Thank you guys for your work on WWII. This is the most complete historical account of the war that anyone has ever tried to create. To me it seems like this is as close as I can get to living through the war. It really has changed my understanding of the war and how it has shaped the world and my world view.
One thing I think the series is missing and a major piece that has been overlooked is the Jewish definition. The more I think about it, the world really doesn’t have a very good definition of being Jewish. Just because your mother is Jewish, you go to a synagogue, or you celebrate Hanukkah does not make you Jewish. Just about anyone could be labeled by the various definitions of Jewish and then that gives people the green light to hate, take their property and kill them.
When it comes to being Jewish or any other religion it really is all about faith one has with that religion. There’s really no way to tell how much faith someone has to any religion. People fake it all the time. A person can pray 24/7 and do all the rituals, but if they don’t believe in the religion then they are not that religion. That is between them and that god and there’s no way to tell what that relationship is like.
The Nazi’s definition of Jewish in my opinion is so bad that I’m completely horrified and amazed that the Nazi’s got millions of people to believe it. It’s so bad and laughably stupid I can’t believe people ever bought it. This is the 1920’s and 1930’s. DNA has not been discovered yet. The only way you know who your relatives are is because they told you so. Documentation at this time is so bad that it generally doesn’t exist. If it does exist there’s a high probability that it is not accurate. It could totally be wrong, faked, or missing. Not to mention the corruption. The fact that people could lie about their age and still get into the military says it all.
The world likes to keep it simple. The world just blames the Nazi’s for everything and labels them evil. As I’ve watched the series since the beginning I’ve come to the realization that it’s not that simple. The Nazi’s weren’t evil. The more I think about it, it’s actually very sad what happened to the Nazi’s. One thing that the world doesn’t talk about is the fact that the Nazi high command (Hitler, Goebbles, Goring, etc) were all middle aged and they were also very successful in their chosen professions. They didn’t need to be in government, persecute the Jews and start WWII. In fact they probably would have been more successful if they weren’t in government.
The reality is that the Nazi’s were just really angry at the world. As soon as the Nazi’s stepped into Poland they pillaged, destroyed and killed anyone they wanted. They never stopped. The only way to stop the Nazi’s was to march to Berlin and kill Hitler and German High Command. This is not a great time to be alive either. This is war and it’s very destructive. They’re houses are being bombed, they’re living in bunkers and dodging air raids. They’re watching their friends be killed and property being destroyed. They can’t travel and if they do travel it has to be done very carefully so they don’t killed. They left themselves no outs. What makes a successful person get so tied up into their cause that they leave themselves no outs. They are more than willing to risk everything including their life, lives of their families, friends, and everything else for that cause. They don’t care if history hates them or not. They just don’t care about anything else other than pillaging, destroying and killing anyone and everything they want.
It’s so perplexing to me as to why the Nazi’s did what they did. The history says the Nazi’s literally risked everything to try and create this superior Aryan Race and rid Europe of Jews. I find this very hard to believe because of what the Nazi’s actually did. They went way further than that. It can’t possibly be that simple.
Yes the Nazi were a very sad bunch, but they were also very much evil.
To get people to go along with what they wanted they needed to create an enemy.
There has been a history in the world of hate and persecution of yews so they were an easy target.
Over time before the war the Nazi party took over all the media and started seeding and building on this hate and resentment that was already there.
This is a tactic used by king/monarchs/dictators/politicians/bullies in the past and still today , create a group and exclude some because they do not follow or they do something different or look different.
And the “they” could be anyone ( color , language, religion, sex, apperance, etc) and if they are aloready disliked then this becomming of “they” is made easier.
They are not like us they are below us.
This is also done throughout history with people of different color , they can not use the same public toilet as us.
And with woman it was also the case, they can not use the same public toilet as us.
It has been done with the gay, they can not use the same public toilet as us.
It is done with trans, they can not use the same public toilet as us.
