4th Reich On The Rise In Europe?

Never heard of this one. This possibly how the German's you met excused their Nazis behaviour?

You actually believe you can excuse Nazism by saying 'they were good people except for their persecution and attempts at annihilation of minorities in particular those who they believed were not pure blooded Aryans'.

...and yet you excuse it.

I am not interested in disputing your number. What is important is your seeming lack of acknowledgement of the actions of the Nazis.

Ah! That will be because you yourself expressed a one sided positive expression of the Nazis ignoring all the inhumane actions they engaged in as well as things you have previously said. Right now it appears to me that you are using the line "I believe the official victor's narrative is bias, incomplete & in some cases, fraudulent" to ignore or excuse essential Nazism. Basically you are being a Nazi apologist.

The Allies were by no means innocent. I have spoken out against their actions when appropriate. However they were not Nazis. That is my argument with you. You excuse the Nazis. I think I am correct in saying you also deny the holocaust.

 

You are assuming that Keynes political orientation was left. It was not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/20/books/the-first-keynesian.html

 

The 'human nature' that the Nazis were shown to depict was lack of empathy. That goes with your second line on how you deal with human nature.

Lack of empathy is the inability to feel with and for another human being - basically the position of the psychopath.

 

I'm not assuming anything about Keynes' political orientation. He wanted to save capitalism. His personal politics was that of most intelligent members of a modern ruling elite. in an advanced country. But ... his personal politics are irrelevant. If my doctor uses a method that cures me of a disease, it's irrelevant if he's a Buddhist or an atheist, a Marxist or an 'Austrian'.

The Nazis were extreme German nationalists, and a sub-set of them, shaped by paranoid anti-Semitism. The latter was counter-productive to the former. Had Hitler, despite his distaste for them, ignored their presence in Germany in terms of laws and outright persecution -- that is, had he been 'just' as anti-Semitic as, say, the Russian Czar had been -- then most German Jews would have been patriotic as they had been in the First World War, or as they were in Finland when it fought Russia. (Three Iron Crosses were awarded to Finnish Jews by the Nazis for their valor against the Soviets.) But anti-Semitism seems to drive otherwise intelligent people insane. Thank God it did in Hitler's case, or his Jewish scientists would have given him those wunderwaffen Germans consoled themselves with as they realized they were going to lose the war Hitler got them into.

But you're right about lack of empathy. Nationalists -- tribalists, really, nationalism being the modern way tribalism expresses itself -- lose their empathy for opposing tribes. Both empathy and whatever its opposite is are biologically rooted, the results of millions of years of ruthless natural selection, which rewards certain behaviors with reproductive success, and in the world of scarce resources, the environment in which most living things find themselves, too much empathy means you don't eat and don't pass on your genes. (This is assuming that there is such a thing as evolution, which a lot of Rightwingers deny, and that naturally-selected genes influence behavior, which all Leftwingers deny.)

But all nationalists-tribalists are this way: that's why Sikh nationalists can put a bomb on an Air India passenger jet, why Serbs and Croats can commit the most disgusting atrocities on each other -- they even turned the stomachs of the Germans during WWII -- why Sinhalese can throw Tamils into the fires of their own homes --- why young British Muslims can laugh while watching a video of a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a cage ...

And this loss of empathy doesn't have to be expressed in delight in watching members of other tribes suffer. How many Americans are bothered by Hiroshima?

And ... evolution has also provided us with the ability to have empathy. It's weak, but is probably the foundation of the one thing that seems to be a human universal, a (weak) sense of 'fair play'. Some peoples seem to have evolved this more than others, or rather, their intelligence has shown them that life doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, that their long-term interests may be compatible with another's long-term interests as well.

Yes, we're subject to these animal impulses to survive at the expense of others.

But ... homo sapiens, uniquely among species, has been able to transcend mere zoological impulses. Not always and everywhere, but our human reason allows us to work out that we can often do better for ourselves if we don't just snatch that other person's food from him. Thus we have evolved the division of labor, and institutions like the state, which try to claim the loyalty of even their most oppressed subjects by claiming to act in their interests.

