The Nazi women who were every bit as evil as the men:

Blonde German housewife Erna Petri was returning home after a shopping trip in town when something caught her eye: six small, nearly naked boys huddled in terror by the side of the country road.

They must be the Jews she’d heard about — the ones who’d escaped from a train taking them to an extermination camp.

But she was a mother herself, with two children of her own. So she humanely took the starving, whimpering youngsters home, calmed them down and gave them food to eat.

Then she led the six of them — the youngest aged six, the oldest 12 — into the woods, lined them up on the edge of a pit and shot them methodically one by one with a pistol in the back of the neck.

This schizophrenic combination of warm-hearted mother one minute and cold-blooded killer the next is an enigma and one that — now revealed in a new book based on years of trawling through remote archives — puts a crueller than ever spin on the Third Reich.

Because Erna was by no means an aberration. In a book she tellingly calls ‘Hitler’s Furies’, Holocaust historian Professor Wendy Lower has unearthed the complicity of tens of thousands of German women — many more than previously imagined — in the sort of mass, monstrous, murderous activities that we would like to think the so-called gentler sex were incapable of.'

I also dislike the attempt to smear Wagner with Nazism but his mature operas were absolutely propaganda for his vision of racialist self-realization and the sort of ‘instinct over reason’ ideology that would eventually lead Germany to disaster. The Ring and Parsifal especially were tracts- complete with characters intended as Jewish stereotypes.

Are Germans somehow morally defective monsters, or can any group of people be made to behave so horrifically?

It isn't limited to the Germans, by any means.

Historically, women have been every bit as capable of torture as men.

Cruelty knows no bounds, and it is civility which must be learned.

We generally teach civility from the cradle onward, but hatred and contempt for life, or any philosophy can be equally taught.

The Nazis bought wholeheartedly into the eugenics thing. Our abortion abattoirs would have made them proud. With genetic testing and computer databases, they could have made the slaughter even more efficient.

Sick cultures produce sick people, and even as we recoil from the evils of the past, we grow culturally closer to the philosophies which produced those evils. The attack on Christianity (and Judaism) seeks to tear down the last significant barriers to the same cultural perversions of the powers we fought in WWII, only now the evils wrap themselves in the cloaks of "caring" and "sensitivity" and "diversity" to mask their true nature.

Beyond names, cultures, and tribes, and nations, beyond the players and intellectuals who take credit or assigned blame, the fundamental elemental battle continues between light and darkness.

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