Mengele stuff up for auction.

[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of many people towards the lessons than can be learned from WWII and the Nazi era does not allow us to destroy unique historical documents.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

[Heinrich]

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

[Adam Went]

Heinrich:

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

Oh, wait....

Cheers,
Adam.

[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

[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

[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]

"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]

Phil H

What an unusual argument.

If someone gives you some examples of Nazi pragmatism, you really are going to be stuck!

[Phil H]

But I have had to try to understand why Hitler and Nazism had the impact they did in their time.

Intellectually I can see the power of their arguments; anti-semitism, miliarism, the power of the state, the role of a superman and an oligarchy, the rejection of democracy. I have striven even to gain an insight into the holocaust and the (yes) "pragmatism" that drove that awful horror. (If you have seen the TV film "The Conference" with Branagh as Heydrich, you will see where I am coming from. You cannot understand the words without - at least for a time - looking at them from their author's perspective.

The processes of the Reich and in particular such concepts as "Working up to the Fuhrer" don't come clear unless one examines them from the inside.

That does not mean that I do not reject all of them. In part, we now reject them - and I am a product of the POST-war world - because they failed. But that they seemed to be, or were tailored to be, practical/pragmatic solutions at the time, is surely undeniable. But a practical solution that is known to have failed is (almost by definition) nolonger practical.

Nazism was in large measure a confidence trick, but like a lie, a con trick has to have some basis in the truth, or at least a truth for it to be a falsehood about.

Phil

[Chris]

Is anti-semitism an "argument"? A powerful one, even?

[Phil H]

It was in Weimar (1919-33) because it was an explanation (an argument if you will) for why Germany did not win the war. It explained the "stab in th back".

It gave the Nazis an internal enemey for Germans to fear and fight - for the Prty to save ordinary people from. It allowed even the poorest "Aryan" the chance to seem like a lord. (Ever seen that film of a class teacher in the USA who divided her class into those with different coloured hair or eyes or something and then watched the effects? Old now but still shockingly powerful.)

It helped that in Europe before 1939 anti-semitism was universal, at least in mild forms. In Germany it became much more of a weapon.

And one could go back further to the politics of pre-1914 Vienna, where the young Adolf lived in poverty, but where anti-semitism and anti-slavism wre political creeds.

Phil

[Chris]

Obviously it was a powerful force, but I still don't understand in what sense you consider it to be an "argument." What exactly do you mean by "argument" in that context?

[Phil H]

The nazi's made it so - look at Mein Kampf is nothing else. Anti-semtism was a rallying cry, a cause, a justification, a call-to-arms - it was an argument for doing what they did.

Propaganda from film to poster art proclaimed it.

Groups like the Germanenorder and the Thule Society (from which the NSDAP sprang) made anti-semitism a cult, like freemasonry with rites and rituals. There were magazines like ostara before 1914 - which Hitler is said to have collected.

All this rooted anti-semtism in history and culture.

Thus, I see an argument as being either the theme/thrust running through a speech, a dissertation or a book; or alternatively a basis for logical reasoning. We would probably never see anti-semitism as that in 2011, but in 1933 the perceptions were different, unchanged in large measure over 1500 years.

Phil

[bolo]

Hi Phil,

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?

Of course not. I'm talking about people like my (now deceased) uncle Georg who was a member of the SS, convinced Nazi and avid collector of documents from '33-'45. He and his comrades openly admitted that they were picking up/buying that stuff for the sole purpose of "taking it out of neo-democratic hands".

I'm very interested in WWII and the political background myself, btw.

I realize that's no legal definition but I guess you know what I mean.

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.

I'm not opting for seizing them if someone obtained them in a legal way (even if he's an "inveterate Nazi") and does not want to sell or donate them. It goes without saying that proprietary rights should be respected, I just pity the lost chance for scientific examination and proper publication.

Let me add that I'm talking about historical documents, not memorabilia.

Hope this helps to make myself a little more clear.

Regards,

Boris

[Phil H]

It does - thanks, for the clarification, Boris.

Phil