I'm watching a documentary on the Einsatzgruppen on Netflix.

I don't believe that was their intent but they got to die with a modicum of dignity.

I’ve watched every documentary that Netflix has about the Holocaust, the Nazis and Hitler. Netflix has been showing a lot of them. They all use old footage, but the documentaries are being done now, with all the information that’s been gathered up to date.

Some of those witnesses were horrified when the mass killings were going on. The people killed in those small towns were their neighbors, their friends, and families they had known for generations. You have to take into account that those killings happened decades before the interviews. What surprised me was the amount of detail they recalled.

I guess it’s true that traumatic incidences are almost always recalled in minute detail. The emotional impact create the sharpest memories.

The Holocaust didn't happen in a vacuum.

You should watch again so you can see that it was the German troops, picked specifically to be killing squads that followed the German army during the invasion of Russia during the Barbarossa campaign. It was shock and awe in blitz style moves to overwhelm the enemy very quickly, invading small towns and separating out the Jews so quickly that no one knew what was going on. If the small towns were all Jewish they would all be killed in record time. Many times by being barricaded in their Temple and burned alive. Probably within the first 24 hours to cut down on any possible resistance.

The same speed was used in all the towns that were encountered. Jews were dragged out without knowing what awaited them. Or do you think the non Jewish people were taken aside to let them in on what the German’s were doing? And that these non Jews turned their neighbors in without the Jews getting a clue?

There are whole bodies of scholarship about how people were more than willing to give up their Jewish neighbors. The pogroms have their origins in the nineteenth century. The Shoah was just pogroms on steroids.

In fact in twenty first century Poland it's a crime to mention Polish complicity in the Holocaust:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44627129


P.S. I will go back and re-watch the documentary. I was more troubled by watching Roots and The Holocaust on tv than this one woman was watching Jews being murdered en masse right before her eyes.

The notion that the Jews were leading idyllic lives in Europe before the mean NAZIS came along is risible.

It was common in the big cities in Germany and Poland especially after the immense Nazi propaganda drive which saturated the airwaves, the laws and the Hitler’s rallies. That’s where we get a huge amount of film footage from. The film we see of Jews being dragged out of their homes and pushed onto and off of the trains was not taken by the general public. It was proudly taken by Nazi filmographers with that specific job. The Nazis loved keeping detailed records of everything they did, especially in cataloging the Final Solution. The German citizens were kept in ignorance of the exterminations.

Anti Semitism isn’t uncommon nor has it ever been. But that’s a different thing than outright being an active participant in killing them.

presents excellent research about the state of antisemitism in the 19th century

My grandparents fled Russia and Poland one step ahead of the latest pogrom. Of course not every Lithuanian, Ukrainian. Pole, et cetera hated Jews enough to kill them en masse but there were enough of them who couldn't care less for it to happen. The Shoah was a culmination of all the pogroms, the Jew hatred, and the blood libels that preceded it.

That proves Jews could be saved if their host nations really cared about them.