I live in the Netherlands and I remember being thought that in school as one of the reasons of Hitlers rise to power.
The Dutch wikipage [1] of the Versailles treaty also reflects this in a section called "consequences of the treaty" (De gevolgen van het verdrag).
[1] https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdrag_van_Versailles_(1919...
On October 3, 2010 were the last debt repaid by the Germans.
I'm not sure why this is socially unacceptable - I thought it was widely accepted that Hitler rode the economic woes into office, and used them to blame the Jews (amongst others). Now, if you start using that to justify what the Nazi party did, I can see why you might be called a Nazi sympathiser, but I don't see why that statement on its own is particularly controversial (if perhaps only presenting one factor).
The question does remain though - would the Great Depression on its own (without reparations), or had Germany been in a better economy situation, been sufficient to result in Hitler's rise to power?
I brought that up on a forum. It isn't justification for Nazi atrocities. It is insight into how the people on the ground suffering hardship saw him in his early years. He was perceived to be a good leader doing good things for the people, at least at first.
But, hey, my previous comment is already deep in the negatives, so I'm guessing HN won't be much more reasonable than Reddit was when I tried to make that point.
People also seem to forget that the entire point of Milgram's experiments was to prove that something like that absolutely could not happen in the US. The theory was that there was something peculiar to the German people. His experiments proved the exact opposite, which was quite shocking at the time and likely part of why they are so very well known, though most people appear oblivious to the origin story.
FYI: My initial comment was well into the negatives for a time.
A lot of people simply cannot look objectively at anything related to WW2. They know how it ultimately turned out, so they basically ret-con it as "they were pure evil from the start."
The problem is such mental models foster convenient explanations and justifications, not solutions for making sure such things don't happen again.
WW2 is actually even inspiration for, say, Star Wars. Darth Vader and his troops are something of a cross between Japanese samurai uniforms and WW2 German uniforms.
It's so deeply embedded, we don't even notice the connection. We don't question where those images come from. We just accept it as "Yup. Totes The Bad Guy! Looks Bad to me!"
On the other hand, I agree that no nation or ethnic group can assume itself intrinsically immune to such things.
But she was also remarking on one of the programs that provided servants to families. I don't recall the details. She could remember her family benefiting in some way from such a program.
Regardless of all those details, Germany was in dire straits and this was due in part to a global depression and in part due to how other nations were treating Germany post WW1. It was the people of Germany suffering because of all that and they likely did not have all the details we now know about Nazi tactics.
This was well before our highly connected modern communications. They used to play news at movie theaters during WW2. TVs were not yet widespread.
My mother's remark is firsthand testimony concerning the perceptions of ordinary people on the ground at the time. That isn't apologist. It doesn't mean any of the ugly political things people are reading into it.
It is interesting to me for that reason. It is rare insight into how and why Hitler could rise to power to begin with. At least some of the people at the time perceived him as doing good things for a country being crushed by outside forces.
Hindsight is 20/20. People pretty routinely are shocked to find where their path has led them. I don't see any reason to question the idea that the ordinary people of Germany could believe he was doing good for the country until things went very wrong and then suddenly feeling like "He's lost his mind and we didn't sign up for this!"
They weren't on Twitter watching political inquiries go down in real time. Things were different back then.
I was a minor when the discussion occurred. That no doubt influenced the wording.
It was a private conversation at home between mother and daughter. She had zero reason to think she needed to defend the remark as if it were a PhD thesis or testimony in a war crimes trial.
If you don’t want to discuss it, don’t post it. If you don’t want to defend it, don’t base an argument on it.
I'm not saying I'm not accountable for choosing to make the comments I've made.
> A lot of people simply cannot look objectively at anything related to WW2. They know how it ultimately turned out, so they basically ret-con it as "they were pure evil from the start."
I don’t know how else to read that other than as an argument that Nazis weren’t pure evil from the start.
I plan to drop it. It's been surprisingly well received so far, by which I mean it didn't turn into a shit show. I see no reason to go there at this late stage in the discussion.
I don’t want to walk away from pointing out that Nazis were, in fact, as bad as everyone thinks and were that way from the start. The fact that it’s been well received just adds further motivation to point this out.
They were not only violent group around, that is absolutely true. But they were pretty bad even if you ignore Holocaust itself.
'You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake'. Jeannette Rankin
Nazis being evil from the start isn’t a retcon. Just look at their internal party purges, or how the Enabling Act got passed.
