German notgeld bank notes

[Thorlifter]

While searching the web for notgeld for sale, I came across a website where I was stunned at their description of German labor/death camps. In their description, they wrote...


Far from being the "death camps" as you have heard so often, places like Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald were not in the business of extermination. They were work camps, critical to the German war effort. But did you know that the Jewish workers were compensated for their labor with scrip printed specifically for their use in stores, canteens and even brothels? The prisoner monetary system was conceived in ghettos such as Lodz, carried to camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau and still existed in the displaced persons camps that were established by the Allies after World War II. Here is the story of the money the court historians do not want you to even suspect existed.

Piles of incinerated corpses were indicting images at Nuremberg, used to prove that the German-run concentration camps during World War II were intended for purposes of exterminating the Jews of Europe. However, a plethora of documentary evidence, long suppressed, shows that prisoners were relatively well-treated, compensated for their hard work and allowed to purchase luxuries to which even the German public did not have ready access. This is not the image of abject deprivation that the Holocaust lobby would like you to entertain.

I guess the word that just floored me was "well-treated". I know some were paid for their labor, but how this guy can suggest prisoners were well treated just makes my head spin.

So, I present this to this site for your reference and, heck, maybe I'm wrong and need to be enlightened.

 

[GrauGeist]

WoW...

It would interesting to see thier plethora of "suppressed documents" stacks up higher than the pile of gold fillings found at Dachau...

 

[davebender]

German work camps were not death camps. That would have been counter-productive. Many of the larger concentration camp systems such as Auschwitz contained both work camps and extermination camps. The web site you found is probably talking about work camps only.

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Come on now Dave. Read it again. It is rather obvious what they are saying. Dont stoop that low.

Labor camps were brutal, nothing like the neo nazi bullshit being spread above. You know that as well. You are smarter than that.

 

[GrauGeist]

Interestingly enough, the sign at the entrance to Auschwitz reads: "Work Sets You Free"...

 

[stona]

I find posts on this thread very disturbing already.
Steve

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Anyone who thinks that labor camps were not bad, and that prisoners were treated well is disturbing.

 

[GrauGeist]

It is true that large populations of workers were relocated for Labor and that in it's own right is inexcusable, because nobody should be forced from thier home and way of life for any reason.

But millions went to thier deaths simply because they were "inferior" and that is unforgivable. And it is up to us to remember that terrible tragedy, no matter how unpleasant the truth is, so that it NEVER happens again...

 

[davebender]

Who made that claim?

My point is German labor camps were not designed to kill prisoners as was normal in the Soviet Gulag system. Germany had special camps whose only purpose was extermination.

 

[GrauGeist]

Who made that claim?

In the original post, the quoted paragraph:

Far from being the "death camps" as you have heard so often, places like Auschwitz, Dachau and Buchenwald were not in the business of extermination. They were work camps, critical to the German war effort.

That right there, is extremely dangerous revisionism

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Enough said...

 

[tyrodtom]

Work camps couldn't be death camps " because that would be counter-productive" ???

The workers in the work camps were treated as a very disposable, short term labor force. These were people the Nazi doctrine wanted to dissappear from the face of the earth, to leave living room for the master race. If they could get some work out of them while working them to death, by Nazi doctrine, that was productive.

It would take hours to list all the policies of the 3rd Reich that were " counter productive " .

 

[mikewint]

Tyrodtom, spot on

 

[stona]

Who made that claim?

My point is German labor camps were not designed to kill prisoners as was normal in the Soviet Gulag system. Germany had special camps whose only purpose was extermination.

Semantics.
It is true that there were only six camps specifically designed as extermination camps. Lets list them.

Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau)
Chełmno
Belzec
Majdanek
Sobibor
Treblinka

There are a couple of others that may be considered extermination camps today but they were not considered such by Eichmann's organisation at the time.

The rest are concentration/labour camps and the differentiation was made clear by various witnesses and defendants at Nuremberg.
These camps had no interest in preserving their prisoners. In fact it was part of their purpose to work these people to death. Their life expectancy was longer than the minutes of one of the six listed above ,they were murdered slowly.


Heydrich,from the minutes of the Wannsee conference.

"Under suitable direction, the Jews should be brought to the East in the course of the Final Solution, for use as labour. In large labour gangs, with the sexes separated, the Jews capable of work will be transported to those areas and set to road-building, in the course of which, without doubt, a large part of them ("ein Großteil") will fall away through natural losses. The surviving remnant, surely those with the greatest powers of resistance, will be given special treatment, since, if freed, they would constitute the germinal cell for the re-creation of Jewry."

"Fall away through natural causes" is a euphemism which surely needs no explanation. It WAS part of the purpose of these camps.

I take it we've all seen the dreadful films made by the British at Belsen and the Americans at Dachau. Neither were extermination camps but the piles of bodies speak for themselves.

This thread should be closed.

Steve

 

[delcyros]

Agreed, it´s not a place for revisionism.

Concentration camps for the purpose of exterminating people existed. Prisoner Camps which employed forced labour tolerated and at times even encouraged life threatening environmental and working conditions. This should never be questioned.

 

[davebender]

It would take hours to list all the policies of the 3rd Reich that were " counter productive " .

The same holds true for modern day USA and the EU.

 

[tyrodtom]

The same holds true for modern day USA and the EU.

Not even in the same league Dave. To say that is a gross understatement of just how wrong some of the Nazi policies were.

 

[A4K]

Who made that claim?

My point is German labor camps were not designed to kill prisoners as was normal in the Soviet Gulag system. Germany had special camps whose only purpose was extermination.

No, prisoners were just worked to death (or set aside for medical experiments in camps like Dachau). Sounds much better that way dosen't it?

 

[stona]

Who made that claim?

My point is German labor camps were not designed to kill prisoners as was normal in the Soviet Gulag system.

Yes they were.You are simply wrong and promoting an objectionable revisionist history.
Read the minutes of the Wannsee conference. Read comments by Himmler,Eichmann and many others. Maybe you could read through the testimonies of men like Speer and Sauckel at Nuremberg.
It was an accepted feature of these camps that the work force would die and need constant replenishment,something Speer moaned about (on economic not humanitarian grounds) and Sauckel had to fix. For this Sauckel was hanged.
Sauckel protested his innocence to the end claiming,like you,that it was not commonplace to work labour to death. I bet he wished that he hadn't written,earlier,that labourers be exploited "to the highest degree possible at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure."
If you don't want to take their words for it you can look up the statistics for deaths in some of these camps. They were good record keepers in Nazi Germany and not everything was destroyed in the chaos of war's end.
That's me done with this.
Steve

 

[Njaco]

Who made that claim?

My point is German labor camps were not designed to kill prisoners as was normal in the Soviet Gulag system.

I don't think Erich Hartmann would have lasted 10 years in a German "work" camp like he did in the Russian camp system.