Nazi Atrocities, Committed by Ordinary People

[Mugu]

From doctors to opera singers, teachers to truant schoolchildren, the extermination of European Jews was the work of roughly 200,000 ordinary Germans and their helpers. Years of research -- not yet complete -- reveal how sane members of a modern society committed murder for an evil regime.

Walter Mattner, a police secretary from Vienna, was there in October 1941 when 2,273 Jews were shot to death in Mogilyov in Belarus. He later wrote to his wife: "My hand was shaking a bit with the first cars. By the tenth car, I was aiming calmly and shooting dependably at the many women, children and babies. Bearing in mind that I have two babies at home, I knew that they would suffer exactly the same treatment, if not ten times as bad, at the hands of these hordes." After World War II, it was obvious to most observers that such acts could only have been committed by sadists and psychopaths, under orders from a handful of principal war criminals surrounding Adolf Hitler. It was a comforting way of looking at things, because it meant that ordinary people were not the real perpetrators.

But the horrifying results of an opinion poll that the Americans conducted in their occupation zone in October 1945 could have raised doubts even then about the version of the story that blames everything on a few pathological criminals. Twenty percent of the respondents "agreed with Hitler's treatment of the Jews." Another 19 percent said that although they felt that his policies toward Jews were exaggerated, they were fundamentally correct.

If you're not horrified enough, read the complete article at:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,542245,00.html

[jgraz]

1. Anyone who thinks it couldn't happen here is kidding themselves.

The "God, Guns and Gays" voters would have no problem putting the rest of us up against the wall.

[hootinholler]

2. Yep! n/t

[Echo In Light]

14. You'd be appalled at how many less obvious examples would go along via groupthink

And deeply seated, irrational attitudes of submission to authority.

Makes me think of this infamous case:

Sodomized Ex-McDonald's Employee Wins $6.1M
Incident Happened In 2004, Part Of Nationwide Scam
http://www.telemundochicago.com/news/14277937/detail.html

[BigDaddy44]

18. Its not just here

Its anywhere

[90-percent]

3. Could happen anywhere

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3028803


the good ole now illegal Milgram experiment.


All of us have a little inner Nazi yearning to be discovered.

-90% Jimmy

[Codedonkey]

9. Not Canada....

:P

[Indenturedebtor]

4. No surprises there

One of the great things about being Jewish is that contrary to popular belief we can be hard to spot in a crowd. You get to hear what people really think a lot of the time. What's especially great is when you hear some moron in a place like Tucson AZ who has never met a Jew as far as they know... at least until they spout off at the mouth about us. Everyone loves to hate us.

And everyone thinks that it can't happen here. Only here I'm afraid it'll be the Muslims, followed by the Homosexuals, followed by the Mexicans, followed by the Liberals, followed by the Asians, then the Jews. That is if the facists can pull it off anyways.

[slor]

16. You missed African Americans in your list...

of those to be exterminated. And believe me, I know of many that would like to get that ball rolling, as a light skinned AA, I have heard with my own ears.

[IronLionZion]

17. There are members of this very site who want to kick out certain ethnic groups

I notice the strong anti-Indian sentiment but that's probably because I'm Indian. It often comes out in the threads concerning outsourcing or H1 visas. There was a recent thread that was bashing the whole ethnicity of Indian-Americans just for being successful and long-time DUers were saying some very nasty xenophobic and racist comments about honesty and greed and quality of work and whatever.

many of the stereotypes about Jews are also used against Indian-Americans and other Asian-Americans.

[PATRICK]

5. The twenty per cent

Life experience tells me that this particular number will keep recurring. It includes most but not all a$$holes, people trapped in authoritarian spite mode, the people who when afraid lash out at the innocent weak, bigots, RW exalters, people lost in special vices like greed, hate movement people. As we phase toward the muddled middle it might get blurry. People there are quite capable of being suckers, dupes, trusting to the point of fatal corruption, evaders of responsibility, herd mentality, not too bright or stupid in application intelligence, an immature moral base.

It gets more repulsive when "higher" humans, duped by pride, fear, group think fall big and fail to fight the flow. then the vast majority in a enslaved, corrupted society fall far short of opposing the evil and now it is the very few indeed who brave the odds to protest and oppose. At the very top are the martyrs for justice and visionary leaders- who reclaim human solidarity with the victims and expose the very very very few who manipulate human evil for their own particular, cynical, human hating ends.

Are their questionnaires and polls trying to delineate the breakdown(both senses of the word)? Probably. The Biblical "thirds" seems in practical experience not too far off.

20% will always back Bush BECAUSE of the falseness and the harm he does that they can relate to on some hypocritical level of sick mystery.

