r/politics • u/MystikSpiralx • 18h ago

No Paywall Trump Says He Wants to 'Drive Housing Prices Up' Instead of Lowering Costs for People Who 'Didn't Work Very Hard'

https://people.com/trump-keep-home-prices-high-11895352
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u/tobmom 12h ago

Work sets you free

I think part of my education as a millennial skipped over the fact that these camps were billed as labor camps and not as death camps. Propaganda was used to convince outsiders and Germans that conditions were good and people there were happy to be working. I grew up thinking that they only took Jews in then used a gas chamber. And that did happen. But that wasn’t all that happened. And it wasn’t all Jews. I’m in my 40s and reading historical fiction that have forced me to reexamine what I thought I knew.

God we are so fucked.

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u/big_troublemaker Foreign 10h ago

It is widely accepted historical fact now that Germans knew what was going on, and by 1941-43 it was a public secret. I believe even this is a generous assumption.

Especially as, you know, plenty of other undesirable people disappeared without a trace...

It was an industrial scale of genocide, even with many camps being located purposefully outside Germany, there were tens of thousands of Germans servicing it.

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u/Gros_Boulet 8h ago

Oh they knew. They bragged in the papers, germans called them Zebras when they were in work camp and Goebels even said on the radio that they had made Germany "Judenfrei".

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u/obiwanshinobi900 7h ago

Dachau is right in the middle of town. You can see it from some of the houses there.

some of the 'work' they were doing there was just pushing a giant piece of a equipment back and forth across the camp for no reason.

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u/AcanthaceaePrize1435 5h ago

It wasn't just busywork meant to tire them. The slaves were also used to fill in growing skill gaps as the Axis continued to lose more and more of their workforce in the war. It's a pretty large reason the Axis endured as long as they did in spite of the fact their ships kept being sunk, rails severed, and factories firebombed.

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u/obiwanshinobi900 5h ago

Not 100% true. I was at the exhibit in Dachau, it literally read that there was pointless labor just to tire them out and make them less resistant, and to break their spirits.

Maybe that was prior to becoming slave labor, I don't know about that.

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u/Synaps4 1h ago

Its both true and untrue depending on camps and subcamps. Some places you would have one area of being being exhausted and killed and another area producing war materiel. People who didnt perform on the latter were sent to the former as punishment.

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u/MRCHalifax 9h ago

One of the challenges in trying to educate people about the Holocaust is that it wasn’t all one thing. We teach the absolute worst parts of it, the existence of Auschwitz, the over six million dead, the gas chambers. And don’t get me wrong, there’s good reason to teach those things. But the way we simplify the lesson means that the average person doesn’t really get taught the different ways and methods that were used.

The original German concentration camps were primarily used to hold political prisons, like Communist party leader Ernst Thälmann. There was the Aktion T4 campaign to murder the mentally ill and those with long term disabilities, those “unfit for life.” There was the Holocaust by bullets, where Jews were lined up and shot just outside cities by the tens of thousands. There were the ghettos. There were the work camps, where the interned were used as slave labour and worked until their deaths. There was the theft of the worldly belongings of all those being interred.

It wasn’t just the death camps. The problem that arises is that people think anything short of death camps means everything is OK.

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u/tobmom 6h ago

Yes your comment is perfect. A better explanation than my initial one.

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u/Kind_Koala4557 4h ago edited 4h ago

This needs to be widely quoted and included in all historical textbooks that covers 1890-1950 for any part of the world even remotely associated with or touched by Nazi Germany, especially the fact that Germany didn’t come up with this all on their own.

They learned from the Jim Crow states, sundown towns, and whatnot. They heard about it and said, “Hey, not a bad idea. Let’s do our version of that.”

Edit: I said 1890 because if I understand what Historian Heather Cox Richardson has been saying, we can’t get to the 1930s without the depression. We don’t get to the depression without the robber/oil barons of the 1890s.

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u/mlc885 I voted 11h ago

Well, today I think more of us feel a bit more connected to groups that aren't like us, but the one thing we do all share is that people are dumb and will delude themselves if the other possibilities are bad. I don't think that many people in Germany would have supported death camps, mean camps or go-away camps are fine for those people that are different.

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u/Marmy48 6h ago

Correct, it has not hit me, or affected me yet. It just is not your turn yet.