First you create a them/they against us and then you can start to blame them for some issue , once the issue has been created you can build on this to cover anything you do that you don’t want the public to know.
Before the was the nazi already killed a lot of people in Germany that the nazi thought were undesirable like mental patients.
When the public did find out the nazi had to put this on pause until the them against us buzz got more powerfull.
When they could openly steal , beat and kill the yews in the street and got enough of the public to go along with it they new they had enough us against them to start going totally mental and do what they want.
And they did , the people knew what was going on during the war , the German people knew about the deportations and about the killings.
The people may not have known on all the details like the experimenting on living humans but they knew about the killings.
People in the allied nations were informed by the newspapers of the deportations and murders.
Small steps over the line will move the line , shifting the line so far that people will do the things they thought they would never do.
Using the us against they to get others to go along is bad but the deportations, murder, experimentations of humans that they believed to be lesser humans is what I think is what makes them evil.
It’s not that simple. Joseph Goebbels will raise six children during the war and then at the end of it kill them all. Hitler didn’t have kids and he wasn’t married during the war. So maybe he was hedging his bet. That if he lost that he didn’t want his kids to deal with the loss.
When you look at other wars like WWI, Napoleonic Wars, American Civil War. Most leaders of the losing side LIVE if they survive the war!
It’s one thing to buy into someone’s political ideology for a job or improve your life type of thing. Its a whole other thing to do what German High Command did. Not only did they buy into it, but they allowed it to totally consume them so that the only three options they had out was suicide, execution or many years in jail and no matter what they picked they would be hated by history.
For example Goebbels will raise six children. Do you know how hard it is to raise kids? It’s no joke. Takes a ton of time. And Goebbels is right there next to Hitler so he’s working 12-16 hour days and screaming NAZI NAZI NAZI!! Yes he has all the help he needs to raise his kids, but still it’s not easy. He’s going to spend the war trying to not get killed. His house will be bombed. He’ll live in bomb shelters. He’s going to be around death and destruction till the end of his life. Which by the way he was 47. That’s not very old.
Then at the end of going through all that he’s going to kill six of his children and himself. Its one thing to have someone or another group of people to kill children far away from you. It’s another thing to kill children yourself. It’s a whole other thing to kill your own children. You don’t do that easily. Most parents would have a really tough time doing that.
German High Command are the most committed to cause group that I can think of throughout history. They can’t be barging with and they can’t be reasoned with. They absolutely will not surrender and will not stop and until the allies kill them. And what exactly are they fighting for? History says: Exterminate the Jews and create a superior Aryan race…
That’s just stupid. Can’t buy that sorry.
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Well my grandmother in the Arbeitseinsatz met a German Woman who was grieving about her son at the front. However she was glad that by fighting the Jews he would go to heaven. So there was a religious part as well. German churches had Jews sucking on the tits of pigs and sadly this connection didn’t end as Pope Benedict welcomed a British holocaust denying Bishop to the Catholic Church . Not to mention the propaganda where the snake in the garden of Eden was depicted as Jew. Also every Catholic was taught that the Jews killed Christ ignoring the Romans and the simple fact that there is zero evidence (apart from a book).
Maybe that logic is impossible to conceive and rightfully so because it were a bunch of extremists. And I acknowledge that also non Jewish Religious people died in the Holocaust as well.
This to me explains a little why so many Germans were with the Nazi’s after it was obvious they had lost the war but only could go on fighting a lost cause.
Focussing on life after death instead of life before death makes on vulnerable to Religious inspired hate (and to me Paganism is also a Religion)
Just to expand, the Nazi propaganda also claimed that the Jew drove bladiebla from the Garden of Eden. See examples, to us they might look utterly ridiculous but from a deeply violent Religious history these connected at a time. Maybe not to later secular scientific people. (snakes don’t care about apples, prove me wrong!
Antisemitism Explained | Philadelphia Holocaust Memorial Plaza (philaholocaustmemorial.org)