Mengele stuff up for auction.

[Phil H]

"Principles" are fine, but I am wary of them.

Advance a principle and you find people acting in inhuman way. Nazism was based on "principles" after all, and principles that had a wide acceptance outside Germany before the war.

Many of the principles used in Nazi Germany to warrant sterilsation of the mentally unstable and so on, were also put into effect in US states. Volkisch culture underlay much of Himmler's mysticism.

Now I learn from this that what one man regards as "principled" action another can question - now or in the future. Thus i am wary of "principles".

I prefer pragmatism, simple and unadorned.

Phil

[Chris]

It is these practical concerns that make me veer away from any suggestion that artifacts or documents should be seized or confiscated or taken out of the hands of anyone.

I should have thought there would be some matters of principle involved, not just "practical concerns"!

[Phil H]

Instead of destroying them, it should be in our best interest to take out of the hands of collectors and inveterate Nazis as many of these documents and items of (potential) historical importance as we possibly can, that specially goes for personal records. [My emphasis]

So how would you define (legally) an "inveterate Nazi"? I have a (slight) interest in the WWII period Wehrmacht; German Party and Military uniforms of the 1920s-40s; and most of my academic background comprises syudying, analysing and seeking to explain the rise of Nazism and its consequences - so would I fall into that category?

Would a collector a Stalin period Russian memorabilia have his or her collections seized?

WHO would make the decision, given that collectors might be subject to US, UK, or other legal systems? In Germany there are laws about Nazi regalia being exhibited but I think that is rather different.

It is these practical concerns that make me veer away from any suggestion that artifacts or documents should be seized or confiscated or taken out of the hands of anyone. If you can do it for one item of personal property you can do it for others - some of which you might not agree with so readily.

Phil

[caz]

Two wrongs don't make a right, so I'm not sure I get the argument that because there are still very very bad people doing very very bad things in the world and nobody is willing or able to stop them, we should destroy documentary evidence of the previous wickedness in our long and painful history.

We can't seem to do anything to stop people becoming serial killers (there's one who has apparently been "operating" in one of our hospitals, at least four patients's deaths are being investigated as I type and fourteen more have had their medication tampered with). But why on earth would we be better off burning anything ever written by a known serial killer? I can't equate the two. The victims's families might or might not draw comfort from doing so, but as another poster said, that would be personal emotion dictating. No information is completely worthless and we need to learn whatever we can from past horrors if we are to have the ghost of a chance of preventing future ones. Burn a book and its contents are soon forgotten. But the bad will be bad with or without a guide book.

"Lest we forget."

Love,

Caz
X

[Adam Went]

Heinrich:

If only we could ask Hugh Trevor-Roper about the veracity of the Mengele documents, then!

Oh, wait....

Cheers,
Adam.

[Heinrich]

Are they as genuine as the Hitler diaries, I wonder, or even the Jack the Ripper diaries.

[bolo]

Errata, I can relate to your aversion against those who try to make a quick buck with Nazi paraphernalia. However, I think the general indifference of many people towards the lessons than can be learned from WWII and the Nazi era does not allow us to destroy unique historical documents. A thorough research of this period and publication of the results is the least we can do to help future generations understand what happened during that time, that's why we should be thankul for every first-hand document that survived to this day.

Instead of destroying them, it should be in our best interest to take out of the hands of collectors and inveterate Nazis as many of these documents and items of (potential) historical importance as we possibly can, that specially goes for personal records. The question as to HOW Hitler and the NSDAP came to power and later on organized the industrialized mass-murder of Jews and other "Untermenschen" has been sufficiently answered already but there still is the WHY, and this avenue of research still needs every bit of authentic data it can get.

Boris

[Errata]

If this guy wanted to donate these notebooks to a museum, or give them to Israel, or some Holocaust museum, I would be fine with that. But he's decided to make a buck off of private collectors. And I'm tired of it. I understand that it's legal, and he can do whatever he wants with them and that I don't get a say. And I agree that I shouldn't get a say. But this is my view on it.

I'm tired of people profiting off of this. I'm tired of people arguing for the protection of documents and artifacts, and then having no problem with putting them in the hands of private collectors, who for all we know are sleeping with the damn things. I'm tired of moot scholastic interest trumping respect for victims. And I'm tired of these Nazi trophies exchanging hands for more and more money, while most of the time no one gets to examine them for historical worth.

And most of all I'm tired of people saying that we need these things to learn from the Holocaust. We don't. Will those notebooks help a grad student with his thesis? Yes. Will it give us a deeper understanding of the Nazi mindset? No. We have that. We know what happened. We know why it happened. And we don't care. I wish to god we did, but we don't. You know how I know? Russia. China. Cambodia. Bosnia. The Sudan. Genocide goes on just as it did in Nazi Europe, and just like in the 30's we look at these appalling acts and say that it's a shame, and we do nothing.

