The good life of the Auschwitz guards..
"At first glance, the photographs seem innocuous enough. Men and women in uniform lie back in deckchairs, listen to accordion music, decorate a Christmas tree.
It seems like a carefree life - but the pictures were taken at the Auschwitz death camp at the height of the Holocaust. The happy men and women are Nazi officials enjoying time off from the business of genocide.....
...Museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding, who has helped to put album online, believes the very ordinariness of the scenes captured is what makes them so chilling.
"It shouldn't have surprised us that this was how they lived in Auschwitz, that this was how they unwound after a 'hard day's work'," But I think it's shocking because it's a reminder that they were human beings, that they weren't red-eyed monsters, that they had pets and children and lives, and yet could do this to other people."
Dr Stephen Feinstein, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota...draws a parallel between what happened in Nazi Germany and more recent events in Rwanda and Bosnia, where people who had lived side-by-side for years ended up killing each other. He also sees an echo in the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where American men and women "raised as good citizens" were guilty of abusing Iraqi prisoners in their charge.
" What it says to me is that anybody is capable of committing genocide under the right circumstances, and what we have to figure out is what makes that possible." BBC news
posted by Albert at 5:29 AM
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