In my field of heritage management, there are growing discussions on dealing with 'difficult histories', whether in museums or within historical sites such as these. The Holocaust museums/site museums are often used as excellent examples of not 'sugar coating' the truths.

At the core, it's all about the society in which the 'discourse of rememberance' is (re)constructed...obviously, telling the disgusting stories of U.S. slavery hasn't found its venue yet. Well, perhaps, it has in academic circles, however, what better place to share these stories than within their historical locations for the wider non-academic public? It just says more about the U.S. today than anything else...

I think this is a function of the amount of national guilt that's felt in the U.S. regarding slavery as opposed to in Germany regarding the holocaust. There are not a large number of people who feel guilty about slavery. It occured 150 years ago, there was a bloody war to put an end to it, and most of our ancestors came from other countries and had no part in it anyway. Most people in America just don't feel personally responsible for slavery. The Holocaust is in the relatively recent past, and there are still people alive who lived during the Nazi era and may even have supported the government (perhaps ignorantly or out of fear). A significant number of Germans have a deep feeling of complicity in the holocaust. The monuments exist to expiate this sense of guilt by acknowledging the Nazi's crimes.

My impression is that this feeling is fading within the youngest generation. As an anecdote, some Germans I've talked to were frustrated with the new movies Americans make with Nazi's as the bad guys. I think they'd like to move one and have someone else to be the antagonist in our movies.

Anyway, I'm not saying it wouldn't be worthwhile to show slavery for the evil that it was in some kind of exhibit, but I don't think the motivation exists outside of the academy. Even if someone built such a thing, I doubt people would go see it.

I agree with George's comments - and I agree whole-heartedly with the spirit behind the post and I'm surprised (although I shouldn't be) at the sugarcoating of slave life on the tour.

But even though there was a disclaimer at the beginning of the entry, I have to say that comparisons between the Holocaust and slavery always rub me the wrong way. I know that wasn't the intention of the post, but while it's possible, if despicable, to whitewash plantation life, it's pretty difficult to do the same to a death camp.

I know that wasn’t the intention of the post, but while it’s possible, if despicable, to whitewash plantation life, it’s pretty difficult to do the same to a death camp.

Just go a little way down the rabbit-hole and you'll find a lot of "historians" who DO try to whitewash the German concentration camps.

Is the tour of beautiful plantation life on par with the deniers of the Holocaust? Just a thought.

I moved to the south after a life time as a Yankee and the Lara Plantation is par for the course when it comes to many "museums" and "monuments" of a romantizied pre-civil war past (one place even called the Union army "northern invaders").
I do think a refusal to acknowledge bad parts of our history (See the lady from Texas in the earlier post) prevents the country from growing up beyound it and recognizing the lingering effects.

You know, Laura (not Lara) Plantation is the ONLY plantation tour that acknowledges slavery AT ALL. The only one. Every other plantation tour I have been on - and I have been on many because I grew up in NOLA and it was a standard field trip - totally ignores the slavery aspect of plantation life. You picked the worst possible example for this comparison. 15% of the tour about slavery is 15% MORE than you'll get on any other plantation. They are working hard there to tell what stories they can, but as you may be aware, slaves' life histories have been erased by time. There's only so much data to work with.

You're way out of line bashing Laura Plantation, especially if you've never been on another plantation tour.

Anyone know how is the plantation funded? On one side the people who run it are acting as the guardians of our heritage, and with that position they have a duty to communicate it well and honestly to the public. On the other hand they are not able to preserve and communicate that heritage if they do not have the funds to do so. If dependent on then income of entrance fees and yummy smelling candles then there is a real need to persuade people to visit the site over Disneyland etc. and preferably more than once. This may be more difficult should the site focus on the difficult narrative of the slaves’ lives, however I would of thought that expanding this part of the tour would be a simple way to provide a whole new audience…

I suspect the memories in Germany are fading, too, because more and more contemporaries are very old and hardly even able to tell their memories of their own life, their social role, their whereabouts etc. to their children and grandchildren. Yes, their is a strong sentiment guilt that Germans even let the Nazi regime come to power, and the role of the average German person such that the Holocaust could happen, but it makes a difference how near or far the horrific events are in time; things have also changed with the new role of Germany in international relations after German reunification. Back in 1989/1990, I was lucky to spend a school year in the US as a junior in VA. My host parents would sing the US national anthem to their young children and they expected me to sing the German national anthem, and I refused to sing it, and that led to very interesting discussions on history, national pride and the role that Germany could take in the future; with my young teenage years, I tried to get across the message that historical guilt of allowing the Nazi regime come to power and not preventing the holocaust from happening will never go away, no matter what comes next, and I would still hold on to that position, today.

