Band of Brothers Episode 9 Reaction; Why We Fight
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- Опубліковано 14 лис 2024
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I was warned...and for good reason.
My reaction to Band of Brothers, ep 9, Why We Fight
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“If anyone ever tells you the Holocaust didn't happen, or that it wasn't as bad as they say, no, it was worse than they say. What we saw, what these Germans did, it was worse than you can possibly imagine.” - Edward "Babe" Heffron
It was. And we will carry the Shame and Burden for Centuries to come.
-Greetings from a former German ISAF Soldier.
@@Jargolf86 Humility s a good thing. I am sorry Germany had to learn humility this way.
Not as bad as the chinese concentration camps will be in which they’ll put us.
@@Jargolf86 If you didn't do it you don't have yo be ashamed.
If anyone would have told my Grandfather it didnt exist they would have been knocked out. Not because he was Jewish but because he was a POW kept with the Jews in a concentration camp in Poland and saw everything. He went into the Army 190lbs and came home at 90lbs.
I only met my grandma once I was 6 and when I shook her hand I noticed 4 numbers with a blue tinge above her wrist, I didn’t know what they were but strangely they gave me a bad feeling. When I was 16 in History class reading my text book and I read ‘ They were numbered with tattoos’, I flashedback and was just floored had no idea i was connected to this
My great uncle was in a unit that liberated a camp. He went through D-Day, Holland, Belgium, Market Garden, Bastogne. Never affected him. Till he saw one of the camps. It broke him hard. Had nightmares about it the rest of his life. Drove him to drink. He was at the one Gen Patton saw. Even Gen Patton himself broke down and bawled like a baby. As bad and hard hitting as this episode was. The real thing was a million times worse. The stench was unbearable. They were there days dealing with it. The ones rescued would still die days and weeks later. Watch the old news reel footage.
Ohrdruf, the first camp the US forces liberated on April 4, 1945 is probably where your great-uncle was at. General Eisenhower brought Generals Bradley and Patton with him to see this for themselves. What they saw and experienced there made 'Ol Blood n Guts' Patton violently ill and he vomited against the side of a building, later refusing to go into others where the victims bodies had been piled up. Eisenhower ordered the citizens of the nearby town of Ohrdruf to be marched through the camp and to bury the bodies - this is where that practice of making the nearby citizens see for themselves and bury the bodies started.. The mayor of Ohrdruf and his wife, at the end of this, went home and were found to have hanged themselves in their house. Eisenhower also ordered any unit in the area not engaged in frontline combat to tour the camp and called for journalists and congress to come and see for themselves. I honor your great uncle's service. the greatest generation.
That war was awful, but the behavior of the Japanese and NAZIS toward human beings was horrendous. Thank goodness Ike had it recorded, otherwise no one would believe it.
Thank you to your great uncle, from a Jew.
my great grandfather liberated multiple camps, fought the japanese at the Marianas islands, transferred to europe and fought from normandy to VE day. he never talked about anything besides Bastogne and Buchenwald. And he always said VERY few words. Bastogne was “cold” and Buchenwald “is the reason i can’t drive”. (he was among the first to arrive at Buchenwald and the nazis executed hundreds of prisoners on the road leading up to it, he was ordered to keep driving)
we have pictures of him with the Jews holding their first synagogue service after liberation.
Currahee ✈️🫡🇫🇷🙏
My late uncle helped liberate Gunskirchen, a subcamp of Mauthausen when he was with the 71st. Almost 50 years later he said he could close his eyes and see it and smell it as if he were reliving it in his mind. It never left him...
We all MUST NEVER FORGET what they went through
absolutely!❤️
The world forgot pretty quickly. There's been many, many genocides since the Holocaust.
I believe this episode began with the purpose of showing the disillusionment that the toll of the war created on the men of Easy Company.... however, after then seeing the horror of the concentration camp, and realizing truly what they were fighting and why they were fighting, it helps eliminate that disillusionment as they now know their righteous purpose of their endeavors of these last two years.
For Nixon, the sad problems of losing his wife and dog are nothing compared to what those in the Holocaust experienced. Adds so much perspective.
Well said
Your wife divorces you during war time then that's not a loss but a gain. His wife must've been one piece of work. Jeez lady!
@@geraldjohnson4013 Maybe she found out about that "certain young lady he mentioned in Episode 5. 😏
@@gravitypronepart2201 hell, I always thought that "certain lady" was a bottle of hooch. Dude always guzzling the fire water like it was life itself.
Except, Easy Company actually arrived the day after the camp shown in Band of Brothers, Kaufering IV (Hurlach), had been liberated by the 12th Armored Division. for dramatic purposes Easy company is shown liberating the camp.
From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
_As US armed forces approached the Kaufering complex in late April 1945, the SS began evacuating the camps, sending the prisoners on death marches in the direction of Dachau. Those inmates who could not keep up were often shot or beaten to death by the guards. At Kaufering IV, the SS set fire to the barracks killing hundreds of prisoners who were too ill or weak to move._
_When the 12th Armored Division and 101st Airborne Division arrived at Kaufering IV on April 27 and 28, respectively, the soldiers discovered some 500 dead inmates. In the days that followed, the US Army units ordered the local townspeople to bury the dead._
My great uncle was one of the soldiers who liberated treblanka he only spoke once about his time in the war- I only know from my grandpa his brother that he regretted to his dying day that they were not there sooner. It’s a strange mentality to have that. My grandpa said if they knew they would have moved mountains to save them.
