I can’t comment on the situation in Germany, and wider Europe, regarding popular history and the impact of the TV series, but I would have thought that the de-Nazification program immediately post-war, the Nuremberg trials and various other events such as forced visits or work by German civilians in death camps immediately post-war would have laid the groundwork for a sense of guilt about the Holocaust.
It was certainly the case outside Germany that popular historians, such as Lord Russell of Liverpool in his best-selling book The Scourge of the Swastika http://www.amazon.com/Scourge-Swastika-Short-History-Crimes/dp/1853674982 , informed the public about the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes. The book was first published in the mid-1950s and I think I first read it in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
Other events such as the Eichmann kidnapping and trial in the early 1960s received wide press coverage in English speaking countries, and perhaps elsewhere, which further informed the public in those nations about Nazi war crimes. I’d be surprised if that trial didn’t get similar coverage in Europe, including Germany.
True, a lot of info’s has been available since the end of WW2, I just think the difference after the TV series was, that the TV series lead to a more widespread understanding of the out masses of the events(in the general public) than before, where Holocaust was an expert subject.
Or perhaps being received by a generation or two which wasn’t even born when the war ended, and had little knowledge of it because it wasn’t discussed much by their parents, who went through the war?
Collective guilt can catch people up who were against things but had no real power to stop them.
Dr Albert Battal a Werhmacht Officer and a member of the Nazi party prevented the SS from removing some Jews in Poland and managed to get aproximately 100 into safe keeping in a Werhmacht Barracks
From Wikipedia but I have read and seen accounts from elsewhere
[QUOTE]Battel’s stand against the SS came to be recognized only a long time after his death; most notably, through the tenacious efforts of the Israeli researcher and lawyer Dr. Zeev Goshen.
On January 22, 1981, almost 30 years after his death, Yad Vashem decided to recognize Albert Battel as Righteous Among the Nations.
[/QUOTE]
After the war he was not allowed to practice law again under the de-nazification rules
Collective guilt can affect people who did what they could (Hitlers Germany was not a democratic place people were scared to go against him and his peers many disapeared or were executed, familys were threatened so some just went along through fear) As time went on though it became personal between combatants (they killed my X so I will make them pay ‘Tit for Tat’)
Propaganda played a huge part in deceiving people as well (that was what it was there for) so a large proportion never knew the actual details of the death camps they were told the people were sent to work camps (as origionally happened)
The collective guilt for the holocaust could extend to the French and British (Channel Islands) both handed over non national Jews to the Germans
Did any occupied country stop all help to the Germans (War material was made in occupied factorys by the indiginous population so they must also be complicit in the total effort by association)
Collective guilt for a whole nation starts rapidly spiraling outwards to take in alot more than the target nation unless you do a limited Guilt just for those on the losing side (ie versailles treaty that sowed some of the seeds for the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party)
I don’t really think it’s a good idea to blame all the European nations around to be guilt in Jewish Holocaust( as some people tend to claim) .
Finaly, it migh to cause opposite sense. Peoples might to ask , what did jews made good for loclas and ets…
And i/m not sure the conclusion would be positive.
For the jews.
Obviously the JEwish Holocaust was such TErrible ONLY in the East ( Poland , Ukraine, Russia ).
But from other hand- in the East the Holocaust wasn’t such exclusive Evil - for comparision ONLY Soviet POWs died more in GErmans camp ( up to 2,5 mln) compared to 2 mln of Soviet Jews , who was included to general figure of Holocaust. Also jewish Holocaust in East was just tiny part of that slaughtering of Civils ( up to 11 mln) in the USSR/Poland or compared to Chinas victims of Japane terror( up to 15 mln i heard)
But i never heard that someone blamed the Brits or Frenches in that evil. I/m sure that too persistent propogand of Holocaust, that we observe around the mass media, migh bring the HARM for jews themself.
PRing the “mega-suffering” of one separate ethnic group - is the Ethnic extremism though IMO.
It is entirely understandable that Jews as a religious group, and in most Western nations as a pretty influential one, were outraged by the Nazi Holocaust directed at them and that they wanted to use their influence to do whatever they could to get justice, vengeance, retribution, compensation and whatever else they thought would help to remedy, avenge, or assuage their pain at what their co-religionists suffered.
On the other hand, there are other groups with about as great a claim on the same things, such as the Gypsies and Russians / Slavs who were targeted on the same basis as the Jews - irrational Nazi prejudice and hatred - but who don’t get the same attention.
