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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMy parents grew up in Nazi Germany.
Most of my extended family still lives in Germany today, and I am in fact the very first member of my family to be born in the USA.
As an adolescent, learning about the history of my parents' homeland, I would wonder and ask: "How could people have fallen for such hate filled nonsense? How could such an evil and corrupt and even insane regime have been able to commit the horrors that it did, with the support, or at least the compliance, of so many ordinary people?"
I read extensively, looking for answers. One of my go-to's of the time was William Shirer, and I just recently re-read End of a Berlin Diary, the sequel to Berlin Diary which I've read maybe a dozen times now.
In it Shirer basically claims that there was something inherent in German psychology that made them, in essence, a culture of sadists. He held pretty much all Germans accountable, and was in favor of the harshest penalties: stripping Germany of all industry, dividing up the country into various segments, even going so far as to seem to exalt in the suffering of ordinary Germans "sleeping in their holes in the ground" under the ruins of their cities. He also--and I suppose this was a view widely held at the time--downplays the mass rapes that accompanied the conquest of German towns and cities, most especially Berlin, and the widespread atrocities committed against ethnic Germans forced to flee areas, such as the Sudetenland, where their families had lived for generations. Germans, he pretty outright said, deserved such abuse, even the women and girls, on account of their complicity in the Nazi horrors. They were irredeemable, and needed to be crushed for all time.
As an adolescent and young adult I pretty much agreed with his analysis, carrying my own portion of guilt for atrocities committed years before I was born. I was at the very least uneasy about his seeming dismissal of the horrors of rape, but otherwise accepted his analysis, even of my own parents.
But I wonder now what Shirer would think of America in the era of Trump. Not that he was naive about the uglier aspects of American life. He had, after all, left the US in the early 1920s, disgusted, he says, with the materialism, the complacency, the small mindedness of American culture, and spent the next decades in India, Afghanistan, Europe.
Still, I wonder if the America we see today would make him re-think his attitude to ordinary Germans of the time. Or if, instead, he would place Americans and American culture in much the same disrepute as he does Germans.
Granted, we haven't come close to the sort of madness and horror and sadism of Germany 1933 to 1945. We haven't as yet murdered millions and plunged the entire world into war.
But is it entirely wrong to think that the potential is there? That so many of our fellow citizens would be up for the ride, adopting their own version of the slogan: "The Fuhrer is always right?"
There's a quote that to me strikes at the heart of the matter:
"In psychological terms, the inhabitants of the Third Reich were as normal as people in all other societies at all other times. The spectrum of perpetrators was a cross section of normal society. No specific group of people proved immune to the temptation, in Gunther Ander's phrase, of 'inhumanity with impunity.' The real-life experiment that was the Third Reich did not reduce the variables of personality to absolute zero. But it showed them to be of comparatively slight, indeed often negligible, importance." -- Sinke Neitzel and Harald Weizer, Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing and Dying.
I think too of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
And now we have the spectacle of a billionaire kowtowing to an obvious fascist. Someone who by any measure has the power and resources to stand firm and resist. Is it fear? Greed? Might it be Sympathy for the Devil?
If Harris wins--and I of course hope and even, with some trepidation, expect that she will--we need as a society to explore seriously how and why we've come so close to the abyss. And here "the experiment that was the Third Reich" might well be instructive. Why do some people succumb to the temptation, and others--often so few--resist? How do we encourage the likes of Hans and Sophie Scholl, and prevent the seduction of the likes of Albert Speer--to me the closest analogy I can see to Bezos?
I think these are among the most important questions, if not the most important questions, of our time.
If you've read this far, thank you for your time and attention, and best wishes to you and yours.
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MaryMagdaline
(7,925 posts)Lynching was so common in the generations right before mine where ordinary (sadistic) men and women attended public lynchings and even sent post cards with photographs of the victims.
I was very uncomfortable around Southerners and suspected that many of their parents and grandparents participated in atrocities.
That said, mine was the generation that desegregated the south, and for the most part, we complied lawfully with the SC’s “integrate now” mandate. Our principals kept order and kept racial scuffles (sometimes lockdowns) from hitting the papers so that KKK chapters didn’t get riled up. I came to realize that a lot of good Southerners were horrified by the sadism of their fellow Southerners and that strong hand of the federal government was a blessing to them.
As a daughter of WWII soldier, I felt that Germans were uniquely sadistic, but today, see Germans as an enlightened group of people, much as they were seen in the late 1800s.
I guess I finally came to see that brutality and sadism can arise anywhere, and a small group can terrorize the much larger group.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)One happy discovery was the history of the "White Rose"--a German student group that resisted Nazism and paid with their lives.
Then too, since Shirer's time we've seen how the world has hardly followed through on "never again."
Biafra, Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia... we've seen multiple societies fall into horror. Not to, as Camus would say, "balance atrocities," but human depravity has been unleashed multiple times since 1945.
Thanks for posting. I appreciate your insight on this.
MaryMagdaline
(7,925 posts)They had every privilege in the world and decided to risk it all for human rights. May their memories be a blessing.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)Perhaps you've seen it?
mountain grammy
(27,404 posts)I have read the story of these brave students and will look for this film.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)One nice thing about it is that it includes English translations of all the White Rose leaflets.
From the First Leaflet:
"Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be 'governed' without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes--crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure--reach the light of day?"
The Third Leaflet calls for Germans to commit "sabotage in armaments plants, sabotage at all gatherings, rallies, public ceremonies, and organizations of the National Socialist Party. Obstruction of the smooth functioning of the war machine... sabotage in all the areas of science and scholarship which further the continuation of the war... sabotage in all publications, all newspapers, that are in the pay of the 'government' and that defend its ideology and aid in disseminating the brown lie..." The Brown Lie being a reference to the brown shirted Nazi Storm Troopers. The italics are in the original.
From the Fourth Leaflet:
"Every word that comes from Hitler's mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil..."
it's a short book but truly inspiring, and well worth tracking down.
mountain grammy
(27,404 posts)Found it on Amazon but checking elsewhere.
MaryMagdaline
(7,925 posts)
Dan
(4,169 posts)Respected her and her bravery, even at the moment of her execution (and her brother’s).
TomCADem
(17,776 posts)While this is a chilling scene, what is even more chilling is how the nationalistic sounding rhetoric in the voice overs is similar to Trump's rhetoric. This can happen here and it would be with the support of millions of Trump supporters.
BadgerKid
(4,706 posts)By “leaving it to the states” as with Roe?
IrishAfricanAmerican
(4,185 posts)
orthoclad
(4,728 posts)was the Confederacy's motto. And the late 60s National States Rights Party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_States%27_Rights_Party
Founded in 1958 in Knoxville, Tennessee, by Edward Reed Fields, a 26-year-old chiropractor and supporter of J. B. Stoner, the party was based on antisemitism, racism and opposition to racial integration with African Americans.[2] Party officials argued for states' rights against the advance of the civil rights movement, and the organization itself established relations with the Ku Klux Klan and Minutemen.[3] Although a white supremacist movement,[4] its messaging was never openly neo-Nazi in the way that its successors in the American Nazi Party were.[5]
The rich have learned to work up from the bottom: school boards, state legislatures, etc. It's easier to corrupt the smaller offices. Remember that Republicans gained 1000 seats in local elections under Obama. They took advantage of fear, rage, and racism.
Susan Calvin
(2,159 posts)Not particularly related to anything in this post or thread, I think, but your reply made me think back and be pleased. My high school in the Piney Woods of Texas was integrated in my junior year, and it pleases me to remember that it was a big nothingburger. As far as any trouble, I mean. We all did make a lot of new friends. Don't ask me why it worked out that way, whether it just did or whether there was a lot going on in the background that we kids didn't see, but it makes me happy to think about it.
MaryMagdaline
(7,925 posts)
4catsmom
(321 posts)with integration in my high school in the 1970s. Parents would show up and stir things up. This went on for years.
allegorical oracle
(3,490 posts)limited to a Germany or a Russia. It's an evil aspect of all humans if permitted to develop and flourish. We're watching it -- tolerating it -- around the world right now. It's fueled by the seven deadly sins (all of which, btw, have been committed by djt). The only balm is education, imo.
raccoon
(31,518 posts)And others, such as the Chinese who came to work on the railroads. Google Hell‘s Canyon Massacre.
Shermann
(8,733 posts)He was marveling at the wealth of the country and the splendor of the homes he saw there. He couldn't understand why the Germans were invading Russia and trying to take what little they had by comparison.
So, there's a parallel there as well with the way we might treat undocumented immigrants. We can be so worried about protecting our riches that we crack down on groups that have much less.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)Russians marveling at such luxuries as indoor plumbing, electricity, phones in every home.
Yet another indication of the insanity of the Nazi regime.
Martin Eden
(13,596 posts)... including bitterly angry Trump voters willing to embrace fascism to assuage their grievances.
Their so-called grievances pale in comparison to conditions in most of the world, as well as 1930's Germany still reeling from their humiliating defeat in WW1 and the Great Depression.
Marigold
(218 posts)She is horrified by what she sees happening in the US. She cannot believe it. She always tells me that the problem is that Americans have it too good. They are entitled, and this gives them the freedom to indulge their hatred and grievances. Sad to think that we all have to suffer to have compassion.
yardwork
(64,830 posts)Every one of the few people I know who support Trump are well-off. They have plenty of money and are not bothered in their lives by poverty or crime. They live far away from our southern border.
They choose to live in a state of anger, fear, and resentment.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)There must be some kind of endorphin rush that comes with being hateful. Or fearful.
People love to be frightened by horror flicks. Maybe there's some connection?