The late Joe Sobran, no pro-Semite he, once observed that the Palestinians would have been far better off if they had eschewed violence and appealed to the Jewish conscience. Go to Israel, and you'll find, side-by-side extreme ultra-Zionist tribalists, on the one hand, and very compassionate and caring, empathic, people on the other. It's not basically a question, I suspect, of a different distribution of alleles -- although this might play a part -- but of different perceptions of how best to survive in the hostile environment they are in: their intellectual judgements have conditioned their respective empathic responses to the plight of the people they landed on -- at least the empathy-action thing is two way, 'dialectical' as our Marxist friends would say.

There are people who seem to be lacking in empathy: sociopaths is one word we give to them. But Hitler was not one. He had huge empathy for his own tribe, as all tribalists do. A true sociopath would see all humans as just objects. His anti-Semitism may have had a biological origin -- we don't know nearly enough about the brain to say, yet, how neurological factors affect detailed behavior. I have noticed that some very intelligent, otherwise ordinary people, can hold to really crazy beliefs, even when these are not reinforced socially. I don't have an explanation for this, it's just a fact. Maybe Hitler was one of these people.

But most Nazis were just German nationalists. It's nationalism (tribalism) that we need to transcend, by realizing that the biological drives they were selected by, the 'goals' of these drives, are best fulfilled by other means than wiping out rival tribes. That stuff keeps us in the stone age, but the human race is going to the stars.

 

Oh I was just responding to you saying

 

You do not lose empathy - except possibly by an extreme trauma. Empathy comes from being in touch with your inner feeling self, your heart. I think Jung puts this quite well when he is describing his meeting with the Pueblo Indians in the US. He described how they told him they thought the white man was mad. Jung asked why they thought this. They replied because they say they think with their heads. Jung asked what they thought with. They put their hands on their hearts. Jung said he never looked on Western Civilisation in the same way again.

In the last few decades people have taken to saying empathy when what they are really talking about is sympathy. I was talking about empathy - the ability to feel with and for another human being.

 

We put an end to 2/3 of those.
And tried but failed with Caesar.

So immediately you have set yourself up as being a traditional enemy of our culture.
By choosing our historical enemies as your role models you have set yourself up against our society.
This tactic dooms you here.
To rebel against us, leaves you unable to lead us.

Jeremy Corbyn has the same problem, by continually and consistently siding with our enemies or against the tenets of our society, he is always too unpopular to lead it.

Hitler and Mussolini were populists. You have to be popular.

Branding yourself a fascist and a fan of Hitler and Napoleon is reactionary. Antagonism. It's sticking your fingers up to us and hence we dismiss you as being against us.
You cannot lead in the modern world if you brand yourself fascist.
That war has already been fought and lost.

However you can rebrand. Social Democrat or whatever. And then carry on with the same popular ideologies and policies as before.






So you wish to start a new empire/crown a new king.
I get that.

But obviously this does not attract the conservative crowd because conservatives wish to maintain the existing orders. Their existing societies and social orders/their positions in them.
They already have an established aristocracy.

So this really is one for the progressives. "Change".

 

Alexa: human beings act as they do from a mix of biological impulses, the result of evolution, and what is vaguely called 'the environment' -- all the other influences on us, from whether our mothers expressed love for us when we were babies, to what is taught in school, to the 'doxa' -- things just taken for granted by everyone.

Danes were ferocious Vikings, now they're the nicest people in the world. Germans are pacifists today -- three generations ago they were the most efficient soldiers on earth. Some Leftists assume from such changes that people have no biological matrix within which their behavior is rooted -- that it's all the environment and so if we, the Left, can get ahold of enough levers of power -- mainly, the state -- we can make perfect human beings. (This seems, actually, what von Clausewitz believes as well.)

It's a view which is not entirely wrong. Societies do evolve.

On the Right, you sometimes hear the view that it's all genetics. Some people(s) are born smart, others not, and this is reflected in the sorts of societies they live in. "Man is a tribal animal" can be an expression of this biological determinism.

It's a view which is not entirely wrong. Humans are evolved animals, the 'third chimpanzee', and are subject to the influence of the genetic heritage they have received from their ancestors.

Although we are animals, and can be really nasty to each other, we can learn how to pursue our self-interests in more ways than just smash-and-grab.

