Obviously, that is correct. My point was that was what the propaganda was. The lady admitted that her parents had to have known what was really going on. I see a distinct difference between “support” and keeping your head down, however.
Ask yourself: if you were an unarmed parent of small children in an evil dictatorship, how would you respond? We all hope that we would show courage and resist, but would we rerally, knowing that our actions would lead to the deaths of our families?
This has implications for us. It’s not impossible that one day we in the U.S. might be faced with something similar. What then?
I agree that opponents of Hitler's in Germany were often afraid to speak up, and for understandable reasons. What I think is often overstated, however, is how many Germans actually were opposed to Hitler's policies.
Until late in the war, Hitler was enormously popular in Germany. Most Germans refused to do anything to stop him -- not because they were afraid of him, but because they agreed with him.
Ask yourself: if you were an unarmed parent of small children in an evil dictatorship, how would you respond? We all hope that we would show courage and resist, but would we rerally, knowing that our actions would lead to the deaths of our families?
Sobering questions. What you describe is life in a totalitarian state. To get an idea of how bad it can get, read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Although Solzhenitsyn describes Stalinist Russia rather than Hitlerian Germany, the two were not greatly different in their methods. Nor are Cuba or North Korea so very different today.