I also take issue with OP’s “just stop being so murder-able” stance; it’s inhuman and just plain irrational, for the reasons already stated. But if anyone is interested in hearing what it was like for the people who did just that, you might be interested in this memoir: After Long Silence
To the best of my recollection, it’s about a woman who unearths her family history and is shocked to discover her parents were Jewish, and that they escaped the Holocaust by pretending otherwise, then never dropped the charade. I read it in college and don’t care to read it again; I found the author’s attempts to connect her experiences of being cold after playing in the snow to her father’s harrowing train ride through Siberia in winter hanging off the side of a train with a broken arm to be rather…cringeworthy. But the parts about what her parents endured divesting themselves of their identity, and their steadfastness in continuing to reject it, are pretty heart-wrenching.
You could advise a young woman who goes to frat parties and gets drunk to ‘stop being so rape-able’. This doesn’t make the frat boys not criminals but it is a simple fact that the woman can reduce her chances of being assaulted significantly by changing her behavior. If it was possible for Jewish Germans to assimilate and make themselves not targets it’s a valid and compelling thing to do. Regardless of the criminal guilt of their government.
:eek:
No, you cannot advise a young woman to “stop being so rape-able”. In fact, on the list of “Top Ten Things NOT To Say To A Young Woman”, that would be in the top three.
Apologies but posters are arguing the identical argument to ones saying that young women could dress conservatively, avoid being alone with platonic male acquaintances, and especially avoid getting drunk when not in the presence of an intimate acquaintance.
“Well they shouldn’t HAVE to do that and this is victim blaming.”
Sure, in a perfect world, they shouldn’t. But the world will never be perfect and there are things an individual can do to help their odds. It took 20 years for the Nazis to be brought down. It might take a lot longer than that before women in the USA can live without the slightest fear of assault. (probably achievable with smart devices with cameras monitoring everywhere)
Keep in mind that in the history of Europe, most countries deliberately singled out minorities and stopped them from assimilating. Socially, only the most liberal elements of society were tolerant enough to consider intermarriage. Much of society (and this goes for Jewish social circles too) considered marrying outside your social circle a big no-no, whether religious or class. There may have been an opportunity for someone who really wanted to, that they could escape the pigeon-hole society put them in during the early 20th century in the big cities, but that certainly wasn’t the majority of the population.
And until the Nazis took over, there was not even a great motivation to assimilate especially to the point of being unidentifiable. First, everyone knew who/what you were in those limited social circles, and things had actually loosened up enough that there was hope for an open society, even if it wasn’t the (allegedly) tolerant society we have here today - so no great motivation.
If someone had told them in say, 1900 or 1880 “Shitstorm coming in 1940” maybe the persecuted minorities could have made an better effort to hide. But they didn’t know until it was too late.
I’ll try to get it into coherent form. But it might take a while; and I might not bother, as in any case I thought I’d already managed it, in post #3 in this thread. This appears to not be just a matter of plain ignorance on your part.
(My father’s side of the family, by the way, lost some 40 members; though in Poland.)
By the way, thought of a new analogy for those who keep falsely claiming I am apologizing for the Nazis.
Everyone knows you would be an utter moron to take a tourist visit to North Korea. This doesn’t make one a “Kim Jong” apologist to give that advice. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t voluntarily go to North Korea, even if you intend to be on your best behavior. Their government can just lie and claim you committed some crime and kill you.
You will not be treated fairly and there is no higher authority.
So, “avoiding North Korea” would be similar to advice to “GTFO if you’re Jewish from Nazi Germany”. Doesn’t make one an apologist. Nazis and north Koreans are still criminals.
Assuming you have a way to leave - or a way to assimilate, per this thread - a choice to not do something is identical to a choice to do something. Either way you are making a choice from a set of available actions. Not doing something is not a ‘special’ action.
It is much easier not to enter a place that doesn’t want you than it is to exit a place when you are being hunted and others won’t take you in. Please read some history books on the subject.
FYI, The Invisibles is a Germany movie from a couple of years ago that describes the experiences of four Jewish teenagers who survived the war in part by passing as non-Jews. I have not seen it yet, but it might help the OP understand the difficulty of what he is suggesting. One of the things that made hiding difficult was the presence of people like Stella Goldschlag, a Jewish woman who actively helped the Nazis to find and arrest Jews who were in hiding.
Let’s answer the OP in GQ style: You ask if it is an accurate model of what happened during the holocaust, to state that some or many of the people perpetrating the holocaust were in fact the descendants of Jewish families who assimilated so well, that nobody knew the difference. The problem, of course, is that were the model accurate, by definition it would not be possible to know. Ergo, the question serves no purpose.
We do know that some people, who were part-Jewish by Neuremburg Laws definition, were part of the German war machine. this includes, literally, a poster-boy for the Wehrmacht: Werner Goldberg - Wikipedia. In 1940, however, nearly all of these were expelled from the military. Some very few were in the SS or the NSDAP: they were either expelled as well, or “arianized”: made non-Jewish by fiat. The point is, though, that all of these were known to be of Jewish descent.
Of course it is possible that there were people in the party, SS or or other parts of the Nazi machine who had one or more Jewish ancestors. It is even likely. There are today a number of people who are not genetically related to their supposed ancestor(s), pretty sure there were then too. The point is that it doesn’t matter. The whole framework of the Neuremberg laws is ridiculous. The idea that Jewishness is some sort of taint, passed on from generation to generation, is crap. Attaching some sort of significance to certain ancestry, of any kind, especially more than a few generations back, is crap. I’m a descendant of Charlemagne. I know this, because nearly every European is. The significance of this is nothing. If you were able to accurately trace the ancestry of those fighting on the Western front in WW1, you would probaby find for most of them that they are all related. Again, it is meaningless.
GTFO is very very different from “just assimilate.”
My partner’s family are Polish Jews. Her grandmother , F, was chosen to receive the one set of false papers they could get, which said she was Catholic. The rest of F’s immediate family went to the camps. F was somehow able to save her fiance, who had been captured while fighting the Nazis. After the war, living in France in I assume terror and trauma, they continued to present themselves as Christian, and raised their child to celebrate Christmas. After a few years, they were able to join other relatives in the US, and then resumed their Jewish identities.
It was absolutely a valid thing to do. They survived. But it is absolutely not something anyone can tell someone else to do. And especially not something you can say someone ought to “just” do. And not something you can tell someone they ought to do preemptively and permanently.
“Staying out of North Korea is a valid thing to do. We all survive. But it is absolutely not something anyone can tell someone else to do.”
A more accurate statement would be to emphasize it isn’t practical to do something. Which I acknowledge. If it requires a lot more than just stopping going to a particular church, but instead you have to pass a background check by murderous Nazis, sure. You’re screwed.
[Moderating]
I had been assuming before that the OP was not actually saying that the Jews should have attempted to assimilate, merely that it was statistically likely that some had, and that the Nazis were thus likely to have themselves had some Jewish ancestry. I had not noticed before, however, that this:
was by the OP himself. Given this context, it looks like he really was saying that they should have assimilated. Which is not something that we need to have on this board, in any forum.