A New "Fuhrer?"

A well researched, well argued, respectful and objective debate by educated and thoughtful men, on an internet message board will definitely resolve this issue, for all time

 

Stoney, I do not think you understand how far reaching into the general population the workforce that is needed to build and support facilities this size.

This was not 50 SS guys throwing it up on a weekend and running everything.

 

Really, it takes more than 50 people? Wow, that's a lot, I had no idea.

Thanks, Devil. In that case, you're right, Germans are all inherently bloodthirsty monsters. Must be in their genes.

 

Seconded.

 

To be clear, I'm not making any generalizations about the current German people. Hell, I'm not even saying that the average German could have done anything about the Holocaust once he or she knew about it.

What I am saying is that I don't believe the claims that they didn't know what was going on. I can see reasons why they didn't speak up or fight against it, but not how so many would have been so ignorant to what was going on.

 

I'll give you another example, which I had figured to be the obvious: Kristallnacht:

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

30,000 men, a quarter of the male Jewish population in Germany, was marched to concentration camps.

Or all the Jews in Germany who were "deported" into ghettos and then moved to concentration camps.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005469

Using Kristallnactht as the example, how could Germans see that and pretnend they knew nothing about it. Whole parts of the city go up in flames and buisnesses smashed? Nothing to see here.

 

Not all, but the ones that stuck around and fought us tooth and nail in WWII to preserve what they were doing, I have no problem saying that.

And saying that the German people did not know what was going on from 1940-the end is something I am not going to be convinced of. Like you said, it took more than 50 people to construct and run those camps.

 

The 13 percent of hate wingnuts in the world is rapidly growing and their voices are filtering to the top.

This should scare everyone.

 

With as many Germans who have their hands in Muslim cash, they're on their way to perfect a Jew extermination policy.

Europeans always help fuck up the world. And yet, there's many among us who desire to make America a Europe.

 

Let's be clear about what "knowledge" we're talking about. By no means am I denying German knowledge of widespread discrimination and mistreatment of it's Jewish population during those years. And Kristallnacht was no secret to anyone.

However, the question being discussed here is how much the average German civilian knew about the Holocaust. Did the average German know that its Govt had embarked on a deliberate plan to exterminate the Jewish race? Did they know of the extermination camps?

It's a debated question, but the vast preponderance that I've read on it indicates no. The Govt itself classified everything to do with the extermination camps as top secret and speaking of it without authorization was very punishable. The six main extermination camps were all in Poland where the German civilian population would never see them. And there was a widespread disinformation campaign that the Jews were being re-settled in Eastern Europe. I'm sure some civilans knew, but most did not. And those that did were afraid to speak of it, and often weren't believed when they did tell people.

And, as horrid as Kristallnacht was, it should be noted (as Bubbler pointed out earlier) that was hardly just a German thing. Pogroms happened throughout Eastern Europe and Russia the first half of the 20th Century. Until Hitler seized power, Germany was no worse than several other places in that respect.

 

Or Obama, Pelosi and Axelrod or Reed or Frank, take your choice.

 

Now, this one IS GETTING POLITICAL.....