Yes, and the vast majority was. There was small minority that fell through the cracks, but their guardians faced fines and even prison for that and the kids could be forced to fulfill their service obligations (on paper they were already members of the HJ by government fiat.) The Hitler Youth was also linked to the school system to some extent, so that at least for the kids who were still in school it was almost automatic.
Because traditionally church institutions enjoyed some degree of autonomy beyond the strictly official, the seminary where Ratzinger lived in a quasi-boarding-school environment could push things a bit further than an ordinary family could have, but eventually they had to relent, too.
There were some rather limited exemptions. Not very surprisingly Jews were not allowed. Certain children who were German citizens with ethnically non-German parents could be exempt on request. Those were the only ones who had any say in the matter. There were further criteria based on behavior and health, but those were always at the discretion of the Hitler Youth. For example, although not explicitly spelled out in the law, it was policy to kick out all teenage mothers. Finally, membership was suspended during military or labor service.
Apart from having a large organisation full of murderous thugs roaming the streets maiming and killing people they didnât like, they werenât so bad.
Hitler only came to power as part of a deal in which he suppressed the SA. Of course, being as reliable as any politician, having stiffed the SA he promptly allowed Himmler to build up the SS, which was like the SA but better organised and with an even higher psychopath count.
But in 1933 the Nazis were already behaving in ways that the most racist Southern cop could only dream of.
The US suffered very little material damage in WW2. Britain still has not fully recovered. The Russians also have a âstrange fetishâ with WW2 - I wonder why? So much so that Volgograd is still renamed Stalingrad for the relevant anniversaries.
France and Italy had a rather mixed record in the War, and so they have a much more ambivalent attitude. Itâs nothing to do with being a superpower or an inferiority complex - it was the time in the last three hundred and fifty years that we came closest to being invaded and destroyed as a country, and for many of us our parents would have been killed simply for being Jewish.
And we still have some reservations about the Germans - perhaps unjustified, perhaps (given recent events in Greece) not.
To be fair, thatâs according to an Albanian I know, but still⊠[ETA] And doesnât he look like a nice ottoman gentleman with his head gear? There is so much going on in that picture, itâs hard to sort of sort it all out. Clearly it was meant to legitimize him to various groups in the region.
The Nazis definitely had this master race idea going on, you could see why that would be appealing to a royal family. Otherwise their position of power and privilege is just chance, whereas if they are actually better than all the rest of us it justifies it. Iâm sure they still believe this to some extent, but they know enough about PR by now never to admit it.
Sure, but itâs also true that the Nazi invasion was incredibly destructive, many, many, many Russians died, and that they were crucial to an allied victory. It wasnât all just about justifying Stalin. There is some truth to the Russian insistence on being remember as important to the allied War effort. They paid a far higher cost than we did in the war, both in terms of material destruction and in lives lost. Itâs disputed, but there are some estimates that put Russian war dead (from a variety of causes, not just directly from fighting) at 20 million:
Well, again, I think I have to point out that itâs not like they were pulling this stuff out of their asses. They were pulling on a long tradition of social darwinism and Eugenics, which came out of the Anglo-American intellectual tradition. So again, itâs not some weird quirk of history here. @Mister44âs point that the nazis enjoyed some wide support in Western Europe and in some places in the US I think is backed up by historical research more generally.
Thatâs always the way, isnât it? Itâs a product of a nationalist-centered historiography that is taught to most⊠people. Not just Americans or Brits.
One of the most boring and least productive arguments in Cold War history is the âwho started itâ stuff (looking at you, Gaddis). The real productive stuff is looking at what kept the conflict going, and how did it impact any number of aspects of life for the people who lived through the Cold War. Saying âit was the Americansâ or âit was the Sovietsâ is literally the least important question of cold war historiography, yet that tends to dominate more popular histories of the Cold War⊠We do the same with the world wars, as the author of that article is suggesting. The East/central Europe saw incredible destruction during both wars, incredibly loss of life, and more changes than Western Europe did during BOTH WARS⊠The Eastern front tells the taleâŠ
I keep hearing great things about Bloodlands⊠I should get a copy already.
WW2 was a hotbed of British socialism. Spike Milligan in his autobigraphy mentions his company marching along singing âVive la Joe Stalinâ, but even in the officer class there was a great deal of discussion about how a better society could be created after the War. My father recalls wardroom discussions after WW2, and some of his friends were socialist enough to get their phones tapped by MI5 post war. The 1945 election delivered a socialist government.
What stifled socialism was that the country was bankrupt after the War - Britain was much more militarised than Germany or the US, possibly even more, given its size, than the Soviet Union. The efforts of the government to deal with crises of fuel supply and income generation caused it to lose the next election, and the Conservatives, who largely control the UK press, have really stayed in power ever since. The Blair Government was considerably more right wing than the Heath Government.
ÎžÎŹÎœÎ±ÏÎżÏ ÏÏÎżÏ Ï ÏαÏÎŻÏÏΔÏ!
(During the Greek Junta, this graffito was written on a wall in Cambridge. The authorities didnât remove it.)
It wasnât quite like that. The Duke was in Portugal at the time and the Nazis were plotting to spirit him off to Spain and thus to Germany, to be proclaimed King when Britain was successfully invaded. But he caught the boat. He wasnât at all a nice man by all accounts, and his wife was a most unpleasantg woman, by Walter Monckton acted as a go between with the British Government and kept him on side. (I have my information on this from a Monckton but Shirerâs account also bears out this story.)