Belgium has a museum set up to commemorate the history of the Belgian Congo and from what I've read it follows the American model of "rememberance". Just wanted to point out that it's not just America that likes to gloss over its sordid history (although we've done a tremendous job of that with slavery and our dealings with Native Americans, even to this day).

The biggest difference I can see here is that America and Belgium never really got taken to task for slavery, or it's treatment of Native Americans, nor did Belgium ever really get taken to task for the genocide in the Congo. The Civil War was entirely internal, and has often been re-branded as a war over secession and state's rights, not slavery. Compare that to the scrutiny Germany received with regards to the Holocaust. I think it's unfortunate but nations seem prone to act like spoiled children within the context of owning up to their own failures - "If nobody knows I did it then I'm not responsible for it. Someone else is."

Beccy, good point. Last I heard, they're privately run and depend on gift shop and admissions. They just survived a nearly disastrous fire a few years ago. It's a good little institution, and they're working hard to be fair, and expecting one shoestring-budgeted plantation house to tell the entire story of slavery is way out of line. Dachau is huge and government funded. Laura is way out of the way, almost an hour from New Orleans, and doesn't exactly have as its mission the GIANT STORY OF SLAVERY including every possible detail. As a museum professional myself, I have to work within my mission, and within my budget. Lisa's demands of this small, struggling institution are completely unreasonable. Dismissing the lives of the white women who lived there is also unreasonable. They lived there for a century without slaves, you know. Are those women's lives meaningless to you? Well, they're not meaningless to me. Women's lives, even if they do involve china patterns, are an important part of history.

It's so easy for Yankees to take pot-shots at Southern institutions. Guess what, y'all? The entire U.S. economy was built on the backs of slaves. All of it. Do you demand that your Northern institutions acknowledge this fact, in excruciating detail? Because you should. Fair is fair.

wow, i agree so much! i was in germany this summer and all over i saw marking points of where jews and others were taken to concentration camps during the holocaust. it was surprisingly comforting, there's no big secret about it, they own it and want for it to never happen again. being jewish, i was impressed and felt welcomed by germany/germans (though i was in a very liberal western side, so i can't say for the entirety, but i was very pleased!)

Who's to say that if the Nazi regime were to have succeeded in continuing its practice of racial purity for more than 200 years that its infrastructure wouldn't be looked upon with the way Germans approach it today? Who's also to say that over 200 years of practice, racial purity wouldn't change from extermination to different forms of slavery, and thus make the comparison more on par with each other? (In other words, the Laura Plantation was likely NOT set up as a prison to hold people and extract their labor before killing them.)

Also, the plantations on show are the ones that are quite palatial in grandeur and scale: easy to be romanticized. The concentration camp buildings that are shown (or at least the ones focused on) are not the palatial residences of the "masters" but of the dehumanizing infrastructure surrounding the prisoners. In other words, the focus of the tours is very different. If one wanted to make a more similar comparison, the Laura Plantation would need to focus on the slave dwellings and the slaves' duties, ignoring (save for maybe a minority of the time) the building in which the masters lived.

It could also be useful to compare the modern German opinion of Jews to the modern American view of blacks. True, millions of Jews are missing from modern Germany that would otherwise not have been if not for the Holocaust. But the Germans have done quite a lot to combat their history of vicious Antisemitism.

I don't see the same mentality in any white politician or white public figure. It's like the vicious exploitation and genocide of blacks, Native Americans, and Latin Americans never happened, even though it continues to happen today.

Germany has its own problems with racism in other regards, but they've generally did a very good job on remembering the Holocaust and the consequence of antisemitism by taking many painful steps to correct it. America, a nation founded on both the exploitation of blacks and the extermination of Native Americans, hasn't really done anything to acknowledge that history. Our curriculum is totally white-washed. I didn't know until I got into college and studied "alternative" history (read: African-American and other ethnic courses that are not required) that the education I received was little more than disgusting indoctrination of the worst kind.

It's certainly not acceptable to fly a flag emblazoned with a swastika in Germany, get the Confederate flag and the myth of the cowboy still is romanticized in America.

I have visited the memorial at Auschwitz with family. As a Jew, I found it both horrifying and respectful. Nothing was hidden. There were preserved piles of shoes, gold teeth, and hair.

I can't imagine such a memorial or museum opening in the US. To my knowledge, there isn't a single place where the genocide of Native Americans or the global institution of slavery is fully acknowledge in all of it's horrible glory. That, I think, is unforgivable, and a testament to how little we care about the wrongs we've committed in the past. It's been less than a century since the Holocaust, and the taint of Nazism is almost erased from Germany. It's been decades longer since the abolition of slavery and the end of the genocide of the Native Americans, but I still don't see any sort of taboo on glossing over being an outright and public bigot towards those ethnic groups.

