It is up to us to decide if "never again" is a universal rule or "oh, but this time it is different".
datsci_est_2015 21 hours ago [-]
“Nie wieder ist jetzt” is common graffiti in Berlin right now: “Never again is now.”
snowpid 17 hours ago [-]
This slogan started as a reaction against rising antisemitism after 7. Octobre. A problem which many here just deny (" Germany is again on the wrong site")
cramsession 17 hours ago [-]
Israel is committing genocide and the German government supports it. If never again really means that for everyone, then stopping Zionism should be the focus of the messaging.
I was in Warsaw a few weeks ago and ended up visiting that museum almost on a whim, so I wasn’t prepared for the experience. I don’t think a museum has ever hit me that hard — inspiring, gut-wrenching, and unforgettable.
0rzech 1 days ago [-]
And the parent comment has been flagged to death until now. What for?
Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego [1] indeed makes an exceptional work of walking people through the dramatic story of the Warsaw Uprising.
I used to live nearby and was always weirded out by the statue just being one of the required two-minute stops for all the tourist groups. A short monologue, then move on to the next attraction...
aaron695 1 days ago [-]
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sdoering 2 days ago [-]
Great work. My SO is doing family research on the part of her family that came from Warsaw (and a few other parts of Poland). I know she will love to see those.
dostick 15 hours ago [-]
It’s in colour if you have a computer
Robotbeat 2 days ago [-]
Incredible to see just so many smiling, cheerful faces surrounded by utter destruction and death. The power of comradery, I suppose.
pzo 2 days ago [-]
It shows only the better part but doesn't show the bad part. Poles are divided about usefulness of this uprising, how it was (badly) executed and many believe it was deemed to fail.
The aftermath [1] was that ~220k Poles died and out of that 150-200k civilians, often with mass execution - later on a lot of warsaw population was sometimes bitter toward the uprising’s leadership.
To put it in context: within 2 months 200k people died, similar number like in Hiroshima but almost nobody wordwide know about warsaw uprising.
For those who don't know, the Uprising was a planned resistance action to expel the Nazis from Warsaw.
Supposedly it was planned in collaboration with the Russians. But the Russian army stood down while the resistance fought alone for two months.
This allowed the Germans to regroup, fight back, and eventually to destroy the city, and most of the resistance itself.
TheAlchemist 1 days ago [-]
That's not accurate - the uprising was not planned in collaboration with the Russians.
The whole point of the uprising was to liberate Warsaw before the Russians get in, as everybody knew that Russians are not liberating Poland - they are looking to occupy the country, just as Germany did. If the Uprising was successfull, it would give a great credit and negotiating card to the Polish government.
Unfortunately, Russians knew that too - that's exactly why they stopped their advance and watched the city being razed to the ground. Also unfortunately, they were right and ended up occupying Poland for the next 45 years.
shakow 2 days ago [-]
It was definitely not planned with the Soviets, for multiple reasons:
- the Poles of the AK (London government loyal) were not the communist faction (Lublin government loyal), and saw the insurrection as the last chance to get a Poland out of the Soviet sphere of influence post WWII – especially after the publicization of Katyn;
- even if they had wanted, Stalin had zero interest in giving a hand to London-loyal Poles that were in frontal opposition to “his” Lublin-loyal Poles;
- the Germans were not caught flat-footed, they already knew of the insurrection preparations and therefore not only was the city well garrisoned, it would have been in any case, as it was the strategic lock of the area to hold the RKKA on the Vistula;
- and all the above is moot in any case, because the RKKA units that reached the neighborhood of Warsaw in '44 had as many chance of taking the city as the German units that reached Moscow in '41 – they were just spent and at the end of their logistic tail after months of fighting during the Bagration operation, and had no chance of successfully developing an opposed crossing of the Vistula against two Panzerkorps.
So the London-loyal Poles were in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, and at least they were able to go with a glorious bang. Like a Marshal said, “c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre”.
pzo 2 days ago [-]
> So the London-loyal Poles were in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, and at least they were able to go with a glorious bang.