Whatever the case, we better figure all this out before it's too late.
yardwork
(64,830 posts)Interesting!
eppur_se_muova
(37,759 posts)The presence of Russians and Russian culture meant no more to them than Native Americans meant to the cattle and railroad barons in the US. They just wanted the land and resources. Well, and maybe a little slave labor, until they wore out.
I seem to remember at least one influential German (can't remember who) referring to Russia as "Germany's Africa" -- reflecting the 19th-centurey "Scramble for Africa" which culminated, ironically, in the Berlin Conference of 1884-5.
Ukraine, of course, they wanted for their granary, and the Baku area for its oil. When the Russians blocked the German advance on Baku, that was the first sounding of the death knell for Hitler's plans. Defeat was inevitable without abundant fuel for Germany's motorized forces, and he knew it.
ETA: Interesting to compare the German notion of lebensraum with the American notion of "Manifest Destiny" ... both excuses for taking what you want, and claiming it's yours by right.
Wednesdays
(20,317 posts)Schoolhouse Rock made a cute little song about that.
moondust
(20,533 posts)perhaps leading to a widespread sense of supremacy and invincibility among the German people, i.e. a "god complex"?
Adolf Hitler's 'messiah complex' studied in secret British intelligence report
~
Sound familiar?
Collimator
(1,875 posts). . . But some of the points and questions posed here remind me of this observation from Abraham Lincoln. (Paraphrased)
"Most men can handle adversity; if you really want to test a man's character, give him power. "
We have all seen what DJT has done and tried to do with the power handed to him with the presidency.
murielm99
(31,544 posts)If I had a little bit of power, would I misuse it?
Mysterian
(5,214 posts)To think otherwise is naivete. The scourge of German nazi fascism was only one generation ago. Humans have not evolved or become nicer since then. Fascism did not die in 1945. It just went into hiding.
mitch96
(14,793 posts)thucythucy
(8,779 posts)but I am often appalled at how little history we seem to know.
Trump is a stunning example, and many of his followers likewise.
Personally I don't understand it, since I find history so fascinating. But then, here we are...
mitch96
(14,793 posts)history sections... To me they were great stories and kept me entertained...
m
GiqueCee
(1,557 posts)... than one generation. On average, a generation is 25 to 30 years, which makes it more like 4 generations. That length of time might also explain why the memory of those horrors has dimmed significantly, making it easier for a malevolent demagogue like Trump to exert such malign influence on low-wattage intellects. And decades of Republican efforts to sabotage the public education system didn't help. They hate – and fear – an educated electorate, and with good reason. Intelligent and empathetic people don't vote for Republicans.
Evolve Dammit
(19,216 posts)et tu
(1,904 posts)wherever slavery was encouraged,
sadism takes root and grows- ex.
our southern states, but recently it
has bloomed and spread infecting more
and more. just so sad for our country and
our legacy.
J_William_Ryan
(2,289 posts)Even with Vice President Harris winning the election, we’ll still be at the abyss.
Indeed, a President Harris will further inflame the fascist right, fueling baseless conspiracies of another stolen election and a continued ‘assault’ on white Americans and ‘white culture.’
Trump might be gone but white grievance politics and racist replacement theory will be alive and well, and the Trump Cult will be searching for another cult leader.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)As is the prospect of someone taking up "the cause"--someone not as much an obvious oaf, not as incompetent a liar, as Trump.
We will continue to be vulnerable long after this election.
hadEnuf
(2,806 posts)but more of a starting point to win the fight.
Trump, the MAGA movement, and to an extent the Reublican party as a whole, need to be completely rendered unable to continue doing what they have been doing.
One thing that always aggravated me about Obama, and even Biden to a certain extent, was that when the GOP was on it's knees they were helped up and dusted off only to turn more viscously on them and the country.
Perhaps it was the American thing to do, but it was done with the wrong people.
malaise
(279,102 posts)Very thoughtful
Rec
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)And best wishes.
demmiblue
(37,885 posts)Kid Berwyn
(18,433 posts)An appellation for too many today, and not just for those in the Dixiest of Red states.
Thank you, Thucythucy for sharing your thoughts with us.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)And I always thought the plea, "And lead us not into temptation" also spoke to the heart of the human condition.
I for one am grateful that, thus far in my life, I've never been presented with the circumstances faced by the generation before mine, or by those today who have been offered the "opportunity" to be inhumane with impunity. I think and hope I wouldn't succumb, but am humble enough to wonder, and am thankful I have never been tested in such a way.
Best wishes.
Kid Berwyn
(18,433 posts)…Her father grew up in a home in Texas where German was his first language. In World War 2, he and his brother enlisted and became members of the USAAF. His brother was a skilled aviator and trained B-25 pilots. My FiL was a navigator on a B-17G, flying missions to bomb targets in his family’s home cities, including Bonn and Köln.
After the war, the two branches reunited when one of the German cousins came to the US as a NATO officer, helping to rebuild the Bundeswehr and make West Germany a democratic bulwark against Russia. On his travels, he would visit a major city and look in the phone book for someone with the same, somewhat rare, German surname. Thus, the two branches reconnected in Houston in the 1960s.
I had the honor of meeting the gentleman and his extended family in Münich in 2017. Then long-retired from the military, he saw that the family would gather annually for All -Saints Day at the family memorial in a remarkable forest cemetery in the city. Then they would take over a floor of a nearby restaurant to remember and commemorate the family. Only those who got up and dressed for the memorial service would be welcome at the luncheon. And they invited my wife and me to attend.
As part of the remembrance, the family patriarch led a slide presentation showing the images of family members to remember. Grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts, cousins and uncles. To welcome my wife and I to the family, they included where we fit into the family tree with a slide show presentation. Unbelievably, they out this together on short notice: There were our faces and names.
The presentation continued, and images of two family lost in the war were presented. One was in the uniform of the Kriegsmarine and the other was a pilot in the Luftwaffe. Both were in dress uniform. I thought of my grandfather and his brothers who wore US uniforms to fight these guys. I looked carefully at each and saw both were officers and that neither wore emblems of the murderous SS. When I looked back at the group I was with, every man’s eyes were on mine. Instantly, I understood they wanted to gauge my expression and see what I saw examining the two portraits.
The German side made us feel like we were at home. They wondered why I — a Spanglish speaking Puerto Rican guy — could speak (very) elementary German, while my wife could not? It didn’t much matter, anyway, as the Germans wanted to do most of the talking, particularly the patriarch. I did get asked a lot how in the world America could elect Trump?
In previous reunions, the German NATO officer patriarch had exchanged with his cousin, my FiL, that his father’s unit had often flown against the 8th Air Force on which his cousin flew for the US. They talked about the horrors of war, losing family and friends; and even finding lost family while walking in miles-long lines of refugees as a young child after the war. The cousins respected one another, and the families still love one another.
The NATO officer cousin passed a few years back. I am proud to say in the few hours we shared, and the few minutes I had the floor, I got to thank him for helping defend Democracy in Germany and in the United States. He understood exactly what and how I meant it.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)Since my parents died I've been to Germany multiple times and met with my mother's family. My father's family has pretty much disappeared, but that's another story.
Most of the ones who survived the war are gone now, some long gone.
And yes, the family members with whom I correspond look at Trump and wonder: WTF? In fact, some of them had the same response to G W Bush.
Thanks again for your remarkable post, and best wishes.
Beck23
(272 posts)When I was in high school, my father, who was a doctor, and one of his employees who was from Germany, took the family on a trip to visit her relatives. There was a picture of her brother on the wall, who was killed in WWII. Her grandpa showed my dad the scars on his side from WWI.
mitch96
(14,793 posts)to the US in 1946. Due to her indoctrination she was not to keen on all the "jews" living in her LI NY jewish
Italian neighborhood. I must admit the only antisemitic comment I ever heard was mentioned was about another friend of ours. She said "Russ was a Jew but he was a good Jew" I did not understand what she ment and just blew it off... Old propaganda dies hard...
Our "crew" in the neighborhood was a mixed bag of backgrounds and religions
The classic melting pot..
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)Back in grade school one of my very best friends was Jewish.
My father was intensely antiSemitic, my mother not so much.
She talked to me about it after she met my friend's mother, and figured out what was happening.
Her comment to me was, "Don't tell your father."
She said the same thing whenever I brought home books about Nazi Germany. It seems weird to me now, but the paperback editions of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Berlin Diary were emblazoned with swastikas. My mother saw me with those books and freaked, wondering what the hell I was getting into. After I explained she told me to hide the covers, and again, "Don't tell your father."
My mom was apolitical but she hated the Nazis. It was a personal thing. There was one living in her apartment block who informed on others who weren't true believers. He slapped her once--and remember she was quite young at the time--for saying "Guten Tag" instead of "Heil Hitler." She also was pissed at him because as a die hard Nazi he was seemingly immune from the draft when all the other young men she knew were in the war, or dead, or POW's. Then too, he had access to real coffee when everyone else had to drink some horrid ersatz beverage made of acorns or something.
I credit public school with setting me straight on all this, especially a couple of social studies teachers who were just wonderful. I also grew up in a "mixed neighborhood"--lots of immigrants and first generation Americans such as myself.
Thanks for sharing, and best wishes.
agingdem
(8,541 posts)my mother was the sole survivor of her family of five...my father and his brother were the only two to survive their family of 6...though they embraced the United States, they were forever on guard for the next Hitler...they hid gold coins, money, and jewelry under our beds in holes drilled through the slab...every year we packed/repacked our suitcases, ready to leave on a moments notice...the stash under our beds?...to be used to bribe the soldiers to let us go...
they were right....
