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I'm well aware of the crimes of the Wehrmacht, and I implied as much when I mentioned how they executed rural Jewish populations in Soviet territory. As I said

I'm well aware of the crimes of the Wehrmacht, and I implied as much when I mentioned how they executed rural Jewish populations in Soviet territory. As I said earlier, there is a big difference between what people can be made to do in the heat of the action compared to when people have time to think. There's intense peer pressure and training that stresses compliance. They had been under fire recently, which made them more willing to kill. There's the escalation of engagement, where you've been killing people for a while already, so murdering civilians is, in a way, merely an extension. > I would imagine all the Nazis not directly involved (perhaps even Hitler!) would be 'innocent'. I'm not arguing in terms of guilt or innocence; it's a rather pointless exercise. But if I really must, then the Germans were certainly guilty of persecuting, despoiling and rounding up the Jews in concentration camps. As such, they were ultimately guilty for the extermination that this made possible.

pasabagi 6y ago
> As such, they were ultimately guilty for the extermination that this made possible. The wording here is kind of insane. The germans did the extermination. They didn't make it possible for some other group to do it. Just because not everybody involved can literally be throwing the cans of gas through the trapdoor does not mean that all the masses people in all strata of society directly involved in its planning and execution were not culpable. Doctors who sent their patients to the gas chambers did not do so 'under fire'. I think arguments like yours would hold much more weight if they hadn't tacitly legitimized the holocaust in the post-war era, by not prosecuting even the worst and most awful monsters of the system. If the German people were truly shocked and horrified about what had happened, then surely they would have made a bigger effort to make sure that the people who had done these shocking and awful things were recognized as the criminals they were, rather than just saying they were 'under duress', if they even bothered to bring them to trial. The real thing that bothers me about the German reaction to the Holocaust is not the guilt or innocence of specific parties. It is this idea - 'under duress', under which the Germans have fashioned themselves this whole idea that they were unwittingly involved in monstrous acts, or terrified into submission by a small group of crazy people, so they don't have to confront the actual horror of what they did. If the Germans had been half so serious about dismantling the Nazi state as they were about dismantling the DDR, you can bet there would be no VW today, there would be no 'under duress', there would be no smooth transition from the Nazi party to west-german beamter (there certainly was no such transition for east german beamters). The whole German state would have had to be re-built from scratch, and it would have been better for it.

pasabagi 6y ago

> As such, they were ultimately guilty for the extermination that this made possible. The wording here is kind of insane. The germans did the extermination. They didn't make it possible for some other group to do it. Just because not everybody involved can literally be throwing the cans of gas through the trapdoor does not mean that all the masses people in all strata of society directly involved in its planning and execution were not culpable. Doctors who sent their patients to the gas chambers did not do so 'under fire'. I think arguments like yours would hold much more weight if they hadn't tacitly legitimized the holocaust in the post-war era, by not prosecuting even the worst and most awful monsters of the system. If the German people were truly shocked and horrified about what had happened, then surely they would have made a bigger effort to make sure that the people who had done these shocking and awful things were recognized as the criminals they were, rather than just saying they were 'under duress', if they even bothered to bring them to trial. The real thing that bothers me about the German reaction to the Holocaust is not the guilt or innocence of specific parties. It is this idea - 'under duress', under which the Germans have fashioned themselves this whole idea that they were unwittingly involved in monstrous acts, or terrified into submission by a small group of crazy people, so they don't have to confront the actual horror of what they did. If the Germans had been half so serious about dismantling the Nazi state as they were about dismantling the DDR, you can bet there would be no VW today, there would be no 'under duress', there would be no smooth transition from the Nazi party to west-german beamter (there certainly was no such transition for east german beamters). The whole German state would have had to be re-built from scratch, and it would have been better for it.