Crazy mixed up newspaper article trivializes the Holocaust

Richard Cohen is a famous newspaper man, who writes for the Washington Post newspaper.  If he were a cub reporter, he would probably have been fired by now, for writing a crazy mixed up article which you can read in full here. 

The article includes several photos, including the photo below, which was taken at Ebensee, a sub-camp of Mauthausen.

Prisoners at the Ebensee subcamp of Mauthausen

Cohen went to Dachau, but his article includes a photo taken at Ebensee.

For some reason, the photo that is shown in the news article looks as if it has been badly photo-shopped.  Why is a photo, taken at Ebensee in Austria, being shown to illustrate a story about Dachau?  Is it because the prisoners at Dachau were in fairly good condition, considering the typhus epidemic in the camp, when it was liberated? A photo of skinny legs was needed, so the Ebensee photo was added, but the location was not identified.

The prisoners, shown in the photo above, were marched out of other camps and taken to Ebensee in Austria for their own safety.

Showing a photo of Ebensee, in a story about a visit to Dachau, amounts to Holocaust denial.  The prisoners were taken to Ebensee to save them, not to kill them.

You can read about Ebensee on my website at http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Mauthausen/KZMauthausen/Subcamps/Ebensee01.html

You can see what the former Dachau camp looks like today, in my recent photo below. The barracks have long since been torn down.

The former Dachau camp looks like this today. The boxes of gravel indicate where the barracks once stood. The guard tower on the left is a reconstruction. The building in the background is a church.

This quote is from Cohen’s news article:

It is August and the parking lots [at Dachau] are full. Throngs course through the [reconstructed] barracks, stroll the once-electrified perimeter  [fence], view huge photos of horror [in the Museum]  and, inevitably, drift over to the crematorium [Baracke X]. There, a father places his son — about 6, I’d guess — in front of [one of] the oven[s] and poses him for a picture.

One of several ovens at Dachau where tourists can pose for a photo

This quote is also from the news article:

In his forthcoming book, “Black Earth,” Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder titles one chapter “The Auschwitz Paradox.” That camp has become synonymous with the Holocaust itself, obscuring not only other camps (where the survival rate was nonexistent) but also the fact that most of Europe’s Jews were not killed in some industrialized, virtually robotic, fashion. They were shot close up.

“When the mass murder of Jews is limited to an exceptional place and treated as the result of impersonal procedures, then we need not confront the fact that people not very different than us murdered other people not very different than us at close quarters for no reason,” he writes. “This we generally prefer not to see.”

What is he trying to say?  It’s all Greek to me.