Conservatives are absolutely full of shit. It doesn't "take time" to erase the effects of brutality; it takes effort.

Not sure how I feel about this post. For several years in my academic career I was a modern german historian, and I spent a great deal of time reading and thinking about the holocaust and memorials and memory in general. I visited Dachau in 2006 and felt that the museum was very very sterile. In many ways I feel that only novels and films (like beloved, under a cruel star, the bluest eye, the pianist) can get at the emotions and truth of what has happened in these places. The Bluest Eye made me want to throw up at the cruelty inflicted upon the psyche of the little girl by American beauty culture. Dachau made me feel somehow callous and as if things were hidden, even though I know they were not. I also grew up in the deep south, and I currently work at a house museum that has a slave past. Only in the last two years have the staff been able to get the funds to do site specific research and create an exhibit about slavery. Plantations in my opinion should have an interlaced two sided story: the wealth and opulence should be there, as it is, but the slave culture that supported it should be given its full due. The labor and lives of slaves were taken to produce the "glories" of the south. It is an odd balance. Slaves were worked to death to produce beautiful things that they weren't allowed to enjoy, but that we can enjoy today. Ugh.

I have never been to the Lara Plantation, but I lived in Munich for a year and did quite a bit of traveling around Europe in 2000-2001. I found Dachau to be quite different from the concentration camps that I visited in other countries (specifically, Auschwitz in Poland). Dachau felt cleaned up, sanitized, etc. in a way that other camps don't. I remember having interesting conversations about national guilt and how to appropriately recognize the holocaust in Germany with the group of students I was traveling with -- everything from what to do with Nazi buildings in Munich (many have now become university buildings) to how to present concentration camps (i.e., Dachau) to how to construct a memorial. I offer this up only because if you visited Aushwitz and compared it to Dachau, you might have a similar feeling to comparing Dachau to the Lara Plantation. I think one of the critical differences is the idea that "we did this," vs. "they did this."

I think at least in part this might be because slavery and everything surrounding it were integrated into the culture of the South, something I don't think happened with concentration camps...

I went to Dachau in 2006. There are no words to describe the feeling of standing in the very same places where people were beaten, mercilessly brutalised, neglected, and slaughtered.

It was a visceral experience that I will not soon forget.

Fascinating. It is, of course, an attempt to compare a death camp with a slave-made human economic engine in which death and violence was a by-product that few of those who benefited cared about. As such, the comparison fails. In addition, as someone above pointed out, Germany was forced to deal with it because they were totally defeated. The United States dealt with it by defeating the South, punishing for a decade or so some of the worst offenders, and then letting that all be forgotten in the name of national political bargains to handle issues "more pressing" for whites. The complicity of the latter situation meant that, at the very least, the entire non-black country spent some time working hard to forget what had happened.

In short, viewed historically, the analysis must fail; it's not very compelling. However, if you were merely to say, "Geez, Dachau was unrelenting; and then I went to the Laura Plantation and I didn't hear almost anything bad about slavery or how slavery made the entire plantation possible...." then you'd be on great ground.

I think it's HORRIBLE that this country spends ANY time denying the effects of racism today as a social variable. I think it's HORRIBLE that any plantation spends **any more time** on the fancy white things as it does on the murder, coercion, and violence that was the construction of the slavery system (quite aside from whether the large plantations were worse or better off in terms of daily violence). As a trained historian, however, I think you don't need Dachau for this at all, because I don't think the comparison is very apt. I think you just need to say that we deny our history in the United States because we -- whites and white men in particular -- want very much to believe that it didn't happen, or if it did, that it didn't contribute to the "major growth" of our country, that it was "incidental".

And don't get me stared on Native Americans. The actual historical facts are sticky things (unintentional death by disease vastly the major killer; actual organized warfare relatively infrequent; early on NAs used whites against their own enemies instead of making common cause; etc.) but against the larger point that whites destroyed entire civilizations to take their land, there is no persuasive argument.

A great many cultures in the world have practiced slavery at some point in history. If every culture that has done so constructs monuments and museums to educate the public about that, then perhaps it is best to make them more relevant to instances of modern-day slavery--things that are happening RIGHT NOW--and working to eradicate that.

Thank you very much for this post. (And just to let you know, I have linked to it.) Too many Americans downplay slavery--using the same rationales that I read in some of the comments here:

-It happened a long time ago...
-None of *my* ancestors were responsible...
-Lots of societies/every society has practiced slavery at some point...
-It was only the South that benefitted (and they were Defeated)...
-Slavery was bad, but it wasn't as bad as ________...

