OldTimeRadio said:
Yes, "
race".
I believe the posting about big noses referred to Jewish people, who were considered by the Nazis to be a different
race, even to the point of being able to pick out physical
racial traits.
In the past, Jews have even seen themselves as a seperate tribe, or
race, to the point of saying that anyone could convert to Judaism, but they wouldn't become "proper" Jews, it was a blood thing, not a faith thing. Which I guess fuelled anti-Semitism throughout the ages, bolstering the "them and us" charges.
British law was changed many years ago to include anti-Semitic offences under Anti-
racist laws probably because the average anti-Semitic offence is a whole lot more violent and disturbing than calling someone a big nosed Kike, and until very recently, committing offences against a person on the grounds of their religion was considered to be a thing of the past and not worthy of enforcable laws. If you commit an anti-Semitic offence, you are a
racist.
To the OP, re the "stone tape theory", perhaps the deaths there were not violent enough to create an impression. That is not to trivialise the horrors of the place, but from accounts I have read, people filed into their deaths in a pretty orderly fashion, despite being warned by other inmates what fate awaited them. There seem to be few, if any, reports of trainloads of people panicking and having to be forced into the "de-lousing" areas. Indeed, these camps were overseen by relatively few armed men, certainly not enough to stop a terrified mob trying to escape their deaths.
It seems that the inmates were resigned to their fates through either extermination, disease or by being worked to death. For many, their death would have been a long drawn out process, they would have been well aware of it's approach. Perhaps that lessens the efficacy of the surroundings to make a "recording"?
Compare that to Dresden or Hamburg, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed in one night in bombing raids which they thought they would be able to weather, as they had done previously, I would have thought they would be more likely candidates for "soaking up" the effects of multiple sudden violent deaths.