Tea at Trianon: "Intelligenzaktion"

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

"Intelligenzaktion"

From DW:

Korczowski and Pogonowski were among the first prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp, which was set up in the spring of 1940 in the buildings of what used to be Polish army barracks. SS commander Heinrich Himmler liked the location's good transport links, which seemed practical for bringing prisoners to the camp from different occupied regions of Europe.

Three-quarters of the 728 Poles who were moved to Auschwitz from the prison in the southern Polish city of Tarnow were men aged below 30. They were mostly intellectuals and students. The camp functionaries and guards were 30 German criminals whom the SS had brought to Auschwitz from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp a short time previously.

The Polish prisoners were victims of a German occupation policy that aimed to wipe out the Polish elites. After German troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the Nazi regime incorporated the western regions of Poland into the Third Reich. By July 1940, the occupiers had murdered 50,000 Poles and deported the same number to concentration camps as part of the "Intelligenzaktion," a genocidal operation mostly targeting intellectuals. (Read more.)