Treblinka was shut down by the NAZI'S in 1943. Was he an American soldier? No U.S troops liberated any camps in Poland. It was the Soviet army that liberated Auschwitz and the few remaining sub camps. The Americans liberated Dachau, Buchenwald , Flossenburg,Mauthausen and Dora-Mittelbau concentration camps. Maybe one of them? Treblinka was torn down before it could be liberated.
I always saw the mentioning of Beethoven as a metaphore for the two extremes of Germany. One side is the highest class of artist (classical music) and on the other side the Holocaust. The violin case in the last scene always looked like a coffin to me, meaning the civilization died.
Norbert Brainin, a famous violinist said, "Austria has the best propaganda ministry: they have convinced the whole world that Hitler was German, and Beethoven was Austrian."
During the 1930s Germany had the highest rate of university educated population in the world.
@@steriopticon2687 THAT is the true reason why that point was made in the episode. Mozart was Austrian too...Nix as a Yale man would likely have known this and they made his character very keen to point out that the Germans were playing GERMAN music, not Austrian.
Also pretty sure its a reference to Juliek's violin, a scene from Elie Wiesel's Night
The older woman’s husband wasn’t SS..His uniform was of a normal Wehrmacht officer, so he wasn’t directly involved with the camps but he most likely would have known what was happening.
It's crazy when first Nixon is in her house and she gives him the "how dare you" look, only later for Nixon to give her the same look in the camp.
"I have heard it said the American soldier did not know what he was fighting for. At least now he knows what he was fighting against." Dwight D. Eisenhower
Mozart was Austrian, Beethoven was German. German musicians were playing German music was a metaphor.
Thank you, I see
My wife’s uncle was in ww2 one day he opened up to me and told me all about a concentration camp he liberated this was twenty years ago he was also almost killed in the battle of the bulge he used to always tell me stories about the war he knew I was fascinated he passed away a few years ago
The actors used for the camp scene were cancer patients and if I remember correctly the director of the episode had family members killed in the holocaust.
Sadly, a lot of those patients were terminal and didn’t survive long enough to see the final product. They kept them separated from men of Easy to get a very real and visceral reaction
Hi. To answer your question about the German people and the concentration camps... I went to Munich a few years ago and actually visited Dachau concentration camp. The guide actually answered this question by telling us that back in the day, there was some sort of "Don't ask, don't tell." mentality about the camps. The camps were isolated from the towns and those who could see something, only saw the chimneys of the buildings. If I remember correctly, the side of the camp that was facing the town actually had a 10-foot tall brick (or stone ?) wall to actually hide the camp from the townfolks. So, yeah... They knew there was military buildings there, they saw transports coming and going but they didn't investigate more than that. Partly because if they did, they would most likely have been arrested by the Gestapo.
Hard episode to go through but absolutely necessary. I don't know in this particular place if everyone knew, people often confuse the army with the SS who were the ones doing this stuff.
The Wehrmacht were not entirely innocent.
@@russelllapua4904 Also not entirely bad. My Polish great-grandfather was forcibly drafted into Wehrmacht. He escaped in 1944 to join Polish uprising and after the war was awarded Virtuti Militari the highest Polish military decoration. He died in 2007. I'm damn proud of him.
My grandpa survived Auschwitz, and he still carries the number on his arm. Every weekend, he tells me and my other siblings that every day he thinks of the family he lost in the ovens. But he is also happy to see that G-d gave him another chance to build a new family of his own.
About what you said:
As a grandson, I studied the holocaust, and the rise of Nazi Germany, but the Germans didn't know about the concentration camps. The German regime didn't report them deliberately, because they knew it would end up as a disaster and civil revolt.
Same for the Germans, the Polish, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians who participated in the carnage. Those who knew- didn't talk about it anywhere.
May the memory of the 6,000,000 Jews shall never be forgotten. But also let's not forget those fought with Russian/American flag on their shoulders to defeat Nazism and Japanese Fascism (almost 1 million Jews).
A small unknown fact: the Soviet officer who liberated Auschwitz- was a Russian Jew named Jazep Pasternak, son of refugees.
On the question of what the German people knew about the Holocaust camps, historians are split. German Jews had been forcibly removed from their homes years earlier, and the average German knew not to ask questions under Nazism. Every day Germans were also told that the areas where camps existed were secret military installations and ordered to never approach.
Still, historians have found a lot of evidence that the secrets didn't stay secret, and that Germans were aware of the fate of these victims.
Germans in the town certainly knew. There were multiple work (to death) camps. In the area with prisoners working in factories, often being given orders by local Germans. Do they know all the details? No. But stories certainly came from the east about the mass shootings, as regular German army units participated along with the Einsatzgruppen
I was Army stationed in Germany 10 years ago and I visited a lot of the camps that are museums now. Very somber place to be and can only imagine what these guys saw. I will never forget it.
