Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Surviving the Holocaust: Uprisings and the End of the Third Reich
Thursday, January 16, 2025
Extermination Camps
The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.
By summer 1942, deportations were systematic across those parts of Europe occupied by the Nazis. The convoys which arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau came from Poland, but also from western and southern Europe. Hitler issued an order for all Polish Jews to be killed before December 1942.
The United States refused to publish an official denunciation of the extermination of Europe’s Jews, despite being well informed by clandestine reports and alerted by telegrams.
News of the Soviet victory in Stalingrad reached the Warsaw ghetto.The course of the war was starting to tip in the Allies’ favor, and the Third Reich’s armies were being pushed back.
For the survivors of the ghetto, there was nothing left to lose. In April 1943, the ghetto rose up. In August, then in October 1943, the prisoners in Treblinka and Sobibor revolted.
But Himmler ordered the units of Special Action 1005 to erase all trace of the genocide in the extermination camps.
On the morning of 3 November 1943, the liquidation of the Majdanek camp began: Jews were shot dead in ditches.
By nightfall, 18,000 people had died. In all the death camps, the men of Special Action 1005 disinterred bodies and built huge pyres, grinding the ashes so no trace remained. The gas chambers, the crematoriums, the shacks; everything was destroyed.
The Allied advance pushed ahead at greater pace and Hungary considered switching sides and joining them.
In March 1944, the Wehrmacht occupied the country, and the deportation of 437,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began several weeks later. As the noose tightened on the Nazi regime, caught between the Red Army to the east and to the west by the Anglo-Americans who had landed in Normandy in June 1944, many camps were evacuated between August and November of that year, amid scenes of untold chaos and violence.
When the Red Army entered Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek, the camps had ceased to operate and were practically empty; only those too weak to have been “evacuated” were still there. In the eyes of certain high-ranking Nazis like Himmler, salvation was now a matter of negotiating a surrender, but the opportunity quickly evaporated. Hitler then Goebbels committed suicide, as the Red Army entered Berlin.
On 8 May, Germany surrendered unconditionally, and the Third Reich was at an end. Himmler was captured at the end of May by the British and also committed suicide.
With the end of the Second World War, the Allies began to organize the return of prisoners of war and deportees. Fewer than 1,000 people survived the death camps of Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, out of 1.85 million deported.
Those who made it home felt like the last of the Jews. In six years of war and 12 years of power, Hitler had annihilated nearly all of Europe’s Jews.