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)one of my Jewish friends called and asked, if push came to shove, whether I'd be willing basically to hide her and try to keep her safe until she could find her way to Israel. I agreed, of course, and actually began a sort of check list of what in that case would need doing. Her family background is similar to yours. Her grandmother on her father's side came to this country in the 1930s, all the others who stayed behind in Austria were murdered.
My neighbor in the apartment complex where I used to live was a survivor of Auschwitz/Birkenau. She was a Romanian Jew, passed away many years now. I occasionally tried to draw her out but she didn't want to talk about it, which I obviously could understand.
That so many Americans are ignorant of the Holocaust, or worse yet skeptical that it happened, is beyond infuriating. And this past year, since October 7th, has been especially depressing.
Best wishes to you and yours. Let's hope this coming year is better than this last.
MyMission
(2,000 posts)Her father was a German journalist who spoke 5 languages, and he sent his young daughter to live in Switzerland so she wouldn't have to join the Hitler youth group and be indoctrinated. He was forced to join the Nazi party and became part of Hitler's press corps. When the Germans conquered a city he would travel there to report on the glorious victory, and he would smuggle in various documents to help the residents escape. He knew that birth and baptismal certificates, travel papers, military IDs could be forged if they had original documents to copy. He'd also travel to Switzerland to see his daughter when he could. She returned to Germany after the war, eventually immigrating to the US.
My "aunt" Sigrid and my mom were new brides living in the same apartment building in Brooklyn, and her daughter was born 4+1/2 months after I was; we were raised as cousins, but she's also my best friend for almost 63 years. She'd privately joke about her mom being like a Nazi, a tough disciplined German, especially when rules were imposed she objected to. Kids!
But Sigrid came to the US on her own, met a Jewish man and married him, and gave him a Jewish child, or at least a child with Jewish blood and a Jewish name. I've sometimes thought over the years how what she did was her own form of reparations, ignoring the fact that she loved my "uncle". He was from an Orthodox Jewish family, and was rejecting their lifestyle by marrying a nonjew, but she raised her daughter as a Jew (with my mother's help). I think it was important to her, giving the world a Jewish child. She always had German magazines lying around.
She passed away earlier this year at age 95, feisty until the end!
I have many fond memories of my German Aunt.
mitch96
(14,793 posts)She had Parkinson's and her mind was failing her but like your friends mom, feisty till the end. I always was amazed at how beautiful she was. Long and lithe like a swimmer and always moving. Clean clean her place was spotless. With 5 kids she was always cooking too. When she started to need help about 20 years ago, my friend (the oldest) jumped in and took care of her. Towards the end she had an aid come in 5 times a week to help with her needs. The other kids wanted to sell the house and throw her in an assisted living facility. No that would never do with my friend. He is a real mensch.
m
ismnotwasm
(42,484 posts)We formed groups for safety, for comfort. We organized together for food.
We developed a form of intelligence, and some of is told ourselves that we were superior to all others. Groups became tribal, with tribal identities etc.
In history, there have been many horrible, horrible events. Nazi’s are one of the more recent.
In Octavia Butler’s “Dawn” an alien character says this:
cs."
"What's the second characteristic?"
Jdahya made a rustling noise that could have been a sigh, but that did not seem to comer from his mouth or throat. "You are intelligent," he said. "That's the newer of the two characteristics, and the one you might have put to work to save yourselves. You are potentially one of the most intelligent species we've found, though your focus is different from ours. Still, you had a good start in the life sciences, and even in genetics."
"What's the second characteristic?"
"You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all...
I’ve thought about this a lot over the years
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)but not this one.
Thanks for the turn-on!
ismnotwasm
(42,484 posts)A three books series—one of the best IMO!!!
JohnSJ
(96,838 posts)we are today., and social media sealed it.
William Seger
(11,124 posts)... and apparently it's a large enough subculture to be considered part of the American stereotype. I don't know what you'd call that other than sadism.
Turbineguy
(38,536 posts)I worked with a number of Germans and they were all very nice to me.
They paid a terrible price for Hitler and the Nazi's. Especially in the east. Something that MAGA's don't realize may very well happen to them if they succeed in electing Trump again.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)if you haven't seen it already.
Germany As a Culture of Remembrance, by Alon Confino.
Best wishes.
Turbineguy
(38,536 posts)
niyad
(120,839 posts)is not often mentioned in trying to figure out what happened to Germany that enabled the horrors of the third reich was the explicit psychological campaigns that had been going on for decades. From nietzche's "man and superman" to literature, art, music, etc., thete was a continuing effort to create and instill a belief in aryan superiority. hitler seized on it, and gave us the end result of such a belief. Today, we see the results of at least 50 years of a similar psych manipulation and propaganda effort, both here and elsewhere (looking at you, murdoch, ailes, amoung many others).
This is a very simplistic, very short, reference to decades-long, multi-pronged social experiments, and their intended horrific outcomes. But, one hopes, this time, knowing how and why it came about, we can stop it before it is too late.
Agaain, thank you for your most insightful OP.
Farmer-Rick
(11,543 posts)Hitler was funded by big business, including I.G. Farben and Krupp. They provided financial support for Hitler's propaganda campaign in Germany.
As the wealth of nations gets concentrated in a few privileged families through capitalism, more resources are removed from the middle class. Then comes the great depression, the great recession, the Treaty of Versailles, austerity for the middle class, bail outs for banks, foreclosure for the masses.
Our US factory jobs all moved out right before the great recession. And along with them, went the decent paying middle management jobs. We are now a nation of cashiers, waiters and servers.
This is what the MAGAts and Nazis feel. This is why they feel victimized. They may not understand why this is happening but they know their children and grandchildren aren't getting even the small successes they or their parents once had. Austerity and reparations have done their work on the middle class.
And all this wealth legally
and illegally collected from them, is fed to the filthy-rich. Then the filthy-rich use the wealth to make them afraid through propaganda and manipulation.
They buy up very convincing ads and propaganda to convince them that other Americans and immigrants are the real enemy. They divide and conquer.
Krupp was once the largest company in Europe and it made it's wealth from building weapons. I.G. Farben was a chemical conglomerate made up of 6 other companies. Yeah the average pre WWII German was suffering from the Great Depression but the filthy-rich were not. Austerity and reparations were the excuse used to take more from the middle class.
The filthy-rich have the wealth of small nations and now they want control and obedience from the people of those nations. So they buy monsters to implement their plans.
The populace of Nazi Germany and Trump supporters are merely believing the lies and propaganda. They are almost hypnotized by it. They can see only Trump or Hitler as the man who will save them from the mounting stress of slowly losing all they use to have. And they come with built-in, guilt free, scapegoats like Jewish people and immigrants.
Their plans work so well. It's amazing that people here can so readily see through the lies and manipulation. I have to wonder why everyone does not fall for it.
Joinfortmill
(16,694 posts)1. Its easier to blame others for our troubles than to take responsibility for ourselves.
2. Humans seem to gravitate to people who tell them they can solve all their problems.
The thing these two scenarios have in common is abdication of personal responsibility. Instead of a 'we're in this together' attitude, it's a 'you are the blame for my suffering' attitude.
Beck23
(272 posts)Bertrand Russell wrote an essay called "Superior Virtue of the Oppressed" in which he asserted that having been oppressed does not bestow a superior virtue on a person or a group of people, and that they could also resort to atrocities in the right cirumstance.
I still think there are some who resist the crowd. An example was Dietrich Boenhoffer who spoke out against Hitler. He paid with his life. There were also those like the family that hid Ann Frank's family.
Martin Eden
(13,596 posts)I understand Shirer's absolute comtempt for compliant Germans and his thirst for revenge, but the punishment he desired is based on emotion -- not a logical strategy to ensure fascism does not rear its ugly head again.
Hitler's rise to power may not have taken place if not for the punitive measures inflicted on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, followed by the hardships of the Great Depression.
Americans in 2024 embracing the fascism embodied in Donald Trump have no such explanatory circumstances as did the German populace ninety years ago.
So we do indeed need to answer why is fascism rearing its ugly head in the United States now, and how do we ensure it does not rise again?
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)He had spent years in Berlin during the Nazi regime, had witnessed first hand the hate mongering and even some of the atrocities. He and his wife also tried helping Jews who came to them, whenever they could.
But you make a good point. You would think in a nation as relatively prosperous and safe from turmoil it wouldn't be happening. This isn't to say that people aren't suffering, especially with the widening income disparity. But as in Nazi Germany, where the greatest support for the Nazis came from the middle class, we see lots of MAGA supporters who would seem to have no objective reason for feeling oppressed, aggrieved, threatened.
I look at the right wing focus on transgender people, at all the hatred directed against them from folks who never in their lives have met someone transgendered, let alone been in any way hurt by them, and have to wonder: what the fuck?
I suppose in part it's resistance to changing attitudes about gender, race, sexuality. The tolerance of Weimar Germany was a shock to many Germans, who felt their "traditional values" of homophobia, and keeping women "in their place" were being threatened.
There's a book I found interesting on this: Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, by Otto Friedrich.
We can see the same backlash in America today. I think, for instance, the election of President Obama fried the brains of so many Americans who found their fear of "the other" triggered in a massive way. This is not the America they grew up in, where LGBTQ+ people were consigned to the closet, and women were almost never in positions of authority, and people of color were denied anything close to an equal shot at "the American dream."
I wonder too if our defeat in the Vietnam War also didn't set some of this off. The same "stab in the back" nonsense as took hold in Germany after WWI. I remember seeing "Rambo" and hearing Stallone say something like, "This time, are you going to let us win?" Alarm bells rang in my head.
Anyway, thanks for your comment, and best wishes.