All of politics is about trying to work out what those ways are. And we've been pretty successful at it. In just a few tens of thousands of years ... a blink of the eye in terms of evolution ... we've come from being primitive hunter-gatherers to a species that put robots on Mars. Not bad!

But it's slow, and uneven. People cannot jump over their own heads. Backward peoples, like the Afghans, can't take too much change, too fast. Don't open a Lesbian Outreach Center in Kandahar. There'll be one, someday, or the equivalent ... but for the time being, let's just try to open a few schools for girls there.

The people who want ethnically-pure states are, although they will hate the comparison, like those young men in Kenya who, after each election which their tribal party loses, roam the streets with machetes looking for members of the winning tribe-party, to hack them to death. Yes, it's human, yes, we all have those impulses, they're biological. But we can do better. This is what we're arguing about.

 

My reply to the post quoted in 903 remains. This has no connection.

 

I think you have grossly misinterpreted & misrepresented my views. Nowhere did I say that the Germans I met excused the excesses of the Nazis nor do I.

Who wouldn't despise the acts of Hollywood Nazis but it is a salient reality that actual Nazis comprised only 5% -10% of the German population. How could so few people commit such expansive atrocities and at the same time conquer so much territory?
I simply believe there's more to the history of that tragic era than is represented by your "Yesterday Channel" & America's "History Channel".

Re:

If there was an attempt to annihilate all minorities, why did 2 million of them serve in Germany's WW2 military that included 150,000 Jews?

Not only did Blacks, Jews, Slavs etc serve in Germany's WW2 military but they received Germany's highest military honors and rose to the very highest ranks with some commanding hundreds of thousands of men including commanding "pure blooded Aryans".(1), (2).

In some cases, the Germans dissolved a few of these non German units & prosecuted their commanders precisely because they were inhumanly vicious in settling ethnic scores.

I find it also puzzling that the British cracked the Enigma Code in 1941 but there was no mention of mass murder or racial genocide(3) in any of the radio transmissions.

Additionally, I've spoken with holocaust survivors who quietly deny what has become the standard holocaust narrative.
I say "quietly deny", because they have faced indifference, hostility & even threats from what Norman Finkelstein calls "The Holocaust Industry".

There are many other facts you won't see on the "Yesterday Channel" that have caused me to question the victors narrative of WW2 but, finally, I don't doubt that horrific atrocities were committed under the 3rd Reich.

I doubt, however, that they were any more horrific than what happened in distant & secretive Soviet Gulags or were committed by Eisenhower,(4) Arthur "Butcher" Harris, the army of Soviet rapists, Solomon Morel, & innumerable other malevolent individuals who kept the concentration camps operational long after WW2 (5)

I believe that we are a product of our very diverse experiences & things to which we have been exposed just as I learned very quickly in my military service that the first casualty in any war is Truth.

You may call me any names that you chose: "Nazi apologist", "holocaust denier" etc because I do not believe everything espoused by Hollywood, the "Yesterday Channel", the holocaust industry etc but I feel that I am justifiably skeptical in light of the increasing number of frauds & outright lies that have been exposed over the decades.

I vividly remember when the "human soap" & "human skin lampshades" hoax was held as ironclad proof as to the Germans' depravity and to question it was to be the lowest form of life: a "holocaust denier". Over the decades, numerous other "irrefutable" holocaust tales have been quietly debunked.

Finally, my views on this volatile topic are far from static as I try to keep an open mind. I do not see why these topics cannot be openly discussed without rancor or the threat of imprisonment as is the case in many countries. The truth welcomes honest scrutiny but only a lie requires draconian censorship laws.





(1) "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers"
https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Jewish-Soldiers-Descent-Military/dp/0700613587

EXCERPT "Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought-perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals."CONTINUED


(2) "Adolf Hitler’s Armed Forces: A Triumph for Diversity?"
Veronica Clark
https://www.inconvenienthistory.com/1/3/3102


(3) “THE HOLOCAUST NARRATIVE” by Nicholas Kollerstrom
https://archive.org/stream/BreakingTheSpell_48/BreakingTheSpell-Kollerstrom_djvu.txt

EXCERPT “In 1941, British Intelligence analysts cracked the German “Enigma” code. This undermined the German war effort—but also threw new light on day-by-day events in the Nazi concentration camp system. Between January 1942 and January 1943, encrypted radio communi-cations between those camps and the Berlin headquarters were intercepted and decrypted.