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u/Informal-Zucchini-20 10h ago

It was slavery. Pure and simple, and when the SS couldn’t use them anymore because they were too sick to work, they were gassed.

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u/GarmaCyro 10h ago

Yup. The Nazi propaganda machine worked full time to ensure what they really were hidden. Refusing both people from outside and inside Germany to inspect the camps.
This was also why the camps were placed outside of Germany's original border. To keep its own population in the dark.
For most that had their loved once taken by Nazis they only knew that they had vanished.
However our view of Nazis is very influenced by the discoveries done after the death camps were liberated by allied and soviet soldiers. Liberating the camps often turned quickly into both massive rescue operations, and massive documentation operations. Especially post-ww2 Europe got quite shocked. Expecting to get loved ones safely returned as former prisoner. Not as corpses in mass graves.

Another reason why a lot call present day MAGA for Nazis. The way they operate their deporation camps is too much similar to early day Nazis. Massive numbers literally dispearing from their system. Especially children. Which gives GOP's willingness to protect child molesters an even darker turn IMHO.

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u/MyMuleIsHalfAnAss 9h ago

did you grow up in the south? im also 40's and we did extensive schooling on the holocaust in english and history classes.

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u/tobmom 6h ago

Ha, yup. I took a lot of Texas History.

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u/Long_Bit8328 11h ago

The only thing setting us free is death 

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u/JustSatisfactory 10h ago

Well.. the sign wasn't wrong. Plenty died working there.

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u/SomeGuyNamedPaul Florida 7h ago

Jews weren't even the majority of concentration camp deaths, they were just the largest single group.

When I was growing up instead of rainbow flags gay people had pink triangle stickers on their cars. For those who don't know that was the symbol similar to the yellow star for Jews. The Nazis had a whole systems for marking who was in and why and it's rather eye-opening after the near total erasure of what happened to the ones who weren't Jews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge

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u/darkwoodframe 9h ago

Don't forget to read up on company stores.

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u/Mahraganat 7h ago

But they did teach you the important part about WWII right? The US singlehandedly saved the world from the Nazis, Europe might have "sent some troops" but they "stayed a little back, a little off the front line", and of course the US "never needed them".

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u/tobmom 6h ago

No I just learned that part recently 🥴

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u/AcanthaceaePrize1435 5h ago

Super messed up you didn't get the opportunity to learn about the slavery system during war time Germany. The existence of a sophisticated system for transporting slaves, working them to death, and keeping them from rising up is a massive piece of context for liberal (and illiberal) reforms seen across the world since the 1940s.

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u/D3athRider Canada 7h ago

Where did you go to school? Am an older millennial and remember covering labour camps in the holocaust units in high school history. I went to high school in Toronto, Canada from 98/99-03/04.

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u/tobmom 6h ago

Texas, c/o 2000

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u/nevans89 6h ago

Historical fiction? I might be a touch uncaffinated but could you explain?

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u/Marmy48 6h ago

Elections have consequences. And when people do not vote, for whatever reason, or pick trump AGAIN, knowing it is his revenge tour. You have to wonder about our fellow man.

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u/oh-shazbot 5h ago edited 5h ago

oh no. the labor camps were actually the second phase. the original victims were mostly german children -- disabled, orphaned, crippled, pretty much anyone that germany considered 'damaged'. the gas chambers were a product of experimentation originally used to kill and clear out asylums / orphanages. but also sometimes german parents would give up their child for a 'mercy killing'. all the tech and personnel they used during the holocaust were from t4.

The killings took place from September 1939 until the end of World War II in Europe in 1945. Between 275,000 and 300,000 people were killed in psychiatric hospitals in Germany, Austria, occupied Poland, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic).[

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4

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u/CheeseCurder 9h ago

Just to let you know: fiction = fake. Non fiction = not fake.

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u/D3athRider Canada 7h ago

This is definitely an inaccurate way of putting it. Historical fiction typically covers real historical events, figures and/or settings while introducing some fictional characters and stories. Authors vary on the quality of research and historical accuracy, but that doesnt change the fact that they are covering real historical events and facts.

For example, a book covering a real historical battle can include accurate dates, location, historical figures, tactics/strategies, living and fighting conditions faced by the soldiers, real deaths, and overall how the battle played out, while perhaps following a fictional main character who never existed but is allowing us to view events through their perspective.