Replies

I see the use of the term Nazi as a way of Germans distancing themselves from the sins Germans of that generation committed. I don’t mean to imply that Germans today bear any guilt of the generation of that time but to try and make it appear as if some other worldly entity committed the evils is intellectually dishonest and historically inaccurate. As I’ve stated, it’s almost as if historians and Germans today speak of the Nazis as if they just fell to Earth one day. It’s become the meme over the last few decades for Germany today to see itself as a victim in the Nazi time and personally I find that repulsive. Yes, Germans of faith and conscience attempted to resist and they went to their death in the gas chambers along with the millions of other victims of the Nazis. But to cast the millions of Germans, who for whatever reason they went along with Hitler as some kind of victims is to dishonor the real victims of the Nazis and sullies the courage and the sacrifice of millions who fought to put an end to Nazism. Every time I see those documentaries of Germans marching and stomping around as if the owned the Earth I say to myself “Victims’’? Ha! I’ll say one thing though, them Krauts sure could march. And they sure knew how to turn out a snappy looking uniform.

Well, yes, and I don’t think that we should however unconsciously or ignorantly assist the Germans in wiping out their glorious past by using the term ‘Nazi’ with everything related to WWII, except when referring to “Polish death camps” as the New York Times and President Obama like to do. This is what motivated by initial response. What, the Soviet Red Army heroine sniper asked her targets to show their NSDAP membership cards before she shot them?

Yes, I’ve noticed, and so have the Eastern Europeans, that Germans are attempting today to recast themselves as victims of those “Nazis”, when their grandparents eagerly participated in the Third Reich, not always in the SS or Gestapo of course , but patriotically supporting the warring state.

Man Refuses To Perform Nazi Salute, 1936 - “August Landmesser (1910 – presumably killed February 1944) was a worker at the Blohm + Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany. He appeared in a photograph refusing to perform the Nazi salute at the launch of the naval training vessel Horst Wessel on 13 June 1936. “He had been a Nazi Party member from 1931 to 1935, but after fathering children with a Jewish woman, he had been found guilty of “dishonoring the race” under Nazi racial laws and had come to oppose Hitler’s regime. In February 1944 he was drafted into a penal unit, the 999th Fort Infantry Battalion, where he was declared missing in action and presumably killed.”