Oddly enough, historians have largely ignored the information furnished in these intercepts relating to “arrivals,” “departures,” recorded deaths and other events at these camps.The only reasonable explanation is that the intercepted data contra-dicts, even refutes, the orthodox “Holocaust” narrative.

The information does not expose a program of mass murder and racial genocide. Quite the opposite: it reveals that the Germans were determined, desperate even, to reduce the death rate in their work camps, which was caused by catastrophic typhus epidemics.”CONTINUED


(4) "GERMAN HOLOCAUST GERMAN GENOCIDE: 9-15 Million Germans Killed 1945 – 1953 Post WW2 “The Morgenthau Plan” EISENHOWER’S DEATH CAMPS “A Forgotten Genocide”
http://truedemocracyparty.net/2014/...eisenhowers-death-camps-a-forgotten-genocide/


(5) "Rape Of Germany After It Lost In 1945"

https://historyimages.blogspot.com/2012/01/1945-after-it-lost-germany-raped.html

EXCERPT "We are ceaselessly reminded of the Third Reich’s wartime concentration camps. But few Americans are aware that such infamous camps as Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz were kept in operation after the end of the war, only now packed with German captives, many of whom perished miserably."CONTINUED

 

Crimes against the German people, during and after WWII, have indeed been glossed over, in the interests of presenting a black-and-white picture of the war known in the US as "the Good War".

The reality of the these crimes is independent of the reality, or otherwise, of Nazi policies towards non-Germans.

As direct memory of the war fades, it is becoming more and more possible to study and record the objective truth. So the truth is coming out.

For example, the mass rape of German women, not just by the Red Army, was the subject of a book published in Germany a few years ago, which was reported in the British Telegraphy newspaper here (although numbers were disputed). The undisputed fact that German civilians were subjected to the largest ethnic cleansing in history was reported in the Huffington Post, here.

Neither of these are crank, obscure publications. But it will take time for an objective view of WWII to become established.

 

You forgot the many thousands of German POW's starved to death by Eisenhower.

 

I honestly don't know how you guys can see a difference between an Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, or a Julius Caesar.

Only Adolf Hitler deliberately set up death camps for the wholesale genocide of his enemies. Julius Caesar may have killed up to a million Gauls in the Gallic Wars and Napoleon killed many thousands but neither set up death camps and deliberately killed people in chambers designed for mass executions as an ongoing thing. Hitler is unique in history in doing this, and the Nazis are unique in the greatest number killed in the shortest time. (The mongols killed up to 50 million Chinese but it took them about a half century.)

And you were sounding almost like a nearly sane individual. Oh well

 

I'm well aware of the charge, and of the reasons for not dismissing it out of hand. By the end of the war, many leaders in the Allied camp, including Churchill, had moved a long way from the 'official' position that this was a war against the Nazis, not the Germans. They had begun to adopt a quasi-fascist, tribal, position which viewed the war as a war between tribes. (I recall reading about the proposed 'Morganthau plan' to turn Germany into a purely agricultural country fifty years ago.)

So when that book by ... forget his name .. . came out a few years ago, about Eisenhower wanting to starve the surrendered Wehrmacht to death, I was prepared to believe it. However, I read a hostile, apparently informed, review of it in a conservative publication, which made me reserve judgement until I had read more. I haven't read more since then so my view on just how bad Allied policy was towards the defeated German Army is in suspension. (I never ever believe a book's thesis, no matter how well-referenced and documented, without trying to read a couple of competent hostile reviews of it as well.)

Note that when we needed the Germans against the Russians, soon after WWII, Hollywood began to put out movies with 'good Germans' in them. (By which I mean honorable German soldiers.) The Russians, who had abandoned Communist internationalism for Russian patriotism when the war started, as exemplified by the vile Ilya Ehrenberg, had to get the co operation of 'their' Germans, and made a similar turn. So there is an additional layer of propaganda mixed up with the cover-up of Allied bestiality.