Many argue this uprising is nothing to be proud of and the crime of the leadership with devastating results: ~200k civilians went with this bang, and city completely wiped out.
shakow 2 days ago [-]
This is a question I don't feel qualified enough to lean one way or the other.
bjourne 1 days ago [-]
Some would argue the same way about the Gaza uprising.
consumer451 2 days ago [-]
For more context, WWII was started as a partnership between Hitler and Stalin to partition Poland. [0]
Spreading this knowledge is now illegal in Putin's Russia. [1]
It would be naive to think that either ruler intended to honour this agreement in the long run. Both sides were probably gambling on when, not if, the agreement would be broken.
consumer451 1 days ago [-]
Sure, that's debatable supposition. I would think that it's likely correct.
What is fact is that Hitler and Stalin were military allies to start WWII. This is documented history.
Would you agree with my latter statement?
NooneAtAll3 1 days ago [-]
meanwhile France and UK simply sat on their asses against empty unguarded border
nobody cared about the poles
consumer451 1 days ago [-]
Yes, and actual history yet again subverts the dominant story:
> The citizens of Poland have the highest count of individuals who have been recognized by Yad Vashem as the Polish Righteous Among the Nations, for saving Jews from extermination during the Holocaust in World War II. There are 7,232 (as of 1 January 2022) Polish men and women conferred with the honor, over a quarter of the 28,486 recognized by Yad Vashem in total. The list of Righteous Among the Nations is not comprehensive and it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Poles concealed and aided tens of thousands of their Polish-Jewish neighbors. Many of these initiatives were carried out by individuals, but there also existed organized networks of Polish resistance which were dedicated to aiding Jews – most notably, the Żegota organization.
As a Pole, I am pissed af about the fact that this true story of WWII is not known. In fact, very often the Russian version of "pravda" is what has been spread.
Why tf is there no Oscar winning movie about this story?
Poland is invaded from both sides, saves the most lives of our fellow Jewish brothers and sisters: the most heroic story, and the movie count is zero.
0rzech 1 days ago [-]
A story of Witold Pilecki [1] would be more than enough.
Are you upset that Russia's attempt at occupying Kyiv was hilarious bad (from a military point of view, obviously not as far as the Ukrainians are concerned), and Russia has lost any chance of retaking Poland for generations?
pstuart 2 days ago [-]
Did Russia back out to intentionally let it happen or did they chicken out to avoid fighting the nazis?
Robotbeat 2 days ago [-]
Intentionally. Allowed the Soviets to administer the place when the Nazis finally left, as the Polish resistance had been crushed. Unforgiveable.
spwa4 2 days ago [-]
It was an attempt of the Polish resistance to avoid being "liberated" by the Soviets to just immediately become occupied by the communist red army. The idea being to liberate Warsaw and get US/UK assistance through the Polish government-in-exile in London to establish Polish military control before the Soviet army arrived. Getting US/UK support could have meant that Poland remained an independent state. Instead, Stalin not only betrayed them, but later actually convicted the surviving leaders of the uprising. "Crimes against communism".
This is now politely referred to as a Soviet betrayal in service of "Stalin's post-war political goals for Poland".
expedition32 1 days ago [-]
The West aren't entirely the good guys here.
My own city was liberated by Polish troops. After WW2 they obviously couldn't go back to Poland. A lot of them ended up in relative poverty after the war.
At least Canadians and Australians went back home and got a parade.
0rzech 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, that was awful. Not to mention pushing Poland into Eastern Bloc and then putting embargoes on it.
varispeed 1 days ago [-]
Russians started the war together with Germans. The idea that they could "help" is Western propaganda that tries to whitewash helping Soviet Union.
varispeed 1 days ago [-]
Don't forget that Germans were able to quickly find people they wanted to exterminate by going through municipal and church records. Today it will be much easier thanks to push for Digital ID. Choose demographic and the dashboard will show where everyone is and their connections.
phatfish 1 days ago [-]
Corporations already have a "digital ID" for everyone. As we know from WW2 (and more recent conflicts) private corporations would be lining up to work with the next Nazi regime if the price was right.
billypilgrim 1 days ago [-]
Ten years ago multiple tech giants openly stated they would not help the Trump administration build a Muslim registry [1]. Since then, several of them have bowed the knee and donated to his second inauguration.
