Jerry Springer - Who do you think you are?

[London_Calling]

Nah, play dumb with someone else.

 

[butchersapron]

Stop sulking fffs

 

[danny la rouge]

Nah, play dumb with someone else.

Was that at me?

Jesus, your problem with a fascinating and moving programme is that it was mostly about people who didn't die long enough ago for your liking. And I'm the one playing dumb?

 

[Belushi]

Is London Calling making an enormous tit of himself again? no surprises there then.

By the way LC you never got back to me on this thread where I asked you what experience you had of life in a pit village after you posted some of the most ill-informed stereotypes about mining communities I've read on here http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=7956551#post7956551

 

[boohoo]

Fwiw, I don't think of 'ancestors' as people who died within two years of my birth.

my mother never met her grandparents cos her dad wasn't around. So actually finding information on her dad and his family was part of my family tree research and in someway more interesting/relevent than people 10/15 generations back.

 

[Mrs Magpie]

What's your issue here? You didn't think it was interesting or appropriate that a descendant of Jews lost in the holocaust should try to find out about their fate?

I don't quite get his moan either. Of course, there is an 'off' switch on a TV if it pisses you off. You can even do what I did some years ago and get rid of the TV altogether.

 

[Dovydaitis]

i thought it was good, but i like anytihng like that. he wanted to know why his family moved, he was very explicit about that at the beginning, and with him not really knowing his eamily, it wasnt destined to go very far back. also the macabre nature appeals to the viewing public a bit more, than "well this is my great great grandad and he was a farmer, he died of old age, and this is his wife, she died of a stroke 2 months later etc"

 

[ViolentPanda]

Anybody see this.

Quite a moving story as he traced his ancestors who had died in the ghettos and extermination camps in Nazi Germany.

More moving than the previous shows I have seen.

Point of order: Theresienstadt wasn't in "Nazi Germany", it was in occupied Czechoslovakia, so "in the Nazi Reich" would be a better description.

 

[ViolentPanda]

...and every disabled person. They tested out their extermination techniques in the early 1930s on disabled children...and Poles were also classed as 'Untermensch'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch

Although, with their usual full measure of hypocrisy, the Nazis "Aryanised" a fair number of Polish children (as Gitta Sereny mentions in "The German Trauma") who fitted the Aryan racial ideal.

 

[zenie]

What I find odd about this is that Springer already knew his relations had died in concentration camps. I'd heard him say it before on a documentary or some such.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Fwiw, I don't think of 'ancestors' as people who died within two years of my birth.

Perhaps you're not aware of just how many Jewish genealogical records were commandeered by the Nazis, or were handed over by the incredibly supine Jewish establishments in most of the occupied countries (Hannah Arendt goes into detail about this in "Eichmann in Jerusalem", but you can also find it in the extracted "Eichmann and the Holocaust" published as a pocket book by Penguin)?
For many of us, getting further back than our great-grandparents is a near-impossibility at best. At worst it's futile.

 

[Mrs Magpie]

Although, with their usual full measure of hypocrisy, the Nazis "Aryanised" a fair number of Polish children (as Gitta Sereny mentions in "The German Trauma") who fitted the Aryan racial ideal.

Yes, I have a book about about Polish children who were stolen and given to German families.

 

[ViolentPanda]

What I find odd about this is that Springer already knew his relations had died in concentration camps. I'd heard him say it before on a documentary or some such.

Yeah, but that was all he knew, family myths and the like. This allowed him to put names to places etc.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Yes, I have a book about about Polish children who were stolen and given to German families.

Could I (at your convenience, of course) trouble you for the title and author? TIA.

 

[Mrs Magpie]

Yeah, my books are in disarray at the moment, but I think it might be with all the wartime history stuff downstairs (my father-in-law was a refugee after the war ended, so my OH is very interested in the whole era).

 

[QueenOfGoths]

What I find odd about this is that Springer already knew his relations had died in concentration camps. I'd heard him say it before on a documentary or some such.

I think he may have known - or assumed - they were killed in a concentration camp but didn't know which one.

I missed some of the programme due to chasing the cat around to try and see what he was chewing on (a large moth) but I think I overheard that he had assumed one of his grandmothers had been killed at Auschwitz but found out that in fact it had been another camp.

