Overall a good article, although I would be very careful with any attempts to "whitewash" parts of the population with remarks regarding the knowledge about the Holocaust or that you'd get shot for refusing to carry out orders. It's not that this is unlikely to have been the case for some, but rather that these very wordings have in the past often been used as excuses by people who did not wish to own up to their responsibility - yet we have heard statements about the lack of effort to cover up mass murder (there is a rather interesting audiotape interview at the end of the movie Downfall that basically indicates people
chose to ignore the obvious signs out of convenience), and we have it on paper that penalties for refusing to take part in mass executions usually amounted to nothing but a cutback of rations or extra duty. That being said, I do believe that in many cases, fear still was the chief motivator. Not necessarily fear of getting shot, but fear of being branded a traitor, not being seen as a
Kamerad anymore, not a member of the
Volksgemeinschaft. In other words: peer pressure, combined with an ongoing escalation in how brutal violence became everyday business. We have heard similar stories of the Vietnam War, have we not?
It is important to remember how and why so many people could have failed to behave like decent human beings, instead falling in line behind institutionalised hatred - now more than ever, for as you have pointed out, hatred is still (or perhaps has become again) a very attractive lifestyle aspect in countries around the world. It is almost ironic how the youtube-commenters you alluded to may well be tomorrow's new {Godwin's Law}, if we as a civilization are not careful enough. Just under a different name, be it ISIS, or Pegida, UKIP .. the list goes on, and every nation has its own demons to fight here.
Anyways, as an ex-German myself, I agree with the overall sentiment of your piece, and you did a good job contributing to the remembrance of something that should not be forgotten, for you have to learn from mistakes in order to prevent them from occurring again. And in order to learn from a mistake, the first step is realizing you've made one, and keeping that in mind.
Lily from animove, on 27 January 2015 - 09:29 AM, said:
WWII was a horrible thing and the biggets of mankinds time, yet the problems of those past are the problems of the present, and many people in their convinient warm and safe homes do not want to see what is still happing out there.
That is also very true. I notice a lot of people have become heartless in that they would wish to erect ever more walls and fences to segregate their preferred community from the rest of the world, and avert their eyes from the suffering that exists elsewhere out of sheer convenience and arrogance - even when it is a suffering that would not exist were it not for their own interests in economic prosperity.
Coincidentally, I just watched Patlabor 2 the other day, and there was one dialogue that stuck with me:
"Now all over the world there are bullet wars, civil wars, suffering, misery, death. We’re a rich country. And what is our wealth built on? The bloody corpses in all these wars. They’re the foundation of our peace. We now put the same effort into indifference that our parents put into war. Other countries comfortably far away pay the price for our prosperous peace. We’ve learned very well how to ignore their suffering."
Ah, humanity could achieve so much if only we would learn to work together, to care for each other, past something as insignificant and fluid as national borders, or the many other labels we use to segregate this world's populace into neatly arranged, pre-defined categories rather than treating and judging each other as individuals belonging to a singular species.
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