I’m from Germany, and keep wondering how much more damage the NSDAP could have done if they had access to the data these companies now have on everybody.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/16/13990234/google-muslim-r...
blub 1 days ago [-]
Germany has the Schufa. Should be trivial to narrow down to a specific group based on name only.
snowpid 17 hours ago [-]
Again a reminder that Google etc have data far more than historical dictatorship like Stasi, KGB etc. just for better marketing. we need better data protection though GDPR is a good start.
lifestyleguru 1 days ago [-]
Digital ID? Kiddos <25 years old give away 3D face scans and fingerprints at the gym, grocery store, and in the gambling mobile app.
watwut 1 days ago [-]
The choosen demographic in Poland was easy to find without any records. Jews were mostly orthodox and easily visibly different and poor.
Polish were basically "anyone there" no records necessary.
odiroot 24 hours ago [-]
That's a big simplification. There were plenty of ethnic Jews who already converted to Catholicism (or remained atheist) and identified as regular Polish citizens. There were also mixed families who were exterminated as a whole nonetheless.
varispeed 1 days ago [-]
They were going after key people like academics, engineers, doctors, artists first.
expedition32 1 days ago [-]
Yeah the Nazis had future plans for Poland. The idea was to make the entire country into illiterate slaves.
A lot of people don't know that although what the Nazis did was obviously terrible it was nothing compared to what they wanted to do.
Poland survived 60 years of communism. It would not have survived national socialism.
0rzech 18 hours ago [-]
There was a version which considered leaving 15%-20% of the Polish population to be slaves, but "In 1941, the German leadership decided to destroy the Polish nation completely, and in 15–20 years the Polish state under German occupation was to be fully cleared of any ethnic Poles and settled by German colonists.[16]: 32 A majority of them, now deprived of their leaders and most of their intelligentsia (through mass murder, destruction of culture, banning education above the absolutely basic level, and kidnapping of children for Germanization), would have to be deported to regions in the East and scattered over as wide an area of Western Siberia as possible. According to the plan, this would result in their assimilation by the local populations, which would cause the Poles to vanish as a nation.[46]"
Specifically a national socialism predicated on a definition of “nation” that was based on dubious race science and excluded anyone whose physical appearance or genealogy was “Polish”.
nicbou 1 days ago [-]
Germany already has religion logged in the Melderegister
flohofwoe 1 days ago [-]
This was voluntarily before 2022 and has been removed entirely since 2022:
I'm a little confused. It's still a field on the registration form and is used to collect Church tax, right? My last Anmeldung was in 2019 so I might have missed something.
elia_is_me 1 days ago [-]
uprising together with Germans against russia invasion, and it garnered sympathy from many Chinese people --- though Polish people are anti-Chinese for religious and communism (maybe also religious) reasons
lukwoz 1 days ago [-]
I don't think there's any such sentiment in Poland; in fact, this research points to (slightly) positive sentiment of the Polish towards the Chinese: https://www.cbos.pl/SPISKOM.POL/2026/K_016_26.PDF
flohofwoe 1 days ago [-]
> uprising together with Germans against russia invasion
Maybe you've been confused by some of the resistance fighters wearing German helmets?
The Germans crushed the uprising because the Soviets conveniently stopped their advance, giving the Germans time to focus on the Polish resistance, which was convenient for the Soviets because it eliminated a potential "problem" for the Soviet occupation of Poland after WW2.
