> > Interesting to note that nazis killed as much ethnic poles as polish jews
> Wow. Why is the holocaust taught with such a focus on one ethnic group of victims?
A large part of that is because they were deliberately and very specifically targeted, particularly with regard to the use of camps and gas (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution). A lot of the other groups were either attacked for more general reasons (being allied to the "wrong" group, not being Aryan enough, speaking against the Nazi regime, to give three examples) or abused generally simply because many the Axis command structure where generally abusive and encouraged that sort of behaviour further down the chain.
> The doomed were bused to killing centers in Germany and Austria walled-in fortresses, mostly former psychiatric hospitals, castles, and a former prison — at Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Hadamar, and Brandenburg. In the beginning, patients were killed by lethal injection. But by 1940, Hitler, on the advice of Dr. Werner Heyde, suggested that carbon monoxide gas be used as the preferred method of killing. Experimental gassings had first been carried out at Brandenburg Prison in 1939. There, gas chambers were disguised as showers complete with fake nozzles in order to deceive victims — prototypes of the killing centers' facilities built in occupied Poland later in the war.
> Again, following procedures that would later be instituted in the extermination camps, workers removed the corpses from the chambers, extracted gold teeth, then burned large numbers of bodies together in crematoria. Urns filled with ashes were prepared in the event the family of the deceased requested the remains. Physicians using fake names prepared death certificates falsifying the cause of death, and sent letters of condolences to relatives.
> Meticulous records discovered after the war documented 70,273 deaths by gassing at the six "euthanasia" centers between January 1940 and August 1941. (This total included up to 5,000 Jews; all Jewish mental patients were killed regardless of their ability to work or the seriousness of their illness.) A detailed report also recorded the estimated savings from the killing of institutionalized patients.
"A large part of that is because they were deliberately and very specifically targeted, particularly with regard to the use of camps and gas "
What about other groups that were deliberately target like mentally retarded, Roma, homosexuals etc?. Why they are less important in this discussion? Is it only because they still have no voice in our society, and (baring killings) we don't treat them any better than Germans did?
In part at least: numbers. The patients killed in the earlier "experiments" numbered tens of thousands, perhaps close to a hundred depending which figures you count (not all the records are meticulously kept at the time and some were destroyed later so some guesswork is involved). The number of jewish people killed (I'm not sure if this is just in the camps or more generally) is counted in millions.
Regarding the "killed as much ethnic poles as polish jews" comparison I was initially responding to, you can slice and dice the figures a great many ways to find such similarities. I'm not sure "polish jews" isn't too specific a category to be considered valid as a single absolute number. What are those figures as proportions of the all Poles and Polish+Jewish populations respectively? I suspect that the proportion of the European Jewish population is going to be a lot higher.
Yes thinking in pure numbers can seem somewhat heartless, and I fully understand if some groups feel unduly ignored, but it isn't being done to deliberately hide or discount the effect on those other groups. The groups that get a lot of the attention do so because the effect on their population was proportionately much higher then most (all?) others.
> (baring killings) we don't treat them any better than Germans did?
Two points there:
1. That we treat them as badly is IMO simply wrong. When making statements like that you need to provide evidence to back it up. Society doesn't treat minorities as well in a great many cases, but I would say the orders of scale are not close to similar. Maybe as a white middle class male I'm misunderstanding the scale of something I myself don't suffer from, but if that is the case please show evidence to correct my understanding instead of a single vague (and potentially inflammatory) statement.
2. I recommend not using "Germans" in such statements, use "Nazis" instead. Many German people suffered too, and far from all the perpetrators were German, so the choice of word will to many flag your statement as unfairly targeted.
Your comments in this thread stand out as provocative and inflammatory, as do some others'. We need you and everyone else not to comment this way on HN—not on any topic and especially not this one.
HN is for reflective conversation. If we're going to talk about the Holocaust we need to do it that way, not this way ("what about", "didn't lift a finger", etc.)
I don't see what's wrong with reminding people that there were other groups of people that we killed in WW2.
I'm also surprised that "didn't lift a finger" is considered inflammatory.
I admit that I allowed myself to be little provocative but I think it would be better not to censor comments, but instead moderate non-technical links from the forum before inconvenient discussions take place. If this is not a place for discussions like that, it's also not a place for links to articles that will start such discussion, right?
There's no substitute for commenters learning the ropes of how to self-regulate in discussions here, technical or non. One of the ropes is not to comment out of fury.
> Wow. Why is the holocaust taught with such a focus on one ethnic group of victims?
A large part of that is because they were deliberately and very specifically targeted, particularly with regard to the use of camps and gas (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution). A lot of the other groups were either attacked for more general reasons (being allied to the "wrong" group, not being Aryan enough, speaking against the Nazi regime, to give three examples) or abused generally simply because many the Axis command structure where generally abusive and encouraged that sort of behaviour further down the chain.