German NTer's how do you feel about Hitler and the Nazis?

[rico x hood]

Originally Posted by Je Ne Sais Quoi

I'm more interested in what they're taught in school.
Do they just gloss over it like Japan does about Nanking and "comfort women"?

I always assumed it'd be the equivalent of teaching white students about slavery and Jim Crow, it's done objectively. It'd be cool to have someone come in confirm/deny though.

 

[foolio]

Originally Posted by Rico x Hood

Perhaps I should explain my reasons for starting this thread a little more. My father went to Germany a month or so ago and when he came back he told me that the Germans he asked about World War II related monuments would give him a cold shoulder, if you will. He would be asking for directions to say, Auschwitz, or any other landmark and the situation would become awkward in a way. I'm sure Germans these days aren't Nazi sympathizers but I'm sure many of relatives that may have been Nazi's or were directly affected, so I thought it'd be interest to maybe here what goes on at the dinner table, if you will, when subjects such as World War II come up in German households.

I'm not sure if there are natural born Germans on this board, I just through the question to find out what kind of responses and/or stories I'd here.

auschwitz was in poland....................
anyways, I go to school in switzerland, but I speak german, my best friend is german (his grandfather was a general in the SS) and have visited germany many times. Germans have worked very very hard to try to shed the whole nazi image, they paid reperations for ww2, still pay poor euro countries as bail outs etc. You can still find neonazis and skinheads, mostly in eastern germany because even after the fall of the wall they still had the mindset of communists, although not nessesarily jew hatred, but imagine living in a communist country for your whole life, you would still have a very closed mind, it has not been more than 2 generations past since the fall. the MAJORITY of germany though loathes being considered nazis and atleast 95% hate that connotation. 

though they are a BIT racist towards the turks... lol.. but thats because most of the time when you see a fight at a club or somthing it is a turk. theres a huge turkish population in germany, hence why the doner kebab is so popular there. most americans have never had a doner, and until you do, you dont know what life is. 

 

[danzinreallife]

I've yet to go to Germany to truly get a feel for my German heritage but can you blame them for being awkward about it? Especially the older ones.

My Grandmother never spoke about what it was like for her over there at that time and as much as I wanted to ask, I felt like it would almost be disrespectful or cause her pain to have to bring up that horrible time in history.

 

[Shanegerous]

Being german should have no affect on how you should feel about hitler. Everyones views of him should be exactly the same: pure evil.

 

[krazykrake]

Originally Posted by trak1sh

Being german should have no affect on how you should feel about hitler. Everyones views of him should be exactly the same: pure evil.

True.

Germans still feel the shame and guilt that comes with being part of a people that was led to follow a madman into total war and racially founded extremism.
However, no one in their right mind would ever try to justify the Holocaust or WW2. Education in school tells it _all_ and does not stop at the most disgusting atrocities commited by the Nazis.

Oh, and by the way, a LOT of Germans lost relatives in concentration camps and combat action, so there's another reason for reacting awkward to questions about the darkest hour of my otherwise fine nation.

 

[lazylid]

im part german.... as well as part jewish so im not sure im what youre looking for

 

[langfor5]

I had a couple friends who biked across Europe a couple years back and they told me that in some cities in Germany you aren't even allowed to mention Hitler or the Nazi name. I wanna say it was the town that Hitler was born in.
History professor in college told a story of him visiting a concentration camp. Said he didn't believe in ghosts but when he went on a tour of the camp it was like 90 degrees outside but when he set foot in the crematory room he could feel a cold chill in the room. He was like, you could feel people in the room. 

 

[brockbo]

To be honest ive always been interested in learning about the Nazi's and just the history of WWII to be honest (im black) I would be scared out of my mind to be alive during that time in Europe

 

[bostonthreeparty]

Originally Posted by Tiburon

Originally Posted by Paul Is On Tilt

Originally Posted by ricerocket1


true story.

Yup.

  

absolutely hate this guy. I know someone who has the exact same mannerisms, expressions and looks so similar to him. once i saw the show, i freaked out. 

 

[an dee 51o]

Originally Posted by Je Ne Sais Quoi

I'm more interested in what they're taught in school.
Do they just gloss over it like Japan does about Nanking and "comfort women"?

This is what still gets me

Many people are still alive that are survivors, yet Japan pretends this never happened.

 

[gg23]

Originally Posted by LazyLid

im part german.... as well as part jewish so im not sure im what youre looking for

This.  My family left a few months after the Nazi's came into power.

And in regards to your statement, Rico, about your pop visiting Germany, its a time in history I'm sure Germany would rather forget.  Even during WWII, most Germans were not Nazi sympathizers.  Hitler came to power with something like 34% of the vote.  I would imagine most of the people in Germany today would rather not be associated with an evil they're born into.

 

[Gex the Damaja]

Originally Posted by GG23

Originally Posted by LazyLid

im part german.... as well as part jewish so im not sure im what youre looking for

This.  My family left a few months after the Nazi's came into power.

