A New "Fuhrer?"

I have no idea what you are talking about.

 

H. L. Mencken repeatedly noted that he simply couldn't believe that the Germans were capable of
that sort of thing.

I love Mencken, but in this case, he was remarkably full of shit.

Again . . . millions of Jews (the most prominent of the Hitler elite's whipping boys) were "made to
disappear".

Where the hell did the broad German population think they went?

I have all day.

 

Germany's savage roots pre-date recorded history. Even Julius Caeser refused to send his armies into the Black Forest.

 

That's where I'm kinda split on the German peoples' culpability. On the one hand, I can see the pressure that they were under to conform. Kids who didn't join the Hitler Youth were ostracized. And the fear of conforming as a whole was legit. Just like Sadaam claiming everyone loved him when he won 99.87 of the vote in Iraq, I would like to think the Germans kept silent out of fear.

I'd like to think that many of them were like Marge Schott, they thought Hitler was OK and was restoring their pride and hope, especially after the economic issues and general depressed feeling they were having after WWI, but that once in power, he went too far.

But again, I've seen videos of parades where Germans are just cheering the hell out of the Nazis, and were enjoying themselves watching Jews get abused. As pointed out earlier, apartments and houses suddenly get abandoned left and right, and no one questions why it is? Whole villages disappear overnight? Thousands of people could have stormed the streets in protest of the treatment of their fellow citizens. Instead, they were silent, or they cheered their destruction.

One of the most powerful stories is the one where the American general (Patton?, I can't remember) came to a concentration camp, saw the carnage, and ordered the entire German town next to it to walk through it, so they could never deny what happened. (This was also in Band of Brothers, where the Germans were forced to bury the bodies). I only wish every German had been forced to see what had happened at the camps. Then you wouldn't have 13 percent of the population wanting a new Hitler.

 

You are always going to have wingnuts, though. In every country there will be seven to 13 percent who are cool with rounding up a certain group and doing this.

Shit, outside of actually killing them, I'm pretty sure we can get 15% of Americans to agree to do this to Mexicans and illegal immigrants.

What's distressing is that they actually came to power in a country. You need more than 15% to come to power. This is why it should scare people to death the forum that some of our politicos are having.

 

Have you read about this stuff in anything beyond the coloring book HS textbook level?

Hitler did not come to power on a Holocaust platform. The common German man who supported him in 1933 didn't know he had that plan. Hitler came to power by promising to fix the economy, replace the limp-wristed Weimar Republic with something strong again, and restore Germany to a place of pride in the world. It was an intoxicating message to working class Germans who'd been beaten senseless by the Depression, punitive post-WWI sanctions, outlandish inflation and an impotent post-war government.

Although there'd certainly been plenty of Jewish discrimination throughout his term, he didn't create the concentration camps and start the deportations until quite a few years later after the war had begun. And he didn't tell the common man about it. By that point in time, he'd already eradicated freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of dissent and essentially freedom to express anything remotely unfavorable toward his Govt. Even if German people were noticing the disappearance of their Jewish neighbors, they weren't free to write about it or even talk openly about it without fear of an SS agent showing up at their doorstep.

I'm surprised that there are people here who seem to buying into this notion that it had something to do with the innate genetic character of Germans. What happened in Germany could've happened in many countries during past eras. In fact, it HAS happened in different forms in many other places before. An evil nutjob comes to power democratically, then begins gradually consolidating power and removing civil liberties until the people are helpless to oppose or remove him. Why do you think civil libertarians were so riled up by the post-9/11 Patriot Act type measures here? That shit usually seems good-intentioned at first, but can end up in a very dark place.

 

They didn't have to go for him, hook, line and sinker. Mein Kampf came out in the early '20s, and Chapter 6 is quite explicit about Hitler's hardon for Aryan supremacy. What did they think they
were buying? The Teletubbies?

I'm not Jewish, and part of my European bloodlines are German, but much of what I've read on this thread
is deeply disturbing.

 

Seeing what was coming, Albert Einstein bailed out of Germany (where he was born) in 1933,
so he could live his life without being persecuted. Einstein was a longtime Princeton resident.

German newspapers didn't hide the news, and at least one subheaded the story with:

"Good news -- he's not coming back"


Ya-hoo.

 

You know what happened to those who openly protested during wartime Germany, right? The idea that "thousands of people" could've staged some mass protest rally is absurd. It's our First Amendment rights that permit us to do that here, they didn't have those. Publically protesting Hitler's policies meant accepting the likelihood of losing your family, freedom, home or life. And some did try anyways, but they didn't last long.

And what exactly are you referring to with the "whole villages" reference? And can you provide a link? I'd be curious to read about it, if accurate.

This is a gross over-generalization. First of all, once again, the vast majority of Germans did not know about the camps. And they were not all silent. Some harbored jews, some helped their Jewish neighbors escape, some protested, and quite a few lost their lives or ended up imprisoned or in concentration camps themselves for speaking out or trying to help.

As for "cheering their destruction", what is that based on? That might be true with some, but to suggest that the vast populace was cheering for it based only on some video clip you saw is BS. Have you ever seen that hideous photo from our own past of a crowd of smiling people gathered around a lynched African American body? What percentage of Americans do you think that group represented?

 

Which is why in my whole post, I put in how I felt mixed about Germans' culpability. I acknowledged the fear that they had.

And while Hitler ran on an economic and national pride platform, I would think that seeing a bunch of storm troopers marching in the streets might have given voters some pause. That's not to say that they would have voted against him out of fear. But as someone here said earlier, didn't they read Mein Kampf?

You asked about links to whole villages being wiped out. Here are some of the onese I found:

Jozefow, Poland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zef%C3%B3w,_Bi%C5%82goraj_County

Distomo, Greece: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distomo_massacre

Marzabotto, Italy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marzabotto_massacre

The expulsion of Poles:

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

Those are just a few examples. While I agree that Germans were economically desperate and respect for Jewish people was never very high, didn't it occur to the Germans at one point early on that maybe this Hitler guy was just a little too off his rocker?

I'll close this post with a quote from U.S. Colonel George Lynch, who addressed German citizens at Gardelegen after making the citizens do a proper burial for 1,016 prisoners who were burned alive in a barn after the Nazis killed them for being too sick or unable to march away from their camps so they could cover their asses as the Allies approached:

"The German people have been told that stories of German atrocites were Allied propaganda. Here, you can see for yourself. Some will say that the Nazis were responsible for this crime. Others will point to the Gestapo. The responsibility rests with neither -- it is the responsibility of the German people....Your so-called Master Race has demonstrated that it is master only of crime, cruelty and sadism. you have lost the respect of the civilized world."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardelegen_(war_crime)

 

No offense, but you are confusing the issue. These examples, as horrid as they are, are not relevant to the issue in the context in which you made that "villages" reference. We weren't discussing how horrible Nazi atrocities were (we can all agree on that one), we were discussing the issue of how much the German civilian population knew of the Holocaust and what they could've done about it. You responded by suggesting that they should've noticed the disappearance of their Jewish neighbors and "whole villages disappearing overnight."

Well, from the context in which raised, I logically took that to mean entire Jewish villages within Germany. Yet three of your four examples did not even occur within Germany. Pardon me, but how was the 1944 massacre of Greek citizens in Distomo, Greece (which I can assure you did not make the German papers) supposed to tip off the working class man in Munich that the Holocaust was happening? And the only example you cited that occurred within Germany's borders dealt with the deportation of Polish citizens, without regard to religion, how was that designed to inform the German housewife in Hamburg of the atrocities being commited against the Jewish population?

Sorry, but I fail to see much relevance of those examples to the actual issue that was being discussed.