Martin Eden
(13,596 posts)That's a big part of it but they don't look at it that way, except the rich whose greed exceeds their humanity. They understand that to maintain and expand their wealth and power requires the divide and conquer strategy of manipulating through fear and hate, pitting the common folk against each other.
Tens of millions of common folk are religious cultural conservates whose upbringing sees gender diversity as repugnant, immoral, and a threat to their way of life. The wealthy (noted in the paragraph above) have been manipulating those fears with decades of media propaganda from talk radio, Fox News, and more recently internet algorithms.
One of my high school friends moved to northeast Arkansas about 5 years ago. Through personal experience she tells me her neighbors are good people. Nice, friendly, and though mostly poor, they will go out of their way to help neighbors in need. Yet they are staunch Republican Trump voters, programmed to believe Democrats are devils.
Perhaps the most obsene aspect of fascism in America today is how the religion of Jesus Christ has been co-opted by money changers in the temple who are the antithesis of everything Christ stood for.
Beck23
(272 posts)Just like some MAGA churches today.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)have had a visceral reaction to the sight of American flags in church pulpits. Not MAGA flags, mind you, but American flags.
They invariably comment on how this was done in Nazi Germany, and ask why do the churches allow this, and how dangerous it is to mix religion with nationalism.
Of course, as a society Germans learned this the hard way.
NNadir
(34,881 posts)Although I'm not entirely certain, since it was a long time ago, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich may have been among the first "adult" history book I read, probably in Junior High School. My parents didn't have many books in our house, but for some reason had that one, in hardcover.
For the record, my father was half German and half Scots - his Grandmother was a German immigrant, his Grandfather a German speaking Austrian - and his father, the Scots drunk, was badly wounded in World War I fighting the Germans in the trenches. My father, looked, in his old age, rather like the Austrian war criminal Adolf Eichmann when he was on trial in Jerusalem, almost a dead ringer in fact; I always wondered about that, if Eichmann was a distant (or not so distant) relative. My father had an antisemitic edge, although many of my friends growing up were Jews; all of my first four jobs had Jewish bosses, one a holocaust survivor, tattoo and all. My father got along very well with my best friend growing up, who was a Jew. He certainly was no Nazi, and spoke rather proudly of having machine gunned Nazi war planes in the Eastern Atlantic.
Still, my parents, as poorly educated as they were, didn't really buy many books; it was enough to keep food on the table, a roof over our heads.
Why they had that book, and few other books, other than Bible commentary is something I never thought about. I remember Shirer's commentary as sardonic, as finding it all unbelievable but real, but I didn't have the sense that he wanted Germany pastoralized, but then again, the book was history, not political theory. Of course, I last read the book nearly half a century ago.
The punitive pastoralization of Germany was of course, the proposal of Robert Morgenthau, resisted by Henry Stimson, and finally by Roosevelt, and then Truman. It was a serious consideration; happily it didn't prevail. Truman did a lot to establish West Germany, and to protect West Berlin.
I should read that biography of Morgenthau; there's so much to read, so little time, I may never get to it.
I don't believe that the US will go fascist; Trump is just a high point in the will do so, but of course, there were Germans who didn't believe Germany would go fascist. The difference of course, is cultural, hopefully. The US has a long culture of democratic government; in 1933, Weimar Germany was an imposed Government, just 14 years in existence, imposed by foreign punitive powers, and it followed a long history of autocratic Monarchism. (Basically, World War I started as a familial dispute among cousins.)
I hope, and believe, I'm right; that we are at a nobler crossroads than 1933 Germany.
An excellent post by the way, very thoughtful.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)are in End of a Berlin Diary. It was written in 1945-46, and I think it reflects how raw were the wounds inflicted by Germans throughout Europe. Shirer covered the Nuremberg Trials for CBS radio, and translated and included in his book many of the documents used by the prosecution. The documents are shocking to read even today, back then no doubt more so. How Hitler and the General Staff deliberately planned their wars of aggression. How, for instance, Russian POW's were deliberately starved to death as a matter of policy. How SS soldiers dressed in Polish uniforms attacked a Prussian radio station as a "false flag" operation meant to justify the start of the war--with the soldiers who participated then murdered so as to leave no witnesses. How the gas chambers at Auschwitz were designed after experiments in mass killing conducted at other camps. And on and on and on.
By the time The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich came out fifteen or so years had passed, and so I think his views may have tempered some. By then democracy in Germany had seemingly taken hold, and "the German problem"--as he put it--didn't seem quite so urgent. Also, the Rise and Fall, as you point out, was history, whereas Berlin Diary and especially End of a Berlin Diary are more his first hand observations and ruminations.
I somewhat disagree when you say Weimar was "imposed" on Germany. Perhaps in the sense that it was the result of the lost war, but it sprang out of the revolution that began with the sailors' mutiny in Kiel and then spread throughout the fleet. The Social Democrats, largest party at the time, took power and proclaimed the republic after the Kaiser fled. But yes, this was the first time Germany had experience with anything like a democratic government, aside from the short lived attempts during the failed revolution of 1848.
Winston Churchill also played a part in killing the Morgenthau Plan, as well as other schemes to punish Germany. To be clear, he was in favor of the Nuremberg trials and bringing war criminals to justice. But there's an account of Stalin, at one of the Big Three summits, insisting that 40,000 German officers be summarily executed at the end of the war. He wanted the entire General Staff and then tens of thousands of the top ranking officers stood before firing squads. Churchill told Stalin he'd rather be executed on the spot himself right then and there rather than be part of such doings. Stalin then said he was only joking, but Churchill, recounting this in his memoir, said he doubted it.
I'm holding my breath until President Harris is inaugurated. I'm hoping for the best, but can't help but feel nervous about the outcome.
Thanks for your post, and best wishes.
NNadir
(34,881 posts)I am not particularly up to speed on the exact series of events internally on the German side at the time of the First World War ended.
I'll take your word for it; it can be said, though, that Weimar was associated with the defeat, and perhaps this is the reason that the "stab in the back" myth offered such resonance in Germany.
My familial connection to being of German extraction are far more tenuous than your own. My mother signed one of her pictures she gave to my father in German (although, she didn't speak any German really) when they were dating. I still have it. She signed, "Ich leibe du" rather than "Ich liebe dich," so there's that. Maybe she was trying to flatter his German origins; I don't know; they've both been dead for a very long time.
I've mostly focused on the background of the American intervention, a kind of curious thing about which to think.
It's funny to find myself in this conversation, because just two days ago, I watched a CSPAN history lecture on line by Jennifer Keene, teaching a class on American "neutrality" during World War I, and the reasons the US entered the war.
Jennifer Keene Myths About America in World War I.
She spent part of the lecture talking about Herbert Hoover's relief efforts in Belgium.
Belgium, at that time was considered an "German atrocity." Of course, Belgium was responsible for the "Congo atrocity" about which very little is said, even to this day.
But to return to the 20th century war(s):
I often engage in the perspective of there being a "World War I" and a "World War II," but at the end of the day, I think they were the same war, interrupted by a two decade smoldering intermission, and the so called "Cold War" being a smoldering sequel.
History is a horror that flows in darkened light; hopefully we will not mirror 1933; I don't think we will.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)but when the Versailles Treaty was finalized he commented, "This isn't peace. This is a truce for twenty years." Which turned out to be exactly right.
The stab in the back was given resonance when the German military, under Ludendorff, dodged all responsibility for the surrender. Ludendorff went personally to Kaiser Wilhelm and insisted he ask for an armistice, but then left it to the Social Democrats to negotiate the terms, even though they'd been out of the loop for years and knew nothing of the military situation. The result being that the public blamed them for the surrender, rather than the military which had botched it all.
Another factor was how the Allies extended "the Starvation Blockade" even after 11 11 1918. The Germans surrendered under the assumption that the blockade would be lifted once the shooting stopped, and the famine conditions that prevailed in the major cities would improve. In fact, things got worse. The only source of protein for Germans by that time was the catch of the Baltic fishing fleet. When the German navy surrendered the Allies entered the Baltic and refused access to German fishermen. The blockade was used then as a tactic to force the German government--by now run by the Social Democrats--to agree to the terms of Versailles. In the meantime many thousands more Germans--mostly elderly, young children, and disabled--starved to death. I can't imagine the bitterness something like that would cause among the families who suffered such losses.
Have you read The Illusion of Victory: America in World War One, by Thomas Fleming? It's very much a revisionist history of "the Great War." It's rather controversial among historians of the era, but worth the read if only for a take that's very different from the general American view of that war.
Thanks for the link to Jennifer Keene. I'll check it out later today or tomorrow.
Best wishes.
NNadir
(34,881 posts)...shirking of responsibility for the German defeat, and of course, he was a proto-Nazi in "master race" ideology. The right wing "stab in the back" myth derives from his immoral lack of acceptance of responsibility.
I have not read The Illusion of Victory but I checked our reviews on the internet; it looks quite interesting:
Wilson is my least favorite Democrat of the 20th century, even worse, in my view, than Joseph P. Kennedy and his famous sons, of whom I am also not all that fond, although Ted eventually straightened out his act and became a true liberal. I'm always open to Wilson bashing.
My county library doesn't have the book however. It seems to be available in Princeton University's Firestone library; perhaps I'll leaf through it there. (Good 'ole Harvey Firestone, reintroducing near slavery for rubber plantations in Liberia, of all places, long before Eloon Musk reintroduced it for cobalt slaves in the "Democratic Republic" of Congo.)
Wilson, of course, was a terrible racist. His domestic policy alone is enough to condemn him. There are, or have been, some "shrines" to him here in Princeton, including the formerly named Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs and International Relations. The University, of which he had been President, dropped his name from the Institute when activists pointed to his racism. (When my kids were small they liked to wade in the fountain in front of the building and I'd sit on the steps around it, glaring at the building in a completely ineffectual way.) Wilson, to my mind, was the last of the Civil War era Democratic Presidents, nothing like our modern Democratic Party. Wilson, I'm sure would have voted for John McCain and for Mitt Romney, aghast at an African American in the White House.