0rzech 1 days ago [-]
> though Polish people are anti-Chinese for religious and communism (maybe also religious) reasons
Where did you get that from?
maradon 2 days ago [-]
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siltcakes 2 days ago [-]
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enoughstupid 1 days ago [-]
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7e 1 days ago [-]
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xyzelement 23 hours ago [-]
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datsci_est_2015 21 hours ago [-]
Well for one thing there are still buildings in Berlin that were built before 1945 (“Altbau”) but the policy of IDF appears to be to make the strip entirely uninhabitable except by their terms. At least, that’s what independent satellite imagery studies would imply (90%+ buildings uninhabitable).
xyzelement 20 hours ago [-]
Unsure about that "policy" but was there anything going on recently - any sort of context?
datsci_est_2015 20 hours ago [-]
To expand on my usage of the word “imply”: the implication of destroying buildings to the point where independent satellite imagery analysis deems 90%+ off buildings uninhabitable would be that there is a policy of making that area entirely uninhabitable, whether explicit or implicit.
To use the very example the grandparent comment gave as contrast, the advancing Russian army did not have a policy of making Berlin entirely uninhabitable - and if it did it was stopped through diplomatic means at the end of the war.
xyzelement 19 hours ago [-]
The idea that the allies restrained themselves to win the war is best underwood by considering Hiroshima or Dresden than whatever we can divine from the remaining pre war architecture in berlin. My point was that looking at what was happening. In berlin (or Hiroshima or Dresden) in 1945 without considering that those countries had done immediately prior is dumb.
cramsession 17 hours ago [-]
This applies to October 7th and why Hamas was fully justified in fighting back against 75 years of Zionist terror.
datsci_est_2015 18 hours ago [-]
Well that wasn’t the point of this thread. The comment was literally asking if the Battle of Berlin would’ve reminded the OP of Gaza.
> The idea that the allies restrained themselves to win the war is best underwood by considering Hiroshima or Dresden than whatever we can divine from the remaining pre war architecture in berlin.
Yes, interestingly you bring up the worst of the worst bombing campaigns of the allies, Hiroshima and Dresden, which were specifically not carried out as extermination campaigns against an entire peoples, rather the destruction of a city thanks to a misguided doctrine that declared aerial bombing would demoralize populations, still unsuccessfully in use today (spoiler: it does not demoralize, it radicalizes).
Maybe it’s best to compare Japan’s actions in China to Israel’s current actions in Gaza?
> My point was that looking at what was happening. In berlin (or Hiroshima or Dresden) in 1945 without considering that those countries had done immediately prior is dumb.
What did China do to deserve its rape and pillage at the hand of Japan?
xyzelement 18 hours ago [-]
>> still unsuccessfully in use today (spoiler: it does not demoralize, it radicalizes).
I think your idea if I follow correctly that Israel's campaign in Gaza is to demoralize the Gazans (vs kick back, Hammas, get the hostages back, etc.) but at the same time that it's irrational for them to do it because of what you said re radicalization?
datsci_est_2015 12 hours ago [-]
Actually no, because the IDF isn’t carrying out an aerial bombing campaign. Aerial bombing campaigns are the ones that have been used in attempts to demoralize an enemy, but often instead radicalize them, e.g. Battle of Britain.
The IDF is occupying the strip, much more akin to the occupation of nations on the Eastern front, or Japan among the islands of SEA and Oceania, if we’re continuing comparisons to WW2. Those occupations were about resources, Lebensraum, and affirming racial superiority.
lifestyleguru 1 days ago [-]
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cramsession 2 days ago [-]
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ngruhn 2 days ago [-]
They were fighting the German army. Hamas mostly and intentionally gunned down civilizations and then took some hostages for good measure.
cramsession 2 days ago [-]
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ngruhn 2 days ago [-]
Wow, Hamas is _more_ justified? The Nazi's invaded Poland. Doesn't get more stolen than that. Also again: one is slaughtering civilians, the other is fighting the army. This is not even comparable.
cramsession 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
yakshaving_jgt 2 days ago [-]
Lots of Polish people on this website, including me.