The most important difference between the two groups is that since WWII the Jews have had great social, political and economic influence in most Western nations; they have had the support of the Zionists in Israel; they have had for much of that time the sympathy of non-Jews who were equally outraged by the Holocaust, although that has waned considerably as the Zionists in Israel continue to demonstrate that when they have the whip hand they are little better than the Nazis in their contempt for people they don’t like and just as happy to deny them their human rights, albeit not on the same brutal and fatal scale; and they have had the able and vigorous publicity for their cause from the likes of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and its offshoots and adherents in most Western nations with a sympathetic press.
Meanwhile, the Gypsies and Russians / Slavs had the misfortune to be on the wrong side in what eventually became Reagan’s Evil Empire (curiously enough first revealed to a national conference of evangelical Christians, just to add another religious dimension to international insanity under the leadership of religiously aligned zealots and other zealots who think their brand of zealotry entitles them to shit on everyone who isn’t just like them). So, as reprehensible communists who were a threat to all the goodness and greatness for which the West stood, the Gypsies and Russians / Slavs had no voice in the West about the equally bad crimes committed against them by the Nazis while the Jews were broadcasting their, understandably Jewish focused, version of Nazi crimes against humanity which were limited to the Holocaust, being crimes against Jews.
The result is that the Jews’ account of the Holocaust continued to be well publicised and widely understood in the West from 1945 as if it was the only exercise in extermination carried out by the Nazis, while the crimes against humanity perpetrated against the Gypsies and the Russians / Slavs were largely unknown to most people in the West because aggressive Western hostility to the USSR, and China and communism in general, as a threat to Western capitalism, re-invented the communist nations and their peoples as a modern form of godless Nazi which oppressed and exterminated people with the same enthusiasm as the Nazis (not always an inaccurate assessment), which put them into the same camp as the Nazi dictatorship in the popular mind.
So, the absence of any competing accounts allowed the creation of a belief in the minds of most people in the West that the Jews were the only people who experienced a holocaust. That is not the fault of the Jews, nor really of the Western governments opposed to communist regimes, but simply of an unfortunate post-war political reality which brought the Iron Curtain down between the West and the USSR which denied the Eastern victims of their own holocaust the same publicity and sympathy in the West which the Jews gained in the West while promoting their own cause without any competition from equally worthy Eastern European sources.
All is true, mate
Except , that i doubt that West didn’t know about Holocaust of Salvic civils in the East.
Endeed all the western historiand ( well probably except revisionist) knew and published infor about slayghtering of civils, mass execution and crimes toward pows.
Besides it was ALREDY known diring Nurenberg tribunal. All was well studied and known endeed by historians in the west, including germans one.
The figures about 2,5 mln soviet POWs dead has come from GErmans archives.( this figure did use the British historians also :Bevour and Clark)
But you abolutly righ - the one hand to know the true, the other hand to cry about it righ on the street.
i think there is no sense ALL TIME to reproach the GErman nation in their guilt in ww2, but some JEwish leaders don’t think so obviously.The more time to pass - the more loud they shout about it.
The Holocaust has been turned into the form of …evil religion for them.
Even the some of jews notice that Holocaust now is used rather for political/finantial purposes , then for real help for the victims of it.
Sadly , but i think the such a situation might to case - the opposite reaction of non-jews, and the JEwish leaders should be more careful with it.
The slogan “Never again” might be wrong understood among the other peoples.
Sure we shall take an example how the jewish groups care about their people, collecting the infor and archives about jews.But the everything has a limit.Including the memory of tragedy.
Absolutly correct IMO.
the one who is going to separate their people out of rest world is danger RACE-hate provocator.
We are the ONE mankind , no less.
If someone dreams about “choosing/superior race” - lets’ look at bright historical example - Adolf Hitler.
What he has done with his nation finaly?
You’re right on that aspect, being historians and people in the English-speaking West (don’t know about Western Europe) who were reasonably well informed about these things by the news media during and for a few years after the war, but I was referring to the much larger general population who were children during and especially those born after WWII who got most of their information from TV shows and crappy newspapers which concentrated on simplistic law and order rants, sports, and big pictures of lovely sheilas with big tits (not that there is anything wrong with that, for the lovely Samantha Fox had a great set and I am still surprised that she did not respond to my letter offering to really pump up her balloons. ).
The Western masses were not, alas, given to seeking out the truth behind the rampant anti-communist propaganda pushed out by our governments and news media from soon after WWII ended until at least after the Berlin Wall fell.
Our Western governments and their supporters in the conservative news media (which is most of the news media in the West as most major news organisations are run by laissez faire capitalists, e.g. Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black, Rupert Murdoch - who is the only one of the three not to be shown to be a crook as well) presented the USSR, and China and Cuba and North Vietnam and all other communist regimes, as virtually equivalent to a Nazi regime.
