Right, it’s all fed through an ideological lens, including our own. But the Soviets started the remembrance of the Soviet involvement in WW2, because, they did indeed sacrifice much as a nation. I think that’s pretty undeniable. But as Bloodlands point out, the Soviets had blood on their own hands, in the name of ideological purity.
2 Likes
Additionally, as the Bloodlands review posted by @jerwin the majority of people who died in the holocaust were not killed in camps, but in brutal massacres outside of towns and villages. Christopher Browning’s book on this topic is pretty depressing, but illustrates this very point (as well as bring up some interesting points about the men who carried out these orders):
4 Likes
That’s why the photo — and Henry Ford — are sooooo creepy.
2 Likes
This could be the new standard to illustrate WWII war dead: [The Fallen of World War II][1].
[1]: https://vimeo.com/128373915
2 Likes
The Sun is just upset that they turned out to be fair-weather fascists.
2 Likes
So they “knew,” but they did not know.
This is exactly why Snowden’s and Manning’s whistleblowing is important. Before them, everyone ‘knew’ about what was going on, but nobody knew. Now you have to be aggressively, willfully ignorant to not know.
Also, in the context of 1930s Europe - and Germany especially - I find it easy to understand that they didn’t have the internet, their press was much less an open and free, and the population didn’t move about much. In the context of the time, it would be easy to accept it as a smallish (100,000 / 110 = only about 900 occupants per camp), localised thing, which theoretically might - but, you know, probably didn’t - exist in loads of other places around the country. Also, while the German population remained much more rural than much of the rest of Western Europe, only a small fraction of the population would have had direct personal experience of the camps. The residents of Hamburg or Berlin, or Munich, or any of a dozen other major cities would’ve had no visibility of the camps (other than the odd friend-of-a-friend disappearing for a while, and occasionally returning albeit much less militant than before).
6 Likes
This conversation juxtaposed with the atrocities that are happening in the middle East and Africa are beyond depressing.
I know the history, and we all will be judged less harshly for not saving people because… Well that exercise is left up to the reader.
1 Like
The fuck, you say.
Seriously? That’s’ exactly what I meant. Germanys government and public is the exact opposite of what happened and is trying for the last 70 years it’s best to prevent it happening again through rigorous public education and building a stable bond with it’s neighboring european countries through various means (i.e France, once mortal enemy). At the same time the british press, public and government continually paints germany as secret crypto-nazis plotting for the last decades to overthrow And dominate Europe again. Ironically it’s the UK and the US slowly turning into warmongering police states since the last decade (Iraq, torture, mass surveillance etc).
E.g. Every time the UK (or Greece) was a hard negotiator in EU talks it’s just “representing their voters and protecting their country interest” if Germany as a hard stance on some issue it’s suddenly all Hitler-Merkels speech bubbles and “the mask is off - the hun shows its true face”. Do the Irish use the same rhetorics when negotiating with the UK?
Must be some of inherent, perhaps genetic, quality the germans have that you fear that they are still to transform into bloodthirsty subjugators even when 3 generations removed from WW2, eh?
That’s an “interesting” way to describe Reform Judaism…
2 Likes
Yes.
I don’t regard myself in any way anti-German. German is my third language after English and French. I used to be involved with R&D projects in Bavaria and Hannover, two of my kids have been to German universities, and I have a high regard for the German people.
However, I feel that Germany has made three mistakes in the past. The first was being in far too much of a hurry to integrate former Soviet satellites into the EU; the second was to admit too many countries into the Euro; and the third was to ignore the evidence of Greek corruption and rely on very dodgy assessments by bankers in order to get Greece into the Euro. Having done this, and the Greek mess having resulted, Schauble was trying the same approach that caused so much pain for East Germany, but without the benefits the East Germans had of being able to travel freely and work in West Germany.
The result is that without cancellation of some Greek debt, Greece is facing economic stagnation which will make it even harder to pay off the debt. I think this is a mistake. So do quite a lot of Germans.