In my opinion, you can't read about what the Nazis did to other peoples, and what they in turn did to the German people, without wanting to commit 'genocide' yourself: against all nationalist ideologues.

 

My sentiments exactly. I've discussed/argued/debated with lots of people, from every part of the political spectrum. Some are intelligent, but really wrong. And you can sort of see how they think: usually it's by grasping one Big Truth -- the efficiency of the market, the failures of the market -- and using it to explain everything. They collect all the bits of evidence that support their view and ignore those that don't. Easy to do, and I did it myself for a good twenty years. (Now of course I'm perfect.)

And with respect to the tribes of mankind, I can understand emotional disdain, scorn, even hatred, as a kind of reflex casual attitude. The world is full of selfish cruel bastards, liberally sprinkled over ever race, and wherever a race/tribe gets state power, their cruelty can be greatly magnified.

So I understand why Protestants scorn lazy Pope-dominated Catholics in Northern Ireland, and why Catholics there scorn the Brit-loving, cold, Proddies. A Tamil acquaintance of mine once shocked me by smiling when I told him of an anti-Sinhala atrocity committed by the Tigers in Sri Lanka... he saw nothing wrong with it ... but then he had seen his Tamil neighbors being thrown by Sinhalese into the burning timbers of their own homes. I happened to know an Azerbaijani geneticist in Moscow in the late 80s, and an Armenian astrophysicist in London at the same time ... I assumed that, like me, they would deplore the lynchings that these two peoples were beginning to carry out on each other then. But no, each was a total nationalist for his own tribe. I understand Blacks who hate whites, and whites who are disdainful towards Blacks.

And I can understand people who are angry at, say, the Cuban lobby in the US which prevents us from having a policy towards Cuba that would push them towards more economic and eventually political freedom. I share it, in fact. And the same for those who feel that way towards the powerful Zionist lobby and are sometimes careless about distinguishing this lobby from Jews in the US as a whole.

But what seems the equivalent of clinical insanity to me are people who think that several million people are some sort of unified conspiracy -- the most fractious, divided, people in the world. I've met three people like that in my life, and they are absolutely unshakable. (Okay, my relatives in Texas think Obama is a Muslim and are unshakable but they are simply not informed about very much outside their own personal worlds.)

The three anti-Semites I've met are well-informed and intelligent people, not obviously suffering from some sort of demented hate-the-world syndrome. Yet they believe this ridiculous idea. There is, or used to be before Vatican II, far more evidence for a Roman Catholic world-domination conspiracy, than for a Jewish one. So for me, this view -- or the people who hold it -- are just another of life's mysteries.

But there we are. Although genuine fascism has had a revival in the US since the days of George Lincoln Rockwell, and has some articulate and not-stupid leaders like Matthew Heimbach and fellow-travellers like Richard Spencer, and the possibility of an objective economic/political situation favorable to the growth of radicalism as the US slides down from being the sole Superpower ... I think the odds are stacked heavily against seeing these people prosper.

Here's an article worth reading, with a happy ending.

 

OK lets look at this. You are of course only talking about formal members of the party, not supporters, but let's look

https://www.politifact.com/punditfa...illing/schilling-throws-wild-pitch-nazi-stat/

As is yours of 5-10%. When people deliberately put in misleading statistics they obviously are intent on deceit.

What now you are denying history completely?

No what you are doing is denying what you don't like even when you have no knowledge of what you are talking about. This suggests you yourself are not open to the truth but instead are intent on protecting the Nazis with ridiculous tales that they did not even exist. I have done a little reading this evening. I discovered that soldiers who were to do the really dirty work, you know the killing of women, children and babies were given a choice. They did not have to do it. Out of 500 asked in one massacre only about 15 refused, of those who got stuck in for the first batch of killing the helpless, only a a small minority could not manage the next.

and oh no of course you believe they could not have managed to do all these things to all these non Aryans, but what about what is now estimated to be the 300,000 Aryans they bumped off - and it seems I was wrong. They did not stop this at the demand of the German's as I had thought. They carried on till the end of the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4

I do not know if Blacks were in their army but I believe they sterilised them. German Jews were German. Most of them were non or antizionist. They were loyal to Germany and fought with everyone else in WW1. In WW2 they were obviously trying not to taken to the camps. Many German Jews just simply did not believe that things were going to develop as they did. Interestingly in the 1920's when the US were sterilising everyone they thought they did not want reproducing, Germany was very reluctant to do this. People saw them as a very civilised people. In Mein Kampf Hitler got busy changing their minds. (see above link)

a lot of outsiders joined the German Army for political reasons - like hating communism.