I'm really, really, really looking forward to an African American woman in the White House to totally dispose of the Wilsonian legacy. I'm fairly convinced we'll see it; a little nervous of course, but overall confident.
llmart
(16,331 posts)It's posts like yours that keep me coming to DU for education, insightfulness, and personal experiences that are relevant.
My mother was German but she was a very private and quiet woman who was overwhelmed by a life with an abusive husband who wasn't a good provider and her seven children. She died when I was only 17, and I regret that I really wasn't that interested in her life as a young person or her parents who were both German and whom I never knew. I do remember that when my loud-mouthed, angry father would get mad at her he'd call her a "f***ing Nazi. It could have been just one more of his derogatory epithets which he was famous for, but I've often wondered about my maternal grandparents and what they were like during WWII and how my mother grew up. I hated and feared my father, but my mother was one of the most unprejudiced people I've ever known.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)And thank you for your kind words.
Best wishes.
DemonGoddess
(5,125 posts)You give many people food for thought. Thank you.
orthoclad
(4,728 posts)when Hitler took power.
He served against the Nazis.
But he wouldn't let me speak ill of the German people.
Now I can sympathize with his flight from Hitler.
Swede
(34,923 posts)She was born in the fifties. Her father was in the Luftwaffe and was captured by Russians. He was released from prison in the fifties and this is how she came to be.
Her mother hated Hitler, called him "der Teufel" Her 16 years old son was conscripted in the last days of war, never to be seen again.
My dad was in the Canadian army, during WWII, landed at Normandy, he saw horrors, but never really gave details to us. Grama said he came home changed, all the joy of life was taken away, as she put it.
Let's not do this again.
bucolic_frolic
(47,737 posts)Human foibles are everywhere, but a fascist leader needs opportunity economically, historically, politically; he needs financial backing and abundant narcissist followers who think it their destiny to rule and exploit.
Cruel leaders come and go periodically across history. Fascists are the modern variety. There were plenty of brutal kings, queens who were despots. The people, those around them, have little choice but to follow. We are like ant colonies or bee hives.
BlueMTexpat
(15,504 posts)Having just recently returned from a trip to the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, & Lithuania) and Poland, I am so heartened and impressed by the courage and endurance of those peoples, who were all invaded and occupied by various regimes throughout their history and who have accomplished so much in their countries since 1991. We hve been remiss in not emulating them - certainly we who are "white" US citizens have had much better beginnings than they.
We in the US - other than our fellow Native American citzens - never had the experience of invasion and occupation in our comparatively MUCH shorter history, once our country won its 18th century war against the British. We had our heart-wrenching "civil" war that may have legally emancipated oue enslaved population. But the DNA of racism (and mysogyny) Has been in our culture from the beginning, despite our Founders' statements to the contrary. As can be seen in so many ways, even today in the US.
On the second to last day of our tour, we visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. https://www.auschwitz.org/en/
Auschwitz-Birkenau is probably the best preserved site of the horrors and atrocities that human beings inflicted on other human beings simply because they were deemed by the Nazi Reich to be members of specific "target" groups: Jews; Roma (gypsies); people with mental and/or physical defects; homosexuals; and Jehovah's Witnesses. But these groups were also joined by others who were NOT members of these target groups simply because those others either were caught assisting target group members (or their children) to escape or because they spoke out against the Nazi authorities for what they saw happening.
I already knew quite a lot about this history from the last international claims project I worked with before my official retirement in 2007, having met some of the people in person who had risked their lives at the time (without being caught) and whose contributions have been recognized because their names are included among the Righteous Among the Nations at the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem. https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous.html
But it was also disheartening to realize that so many people in the USA either never learned about this history or never cared to learn. Of course, many of these same people care little about our own US history as well, except for the "Rah, rah" bit.
Like you, I read Shirer, specifically his "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," as soon as I could get my hands on a copy in the 1960s. I was born during WWII (my father was in the US Navy in the South Pacific when I was born) and I wanted to learn as much as I could about what had happened in Europe because we literally did not know much then about the extent of the horrors.
We have learned so MUCH more since then, especially since the break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact when more documents and witnesses have become available.
For us even to have as a PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE (let alone as an ex-President) who openly states his admiration of Hitler and his Nazi Reich and for ANY of our fellow citizens to CONSIDER voting for him, is literally something that is incomprehensible to the thinking world.
We know his track record; we know what he plans to do; we know what his oligarchic friends in the US and abroad want him to do.
IT MUST NOT HAPPEN.
*************
For reference: I mailed my absentee ballot (straight BLUE ticket for all partisan races) to the US before leaving for this trip and received confirmation from the Maryland State Board of Elections that my ballot has been received and will be counted.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)It's a documentary called "Weapons of the Spirit" about resistance to the Nazis by the inhabitants of a small French village.
https://www.jewishfilm.org/Catalogue/films/weapons.htm
It's an incredible story and something of an antidote for the depression that can come on contemplating this history.
Thank you for your post, and best wishes.
BlueMTexpat
(15,504 posts)Thanks for that link. But I have heard stories of the events in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and the plateau of Vivarais-Lignon. See also: https://time.com/5680342/french-village-rescued-jews/
I also heard stories -secondhand - about secondary students in Douvaine, a small commune on the French-Swiss border near Lake Geneva, who similarly were inspired by their parish priest to hide Jewish children and then smuggle them across the border into Switzerland during the Vichy Government era. Their parish priest was ultimately caught by the Nazis when they fully occupied France. He was sent to the death camps and killed there, without ever betraying his student helpers, who lived to pass the tales on.
Among the most impressive French survivors (ALL were impressive) of both the Vichy and Nazi Reich eras whom I met personally was the Frenchwoman Jeanne Brousse. I met her in 2006, when she must have been 85, but she had a mind and spirit as lively as ever and - surprisingly - looked MUCH younger than her age. She was a true role model and risked her life many times trying to help Jews and other targets of the Nazi Reich. This Wiki article gives a good overview of her life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Brousse
Her biography (in French) is called Les Armes de Jeanne 1940-1945 and I have a signed copy. Her activities and motivations are well described there, Having the privilege to meet and speak with her in person was one of the magical experiences of my life. I've long hoped to find an English translation for family members who neither speak nor read French. But I haven't found one yet. https://www.decitre.fr/livres/les-armes-de-jeanne-1940-1945-9782912008268.html
You can also find copies in French on Amazon, but this is probably not the best time to beat the drums for Amazon.
Best wishes to you! Despite our own troubled national psyche in the US, there are still heroes here. Some we all know well already. But others are and will remain unsung.
paleotn
(19,617 posts)I completely agree. I've read his Rise and Fall a number of times, but never his Diaries. Sounds like Churchill's crazy plan to divide up and impoverish Germany forever. Thankfully, cooler, more long thinking heads prevailed. I think, maybe Shirer was very uncomfortable with the idea that the land of Beethoven and Goethe could descend into such barbarism, so he made an excuse for it. Something he could ascribe to German character as the driving force. But it wasn't something in the German psyche, in my mind. Any human society could do the same given the right circumstances.
TygrBright
(20,987 posts)...until cultural toxicity resulted in climate change.
While the existential threat of climate change may be more urgent, the underlying cause of cultural toxicity should not be ignored.
However, if the existential threat of climate change is to be addressed before it completely reboots our species, the very process of addressing it may help address the underlying issues that make so many of our cultures so toxic.
I'd like to hope this.
wistfully,
Bright
ananda
(30,979 posts)So it's hard to resist, even for the best of us who want what's
good for everyone and the planet.
We can do it, but it takes work, hard work!
As Kamala and Tim keep saying: Hard work is good work!
cilla4progress
(25,987 posts)Thanks to all who generously shared their thoughts and experience!
Uncle Joe
(60,289 posts)so it's instinctual to desire being part of something larger, the group, herd, tribe, party or nation and that's just how planets are formed.
It's the eternal struggle between dark matter and dark energy, the impulse to be part of something bigger as in the former opposed by expansion and separation as in the latter, creating "the other."
Thanks for the thread thucythucy
Wild blueberry
(7,286 posts)and all who wrote such thoughtful discussions.
This is why I love DU.
Thank you, all.
Envirogal
(178 posts)while I was backpacking in Europe. I had never really understood much about WW2 and decided to deep dive. I think it might be a good idea to reread it given the times we live in now.
Blue Owl
(54,984 posts)moniss
(6,205 posts)about Germans and Germany during that period are rhetorical for many and they really don't want answers as much as they want to use the phrase "how could they" as an eternal condemnation, label of responsibility and use this as an eternal condemnation of German people of that time.
I know that your questions and curiosity are well founded etc. and so please understand that my statements are not directed at you but are just made to add to the discussion. The answers to these questions about Germans and Germany during the period are sometimes complex and sometimes simple. But many who seek them fail to see that a mirror mocks their "wondering" and their questions are posed to others as well. For just one example "How could the American people allow and take part in the slaughter of the indigenous people here in the US?" How could we allow and take part in the slaughter to the point of near extinction of one of the most prolific species in America? Truly how could people have done not just these examples but many more and the US is certainly not alone in the world as we look at the conduct of the European Colonial Powers.
I do not believe that there is something unique to Germans that somehow made them "allow" Hitler. I think Shirer displays an ignorant bigotry by claiming such a thing. There were plenty of ethnic Germans who resisted in the very beginning and many more who fled rather than be trapped and made prisoner to what they feared was happening. Shirer has no room in his ideas of what is "inherent" in Germans to explain the ones who fought against it and who fled and helped others flee. He gives proof to the saying "Some of the most ignorant people are also some of the most educated people".
