Posted on 03/19/2008 9:19:19 AM PDT by moderatewolverine
From doctors to opera singers, teachers to truant schoolchildren, the extermination of European Jews was the work of roughly 200,000 ordinary Germans and their helpers. Years of research -- not yet complete -- reveal how sane members of a modern society committed murder for an evil regime.
Walter Mattner, a police secretary from Vienna, was there in October 1941 when 2,273 Jews were shot to death in Mogilyov in Belarus. He later wrote to his wife: "My hand was shaking a bit with the first cars. By the tenth car, I was aiming calmly and shooting dependably at the many women, children and babies. Bearing in mind that I have two babies at home, I knew that they would suffer exactly the same treatment, if not ten times as bad, at the hands of these hordes." After World War II, it was obvious to most observers that such acts could only have been committed by sadists and psychopaths, under orders from a handful of principal war criminals surrounding Adolf Hitler. It was a comforting way of looking at things, because it meant that ordinary people were not the real perpetrators.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
hey, Lon Horiuchi was just a regular guy.
There was a book written one time that made the statement, “Hitler wasn’t wrong”.
Now, when you see that the first reaction is, WTF?
Then you think about the complicity of all of those people who allowed this horror to unfold and in a warped way he was right since not enough people were willing to stand up and say it was wrong.
Evil is allowed to exist when good men say nothing....
Not just Jews! Nazi Germans and Austrians butchered innocent people all over Europe. And Germans are still raping their former victims - the Serbian people - in the Balkans by supporting their former NAZI allies the Muslims.
There are demons that lurk within everyone. Some are more predisposed than others to allow those monsters to near the surface. Then it only takes a nudge to fully express them. In this case, the “cover” provided by “racial purity” or “national emergency” that the Nazis drilled into the populace, opened the lid of Pandora’s Box just enough to turn some members of the populace of a nation of shopkeepers and bankers into killers. This of course does not absolve those who committed the atrocities of their guilt. Free will was still operative, but controlled but the darker nature of the human psyche. That is why accountability and punishment for those guilty of such monstrous acts must be certain and absolute. “Just following orders” didn’t cut it at Nuremberg, and shouldn’t today.
This shows how abhorrent actions that people wouldn’t normally do, can happen if encouraged or mandated by heavy handed authorities. Many ordinary people in Nazi Germany were involved with these acts.
It shows the value of limited government, not a strong centralized dictatorial government. Because only a strong top down government can impose such things. Also, it brings up the importantce of values and a moral code, so that citizens would be outraged at these types of acts, and their values would tell them not to get involved with that. Their values would tell them there is no justification for this type of barbarism.
The actor screamed louder and louder, but the subject under direction of the “Doctors and technicians(in white coats etc)” kept urging the subject on.
Guess how many ordinary people including at the time peace nicks “killed” the actor?
%94!!!! when the same experiment was done in Germany the percentage was %97!
That is what a government can make “ordinary” citizens do, and what they are willing to do. No threat of harm to them either. Just the pursuit of science.
Then there was the one done by the University of San Francisco in the 80’s, One group of students played Guards, one group prisoners - they had to shut that one down after 3 days. Guess what happened.
nice thread hijack.
TRUTH hurts doesn’t it?
“This shows how abhorrent actions that people wouldn’t normally do, “
i was expecting to be flamed, but you have it exactly right.
limiting citizen’s options has been the recipe for malfeasance by all such regimes. it matters not with which “ism” they’re labeled.
I have often thought that the average German in Hitler’s time probably had the same reactions to the concentration camps as people in the U.S. today have to abortion clinics. As they walked by, they probably thought to themselves “there’s killing going on in there, but it is legal killing, and it is for a greater good. If we let those Jews (babies) live, we would suffer economically.” As with people today, there must have been a range of feelings, from “I hate what is happening in there, but what can I do — it’s legal, and they will stop me if I try to do anything about it” to “the more Jews (babies) are killed, the better off we all are.”
What truly IS amazing to me is that liberals will denounce those who were so indoctrinated and desensitized that they cooperated with the Nazis in their attempt to kill the Jews, but can’t see what’s wrong with killing an almost full-term baby or allowing a baby born after a failed abortion to die. It’s very clear to me that almost anyone can be convinced to do barbaric things if they are subject to enough indoctrination and peer pressure. And I find that very scary.
What happened? Let me guess. The “guards” began to abuse the “prisoners.”
“That is what a government can make “ordinary” citizens do, and what they are willing to do. No threat of harm to them either. Just the pursuit of science.”
I sense the beginnings of it here. All it’ll take is a liberal to get elected President, and down the slope we’ll go.
Folks used to say (of the 11.5 million people murdered by the National Socialists): "it can't happen here (in America)".
Bullshit.
It's happening right now.
It is curious that even the hardened SS men found this sort of pretense difficult to maintain in the face of actual people and actual blood. The death camps were constructed as a result of it. If that lends hope that there is a spark of humanity in even the most propaganda-soaked ideologue, we need only recall that they managed to bring themselves to shoot them anyway.
When one comes to hate a class of human beings instead of individual ones, one has already taken the first step toward the ability to murder the latter. It is that dehumanization that is the necessary ingredient to the willing suspension of disbelief that results in a gun barrel to the head of an innocent. Or a car bomb in a crowded marketplace.
Of course even some Serbs who helped the Nazis. And in some cases that sound bizarre but are true, Jews served the Nazis as Jew-catchers in Berlin and other places with special papers allowing them to stay out of the camps.
Sick, but true.
The truth doesn't hurt if you can convince yourself it's a lie, like you and your friends have done when confronted with the mass graves of Serbian victims from Milosevic's wars.
You can bitch all you want to about the Germans, but they've come a long way in confronting their past, unlike the most recent perpetrators of genocide in Europe.
Some people have the sense to understand this but others won't believe it until they read about it in a "peer reviewed" publication.
Science will affirm and re-affirm what our creator has already stated in the original "peer reviewed" publication.
True that. The Germans are in Kosovo to control the tin mine, and the muslims are serving that interest...for now.
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