Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
just from the germans i know.--- kind of like us, once they were invincible, always right, marched under the flag of an eagle. dropped bombs on people and cheered at their superior fire power and military genius. you know, they were the good guys, just like us.
Your statement is filled with lessons we need to learn in order to avoid even greater mistakes. We now have the added issue of nuclear weapons to our destructive abilities; which allow us to do things beyond stupid, while thinking we are too smart or too right to make mistakes.
The book is The Question of God by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi. It puts Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis together in a debate which sadly never happened. I find it interesting to see the different ideas of the two great thinkers side by side without judgment from the writer. Among the speeches by Freud are his questions on how an educated culture could fall for the Nazi propaganda, and he had ample time to make a judgment on the cultural actions of the population.
I personally think the actions taken by the Nazi party were well known in Germany, and only the ignorant would not have recognized what was happening than or accept it as history now. I understand people not wanting to believe it, but as intelligent individuals they had to recognize their neighbors had not just gone on extended vacation or the gold stars they wore were a new style. The bigotry preached by the Nazi party leaves little need for higher thinking minds to know what was happening.
Lastly I did not compare Bush to Hitler, I compared the Bush’s War and our response to it with the German response to the Holocaust.
Thank you for the clarification. Much appreciated.
However, I still think the comparison of responses is innaccurate, but that is for another time.
Yeah, unfortunately, some people do.
Did Hitler feel a cold blooded disassociation with the deaths he caused? After all, supposedly he just said that he wished someone would take care of the Jewish problem some how, just make it go away. Doesn't matter, it's his fault all the same. He's responsible for millions of deaths.
Did Stalin somehow feel guilty about the deaths he he caused? Is that why he spent hours poring over the execution lists, carefully adding names, perhaps on occasion crossing a name off? Did he feel that he was doing the right thing to preserve his nation as he saw it? That some had to go for the good of others? Doesn't matter. He's responsible for millions of deaths.
Doesn't matter how many were shot, gassed, bayoneted, strangled, hanged, burned alive, starved or froze to death or just died from disease because they were denied medical care in some camp or prison.
I don't care who killed how many. It's true though, a single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.
I suppose the special horror that was Hitler was the cold blooded, mechanical and industiral way he set about ridding Germany, then Europe of all that were not desired to live. The death camps were mass production centers intended to be as efficent as they could be, and the inmates got used up for the benefit of Germany first if they were deemed strong enough. If he had been able to kill ALL the people he wanted his toll would have been much higher, but he lost his war in some seven years and his purges ended.
Stalin's special horror was in the length of time he had to kill. He is responsible for millions of deaths, no matter how you calculate it. He was also feared by even his closest associates. He performed regular purges of his own staff and generals just because he had gotten to paranoid they were against them.
Neither of them were other than murders on a mass stage. If you look at the story from their side, they were right and doing the proper thing, to remove the enemies of their nation. Even the most evil villen in a story does not ring true if not written from the pov that he believes he is doing right. And its the same in real life.
A month or so ago I saw a documentary on one of the cable channels called Worse than War. It was about the still exisiting practice of genocide in this world we not live in, not Hitlers Europe. There was an attempt to kill off the native Mayan population in the 1980's which was not even known ourside of (I believe) Guatamala. It doesn't matter how many you kill, or what excuse you use, or how you do it. It is still a horrifying thing. If we want to see it in its true way, find the stories of individuals who have experienced it. See it through their eyes, human to human. The worse thing we can do is accept the statistic and go about our business. If you lose the horror you've let them win.
Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, a non-smoker and a non-drinker. He ordered German bakeries to produce whole-grain bread, and the German government and scientists were the world's first to condemn/ discourage smoking tobacco. As a contrast to the decadent sleazy night-club atmosphere of Berlin as shown in the Broadway show/ movie "CABARET", the Nazi's promoted healthful activities, camping, and outdoor exercise for their youth. Germans saw all this is morally positive. Winston Churchill by contrast was a heavy cigar smoker and an alcoholic. I'm not defending the murderous Nazi's -- but just want to illustrate some reasons their cause seemed attractive to German people.
I remember reading two things about how the average Germans thought during the war.
One, was a testimonial by a Holocaust survivor speaking of how she remembers being in a train loaded w/ other Jews headed for a camp. When the train was passing by a small rural area, the German children who lived there would look at them confused and stupefied - and the adults would turn around.
Two, when the US Army liberated some of the camps, it went into nearby towns and forced local residents to come to the camps to bury the dead - and they mocked the good middle-class Germans who would simply say "we didn't know what was happening."
