From mcurtis@inetport.com Sat Dec 28 12:00:12 PST 1996
Article: 89569 of alt.revisionism
From: mcurtis@inetport.com (Mike Curtis)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Re: 'Let them die, why should you care?'
Date: Thu, 26 Dec 1996 16:10:06 GMT
Reply-To: mcurtis@inetport.com
Message-ID: <32c6966c.9125173@news.inetport.com>
References:  <59pj3l$cjv@juliana.sprynet.com>  <32c079a4.29964937@news.gte.net>
X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99g/32.339
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
NNTP-Posting-Host: 206.64.12.98
Lines: 70
Path: nizkor.almanac.bc.ca!news.island.net!vertex.tor.hookup.net!nic.mtl.hookup.net!rcogate.rco.qc.ca!clicnet!news.clic.net!news.bconnex.net!feed1.news.erols.com!worldnet.att.net!newsxfer2.itd.umich.edu!uunet!in2.uu.net!206.64.12.3!news.inetport.com!206.64.12.98

10@11.12 (Matt Giwwer) wrote:

>>## German civilians living near the camp, after the American troops
>>## have taken them to Buchenwald to witness the horrors. Notice how
>>## well-dressed and well-fed they are.
>>
>># The German civilians had nothing to do with the running of
>># the camp. Why do you criticize them if they are nicly dressed?
>>
>>Try not to be so stupid. I am not criticizing them. I am pointing
>>out that there was enough food for everybody, yet the inmates
>>starved to death.
>
>	Amazing really.  POWs starved at Andersonville but their civilians
>were well fed also.  And no one claims (for at least the last 70
>years) that it was a death camp.  
>

Well, if Giwer is going to continue to prove that he is constantly in
error, I will help to continually prove it when he hits my era of true
interest. 

_Andersonville_ by MacKinley Kantor, published in 1955. He makes this
claim. 

Bruce Catton in his introduction to _John Ransom's Andersonville
Diary_, Eriksson, Vermont, 1986, says:

"To become a prisoner in the Civil War, on either side, was no
shortcut to survival. Quite the opposite; and to understand how
appallingly lethal were the prison camps, North and South, one need
only to reflect on this bit of simple arithmetic: about two and
one-half times as many soldiers were subjected to hunger, pestilence
and soul-sickness of the prison camps as were exposed to the deadly
fire and crossfire of the Guns of Gettysburg--and the camps killed
nearly ten times as many as died on that battlefield. Best estimates
that the Confederacy imprisoned, ovr-all, some 194,000 Union soldiers,
of whom 36,400 died, and the Union held captive about 220,000
Confederates, of whom 30,150 died.

   If we are looking for culprits, there is not much room for choice
between them. But we do better, I believe, to forget the villians,
personal or collective. They obscure a bigger and more useful truth:
the horrors endured by Ransome and his contemperary POW's were not
created willfully and malevolently in order to kill them -- as many
good people on both sides believed at the time -- but by a combination
of human blundering in the face of vast, bewildering problems, and the
climate of horror that make up war itself."

[This intoduction was first published in 1958]

How about a 1962 introduction to _Andersonville: A Story of Rebel
Military Prisons_ by John McElroy, Fawcett Publications, 1962. The
introduction is by Phillip Doran Stern.

"Andersonville pales in comparison with the montrous death camps like
Auschwitz, Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau, where the Nazis debased all
humanity with their dreadful deeds, but a man could starve and die in
Georgia just as surley in Germany.

  Unlike the Nazis, however, the confederates who ran andersonville
were not deliberately trying to exterminate their captives. . . . ."

I could find more recent discussions and writings, but I don't think
it is worth the time.


Mike Curtis 
E-mail mcurtis@inetport.com
Nizkor Web: http://www.nizkor.org/

Home ·  Site Map ·  What's New? ·  Search Nizkor