I don’t equate the socialism of the kind I’m thinking of with Stalinism; although the full extent of Stalin’s evil was unknown at the time so we can allow some degree of naiveté there. I agree that the cost of the war stifled any degree of progressive reform when our forebears were still having to ration food for a decade
And, your last point, I’m even more on-board. I long for a better choice than Conservative or Conservative Light in elections. I feel for our US friends more so but even there are some glimmers of progressiveness at the moment whereas we’re doomed to another 5 years of Cameron.
And that’s the one they actually did try to elect. Of course, the result of the referendum was ignored by the Great Powers (as the Greeks had elected a British prince, and treaties banned members of the British, French or Russian royal families from becoming king of Greece).
Eventually, they ended up with Prince William of Denmark, who became George I of Greece with a total of six votes (compared to 230,000 for the winner, and 93 for a republic).
They were “super-bad”, but people thought they could get away with courting them. Some actually did get away pretty well with it, i.e. IBM, Ford, Standard Oil…
In February 1945, at age 18, Elizabeth Windsor joined the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service. She trained as a driver and mechanic. She is the only living head of state that served in WW2. (sources: Wikipedia, history.com).
How do you reconcile that with §1 of the Zweite
Durchführungsverordnung zum Gesetz über die Hitler-Jugend (roughly: “Second implemenation regulation for the law concerning the Hitler Youth”) of 3/25/1939?
I like the classic book “They Thought They Were Free, The Germans 1933-195” in which Milton Mayer interviews a number of members of the Nazi party who had various degrees of ideological commitment. It all crept up on them, and there was not a defining moment where someone would take a stand. A rumor of a massacre in a distant town? The price of stamps went up a dime? At what point does someone decide “That’s it, today I throw everything away in a futile gesture of resistance based on a rumor.” But as soon as there is an official emergency, everyone unites and starts talking in war movie cliches (“Don’t you understand we’re at war?!”). He juxtaposed that to America in a chapter titled “Peoria Uber Alles.”
He also discussed how “Everybody Knew, Nobody Knew” but did not quite carry it over the finish line in discussing how people can be intimidated into silence and emotional denial. They all “knew” about the Holocaust (using scare quotes to indicate uncertainty) in the sense that they’d heard rumors or seen odd things now and then. But nobody knew in the sense that they had all collated this information and reached a consensus about what was really happening which risked holding opinions counter to official propaganda.
I think that at that epoch the circumflex hadn’t yet been used to replace an unvoiced s, so he would have been “Guillaume le bastard”. I don’t know French as far back as 1066, but in Villon’s day the s was still being written in a lot of words (e.g. “sus estan” and “bruslerent” in Ballade des dames du temps jadis.) -(I just checked that with Google and my memory is correct)
researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout
Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself
and
As early as 1933, at the start of Hitler’s reign, the Third Reich
established about 110 camps specifically designed to imprison some
10,000 political opponents and others, the researchers found.
There were camps of some sort in nearly every town, village, and hamlet, and it started from the very beginning. Everyone in Germany could smell what was going on, literally.
Convincing oneself that it wasn’t really “known” was a survival technique. We can certainly understand why they didn’t want to know. Who would want to admit to that, other than true believers?
An important note: Soviet ≠ Russian. Only somewhat more than half of Soviet deaths during WW2 were ethnic Russians. Also consider that being non-Russian was a major cause of death when Stalin was in the mood for some purging. Bloodlands and the linked article/review have more detail, of course.
Then again, under the current Russian nationalist interpretation of Soviet history, all Soviets killed by Nazis were Russian, and all people killed by Soviet forces were fascists. Makes things so much easier.
In the beginning, those weren’t death camps, they were brutal work camps from which people could return. Once unions were crushed, unemployment basically became illegal. Workers needed government papers to hold a job, but the employer held those papers. If the employee got fired, he was likely to go to a work camp.
The Nuremberg laws of 1935 got off to a slow start because of uncertainly about racial classifications. Kristallnacht was not until 1938. Jews were slaughtered as the Nazis invaded various countries in 1939, often with the enthusiastic participation of the local people, but it was still people being massacred on site. The Wannsee Conference to create a system of death camps to kill all Jews in the Nazi sphere of influence did not occur until 1942.
After 1936, the Gestapo was pretty much everywhere, so a general discussion of these events was impossible. By the time the Holocaust was at its peak, a German citizen would have risked prison for listening to the BBC. So they “knew,” but they did not know.
All were obviously brutal and dehumanizing, but most were at least survivable. The kind most associated with the Holocaust - the gas chamber kind, termed extermination camps or “death factories” - only appeared after 1942, were present only in the occupied territories to the East, and were very secret as per their mode of operation.
I think a lot of the confusion comes from not defining what it is that people are supposed to have known.
Of course people knew about the concentration camps. It would be absolutely laughable to suggest otherwise and actually I don’t think I have ever seen anyone do so. They were heavily featured in propaganda right from the start and as you said they were everywhere. Many may have imagined something closer to the official narrative though.
People also knew that Jews were deported to “the east” outside Germany. That was not a secret either. Town held celebrations when they were officially “Jew free” and everything. The more perceptive people realized that this was even worse than the official version, but details were generally sketchy.
As the others have said, “final solution” in the stricter sense, i.e. the death camps etc. happend outside Germany in relative secrecy.
Of course you can argue that a) what people knew was already bad enough and b) they had enough pieces of the puzzle to figure out more. Obviously there was a lot of denial and willful ignorance going on, but those claims of ignorance were much more limited than they are often presented.
On the other hand, when poking into things could mean an encounter with the gentle state security agents, few would try to figure out more. Double so if they had to expend considerable effort to just survive day to day.
It’s easy to condemn with the benefits of 20/20 hindsight and not having own skin in the game.
In “They Thought They Were Free” he noted that the people who tended to survive were the ones that had a strategy of not making waves. They would go through the motions of compliance, throw in a couple bucks at party fundraisers, and volunteer for some minor tasks. Also, most people have the idea that even if something bad happened today, things are likely to be better tomorrow, and this is generally true. On the other hand, who are you going to rebel with? There are plenty of people in America right now that have thrown away their marriages and careers preparing for the apocalyptic final showdown with Obama’s mulatto socialist death squad commandos, or camping out at the Bundy Ranch, or they’ll somehow manage to die during Jade Helm.
What was sick was even in the US the majority of Jewish organizations suppressed emergency Jewish immigration and publication of the industrial murder of European Jewery because they were afraid of antisemitism. The only organized Jewish dissident was the remnant of old guard, out of touch with normal America, immigrant European orthodox rabbis living in the US and Canada.
This was several decades into the Jewish whitening program which was an organized attempt imported from Germany to turn light skinned Jews into acceptable white people in order to eliminate antisemitism.
