> Why should people in the US feel responsible for the holocaust? The
> Nazi's, not the Americans, were exterminating Jews. I've never understood
> this position.
Many Americans may as well have been. When Senator Claude Pepper agreed to speak before a gathering of Hollywood luminaries - David O. Selznick, Jack Warner, Charlie Chaplin, Hedda Hopper, hundreds more - during the war to raise money for various Jewish causes, his contacts with the group organizing the event who were to take him to the venue had to wait outside the country club dining room where he was having dinner because Jews weren't allowed inside. Strictly speaking, I fail to see much difference between killing someone for their skin color, heritage, religious affiliation, etc. and refusing them entry to a dining room. It's the same thinking at work.
So this isn't an example of the relative intellectual/emotional isolation from the world which is and long has been fundamental to the American way of life (and explains a lot of things), but instead highlights the more insidious nature of the prejudice ingrained in the popular consciousness of the time.
I realize that may not seem to directly address your question, but as with most instances of evil and depravity run amuck in the world, it's always prudent to look to home first before we go pointing fingers elsewhere.
In any case, isn't it true that the US (primarily govt. and corporate interests, not citizenry per se) and Western Europe actively, if somewhat surreptitiously, encouraged the militarization and re-industrialisation of post-WW1 Germany, and along with it all the little Hitlers, in the interest of fending off a bogus communist 'menace' (sic) that supposedly threatened to overtake the minds of the war-weakened and demoralized German populace? Weren't there (mostly) trumped-up allegations of reds marching into the Rhineland?
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/ dave /