I do not know what it will take for citizens of the US to take a hard look at American Slavery and its impacts. It seems even our government just wants to issue a symbolic apology and move on.

The former owner of Henderson Hall Plantation, the late Michael Rolston, allowed me to conduct my own tours of the plantation. My only focus was about slavery and what I know about the lives of enslaved people who lived and worked at Henderson Hall and other plantations along the Ohio River. The truth is, not many people, especially black people, came to my tours.

I have a feeling that many Americans have psychological problems with understanding slavery. Very few people, including African Americans have spent time thinking about slavery and how its lingering effect still haunt life in the United States.

We must have had different guides, because when I went to LaUra Plantation I was struck by how much emphasis was placed on the experience of slaves.

I wish to comment on the phrase: "slaves were allowed to have a gardens". The typical day’s work for a slave was from dawn until darkness This means that slaves had to tend to their gardens at night after they were released from work on the plantation. How convenient for slaves to raise their food on their own time!

I lived in Germany, Switzerland and Austria for two years. I ran into Germans who survived the war that fought in it. One of them had received the Iron Cross while fighting with Rommel. The war for those that I ran into was a terrible thing and affected them the same way it did our guys.

We don't realize that Hitler (as evil as he was) took Germany from the ashes to a thriving economy. His true motives hidden, the German people were thankful for long awaited prosperity. They either looked or just didn't see the atrocities that were taking place until late into it. We can't understand that but we should be able to. The media was completely controlled by Hitler and his minions. Hitlers speeches were well thought out and as slick and well delivered as any politicians.

We could just as easily be duped in our country if it were not for the communications that we now enjoy. The German people are a strong people and I am glad they take this seriously and never want a repeat of the evils that transpired then.

I am glad that they have these tours and that we don't forget how close this world came to being overrun by a mad-man!!

There are atrocities that have taken place everywhere in the world. Slavery in the United States and then Civil Rights violations are things that we should never be proud of and should always remember. The treatment of the Native American people should also never be forgotten. They were here first. I am a white American with my roots coming from Europe. I am proud of my heritage and I think that all Americans should have great pride in where we came from. However, we are here now, together. Remembering the past and letting it adversely affect our future are two different things. If the effect is positive that is great.

Germany is no different. The people there should be proud of their strong heritage. They should remember what happened with disdain and a resolve to never let it happen again. However, the Germans then need to tend to the present and the future as the past dissolves into the fog. The world also needs to remember what a great people they are dealing with and also focus on the present and future!

We all are very good at identifying problems associated with racism, but we will never get rid of racism in the United States until we get rid of the denial!
Leadership from every segment of society will have to contribute if we sincerely want to eradicate racism. Churches, Schools, Civic Organizations, Military Organizations, Business Enterprises, parents, students etc., etc., etc. An end to racism is coming, I just hope there is a non-violent resolution. Non-White Americans, as a group, are no longer the minority.

I think the situation in Germany is unique and can not be compared to that of other nations. As far as I know, Germany is the only country that celebrates loosing a war. I have always lived in West Germany and can therefore not speak to the way history was dealt with during the separation, but for West Germany, not being allowed to forget was a very, very good thing, and something we learned to see as a nessecity.

Unfortunately, there are still parts of the Nazi crimes that are not remembered nearly enough. Everybody knows about the Holocaust and anti-semitism is unacceptable outside of right-wing-extremist circles, but the fact that Sinti and Roma were searched for, disowned, ripped from their families,forced into camps and murdered in the same horrific way is far from common knowledge,and prejudice against "gypsies" are still wide spread.

And while remembering is generally acknowledged as neccesary, there are still people who do not want that remembering to happen to close to their homes. My mom works with the artist who is placing "stumbling stones" in front of the houses of people who were murdered by the nazis (jews, sinti, roma, people with mental or physical disabilities). Mostly the reaction have been good, but there was also opposition from people who didn't want to "have to look at that every day", or "be forced to explain to their children". There were people who claimed they were simply afraid of possible vandalism, but their arguments rang false.

Regarding the comparism to slavery in America: There was slavery outside the camps in Germany during the war. Soldiers who lost their battles were forced to work in factories, producing among other things weapons that would be used against their own people.

Several years ago, when these people and their children asked for restitution, there were a lot of people who thought the money should not be payed,because it would be to damaging for the German industries, never mind the fact that these industries had gained undue financial gains from these forced workers.

So I wish I could say that we all learned and became better people,but there arestill far to many things that are not talked about nearly enough.

That doesn't change anything written in the article, I agree with the points made, but I get uncomfortable when people talkas Germans are the poster children of how to remember the right way.

I go on historic house tours everywhere, and have been on many in the south. I'm sure there are individual docents and maybe even some houses that try to provide a realistic understanding of the plights of slaves, but in my long experience I have not encountered it.

