The Nazis even declared the Sioux “honourary Aryans”.
I think a lot of us would be surprised at how “easily” we could have survived. Including the people who don’t think they’d have been able to keep their mouths shut.
I once got into it with my mother about what kind of slaves we would have been. I told her flat-out that I would have been a “good” slave. Not because I would have loved shuckin’ and jivin’. But because I am scared of pain. Hell, I can’t even look at a belt without sweating, and I wasn’t eaten spanked that much as a kid! I wouldn’t have necessarily been the hardest working one, but I can’t see myself having the balls to runaway. Or sass-mouthing anyone. The most rebellious thing I could see myself doing would have been stealing food.
My mother, quite the afrocentric type, was OMG! aghast. How dare her daughter renounce identification with Harriet Tubman, throwing her lot with the Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas! Of course, my mother saw herself as being the perfect anti-slave. Leading rebellions. Telling off Missy and spitting in her food. Clutching the slave children to one breast, and slaying the white men with the other. It was wrong, in her eyes, that I couldn’t see myself setting fire to the whole establishment right alongside her.
Maybe it is wrong. But mind you, this is a woman who can’t bear to spend five seconds in a normal swimming pool without screaming “LORD JESUS, HELP ME! I’M DYING OF HYPOTHERMIA!”
It’s totally easy to imagine oneself as the heroic figure. But there’s a reason why we know Harriet Tubman’s name. There weren’t a whole lot of folk like her. If what she had done was natural, she would have had more company with her on those midnight escapes. Besides, neither my mother or I would be here if it hadn’t been for all those “normal” slaves who just wanted to live. I’m not ashamed of being able to identify more with them than I am with my personal hero, Ms. Tubman. If I could see myself as Harriet Tubman, maybe I wouldn’t think what she did was all that awesome.
I’ve read this sentence several times but I can’t quite parse it, could you explain what you mean? (in my defence its way past midnight here). Thanks.
btw I agree with Alessan, and I recall a very similar question being asked by a teacher and discussed when I was at school, I remember thinking that the only honest answer is, ‘I don’t know’, and that those who said they would be fearless fighters for ‘le resistance’ were full of it.
edited to add I also agree with monstro’s post, the reason we remember certain peoples names is precisely because they were exceptional, most people just kept their heads down and hoped the bad stuff would happen to someone else…and from the safety of 21st century west its difficult to judge them too harshly.
I’m physically the poster child for the Aryan Nation. 6’2" blonde & blue.
I would hope I had the backbone to fight against the evil or flee before it was too late, but I probably would have been caught up with so many Germans who were swept into war and would have died in the cold on the Eastern Front. Hindsight being what it is I believe I have the moral character to have avoided the nastier parts of German Socialism and thus would have been sent into the meat grinder with the rest of the citizens.
So yes, though I would have passed the physical qualifiers, the chances of surviving the Third Reich are slim no matter what you look like.
No. Shit.
I’ve been watching an excellent documentary series World War II: The Apocalypse.
As I watched the parts where British children were rounded up and sent north to keep them safe from German bombs, the cruelty endured by citizens of all countries, the pure cruelty inflicted by Japanese soldiers on all who stood in their way…
No nation owned the rights to Good and Right but I am sure many young people today have no clue how incredibly evil people can be to each other.
Definitely this as well. Not only could any walking male of almost any age have been blown to bits on the Eastern Front or in final defense of Germany or died in a Soviet POW camp, all Germans also were in danger of bombing, starvation, and Soviet atrocities.
In the movie, a Jewish boy is mistaken for Aryan and put into the Hitler Youth. He uses a piece of thread to hide his circumcision, but it becomes infected.
Otherwise, let me see how close I came: my parents were involved in Civil Rights in the 60’s, our lives were threatened by thugs regularly, eventually there was a home invasion by armed men; the cops told us we’d brought it on ourselves, and we moved out of town. Some similarities but not nearly in the same order of magnitude. But, I was a child made aware that I’d been marked for death by assholes, and I didn’t think there was much I could do about it. One doesn’t really think about these things, one just experiences them. And, for the rest of ones life, one never fully comes to terms with them.
(Every so often I relate this on the boards, and I apologize in advance to anyone who’s long ago found it tiresome)
Considering that I would have been raised and educated by a German family in German schools, I’d might have fit right in.