My grandfather liberated a small camp like this in Germany. What they did with the townsfolk is accurate. They made them clean up bodies from sun up to sun down, no breaks, no food, no gloves.
He said he couldn't help but feel sorry for them too.
I watch this series once every year I still can't watch this episode without shedding some tears
You noticed how Frank Perconte addressed O'Keefe the first Time with his real Name after seeing him crying in the Camp?
Sometimes it dosent need Combat to make a Comrade your Brother, sometimes Compassion is enought..
This has happened several times since. Genocides in various countries.
Like you pointed out, people don't see others as people so its easier for them to annihilate them. Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda just to name a few.
There's mass murder and ethnic cleansing occurring right now in the latest Ethiopian civil War. And then we have genocide in China against Uyghurs.
This episode always makes me cry. Watching you break down made me cry even more. So important for people to see.
This episode is brilliant.
It first sets up the idea of a kind of equivalence in the interviews with the vets. Well, maybe they weren’t so bad, maybe they were like us.
Then we see a series of scenes that show how hardened the men of Easy are from where they were in episode 1. We worry about the girl in the barn with Luz. We don’t think Luz is a rapist but still we worry. Spiers is looting without a blink. A family is dispossessed not a thought about where they will spend the night. Perconte sees the French soldiers execute a prisoner and shrugs. Is Easy really that different from the Nazis?
And then we see the difference. The moral difference comes into focus with remarkable clarity.
Some people knew. We had intelligence from Poles and Jewish resistance fighters. Some of it was discounted. In WWI the British did propaganda against the Germans that was horribly exaggerated. We didn’t want to do that again. Our Allies in the East, the Russians, had problems of their own with incidents like the Katyn massacre. There was also a lot of anti- Semitism in the US State Dept. Look into the story of the passenger liner St Louis. The troops on the ground did not know.
The woman in red… the photo of her husband had a black ribbon in the corner of the frame. This indicates he was deceased. His uniform indicates he was Wehrmacht, regular military. The camps were usually run by the SS. That’s not to say she had no guilt.
People try to explain the Mozart / Beethoven thing with a German / Austrian contrast. Hitler, of course, was born in Austria.
I try to watch BOB every year. I still cry.
What is shown in Band of Brothers is representative of the camps in general but is not accurate for this specific camp. In reality, the camp shown in Band of Brothers, Kaufering IV (Hurlach), was found and liberated by the 12th Armored Division on April 27, 1945 and Easy Company didn't actually arrive until April 28. And there were only a handful of survivors (those who been able to hide) found alive along with about 500 bodies. The Germans had evacuated all eleven Kaufering complex camps and forced the prisoners to march in the direction of Dachau. For dramatic purposes Easy Company is shown liberating the camp.
From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
_As US armed forces approached the Kaufering complex in late April 1945, the SS began evacuating the camps, sending the prisoners on death marches in the direction of Dachau. Those inmates who could not keep up were often shot or beaten to death by the guards. At Kaufering IV, the SS set fire to the barracks killing hundreds of prisoners who were too ill or weak to move._
_When the 12th Armored Division and 101st Airborne Division arrived at Kaufering IV on April 27 and 28, respectively, the soldiers discovered some 500 dead inmates. In the days that followed, the US Army units ordered the local townspeople to bury the dead._
The change in tone from Luz roasting Perconte for the Bastogne comment to the scene where Perconte runs back to Winters is brilliant. Just a sudden shift in tone and suspense and really builds up the theme of the episode
The most heartbreaking episode of the whole show, because it was real.
Couple points Id like to make. One, the women whose house Nix went in to, then later was shown helping to bury the dead at the concentration camp, her husband, shown in the photo Nix dropped was not a Nazi, he was regular Army no party affiliation, (NO Party Pin that would have been seen prominently on a lapel otherwise). It bares saying that most of germen officer core backed at the notion of taking the pledge to Hitler as opposed to the German state but had to or be broke and living on the street, possible even imprisoned and at the time the German people where despite to be out from under years of slavery to France and England after the treaty of Versailles literally indentured an entire country. Now while none of this makes what the Nazis did ok it bares reminding people many did not agree with what the Nazis where doing but at first it was rumor and gossip that was considered Unpatriotic then made Illegal to talk about. So by the time they realized it was true, you either turned a blind eye to it, or left everything and everyone you ever knew or loved and ran, or like most chanted the party slogans till you believed it and it quieted your conscience and pushed on with living. Next and to the point, My Sister in-law is second generation Japanese American. I went to stay with her Family for a week and came to love and respect her parents. Her father and I were watching and discussing this episode and he told me a story about what his dad had been through in a camp in the US. After he said, nodding at the Germans burying the dead in the camp; "I was in an argument with my father about how I thought America was treating Minorities he shut me down by telling me , What we went through in the camps in America was not present but Men where dyeing to fight against eval, blood was being spilled, lived dreams and hopes lost across the globe so people that would never even know their names could avoid being under a global dictatorship that was at the time engaged in wholesale genocide. What we had to go through was NOTHING compared to what the other side was doing. We were treated like an inconvenient necessity while in Germany and in Asia the unwanted where butchered, mutilated, gassed and burnt alive. So don't tell me how bad it is here until you have seen how Horrible it is elsewhere". He paused and then finished. "I Joined the service that year and was the wiser and better for it". A couple good lessons many today could stand to learn.