The same thing we were thinking when we let Bush invade Iraqi. We think we are too smart, or to good to be pulled in on something so unacceptable as killing other humans, but in hindsight it looks like a human weakness.
. He ordered German bakeries to produce whole-grain bread, and the German government and scientists were the world's first to condemn/ discourage smoking tobacco.
Swell for the Nazis, but the slave labor forces were expected to exist on a few ounces of bread per day, bread which was 40% flour and 60% sawdust.
While Hitler maintained a personal rigidy about the above health habits, except for smoking in his presence, he tolerated gluttony and alcoholism in his subordinates. At staff meals, his aids and generals ate conventional foods and sloshed down the wine and beer, he was the only one with a restricted diet.
And before we assign too many good health points to Adolph, we may recall that he spent the last couple of years of his life addicted to an array of drugs prescribed by Theodor Morell, his quack personal doctor. Right up to the end Hitler was taking some 28 Morell prescribed pills a day as well as receiving a few injections. Hitler died a meth addict.
From surviving descriptions, Morell himself was obese and extremely careless in his personal hygiene.
Quote:
Winston Churchill by contrast was a heavy cigar smoker and an alcoholic. I'm not defending the murderous Nazi's -- but just want to illustrate some reasons their cause seemed attractive to German people.
That cigar blowing, brandy swilling Churchill lived to the age of 90. His alcoholism was the type where the person sips all day, but never appears to be inebriated. Churchill began each day with a hot bath and a huge brandy sniffer, and never really ceased drinking until he went to sleep. Apparently the man could hold his booze. The above habits descriptions may also be said of President Grover Cleveland, described by one aid as a man who "glowed all day."
Stalin of course was also a severe alcoholic, lots of accomplished people have been. Buffalo Bill Cody, Sam Houston, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Hunter Thompson, Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas..........Lindsay Lohan.
Very true... I wish more people understood history and how WW2 came about.. The German people were decimated after WW1... couldn't buy food for their families, their military was crushed, unemployment was extremely high and the world didn't care. They NEEDED a "nationalist" movement to get out of the sink hole they were in and they also NEEDED a scape goat - right/wrong or indifferent.
This is true. The state of Germany after WWI was absolutely terrible: high levels of unemployment, the military in disarray, etc. Couple that with a leader in the rise that promises to get Germany out of their situation. German citizens were looking for any way out, even if that meant buying into the Nazi propaganda and millions of Jews and individuals of other races being brutally murdered in concentration camps.
It's absolutely horrid what happened to those people in the camps during the Holocaust! However, it makes me wonder: "Would history have been different if the Treaty of Versailles DIDN'T impose such harsh war reparation requirements on Germany?"
Martin Niemoller was a German U-boat commander during WW I. After the war ended he returned to farming, and then gave that up to become a Lutheran Minister. Along with the majority of the nation's Protestant ministers, he supported Hitler's rise to power.
He gradually changed. First he became disturbed that Jews who had converted to Christianity, were being treated the same as Jews who had not. Then he became even more upset when the Nazis began to semi nationalize the Protestant Churches of Germany. Though he held some anti Semitic views himself, Niemoller came out strongly against the "Aryan Paragraph", a clause which was inserted into all property transactions calling for the promise to never sell the land, or item, to a Jew. (And that wasn't even a Nazi invention, it had been around since 1885.)
Niemoller then founded the Pfarrernotbund, an organization to prevent discrimination against Christians with Jewish backgrounds. The Nazis began arresting such activists and in 1937, they got around to Niemoller. He was charged with "activities against the state", held for nine months, given a trial where he was convicted and sentenced to seven months, released, and promply rearrested by the Gestapo which was annoyed by the lack of a more severe sentence.
Not bothering with a trial of any sort, the Gestapo placed Niemoller in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and later transferred him to Dachau, and finally to Tyrol. There he remained until the the US Fifth Army liberated the camp in April of 1945.
After the war, Niemoller was extremely candid about his own guilt in cooperating with, and supporting the Nazis. He deeply regretted his earlier anti Jewish statements and positions. He organized other Protestant pastors and collectively they issued the "Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt" where they confessed that their support of the Nazis had been a betrayal of their Christian duties.
Niemoller became a frequent lecturer on the subject of German guilt, traveling around German schools to deliver his message of regret and personal shame. At one stop he was asked by a student.."How could this have happened?" Niemoller answered:
Quote:
First they came for the Communists but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists but I was not one of them, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews but I was not Jewish so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
