Alfred Hitchcock tried to educate us regarding the “banality of evil” but we didn’t learn our lessons like we should of. Now we’re seeing it live and in person in our daily lives and interestingly going back in history and learning about it from an historical perspective. I don’t think Hitch would be surprised to read this.
Check out Erma Griese,a female SS guard at Buchenwald.
The Holocaust could not be possible without significant involvement of the ordinary German folk. It’s foolish to imagine that 6+ million people could be snuffed out without the participation of the common ‘myriad small creatures’ that populated Germany.
It’s a hard lesson in there for the rest of us, that if such a thing could happen in a culture “blessed” by an enlightenment of sorts, it can happen anywhere else, too. You don’t always need to be primitive to become barbarian.
So much for the myths that there would be no war if women or gheys ruled the world.
If you want to write a best seller, you only need 3 subjects. 1. Anything on SEX.
2. How to make a Million without working.
3. Put Hitler in the title.
1) Elect the same people that led them into WW1 and the economic crisis that followed.(Yes I know German had a Kaiser)
2) Communists and the slaughter that the Reds committed in Russia.
3)Elect the Nazis that promised to protect them from the horrors of an Russian led communist revolution and they also offered reforms that the conservative parties were reluctant to follow through.
It's damned easy to condemn those without the benefit of hindsight.
Germans could just as easily point the finger of blame to Americans for four hundred years of genocide, rape and slavery....
Nobody's hands are so clean...
Women can, and have been, many of the most horrible “true believers”. And even when victims, cling to false hopes...
Eugenia Ginzburg documented her 18 years in the Stalinist Gulags in “Journey Into the Whirlwind”, and supposed it would not be published until the 80’s. But when she knew it would be in the late 60’s she concluded in it... “How wonderful that I was mistaken and that the great Leninist truths have again come into their own in our country and party!”
Not to be confused with Ernst Roehm and Hitler’s Fairies.