Yes, a leader can be corrupt and dictatorial, and yes, they can strong-arm many people. To somebody with strong morals and heavily deontological beliefs, they can look at that leader and say "How could anyone support such a person?". The answer is to look at a concept like Maslow's hierarchy of needs [1] and realize that the supporters are likely pursuing an entirely different stage of needs than you. When your kids are hungry and you have to work from sun-up until sun-down to keep the family fed, and somebody makes it easier for you and your family to survive and maybe even have extra money at the end of the week, none of the moral ideologies against corruption or dictatorship really matter to you. That's why Russians give Putin such a high approval rating; they don't deny that he's corrupt, they just don't care, because their lives have improved.
The same can be said of hopeful Trump supporters to a lesser extent, in fact, and linked is a fantastic analysis on that topic (the most fair and analytical one I've read) [2].
My point is: the above poster's mother wasn't apologizing for Nazis. She was likely saying that, as far as she could tell at that point in time, similar to my Russian family, her family's life had improved. I don't see how that becomes false in light of future events.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
[2] http://inference-review.com/article/trump-and-the-trumpists
Also, economic only explanation ignores how much militarized Germany was, how much lost itself was impossible to stomach to them leading to "Jews stab us in back" myth.
There is whole lot more.to it then just suffering economy. Hitler support was not.among poorest either, it was among artisans, owners of small businesses and such.
As an example the term 'holocaust' was widely publicized by ABC TV for their miniseries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(miniseries) Prior to that the term 'holocaust' was used to describe the Armenian genocide and you can still find Armenians who are deeply offended by this.
This is not a defense of the Nazi party - I grew up in Coventry UK, one of the most heavily bombed cities in England in WWII (my mother was there under the kitchen table) - this is an attempt to address the reality that in 2018 we are largely influenced by the media in our perceptions of a war that was more than a generation ago, and that politicians were as labile and devious then as they are now, on both sides.
The wehrmacht was national army with long tradition. They took over most of Europe including significant part of Russian territory. Not clueless farmers and clueless farmers were not in leadership. Moreover, Germany was preparing for war for years and that included school system trying to help raise soldier material. As for bicycles, bicycles don't require gas which is why popularity among both army and civilians. Add to it restrictions imposed on German army by WWI victors (which Germans broke, but had to be careful not to do it too openly) and it all becomes logical.
Polish army was still using primary horses and did not anticipated modern war. Germans actually came with better technology.
Lastly, the idea that bad things started with war and later Holocaust is not correct. The state performed repressions of political opposition and violent social control started at earliest, the moment nazi took power. Plans were ready in advance. The nazi themselves were like that even before they took state power into control and violence etc played role already during democratic state, including during elections.
Still, you can't escape the fact blitzkrieg was also effective. It was effective as tactics had not evolved far from WW1 trench warfare. It was but a very small part of the military whole.
There were lots of shortcomings in the German war machine - for example, they never developed a successful 4 engine bomber severely limiting the bomb loads they could send, and range.
As to holocaust, my UK history lessons, before this mini series was made, and books referred to "the holocaust" as the main term, occasionally referring to the Nazi term "the final solution".
Hitler got into power because of the great depression and the German populations attraction at the time to authoritarian nationalist political party's not because Germany's war reparations were so horrendous.
In a nutshell, the seeds of WW2 were planted in WW1. This is a longstanding human tradition and is in part related to the historical practice of extracting war reparations, but there was other stuff as well that wouldn't, strictly speaking, be classified that way, yet still had a negative impact.
I've read a fair amount of history. I was a history major for a time. My ex was career military and particularly interested in military history and had an extensive book collection. We sometimes looked up the actual battles while watching movies.
The American Civil War is notable for being singular and not the beginning of a series of civil wars. Grant was an alcoholic and ne'er-do-well and this has been credited with his unprecedented choice to set very merciful terms of surrender. Not only were war reparations not extracted, he insisted that the South accept help for rebuilding.
This has been credited with being the roots of similar tactics post WW2 where America occupied and helped rebuild both Japan and Germany.
I hope that's a little clearer. I don't know that it is. I have a raging headache.
Where? I learnt WWI & WWII history while at school in England, and that was exactly the version we were taught. Although modern historians somewhat dispute the simplicity of that narrative.
The real thing that put Hitler in power to begin with was the horrendous war reparations Germany was saddled with from WW1 because it was "last man standing" on the losing side. You get called a Nazi sympathizer and things like that for trying to provide that context, but to my mind that is the real reason they said "Never again" and instituted global protections for financial stuff at the end of WW2.
People seem to forget the entire world was suffering through a depression prior to WW2 and most wars are, at their root, motivated by resource limitations.