What makes you think you're in a position to qualify the morality of the deaths of my not-so-distant relatives at the hands of Nazi invaders?
cramsession 2 days ago [-]
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yakshaving_jgt 2 days ago [-]
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cramsession 2 days ago [-]
I'm 100% sure threatening other Hacker News users with violence is against site regulations.
Drupon 1 days ago [-]
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thomassmith65 1 days ago [-]
Polack jokes, too. Very classy /s
sdoering 2 days ago [-]
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Drupon 1 days ago [-]
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1 days ago [-]
sdoering 2 days ago [-]
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breppp 2 days ago [-]
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Drupon 1 days ago [-]
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breppp 1 days ago [-]
So a thousand civilians weren't shot by death squads in civilian towns? babies weren't kidnapped? women weren't raped? houses weren't burned with people inside? bodies weren't found dismembered?
I think you should really investigate your sources of information as this is approaching an alternative reality.
cramsession 2 days ago [-]
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sdoering 2 days ago [-]
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Drupon 1 days ago [-]
If disliking the terrorist tactics of the zionists who invented modern terrorism (Lehi, Irgun, etc.) is "antisemitic" then my heart weeps for the Jews who will have to be held accountable for it then.
cramsession 2 days ago [-]
What did I say that's antisemitic? Ashkenazis aren't even Semitic and their factual history is just that.
breppp 1 days ago [-]
Jewish communities in Europe trace their roots to Israel/Judea and the Roman expulsion and subsequent colonization.
Israel nowadays is mostly non-Ashkenazi in any case, and is mostly composed of Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab countries following the 1948 war
There's a widespread antisemitic conspiracy theory which links Ashkenazi to Khazars, but except being historically unsound, it echoes very ancient antisemitic (racist) tropes such as British Israelism, which are christian ideas claiming Jews are imposters to their own religion/nationality
cramsession 21 hours ago [-]
No, actually every single Israeli prime minister is in fact Eastern European. They even changed their names to sound more "hebrew", which itself is an affected language created for propaganda purposes.
https://www.barwypowstania.pl/photos/22
https://www.barwypowstania.pl/photos/51
and the world is stupid enough to repeat the endless cycle of violence.
It is up to us to decide if "never again" is a universal rule or "oh, but this time it is different".
https://youtu.be/Ejd2rsXoQSI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22W%22_Hour?useskin=vector
---
Also, if you ever have a chance then head to Warsaw Rising Museum:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Rising_Museum?useskin=v...
Muzeum Powstania Warszawskiego [1] indeed makes an exceptional work of walking people through the dramatic story of the Warsaw Uprising.
[1] https://www.1944.pl/en
The aftermath [1] was that ~220k Poles died and out of that 150-200k civilians, often with mass execution - later on a lot of warsaw population was sometimes bitter toward the uprising’s leadership.
To put it in context: within 2 months 200k people died, similar number like in Hiroshima but almost nobody wordwide know about warsaw uprising.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising#Aftermath
For those who don't know, the Uprising was a planned resistance action to expel the Nazis from Warsaw.
Supposedly it was planned in collaboration with the Russians. But the Russian army stood down while the resistance fought alone for two months.
This allowed the Germans to regroup, fight back, and eventually to destroy the city, and most of the resistance itself.
The whole point of the uprising was to liberate Warsaw before the Russians get in, as everybody knew that Russians are not liberating Poland - they are looking to occupy the country, just as Germany did. If the Uprising was successfull, it would give a great credit and negotiating card to the Polish government.
Unfortunately, Russians knew that too - that's exactly why they stopped their advance and watched the city being razed to the ground. Also unfortunately, they were right and ended up occupying Poland for the next 45 years.
Many argue this uprising is nothing to be proud of and the crime of the leadership with devastating results: ~200k civilians went with this bang, and city completely wiped out.
Spreading this knowledge is now illegal in Putin's Russia. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Against_Rehabilitation_of_...
What is fact is that Hitler and Stalin were military allies to start WWII. This is documented history.
