Obama, McCain and Learning The Lessons of Buchenwald

(10 am – promoted by ek hornbeck)

“It was Soviet troops that liberated Auschwitz, so unless his uncle was serving in the Red Army, there’s no way Obama’s statement yesterday can be true,” said Republican National Committee spokesman Alex Conant. “Obama’s frequent exaggerations and outright distortions raise questions about his judgment and his readiness to lead as commander in chief.”

link: http://www.chicagotribune.com/…

The above is a confident statement from a confident American political operative, working for a jittery party that senses its own demise. Desperate for any political traction, they grasped today upon Obama’s mis-statement that his relative liberated Auschwitz, and not Buchenwald.

For this small historical gaffe, the GOP would have us infer that Barack Obama is not fit to be President of the United States.

But what is the greater gaffe, mislabeling one of several Nazi concentration camps, or misunderstanding the lessons of the Holocaust as our country stumbles, and trips, and reaches for light straws of hope as we seek to restore our moral authority as the world’s leader on human rights after the abuses at Abu Ghirab and the ongoing detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay?

The following is an extended excerpt of Edward R. Murrow’s radio broadcast, where he speaks of the liberation of Buchenwald:

From the broadcast:

I was there [in Buchenwald] on Thursday and many men in many tongues blessed the name of Roosevelt. For long years his name had meant the full measure of their hope.

What did this “full measure of their hope” mean for the prisoners of Buchenwald?

We can understand some of what the hope meant through statistics. From the Shoah Education Project website:

The cruelty of the camp was well-known; over 600 of the November Jews died in the first few months: by the end of the war, there were over 110,000 prisoners, and over 60,000 deaths. Deaths were by shootings, hangings, and phenol injections1 The infirm according to USHMM were sent to lesser camps which were euphemistcally called “Euthanasia” centers, but were really gassing centers and krema.

link: http://www.shoaheducation.com/…

But that doesn’t tell the entire story of Buchenwald. Buchenwald had the infamous honor of being the concentration camp of some of the more reknowned political prisoners the Nazis chose to incarcerate. Among them were German Reichstag member and Social Democrat Ernst Heilmann, who was executed by lethal injection. Other political luminaries included the former Minister President of France, Édouard Daladier, and Paul Reynaud and Léon Blum, also members of the French government. Chairman of the Communist Party of Germany, Ernst Thälmann, was shot to death at Buchenwald.

Buchenwald was the temporary holding place of 1,953 members of the Danish police. Sixty of these policemen died in Buchenwald before being transferred to another location.

Buchenwald also housed Norwiegan students – 348 of them – who were arrested at the University of Oslo. It detained Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses (for being conscientious objectors), the poor and homeless (referred to as being “work-shy”), homosexuals, disabled people, Soviet and Allied Prisoners of War, pastors and pretty much anyone else who either refused to be on board with the Nazi government, or who the Nazi government just wanted to discard like so much human waste. Originally a male only camp, Buchenwald eventually housed women and children.

This view of everyday life at the camp was taken from the Buchenwaldlied (Buchenwald Song), composed by Austrian Jewish inmates Hermann Leopoldi and Dr Fritz Löhner-Beda:

When the day awakes, before the sun laughs,

the crews embark for the toils of the day,

into the dawn.

And the forest is black and the sky red,

we carry a small piece of bread in our bags

and in our hearts, in our hearts our sorrows.

Oh, Buchenwald, I cannot forget you,

because you are my fate.

Only one who has left you, can measure,

how wonderful freedom is!

Oh, Buchenwald, we neither lament, nor complain,

and whatever our future may hold:

we still want to say “yes” to life,

because one day the time will come –

then we will be free!

link: http://typo3.ort.org/index.php…

Forced labor, medical experimentation, outbreaks of diseases like typhus, overcrowding and death due to exposure were all part of the experience of existence in Buchenwald. Forced starvation for offenses ranging from stealing a raddish from the prisoner’s garden to a mislaid pig were conducted at the camp.

Barack Obama’s relative, Charlie Payne, arrived in Germany and liberated a subcamp of Buchenwald. The United States Holocaust Museum explains what a “subcamp” was:

Buchenwald administered at least 88 subcamps located across Germany, from Düsseldorf in the Rhineland to the border with the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in the east. Prisoners in the satellite camps were put to work mostly in armaments factories, in stone quarries, and on construction projects. Periodically, prisoners throughout the Buchenwald camp system underwent selection. The SS staff sent those too weak or disabled to work to euthanasia facilities such as Bernburg, where euthanasia operatives gasse them as part of Operation 14f13, the extension of euthanasia killing operations to ill and exhausted concentration camp prisoners. Other prisoners unable to work were killed by phenol injections administered by the camp doctor.

link: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/artic…

Mr. Payne, and all of the soldiers in his unit, liberated a small part of a gigantic bureaucracy of horror. For this they should be lauded and remembered, as Barack Obama attempted to do on Memorial Day.

But for the sin of confusing Buchenwald with Auschwitz, this attempt to honor his relative is derided by the GOP as an “exaggeration and outright distortion”, which raises “questions about his judgment and his readiness to lead as commander in chief.”

Good lord.

Someone please tell these folks to shine the mirror of truth on this party. This is the same Republican Party whose leadership authorized the torture of prisoners by simulated drowning. This is the same party that sought to spy on Americans without FISA court review. This is the same party whose Department of Homeland Security had Ted Kennedy put on a “watch list”, interfering with his ability to board aircraft at domestic airports.

This is the same party whose current nominee, John McCain, until days ago had a top campaign operative on his staff who was a PR man for the military junta in Myanmar, the same folks who just today illegally extended the detention of opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Aung San Suu Kyi, and whose paranoid need to control their totalitarian state has left over two million cyclone victims suffering, without adequate protection from disease and starvation, begging by the roadside until a military vehicle stops by and tells them to leave.

Men in glass parties shouldn’t throw stones.

It’s time for the GOP to illustrate that, in addition to having memorized the names and dates and places of the Holocaust, they now understand its central lesson: Never Again.