But then I was raised by a reneck father and went to flag-waving American schools, and I don’t fit in with American political philosophy very well, so maybe not.
Well, I’m Jewish, but I’m also blonde and blue-eyed. It’s possible you know! My entire Jewish side of the family is blue eyed.
I don’t think hair color and eye color would do me much good, though I know there are isolated incidents of Jews “passing” in various ways, or getting exemptions. My friends grandfather survived by working as a secretary for a Nazi officer.
None of my extended family seems to have died in the death camps; most of us were out of Europe by then, but my great uncle died fighting for the Red Army.
I voted other, for which I will explain:
I’m blond and blue-eyed norwegian… but I’m liberal, I’m involved in artitistic endeavours of the avant-garde(ugh) kind, and I talk waaaay too much. And waaaay too loud. And I don’t really have a family of my own to protect or any of that.
So I can’t really say. Who knows, maybe with stakes so high I’d be able to keep my head down, mouth shut and all that. Maybe not.
In any case, I’m very happy I don’t have to live under such conditions. I’ve met people that survived the camps as political prisoners, and I can’t say I envy them having had that experience.
Getting a little bit off-track from the primary focus of this thread (chances of survival for people of whom the Nazi regime would, in one way or another, have taken a dim view) … anyway, I feel that male posters here who consider that although they would have been highly-acceptable Germans, they’d be enormously likely to have been killed on the Russian front – are being a bit over-pessimistic.
Whilst the Eastern Front was the most dangerous place for a member of the WW2 German army to be sent to; very many guys served on that front, and did come through alive and more or less in one piece. Assorted things could, and did, happen to people – as always in war, “the luck of the draw”. A considerable number of guys were taken prisoner by the Russians, but managed to survive that experience, and ultimately come home (in some cases, as late as the mid-1950s).
I gather that in the Western-occupied zones of Germany, later West Germany, former members of the German forces in WW2 whose service had actually been in occupied countries of Europe, often claimed “for public consumption”, that they had spent the war on the Russian front. Not particularly admirable, but understandable. Wonder whether it worked the other way around in East Germany – guys who had fought in Russia, telling the “opposite” fib and saying that their service had been in other places…
I can tell you that my grandfather was a Russian sent to fight on the Eastern front and, yeah, it was pretty much considered a death sentence. (My family weren’t well regarded by Stalin’s goons, shall we say.) That “many guys served on that front, and did come through alive and more or less in one piece” means very little when you’re one of the countless who aren’t so lucky.
Whatever – nobody is able to choose what happens to them, and nobody says that it’s fair.
A lot of people did survive, though. Going on this thread, you’d expect Germany post-war to have about ten men under the age of fifty and over the age of 16 left.
Blond hair, blue eyes, tall - the perfect Aryan but I don’t think I’d be able to keep my mouth shut. Although that’s easy to say when you’re not in that situation. Maybe I would have been too scared to say anything - who knows.
It wasn’t even that bad in Paraguay, after the very horrible mid-19th-century War of the Triple Alliance.
Well there’s plenty of people who don’t bother to distinguish between the Nazi’s and ordinary Germans of the period and consider them all equally Evil and there are plenty of people who fondly like to imagine themselves heroically hiding Jewish refugees, plotting to overthrow the regime or boldy speaking out for truth, justice and morality when the reality is they’d be doing what the majority of people actually did…keep their head down and hope the cup passes to someone else.
But how much the ‘ordinary Joe/Jane’ supported the regime is one of those questions its practically impossible to answer.
Thanks, sounds unpleasant!
btw recently watched the Italian movie ‘Life is Beautiful’, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a mix of clever humour, heartwrenching sadness and casual horror before. Good film.
To be clear No. Shit. was my Amen to the thought that we can’t judge now what we would have done then: it was an emphatic agreement. No snark intended.
Sometimes the written word does not relay the response correctly. Sorry if there was any misunderstanding there.
Priests could get themselves in big trouble if they got political and violated the terms of the Reichskonkordat, but there were far too many Catholics for official persecution.
From what I understand, it was much the same for the Protestant churches – Germany being about half Catholic, and half Protestant; tending to be the former in the south and the latter in the north, with various local “blips”.