My parents grew up in Nazi Germany. [View all]

[thucythucy]

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.