Would you agree with my latter statement?
nobody cared about the poles
> The citizens of Poland have the highest count of individuals who have been recognized by Yad Vashem as the Polish Righteous Among the Nations, for saving Jews from extermination during the Holocaust in World War II. There are 7,232 (as of 1 January 2022) Polish men and women conferred with the honor, over a quarter of the 28,486 recognized by Yad Vashem in total. The list of Righteous Among the Nations is not comprehensive and it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Poles concealed and aided tens of thousands of their Polish-Jewish neighbors. Many of these initiatives were carried out by individuals, but there also existed organized networks of Polish resistance which were dedicated to aiding Jews – most notably, the Żegota organization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Righteous_Among_the_Nat...
As a Pole, I am pissed af about the fact that this true story of WWII is not known. In fact, very often the Russian version of "pravda" is what has been spread.
Why tf is there no Oscar winning movie about this story?
Poland is invaded from both sides, saves the most lives of our fellow Jewish brothers and sisters: the most heroic story, and the movie count is zero.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki
This is now politely referred to as a Soviet betrayal in service of "Stalin's post-war political goals for Poland".
My own city was liberated by Polish troops. After WW2 they obviously couldn't go back to Poland. A lot of them ended up in relative poverty after the war.
At least Canadians and Australians went back home and got a parade.
Polish were basically "anyone there" no records necessary.
A lot of people don't know that although what the Nazis did was obviously terrible it was nothing compared to what they wanted to do.
Poland survived 60 years of communism. It would not have survived national socialism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost#Poland
https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2022/kw39-de-p...
https://www.vaticannews.va/de/kirche/news/2022-10/deutschlan...
Please educate yourself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising
Maybe you've been confused by some of the resistance fighters wearing German helmets?
The Germans crushed the uprising because the Soviets conveniently stopped their advance, giving the Germans time to focus on the Polish resistance, which was convenient for the Soviets because it eliminated a potential "problem" for the Soviet occupation of Poland after WW2.
Where did you get that from?
To use the very example the grandparent comment gave as contrast, the advancing Russian army did not have a policy of making Berlin entirely uninhabitable - and if it did it was stopped through diplomatic means at the end of the war.
> The idea that the allies restrained themselves to win the war is best underwood by considering Hiroshima or Dresden than whatever we can divine from the remaining pre war architecture in berlin.
Yes, interestingly you bring up the worst of the worst bombing campaigns of the allies, Hiroshima and Dresden, which were specifically not carried out as extermination campaigns against an entire peoples, rather the destruction of a city thanks to a misguided doctrine that declared aerial bombing would demoralize populations, still unsuccessfully in use today (spoiler: it does not demoralize, it radicalizes).
Maybe it’s best to compare Japan’s actions in China to Israel’s current actions in Gaza?
> My point was that looking at what was happening. In berlin (or Hiroshima or Dresden) in 1945 without considering that those countries had done immediately prior is dumb.
What did China do to deserve its rape and pillage at the hand of Japan?
I think your idea if I follow correctly that Israel's campaign in Gaza is to demoralize the Gazans (vs kick back, Hammas, get the hostages back, etc.) but at the same time that it's irrational for them to do it because of what you said re radicalization?
The IDF is occupying the strip, much more akin to the occupation of nations on the Eastern front, or Japan among the islands of SEA and Oceania, if we’re continuing comparisons to WW2. Those occupations were about resources, Lebensraum, and affirming racial superiority.
What makes you think you're in a position to qualify the morality of the deaths of my not-so-distant relatives at the hands of Nazi invaders?
I think you should really investigate your sources of information as this is approaching an alternative reality.
Israel nowadays is mostly non-Ashkenazi in any case, and is mostly composed of Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab countries following the 1948 war
There's a widespread antisemitic conspiracy theory which links Ashkenazi to Khazars, but except being historically unsound, it echoes very ancient antisemitic (racist) tropes such as British Israelism, which are christian ideas claiming Jews are imposters to their own religion/nationality