From: dieter@informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Dieter Kreuer)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.german
Subject: Re: Let's hit Nazis?
Followup-To: soc.culture.german,soc.culture.jewish
Date: 22 Jan 1993 16:02:07 GMT
Organization: i4
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: frueh-koelsch.informatik.rwth-aachen.de

In article <1993Jan21.201151.19640@husc3.harvard.edu>,
abkevich@husc3.harvard.edu in reply to Christian Lampl wrote:

> But germans were generally more cruel during WW2! You could find a lot of 
> reason, like bad life after WW1 and so on, but is it important. The problem is
> that all these cruelties made the whole nation more cruel. And it would take 
> more then 2 generations to overcome moral consequences of 12 years Nazi power.

Currently, a TV series on the Stalingrad battle is being broadcast in
Germany. No doubt that brutal war crimes had happened during WW 2, but
on either side. There have been mass executions of German soldiers as 
well as of Russian ones. I don't know whether the German army was more
cruel to the Russian civilians than the Russian military to the Germans,
but I have heard that many Germans prefered to surrender to the western
allies than to the Russians and fled westward when the Red Army came.
Well, dropping 2 million tons of TNT on civilians and 2 nuclear bombs
on Japanese cities is also rather cruel, so I would not rate any World
War 2 participant to be much crueler than another (disregarding the
fact, that one might rate dropping a bomb on an aggressor less cruel 
than on a defender; for the average German, Japanese, Iraqi or whatever
housewife or child, it didn't matter much whether they were on the good
or on the bad side; they weren't asked what side they would have liked 
to be on, anyway, as is true for the Jewish people who were murdered).
Of course, the Germans had started the war, and the Holocaust was commit-
ted by Germans, which is the most cruel atrocity which ever happened in
human history. But the decisions on these crimes were made by a small
group of the population. I would not say that the average German
was more brutal than the average Russian/American/English/French. Only,
while in the allied countries, dangerous criminals were in jail, here,
they were ruling the country, and it is the fault of the German popula-
tion not to have stopped them at the very beginning.

> Should I understand you, that you finally agreed with me that germans in
> reallity did know what was going on, but prefered not to know? I could
> understand why... After all my own grandparents didn't do a thing in 1937, even
> though they understood what were going on. They were afraid... After all what
> could they do? But it doesn't mean that I don't condemn THEM. And it doesn't
> make MY life easier eventhough I was born 12 years AFTER Stalin's death. It is
> very important to understand that they knew.

What would you have done in their position? Or in the position of a
German citizen of 1930? 1933? 1939? People were probably not aware of
their fate in the beginning, and later, the Nazis were too powerful.

Consider the following example:
What do people now to combat the ozone hole? We hear warnings frequent-
ly, but most people are only concerned for a moment when they hear the
latest numbers in the News, and then go on living as before, when not
forced to change their behaviour by governmental action. That's the
way people behave, they often don't take the consequences when they
are warned. They feel irresponsible, impotent, or simply just don't care.
That is shameful, but that's the way it is, and not just for Germans. 
And they are easily influenced by propaganda. Look at the Serbs in 
Yugoslavia. They recently have **democratically elected** a government
which is fighting a rassist war against their former countrymen. There
are even concentration camps and mass executions happening in Bosnia-
Hercegovina. Anybody who claims that the Germans are/were special should
take a close look at this war. In my opinion, it's the special situation,
not the special people, which make cruel wars. If it weren't the Serbs
but the Russians with their nuclear power - oh well...

> All people who were born after let's say 1927 are not guilty at all.
> Most of them have nothing to do with Nazis (at least I hope so). They made no 
> crime. Nobody should accuse them. However I am not forgetting that they were
> *influenced* by their parents and grandparents who are bearing moral guilt. 
> That's why I am trying lets say "suspicious" when somebody is saying: "I am
> German. But I was born after 1945 and so 'de facto' I have as much in common
> with Nazis as you." That is what you are doing. You are not hiting Nazis. For

Influenced, yes. But it's really not true that either

1) All/most people who had lived during wartime had Nazi ideas,
2) the younger generations were educated this way, too, and
3) even if they had been, they would have adopted this indoctrination.

After the destruction of German cities by the allies, after they had
been shown the concentration camps, and after their sons and husbands
had come home from a POW time of up to ten years - or had not come 
home at all, like one of my grandfathers (yes, we also lost relatives
during the war), the German people got to know very well which kind 
of leader they had been following the years before (in case they had
not realized beforehand). They felt more liberated than conquered, when
the allies came. I know of many Germans who were children then, 
who admired the American soldiers, who gave them chocolate, and after
the war, the USA had long been an idol country for Germans ("the
land of infinite possibilities"; when I was a child, I admired so
much the Apollo program, and the American jet fighters, and my
admiration for the USA remained until I got there and saw the same
or even bigger problems as we have here).
I have been educated to be democratic from the very beginning. At
school, we elected our "speaker of the class" who would bring for-
ward our wishes to the teachers. We had political interest groups at
school (environmental and third world groups were most popular). 
Most youngsters took more leftist positions than their parents had
wished them to, so one really cannot say that the former Nazis have
given their bad heritage to the young Germans.

The firebombings which have happened recently were not committed by
the typical young German (the one who has demonstrated against racism),
but by some rare idiots. It would be very unfair to blame the "German 
youth" for these things, like it would be to claim that the typical 
German youngster kills his ex-girlfriend because there had been such an
incident in our town two years ago. Of course, things like this make
it to the news. The pupil who makes his homework together with his
Turkish friend will never.

-----------------------                  ---------------------------------
     Dieter Kreuer      ##     ======== / dieter@informatik.rwth-aachen.de
Lehrstuhl Informatik IV __   /// /#    /  dieter%informatik.rwth-
     RWTH Aachen        ##  /// # #   /             aachen.de@uunet.uu.net
     Ahornstr. 55       ## /// ##### /...!informatik.rwth-aachen.de!dieter
W-5100 Aachen, Germany  ====      # / PHONE:  +49 241 80 21413
Newsgroups: soc.culture.german