My Name is Michael, my auntie was Janine Fiant, who was from Grandcamps Les Bains in Normandy, she died in 2020 from covid but she has lived the Neptune Operation from WW2 in Normandy at the age of 5, she tomd me she saw her first black soldier, she discovered the chewing gum, the silent rangers, the chocolate bar...she was at 6kilometers from La pointe Du Hoc, the epicentre of the operation. Thanks to all the soldiers.
I only read it recently, but during this time of the war, on the 506th flank was a unit of Free French soldiers. One of the units they encountered (likely represented by that scene in this episode) was the Charlemange Unit, a Waffen ss unit made entirely up of french collaborators. Needless to say, they didn't have a good time when Free French soldiers got their hands on them.
For a bit more elaboration on why they had to limit food intake, refeeding syndrome is a big problem for people who are starving, as the body as so little electrolytes from malnourishment that the metabolic and electrolyte shifts for the digestive system and other functions to start again can kill them.
The Free French, and, Polish forces, who also wore French equipment, did not take prisoners. ESPECIALLY not from Waffen SS units, ANY Waffen SS units. After Malmedy, neither did U.S. troops, for the most part.
@@ExUSSailor Yeah, I'm not at all surprised that they didnt.
The number of prisoners taken by the US vastly increased after the Battle of the Bulge. It is incorrect to claim they killed hundreds of thousands of Germans who surrendered
The French officer in that scene was Tom Hanks in a uncredited role
@@mikeyj9607 If you're referring to the french soldiers executing the Germans, that's not Tom Hanks, freeze frame and it looks nothing like him
The University of Minnesota conducted an experiment on volunteers from contentious objectors where they were subjected to long periods of starvation with the expectation of massive food shortages to study how best to save as many of the starving as they could. This experiment ended up being extremely useful for concentration camp survivors which saved a ton of lives.
I have watched this series dozens of times. The scenes at Landsberg never fail to bring on the tears. It is a testament to the quality of production, and of course, the history of Hitler's "Final Solution."
I understand that cancer patients volunteered as extras for the camp scene in this episode. Some did not live long enough to see the movie. I hope they know what an important contribution they made to help the world understand
Americans knew about these camps before and during the war. My grand parents knew about them because they got letters from family still living in the old country. There was nothing they could do about it. My Grand father was in the Navy in the PAcific and he and his fellow sailors knew about the camps.
Ohhh, I am hearing different things, I guess it wasn’t widely spread? Or maybe not readily accepted/believed by all
?
@@NiaMakiReacts I think it just depends if you had family still over in Europe at that time. If you had no family there, then you may have not been fully aware of what was going on.
@@NiaMakiReacts during World War I, the British put out a lot of phony propaganda about supposed German atrocities to influence America into getting involved. When stories started coming out about concentration camps, 30 years after World War I, many Americans thought it was bullshit put out of British intelligence again.
When I went to high school, most of my teachers were ex military men, and women. They had fought in World War Two, and I heard stories of B-17 bombing runs. Or tales of watching battered B-29s returning and ditching off the coast of Tinian Island.
My schools art teacher was an older German lady, who had one of the tattoos on her forearm.
Along with being in the room with these people and having a direct link to their experiences, we were shown things like Judgement At Nuremberg whereas today I doubt it would win approval from school boards.
This episode should be required viewing in every school.
While the camp scene is an amalgamation of several units experiences, it portrays as accurately an experience as film ever could.
One of, if not THE most powerful moments in film history.
We live in a Society that people call those who disagree with them or do not believe what they believe a Nazi. I sometimes feel that today's society does not know what a true Nazi is. In this episode of Band of Brothers, we see what a true Nazi is and what a true Nazi does.
Thanks for continuing to react to this series, Nia. Hopefully you can take some extra comfort or connection knowing we were all crying with you. I’ve seen the series over 20 times … and I cry every time.
I can never watch this episode without tearing up. It was said that American soldiers didn't know what they were fighting for in WW2, but after finding the camps, they knew what they were fighting against.
Anne Frank was Dutch and so were the people who protected her family.
I always cry during this episode
yea... this one was a hard one for sure =(
What's even harder is that the polish guy was saying, he's not dead please , help him, or something along those lines. Also the extras acting as the camp inmates, were those affected with cancer, sadly many, didn't live long enough to see this epispde.
Her husband was already killed when the camp was liberated. The black strap over the photo indicates that he was killed in action. My great uncle liberated a camp, Haunted him till the day he died.
yeah, I wasn't sure if it was something that would change how she felt about his service after seeing what she saw burying them... I can only imagine how your great uncle felt, that can never leave you
in the end the musician places his violin in a “coffin style” case
You handled it pretty well…wait for Schindlers List 😊
This episode makes me cry, every single time...