However don't quote me on that as I was involved in unsuccessful moth-from-furry-jaws extraction at the time

 

[ViolentPanda]

Yeah, my books are in disarray at the moment, but I think it might be with all the wartime history stuff downstairs (my father-in-law was a refugee after the war ended, so my OH is very interested in the whole era).

Great, thanks again.

People think my books are in disarray. I say that it's not true, and that they don't understand my filing system.

 

[Mrs Magpie]

Found it...I'm not quite right in saying it's a whole book (it's 12 years since I read it). It's a whole chapter in a book called Master Race by Catrine Clay & Michael Leapman. It includes stuff about Lebensborn

 

[ViolentPanda]

Found it...I'm not quite right in saying it's a whole book (it's 12 years since I read it). It's a whole chapter in a book called Master Race by Catrine Clay & Michael Leapman. It includes stuff about Lebensborn

Just snagged a 2nd hand copy on Amazon. Cheers!

 

[Belushi]

Although, with their usual full measure of hypocrisy, the Nazis "Aryanised" a fair number of Polish children (as Gitta Sereny mentions in "The German Trauma") who fitted the Aryan racial ideal.

Yes, the history of that region means many proud Germans are actually of Polish descent and plenty of Poles have German ancestry, especially in Silesia etc. A friend of mine from Lodz is a blue eyed blonde who'd fit the Nazi stereotype of an 'Aryan' much more than a 'Slav', despite being as Polish as they come.

 

[lobster]

They is that infamous book Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story Of Nazi Racial Laws And Men Of Jewish Descent In The German Military - and a film documentary Hitler's Jewish Soldiers which also questions the whole aryan thing....

Ive met blonde jews before, the whole thing is unscientific and full of rubbish.
We all descend from Africa anyway....

 

[Geri]

I think I overheard that he had assumed one of his grandmothers had been killed at Auschwitz but found out that in fact it had been another camp.

That's right.

Springer goes on to discover that in 1942 his maternal grandmother, Marie Kallman, was dispatched in a cattle train to Chelmno extermination camp, where she was among the first to be gassed to death. As Springer wanders around the trains wreathed in barbed wire that have been kept at a nearby station as a memorial to the victims, he sobs and says a prayer.

Meanwhile, he finds out that his paternal grandmother, Selma Springer, was deported to Theresienstadt, a Jewish ghetto near Prague. The Nazis put out propaganda films claiming that the ghetto was like a holiday camp. In fact, it was squalid, hideously overcrowded and rife with disease. The starving Selma died there in 1943.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/jerry-springer-the-holocaust-and-my-family-905317.html

 

[weltweit]

I think it must have been very moving for Springer, as he was actually at the place where his relatives had died.

It struck me during the Boris program that Boris could have gone to the spot at which his grandfather or was it great grandfather was killed by the mob. If it had been me, I would have wanted to go there, perhaps he did but it was not included in the film.

 

[danny la rouge]

I think it must have been very moving for Springer, as he was actually at the place where his relatives had died.

It struck me during the Boris program that Boris could have gone to the spot at which his grandfather or was it great grandfather was killed by the mob. If it had been me, I would have wanted to go there, perhaps he did but it was not included in the film.

Maybe he did but made a stupid comment, or wasn't wearing a tie.

 

[Psychonaut]

The records kept of the transports and ghettos struck me, how the Nazis could keep such meticulous records even when they were doing something so diabolical never ceases to amaze me.

I thought about that too. I think perhaps the function of all that red-tape wasnt to serve any practical purpose, but more to lend a veneer of officialdom/authority to the process, making it more acceptable. ala the Milgram experiment

 

[scifisam]

Perhaps they should re-title it Find your Grandparents.

Why? It's called 'who do you think you are.' It makes no mention of parents, grandparents or more distant ancestors, and all the other shows have been about grandparents and grea-grandparents, depending on what was more interesting and/or what was more elusive.

 

[foo]

The records kept of the transports and ghettos struck me, how the Nazis could keep such meticulous records even when they were doing something so diabolical never ceases to amaze me.

that shocked me too.

i watched the repeat last night and sobbed me silly heart out.