So if we are not going to learn from the Holocaust, then all we are doing is collecting trophies. And the least we can do is get rid of the memorabilia. Burn it all. Don't let people profit from it anymore. I'm sure the victims of the Nazis would love nothing more than for us to learn, to make true the vow "never again". But since we aren't doing that, get rid of it. Respect the victims enough to ensure that some rich idiot doesn't pass it around at parties to make his rich idiot friends jealous.

[Phil H]

Yet I have been to the Tower of London and seen the axe and block used to behead Lord Lovat around 1746. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has lots of shrunken heads that must (once) have belonged to individuals (in both senses). Nelson's coat with the bullet hole is on show at Greenwich...

And I have been interested to see them all. They are part of the colour of history and they bring us closer to past events.

I would not particularly want to see articles associated with more modern crimes and horrors, but distance does seem to soften the impact - at least for me.

There was a vidoe produced a few years back which included uncut and graphic film of executions - shootings, beheading etc. I was repulsed by the idea and refused even to think of buying or watching it. On the other hand, if film was found of the execution of Charles I (1649) I would be fascinated to see it.

Phil

[Bob Hinton]

Greetings.

There are good reasons for destroying these items and there are equally good reasons for not destroying them.

The only comment I can make is that I would not be interested in owning them, in exactly the same way I would not want to own a hangman's rope.

[Phil H]

Certainly the documents should not be destroyed - future generations might find them valuable to explain both the horror that was the nazi regime and the psychology of a man like Mengele, and thus help us to avoid such things happening again.

I recognise that there is a "moral dimension" to all this - the Holocaust was an appalling and inexcusable event - but it happened, and we cannot ignore that.

There is a modern trend - it seems to me - to seek to allow grieving families etc a role in trials. I have a strong view that that is WRONG. We determined in medieval times that juries etc should not make judgements on the basis of emotion or personal involvement. Any change to that brings us closer to summary justice and the world of the lynch mob.

So I believe strongly that emotion should not be the basis of decisions.

Equally, the document belongs to whomever owns it or has the right to it legally. It is very difficult to overcome that without creating a precedent for other occasions. So, if it has value, that must be recognised.

I would not wish this sort of thing to go into some secret Nazi collection to be revered and worshipped, but no doubt such things exist and it will be difficult to stop it. Where does one draw the line?

Phil

[bolo]

If I had the money, I would buy the documents and hand them over to a historian or university for free. While the grand picture and a lot of historical details of the Holocaust have been thoroughly researched already, it still is difficult to cast a light on the personal history of its leading figures. I think Mengele's diaries are of socio-historical interest (and other fields of research), that's why I hope they will fall into the right hands.

[Adam Went]

Personally I think this is along the same lines as people who salvage items from shipwrecks such as the Titanic and sell them off, it is a graveyard to 1,500 people and should be left that way.....I know it's a bit of an odd comparison to draw but burning or in some way destroying items like this won't achieve anything, it just brings back all the hate from decades ago that the new generations have tried, and are still trying to wipe out.

Stuff like this belongs in a museum or at least kept safe for the sake of history.

Cheers,
Adam.

[The Grave Maurice]

Hmmm. Well, I agreed with you up to a point, but now you're talking gibberish. They aren't made out of human skin, they aren't a video of someone's last moments, and heaven knows what penises in a jar have got to do with anything. They are "small, spiral-bound notebooks". They are historical documents and, thankfully, you won't get to decide their fate.

[Errata]

You make your point very well, Errata, but I agree with Stan. Original documents should never be destroyed. BTW, do we know what language they're written in---German, Spanish, Portuguese?

Several years ago there was an auction of a couple of books and a lampshade made of human skin. The skin came from victims of Auschwitz. There exist still bars of soap made from human fat and ashes from the crematoriums. And there are always arguments that it is part of the historical record, that these are artifacts, that they are relics from an important part of history.

And maybe they are. And I don't condone book burning, or the suppression of knowledge, and I really do respect scholarly interest. But 10 million people were murdered. And it's only an artifact if you are 100% certain it isn't your grandmother as a book binding. And Mengele's adventures in South America are really only interesting if your father's twin cousins weren't butchered and sewed to each other. Scholars are interested in knowledge. Collectors are interested in originals. Let scholars have the diaries for a few years. Let them copy it.

Nothing is of such historical value that it trumps simple humanity. If your brother had been a victim of Jeffrey Dahmer there is no way you would accept if it some collector in Finland had your brother's penis in a jar. There is no argument that would make that okay. And if a videotape existed of your mother's last moments, you wouldn't want that circulated either. The diaries of a post-Germany Mengele are irrelevant. They are not worth half a million dollars, they are not worth the pain of his victims or the pain of his victim's survivors. Get rid of them. Get rid of all of them. Sometimes you have to let being a person win over intellectual obscura.