faced in a Europe that eventually would be overrun by the Nazis and their ideology of anti-Semitism. The president has been celebrated for his masterly prosecution of the war, but in the verdict of history there always has been an asterisk for his callousness toward the Jews and his willingness to intern Japanese Americans in camps in the western United States.

Now new evidence filling out the portrait of Roosevelt in the years leading to the Holocaust has been unearthed from an unlikely source -- a team of historians examining the papers of James G. McDonald, an FDR confidant who served as League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and who issued some of the earliest and most passionate cries of alarm over the threat that Hitler posed in Europe.

These newly discovered documents are not exculpatory -- they do not relieve Roosevelt of the historical burden of answering why he did not do more -- but they show an American president more interested, more horrified and ultimately more involved in these issues in the period leading to the war than previously believed. These documents, assembled this spring in "Refugees and Rescue" (Indiana University Press), change our view of FDR, though not as dramatically as his thoughts about the Jews in the late 1930s might have changed their tragic destiny.

They show Roosevelt in anguish over the agony in Europe, struggling to find a solution, thinking out loud about what steps might be taken to rescue Jews from Europe before they were engulfed by the fires that would come to be known as the Holocaust. They show FDR, who had presided over a huge increase in the role of government in his New Deal response to the Great Depression, speaking in the most ambitious terms of rescuing the Jews. His plan was no less dramatic than to sweep every Jew out of Europe to safety abroad.

Roosevelt referred to this as "my refugee proposal," and the details were set forth in a remarkable account found in the Library of Congress, tucked away in the heretofore uninspected papers of Arthur Sweetser, who worked in the League of Nations information section. This account quotes Roosevelt saying:

"We had the matter up at the Cabinet, to see if we could not do something for these unfortunate people. ... Then suddenly it struck me: Why not get all the democracies to unite to share the burden? After all, they own most of the free land of the world, and there are only ... what would you say, 14, 16 million Jews in the whole world, of whom about half already are in the United States."

They show Roosevelt, in the wake of Kristallnacht, the Nazi rage against the Jews in November 1938, trying to find $300 million to settle 100,000 families at the cost of about $3,000 a family. They show him thinking that some of these families, so threatened by the coming storm, might be settled in Tanganyika, the Cameroons and the Middle East -- options he discussed with Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis.

Roosevelt even spoke of congressional appropriations for such an undertaking, a notion that startled State Department officials. He spoke openly of seeking $150 million over a four-year period. Listen to the official minutes of a private White House meeting:

"The president pointed out that as yet no practical suggestion of colonization had been developed. The president suggested that an appropriation by Congress might be conceivable when practical plans emerge if other governments and private agencies participate."

Some six months later, the president pressed for action. This diary entry from Jay Pierrepont Moffat, head of the State Department division of European Affairs, details a White House meeting on the German Trust, set up to administer seized Jewish property -- a session that revolved around warnings from the U.S. embassy in Berlin that "unless places of settlement were opened up very shortly the radicals would again gain control in Germany and try to solve the Jewish problem in their own way":

"The president, however, stuck to his point, and said that in his opinion we should tell the Germans in a fortnight -- not one day longer -- that an organization was in existence which could deal with the German Trust. It was not so much a question of the money as it was of actual lives, and the president was convinced that the warnings given by our embassy in Berlin were sound and not exaggerated."

These plans came to naught. War came to Europe, and eventually the United States was swept up as well. The president became more concerned about winning the war than saving the Jews, or perhaps believed he could accomplish the latter only by succeeding in the former. Though the president did not open American borders to European Jews, this new book gives the lie to the notion that Roosevelt didn't know, didn't care, didn't plot.

"It says that Roosevelt had different views at different times, and that any flat statement that is a moral judgment -- he didn't care, he was anti-Semitic, you choose it -- doesn't really do justice to a politician who changed according to circumstances," says Richard Breitman, an American University historian who was part of the team that assembled the documents in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "It doesn't mean he was right in every circumstance. Some of the response to news of the Holocaust was belated, and there was resistance to doing things that he thought might get in the way of fighting the war and finishing it as soon as possible. But in 1938 and 1939 he was very active and concerned about what he thought was a looming disaster in Europe."

World War II was monstrous and complicated. It has been over for about two-thirds of a century and still we do not have a comprehensive picture of it or of its principal players. The picture has just changed again.

http://www.uexpress.com/davidshribman/

I remember visiting Dachau as a young girl in the early 80s, before moving to the US from West Germany. Even as a young teen (despite that typical teenage angst "I know everything" attitude), I was struck into silence. Occasionally, I would ask my mother a question or two but remained silent for the tour with one of the camp survivors. I also remember the ovens, the smell ever-still present in the "showers". When we were at the ovens, there were some young GIs also touring. One of them climbed into one of the ovens, hung his head out backwards with his tongue hanging out and his friends laughing and snapping pictures. You can imagine the HORROR that everyone else expressed. My stepfather, a SSG at the time, quickly dispatched them out of there, took them off somewhere private and chewed their butts. I remember watching them leave the camp shortly thereafter.
I grew up with the stories from my German grandparents. My Opa (German grandfather) had a sister that was sentenced to Bergen Belzen. They always said she was NEVER quite right after that...they sterilized her. Her crime? Helping anyone she could escape from Nazi Germany! There are endless stories.
I watched the POTUS with a heavy heart as he spoke at Buchenwald. Here is a man who with a huge smile, shook hands with one of the loudest and most powerful condemners of the Holocaust...and now he speaks at one of the horror camps. I have to paraphrase his words but I remember him saying something like .... camps like these should speak volumes to discount those that would deny that the Holocaust happpened. For whom did he make that statement? For Elie Weisel? For the Iranian president? For all the survivors from those camps? For all those in denial? Did he believe his words or were they just political and media rhetoric?

When I was in Germany for AT, we visited the Flossenburg site. Before I even stepped through the gates, I had a chill come over me. Once inside, looking at the ovens, pictures, graves, and this display of the prisoners actual shoes, I was overwhelmed by sorrow. How a human could do those things to another human is beyond me.