I’m currently reading ‘’Hitlers Furies. German Women In The Nazi Killing Fields’’ by Wendy Lower. Have you read it? I recommend it. I’ve studied Nazi Germany and WW2 history since I was fourteen. I’m currently fifty-seven. While some Germans joined the movement to better their socio/economic status, the Third Reich had millions of true believers without whom it never would have been the power it was. Many have denounced Daniel Goldhagens book ‘’Hitlers Willing Executioners ,’’Ordinary Germans And The Holocaust’’as unscholarly, but he is correct in pointing out that the Germans, and he emphasizes that that is who the Nazis were, were ordinary people who readily embraced Hitler and National Socialism and are directly responsible for provoking a six-year cataclysm humanity barely survived and perpetrated perhaps history’s most monstrous crime, The Holocaust.The German people did this, not ‘’The Nazis’’ Hitler was an egomaniac and a military dilettante but he was not ‘’insane’’. Any man who could become the sole leader of the most populous, most industrialized and cultured nation in Western Europe and compel them to unleash hell on the world is not ‘’insane’’. Diabolical but certainly not insane. Himmler, Heydrich, Goering, Goebbels and the rest of them were evil enough. It was the German people and their willingness to do the bidding of these criminals that is the real personification of evil. There is nothing more terrifying than ignorance in motion. And if this isn’t what you’re really imparting to your students you’re doing them a great disservice. The Nazis aren’t dead entirely. Evil never goes away and war, like evil, slumbers but keeps one eye open. Teach them that. And I’ve met a few Germans from that era. They’re all such liars.
I just finished Hitler’s Furies, in addition to just about any other book about the 3rd Reich and WWII you you can name...two or three a week. It’s my profession.
What I teach my students is that these profoundly evil people rarely harm anyone.
It’s the willingness of individuals to kill for “leaders” that causes ALL the collective human evil in the world.
Until THEY (my students) take responsibility for their actions, we’ll never progress as a species.
That’s the lesson I hope they take away from my classes.
/BTW: visit Auschwitz. It’ll change you forever.