But you didn’t SEE the people on death row commit these crimes – the state TOLD you they did. And it was the state that told Germans the Jews (and others) were monsters – “scumbags” – deserving death. The willingness you show to condone death to those someone else told you are evil is exactly what the Nazis exploited.
What you say here is so true – and, at the risk of a hijack, the point at which vegans would like a word with you.
I actually was a vegetarian for decades. But, as I say, pregnancy has a way of setting you at peace with your place in the food chain.
For the last decade I’ve been eating meat, and I love it. But I’m definitely not as healthy, and know deep down that I will have to give it up again eventually. I’ll probably end up keeping fish and poultry.
I’m not sure this often-repeated saying is actually true.
For one thing, the Nazis knew a lot about history, many of them were extremely well-educated, it didn’t stop them from doing what they wanted to do. Hitler himself even rhetorically asked “who today speaks of the Armenians?”, i.e. implying, correctly, that Turkey committed genocide against Armenia and was never held to account for it.
For another thing, there have been a number of genocidal regimes in the decades since the Holocaust and nobody stepped in to stop them, despite knowing about the fact that there was genocide in the past.
I have no choice but to conclude that knowing or not knowing about history does not play a role in whether or not it gets “repeated”, in the sense of “bad things continuing to happen.” The bottom line seems to be that sufficiently-motivated people will do what they want to do, regardless of the history.