The Germans had a long history of collective punishment (WWI Belgium) and more recently in Czeckoslovakia after the assissanition of Hyerdrich (early WWII) and in France (late WWII)in 1944.

There was an hour long program on WW2 TV (YouTube) about resistance in Poland. Resistance to the Nazis was not a simple clear cut endeavor.

But “we knows.”

I agree with your points except the very last one. No one knows who turned in the Frank family. All is guesswork and supposition, basically. Please see this.

There is the matter of being ” hostage” to one’s perceived obligations to family or “fellows”.

The weak become a chain around the neck of the potential fighters. The promise of adequate if not especially humane treatment at the end of the road if all cooperate on the way, versus indescriminate retaliation if any disobey, would have a lulling effect.

Even among fighting age men in early stages of captivity, some will resist rocking the boat and even sabotage the attempts of others to escape, fearing group punishment. There is the memoir of a captured U Boat captain being narrated on YT. Taken into custody at the war’s end by the British in Norway, he was scheduled to be repatriated after some weeks. For some reason, once in the western Rhineland the prisoners were transfered to the custody of the French in what they viewed as a doublecross.

The French then put them into cattlecars in order to transport them into western France. Having a pocket knife, he managed to work loose one board in the end of the car and squeeze partially through. Half out he was dragged back in and held down by a dozen of his fellow prisoners in that suffocating shit filled car. These were all military veterans, who nonetheless feared collective punishment should he escape.

This notion of collective responsibility and fallout seems to be pretty effective psychologically.

How many of your liberal anti gun relatives and friends could you trust if they figured an advantage would accrue to them by informing on you. Look who turned in Anne Frank …

Yes, that is part of my objection to the “passive” claim about the Jews in WWII. I haven’t seen it applied to anyone else; just the Jews. Plus, of course, they were less passive than most people think, given the possibilities that were open to them and their status in the countries in which they resided. There is also the question (as I wrote in previous comments on this thread) of how one defines “passive.” I think that desperately trying to escape and yet being blocked because you can’t get papers and/or you can’t get any country to take you in, for example, is not being “passive.” And yet it was an extremely common occurrence that many people seem to ignore when discussing the passivity question. Those letters I quote from in this previous post is I think a good example. He was murdered, but he was hardly passive IMHO.

Another example is going into hiding and yet being betrayed and/or accidentally discovered. This was not the least bit unusual, either. And yet those people – when sent to death camps, or killed on the spot, are probably not considered exceptions to the description of Jews during that period as being “passive.”

Otto Frank and his family were not “passive.” They fled Germany. Then when their new country was invaded almost overnight, they hid. They were betrayed and sent to camps, and all but Otto died there. So they I suppose would be considered part of the “passive” statistics. But they were anything but passive.

I specifically said that only sometimes people who say this are anti-Semitic and “sometimes they are not the least bit anti-Semitic” in order to show that I was NOT making some sort of blanket accusation of anti-Semitism. And I certainly wasn’t accusing you of it. I am assuming you are in that second category.

Nevertheless – and although I also don’t doubt you have plenty of knowledge on the subject of Poland and the Holocaust – I continue to disagree with some of your conclusions, at least as I understand them. Perhaps it is a matter of defining what “passivity” is, and what is meant when people mention it in connection with the Holocaust.

I’m not going to spend tons more time on this right now. However, you write:

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Jews murdered in the Final Solution did indeed go meekly like lambs to the slaughter, and did so every step of the way, e.g., during the Actions, during the roundups and mass shootings, aboard the trains taking them to the death camps, while being herded into the gas chambers, etc. The vast majority. Their passivity is entirely understandable. But it cannot be denied.

Hence, “Never Again.”

We have to be honest about this. Jews are: they know.

Jews (or anyone else) who object to the characterization of the Jews in WWII as “sheep to the slaughter,” however, point out that Jews were no more passive or “meek” than others would have been under the same circumstances (the word “meekly” means “in an overly submissive or compliant manner”). So why is the Jews’ supposed passivity pointed out over and over by so many people, as I’ve seen done? Why are the Jews of the Holocaust considered “overly submissive”? To me – and you may differ on this – “passivity” and “meekly” usually don’t just imply victimhood; they often imply that the victims might have (should have? could have?) fought and been less passive and were not. Again, I’m not saying that you are meaning to say this. But some people do say it very explicitly, and blame the Jews for it.

And as that quote I already offered in one of my previous comments says: “Bauer disputes the popular view that most Jews went to their deaths passively—’like sheep to the slaughter’. He argues that, given the conditions in which the Jews of Eastern Europe had to live under and endure, what is surprising is not how little resistance there was, but rather how much resistance was present. … In The Myth of Jewish Passivity, Middleton-Kaplan mentions … ”

So there are at least two Jews – I assume those authors are Jews – doing scholarly work and in one case writing a book to dispute the “passive” assertion about the WWII Jews. So obviously there are some Jews who don’t “know” that they were passive in the Holocaust, and who dispute it. I doubt those two are the only ones saying it, either.

“Never again” refers to several things, but a main one is the idea that in Israel Jews have an army and their own country, and are not living among populations that were often hostile to them as in much of Europe (of course, Israel is surrounded by hostile countries now, but at least the Israelis have an army). It also refers to fighting anti-Semitism itself, but we all see how well THAT’S going. Not well at all.

Lastly, I will reiterate that when people call the Jews in the Holocaust “passive” I believe they are often ignoring the vast numbers of people who escaped or attempted desperately to escape and failed, such as the man I describe in this post, who lived in Poland. He certainly didn’t go passively, but he indeed was slaughtered in the Holocaust. He tried all avenues and they were blocked. This was true of an enormous number of people who are not counted in the “resistance” statistics, and yet they were not passive.

We also have no idea how many committed suicide, but at least in Germany Victor Klemperer wrote that the numbers were high. I don’t think those people were passive, either.

Just sounding the nerd alert on me Now?!?

Nerd alert!