In my experience, tours of antebellum homes are exercises in reassurance for white southerners that (1) life was better before the civil war; (2) there was nothing wrong with slavery; (3) white southerners experienced a massive injustice that is more important than anything black people went through.

A typical story you hear is that when the "little black boys" carried the trays of food from the backyard kitchen into the dining room, they were made to whistle so they couldn't stuff any food in their mouths. Everyone always laughs and titters about little boys stealing food (no questions about whether they got sufficient nutrition, etc).

Small things are overemphasized: like being "allowed to have a garden", any sort of "perk" for slaves is made to be a big thing, as they try to argue that the life of slaves was not as bad as those northern busybodies say - in fact, it was quite good. You always hear anecdotes about slaves who were loyal to their masters, stayed after they were freed, etc. It frequently comes up that there were children of a slave and an owner, but I have never heard it described as rape.

The docents are almost always white women, smart and opinionated, almost on a mission. They always seem to have a lot of detailed information about the high tax rates the whites had to pay during reconstruction and so on.

White southerners vote Republican since the Democrat civil rights reforms. These expressions of southern pride and denial are widespread and they serve to reinforce the white southerner's sense of being the victim.

By the way, I found the treatment of WW2 in Berlin to be defensive and unsettling. But that's another story.

Dear Yappa,
You gave an excellent critique! There is a Slave Narrative in my Family done by Sarah Burke (1842-1940). She spoke about constant hunger among slaves. The enslavement of African people in the New World is one of the most heinous atrocities ever put upon a race of human beings.

I vistited this plantation this summer and my friends and I came away with the same impression. The tour guide was no only unable but also unwilling to answer questions about the lives of the slaves.

[... - thesocietypages.org is other good source of information. Online Car insurance claims [... -

I came to this post via a link from What Tami Said. This is a fascinating post and a really fascinating blog (I was a sociology major with a double in gov't, now a lawyer/social worker, so this site and your sociology backgrounds/work really appeal to me!).

I visited Dachau in 1985 but I've never been to a plantation. However, what you describe as the differences doesn't surprise me and it does disappoint me. I also think about how, having grown up in New England, we have places like Sturbridge that re-enact Colonial times, but what do they really show us of how the Native Americans were treated and the life they lived, being corralled into smaller and smaller places, and the indignities they had to suffer?

I consider our inability to put these difficulty realities out in the open for everyone to learn from a huge error and flaw. Sometimes I think that Jews and African-Americans have made far more inroads with each other than Whites and African-Americans. But that's just my sense from my one place in the world.

Is it any wonder that "While Germany is processing its participation in a human rights tragedy, the U.S. is denying its own"? Though I wouldn't say "denying" so much as "neglecting" or "conveniently ignoring". In this respect, the Germans have the relative advantage of near universal worldwide condemnation (because it took place in the context of a world war) of a relatively recent horror. As Americans, we have to bring the issue up amongst ourselves, and we're not very good at it.

The whole history of slavery was based on a disregard for human dignity. While concentration camps were set up for the express purpose of exterminating undesirables, plantations were set up for the long-term exploitation of human slaves for generating wealth. The end result for many of the persons afflicted may have been comparable, but the goals of the institutions was not. So, as I said, is it any wonder that the tragedies of slavery are ignored, when the whole system was based on ignoring human rights in the pursuit of wealth? The Holocaust is actively engaged because the extermination of the Jews and others was actively and deliberately pursued.

I think the two big reasons why nationally we don't treat Slavery with the same degree of gravity as they can treat the Holocaust is...

1. There aren't any slaves or slaveholders left, there is no one left to keep the memories actually alive, it's "dead" to us.

2. Many people feel like that since America ended slavery on her own, and spent hundreds of thousands of lives to do so, that we aren't totally responsible for it since we spent so much blood trying to rectify the mistakes of our ancestors. Not to mention that many people feel as if the attempts by our welfare system and job quotas have tried to make up for everything that happened in the past.

I think it'll take longer for the wounds to heal totally, and while I don't think it should ever be forgotten, I think that it can't consume us forever.

I'm Jewish, I already forgave Germany a long long time ago, i'm not owed a thing, and it's hard for me to feel anger or hatred towards modern Germans, it won't accomplish anything.

I guess a lot of that also has to do with also being a Southerner, and having to live with the history a lot more closely. I am conflicted, because it's constantly balancing not wanting to ever forget, and constantly being reminded of the horror, and how it relates to other horrors, and then on the other hand not wanting to ever really think about it.

I can't just sit and think about slavery, or I think I would break down.