And in regards to your statement, Rico, about your pop visiting Germany, its a time in history I'm sure Germany would rather forget.  Even during WWII, most Germans were not Nazi sympathizers.  Hitler came to power with something like 34% of the vote.  I would imagine most of the people in Germany today would rather not be associated with an evil they're born into.

It's a little higher than that, in the 40's if I remember(believe 47%). I'm more interested in russian's emotions towards Stalin. It seems Hitler is the favorite topic of ultimate evil, but compared to Stalin, I'm not sure he could compete.  

 

[clone]

Originally Posted by Rico x Hood

Perhaps I should explain my reasons for starting this thread a little more. My father went to Germany a month or so ago and when he came back he told me that the Germans he asked about World War II related monuments would give him a cold shoulder, if you will. He would be asking for directions to say, Auschwitz, or any other landmark and the situation would become awkward in a way. I'm sure Germans these days aren't Nazi sympathizers but I'm sure many of relatives that may have been Nazi's or were directly affected, so I thought it'd be interest to maybe here what goes on at the dinner table, if you will, when subjects such as World War II come up in German households.

I'm not sure if there are natural born Germans on this board, I just through the question to find out what kind of responses and/or stories I'd here.

I'm part German and have been to Germany many times and the reason why they act like this is because they hate when people bring it up, their ashamed of it. It's like asking people about slavery here.

 

[gg23]

Originally Posted by Gex The Damaja

Originally Posted by GG23

Originally Posted by LazyLid

im part german.... as well as part jewish so im not sure im what youre looking for

This.  My family left a few months after the Nazi's came into power.

And in regards to your statement, Rico, about your pop visiting Germany, its a time in history I'm sure Germany would rather forget.  Even during WWII, most Germans were not Nazi sympathizers.  Hitler came to power with something like 34% of the vote.  I would imagine most of the people in Germany today would rather not be associated with an evil they're born into.

It's a little higher than that, in the 40's if I remember(believe 47%). I'm more interested in russian's emotions towards Stalin. It seems Hitler is the favorite topic of ultimate evil, but compared to Stalin, I'm not sure he could compete.  

My mistake it was 44%.  I didn't catch that.  However, still not a majority.

I did a project on Stalin in high school.  Even being Jewish, I would say Stalin was eviler.  But Stalin didn't really affect America the way Hitler did so history textbooks like to graze over him.  That being said, Hitler was half the man Stalin was when it came to getting what he wanted politically.  Hitler didn't like Jews, Gypsies, etc. and that's well documented; but he loved Germany and the people who supported him.  Stalin killed anyone who questioned him or gave him a funny look, purposely wiped out people with famine being common, killed millions of Jews, didn't care about anyone other than himself and did whatever it took to get what he wanted.

 

[color me green]

I've been thinking about this question for the longest time now 

 

[ekon one]

Yeah I think I've said it on the boards here a couple of times. The Third Reich and Hitler are Germany's national shame. They've gone so far to try and make amends in means of financial, political and social reparations.

It's interesting to note that hate speech is not covered by free speech in Germany.

 

[kramer]

Im sure they feel the same way everyone does

 

[Peep Game]

Wow...this is a random as hell question, yet...oddly intriguing

 

[rexanglorum]

FOOLIO wrote:

---

anyways, I go to school in Switzerland, but I speak German, my best friend is German (his grandfather was a general in the SS) and have visited germany many times. Germans have worked very very hard to try to shed the whole nazi image, they paid reperations for ww2, still pay poor euro countries as bail outs etc. You can still find neonazis and skinheads, mostly in eastern germany because even after the fall of the wall they still had the mindset of communists, although not nessesarily jew hatred, but imagine living in a communist country for your whole life, you would still have a very closed mind, it has not been more than 2 generations past since the fall. the MAJORITY of germany though loathes being considered nazis and atleast 95% hate that connotation. 

though they are a BIT racist towards the turks... lol.. but thats because most of the time when you see a fight at a club or somthing it is a turk. theres a huge turkish population in germany, hence why the doner kebab is so popular there. most americans have never had a doner, and until you do, you dont know what life is. 


I agree with everything that you said. I studied German in high school and studied at a German High School (it's senor classes are like freshman and sophmore classes in the US) and audited a number of classes at a fine German University, Heidelberg, for a semester (I felt so much more cultured to go to a school that is not all about its football and/or the basketball team and/or its celebrity professor that is never actualy there and that prides its self on being centuries old and making Harvard and Yale look like UC Merced or CSU Channel Islands in comparison). Also, Doners are great as is Turkish food in general, is the German counter part to Mexican food in the US and yes, Turks do tend to get in to the most fights, mostl ywith eachother in fight clubs. Most Turks do not shoot people or anything, they just tend to brawl while ethnic Germans of my own generation are peaceful and they believe that the running track or soccer pitch or basketball court is where one should get out his aggression.

