I am sure not all nazis were bad ( even though the ideology was ) but neither were all the soldiers in vietnam or did they all shoot the kids and burn down the village ?
Wasn’t it custer who used to shoot the children because he reckoned they would just grow up to be native american wariors anyway ?
mmmmmm
<< The nazis / japs shot unarmed soldiers but we bombed unarmed women and children >>
“The Nazis only shot unarmed soldiers?” Hey, dude, wake up!
How about the round-up of Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, who were tortured, starved, and worked as slave labor before they were shot, gassed, hanged, drowned and burned? How about the disabled people who were the first victims of the Nazi death programs? The Nazis embarked on a deliberate policy of trying to eradicate these groups. Unarmed soldiers, my ass.
How about the Blitz, where the Nazis dropped bombs on London and other towns in Britain? You think the entire population of London was “unarmed soldiers”?
Hey, look, I’m not defending bombing cities, but there’s a big moral difference between civilian casualties during bombings and straightforward one-on-one torture of the victims before killing them.
And the term “japs” is offensive today; it was a derogatory term in common use in earlier eras.
As Izzy pointed out, that popular conception is being challenged. I recommend you check out Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Goldhagen argues that centuries-old anti-semitism lead to the active and eager participation by “ordinary Germans” in the slaughter of millions of Jews. This is what makes the Nazi era so eerie…it was propelled by absolutely “regular” people. All it took was the official sanctioning by the gov’t, and the true hatred of people was unleashed. It really makes one question those who say “it couldn’t happen here”.
As a Brit i understand the ‘they bombed us lets bomb them’ concept BUT i still don’t think bombing cities is ok.
If the jews started rounding up the germans does the holocust make it ok ?
Lets nuke the japanese, er, ok lets nuke a city, no children there, well, perhaps…
I will probably not be reading Goldhagen’s book very soon, so in the interval let me clarify two things. As I understand it, part of Goldhagen’s thesis is that the Germans were not forced against their will to carry out the Holocaust, but that those who did so were willing, and active resistance to it by the Germans was very rare. I agree with that part of the thesis completely. To the extent that Goldhagen says, or has been interpreted to say, that the majority of the German populace actually killed or helped to kill Jews, then I disagree until I see his evidence.
The other thing I want to clarify is that I don’t say “it couldn’t happen here.” My interpretation that it only takes a handful to perpetrate a Holocaust makes the chance of it happening here much greater, not smaller. We already have all the people necessary to carry out the American Holocaust, if it happens. Right now they are in the KKK, Aryan Nations, skinheads, and the like; come the American Reich, they will be manning the murder mills. What we do not have yet, thankfully, is the political leader who will convince the American public at large to willingly sit back and do nothing while their next-door neighbors are being slaughtered. Although I don’t see such a leader being successful in the current political climate, do I think it could happen in a future, unhappier climate? You bet I do.
I don’t believe it’s asserted that the “majority” of German killed Jews. Goldhagen merely attempts to dispell the popular image that the German atrocities were committed without the knowledge of the general German population by a small number of people “insane with ideology”. His evidence is based on the postwar interviews of members of the police battalions and auxiliary military units that had the duty of “on-the-spot” extermination of Jews. These police battalions were made up of ordinary Germen men in their 30s & 40s–not highly indoctrinated soldiers. “Goldhagen documents repeated instances in which unit commanders offered their men the opportunity to opt out of the killing but finds few soldiers who accepted the offer.” (Quoted from a reviewof the book that sums up many more of Goldhagen’s arguments) Hitler’s propaganda merely provided a cover for the manifestation of decades of German anti-semitism. Blame the Nazis all you want, he says, but “the Germans killed the Jews because the Germans wanted to.”
I couldn’t agree with you more. All it will take is for economically bleak times to hit, and we’ll be looking for a scapegoat. Who will it be? Well, I shudder everytime I hear someone rant about how “those Mexican” are coming up here and mooching off of us.
yes they did do this quiet often and when that filed they took others
theres a group of children that was in europe that was taken from their parents and raised in a specific enviroment based on theit physical and raicial condition sort of like a boarding school
although this was lowered near the end when the supply became scarce
i forget the exact term but the documentry has been shown on the history channel a few times
but the exact number will never be known becuase it was rarely listed in the after war adoption records
it was supposed to have been ran by the head of the gestapo himself and was even kept secret from most high ranking nazis
in some countries it was such a mark of shame that when it was discovered about a person they were ridiculed and harassed to the point of suicide
so its still a dirty little secret to a lot of people
Back to the original question, which I take to be something like: why do we see the nazis as more evil than other groups that have done equally evil stuff?
