Polish people were guards at these ( how can I say this PC ?? ) death camp prisons in Poland , some of them not-that-unwillingly I’ve read . I think the Poles just want to forget that inconvenient truth and are less insulted by the facts than they are embarrassed .
Raees wrote: Polish people were guards at these ( how can I say this PC ?? ) death camp prisons in Poland , some of them not-that-unwillingly I’ve read . I think the Poles just want to forget that inconvenient truth and are less insulted by the facts than they are embarrassed .
And what does that have to do with Obama's misstatement? And in this case, this is not a matter of being PC. The death camps were not Polish camps, not set up by the Polish government, not sanctioned by the Polish people and not run by the Polish people. They were Nazi Death camps, plain and simple.
And you are wrong about "the Poles just want to forget that inconvenient truth." Take a visit to Warsaw sometime. You can't walk 10 meters without tripping over some memorial, some museum, some gave, some preserved remnant of what was done, what they did and how they fought back. It's a WWII Disneyland. It's one of the most depressing and yet reflective places I have ever studied at. I started my Holocaust research here in the states, and after hours of work, I realized that there was no way for me to even scratch the surface of the Holocaust without visiting ground zero.
FredHayek wrote: The Germans of today are still lumped with the Nazi's of 70 years ago even though they have bent over backwards to admit their guilt and blame, only makes sense that the Poles of today be lumped in with their fathers. Fathers who chose to herd fellow countrymen for the Nazi's. Some Euros fought the Nazi holocaust, but the Poles are way down on the list compared to other countries.
Trivia: Auschwitz used to be part of Germany before World War I, but was given to the recreated land of Poland after the war.
Fred... go educate yourself about the Polish Home Army, the Polish Underground, the Warsaw Resistance, The Polish government in exile in England... go read Jan Karski's book "Story of a Secret State," or a booklet entitled "My Year in Treblinka" or "The Holocaust" by Nora Levin. These are no holds barred accounts of what was going on, much of the accounts first hand. These are not the "popular" books you'll usually find in a Holocaust reading list and I think you'll be surprised by the rare stories presented in these works.
I don't think you have a really good idea what was going on in Poland during WWII.
I know a lot about Polish history since its reformation after World War I, and I agree there were good characters who fought a losing, tragic battle for independence from not only the Nazi's but also the Soviets. But there were also a lot of bad apples/Quislings/collaborators. And I do have sympathy for the Polish people who lost a greater percentage of their population than anyone else in WWII.
Imagine, Poland, a proud country, being reborn after WWI, having to fight right at the start against the Russians, having 20 years of freedom, before being overrun by first the Nazi's for 5 years and then the Soviets for decades longer before Solidarity, a union, throws off the Russian yoke.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
Hopefully Obama at least credited the American corpse men who helped free many from the Polish death camps before returning back home to the 57 states.
pineinthegrass wrote: Hopefully Obama at least credited the American corpse men who helped free many from the Polish death camps before returning back home to the 57 states.
Shhhhhh! Those are just misstatements...and you can't expect Obama to read all those pesky words off a teleprompter and understand what he's saying or how to pronounce the words. Obama's brilliance can not be measured by classical means, he is beyond our common understanding of what intelligence really is.
The White House on Wednesday shrugged off Polish demands to express more than mere 'regret' after President Barack Obama mistakenly referred to a Nazi Holocaust site as a "Polish death camp."
"We regret the misstatement, but that is what it was," said Obama spokesman Jay Carney, reiterating that the president "misspoke" during a ceremony awarding the highest US civilian honor to late Holocaust hero Jan Karski.
The Liberals GOP Twin wrote: Does anyone around here get "off the mountain." The ignorance is thick.
Not if I do not have to.
but like you I have studied the holocaust. I have been to a few of the camps that have been preserved. I have been to both Dachau and Auschwitz. I am most likely not as informed as you, but I got a lot of first hand information from my German Grandfather before his passing. My mother spent the war in an orphanage in Tubingen, Germany during the war. Some of the things that she is finally talking about is something. My grandmother also talked to me about things that happened during the war.
Some other facts on the Polish people is that during the war, so many poles had been killed that there was not enough left to supply the Nazi forced slave labor force, so they started using french people to fill it.