Most German not only hate having their country and language and society so closely associated with the madness of Nazism but they also regret how 12 years of Nazi evil over shadowed the centuries of achievement by German, Austrian and Swiss people as well as the hundreds of millions of German speakers around the world. Before the first World War, whole German communities and regions would tranplant themselves to every habitable continent in the World. They built the American midwest, Texas, parts of California, parts of Canada, the most productive and prosperous regions in South America, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Eastern Europe and small parts of China and East Africa. They proudly advanced truly liberal ideas by opposing slavery before any other whites did, they set the model for higher education in the United States and they even changed US culture by removing the Anglo-Puritan stimaga against playing sports and having fun on Sundays and they also showed Anglo-Americans that people could drink alcohol without hving to be flarantly drunk. Those all American activities like recreational sports leagues and BBQ's and picnics and county fairs are all German as is the notion of education moving you methodically from kindergarten right up through your PhD.

Before the World Wars, the Lingua Franca of science was German and serious students of physics and chemistry came to Germany to study and not to Oxford or to MIT, English speakers learned German and in the Mid West of the US and other German communities aborad, the communities were bilingual, with many people reading news papers and hearing church sermons in German. Also counted among the German speaking world is Gutenberg's Printing Press, Martin Luther's Reformations, the Music of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven, the Psychology of Freud, the Economics of Hayek and Mises and Schumpeter, the Statecraft of Bismarck, Schiller and Goethe's Literature, the engineering of the automobile by Benz, the Philosophy of Nietzsche and Hagel and Kant and the Physics of Heisenberg and Einstein and that list is far from exhaustive of Germans who stood out in their fields of study. 

With regards to the German cultural outlook to religion; during the 250 before the rise of the Nazis, Germany led the world in religious tolerance and it was the first place in Europe were Jews could enjoy full equal rights with Christians. Also, Protestants and Catholics had Harmony that did not exist elsewhere in Europe from the late 17th Century through the early 20th Century and after 1945, they had re established that tradition. It should also be noted that while many Germans have been leading Pacifists and historically German polities have not be aggressive, ethnic Germans, where ever they may be, are fine soldiers and even better officers. They are inevitably disproportionately represented among the officer corps, especially the ranks of colonels and generals in the US, Australia, Canada, Latin America and prior to their expulsion from Eastern Europe, Germans were one percent of the population of Czarist Russia and they were 40% of the generals. Gemans also build, they build Church, Schools and public builds where every they settle and they sometimes become the only engineers and industrialists in a given region. In Brazil in 1900 every single chocolate bars, bottle of beer, horse carriage, saddle, barrel, piece of furniture, clocks, watches and almost anything could be mass produced and.or required a high degree of precision were German made and that pattern or similar patterns folow Germans where ever they choose to call home.

The terrible error committed by many historians is that view every things done in by Germans and Austrians as a prelude to the Holocaust, as if the Holocaust was a natural result of simply being German. People look at the anti Jewish Pogroms of the Middle Ages, Martin Luther's handful of anti-Jewish thoughts (the Roman Catholic church and the etsbalished crowns of Europe and Russia at the time only prodtected Jews so that they could be forced to to its dirty work of debt and tax collection) and Wagner's silly notions of the Germans being a true a pure Volk. Anti Semitism in German was, until 1932, always lower in intensity then in any pther part of Europe and in the 19th Century it was vurtually no existant. Since 1945, Germany has paid reparations to Israel/Holocaust survivers, it supports Israel diplomatically and it has welcomed Jews to return to Germany and the primary threat that today's German Jews face is from its unassimiliated Muslim population. It should also be mentioned that the evil men of the SS recieved ample help from most Eastern Europeans and most Frenchmen in rounding up Jews dring the time when the German military occupied most of continental Europe. Only the Dutch, the Danes and Norwegians were generally serious about protecting Jews from the Nazis.

Germany has also been paying unofficial reparations to the rest of Europe through its funding of bailouts. Germany has also outlawed efforts by their own citizens to seek repartions for they starvation and mass enslavement that was inflicted on them for two years by the Western allies and the decades of enlsavements inflicted upon them by the Russians (of the tens of thousand that surrende at Stalingrad only 5,000 returned, in 1955) and they has been little complaint nor mention of the USSR's systemic Holocaust against the millions of ethnic Germans (enclaves of Germans that started as early as the 13th century and that spanned from Prague to the Volga River) that were not Nazis and that simply were citizens of various Eastern European Countries.

Not only do historians misrepresent the German Character but they miss the biggest and most valuable lesson in that can be derived from those gruesome 12 years of German history from 1932 to 1945. It is the fact that such onderful people could become, in their millions, absolut monsters and that rhetorical power of a Hitler turned an industrious and frugal people into pople that lived by the plunder of Jews, it turned the most religiously liberal people into the most illiberal, it turned the haven for European Jews in a hell, it turned a charitable lot into people that opted to murder the disabled, it turned a people that were open to science into a people that accepted bizzare pseudo science and the occult. The lesson from the Holocaust should not be, watch for those evil German rather, if it could happen in 20th Century Germany it can happen anywhere and we should be cautious on any and all political rhetoric because an evil man wit ha golden tongue can get into power and put millions into gas chambers within a few year's time. 

 

[prymone]

im half german, born and bred in chicago tho
never been there