It reminds me of something I read, that the average person only has a personal connection to a few hundred people tops, and that if anyone outside of that group dies, it's hard for them to actually feel sadness.

Every time a major disaster happens, and thousands of people die, why can't I feel the same amount of sadness for each one, that I felt for my Grandma when she died? Because I don't know them.

If I sat and actually felt the same amount of sadness for everyone that died, I would do nothing but feel sad constantly, I would be paralyzed by the sheer horror of it.

So we're only able to actually live and do anything, because we have short memories and narrow vision. The shear unmitigated paralyzing reality is something that has to be filtered or we'd curl up and whither away from sheer mind-shattering gruesomeness.

That's why we can never actual understand a terrible event, the holocaust, slavery, the Armenian genocide, the Khmer Rouge, the Soviet Gulags, Unit 731, Dresden, Stalingrad. All of it's beyond our complete comprehension, because fully understanding the complete soul-destroying horror of even a single one of those events would destroy a person.

So we halter on and live day to day, say a few sad words when it's necessary, but otherwise don't dwell on it. It's because most people are simply so incapable of dealing with it, that they just can't.

I haven't read all the comments but as I saw most of them were from an American point of view. I live in Switzerland but my mother is German (and I have a German passport as well) and my grandfather had to leave his city (Königsberg) after the second world war, which is since then Russian territory (called Kaliningrad today).
But anyway, it is true that Germany actually faced their history without trying to sugarcoat it, but it has a lot to do with the fact that they were forced to do so by the victorious powers and it was a strategy to be aloud to claim some credibility ever again. If there would have been any other possibility to reach economic power again without relentlessly facing the Holocaust it probably would have been taken, because no one likes to acknowledge mistakes if it isn't for the purpose of manifesting an image of remorse which again engages outsiders sympathy for oneself. So to speak both strategies have the same aim, namely to present themselves in a good light - once as good an caring people who did so much more good things than bad ones; or as people who really learned from their mistakes and will never ever make them again, which in the end makes them morally superior to everyone else.
And interesting enough to also post it here is the difference in which Italy deals/dealt with its past. Mussolini, the Italian fascist leader was, as is known, a dear ally of Hitlers Naziregime and they shared a great deal of the same ideologies, there where no death camps in Italy, but at that time living in Italy must have felt pretty similar to what it felt in Germany - Italy was just as much a totalitarian regime as was Germany and it also worked with Germany on the logistics that surrounded the "Endlösung der Judenfrage", which means nothing else but that the fascist regime not only knew, but actively participated in the Holocaust. e.g. in ghettos living jews were simply removed by the Germans.. BUT and that is my point here, Italy switched sides shortly before the end of the war, why they weren't imposed with the same severe obligations as Germany was. And as a result Italy never really dealt with its violent fascist past, the way Germany had to. Nowadays it's not shocking to declare oneself a fascist in Italy (which in Germany isn't only unthinkable but also against the law). In Italy though Mussolinis granddaughter is a member of the parliament, and she defends her grandfathers ideas vigorously; also there is a party called "lega nord" that has very strong fascist tendencies that was just recently again very strong in the elections, and my Italian boyfriends father officially worships Mussolini, "because he really cared about the Italian peoples and because he invented an old-age pension". The whole Holocaust-aspect is something Italians (not all of them of course) do not link to their own history, but something they project onto Germany exclusively.

(just to make that clear, I do not at all agree with my boyfriends father, I regularly argue with him about politics but it always strikes me as very odd over and over again, how he has a very different perception of Italy's past than I (as German as well as a person who has lived in Switzerland her whole life) do. And he usually condemns the Holocaust but emphasizes that this was all the Germans, the Italian fascist regime only cared for "the good old values" and they didn't know or like all the other bad stuff)

And of course not all Italians think like that, but it's a very strong tendency in the current political discourse.

correction: Italian people of course, not peoples. (sorry, English isn't my native language, so..) :-)

Henry wrote:

"I wish to comment on the phrase: “slaves were allowed to have a gardens”. The typical day’s work for a slave was from dawn until darkness This means that slaves had to tend to their gardens at night after they were released from work on the plantation. How convenient for slaves to raise their food on their own time!"

Well put. The reason why slaves were allowed to have their own gardens was simple economics: if they grew their own food, that meant their owners had to buy less food for them. In much the same way, slaves were allowed to marry - even if those marriages were sometimes broken up by sales a few years later. Obviously, married slaves are more likely to produce... more slaves, the sick antebellum society's equivalent of an ATM.

