That book sounds like it would be painful to read. The writer doesn’t seem to understand that Britain, or even just England, doesn’t have a unified national identity.
But when you start down that path you have to start asking questions like “was Winston Churchill a socialist?” He was heavily involved in building the foundations of the British welfare state and the 1945 Conservative Party election manifesto had plans for a healthcare system.
While not conventionally socialist, the Nazis were a reaction against the failures of capitalism, in particular the depression and the mass social dislocation it caused. At the risk of a Godwin’s penalty, there is at least a passing resemblance to the way that MAGA has co-opted anger at late-stage capitalism’s failures.
Oh, hey, an instance of DJT emphasising with quotes that actually works.
Yeah, it sounds like Owens is best described as a “thinker”, with appropriate finger gestures.
it would have been the social dislocation caused by germany’s defeat in the “great war” that led to parties like the german workers party which was what it was called when hitler first started investigating it at the behest of the german military in 1919. hitler saw the potential for becoming a power within the party which led to his joining it. this was renamed the national socialist german workers party in early 1920.
while the great depression enabled the nazi party to gain more voters, the founding of the party, along with its initial skirmishes with both the truly left wing parties and the german government began a decade prior.
Vaguely relevant thing I found on Project Gutenberg:
being the results such as they are of an investigation into claims of atrocities committed by French African troops in the occupation of Germany after the First World War.
Interestingly, there is some indication in there that the majority of the clamour about ‘black’ troops may have been for American consumption or even American inspired (in the sense of Germans in America pushing it/being the targets rather than the US Government).
One of the people in those letters is Norman H. Davis, who went on to lead the Red Cross in WWII, and was a big supporter of segregating black people’s blood donations from white peoples.
It looks like he’s reporting on a combination of anti-Black propaganda articles that even he doesn’t really believe, mixed with complaints from Germans that Black soldiers existed.
Appendix V is about the only useful bit. All the rest is just “We’ve heard there are complaints but the French say it’s all fine and we should leave them to it” - which is fair enough but not really an investigation.
4. A very violent newspaper campaign attacking the French colonial troops, especially the Negro troops, broke out simultaneously throughout Germany coincident with the time of the French evacuation of Frankfurt and Darmstadt, and has continued up to the present time. It is unquestionably a fact that many gross exaggerations were circulated in the German press concerning the conduct of the French colonial troops. The allegations in the German press have been, for the most part, so indefinite as to time and place, and circumstance, as to leave it impracticable to verify the alleged facts, or to disprove them.
5. After all proper allowance is made for the natural difficulties, which always are to be expected in tracing crimes of this nature, due to the shame and distress of the victims, the great mass of the articles in the German press, by the simultaneous appearance all over Germany, and by the failure to cite time, place, and circumstance sufficiently clear to enable the truth to be ascertained, give to an impartial observer the impression of an adroit political move which would tend to sow antipathy to France in the other lands of the allied and associated powers, especially in America, where the Negro question is always capable of arousing feeling.
6. The Rheinische Zeitung and the Kolnische Volkszeitung, recently suspended for publishing attacks on the French colored colonial troops, admit under date of June 15, that they employed certain terms and expressions which they might better have omitted, due to the imperfection of the news coming for the most part from outside sources, says the Volkszeitung, and from Berlin says the Rheinische Zeitung. This tends to bear out the opinion noted above, which is further strengthened by dissentant voices in the South German press which protests against exaggerated accusations by other German papers against colored French troops.
7. These exaggerated attacks in the German press outside of the Rhinelands have, in several cases, been refuted by responsible officials (German) and citizens of the Rhinelands.
This section is also fairly telling:
Generally, it sounds like the Americans and French were happily and deeply racist, but that even they had to admit that the Germans of 1920 were being super extra deeply racist.
It also is a good example that Facebook Fake News wasn’t a new thing with pamphlets
the American edition of which, published by the New Times of Chicago, appears to be a literal translation with the addition of the words, “An appeal of white women to American womanhood.” It is perhaps worth noting that this pamphlet was published not in the Rhineland, but in Berlin, and that the avoidance of names makes it impossible to verify or disprove the specific allegations. Furthermore as Mr. Dresel has pointed out to the department, practically all the alleged instances of misconduct by the French black troops cited in the German press give no reference to date or place and are therefore of little value as evidence.
