Copryright 2020. I went to Auschwitz Concentration/Death Camp.  So for all the conspiracy theorists, you can… go to Naples! 😉

To see everything as it was left in 1944… the ovens…. the gas chambers… the rooms full of the people’s shoes, a living room sized room full of their hair, human hair… to hear the horrific stories… was all terrible.

But a few things that really struck a dissonant chord, like jaw dropping substance learned from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States or Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, and that still highly resonate with a terrible twinge are the following:

CORPORATE INVOLVEMENT

Learning that the Nazi doctors would, on arrival, separate out the women, children, elderly men, and other “weak” people… they would all go straight to their death within 4 hours or so of arriving to Auschwitz, BUT the twin children they would separate out… and would perform medical experiments on them… something out of a Wolverine X-Men comic… and sometimes they would die, and sometimes not… AND the company responsible for doing these experiments was one that still exists – slap-free mind you – and we all know today, is BAYER, your trusted pharmaceutical company with that clever cross-shaped logo you buy all your Aspirin and so on from…

Another company that still exists that we are quite familiar with, HUGO BOSS, the one that makes those nice designer clothes… the German founder bearing the same name, Mr. Hugo Boss, was a member of the Nazi party and he designed all those Nazi uniforms – again this company still existing now, slap-free.

WHY JEWS?

I never understood why Jews were selected by Hitler and the Nazis as their subject for execution.  And should mention that it was mostly Jews, but there was also others, like people with a bully pulpit (ie political prisoners) that may speak out against the Nazis, and people of “higher” social status like doctors, lawyers, bankers, etc. for the same reason.  But yes, so why Jews?  I learned it was much related to jealousy… Jews were generally quite successful, working as bankers, doctors, lawyers, engineers (which I mention for accuracy and not self indulgence), and there was jealousy in this.  This was the primary contention.

And lastly, should also mention, they were shipped from most every part of Europe.

KILLING EFFICIENCY

Im an engineer and it is probably fair to say that in many ways Im a bit different than your average engineer, but like most I can marvel at efficiency… you learn that much thought goes into a process, especially one that works well… you have revisions of revisions of revisions, and often more. So in this case, at Auschwitz, it was chill-inducing and jarringly obvious for me to learn the planning, the thought, the efficiency in which the Nazis did one thing… KILL.  In five years they killed 1.5 million people, the biggest mass murder in human history.

Some examples of this efficiency I speak of are the following: The testing of different chemicals to inject and eventually drop into the death chambers. They first tied a car’s exhaust pipe to an opening in the chamber and used carbon monoxide – they couldnt kill enough people at once with this method so they then tried dropping different chemicals in the chamber and at different doses, sometimes taking days for the people to die. Cyclone B was the name of the final chemical selected;  As mentioned, to sort the people, then get them all from the train to their death within 4 hours of arriving;  They had a solid iron I-beam for hangings, that as a civil engineer especially caught my eye – no breaking of the gallows during the hanging was going to happen.

Things started to build-up from the people, so they started to re-use items, they would re-use the human hair to make burlap bags even…

LESSON LEARNED?

The fact that we think that this could never or would never happen in the world again, but yet when we sit down and rack our brains we actually did have the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990’s, we’ve all seen the film Hotel Rwanda… and CURRENTLY, 70 years later – and I encourage you to look into this stuff for we don’t hear about it much in the current corporate media system, which merely “manufactures consent” – we have possible genocide in the Central African Republic (or this link if you prefer Fox News) and have concentration camps in North Korea, amongst others.

I find myself incredibly thankful that we are sheltered from the storm back home, but find it incredibly unfortunate that we are sheltered from the information. ~Jason

More pics:

If touched, the electrified fences would kill a person in weakened state