This of course to you excuses everything the Nazis did. I have a bad internet connection for my search on Black men commanding German Full blooded Aryans! Ah got one now, does not seem to have provided anything confirming what you said so for now I am not believing you that 'Black' men commanded 'pure blooded Aryans'.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Ger...+aryans&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-ab

This of course to you excuses everything else - the killing of 200,000 Aryan Germans, 100,000 Aryan Austrians as well as setting up concentration and death camps.

Yes, I have your message, nothing happened.

I think that is a bit of an Oxymoron.

Norman Finlelstein does not deny the holocaust. Linking him to Holocaust denial kind of makes any place where I might have given you a little bit of room disappear.

Grow up Grau. You know nothing about the documentary I was watching the other day which was made certainly within the last ten years and was speaking to German's who had researched it. You have given nothing to suggest you have ever learned how to do research. I have and I will tell you one more thing, the German's had already set up their first death camp in Africa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Namaqua_genocide


It was not the first time. Some people argue that what threw people this time was that they were doing this to white people.

You have spent all this thread denying them.

Ah! I see! You have a similar mindset to Zionists. When discussing something, you do not like, you ask them why they are not discussing something else.

I have given you too much of my time.

 

I didn't.

Please see Post #910.
While the number of casualties may vary according to differing historians, Eisenhower's deliberately downgrading German POWs from that Internationally protected status to his artificially created "Disarmed Enemy Forces" status.

That war crime had only one purpose and that was to guarantee the death of of those POWs as certainly as if he had executed them by firing squad.

"God, I hate the Germans."

Dwight D. Eisenhower
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/578610

 

Hmmm.... I've read and re-read the argument above about the percentage of Nazis in Germany and I don't see that Grau has said anything substantially different from Alexa: with respect to Nazi Party membership as a percentage of the Germanic population the figure is of the order of 10%.

There is more of a substantial dispute with respect to what percentage of the Germanic population 'supported' the Nazis without being Party members, but this is very cloudy due to the fact, as was noted above, that

(1) Germany, like Russia at the time, was a totalitarian state. How was 'non-support' to be expressed? I follow events in Cuba more closely than many people do, and, every year, there is a mass May Day parade there. Huge numbers of people take part. Useful Idiots on the Left in the US always point to this as proof that the Cuban people support their government. But when you talk to individual Cubans, and read what they post online [Cuba actually has far more freedom for dissenting views to be expressed, by the way, than Nazi Germany or Communist Russia did, so long as they are not organized], you find that attendance at these events is not really a voluntary event. It's more like saying the Pledge of Allegiance in the US (or as it used to be when I was young).

In a state where almost everything you hear is what the regime wants you to hear, and where dissent is dangerous -- physically dangerous in some cases, just a career-buster or ostracism-inviter in others -- you find people who, while not being regime toadies, are also not disloyal. The double negative here is appropriate, contra George Orwell. When I lived in the USSR for a few months, and then re-visited it several times during glasnost, I found it interesting that many intelligent people who were not Communists were still what you might call 'Soviet patriots'. They definitely didn't like the bureaucratic features of the regime, the restrictions on travel, the economic backwardness (which was becoming, more and more, obviously technological backwardness), but ... most of them did not explicitly opposed socialism, nor did they think the Cold War was caused exclusively by a guilty Soviet Union attacking an innocent America. Given the circumstances, it was not possible to have frank discussions, but you could sort of read between the lines to distinguish the people (there were a few) who really hated the regime, from others, who just accepted it, but were not uncritical supporters.