Nazis were socialists, in addition to being the result of a ridiculous translation that really doesn’t keep the meanings of words in historical context, is an argument brought to you by people who:
Though I find turning back boats of people who face death camps at home to abhorrent, I have to admit it is different than setting up your own death camps for them.
This was in the early Twenties, after WWI, but don’t worry, there were still plenty of everyday American bigots at the time who also protested the existence of Black soldiers stationed in Germany.
#NotAllGermans! It seems from that text that there were Germans (women at least) that were not racist and that were happy to mingle with the African troops. The biggest fear of Hitler and his accomplices was about miscegenation, about the “pure German blood” being contaminated by mixing it with blood from the Jews or other “inferior” races. Most Jews in Germany at that time were pretty much mixing and integrating with the rest of society. It’s like the bigots here and now, complaining in the same breath about immigrants not integrating and about the horror of “brown grandchildren.”
Well German newspapers certainly.
Given that there were apparently a whole 66 cases reported to the authorities, the general public doesn’t seem to have cared that much.
Then you look at Appendix IX which reports on an “American” meeting ostensibly held to talk about the outrage of black troops being used in occupation which turns out to have one German speaker on the panel and the audience is only really miffed at the French and Americans in general rather than black troops specifically.
The impression I get is that while Germany and Germans certainly were horrendously racist and resented the defeat and occupation, the fixation with black people is a specifically American thing which fell flat as far as propaganda in Germany went.
Germans of course being much more fixated on Jews and Poles, etc.
There was a staggering amount of propaganda going on before, during and after the First World War, from all sorts of groups, much of which is fairly hard to get a decent overview of (at least for me).
Project Gutenberg is quite useful in that respect, for example there’s a book on there with a title which just begs for 1980’s comedian crap jokes - “Brave Belgians”.
It’s a collection of tales of derring-do and bravery by Belgians in the First World War and contains a surprising (to me at least) number of secret agents and commando-style raids for a war which we’re habituated to thinking of as a bunch of guys in trenches shelling each other for weeks before hopping over the top for a slow stroll into machine gun fire.
All of which takes us rather off topic - which is to say that the idea that Hitler could possibly have come to power with any agenda which would not have required him to take measures outside “Germany” (however you choose to define Germany) is, as several people have pointed out, complete nonsense and the idea that everything would have been fine (for Hitler) as long as he just stuck to murdering people in Germany is… well, probably honest.
It would be nice to think the rest of the world would have got involved if Germany hadn’t invaded other countries but history doesn’t seem to back that up.
Of course quite how he could have embarked on a process of murdering millions of people within Germany without at some point having to invade a neighbouring country is an exercise in economics and geography that seems to me to involve magical thinking.
By generally, I did very much mean generally, in the scope of the Military report.
It is always good to point out that it’s a myth that racism was monolithically agreed-on in the “traditional” past.
Of course, there were also plenty of outspoken racists on the ground and at the newspapers and military of the time too.
The term “Globalism” was indeed coined in the aftermath of WWII.
The word itself came into widespread usage, first and foremost in the United States, from the early 1940s.[10] Many of these early uses of the term “globalist” in American English were pejorative uses by marginal political groups like the KKK and neo-nazis and anti-Semites like Henry Ford and are not connected to later academic uses of the term in political science.[11]
Color me shocked.
True, but it was a fringe party back then. What turned it into a party with huge popularity was the failure of capitalism, and Hitler’s great success in turning Germany’s economy around. As with Mussolini, it was economic success that led to much of the the fascists’ popularity with the masses.
The goalpost is rapidly moving to: “All of a sudden it’s politically incorrect to align oneself with Adolph Hitler. When will the bullying stop?”
They seem to explain that by saying democracy is mob rule, because we all know that North Korea’s problems come from mob rule.
If only we had a word that separated mob rule away from democracy…
Blatherskite. Fascism was not great for economies, though it is often and loudly propagandised as being great for economies.
And any “success” he did have came from exclude entire categories of people from the economy, murdering them, and giving the ill-gotten gains to loyalists. Their entire economic “success” was built on violence, murder, and theft.
A seemingly well run economy isn’t the end all and be all of human happiness.
