A few brief examples, from the testimony of Josef Kramer, Kommandant of Birkenau:

Did you prefer to be a party to wholesale murder rather than to be arrested yourself? - I did not partake in this mass murder.

Do you think that anyone is entitled to give or to execute orders for the mass murder of innocent people? - Probably there must have been somebody who issued these orders. I myself never saw them and have nothing to do with it.

I put it to you that not only were you present at these selections, but you took an active, and very active, part in making the selections yourself? - That is not true. It is a lie.

You heard witnesses here in person, one after another, and affidavits of dozens of other people read, with regard to the beatings which went on at Auschwitz. Do you say that never happened? - Yes.

Let me suggest to you that you beat so many people that you cannot remember any particular one? - I can only say I have not beaten any prisoner.

Irma Grese denied all allegations of abuse as well:

There was a lot of beating of prisoners there, was there not? - I did not see it.

I suggest this to you: that when you went out with these working parties you made a habit of beating women and of kicking them, and you enjoyed it? - And I say that you are badly informed about me, and that it is a big lie.

Gertrud Diament in her deposition said that your favourite habit was to beat women until they fell to the ground and then kick them as hard as you could with your heavy boots? - That is a lie. Perhaps it is her habit to lie.

Elisabeth Volkenrath:

These people knew they were being selected to die, did they not? - I did not know and the people could not have known either. Nobody knew why these selections were made.

Are you seriously asking the Court to believe that? - Yes.

Is it not right that it was quite easy to tell a selection parade because only Jews had to parade for it? - We were never told anything about it.

Throughout the testimonies, these examples seem to be common answers from former SS guards. I noticed that according to a large number of guards, they were never themselves part of gas chamber selection, it was always either someone else giving the orders for murders or beating prisoners, or it never happened to begin with, and almost all accusations of abuse by former prisoners were considered lies or exaggerations. And on top of everything, the most surprising part of all is that they seem to have zero emotional response or general remorse over what they were part of.

Have these reactions been studied at all? If so, what was the reason behind such blatant denial of wrongdoing or abuse in the camps? Was the average guard actually that naive, or were there actually very few guards who were involved with murder or abuse in Auschwitz-Birkenau?

For those not in the know, here's the Wikipedia page on perpetual stew. The one with which I'm most familiar with is Welsh cawl, not that the recipe cited is a perpetual version.

I can think of certain advantages to a perpetual stew including:

• economy

• ease of cooking

However, I also presume there were certain drawbacks.

• what would the effects of spoilage be? No matter how well you try and mix the ingredients in the pot, there will always be some residual food from previous days/weeks. Surely this had a spoiling point, and therefore could contaminate the rest of the batch?

• if spoiling of a perpetual stew happened, how was the dish "restarted", for lack of a better word?

• were there nutritive drawbacks (not every diner is guaranteed the same ratios of foods in each portion)?

I've deliberately not specified a period/place for this question. Many thanks for your input. EDIT: formatting to make bullet points work

Hello. I came across this article http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2013/01/28/podlich-afghanistan-1960s-photos/5846/ yesterday that shows pictures of Afghanistan from the 1960's, and seem to illustrate a (relatively) progressive, functioning society of the kind we would recognize in the West.

I see compilations like this relatively frequently, and similar ones from Iran during the Shah's day which represent the country as being modernized, relatively tolerant, and not a bad place to live.

My question is, how close to reality are the pictures in these sorts of compilations? Are we seeing the lives of a small, privileged elite that lived in Kabul and/or Tehran? Or were these countries truly dynamic and (again, relatively) progressive places before being 'ruined' by religious extremism and repressive societies?

Of course I know that the Shah and the King of Afghanistan were very repressive themselves, but arguably less so then the regimes that followed them. I'm not very educated about the recent history of these regions so I'm interested to know more.