[eShirl]

6. if you are human, you need to realize this. n/t

[yodermon]

7. THE SOURCES OF WWII AND THE HOLOCAUST IN GERMAN CHILDREARING

Historians have avoided researching German childrearing at the end of the nineteenth century. The few that have begun to do the research have found German childhood uniformly more brutal than French and British childhood. A comparison by Maynes of 90 German and French autobiographies of late nineteenth-century working class childhoods found German far more brutal and unloving, with the typical memory of home being that "No bright moment, no sunbeam, no hint of a comfortable home where motherly love and care could shape my childhood was ever known to me."275 In contrast, "French workers' autobiographies tell somewhat different childhood tales. To be sure, there are a few French accounts of childhoods marked by cruelty, neglect, and exploitation."276 Yet "much more common are stories of surprisingly sentimental home loves and warm relationships with mothers (and often fathers), even in the face of material deprivation."277 Maynes found unrelenting child labor, sexual molestation and beatings at home and at school were consistently worse in the German accounts.

(snip)

Infanticide and infant mortality rates at the end of the nineteenth century were much higher in Germany and Austria than in England, France, Italy and Scandinavia.294Newborn were not considered in most areas as fully human since they not thought to have a soul until they were six weeks old, and so could be "killed in a kind of late abortion." 295 Women giving birth often "had their babies in the privy, and treated the birth as an evacuation, an everyday event, and...carried on with their work."296 Births which were "experienced as a bowel movement made it possible for the women kill their children in a very crude way, by smashing their heads poultry and small animals..."297 Mothers who killed their newborn babies were observed by others as being without remorse, "full of indifference, coldness and callousness the impression of a general impoverishment of feeling" toward her child.298 Even if the infant was allowed to live, it could easily be neglected and not fed enough, and it would be made to "go straight to heaven." Infant mortality rates in Germany ranged from 21 percent in Prussia to an astonishing 58 percent in Bavaria during the latter part of the nineteenth century,299 the figures in the south--the highest in Europe--being due to their practice of not breastfeeding,300 since hand-fed babies died at a rate three times that of breast-fed babies.301 The best figures for overall German infanticide at the end of the century were 20 percent, half again higher than France and England.302

(snip)

Mothers and other caretakers of newborn German babies were so frightened of them that they tied them up tightly for from six to nine months and strapped them into a crib in a room with curtains drawn to keep out the lurking evils.314 Two centuries after swaddling had disappeared in England and America, two British visitors described it as routine throughout Germany:

A German baby is a piteous object; it is pinioned and bound up like a mummy in yards of bandages...it is never bathed...Its head is never touched with soap and water until it is eight or ten months old, when the fine skull cap of encrusted dirt which it has by that time obtained is removed...315

In Germany, babies are loathsome, foetid things...offensive to the last degree with the excreta that are kept bound up within their swaddling clothes...the heads of the poor things are never washed, and are like the rind of Stilton cheese...316

When the children were finally removed from their swaddling bands after six to twelve months, other restraint devices such as corsets with steel stays and backboards continued their tied-up condition to assure the parents they were still in complete control.317 The result of all this early restraint was the same production of later violence in children as that obtained by experimenters physically restraining rats and monkeys--marked by depletions of serotonin, increases in norepinephrine levels and massive increases in terror, rage and eventually actual violence.318

much more:
http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln06_war.html

[DCKit]

11. Ah, the German version of "No Child Left Unscathed"

Please stop giving them ideas.

:sarcasm: Heh, we know they can't read.

[midnight]

8. You only have to ask D.U. how many can drive home after work.

Even if it is 1:00 A.M. without trouble, or how about the nice police community members who think that you're terroist so they drive over your mail box, and throw flags in your yard. Or how about those nice people at your human resource department that tell authorities that the reason you don't have your medical treatment is because you decided to bypass the appeal procees. Not because you choose to by pass the appeal process, because you did that and more, but because they can say whatever it takes to block your rights. Not only was this effective in Germany, but it is effective right now....

[Codedonkey]

10. huh?

"Or how about those nice people at your human resource department that tell authorities that the reason you don't have your medical treatment is because you decided to bypass the appeal procees. Not because you choose to by pass the appeal process, because you did that and more, but because they can say whatever it takes to block your rights."

What is this about? What do you mean exactly? What kind of treatment would the authorities care about? I'm confused...

[depakid]

12. Sounds a lot like the banality of evil to me

Now that's a scary set of thoughts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banality_of_Evil

[mmonk]

13. Torture and incineration. Well, while not having ordinary citizens

engaged in atrocities, maybe on our march to be someting similar to Nazi Germany, we'll get there.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/31874

[Echo In Light]

15. The Milgram Experiment

The Milgram Obedience Experiment
http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/milgram.htm

http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20020301-000037.html