Links to PBS documentaries on UA-cam:
"Secrets of the Dead" episode "Bombing Auschwitz" (S18E02)
ua-cam.com/video/_I0QWudMVPg/v-deo.html
"Secrets of the Dead" episode "Bugging Hitler's Soldiers" (S12E02)
ua-cam.com/video/ubGSypuXj0w/v-deo.html
I put this in a separate comment because i am not sure of your policy on links in comments.
So you get moments in WW2 And other wars where war it's self is horrific But then you find things like the holocaust, The atomic bomb killing civilians, The rape And killing of Nanking Etc etc
I remember asking my grandfather "what was the worst thing you did or saw?"
He told me : I remember vividly a platoon captain going threw the ranks Telling other CO's a dozen Or more of our own men tied with their hands being their backs most with blindfolds And a bullet in the back of their heads behind a church Well of course this went threw the men like wildfire. And for a good 3 weeks HQ wondered why They were not getting many If at all..German SS prisoners No one cared if they surrendered They killed them anyways You have to remember You are at war So is your brother Or highschool friend And friends you went into combat with And these German SS might of took them away as the surrendered And shot them anyways ..Anyways the last i heard of it from HQ orders was: Anyone found killing surrendering prisoners will be arrested and tryed .....The Canadian troops after that Just started to hand over any SS to the French people... That had no such orders .. And by Holland I had enough - A Hunter / Fisherman He never picked up a rifle coming back home Nor told the story to my Mother Or father And 5 others in the family He had a military funeral with new members of his Regiment And Native soldiers honoring him 2011
Edit my neigbour that lives next to me has the last name "Gies" You might not know that name.....It was the last name of the lady that took in Anne Frank And her parents
That lady's husband was Heer, regular army. You can tell from his collar. He would have had nothing to do with the camps. The SS is who ran and guarded them. He was just some random German officer killed somewhere, likely against the same forces that were now taking over where she lived.
@@madurso Very true, Wehrmacht new what was going on and was complicit, but they didn't run the camps, that was only the SS.
Although the Wehrmacht did not round up Jews across occupied Europe and send them to death camps, they certainly planned and participated in war crimes and crimes against humanity. They systematically killed POW and ethnic Slavs in the eastern front. They along with the SS front line Waffen SS units slaughtered jews and non Jewish Italians civilians. Just to name a few.
@@madurso where did you learn this crap?
Heartbreaking episode, i just kinda forgot that part of the war watching the series, and then it hit like i was one of the soldiers.This production is a masterpiece
After you finish episode 10. You really need to react to the special edition Interview episode with the actual Easy Company guys. Called We Stand Alone Together. It's really something.
"We're back with baby face. Damn it, is that why I'm going to be sad?"
Oh, dear. You're in for a rough ride
I appreciate your kind heart.
aww, thanks David!!
The main-cast actors for BoB were NOT told about the concentration camp scene in advance. The set was staffed with people from cancer hospitals who really looked like that. The directors equipped the set with rotting meat so those reactions were legitimate.
There is a wider lesson to be learned here. Nazism possible because Hitler and his followers used victimhood. when humans feel like victims we become capable of unimaginable evil, and even feel justified in it. Hitler, Tojo, Staln, Mao, Pol Pot, all jutitfied their action as necessary. This is why we must never forget the Holocaust or any of the other travisties that have occurred that started with the politics of victumhood.
So true, Hitler believed the Treaty of Versailles was unjustly harsh on Germany with $Billions in restitution to be paid to the allies. He raged that Germany was a victim of revenge and grew his military in secret, while his power grew.
You have a good point.
@@victorpena9824 yes, WW2 was in a way directly influenced by the Allies strict punishment of the Versailles treaty, a “perfect storm” of sorts that allowed someone like Hitler to come to power…If that art school had just accepted Hitler who knows what history would have been like.
@@ryanhampson673 Very VERY true, and dont forget like at least half of us back then didnt even know about the camps and the rest either couldnt blow the whistle since there was no internet and anyone who talked about it was vanished.
It really says something that the first, or one of the first soldiers we see at the camp is Bull and even he is rattled and can't look at it.
Also I'm always amazed at how careful people are to not spoil this. Every reactor is told episode 9 is really bad but they're never told _why_
Nixon didn't fire his weapon in combat because his job was intelligence. He was tasked with relaying orders from HQ to the different company comanders and relaying what situations the company comanders were finding in the field.
As far as the wife of the Nazi officer. She probably knew what was happening. I say this due to an interview of a wife of a officer at Auschwitz . She spoke of a time finding 3 or 4 young children that had some how escaped the camp. She found them hiding in a drainage ditch in her back yard. She said she made them sandwiches to eat. Then after eating she took them back out to the ditch. Pulled out a pistol as shot them. When.asked how she could murder children. She replied "They were Jews" as if she was talking about killing rats.
"its right there... They had to know" even IF you knew, you'd end up there or in prison if you dared to speak up. So you had a lot of people who might have know but also a lot of people who never got told, since that would endanger both people.
Hi Nia Maki, after WW II, there was another large-scale incident in the 1970s, that was attempted to be described in the movie " The Killing Fields ".
just one of many examples unfortunately.