I think the main reason for the difference in historical perspectives is federalism - seriously. In Germany, the German federal state rightly has an official view on the Holocaust, and has ensured it's promoted and enforced at every level to avoid repeating history. In the United States, it's as if the Nazis had been allowed to run in regional elections in Germany in 1960. And so pro-treason organizations have steadfastly maintained their influence on state and local governments, pushing them to maintain a pro-treason, pro-slavery, pro-rebel whitewash of history. And it is now the official federal position of the government of the United States to tolerate that whitewash to help various administrations pander to sympathetic voters.

The result is two official histories of the Slave Power institution and the war that ended it instead of one. I'm not American, so it is bizarre to me that the government of the United States has not had the courage to force a correct and official view down the throats of secesh over a century after their movement was crushed on the battlefield.

I already left one comment on this subject. I don't think I understood the question when I wrote the first comment.
I spent 60 months in Germany from 1959 through 1964. I was married to a German woman and we have three grown children and two grand childred living in Germany.
Germans who were adults in Nazi Germany are almost all gone. Today younger Germans feel some guilt but many of the Germans who lived during the Nazi Holocost never felt guilty about persecuting Jews. What they felt was remorse for losing World War-II!
Listen to Neo-Confederates whine about the bad deal the South got from the North at the end of the Civil War. They are sorry the South lost the Civil War! There are sorry enslaved African Americans were freed, and they do not abologize for enslaving African Americans. I have heard a few of Neo-Confederates say that the South would have freed slaves in due time, but that is a B.S. hypothesis.

First of all I think it is incorrect to compare the Holocaust with the slavery. I think any KZ inmates could only dream about such two-family cabins like those on the photo. But the difference is not only in the conditions but in the intentions: the Holocaust was to kill, the slavery was to make people work.

It is impossible to compare murder of millions people who even were not told that they will be killed with some tens of show executions that could take place in the plantations (and which anyway could affect only a tiny part of the total slaves). It was both unprofitable, illegal and condemned by the religion to kill slaves.

I would even say that the conditions of the slaves in the first part of 19th century could be better than the conditions of Russian serfs of the time who also were subjects of abuse.

In other words, just dry numbers of victims differs by many orders. It is like comparing a war with a murder in a course of a robbery.

It is true that the purpose of Death Camps was to get rid of Jews while Plantation wanted to get work from enslave Africans and African Americans. But the number of years that millions of African Americans endured under the torture, violence and threats of violence make the two situations comparable. And this is not to mention the genocide of Native Americans!

Before WWII there were 9 million Jews in Europe. AFter, three million. The camps were designed to either work the inmates to death, or to feed them diets scientifically designed to starve them in three months. Or both.

In the United States, the black (slave) population, both before, during and after the civil war (sic), grew at the same rate as the white population. Slaves ate pretty much what white people in the South ate, especially poor white people. Today, it's called soul food and is viewed positively, tasty and nutritious if high in starch, something that wasn't as much a problem in the past as it is to today's sedentary lifestyles.

If there is nothing at Laura plantation about "...extended discussions of the health of slaves, their physical and emotional abuse, the breeding programs, rape, their punishing labor, the destruction of their families, the age at which slaves began to work..." perhaps they aren't pertinent. Perhaps the slaves at that plantation were healthy (there were several hospitals for slaves in the South; I've never heard of any hospitals specifically for the inmates of Nazi concentration camps). Laws varied from state to state, but they mandated lighter work for pregnant slaves and support for slaves in sickness and old age when they could no longer work. Never heard of anything like that in Nazi law, have you? And rape was not the problem it's construed to be today, basically because the racism of that day precluded most white men from having such contact with black women.

Do you know for certain there was a breeding program specifically at Laura plantation? If there wasn't, why should it be showcased there? Do you know for sure slave families were destroyed there? If they weren't, why should it be showcased at Laura plantation? Yes, by all means, acknowledge the abuses where they occurred, but to require showcasing them where they did not occur is dishonest.

Not all slaves worked sunup to sundown; some plantations operated on the task system. When a slave's tasks were completed, his time was his own. Some did work their gardens; some hired themselves out for pay; some were able to purchase their freedom this way.

Slavery was bad but let's be honest in portraying it. Let's not give in to the modern demand that we make it worse than it actually was out of some perverse, misguided desire to evilize our culture.

Superb job of diverting attention from the real point, Ilya & Connie. The thread - and the appeal it represents - is about whether our countries remember our worst moments in history honestly and candidly, not about whether the Holocaust was worse and slavery relatively better for the victims.

The same question could be asked of, say, "The US and Canada" and Canada's memory of residential schools (look it up), or "The US and Japan" and Japan's own failure to recognize its war crimes in 1931-1945, and so on. But the comparison of the US to Germany is useful for the simple reason that Germany has taken pains to be honest about the horror of what was done and why so the horrors of race-based oppression won't be repeated. And so the question: why can't descendants of the rebels of 1861-1865 and descendants of the Klansmen who continued the war by guerrilla means do the same? Why not be honest?

