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My wife is German, her parents were also forced into the Hitler Youth. What happened during the war was horrible and should never be forgotten, but, by and large, the Wehrmacht, (German Army) were not Nazi's. Only about 12 percent of all Germans were members of the Nazi Party.
The leaders of the Nazi Party were beyond reprehension but painting an entire country or military as that is unfair and not true.
It's the same thing as saying all Republicans are members of the Oath Keepers or white supremacists and all Democrats are members of BLM.
My fear is that we are losing our sight of what happened then and are doomed to repeat something similar.
Unfortunately, the Nazi’s were very effective at utilizing propaganda and brainwashing their own citizens….with a particularly strong focus on “educating” young German children about the inferior nature of the Jews. Below is a link to a paper published by the US National Academy of Sciences that found “Germans who grew up under the Nazi regime are much more anti-Semitic today than those born before or after that period.” The tragedy of this is that some of anti-Semitism that exists today can be traced directly to the hate spewed by the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945.
You don't have a clue what you are talking about! Internment camps were nothing like concentration camps.
At Auschwitz they went through the "selection". Nothing even close to that in an internment camp. Auschwitz did not have schools for the children, bands to join, community gardens, or any other things the internment camps had.
The internment camps were a blot on our history. Life there wasn't good, but they should never be called concentration camps!
yep - even the German POWs were treated pretty well.
Thousands of German POWs moved back to the United States after the war, including Hennes. Historian Arnold Krammer estimates that 8,000 POWs eventually returned to the U.S. Some married American women, but most were sponsored by a resident to be eligible for residency, including former farmers supporting their former farm hands. POWs who didn’t immigrate to the States still visited Texas regularly for reunions with the farmers they once worked for. “Without exception, they recall their years as POWs in Texas as ‘the greatest times of their lives,’” Krammer observed.
Why does everyone always see holocaust as Germans targeting Jews. During the same time period there was plenty going on in Poland and in the UdSSR, Greece, Italy, Spain. If you focus on Jews look at the history of the last 2k years. If you are looking at people look at the last 100 years.
No family connection but back in the 1970s I visited Dachau. As we checked in at the entry booth I remarked to my ex that the guy giving out the tickets was probably the same guy who sat in some kind of booth checking people in before.
To see a sign that said "shower" in German and to know that it was really a gas chamber made me furious. Same with the barracks where they slept, piled on top of each other. Same with thoughts of cleaning the roads with a toothbrush for punishment and being kicked around, harassed, then killed anyway.
And our host friends had a book on Hitler. When you opened it up, a page folded out and then out again and again and again and again. At the edge was Hitler at one of his rallies. The rest of it was crammed with people cheering and hailing Hitler.
Not to mention that we were on the border with E. Germany and way up in the sparsely populated mountains. My (colored) blonde hair was fine until the brown roots started to show. People still had the mind set and I got the looks. Our hostess even kept suggesting a hair dresser who would bleach my hair blonde but I was too naive to know what she was really trying to tell me. Even though I was not Jewish, the prejudices were still there.
"Ol' Brooke" who had been Himmler's personal secretary suddenly wasn't so friendly to me anymore. I always wondered how he went free or if anyone was looking for him! Fun guy, interested in music and the teachings of ancient India--later I found out that India's ancient teachings were one of Hitler's interests. Ol' Brooke must have remained a Nazi. He hadn't changed, was probably hoping it would all come back. I was never so disillusioned with people as I was with those few Nazi leftovers. Disgusting.
I'm sorry if I have ranted but I grew up with a lot of Jewish people, my next door neighbor and good friend is Jewish, and I've always had Jewish friends who feel like family to me.
My family is French catholic. My parents told me stories of what went on in France during the war. Horrible. Some German soldiers were killed and they called families to come outside their homes to talk and machine gunned them down as an example. Some others were hung up by a meat hook. My husband, daughter and I went on a trip there years ago and went to a town that had been burned to the ground. It is just as it was that day nothing changed frozen in time. The men shot and the women and children put in the church and set on fire. Anyone trying to escape was shot. How could they stand to hear the screaming of the women and children? One lone boy from the school survived because be went out the window as the class left the building. People who had been out of town that day came home to find their families dead and village destroyed.
I forgot to add that I had an uncle in Paris who hid and transported Jews during the war. Someone informed the Nazis and he was sent to a camp. I remember seeing the tattoo and noticing how his arm always trembled and asked my parents what had happened. They said he was tortured. He made it home at least. He was such a sweet man. I always marveled at how he was always happy and in a good mood. Never seeming depressed. I was curious and would have wanted to ask him questions , but I didn't want to bring up such terrible memories.
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Must never forget this happened