I think a lot of it simply has to do w/ proximity: we’re closer to Germany–culturally speaking–than we are to Russia, China, Japan, etc (a lot of Chinese people hate Japan because of the invasion, rape of nanjing, etc, and don’t particularly concern themselves with Hitler’s slaughter of European minorities, too. . . of course, a lot of people in China overlook Mao’s executions as party of the 70% good/30% bad, not really investigating the issue any further than that–proximity is not the only matter). That means, to distance ourselves from those other white industrialized europeans, we have to make them evil and us good: broad brushstroke activity, which most governments have found to be the best way to deal with an always stupid populace.
Americans ain’t perfect, of course: as many others have mentioned, the US govt’s treatment of indians & blacks has very often been evil, too. So like the chinese, we don’t talk about that a whole lot–or paint ourselves as evil–because we like to feel superior to other groups of people.
as for the communists, from a different angle: a lot of people are still somewhat sympathetic to the ideology of communism, at the very least. brotherhood & equality are values that we have in America today, despite any otherwise anti-communist values we have. we can look at Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Lenin, Ho Chi-minh, Castro, Tito, and see them as [amazingly] aberrations, traitors to the cause of brotherhood. Hitler, on the other hand, had evil motives, too.
One more thing: some people have suggested that Mao & Stalin are worse for “killing their own people”. . . is it worse for a white man to kill a white man than to kill a black woman, then?
LRK
To **Nightshadea:
**Besides simply regulating what types of people could marry and have children, the Nazis also engaged in the selective breeding of humans. The subject is still taboo in Germany, and the full extent of the selective breeding program is not clear. However, there is ample evidence that the Lebensborn program, ostensively a system of maternity homes to aid unwed mothers, was used to selectively breed approved German men and women. Young women (usually in their mid-teens) were selected on a voluntary basis and mated with a male selected on the basis of his physical or mental attributes. Both parties had to be, of course, Nordic Aryans. Through such a method, the Nazis were assured of producing children with the racial characteristics considered valuable in Nazi Germany.
To All others:
Yes; the Nazis where very bad, Comparativily speaking.
And we all watched it getting started and practically no-one did anything about it, untill it was to late for thousands of jews, gypsies, handicapped children and homosexuals.
Never Again Please.
[QUOTE Probably most of us could be forced to gas a roomful of children (I would much rather die than do that, but I’m fairly certain I could be physically tortured into doing it), but most of us would not do so willingly, as the Nazis did. **[/QUOTE]
Well…Certainly some people wouldn’t do that. Nevertheless, it seems that in the appropriate circumstaces, actually a lot would. There has been a lot of talk, some years ago, about a analizing the operations conducted by a german police unit in Poland (I can’t remember the title, but perhaps someone will know it).
These men were member of the reserve police. So they weren’t nazis, not even selected on the basis of their faithfulness. They were ordinary citizens sent in Poland originally on a police duty. Eventually, they were ordered to execute Jews, and that on regular basis. At first, they were reluctant. But ultimately, they carried on their “duty”.
Perhaps even worst : some of them actually refused to do so. And quite simply, they didn’t. They weren’t prosecuted, punished, or whatever. It means that the others “ordinary citizens” could have done the same. But they didn’t.They didn’t kill Jews out of fear. They kill them because they were ordered to do so.
It means that it’s likely your neighbor or brother-in-law, or whoever else picked at random would have done the same in similar circumstances. You could argue that with the nazi example in mind, contemporaneous people wouldn’t act in the same way. But I’m really not that sure it’s true. Perhaps they would refuse to kill jews, the similarity would be too obvious. But quite possibly not some other group considered at the moment as “our ennemies”.
Ok…for some reason, I believed I had read the whole thread. But obviously I was wrong and this book has already been pointed at and discussed…sorry.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by clairobscur *
**
Actually, clairobscur, you might be referring to Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning, rather than Goldhagen’s book. Goldhagen covers much of the same territory, but comes to a significantly different conclusion re: the motivations of the German trigger men.