Hitlers willing executioners

Yeah, I walked that path of hindsight before and even now. No problem. I once had that same opinion.

 

Holocaust images



http://www.princeton.edu/~ttrezise/

 

Just read a book mostly on handling the partisan situation in large areas in the east Ben Shepherd " War in the wild East" but it also includes this interesting view by one captain.

Captain Brandt of the 221st Security division on October 1941

" It is unacceptable that officers have to do the shooting while the men watch. Most of the men are weak. This is a sign that the meaning of " Partisan warfare" is something they have never learned or at least have been badly taught."

The numbers of killed partisans were rather "crazy numbers " compared to weapons captured. The clear message is " Where there is a Jew there´s a partisan, and where there is a partisan there is a Jew!"

 

Well, you just can't organize a multinational mass extermination program, at the scale of a continent, involving industrial methods, ingeneering, R&D, "workers" and logistics (trains etc), while avoiding many people to know, guess or at least getting suspicious about what's happening.

This does not mean all Germans knew about the extermination camps, whose locations were more remote than for the concentration camps.

But at least, a majority of Germans knew about forced labor and mistreatments, it is believable many of them thought that it was the same in the eastern camps, and therefore did not knew about gas chambers and mass extermination in general.

I agree on the fact that many Germans saw how Jews were mistreated, spoiled of their properties, then sent to camps / forced labor etc, so it's hard to know if a given German knew about the extermination process, but it's sure many of them did not give a damn about a Jew's fate.

They offered the power to the Nazis it does not look like seeing the true face of the Nazi-way was much of a problem for the average German citizen, and only when the war started to weight too much on the country, they had afterthoughts.

But there also were many German that did not have a clue about this, other who were oppposed but kept their mouth shut in fear which is understandable.

And, because there's always a Few, with a capital F, some opened their mouths and...well, see what happened to Sophie Scholl.

And about this genocide being something inherent to German people...this is not only stupid, racist, but also it prevents you from learning one of the most important lessons taught by WWII : how facism, racism and cult of personality can turn many citizens into white/blue collar killer and even more citizens into passive spectators of the process.

And this can be you or me, whether we are German or not.

 

From Richard Rhodes " Masters of Death - the SS-Einsatzgruppen"

Even within Police battalion 101 Michael Mann found four signs..that things might actually have been a little out of the ordinary.

First, 38% of the policemen were nazi party members, which was double the membership level among all German men at this time.

Second, the higher the rank, the higher the proportion of nazis.

Third, this was a battalion whose main officers, NCOs and the more experienced lower-ranking enlisted men were career police men: 20% had several years experience of policing, and since their average age was 39 most would have only had experience policing in a nazi state-obviously not a training in genocide, but police work without effective limitation or regulation by the law.

Fourth, the worse the complicity in genocide ( as measured by postwar convictions for war crimes), the more these tendencies appeared.