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From: vxl5382@acf4.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: resistance in the Holocaust
Message-ID: <9300002@acf4.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 9-May-84 17:10:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: acf4.9300002
Posted: Wed May  9 17:10:00 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 11-May-84 07:37:54 EDT
Organization: New York University
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Nf-ID: #N:acf4:9300002:000:1573


Nf-From: acf4!vxl5382    May  9 17:10:00 1984


> In particular, I wonder why more of those taken to the death camps did
> not physically resist.

I am not well informed on the subject of organized armed resistence. However,
I think the question is more directly relevant not to such resistence, but
to the actions of the unorganized millions taken to their death like cattle.
In other words, when it was apparent that they were about to be killed, why
did all these people not run: the number of German guards was never very large
and some surely would have gotten away. One answer that has not yet been fully
presented is that there was no place to run. The population around them was
not only scared, but in general apathetic to the fate of the Jews, and to a
rather significant degree antagonistic. This antagonism was not caused by
German propoganda of any kind but streamed from a bloody tradition of 
centuries. In Russia, where I come from, the Jews were mostly not taken to
death camps, but machine-gunned in mass graves close to the villages and
cities they lived in. In many, if not most, cases the actual act of herding
and shooting was carried out by Russian (or some other ethnic group) nationals
recruited for the purpose and commanded by the Germans. The people living in
many countries of Eastern Europe, such as Poland and Russia were the same
people who of their own accord carried out pogroms in the late 1800's and early
1900's. The Jews were surrounded in a sea of hate and indifference into which
they could not disappear and which would not help them in an effort to resist.

						Vladimir Lanin