(PS: Connie, slaves "were allowed to have their own gardens" in some instances for the obvious reason that anything they grew and ate reduced the operating cost of owning the slave to the owner. The statement "his time was his own" shows an absurd disregard for the realities of being a slave; one's time is never "one's own" if that time is granted conditionally by someone who owns you. Was his time his own if he was sold to an owner in a different state the next the next week to recoup capital appreciation? Was his time his own if he wanted to read a book, learn engineering, or travel freely to see his child in a distant plantation? Stop hiding what slavery was, and start calling it what it was: pure crime, even by western civilization's own standards of the day. All of our ancestors share in the shame of the slave power in some way, but only some decided to commit mass treason to protect that shame industry from even the smallest of limits.

You won't cheapen your history by acknowledging that. On the contrary. Only by acknowledging the crime can you properly celebrate the scale of the redemption for it.)

Your first two paragraphs totally ignored what I said, solely for the sake of repeating your non-sequitor about death counts (as though that's the only measure of suffering, or criminality). Fine. If you're going to keep doing that, I won't be able to stop you.

But I would like to know what this means...

"It was also mentioned that slavery was abolished as a result of the civil war. This is like if you claimed that the USSR (or modern Russia) should share responsibility for Tsarist serfdom which was abolished in 1860s."

Huh? Please elaborate. This makes no sense.

And to your comment that "the state has no means of coercion to make them feel shame," what does coercion have to with it? Why can't people recognize their past freely? And why talk as though the state the only means to doing so?

Slavery was a crime? So was slave-trading by New England maritime interests. So was the U.S. government's official policy of genocide against the Plains Indians. So was the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII. So were the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments. So is abortion. All should be viewed and understood as they were/are, neither whitewashed nor made to be worse than they were to satisfy some need to feel good about ourselves by evilizing others.

Incidently, the people and soldiers of the seceded states did not commit treason. The definition of treason only applies to those who, owing allegiance to the United States, make war on it. There was nothing in the Constitution at the time forbidding secession, so the people of the seceded states no longer owed allegiance to the U.S.

Thomas Jefferson declared that governments are instituted to secure the rights of the people. One of the rights he specifically identified is the right of the people to alter or abolish their government and create one that suits them better. How ironic, then, that the only time Americans have attempted to exercise this right, the government that was supposed to secure it made brutal war on them instead.

1. Connie, the "so did everyone else" bit won't work on me. I've already acknowledged that the British - my ancestors - started the slave trade. But they also *voluntarily* ended it, decades before the Civil War, and no slaveholders formed armies to prevent it. My ancestors were British imperialists. Acknowledging that Amritsar Massacre was a massacre doesn't "evilize" anyone, including a relative of mine who was present. Yet if we describe Fort Pillow as a massacre, southern revisionists line up to deny it. If we're trying to understand things "as they were," why are the descendants of US rebels and their sympathizers so insistent that it's unfair to paint slavery as a crime and secession in its defence as a monstrous mistake?

2. I'm of British descent living in Canada. While in government, I've had to work directly with elected separatists and officials from their government. I don't secession is, was, or should be illegal. I'm not a "yankee."

But there's a big problem with the revisionist history on this that you've just repeated. First: many rebels took armed action to seize US arsenals or attack federal bases or ships before their states had even held secession conventions, or before those conventions had even voted. In other cases, where those attacks came after the vote, those launching them had openly conspired to do so before the state seceded. By the definition of treason applied - with southern applause - to John Brown in 1859, that's treason, no ifs, ands or buts, no room for gray (forgive the pun).

Second, many American soldiers broke their oath and either aided or joined the rebel army - again, in some cases, before their state had seceded. That's also treason.

I don't consider a southern man conscripted against his will in 1863 (for example) to be a traitor, but there were certainly thousands of traitors in the rebel army by the definition of the day.

Finally, let's remember who made war on whom. There were at least a dozen incidents of organized violence against the United States perpetrated by the rebels before Sumter was surrendered. Not to mention the fact that Sumter was fired on 3,000 times 150 years ago tomorrow; that bombardment was not exactly the act of a helpless victim of aggression. Finally, the rebels first act was to mobilize tens of thousands of men into an army that was many times the size of the US army at the time. Again, who waged brutal war on whom?

Across the south, countless thousands of Americans who wanted to stay loyal and be neutral - generally because they didn't own slaves, or simply wanted to lead peaceful lives - they were systematically conscripted, marginalized, attacked or outright slaughtered by the rebel government and its armies. Where's the Jeffersonian democracy, here? I don't see much of it on either side, I'm afraid.