I am sure this was the case in Nazi Germany,. especially when the terrorflieger came over. (One of the few books I have read that attempts to show 'both sides' -- and I think with success -- is Len Deighton's 1970 novel Bomber, an account of a British Lancaster bombing mission over Germany. Deighton did extensive research for this book, interviewing many Germans -- night-fighter pilots, radar crew, emergency services people -- and he gives a very convincing account of how an ordinary worker -- a fireman, in this case, who had been a SPD (the Socialist party) member and who hated the Nazis -- could also really hate the British bomber crews who dropped bombs on hospitals. [Twenty years later Hollywood made a film very loosely based on the Deighton novel, which includes a ludicrous scene in which the bomber's crew realize on their first run that they are going to hit a school rather an an armaments factory, and so go around a second time. Utter nonsense.]

There was a book published a few year's ago, called Hitler's Willing Executioners, which supported the "they were all guilty" thesis, arguing that anti-Semitism was deeply rooted in German culture and led ordinary Germans to treat Jews far worse than, say, Poles. I have not read the book, after reading a very critical review of it in a strongly pro-Zionist publication. Apparently, most historians are very critical of it. (I've linked to the Wiki article on it which is actually quite informative about this whole subject.)

(2) Even in non-totalitarian, democratic, states, people normally support their government, either actively or passively. Thousands of Blacks were lynched in the US, denied the right to vote in the South, and otherwise discriminated against. What percentage of Americans actively protested this? How many Americans, during WWII, and for many years thereafter, would have had second thoughts about dropping nuclear weapons on the cities of their enemies, killing hundreds and thousands of civilians? It's war, right?

(3) In combat, ordinary decent people can shed the layers of cultural inhibition regarding violent behavior towards non-combatants, and unleash the beast within us all: No American should open his mouth to criticize the Germans until he has read every word of the Wiki article about My Lai. (Yes, the difference between a liberal democracy and a totalitarian state is that we knew the truth about My Lai not too long after it happened, and many Americans were revulsed by what we did there. But note that the man who ordered it, Lieutenant Calley, was a hero in his home town, and got effectively no punishment.)

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." But Kant was wrong. It's just that it takes a long time to straighten out crooked timber, generations, centuries. We can sympathyze with the young Trotsky, after the failure of the 1905 Revolution in Russia, believing that history was on his side, but demanding, "What thou doest, do faster!" .... but she moves at her own pace: forward, but unevenly and slowly.

To my mind, the most remarkable thing about the German people is -- even if you assume that the very worst that people say about them re Nazis and WWII behavior is true -- what an astonishing transformation they have undergone. In fact, I think they're a bit too pacifist and tolerant today, which, among other things, may open them up to a nasty backlash in which the failures of ultra-liberal diversity-is-so-wonderful, military-service-is-bad Lefty horsefeathers gives an opening to dark forces. People can't jump over their own heads, not even the Germans.

 

The difference is not with the level of German Nazi Party membership it is with what Gru said

It simply is not true that nazi support was only 5-10% which is what he is suggesting.

 

Disagree with you again. Only a few years ago the BBC did a documentary on this. They were starved to death...not all but a lot. I cannot remember all the details now but it was pretty much like in other videos on Youtube. It was not denied by the American's. What I found concerning was that the BBC accepted with no further questions that it made sense to let them die as there was not enough food for anyone. It was not acceptable to starve men in custody who cannot get food for themselves.

I do not blame all German's for what the Nazi's did. My father for instance was with the army fighting Rommel in the desert - he drove the ambulance. He said it was the safest job as once they saw his red cross no one would fire at him. Rommel believed in the laws of war something you would be lucky to see from the west nowadays.

 

I don't know what it is, Alexa, about my writing, but I can't seem to convey my thoughts accurately to you. We're again not actually disagreeing. (And Grau did NOT say that only 10 percent of the Germans 'supported' the Nazis, but that only something like that percentage were Nazi party members. 'Support' is a vague term, and in a war, it's the default position of ordinary people when their government is defending them, or 'defending' them. George Bush got fewer popular votes than Al Gore in 2000, but Al Queda made sure that the majority of Americans 'supported' him when he took us to war after 9/11.)

To my mind, the single most important statistic about Germans and Nazis is the one from the last election in which Germans were free to express their support, or opposition, to them: November 1932. The Nazis got just under 33%, the non-Nazis got the rest, and of that rest, 37% went to the Socialist and Communist Parties, both of which were violently anti-Nazi.

