I’ve always had mixed feelings about WWII. Mostly, because had it never happened, I wouldn’t be here.
But there’s more to it than that. Both sides of my family fought for the wrong side.
Up until recently, I was okay with that. After all, had my German uncles and aunts and mother refused to serve as they were told, their lives would’ve been a lot shorter, and again, I wouldn’t be here.
But recently, I found out something that I’m having trouble wrapping my head around. My grandfather was a brownshirt.
I’ve pressed my mother for details, but apparently she can’t tell me much more than he was with the SA until it was disbanded. After that, he wasn’t involved in any Nazi organizations that she knows of.
Now, I personally doubt that he was out busting heads for Hitler. He was getting on in years by that time, and my mother tells me he was a good loyal father, if a little reserved. She loved him, and she knows he loved her.
I never met the man. He died before I was born. In fact, I was always a little proud of the way he died. He was riding his motorcycle and someone ran into him.
He was eighty years old, and he died riding a motorcycle. That’s what made me proud.
But now, I can’t help but find his image in my mind a little tarnished. I know everything is just the same now as before I knew this. It doesn’t really affect me except for that small twinge I feel whenever the subject of WWII or the Holocaust comes up. But the small twinge just got bigger. And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
The plain fact is that, had any of us been born in Germany in the the early nineteen-hundreds, we would probably have been on the “wrong side” too. It’s easy to condemn, now, when we have the full picture. It’s not easy choosing the correct and moral path when you have no real idea what is going on.
Think of it this way: if everyone who had authority over you, everyone you trusted, most of your peers and your government told you to behave in a particular way, how easy would it be not to? If the price for not following the mainstream also meant that you and your family and your friends were put in very real danger?
People wound up in serving under a nazi flag for all sorts of reason, and not all of them were evil. Some, maybe even most, were simply mislead, idealistic for all the wrong reasons, and angry at a world they didn’t get a correct picture of. Some were probably just pragmatic. The events leading up to WWII were a perfect example of good intentions paving the road to hell.
You don’t know your grandfather’s history, you just know an isolated fact. How would you look if the worst fact about you was all that was known about your life?
Hmmm. does it help to know that the brownshirts were probably the most tolerant Nazi organization toward gays, as Ernst Rohm and many of the hierarchy were gay?
Also, they were dibanded because Hitler saw them as a threat. That says SOMETHING good about them, I suppose.
One of the reasons that I am so opposed to war is that almost always, a person supports the side that he or she was born into. It doesn’t seem to be so much a matter of choce or ethics, but a matter of where you were born.
My grandfather was a Confederate soldier. At least I have the satisfaction of knowing that he lived to regret it.
Never judge anyone by one or two facts. Oskar Schindler was a Nazi and a war profiteer. Thank goodness there was more to him than that.
So? If your great-great-great-grandfathers were born on a plantation in the pre-civil war South where they whipped and raped slaves all day are you going to feel bad about it? The actions of our ancestors are not our fault. (not that you even know what your grandfather really did in WW2, but the point is it shouldn’t matter)
Thanks guys (and gals). I think I just needed to hear the above points from someone besides myself. I admit that Boyo Jim’s point never occured to me, but it’s an interesting point of view.