Welcome to Litsy!

If you‘ve got access to Netflix, check out the documentary series for the book. 5 episodes.

Shown: this man was thought to be the infamous Ivan the Terrible. He is identified as John “Ivan” Demjanjuk. He was accused in the murder of 29,000 Jews in the Sobibor concentration camp.

Here is a link for one of NPR‘s ‘interview with the author‘ for this book, (2014), with sound bytes:

https://www.npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-nazis-were-rewarded-wi...

The pit was a wooded hamlet called Ponary. In the ghetto, mothers had a dark song: All roads lead to Ponary, but no roads lead back. The Nazis lined Jews up at the edge of the crevice and shot them, bodies falling in the pit. A small few, wounded but not killed, hid among the dead in the pit, lived to tell of the horrors. The Nazis kept typed execution cards for each victim, with a slash mark in red or blue pencil confirming that it was done.

Pat Buchanan argued that Treblinka was not in fact it death camp, but a “transit camp” used as a pass-through point for prisoners. It was only a deportation point.

Some 900,000 Jews died at Treblinka. Fuck this guy. Again, it‘s no surprise that Trump surrounded himself with these type of people. 😔

The Nazi hunters, Soviet intelligence officials reached a devils bargain to go after wrongly accused men, the Americans accused were left undefended/presumed guilty. Testimony from witnesses who survived the Nazis was deeply suspect, Holocaust survivor syndrome leading to group fantasies of martyrdom, heroics. Carbon monoxide from diesel engines at camps didn‘t kill prisoners. Hitler himself for all his faults, was an individual of great courage.

Reagan publicly insisted that the German SS officers and soldiers buried at the Bitburg cemetery were “victims” of the Nazis “just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”

⬆️If you needed another reason to cringe at Reagan, there you go.

I had to laugh when I saw that. I supposedly was rounding up the Communists and Jews. For the information of that young man who wrote that book, in our territory there were no Jews whatsoever. They lived a few hundred miles away in a separate colony in the Caucasus, and no one ever harmed them. They were saved like as in heaven. They never were our enemies. —Tscherim Soobzokov (Nazi)

Dr. Hubertus Strughold: known as ‘The father of space medicine‘. He was involved in medical atrocities. High-altitude, freezing experiments on prisoners at Dachau. In one experiment In which he was trying to discover how to make seawater safe to drink for downed Luftwaffe, he added traces of silver to the water and also forced his prisoners to drink putrid water until they became violently ill or died. AND Walt Disney hung out with him! 😱

There was a female guard, an Australian woman who, even by the camp‘s grusome standards, was infamous for her sadistic treatment of the female prisoners. She was the worst of them all. They called her Kobyla— The Polish word for mare – because of the ruthless way she would kick the women with her steel-toed boots. Her real name, was Hermine Braunsteiner. The camp was Ravensbrück.

Only 40,000 people were admitted to the United States in the first three years after the war, despite calls for America to open its shores. Lingering anti-Semitism meant the denial of visas en masse to Holocaust survivors crammed into the displaced persons camps. Yet Nazi collaborators and even SS members in Hitler‘s reign of persecution, men who had proudly worn the Nazi uniform, were often able to enter the United States as “war refugees.”

This book is the tell all of how thousands of Nazis were given a safe haven in America. It isn‘t surprising...but no less disgusting.
This is a history lesson highly recommended. One thing is for sure: there is no such thing as a good Nazi.

Finished this documentary today. Disturbing, but worth watching
#nfnov