For some reason, this exchange reminds me of an old American joke, circulated during a time when a right-wing nut group called the John Birch Society -- who believed Eisenhower was a Communist -- was getting a lot of publicity. One of their members -- a little old lady in the original version although I suppose that's wrong to say now -- goes into a music shop, and is browsing through all the records. Suddenly she snatches one up in indignation, strides over to the owner, and shouts, "This record is Communist Music!" The owner looks at it and says, "Well, yes, it's Shastakovich's 7th Symphony, the Leningrad Symphony". "But he's a Communist!" she screams. "Yes," replies the owner, "but he composes beautiful music." "You could write beautiful music too," she yells, "If they put a gun to your head!"

Well, no you couldn't. But you could, and most people would, go along with their government, if a gun were at their heads. And Nazis and Communists know how to do that.

 

No he said as I quoted already only 5-10% were Nazis.

Gru

There you are. There are no others supporting the Nazis according to him. 5-10% is the most and I wish you would not deal with things by talking about people. There is a forum rule about that. When you do and suggest I or others are saying what they did not say I have to make the situation clear if I can be bothered.

As I said and quoted above and in the previous post he made no mention what so ever about members. I guessed that was what he was talking about

You annoy me when you make me go against forum rules and have to repeat myself ad nauseam. If you have no understanding of what is meant by support I suggest you read the quote I left. To try to pretend that the only nazi's are Nazi Party members is a deliberate attempt to minimise support - and I am not interested in semantics or splitting hairs - just do not say things in threads concerning me which are not true.

 

1932 Results
Candidate Party First round
Votes
Paul von Hindenburg Independent 18,651,497
Adolf Hitler Nazi Party 11,339,446
Ernst Thälmann Communist Party 4,938,341

Nazi's were 2nd place behind the conservatives.
Roughly 1/3 Germans supported them.


Centre left party in a right wing country.
Minority rule. But significant minority.

 

Doug 1943, hope this makes it clearer for you.

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/reviews/000220.20gewent.html

If you doubt that the German people were aware of the holocaust.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/17/johnezard

 

I guess the argument is whether someone could 'be' a Nazi without joining the Nazi Party. Another problem which needs the treatment of Dr Korzybski, but I won't go over that again. I myself have to fight my own 'grammar Nazi' tendencies.

Goldhagen's book caused quite a stir, as the Wiki article I linked to documents. I think from that article you will see that most historians believe he significantly over-stated his case. But of course, they may be influenced by the fact that we need the Germans as allies now, and don't want to offend them. Sort of like the Saudis .... I don't know.

As I said, I haven't read his book. As with many things, I have to make up my mind either not to make up my mind because the arguments are above my pay grade, or I make up my mind because I trust the consensus of people whose judgement I trust, if that doesn't sound too self-referential. And I read a critical review of Goldhagen's book in a very pro-Zionist journal (Commentary? The Weekly Standard? I don't recall now.) which made me believe he had over-stated his case. Testimony against interest, maybe, which should always carry some weight.

But ... it's always useful to entertain worst-case scenarios. So I believe that the ordinary German soldier in the Second World War was, worst case, like the ordinary American soldiers at My Lai. That is, under the circumstances they were in, they could and did do terrible things. Unbelievable things -- if you haven't read about My Lai, do read the Wiki account.

The difference was that the US then (and now) was/is a liberal democracy, where the truth could come out, thanks to some brave American soldiers who were disgusted by what happened. Whereas in Nazi Germany at the time, to have objected publicly to what was going on was a death sentence.

It's always easy to be brave after the event.

A perhaps-relevant story, although I'm not sure of its veracity: Nikita Krushchev, after giving his speech at the 1956 20th Party Congress of the CPSU, denouncing the crimes of Stalin -- a great shock for everyone -- then, as is the custom there, took questions from his audience (delegates from around the Union): these questions are passed up as notes.

He started reading them and answering them.... and then came to one which made him stop, and frown ... and then he read it out loud. It said, "And where were you, comrade Krushchev, when Stalin was committing all these crimes???" The note was unsigned.

Krushchev looked up after reading it out, and said, menacingly, "Who wrote this note?"

No one in the audience moved. They all sat in fearful silence. A minute passed.

"Well, that's where I was," said Krushchev.