TO SUMMER CAMP!

Just in case you were in the mood for seeing a brainless Klansman natter on about what a paradise Auschwitz was, here's a clip from a BBC 3 documentary (sadly not yet available for viewing outside the UK) called KKK: The Fight for White Supremacy, which we're hoping will eventually make it to American TV. The good folks at the Beeb sent a film crew to meet some Alabama KKK members following the Charleston murders, and, always happy for publicity, the Klansmen were happy to share. This is not your KKKinder, Gentler KKK.

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Meet a nice KKK couple, James and Amanda, as they prepare a bunch of KKK recruiting fliers for distribution. After James says that Barack Obama has done wonders for Klan recruiting, he reads an amusing little poem about "niggers in the White House," which is so funny he has to stop, twice, to giggle at his own wit. After a cut, the BBC interviewer asks him why he has a framed picture of Hitler on the wall. This is what is known in the documentaries-about-racists business as "low-hanging fruit." Our Aryan Superman explains:

Adolf Hitler, he was one of the smartest men there ever was, you know? The so-called concentration camps like Auschwitz and so forth, they say they were death camps, you know? But these death camps, they gave the so-called people that were being killed cigarettes, there was coffee, there was a movie theater, a library, even a swimming pool in Auschwitz. And if you’re going to sit there and kill all these people then how come all these things would be in there? It’s more like a summer camp, you know. What Auschwitz was, they were actually manufacturing goods for the war.

"Sorry," says the interviewer, who apparently hasn't read up on some of the nuttier fantasies of Holocaust deniers, "You’re telling me Auschwitz was like a summer camp?” We're not certain whether the reporter is genuinely astonished, or playing it up a little bit for the camera.

"Well, they had a swimming pool, a movie theater and everything else. You know, you don’t see in any kind of prisons today any kind of swimming pool being in the middle of the pod or the prison hall,” James says, evincing a knowledge of prison architecture that suggests a certain expertise. Maybe he's just a big fan of "Lockup," although we wouldn't otherwise think he watches much MSNBC. The robust Socratic dialogue continues:

REPORTER: So what do you think the Jews were doing at Auschwitz?

JAMES: Swimmin', and workin'. Because they didn’t want to do any work, and what Hitler was trying to do was he was trying to teach them to work, trying to rehabilitate them, if you will.”

REPORTER: Where did you hear this? Who told you...?

JAMES: It's all history. It's all history.

REPORTER: Really! Whose history are you reading, where you think it's a summer camp?

AMANDA: OK, enough about the Jews, he'll be going on all night!

You know how it is with enthusiasts! Ask them what time it is, and they'll tell you how the Jews secretly control the clock industry and send Muslim kids to school with fake clocks to create panic and fear.

The fucked-up thing is that there was a swimming pool at Auschwitz -- for the SS guards, not the prisoners -- as documented by Jean-Claude Pressac in his out of print book Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers, hosted online by the Holocaust History Project. (Full disclosure: Yr Doktor Zoom used to help out with the HHP, a fine group of folks who debunk Holocaust denial.) The "swimming pool" was originally a reservoir for firefighting, later adapted for dual use as a swimming pool. Auschwitz amenities also included a library and a brothel -- again, only for the use of the Nazis who ran the place, as well as for some privileged Aryan prisoners. Running a death camp was hard work, and the Third Reich's upper management recognized the need for some recreational downtime for the rank-and-file SS. They weren't monsters, after all.

Then again, Jimmy the Klansman probably thinks if there's a swimming pool and gym for the U.S. troops at Guantanamo, then maybe the prisoners there get to use them, too. Darn it, why are we treating those terrorists like they're at a resort?

[RawStory / Holocaust History Project]