Repeating for emphasis as this is so far down in the thread that it might get missed.
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Whenever I read documents from the 1920s onwards, as for example the diaries of Viktor Klemperer, or the 1933 play “Die Rassen” by Ferdinand Buckner, I come to the opinion that the notion of a political and societal structure which just made people into fascists, or let them at least fall easily for it is not at all convincing. This is, of course, hindsight. But people did clearly see what happened. And they dismissed it, and shunned those who warned against it.
I understand what you say. But I stand by “Wehret den Anfängen”. Never again shall we be silent.
My grandfather fought in WWII. One of the few photos from that period shows a smiling man in a deck chair, wearing his Wehrmacht uniform, in the bright sunshine of Warsaw in 1940. He did never explain how he ended up fighting that war, how his youth let there. It is hard for me to accept that.
If I ever again personally come across youngsters trying to provoke others with the Hitlergruss, or anyone glorifying the Nazi period, I am bound to stop them.
Your father, I assume, would approve of it.
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I’d expect there were a lot of non-party-members among the conscripted soldiers.
I don’t know if I agree - it sounds like basically you say ‘yes, I understand that children are wont to do things that they perceive as naughty’, but then you just say ‘but this is different because I said so’.
It’s not like when kids did this when I was in high school they were utterly ignorant of Hitler, it’s that they’re kids and legitimately don’t have the ability to put this stuff in context.
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We watched likely the same films, but it was in the 80’s. In Texas. The idea was to show how inhumane the Germans became during the war so that we could recognize the signs of a society failing in that fashion with the goal of never letting it happen again.
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Thank you for posting this and more importantly, thank you for trying to get the school to change. Every school needs parents like you.
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I visited the Holocaust museum in DC in middle school. It was traumatic. It was incredibly disturbing and awful. It was also the moment I really understood what the Holocaust was in a deep-down visceral way. Traumatic and an important experience for me. One day, I’ll take my daughter there.
Though the school shouldn’t have scheduled that particular event right before lunch.
Edit: by awful, I mean the content and what humans can do to each other. The museum itself is beautiful and the displays were brilliant. Heart-hurting, gut-wrenching beauty.
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A bit of follow up:
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Yes, “it could never happen here” has worked out as a philosophy for so many civilisations over the years.
Do you actually, genuinely believe that as a statement? I’m intrigued to know how one rationalises a viewpoint like that. How, exactly, is America uniquely protected from totalitarianism in a way that is meaningfully different to any other country that has slid into authoritarian rule?
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