It is totally pointless to blame people for not taking up arms against a ruthless tyranny, or even for not resisting it peacefully. The White Rose (a Catholic resisatance group) passed out a handful of leaflets in Munich; a few weeks later the were all in the hands of the Gestapo. The only group that managed to last any length of time at all in Germany was the Red Orchestra, and that was because they were Communists with proper training, discipline, and organization. And even they were rolled up by '42. Most of them ended up on the guillotine. There is an excellent movie about The White Rose (that is the English title) by the guy who also did The Nasty Girl, a based-on-a-true-story film about a Munich girl who discovers her friends' and family's complicity with Nazism, and isn't, uh, welcomed for her efforts. When people do resist against these odds, it is heroic: The White Rose and the Red Orchestra (among others) have honored places in the halls of human dignity. But no one is obligated to be a hero. Now, there's a difference between not being a hero and turning the Goldblatts in to the SS, of course; for that, see Ophuls' scathing The Sorrow and the Pity (about French collaborationism). If you go to Berlin, check out the immensely moving Museum of the Resistance (Museum der Widerstand), in the former Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) offices near the Tiergarten; it is three or four floors of detailed and individualised exhibits about the many heroic Germans who resisted and mostly died. The courtyard is where the Nazis hanged von Stauffenberg and the nobler of the July conspirators; when I was there in the mid-90s, people had left wreaths on the site of the gallows, which is marked by a plaque. jks
"ChrisD(RJ)" <chrisd at russiajournal.com> wrote: Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Iraq war "clearer" to Americans than WW 2 From: Jim Farmelant
Does this mean that we should ease up in our judgements of the Germans who lived under the Third Reich. I remember being in taught in school, how bad the Germans were because they wouldn't speak up, when Hitler's regime was waging unjustified wars, and committing ghastly crimes like the Holocaust. And yet, weren't all the mechanisms, that Lou outlines below, in operation, thereby explaining the silence, and indeed the acquiescence of the German people under the Third Reich?
Jim F. --- Don't forget about the capacity for self-deception. My great-granduncle was euthanized in Germany in the 30s (mental illness). The family actually believed the government when they said they were just taking up to a special hospital. And his nephew (my grandfather) was in the Hitler Youth at the time and an ardent Nazi. Serious psychological compartmentalization and denial of reality going on.
___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online, calculators, forms, and more -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20030408/3d61ec0d/attachment.htm>