Incidentally, the anti-German rhetoric in the UK comes from newspapers owned by a former Australian and someone who claims to be French for tax purposes, plus a couple of tax exiles. In effect, it is the far right in the UK that is anti-German. When the Sun tries to suggest the present Queen is a Nazi, that’s probably because she won’t give Murdoch an honorary knighthood, and because Murdoch hates the Germans because they won’t allow him to take over mainland European media. I doubt that there is much real anti-German feeling, just the false anti-Germanism of these unpleasant people with right wing agenda.
9 Likes
Yeah, that’s exactly what I find interesting about the way people shrug this off. Because of course everyone condemned the Nazis afterwards– that’s a meaninglessly low bar to set. The more revealing question is what you thought of Hitler before circumstances happened to make him The Enemy.
Lots of people in the UK, particularly upper-class people, were basically on board with everything about the Nazis except the part where they bombed the shit out of London. Edward VIII, Unity Mitford, the Daily Mail– these people didn’t stop publicly admiring Hitler until war was inevitable, and when or if they stopped admiring him privately is an extremely interesting open question.
I don’t think the Queen is an actual Nazi, but I also don’t think we can learn any lessons by refusing to understand that there were, and are, shades of grey in how our society really feels about fascism.
7 Likes
I agree but I don’t see how thats related/similar in any way to the Holocaust.
1 Like
They are. I’m not.
I think you are deliberately looking for something in my posts that doesn’t exist.
I commented above that one of the reasons the British remember WW2 so much is the Shoah. When I lived in North London I knew people whose parents had been on the Kindertransport, and people who had lost their grandparents and cousins. They still get twitchy at anything that looks like German (or British) intolerance, even now. But that was in the context of why we still make so much fuss over WW2 compared to the US: We could have ceased to exist, the US never had that threat. This is in the context of a discussion thread about historical support in the UK for the Nazis, so it’s quite relevant.
I was trying for your benefit to separate my comment in passing- that some people are upset by the German government’s attitude to the Greek crisis that they have done so much to create - from my personal attitude to Germans and the German people, because you seemed to need that distinction spelt out. It seems you still don’t get it. That is now your problem, not mine.
1 Like
Well, it would seem that you have some insight though not much.
From the letters her son writes to the Government, the Windsors would seem if anything to be somewhat left of current centre. Lord Mountbatten, in fact, was notably unstuffy - and if he wasn’t always popular with his ship crews, that was largely owing to his tendency to put himself (and therefore them) at considerable personal risk in his desire to sink anything associated with Hitler.
1 Like
Oh stuff it. Read the 1938 article. It’s hardly complimentary.
1 Like
So, you’re saying the royal household can’t have been sympathetic to fascism because it would later include members who, respectively, forced working-class people to blow up foreigners and used their hereditary privilege to lobby for an ultra-conservative preindustrial model of society?
Anyway, my point was that people in the UK (and other Allied countries) have a misplaced faith that because our society opposed a specific fascist regime that was trying to kill us, it somehow proves that we are immune to that kind of darkness, which is a dangerously wrong conclusion.
5 Likes
I have an Israeli friend whose father pulled himself out of a mass grave in Poland. He wanted to join the resistance, but there weren’t enough rifles, so he had to kill a German soldier with his bare hands to get a rifle. He’s in his 90s now.
I last saw my friend in Washington, D.C., and he wanted to go to the Holocaust Museum. Not a place I likely would have gone on my own, but I’d recommend it to anyone now. One thing I was struck with was how very fast the really bad stuff started to happen once plans were put into effect. Before that moment there was both plenty of time to escape if one was able, and plenty of ways to rationalize staying. How could anyone have wanted to believe what would happen?
That level of disbelief was much stronger than the current wish not to accept that some of the great and the good were pro-Nazi in the early 1930s. Watch Triumph of the Will, the whole thing. It’s pretty inspiring even knowing what we know now. There is no doubt it could happen again.
5 Likes
A family story to reinforce your point:
My in-laws got out of Germany in 1938 and legally emigrated to British Palestine - an amazing feat only possible because one member of the family saw that Nazis for what they would become and starting working on an exit plan in 1933.
However, upon seeing the primitive housing conditions in Haifa in 1938, , the family matriarch went back to Germany.
in 1938.
(Just to be clear – everyone in this story was a “pure” Jewish German citizen and had been treated as such since 1932.)
8 Likes
