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This is a very insightful post. I had family which suffered from both the fascists and the communists and even royalists to a degree. Where I am sceptical about
by yawaworht1978 5y ago
This is a very insightful post. I had family which suffered from both the fascists and the communists and even royalists to a degree.
Where I am sceptical about the German "did not know" is, all these soldiers who went on invasions, they had families and surely some reported about the matters.
In the east European countries and the south, soldiers did report home and speak to families.
This includes the operators of the death camps, which might have been told to keep quiet, but the boots on ground soldiers surely were more communicative. I could be wrong.
War is a horrible thing, not sure how to prevent it or what post war measurements other than education and relative wealth can prevent it.
It is even more sad if one considers how Hitler came to be, all the way from what basically was family feuds leading to WW1 etc.
Germany simply had the manpower, engineering and resources to do it, it could have been some other country as well.
- Tarsul 5y agoPeople often handwave away what doesn't fit in their world view. So if you lived in Germany during those times and heard whispers about the genocide your first thought would be: "But in the news papers it's nowhere to be found! How can it be true? That's probably an exaggeration or a single occurence" (or whatever else pops in your mind at first thought). And because you as a mere citizen don't have a lot of leverage you would probably leave it at that and simply try to live and survive. I think there's a lot about group psychology to be learnt by our horrible past (I'm German) and I think these lessons are helpful for every human being. Especially now with the rise of populists in the last years worldwide (and the atrocities against the Uighurs).
- hef19898 5y agoSadly these lessons are bot fully capitalized on. E.g. the German Armed forces are, in theory, best poised to serve a show case army for democracy and human rights. After all, we have the Nazis and East Germany as a military tradition on top of being a core NATO member. Instead of using that past to build a solid pro-democracy basis, the German Armed forces just declared both, the Wehrmacht and NVA (GDRs army) to be not part of current Bundeswehr tradition. Going so far as to remove exhibits from their internal museums. Such a missed opportunity, and it wont do anything against right wing ideology in the Bundeswehr. That so seems to be a lost cause. I remember one Air Force Lt.-Col. during a recruiting event saying, I paraphrase here, " if you show up here with an Antifa badge, maybe you shouldn't be here". I was quite shocked, hearing a senior German officer in 2018 having a problem with people being anti-fascist.