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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elsewhere who wrote (36741)	8/9/2002 8:15:49 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I have mentioned before the class I took on the history of the Nazi party last summer, taught by Dr. Peter Black, chief historian for the Holocaust Museum. In that class, we did put the Nazi party into the context of its times. We talked about German history prior to WWI, the weird way the war ended (the fact that the military lied to the people telling them that they were winning until the bitter end, breakouts of revolution in support of the Soviet revolution, the hope that Germany would be a party to the Wilson plan, Wilson's illness and inability to implement the Fourteen Points), reparations, occupations, hyperinflation, the Weimar Republic, the failures of the Weimar Republic, the rise of paramilitary organizations, the Great Depression, the whole bit. And then the rise to power of Hitler, starting from 1926. And then his ruthless consolidation of power. And then the history of Germany from 1933 to 1939, and then the history of the war from 1939 to 1945. I took copious notes. I read many books that were assigned for class and then many books for a paper I wrote. The detail was relentless, incredible, and sometimes stultifying. The German propensity for organization is sometimes overwhelming. Every level of society was involved, in what Hannah Arent called "the banality of evil." Of course not everyone went along with it. In fairness, those who wanted to resist were skillfully undercut and marginalized. The Nazis were like the Borg, resistance was futile. The last class we watched a movie about the White Rose, a student group that resisted Hitler by the harmless act of printing protest fliers, and were caught and executed. I don't have a problem with contextualizing Hitler and the NSDAP and Germany inter-war and during war (and after). It was a very cool class. Dr. Black is Jewish, but he did not make a big deal out of the Holocaust. The material spoke for itself. The most wrenching document, in my opinion, was a book entitled Ordinary Men, about ordinary men who were not SS, just cops and the like, who were part of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland and Eastern Europe, who killed Jews by "Stalin shots" to the base of the skull, before the Final Solution was implemented. Just ordinary German Joe Six Packs who would shoot Jews all day, every age from babies in arms to old ladies who could not get out of their beds, then go back to their camps and get plastered on schnapps, with blood and brains all over them, and then get up in the morning and do it all over again. Just another day of work for the Third Reich. The thing that really got to me was that, if they did not want to do it, nobody made them do it. They could hang out and get drunk or whatever. But they did it anyway. Not all, but most. These guys and others like them killed maybe 2 million people, one person at a time. How do you contextualize that? (Let me say again, as I have said before, I am about 1/4 German; my husband is 1/2 German; his mother came from Lauf and was in the Hitler Youth ("everybody did it"), and his uncle died in the Battle of Stalingrad.) My own German ancestors came here in 1769 and fought in the American Revolution, but I do love Germany. I love Bach, I love Beethoven, I love Kurt Weill. I admire Kant. Ich spreche Deutsch. I think Germany is one of the most cultured nations the world has ever seen. So how? My working hypothesis is the Ground Zero to which I always return. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Governments are not to be trusted.