In a new article I document that common German childrearing punishment
practices around 1900 were precisely repeated in torturing Jews during the
Holocaust. I have shown in my 92-page article, now available with full
scholarly references on my website, that German childrearing during the
19th century was something of a family holocaust, with high rates of child
murder, routine tying up for a year in tight swaddling bands, daily child
battering, common sexual use of the child, and daily torture. I have
documented that Jews had much more loving childrearing, which made them far
more liberal, and therefore they were persecuted by the majority of Germans
of everything that their parents thought was "bad,": freedom, independence,
etc. Every method of beating and torture in the Holocaust is demonstrated
in this article to be a direct repetition to the smallest of details of
what was done by parents and others to the average German child a
generation earlier.
To read this article, go to <www.psychohistory.com> and read "War as
Righteous Rape and Purification," an excerpt from which appears below.
Lloyd deMause
"Jews, then, were the main poison containers for the restaging of traumatic
German childrearing practices four decades earlier. Every one of the things
done to Jews in the Holocaust can be found to have been perpetrated by
parents and others to German children at the turn of the century. The
precise details of earlier events that were reinflicted upon Jews later are
astonishingly minute and literal. Jews were, of course, murdered by the
millions, just as German children had watched their siblings murdered in
infanticidal acts earlier, using the exact same phrase for the genocide of
Jews-"elimination of useless eaters"-as parents had used earlier for their
infants and children as they murdered them at birth. Because infanticide
rates were so high, the majority of German children would have witnessed
the murder of newborn siblings by their mothers, would have heard the
murdered baby being called a "useless eater," and would themselves have
been called a "useless eater" as children and so could have wondered if
they might also be murdered. One can hardly read a single Holocaust book
without having to wade through endless accounts of children buried alive by
Nazis, "children having their heads beaten in like poultry and thrown into
a smoking pit," "babies thrown from the fourth floor and crushed on the
pavements," "children's bodies lay around, torn in half with the heads
smashed in," "'little Jews' caught on bayonets after being thrown from
upper story windows," etc. Even the specific methods German mothers had
used for killing their newborn-especially smashing the baby against a wall
or throwing it into a latrine-were "a regular occurrence" against Jews in
concentration camps:
When mothers succeeded in keeping their babies with them...a German guard
took the baby by its legs and smashed it against the wall of the barracks
until only a bloody mass remained in his hands. The unfortunate mother had
to take this mass with her to the 'bath.' Only those who saw these things
with their own eyes will believe with what delight the Germans performed
these operations. [Also] SS men used to amuse themselves by swinging Jewish
children by their legs and then flinging them to their deaths. He who threw
a Jewish child farthest won.
"Jews were also regularly tied up and made to live in their own
filth exactly as swaddled German infants were earlier. Rarely washed,
Germans had spent their early lives covered with their own excreta,
addressed by their parents simply as "little shitter." In the
concentration camps, Jews were subject to what Des Pres calls a constant
"excremental assault," in which they were forced to defecate and urinate
upon each other, were often thrown into the cesspool if they were too slow,
lived in barracks "awash with urine and feces," walked about "knee-deep in
excrement," were forced to eat their own feces, and finally died in gas
chambers "covered all over with excrement." In one camp, 30,000 women not
only had to use a single latrine, but in addition, "we were permitted to
use it only at certain hours of the day. We stood in line to get into this
tiny building, knee-deep in human excrement." Holocaust scholars, missing
the childhood origins of all these gratuitous excremental cruelties, have
been puzzled by how much of the concentration camp routine was devoted to
the endless humiliations: "Why, if they were going to kill them anyway,
what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?" Gitta Sereny
asked of Franz Stangl. But of course the humiliation was the point,
restaging early German childhood exactly. Hitler-himself swaddled and left
alone in his feces by his mother-had told Germans in Mein Kampf, "If the
Jews were alone in this world, they would suffocate in dirt and filth." In
the Holocaust the Jews-"so much like us" (Hitler)-would suffocate in dirt
and filth, as all little, helpless German babies did all day long at the
hands of their mothers. And since the "little shitter" German babies were
also covered with lice, vermin and rodents as they lay swaddled in their
cradles, unable to move, Jews too were called "lice, vermin and rats" as
they were locked into the concentration camps, told "This is a death
camp...You'll be eaten by lice; you'll rot in your own shit, you filthy
shitface..." Some guards even restaged the rodent attacks "by inserting a
tube into the victim's anus, or into a woman's vagina, then letting a rat
into the tube. The rodent would try to get out by gnawing at the victim's
internal organs." Later toilet training of German children was also
restaged, often in precise detail, as by having the ghetto-latrine
supervised by a "guard with a big clock, whom the Germans dressed comically
as a rabbi and called the 'shit-master.'"
"Every extermination camp reproduced elements of a typical German
home. Jews were not said to be there to be murdered, they were there to be
"housecleaned." Mommy hated her children's "dirtiness," wanted them
"clean," so "dirty Jews" were killed so only "clean Germans" would be left.
Jews were Untermenschen (with overtones of "little people") who were forced
to crawl on the floor naked like babies, and who were tied up, starved,
made to kneel for hours, doused with ice water, terrorized and beaten just
like most German children. The battering of Jews in camps followed the
hallowed German child-beating pattern of the child being expected to "be
strong" (not making the perpetrator feel guilty by crying out):
I dropped to my knees without uttering a sound. I knew what was expected of
me. I looked at the commandant from my knees as he smiled back at me with
approval. He swung the chair at me again, striking me on the shoulder. I
sprawled on the ground, bruised and dizzy, but I still made no sound. He
raised the chair and brought it down on my head, shattering it...I bit my
tongue to stop myself making a sound...I knew that if I made another sound,
nothing could save me. 'Very good, for being strong. You shall be rewarded.
Get some food. Tell them I sent you...' "
(From "War as Righteous Rape and Purification" by Lloyd deMause. The full
article appears on <www.psychohistory.com>)
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