karma said:
I'm sure the average citizen just wanted to go to work and feed their family, but at the same time when you are seeing your nation fall through the cracks and tyranized by a minority they have a duty to stand up and put their foot down and fix it before it gets out of hand.
while i agree with the whole germans are not victims thing, i have to say that you didnt really had a choice other than support the NSDAP... and they were NOT a minority. look at this picture from 1934... all those people were members of the NSDAP in one way or another... SA,SS, military...
there was no real way to stop them once people realised what they really did and wanted.
if you didnt support them, you were deported... beaten.... tortured... killed. most of the time not only you but also your family... husband, wife, children. there was alot of blackmailing involved... like 'you stop supporting the resistance or otherwise your wife and children will be deported'... what are you gonna do?
karma said:
It should have been stopped when people noticed Jews being rounded up or even before then with the Euthenasia project.
you had no more rights whatsoever... its not that you were able to go to the police and say 'hey, they are beating up jewish children... do something'.
the police was just another form of the SS or SA, another form of hitler himself. if you did that, they would come to your house at night and if you had really bad luck, you just vanished. in the end you never existed.
you have to realise that there were no rights, no laws (for the people to protect them... all they protected were hitler and his helpers), no police, no legal entities... it was all ruled by hitler.
there was a decree that said something like 'you say something bad about hitler or the NSDAP, you will get imprisoned'.
you never knew who belonged to the gestapo... it was a secret society, the secret state police.
your best friend could have been a member and betrayed you. you never knew. one wrong word and bam, you were the enemy of the state.
so what were you doing? you kept your mouth shut to protect yourself and your family.
karma said:
Hitler couldn't run a country without people, kill them all and he would have been left with nothing to command and just another sadistic dictator.
hitler was running the country cos a) he got tons of support at the beginning and b) once people realised what he really did and wanted, hitler was already having too much power to fight against him... he was the führer, the dictator, the police, the judge, the court, everything... and he didnt kill everyone. not his beloved arians, 'just' political enemies, jews, homosexuals...
karma said:
No instead you got "Oh wow i didn't know that was happening 10 miles away :-/ " or "I would have been killed, better them than me".
most people had no clue what really happened, they believed everything the officials told them. they believed that jews were the bad guys and deserved everything. this is not cos hitler told them, this is something that started years ago... centuries ago.
sure, they didnt like this and that in regards to how hitler handled political stuff... lots of people had jewish friends etc.
but he, hitler, got the people out of unemployment... cos of him they were able to feed their families, they were able to work, they were able to heat their apartments during winter and so on and so on.
but i think you are missing one point and that point is pure terror.
what do you think... would people rather take the chance of losing their jobs and food and support for his/ her family, take the chance to end up in a prison and get tortured, take the chance to end up in a concentration or death camp... or support a jew or a resistance group?!?!
do you bite the hand that feeds you?
i think you dont.
karma said:
but at any moment in Hitlers violent and insane rise to power he could have been stopped. Not once did they as a group surpass their apathy and look around and say "WTF is gonig on here".
karma said:
They could have stood up and fought or atleast paid attention and not let it get that far.
there were people fighting against hitler... there were people standing up... there were students printing fliers and trying to spread them all over the place (for example the resistance group 'Die weiße Rose' by sophie and hans scholl...
http://www.jlrweb.com/whiterose) but look at how many survived. most of them were executed around 1943... if they werent executed right away, they ended up in death camps etc.
others heard that and saw that and they sure as hell didnt feel like trying that too.
and during this time all you wanted was to survive, all you wanted was to eat and support your family. again, you dont bite the hand that feeds you even tho you dont like what it does.