How could the German people "allow" this or that is to lump them all together and that is about as fair as asking "How could the Texans allow the horrendous treatment of immigrants at the border that took place?" It was not Texans writ large but rather some people from other areas along with "some" Texans who perpetrated and "allowed" children to be ripped away from parents and kept in cages some to never yet be found.
I have come to believe that the world has it's accepted "story-line" of how it wants to look at the period and to a large extent the starvation and rape of people, not just of Germans, following the fall of Berlin is not something we will get much honest discussion of or portrayal in Western media. Some people around the world ignorantly lash out when these questions are asked and claim things like "you're just trying to make excuses for what they did" etc. Sometimes I understand that people have a need or cling to a narrative for various reasons and at other times I try to prompt some examination of "accepted" beliefs. I did so a few weeks back when I put up a video of the "Upstairs, Downstairs" episode titled "The Beastly Hun" in which Mr. Hudson is swayed by what's around him and takes a bigoted turn. The episode was well written and performed and squarely comes to the matter that often when people say "How could they?" they hold their own answer and the mirror so desperately avoided asks "How could you?"
So here is the episode again.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)I don't take what you've written at all personally.
You ask interesting and relevant questions.
I haven't seen this episode, in fact I'm not familiar with the series, so I'll take a look.
And thanks again for adding to the discussion, and best wishes.
moniss
(6,205 posts)the episode portrays WW 1 but makes one of the points I raised. I've raised the post WW 2 period in Germany and Europe at times over the years but as I said it is uncomfortable for many to look at the reality. Even today the stereotype of a German as a certain type of person or using "phrases and characterizations" to mock or portray them is considered pretty much acceptable and the ones doing so never stop to think that Germans in Germany during the period also lost family and friends to the madness of the Nazis as they rose and brought horror to the world and so making the mocking generality is thoughtless.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)It makes me want to delve into the series some more.
I think there's a growing willingness to look at the post war period with a bit more nuance, "nuance" seeming to be one of my favorite words these days.
Even in Germany there was a reluctance to bring up the miseries and violence of the post war period. The publication of A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in a Conquered City, was somewhat controversial at the time, with some people uneasy about dredging up this part of the past. Have you read it? There's a movie now based on the book but I haven't seen it. I'll give you a trigger warning, since the book describes in some detail what the Soviet soldiers did in the immediate aftermath of the battle.
There were a few accounts earlier on that didn't flinch at the reality, and I'll post trigger warnings for these as well. The Last Battle by Cornelius Ryan came out in 1966, and describes the mass rapes during and in the aftermath of the battle for Berlin. Susan Brownmiller, in Against Our Will: Men Women and Rape devotes some pages to the topic as well. And there's a movie, Town Without Pity, the fictional account of a German girl gang raped by a group of American soldiers that came out in 1961. But by and large the topic was brushed under the carpet. And all of these early accounts, the ones I know of anyway, are by American or British authors, not German. When Gunter Grass describes a rape in The Tin Drum, he even turns it into something of a joke.
The damage the Nazis did is incalculable, and the fact that the ideology still holds an attraction to so many people is appalling.
I'm holding my breath until the election, and probably won't feel totally relieved until President Harris is sworn in on January 20.
Thanks again, and best wishes.
moniss
(6,205 posts)recommendations. When you mention that much of this work so far is by British or American authors I think that the societal/legal pressure within Germany to not mention things has played a part as well. There has all along been the underlying hesitancy so as not to be seen as "making excuses" for what happened.
The entire post WW 2 period from 1945-1960 is so poorly explained or understood today with regard to the impact and foundation it had to ongoing issues in Europe and around the world. The Western thinking that borders can just be redrawn and people moved here and there and things would "work out" demonstrates such colossal ignorance and was the Colonial powers thinking that they could just treat the world and people like a chess board and pieces. Much of the decision making at Pottsdam and Yalta was not about how these arrangements would be workable for the people and for peace but rather how an advantage could be had by one or the other of the Allied powers.
All of this is so poorly explained or understood in the West and I believe it is by design. The US and Great Britain have their desired memes about WW 2, Yalta/Pottsdam and the period after and there is a general acceptance of a simplistic portrayal that has the soldiers coming home to ticker tape parades and then life goes on. People in the US especially are generally exposed to a recitation of the period that is almost entirely dominated by scenes of battle and narration about troop movements etc. They mostly know about the internment of Japanese citizens on the West Coast but are absolutely shocked to learn about US citizens of German heritage who were rounded up and put in camps here in the US. It shocks them even more to learn of the complete plunder of intellectual/financial assets that took place after the fall of Berlin. You had US citizens of German heritage who were receiving royalties for example from German patents that their long deceased grandfather had owned and who now had that ripped away and handed to companies like Dow, Union Carbide etc. US citizens of German heritage lost businesses and homes just because they were German. But it is not discussed here or an apology given like was done for the Japanese.
ForgedCrank
(2,428 posts)when everyone is a Hitler, no one is a Hitler. i've seen every Republican candidate for the past 25 years compared to Hitler.
We really should stop. This isn't changing any minds on the voting front, but it is making it appear as if all of us on the blue side of the coin subscribe to these silly notions, and that hurts us as a party.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)And for the record I've never likened any American politician to Hitler. Well, maybe David Duke, but certainly no one in any of the two major parties.
But then we've never seen a candidate for a major party announce he was going to be "a dictator on day one." That he would round up tens of millions of "illegal" aliens and put them into camps. That he would use the military to attack political opponents. That his political opponents were "vermin" and "scum." That he would "terminate" the Constitution. That the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be shot. That members of a particular ethnic group were "eating the cats, were eating the dogs" of Americans. That a violent coup attempt, an assault on the Capitol resulting in multiple serious injuries and several deaths was "a day of love." Who stood by and watched while his own vice president was in danger of being lynched. That there were "good people" among the Nazi demonstrators at Charlottesville. That if he lost this election you could "blame it on the Jews" and that "blood will flow." That "Hitler did some good things." That he wishes he had generals more like "the German generals." That what we need to solve crime in this country is "a day of rage." That criminality is a result of "bad genes." That immigrants were "poisoning the blood" of our nation.
Have I left anything out?
Probably.
I think what hurts us as a party, and as a nation, is an unwillingness to face the truth head-on.
But thank you for your opinion, and best wishes.
Bozvotros
(848 posts)I think she was of German or Swiss descent and she coined a term that she borrowed from another psychologist called "poisonous pedagogy." She applied it to the way German people were easily convinced to accept Hitler's hateful rhetoric and were easily intimidated into silence. She wrote about how strict and abusive German child rearing technique had been.
She mentioned that some German child rearing books, encouraged parents to strike their infant children so they would learn to fear and obey their parents. It's not hard for people raised in such a way, to respond meekly to brutal authoritarianism when it rears it's ugly head. A similar poisonous pedagogy still thrives today in America and brought us to Trump.
moniss
(6,205 posts)the ones like Miller, Shirer etc. fail to account for the many thousands and thousands of Germans who did resist and fight and eventually fled and helped others flee. They were raised by German parents as well. My point being there is no one answer because there were many reasons, many different motivations, many different circumstances and there is no room for recognition by these "analysts" of the time that some people did what they did for reasons that have nothing unique to being German. If it were true then we could extrapolate that broad brush to any and all situations involving the horrors that mankind has inflicted upon others down through the centuries. A section of the country for various reasons fell in line or went along for their own survival and some for their own greed etc. I reject the approach of ones like Miller or Shirer because it imparts an unjustified "unity" of blame to a whole people that is not supported by the facts and I also reject it because it is an example of stereotyping bigotry. For example the British writ large did not do horrible things to the Irish as opposed to many in power and their many supporters. The Israelis writ large are not doing things to Palestinian civilians as opposed to a portion of the Israeli population and certain leaders. In all of these example situations there are those who are in opposition to the atrocities and who take actions to resist and to protect others sometimes at ultimate cost of their lives. Despite being raised by the same style of parenting.
Our own Civil War had plenty of examples of brother fighting brother, one defending an atrocity and another decrying it, despite being raised in the same house by the same parents/style.
UpInArms
(51,929 posts)(An excerpt)
The Germans, 1933-45
Milton Mayer
But Then It Was Too Late
"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
More at link
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)I'll be sure to check it out.
The BBC decades ago ran a really brilliant documentary series called "World at War." It's twenty four or twenty six one hour segments, narrated by Lawrence Olivier. Really the best documentary series on the war I've ever seen.
Anyway, there's an episode on the German home front, in which a woman describes what the Nazis did as being like "an anesthetic. It came at you drip by drip," so you were unaware of what was happening until it was too late.
"Gradual habituation"--something like a drug.
Thank you for posting, and best wishes.
Bozvotros
(848 posts)In a similar way you can see the incremental acceptance of Trump's ever more terrifying pronouncements promises, threats and bizarre behaviors. The astounding fact that the Washington Post couldn't endorse anyone for this election was proof of Mayers ideas. And in the same way the New York Times and a host of other media outlets ignored, minimized and sanewashed Trump's rhetoric and campaign. He could literally repeat Hitler's slogans without any of them saying, "This is an atrocity" or "He is an abomination and mortal threat to America and the free world" I also find incredible that no interviewer could bring themselves to ask him "Why do you lie all the time?" Better yet, tell him, "You lie again and again today. It's pathetic you never produce any proof of your assertions or pronouncements. Do you take all of your followers as ignorant fools?"
I'd love to see that before the election. It will be too late if he wins.