6 million Jews and 5 million others makes 11 million in total. For perspective, if you stood on the street and one person walked past you every second you would be stood there for 4 months, 7 days and 7.5 hours. Each and every second someones father, mother, son, daughter. Whole families including young children. I have watched this episode many times but still the tears flow every time.
There are very few television series that I would consider life-changing.
This is one of them.
Rough episode.
my father went thru this war and helped liberate a camp of 15,000 he still would wake up screaming 30 years later he said you never forget the smell and walking dead if anyone tells you it didnt happen there full of it my father was a big man 6' 4" 350 lbs and to see him cry like he did it had to be disturbing to bring him to that
It doesn't take that much to start de-humanizing your opponents... you need only listen to some of the rhetoric coming out of the news media right now, referring to people who don't share their views as "evil." It can always happen again; we're the same species of animal today that we were in 1945.
So true. easy to demonize, then blame then punish. We see it more and more in our universities where fre flow of ideas is noe stifled.
Ask anyone who is unvaccinated how they’ve been blamed, ostracized, cut off from friends, family, work and school.
I’m not equating this with the horror of the Holocaust. But make no mistake, what would become the Holocaust started with regular people being blamed, ostracized, cut off from friends, family, work and school.
The more things change, the more we stay the same
This episode and the concentration camp scene is powerful because thanks to Steven Spielberg to make it authentic like Saving Private Ryan. The extras who acted as the prisoners, were actually cancer from hospitals.
There is a show called Man In the High Castle that takes place in a world where the Axis powers won the war. You should check it out!
You are so sweet, love your reaction to this
I was worried for you when this episode was coming. It's such a punch int he guts. I saw a reaction video with some kids watching it. I'm not sure if they were High School or Collage but they were young and this episode just devastated one of them.
Yes, when I watch Anne Frank and I’m pretty sure Schindler’s list it really messed me up as a kid… I was in the 6th grade I think
When battle hardened troops, who have been through hell, find out there is something worse.
Well yes...but then Easy Company actually arrived the day after the camp shown in Band of Brothers, Kaufering IV (Hurlach), had been liberated by the 12th Armored Division.
The young guy when you asked who is he was Tom Hardy also Michael Fassbender is in BoB too
The German General's wife felt shame.
The husband of the woman is a officer from the Wehrmacht. He didtn had anything to do with the Camps.
Episode 9 is SO intense.
I always like to show people this episode.. and it reveals a lot about them in terms of how they react. Great news that you'll be reacting to the doco as well. A lot of other channels leave that out, but happy to know that you'll be giving that one a look as well.
I was the one who pointed out that they didn't know about any of this.. especially in episode 1, but even this late in the war.. they didn't and I have a hard time accepting that. It's probably true, I trust the accounts of these fine people, it's just that it's a hard truth to accept. Apparently there's books out there saying that American Intelligence knew and that even the NY Times knew. I don't know I wasn't there but it's hard to accept that they had to just "stumble" on a camp like this when they had such advanced air reconnaissance, intelligence, spies etc. The D-Day invasion was orchestrated like a symphony, especially the deception campaign in terms of where the landings were going to be. Despite the lower technology they had, the counter intelligence was still very advanced.
To put yourself in the shoes of the people in those camps, it's a very sad thing. Especially those that lost hope or didn't survive compared to the people who did. I grew up next door neighbors (in Australia) to a Polish couple who lived in similar camps. I was born in the 80's but the events shown here still affected my life even 40 years later. The story of Anne Frank is another very sad story.. the people who didn't make it. Your reaction was great as always..
_I don't know I wasn't there but it's hard to accept that they had to just "stumble" on a camp like this when they had such advanced air reconnaissance, intelligence, spies etc._
Many of the larger camps were well known. Dachau, for instance, had been in operation since 1933...6 years before the war began. But there were well over a thousand sub-camps scattered all over Germany and the occupied territories. The camp shown in Band of Brothers is Kaufering IV (Hurlach) which was one of eleven labor sub-camps of Dachau located in the Landsberg region of Germany known as the "Kaufering complex" that began operations in June 1944.
Contrary to what is shown in Band of Brothers, it was actually soldiers of the 134th Ordnance Maintenance Battalion of the 12th Armored Division who stumbled on to the camp while looking for a disabled tank on April 27, 1945. Colonel Edward Seiller of the 12th Armored Division military government took control of the camp on April 27 and he is the one who ordered civilians from the Landsberg am Lech area to bury the dead. Easy company actually arrived the day after the camp had been liberated on April 28. For dramatic purposes Easy company is shown liberating the camp.
From the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
_As US armed forces approached the Kaufering complex in late April 1945, the SS began evacuating the camps, sending the prisoners on death marches in the direction of Dachau. Those inmates who could not keep up were often shot or beaten to death by the guards. At Kaufering IV, the SS set fire to the barracks killing hundreds of prisoners who were too ill or weak to move._
_When the 12th Armored Division and 101st Airborne Division arrived at Kaufering IV on April 27 and 28, respectively, the soldiers discovered some 500 dead inmates. In the days that followed, the US Army units ordered the local townspeople to bury the dead._
Nia, FYI those were French troops that executed the two prisoners, not ours. The French had a raised strip down the center of their helmet.
