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I said that too of course.
He said "might get you a trip to the Gestapo basement"
And asking questions WAS discouraged.
If a single person got into a Gestapo basement for asking questions is completly irrelevant to the point that people thought they might get into one.
Doctors also werent punished hardly if they refused to do Euthanasia on cripples but that does not mean that all knew this beforehand. Hats off to those that refused.
Did the Germans know that people were being, incarcerated, deprived, assaulted and even executed by the authorities with out due process? Probably but then did Americans know about Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition? I don't mean to pick on Americans. The American response to 9/11 was a normal and utterly predictable human group response to threat and attack. When groups of human perceive themselves as under threat and attack, their concern for out groups drops precipitously.
My Dad was attacked (verbally and nearly physically) by a group of German women, when he was a POW in WWII. "How can you do this? How can you do this?" they screamed at him, referring to the allied bombing. When he told me that story I felt strong anger against those women. "What about the bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam Coventry?" I thought. But of course that's not how most people work. Humans find it very easy to experience themselves as victims. And when people experience themselves under severe attack, their in group identification ramps up massively. I watched the London tube bombings (on the tv) with my girl friend of the time. She was a left wing progressive anti war English graduate, who thought 9/11 might have been an inside job. I watched her morph (temporarily) into a pro war nationalist in front of my eyes. This is what happens, progressives become ethno nationalists and concern for out groups plummets.
Given that Germany in the nineteen thirties was by modern standards a middle income country, given the low percentage, by modern standards of post 18 education. Given what the German people had been through: WW1, the blockade and hunger, the revolution, the hyper inflation, the 6 million unemployed, the start of the second world war and a new blockade and then from 1940 an increasing bombing campaign its remarkable that Germans showed as much concern as they did for the fate of out groups.
My Dad was attacked (verbally and nearly physically) by a group of German women, when he was a POW in WWII. "How can you do this? How can you do this?" they screamed at him, referring to the allied bombing. When he told me that story I felt strong anger against those women. "What about the bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam Coventry?" I thought. But of course that's not how most people work. Humans find it very easy to experience themselves as victims. And when people experience themselves under severe attack, their in group identification ramps up massively. I watched the London tube bombings (on the tv) with my girl friend of the time. She was a left wing progressive anti war English graduate, who thought 9/11 might have been an inside job. I watched her morph (temporarily) into a pro war nationalist in front of my eyes. This is what happens, progressives become ethno nationalists and concern for out groups plummets.
Given that Germany in the nineteen thirties was by modern standards a middle income country, given the low percentage, by modern standards of post 18 education. Given what the German people had been through: WW1, the blockade and hunger, the revolution, the hyper inflation, the 6 million unemployed, the start of the second world war and a new blockade and then from 1940 an increasing bombing campaign its remarkable that Germans showed as much concern as they did for the fate of out groups.
The past year has seen a wave of exposing politicians and celebrities as awful sexual predators. In nearly every case it was then shown that there were "signs" and "patterns" there, often really sick stuff from years back that had been glossed over.
It is not hard for me AT ALL to imagine the holocaust having signs and patterns and even a few accounts but being largely ignored or out of focus until the big reveal when soviet troops actually dumped hard proof. We were talking about pre-Barbarossa what ifs here; even if it IS known to some, it is not a public topic of concern, yet.
Also if we do go with the what if of the USSR being the one to attack Germany in like '43 or later, we should ready up to the realistic expectation that 100% factual reports by the soviets launching said surprise attack into Poland etc would just be initially dismissed by almost everyone else as communist propaganda attempting to justify their war of aggression.
It is not hard for me AT ALL to imagine the holocaust having signs and patterns and even a few accounts but being largely ignored or out of focus until the big reveal when soviet troops actually dumped hard proof. We were talking about pre-Barbarossa what ifs here; even if it IS known to some, it is not a public topic of concern, yet.
Also if we do go with the what if of the USSR being the one to attack Germany in like '43 or later, we should ready up to the realistic expectation that 100% factual reports by the soviets launching said surprise attack into Poland etc would just be initially dismissed by almost everyone else as communist propaganda attempting to justify their war of aggression.
Let me give you the example of the signs and patterns as read by the general United States population.
Nazi - Jewish hostility is well known. It's why Albert emigrated to our fair shores, bringing his brilliant brethren with him. Kristallnacht and the idea of slave labor is known in general terms if not full specifics through newspapers and newsreel accounts.