UpInArms
(51,929 posts)and no one called him out on it …
smh
Sparkly
(24,362 posts)and sharing your family story. 
Have you been able to write or record your parents' memoirs in any way?
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)My mom died when I was a teenager, after a long illness that saw her pretty much incapacitated the year before she passed away. I used to blame my father, but really: it was cancer.
My father, aside from being an anti-Semite and supporter of Hitler to his dying day, was an alcoholic who had difficulty telling fantasy from reality. Anyway, I have some stories of his but he was a most unreliable story teller.
I've had a bit more luck with my extended family on my mother's side. They've told me some little bits about being children during the war and having to rush to the shelter during bombing attacks. My mom grew up in the Ruhr, her father was a coal miner. The area came in for heavy bombing, the Americans by day, the British at night. My uncle, who was also a child at the time, tells the story of coming out of the shelter to see his neighborhood in flames, and bodies on the street. He lost both of his older brothers in the war, the one in Africa with Rommel, the other in Russia.
There's an account in Shirer's Berlin Diary of a joke Germans told 1939-1940.
Q: A Luftwaffe plane crashes. On board are Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Goebbels. Who is saved?
A: The German people.
And then there's this joke my mother told me, which I later learned was also commonplace.
One of the Nazi's favorite slogans was: "And for all this we have the Fuehrer to thank!"
This was repeated in newsreels, on posters, on the radio. The end to unemployment, the building of the autobahn, the curbing of inflation, and then eventually the victories in Poland and France. "And for all this we have the Fuehrer to thank."
Then, later in the war and at its end, looking at the rubble, the bodies in the street, the curtailed rations, the lousy coffee, the shortage of coal so that homes were unheated in the winter, the lists of war dead, some Germans--those who weren't brainwashed idiots--would look at each other and say, "And for all this we have the Fuehrer to thank."
My father of course never appreciated that sort of wit.
Best wishes.
alarimer
(16,664 posts)in their susceptibilty to fascism. Some of it was due to how German was gutted after WWI. We should have done after WWI what was done in Japan after WWII- basically rebuilt it. Hitler would never have happened. But he did.
And it's easy to talk an uneducated populace into hating others. Religion does that very well.
Richard D
(9,474 posts). . . all the people I have heard who rationalize the rapes, torture, murder, and kidnapping of Oct 7 as something that Israelis deserved because, well, Israel.
Trueblue Texan
(3,058 posts)I will come back tomorrow to read it again when my brain is not so tired. Also to make note of the references that I want to learn more from. I love your writing. Please post MORE!
soandso
(1,631 posts)that poses important questions. Before I read the thread, though, I want to say that it's very sad than anyone made you feel responsible or guilty. Nobody is responsible for the actions of another and every German or person of German descent is an individual. Collectivizing people like that - to demonize them - is wrong, no matter how much it goes on.
OldBaldy1701E
(6,700 posts)Too many powerful people rely on racism and division to maintain their wealth and influence. They are not going to give any of that up.
Sad, but true. 
the_sly_pig
(749 posts)I can't speak to the level of education of German public during the Nazi era, but a valid argument could be made that stupidity is a marker of hate, or at least, apathy.
Ronny Raygun figured out that smart people lean liberal. It takes an open mind and critical thought to attempt to understand the world around us. And so with an educated public, a public able to critically think, the prospect of a conservative majority was becoming thin.
The attack on education and science began with him and we are now seeing the fruits of his labor. The nescient unable to discern between right and wrong, being forced back into the arms of an all-mighty savior, because democracy now takes too much effort.
I believe there is a maximum of 40% of the population that will always remain self-centered and stupid. But they can be beaten by a simple vote. And voting is vital. But when you think about the sacrifice it took to maintain this democracy, this Constitution, it can be overwhelming. But people have sacrificed and their sacrifice should not go unnoticed. And so we should certainly hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. And I mean the worst. Because throughout human history, the stupid, the unthinking, the religious, have never hesitated to use force to realize their will upon others.
"It can't happen here" or "it can't happen now" is false. It can happen here and it can happen now.
Pinback
(12,912 posts)Hard to admit, impossible to deny.
Every person has within them the capacity for empathy and community and the capacity for selfishness and cruelty.
As Jung observed, most of us reflexively avoid what he called “The Shadow” in ourselves altogether. Instead, we’d prefer to find fault in others and project our inadequacies onto them. Thus the same nation that produced Goethe and Beethoven can produce Hitler. The same society that produced Eleanor Roosevelt and Jonas Salk can produce Donald Trump.
BumRushDaShow
(144,656 posts)My ancestors and the indigenous of North America would beg to differ.
Biden apologizes for forced Native American boarding school policy that caused abuse and deaths of children.
US Navy will apologize for the 1882 obliteration of a Tlingit village in Alaska
Some other semi-apoloigies.
The largest ethnic group in this country through much of its history, is GERMAN.
The descendants of the European immigrants who dragged the African ancestors of current American citizens, where several million died during the Middle Passage, want us to forget this.
This is why they are trying to ERASE the history here and they've done a damn good job. The 1619 Project attempted to get into it.
Those of us here warn the newly immigrated but they wave it away... until they finally see it for themselves.
I am glad for your epiphany in the moment and the hope is that more will experience the same and will help to continue to move this country into the even greater potential that it CAN have.
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)and I should have qualified that statement to recognize these cardinal sins of America's past.
And it's also true that the descendants of ethnic Germans make up the largest single block of current American citizens.
Which is interesting given how little attention is paid to their role in American history, both good and bad.
For instance, Ronald Takaki in his book A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, is virtually silent on this aspect of our multicultural history. In fact, "Germans" as a ethnicity are mentioned only twice in his 493 pages. One of these references is to German Jews, one is to note that, unlike Japanese Americans, German Americans weren't sent to camps during WWII. "Germany" as a nation is mentioned once, in relation to the murder of ethnic Turks in that nation. Nothing about, for instance, the intense persecution of German Americans during WWI, which included the closing of most German language newspapers, laws passed banning the teaching of German in public schools, and so on:
https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entries/german-americans-during-world-war-i/
The role of ethnic Germans in American society is also nuanced.
The failed revolutions of 1848, when uprisings across Germany and Austria sought to replace the various autocracies, led to thousands of German liberals and radicals having to flee for their lives. Many came to the US, where they joined progressive causes here. German-Americans, for instance, became a major part of the abolitionist movement, and were a significant pro-Lincoln voting block in 1860 and 1864. They also volunteered for service in the Union army in disproportionate numbers. Ironically, the common belief of the time was that Germans made poor soldiers, on account of their perceived pacifist beliefs.
Similarly, the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933 led to more thousands fleeing the country, with many again coming to the States. Scientists, artists, authors, film makers all made significant contributions to American culture. There was, again, a dark side to this in that after the war the US government brought over German scientists, Werner von Braun being the most famous, who were pro-Nazi or at the very least had been willing to put their talents in the service of a genocidal regime.
You perhaps already know all this history, and I post this here simply to add to the discussion.
In terms of "complicity," German-Americans such as myself have benefited from and continue to benefit from all the advantages of white privilege. This part of my heritage is in fact much more problematic than my ties and roots to Germany. For instance, my various though trivial interactions with the law might have had a very different outcome had I had a darker complexion. And my parents, as white immigrants, no doubt had an easier time making their way in America than so many others, both immigrants and native born people of color, and I of course have benefited from their advantages. Then too, my status as an American, hyphenated or not, means that I accrue advantages not open to many people around the world. My carbon footprint--though much smaller than your typical American--nonetheless is no doubt considerably larger than the majority of people on this planet.
So even though my immediate family only participated in American culture post 1940s and into the '50s, I still can't escape my own part as a beneficiary, so to speak, of all the horrors that came before. Indeed, the very land on which I live, this plot of ground on which I'm typing these words, was no doubt stolen from peoples who received no compensation and have largely been hounded out of existence.
Please forgive the length of this post. I do tend to ramble some, don't I?
And thank you again for your post and kind words.
Best wishes.
BumRushDaShow
(144,656 posts)called that for obvious reasons. Yes it is the SAME place where the infamous Revolutionary War "Battle of Germantown" took place and where several of the mansions from that period still stand (as museums), with signs of that battle still etched on their exteriors. It is also where President George Washington fled during the yellow fever outbreak, taking refuge in a home that would be used as the "White House" at the time, in the early 1790s.
Yet Germantown ALSO became one of the biggest hotbeds for ABOLITIONISTS among the religious sect known as the "Friends" (Quakers)) (a group that founder of Pennsylvania - William Penn - belonged to), but only after many decades of soul-searching.
The London-born Penn went traveling through what is currently Germany, and triggered a significant immigration of the disaffected there, to settle here in PA, forming what would be Germantown, as well as the many communities of the current Amish ( "Pennsylvania (Dutch) Deutsch" ) and Mennonites, etc.
Throughout this country's history, there have been cycles of discovery and illumination, followed by oppression, suppression and purging.
Even the term "Multiculturalism", which was an attempt to resurrect the concept of equal rights after the purge of "Affirmative Action" as a remedy to the horrors of the past that triggered the Civil Rights movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, was itself destroyed, in a historic sense, and that eventually (and quietly) gave rise to a new term - "DEI" (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion).
And now, before our own eyes, THAT is being purged from existence.
The irony of the United States is that you have a portion of those who flee the oppression and fascism from their native countries, to come here to find peace and some kind of acceptance, but who often end up actually reproducing the same sort of oppression that they fled, right here - IF they feel THEY are at the top, because they find they can reap the benefits of it, and will support those who continue to suppress the rest of us.
