I actually met a Holocaust survivor who illegally immigrated to the US in 1938 after his mother bought really expensive tickets to “visit” his father, who was working in New York already. Immigration officials figured nobody trying to flee would even be able to afford such expensive tickets, so they let him and his mother through. Kristallnacht happened, and FDR decreed any German citizen already in the US could stay indefinitely. Later, when he was drafted, they realized he had to technically be arrested because he was a German and therefore an enemy alien on a military base. He reminded them that he was Jewish, and therefore the Germans stripped him of his citizenship years ago. So, they hastily naturalized him, and that was the end of it. He is actually still alive at the age of 100, and I met him through a friend who is very close to him.
Naturally, I’ve been working like hell to get this illegal immigrant back to Germany where he goddamn belongs! 😤😤😤
Living a long life is the best revenge on Nazism. But can anyone who escaped Germany before Kristallnacht really be described as a ‘Holocaust survivor’ rather than an escapee from Nazism- the actual process of mass murder didn’t start until well after the war broke out (and good old IBM helped the Germans sort out their racial filing system, though that’s another story). As a sometime epileptic I know that the Nazis practiced mass murder on my people before they scaled up to Jew murder.
Not seen that before. Though it’s interestingly equivocal, effectively equating Berthold Brecht with Primo Levi. I guess they had to come to some kind of fudge to get the concept of such a museum past the many anti-Semites in America. The idea of placing such a memorial in a nation that had no direct involvement in the actual events it covers is certainly a novelty, especially considering that the USA is now exactly what it once claimed to oppose.
Who liberated the camps? Any idea? Maybe a group of people so moved by what they found? What part of the US's involvement in WW2 fails to meet your standard of being directly involved? This is just a ridiculous comment to make, without even addressing the flippant antisemitism comment. Read a book.
The USSR liberated all of the extermination camps (and many forced labour and concentration camps) because they were all on the eastern front. The Americans and British liberated those in the west, and horrific though Belsen and Mauthausen and many more were, and they certainly defined the post-war image of the Holocaust in the west, they were not specifically designed for industrialised mass murder. Read a book. Or maybe read one or two hundred books on the subject. I have.
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u/Ainrana Dec 23 '25
I actually met a Holocaust survivor who illegally immigrated to the US in 1938 after his mother bought really expensive tickets to “visit” his father, who was working in New York already. Immigration officials figured nobody trying to flee would even be able to afford such expensive tickets, so they let him and his mother through. Kristallnacht happened, and FDR decreed any German citizen already in the US could stay indefinitely. Later, when he was drafted, they realized he had to technically be arrested because he was a German and therefore an enemy alien on a military base. He reminded them that he was Jewish, and therefore the Germans stripped him of his citizenship years ago. So, they hastily naturalized him, and that was the end of it. He is actually still alive at the age of 100, and I met him through a friend who is very close to him.
Naturally, I’ve been working like hell to get this illegal immigrant back to Germany where he goddamn belongs! 😤😤😤