Meyer Lansky, the famous Jewish-American gangster who sat at Lucky Luciano's side on the Mafia's 'Commission', would have Bugsy Siegel round up his boys every time they were informed the American Bund was having a meeting to break it up as violently as possible. Bugsy refused payment for services rendered, saying it was a joy for a Jew to pistol-whip a Nazi.
But, Patton driving into Buchenwald - and exposing it both to the cameras and to the local German population with rage and fury - revealed the true underbelly of the Wansee Plan for all with eyes to see.
You are actually getting this story deeply, deeply wrong. The revelation that has happened recently is that it was an open secret that some men were sexual predators. /when it came to people who knew Weinstein they didn't have signs, his serial rape was an open secret, just like it's public knowledge that Donald Trump is a serial sexual assaulter and quite likely serial rapist. I'm not talking about the lesser assaulters, Louis CK for instance. But the Donald Trump case is pretty revealing. Pretty much anyone who hasn't been living under a rock should know that Donald Trump is a serial sexual assaulter by now. However many people would passionately deny it. And many other people will just split the difference between the extremes of stating the truth and belligerently attacking it.
I wonder if 70 years from now people will talk about how "shocked" Americans were to "learn" that Donald Trump was a sexual assaulter after he left office. I'm sure it will be very easy for them to imagine that, just take the middle of the road narrative and fill in the gap.
For the historians' perspective on such things, the likes of Gellately and, to some degree, Richard Evans present the case that people knew (to at least the degree of not wishing to ask awkward questions) and that this can be linked to being desensitised to such things as well as that carrying through to children growing up in that environment. 1933's 12 year old was 1939's new adult. That's all very generalised though. eg Members of the Heer knew of the atrocities in Poland and protested, the memos collated by the suppressed opposition parties of the left also indicate they didn't march to the same drum beat - at least in private.
The issue with all this is the evidence from Germans themselves shows that most of them probably knew what was going on. Not in terms of a clue here and there, but in terms of it being everyone's secret. And indeed, as I showed above, even after 'learning' of the 'full facts' (or at least, undeniably learning of them), a great number still thought positively of Hitler and Nazism, and extremely negatively of the Jews.
Plenty of the members of the Heer, along with ex-leftists, were also quite happy to participate in those atrocities, though.
That is perhaps the most surprising thing about all of it. There were so many men who were quite happy as members of non-murderous political movements but once the Nazi's ran the show, they fell in line and actively participated in the Nazi agenda. It's frightening how malleable human nature is.
Actually, the history forum is exactly where these conversations belong. Because the truth of the history is that the Nazis were Nazis.
Not just the non-murderous parties; plenty of KPD or other Communist rank and file members and voters jumped ship as well at some point. Really I think it comes down to two things. Firstly, Hitler's (and Nazisms) demands chime well with a broad spectrum of anti-establishment thought; loads of people can get behind nationalism, lots can relate to hatred of profiteering fatcats (and its' not a stretch from there, particularly in interwar Germany, to add the Jewish element), and people all across the political spectrum can relate to the idealization of the past in the form of a paternalistic, simple, want-free existence (as nonsensical as that is). That and once Hitler could take credit for bringing back German pride and a semblance of the economy, he naturally looked better to those who were voting at the other extreme for economic reasons.
The Nazis were inside us all along.
Just kidding. The Nazis are people who call white supremacists racist.
No, I mean this thread. This isn't the 'Did people know about the Holocaust Thread.'
The nature of the German regime is very relevant to why the diplomatic landscape was what it was.
No its not. Its not relevant at all. Within the public discourse of western nations today it is controversial to question the proposition, "the Nazis were evil", I'm happy to debate that question if you can find a forum for us to debate that question. I think Paradox have made it quite clear that the don't wish to be that forum. But whether you or I or today's public in general think "the Nazis were evil" is irrelevant:
because the Nazis clearly weren't considered evil at the time, The Finns a Liberal democratic regime formed an alliance with them. The Swedes gave them military transport. Other regimes allied with them. Only two nations, Britain and France actually went to war with Nazi Germany. I'm not counting nations like El Salvadore and Saudi Arabia who made empty declarations to keep the Americans happy. Roosevelt had to promise not to go to war with Nazi Germany in order to get elected. The Communist parties of Britain and France opposed the war, prior to Barbarossa. The Communist parties in Nazi occupied countries bordered on collaboration prior to June 41. The Soviet intelligence agencies shared intelligence on opposition with their Nazis counterparts. The Trotskyists continued to oppose the war even after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Many Ukrianians and Baltic people welcomed the Nazis as liberators. There was an uprising in Iraq in order to support the Nazis.
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