It's all they knew before coming here and probably thanks to what had to have been some modicum of PTSD from their past, lead them to salve the pain in that manner.
I do appreciate your thoughtful posts and perspectives as that is what makes DU a great place to be! 
Collimator
(1,875 posts)"The irony of the United States is that you have a portion of those who flee the oppression and fascism from their native countries, to come here to find peace and some kind of acceptance, but who often end up actually reproducing the same sort of oppression that they fled, right here - IF they feel THEY are at the top, because they find they can reap the benefits of it, and will support those who continue to suppress the rest of us."
The "trigger" was to a memory from elementary school. Our teacher pointed out how many of the people fleeing religious persecution in England immediately established communities which persecuted any and all other religious traditions. Now, it kind of went unspoken that these opposing faiths were all of the Christian variety. But what's important is that even at that young age, my classmates and I were exposed to the hypocrisy that permeated American history, even as we were taught to love our country in a very standard sort of way.
I'm very grateful for those age-appropriate lessons on questioning norms. Those classroom experiences are one of the reasons why I can refute the "Love it or leave it" dichotomy posed by more simple-minded patriots. I love my country enough to want to see it refined into its best possible self. I see the beauty-- the absolute dazzling wonder-- of those founding ideals. The number of times we fail those ideals will never diminish the value of them.
People from all over the world are drawn to those ideals. America didn't invent them, but they still shine here in moments such as the candidacy of Kamala Harris. And from social media comments that I have read, there are people all over the world hoping and praying that America does the right thing and make her our next president.
The hope of all those people lifts me. Yes, there is a dark side to human nature. But if someone like Anne Frank, who lived in a world shaped by Nazi persecutions, could believe in the good of human nature, then it seems weak and selfish of someone like myself to question her faith in our race. There are people of good will and good faith all across the world. That is what I am trying to hold on to now.
BumRushDaShow
(144,656 posts)had a famous story about our hypocrisy -
thucythucy
(8,779 posts)I found this particularly interesting:
"Even the term "Multiculturalism", which was an attempt to resurrect the concept of equal rights after the purge of "Affirmative Action" as a remedy to the horrors of the past that triggered the Civil Rights movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, was itself destroyed, in a historic sense, and that eventually (and quietly) gave rise to a new term - "DEI" (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion).
And now, before our own eyes, THAT is being purged from existence."
I'd never seen that put together like that before, and had certainly never thought of it myself.
And yes, American domestic history does seem to ride a pendulum swinging between progress for human rights and incusion, and backlash and oppression and paranoa and violence. I was naive enough to think that the election of President Obama represented some sort of milestone from which we could move forward and build, not suspecting except in my darkest moments that it would provoke the intensely racist backlash that it did. Live and learn, or I try to, anyway.
There was a "Germantown" a bunch of miles from where I used to live, but its German population was long gone, leaving only the name behind.
Thanks again, and best wishes.
Persondem
(2,097 posts)DFW
(56,935 posts)Hitler's Luftwaffe chief (and close confidant) Hermann Göring was captured after the end of the war, and was interviewed in his cell. He was remarkably open and frank about how Hitler and his cabal got the people to do their bidding:
Göring: Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert [the interviewer]: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
----------------------------------------------------------
Göring: "Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?"
My wife's father was that "poor slob on a farm." He was drafted off his farm at age 17, sent to Stalingrad, and did not return in one piece. He left a leg at Stalingrad, blown off by a Russian artillery shell. He returned at age 19, a cripple obviously no longer to do farm work, and extremely resentful of the regime that was responsible. He was fortunate enough to find a woman who was willing to overlook his grave wounds, and marry him. That was my wife's mom, who lost three brothers in the war, the last of whom was killed trying to retreat to his home, dying five kilometers before making back. My father-in-law later became a loan officer at a rural bank that helped out farmers. There were four hundred people at his funeral, most of them people whose existences he had saved by helping them out at the bank. He rarely talked about his war experiences, saying they were too painful to bring up. He would only say that if he had grandchildren, that he hoped that they would all be girls, so that they could never be drafted into the military. Fate was to grant him that wish. Much later, Germany abolished compulsory military service altogether.
After the war ended, my wife's grandfather on her mother's side was asked by a (newly former) Nazi neighbor not to denounce him to the Allies after the war, which he agreed to. The Nazi neighbor had heard him listening to the British radio broadcasts during the war, which carried the death penalty. He told my wife's grandfather that due to their former friendship, he would not turn him in, though warned him to be discreet about it. After the war, my wife's grandfather returned the favor. My wife's mom said that everybody in their little village knew the Jews were rounded up and disappeared, but only rumors circulated about what had happened to them. The fact that none of them returned was rather indicative, of course.
In the town we now live in, our girls went to the Anne Frank Elementary School. The Geschwister Scholl School is down the road. These schools don't just carry the names. They also teach the children about who the school was named after, and why. ("Geschwister" is a German word meaning siblings)
The one vestige of the "old" Germany, meaning Kaiser Wilhelm II, that lingers, and weighs down the whole country, is the "Beamtentum." Beamten are the "civil (sometimes) servants" who cannot be fired, and whose arbitrary decisions are almost impossible to contest. The status encompasses ten times as many people as are necessary. The old "authority is everything" mentality has not been eradicated. Beamten encompass city hall workers, police, customs officials, teachers, administrators, tax office workers, judges, government document overseers--in short, everyone who has control over any aspect of your life. They are untouchable, and are never wrong. They are the real life version of the person who can shoot some down on Fifth Avenue in cold blood and never be touched for it. It is the one aspect of German life that so many Germans hate, and no one dares attack. About 30 years ago, one guy in Düsseldorf established an "office for the pursuing of misbehaving by Beamten." It started out sort of tongue-in-cheek, but the guy was soon inundated with requests of help from of frustrated Germans who got doors slammed in their faces by uncaring Beamten, and didn't know where else to turn. The guy got so popular that the government finally shut him down (dubious grounds, but they are the government), claiming that there were "proper channels" for citizens to register complaints against overly eager (or overly uncaring) Beamten.
In 1949, the Allies formed two German states. Stalin formed the socialist "German Democratic Republic." They got one out of three right--it was German. The USA/GB/F trio formed the Federal Republic of Germany. The Federal Republic (i.e. West Germany), under the Allies, decided to have the country confront its Nazi past, and have it as part of the school curriculum. East Germany, under the Soviets, decided to adopt the attitude that it had rid itself completely of Nazis (no one here but good socialists!), and that an examination of the Nazi past was therefore not necessary. Indeed, the East German military adopted the Nazi uniform and the goose-stepping march of the Nazi Wehrmacht. The only thing was different was the oddball helmet. The West Germans also had a military, and kept the old helmets, but retained nothing else of the old Nazi Regime. The train system of the west became the "Bundesbahn," or Federal Railway. The socialists in the east kept the name Reichsbahn for their railway system, unchanged from the Kaiser, the Weimarer Republik, and then the Third Reich. When the Wall came down, all the latent rightist extremist sentiment, suppressed for 40 years in the East, suddenly was allowed to resurface in all its ugly splendor, and the current far right extremist party, the "Alternative for Germany," or AfD, enjoys a scary 35% popularity in the East, where there used to be "nobody here but us socialists."
I visited East Berlin several times. Same language, but one freaky place. Got my newspaper confiscated at the border, and "congregations" of more than four people at restaurants and cafés were forbidden (someone might be spreading ideas, after all). Twice, upon returning to West Berlin, the East Germans pulled me aside and interrogated me for an hour in a windowless room. "Why were you here?" (never seen it before/showing my friend from Holland who had never seen it before) "Whom did you visit?" (I don't know anybody here) "Empty your pockets!" (I did, had to explain who each business card I had belonged to) "Why do you speak German?" (I took it in college). I think if I had let on that I spoke Russian, I would have been there an extra week. I was the only one in the room who didn't have a gun, an East German uniform or the right to stand up without permission. They finally let me go. Heil Honecker!
On the other hand, as the line from "Fiddler on the Roof" goes.........We have some solid friends here for whom we would do anything, and who would do anything for us. When pregnant with our first daughter, we attended a "baby group" led by an obstetrician, telling us about what to expect, right up to the moment of birth. We were maybe 8 or 9 couples, and all but one form the core of our closest friends in our small town outside Düsseldorf, now 40 years later. There is the same mix of efficiency and incompetence in service, both public and private, that one might expect in any first world society. As opposed to the USA, the police are reluctant to get involved in pursuing theft or organized crime, as they don't like opponents who shoot back. Organized crime has a pretty easy time of it here as long as they don't get violent. Some of the younger generation of cops and officials are slowly being allowed to have a sense of humor. I was stopped in the train back from Switzerland to Germany two days ago by a troop of three German customs officers. They asked if I lived in Switzerland (no, I live in Germany). Was I in Switzerland for a visit or for work (for work). Did I buy anything (yes, Ramseier apple juice and Sprüngli pastry). They looked around and asked if the suitcase behind me was mine. Not knowing that there was one, I turned around to see what they were talking about. I said, no, that one lay "outside my jurisdiction." That made them laugh. Not realizing that I wasn't German, they didn't ask for any ID, and left me alone, saying "pleasant journey." They have their problems, for sure. But as long as there is a willingness to recognize that and, however latent, a will to do something about it, I'm content for the moment to stay here (it'd be nice if they stopped trying to tax me at 73%). Having a dream wife who is most comfortable living in her home country can't be underestimated as a deciding factor. Those few DUers who have met her know what I am talking about.
Finally, I remember at our wedding, where my dad, who was a US Army grunt in World War II, and my wife's dad, who, however reluctantly (the poor slob on the farm, remember), was in the German army in the same war, got along just fine, despite their language difficulty.