The Adrian Helmets 😉
There's a lot of confusion about the woman and her officer Husband. The officer in the picture is not SS and so had nothing to do with the camps. He is a regular Wehrmacht officer. I think the breaking of the picture is deliberate and hints her husband might be dead, if you pause when she looks down there is a lot of sadness in her eyes and she is angry. I suspect not at Nixon but everything. This scene is far more complex than most people think.
lol fun little titbit, tom hanks cameo'ed in this episode... he's the soldier who executed the germans at the barn while easy rode past...
- In general, the internal story told to the German people by their government was that Jews and other ethnic minorities that had been rounded up had be "resettled in the east" (meaning the newly conquered territories in Poland and the Soviet Union (modern Ukraine and Belarus)).
- Keep in mind that wartime Germany was a socialist dictatorship without free press and no modern media, so information control and propaganda was very strong.
- Locals might have known that there was a secret or restricted facility in the forest nearby, but anyone who was too curious or nosy would be "disappeared" by the Secret Police (GeStaPo), so most would have not looked too closely.
- The photo of the German officer in the home that Nixon broke into was wearing a regular army uniform but not a general or field marshal (look at 2 bars on collar patch), so he would not have been involved in the camps, or probably had any knowledge of them. The black ribbon on the photo indicates that he is dead, so most likely killed on the eastern front against the Soviets.
- The existence of the camps was compartmentalized, so even other parts of the SS, at least at the level of the common soldier or low level officer, such as the Waffen SS or civilian police did not know about them.
- Some Waffen SS soldiers wounded in combat were sent to the camps as guards for light duty while they recovered. Those who did not express too much horror were transferred to the 1st SS Division when they returned to duty, which concentrated those more fanatical or sociopathic personalities in that unit. The 1st SS under commander Sepp Dietrich was know to have committed a number of atrocities and war crimes against both civilians and Allied personnel in France in 1944 and during the battle of the Bulge.
- Check out the PBS series "Secrets of the Dead" episodes "Bombing Auschwitz" (S18E02) and "Bugging Hitler's Soldiers" (S12E02) for some insight on who knew what when. (streaming on the PBS website,
- Also check out the 4-part documentary "Einsatzgruppen: The N--- Death Squads" (I'm not sure how CensorTube reacts to the WW2 n-word) on Netflix. We covered this in high school, but apparently many younger reactors don't know anything about it. If you do reactions to it, it might be a public service to raise people's awareness of what happened. It might also make you look at other things differently, like the scene in "Avengers Infinity War" where Thanos' troops are taking over child Gamora's home planet (this was deliberate, but again many younger viewers missed the reference).
When Buchenwald was liberated General Patton forced the entire town to march through the camp so they could see firsthand what theu claimed to know nothing about
The thing is, even if the locals knew, if they objected in any way, they would find themselves in the camp about 2 seconds later. That's what it is like living under tyranny.
Easily the hardest, but also easily the best episode in the series, IMHO.
"please be grateful" - yes. Well said. We are lucky, and we don't have to live through this horror....but we can NEVER forget...NEVER (this from a Canadian middle class white guy, who's never experienced anything even remotely as horrible as the holocaust). It's too easy to be complacent and ambiguous in our comfort, but we MUSN'T...because this CAN happen again (hate is STILL so strong, in our world, and we must be AWARE).
its happening in China, Russia, North Korea, Iran.. Axis of Evil is once again forming and WE must do anything and everything possible to prevent another World War. Support the West, Support NATO.
It will happen again. Heck, it already has happened again, and it will again in the future. It is a part of human nature, the dark side, and human nature does not change.
Outstanding reaction..
The ordinary soldiers didn’t know but the generals knew and Roosevelt and Churchill knew.
And this is why they fight!!!
The head of the Abwehr (German Intelligence), Admiral Canaris, didn't even know. (When he found out, he actually turned Against the German government and helped the Allies as much as he could until he was caught and Executed)
Almost No one outside of High ranking Axis and a few Allied Intelligence agents knew. (Aside from the actual Staff that was assigned to those Camps)
I see, the comment section has mixed messages about whether people knew...either way it was horrible...
Canaris had been ambiguously against the Nazis since even before the war started, and he certainly knew about the Holocaust. While the details and the exact scope weren't known to many, rumours about what was going on ran through Germany. It was no secret that the Jews were being forcefully deported to the east, never to return (this was done quite openly), and enough regular soldiers took part in mass shootings and other actions that many people back home put 2 and 2 together. This was the worst kept secret in the Reich
This is what happens when humans get comfortable with label their fellow humans as unwanted, unnecessary and inhuman.
I used to work in homes of lord of the people who had been in the armed forces in ww2 some stories were if thought about stuff of nightmares that is the stories ,so the experience can only have been a nightmare IE the driver of a truck ordered to liberate prisoners from concentration camp stopped en route for a comfort break in forest are a offered same to his passengers to comeback to find one clinging to front wheel afraid of being left behind and having to return in case he drove off
As I tell my students when we watch this episode, it really is a two-part episode. The title explains it, "Why We Fight". So many of the men were becoming disillusioned with the war, forgetting why they signed up and why they were over there fighting by the time March/April/May of 1945 came around. You saw it with Perconte yelling at O'Keefe, Webster yelling at the surrendering Germans, Nixon after the failed jump, etc. They have all forgotten or lost focus on why they were there. It took a massive trauma of finding that camp to immediately to bring them all back into focus and finish out the war. You'll notice, not one complaint about themselves or their being "stuck" there once they found the camp...they remembered why they went. One detail you missed was that Perconte, when he found the kid sitting in shock in the camp, finally got his name right and called him O'Keefe. This shows that he partly was getting the name wrong to be petty and haze the kid a bit.
Germany had what was called "forced confrontation" with the Holocaust. Just like in this episode, as the camps were found many Germans claimed the allies were exaggerating the situation. The higher-up's knew that allowing people to not be forced to see what their actions or inactions had done would lead to a rise in denial of the Holocaust as the years went on. It was our way of getting ahead of any problems. Sadly, in my studies to become a history teacher, I have seen videos of elderly people whose parents were part of the Nazi Party who still believe that the Nazis were right, and hold their parents up as some beacon of trying to "save Germany". Today, Germany has laws in place that make every school child visit one of the camps to learn about the atrocities committed by their ancestors to make sure something like that never happens again.
It is a shame we don't have similar here in the U.S. Every high school student should have to visit a plantation, Native American Reservation, a Japanese-American Internment Camp site, or something of the like to see and learn what happened there, instead of banning books and claiming actual history is "CRT" just because it makes some white people uncomfortable. If that makes you uncomfortable, imagine what the people who lived through it must have felt or what their descendants still feel. Having a fear of knowledge is only going to breed ignorance, which breeds hatred and fear, which will lead to MORE problems here and abroad.
I was with you until your third paragraph. After that, i have to say you are a huge part of the problem in this country.
You are indoctrinating children based on your political beliefs and a very perverted version of history written by people like Howard Zinn and Ward Churchill.
Its worth mentioning that the people who played the camp survivors were terminally ill cancer patients who wanted to help show what had happened.
One of the reasons that most Germans did not know about these camps is also beacause most of them was located in Poland and not in Germany!
The picture of the officer was a whermacht officer and if you looked closer on the picture you see a black ribbon!
That mean that he is dead!
The camps was guarded by SS and not whermacht!
Most likly her husband was serving on the eastern front in Russia!
What a load of BS. People in America knew, they didn't believe it but they knew. I don't believe for one second that they didn't know what was happening to those people, they just chose not to know. People talk, always, they always have. They watched the Jews being rounded up and and what was happening to them long before the camps. I'm sick of people like you making excuses for them.
No. The extermination camps were in Poland, yes. But most of the concentration camps were in Germany. Most of the camps provided slave labor for war production, and that work was in Germany.
@@noregerts5247 First off,i am not an american but Norwegian!
And that is what we learned in school and on a trip to Auschwitz as a part of the history class!
And also it comes from my grandfather who was a member of the resistance here during the war!
It is not exuses of what was happening but the reality!
@@karstenstormiversen4837 I never said you were American, and if you think people in America knew but people in Germany didn't, then you are a fool.
The Wehrmacht gladly helped perpetrate the Holocaust.
Even if Liebgott were to try and explain, it wouldn't matter. When you're starving higher thought processes go out the window. All they would understand is that they were being told to go back into the camp. The reason why wouldn't really process in their heads.
There is absolutely no chance they didn't know. It's crazy how many people have to be involved in genocide like that - hard to believe humans can do this to each other for any reason.
We warn everyone about this episode, because it breaks people.
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@@Melrose51653 there are reactors who become distraught watching the camp scene.
Even Speirs is shook (11:45).
Great reaction.
It's a very hard episode. You have probably already watched the last one but it's very sweet with some sad moments.
As a soldier, just stumbling upon this, one has to wonder just what they were thinking and experiencing when finding something that is just so inhumane, you literally can't comprehend what you were looking at. Just trying to process how fucking evil a people can be to their own species.
As for prisoner camps it's happening right now in China and has for years now with muslims.
Well done. Thanks for sharing. If you dig into the post-war Nuremberg trials, it is very illuminating.
The French soldier shooting the Germans was played by Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg were the guys who put this series together. Some have speculated but it is not explained in the series that there were some French citizens who joined the Nazis and that is why a French soldier would execute them on the spot as traitors.
Dear old dad, who was with Patton 44-45, stated that, post-war, the French used German POWs to clear minefields in France. Mostly by probing by hand. When one blew up, the French would just laugh.
Re: the woman and her deceased husband.
We don't know if her husband "did" anything. He was Wehrmacht, not SS. It's just as likely he was killed in action, with zero involvement.
While burying bodies, she came face to face with the type of regime that her husband died for.
I like the juxtaposition of Nixon and the German wife. Should he have been been breaking and entering with intent to loot? No. And then her looking up and that look on actresses face that clearly says she was completely wrong on judging him compared to his judgement when he threw her husband's picture on the floor.
Mozart although he was born in a Austrian town he is considered German Beethoven was Austrian, Hitler wasn't German he was Austrian.