The climate was not sympathetic to presenting people in Eastern Europe (= Communist Bloc = communists = communist people = people who were our enemy ) as victims of the Nazis equivalent to the Jews with whom the West had aligned itself on moral grounds and as supporters of Israel, which the West was forced to support for reasons beyond any real interest in the survival of Israel at that time but to do with other reasons such as oil (DER!) and keeping the Suez Canal open, etc.
I think the mistake your recent ancestors made was in failing emulate other nations and people by basing claims to territory on tenuous historical connections. I am thinking of linking Russian territorial rights to the dispersion of Faberge eggs, which on the known surviving eggs outside Russia gives you a good claim on the United States, Britain, and, best of all, Switzerland. (If you can get any of your oligarchs, or even just your army, to pursue this brilliant idea I expect a significant commission. Of the money, not military, type. )
I did always wonder , how that cheap propogandic blunder about “Nizis USSR” migh to seems realible to someone thinking in the West.
The Jews were one of the major group of rulling elite of USSR- this is well known fact.Even now the 8 from 10 oligarhs are JEwish.
Also the Jews have created the Soviet Russia in 1922, there were organized the special Jewsh authonomy in the USSR ( so called Birobidjan).
Jews were welcomed in USSR inspite of Stalin’s “anti-semitism” ( even his personal tailor was jew and his friend)
I read , from 100 of top Soviet academics in 1970 - 40 were the jews.
And nobody was in trouble of such situation.The Soviet propogand denied any ethnic theories.
But Israel is the other hand- Israel was considered as ally of Greedy Capitalist from USA, our class enemy- =therefore the Israel was an our enemy too=we shall to support the arab states in its fieght.
Thus, the USSR supported absolutly alien regimes of Arab world - Syria and Egypth, when EVERYBODY known that at least from 10% up to 20% population of Israel were the former Soviet Jews.
Such situation was very odd for us.
think the mistake your recent ancestors made was in failing emulate other nations and people by basing claims to territory on tenuous historical connections. I am thinking of linking Russian territorial rights to the dispersion of Faberge eggs, which on the known surviving eggs outside Russia gives you a good claim on the United States, Britain, and, best of all, Switzerland. (If you can get any of your oligarchs, or even just your army, to pursue this brilliant idea I expect a significant commission. Of the money, not military, type. )
:mrgreen:
Why not military type commission?
BTW considering the territorial claims: we still remember that Alaska is a russian:)
As well Arctic , where the recently has been installed the Russian flag on the bottom of the ocean.
OK, i think we might Canadians to take the Alaska for themself:)
Just like the Acrtic “Surface”
But Arctic bottom gas and oil is OUR:)That’s a spot.
Well the four rust old British submarins is a serious “military” of course,If to talk about Great Lakes scale, but not for ocean:D
No more odd than the US a long way away from Israel and with no apparent military or strategic interest in it supporting it to the hilt, to the detriment of the US in international relations with the oil nations the US relies upon in the Middle East for its oil supplies, but has been willing under the Republican regime to risk losing for domestic support from the American fundamentalist Christians who require Israel to be supported to enable the second coming of Christ.
Call me a tolerant agnostic, or just a crazy fool, but I’m willing to allow people to have their beliefs about someone who was the son of a god and who was born of a virgin through the visit of an angel and who died a couple of thousand years ago coming back to life to save people who believe in that (which, hard to believe, I know, probably excludes me) so that we can all face Armageddon and mostly go to hell.
At least the Jews had the sense to stop their biblical fantasies before that and confine themselves to realistic events, such as the parting of the Red Sea, not to mention cramming in to the Ark all the breeding stock for everything that is now alive in the world. Or made extinct between the launching of the Ark and now, due to human intervention in divine intention. Or something like that.
Because I don’t have a forehead like a reverse ski slope that will fit into your officers’ caps.
Don’t forget it.
First chance you get, drive some elk or moose or something with hammer and sickle brands across the land bridge, under the Yanks’ early warning radar, and frighten the shit out of them. Better still, fit systems to the elks or meese which make incoming missile sounds. And stay away from major military and population centres in Russia for a day or so.
The Americans probably think that that is the best place for it.
Ha, you underestimate the Canuck military. We’ve only laid so low to stay under the radar of the superpowers while we built up the most deadly weapon of them all!
We managed to create the most deadly superweapon in the world: Paramilitary beavers!
YA Right On eh!
Canada Owns the Arctic and no Ruskies are gonna try and slip in there without us noticing. Unless they are gorgeous Female Ruskies, we ain’t going to back down. At this time, we are arming our Eskimo’s with fairly bad flesh piercing bb-guns. The Canadian Military is not to be reakoned with.
P.S. Send over some cases of Smirnoff and well call it a deal!
Long live Canada
God Bless our Queen!
Ha, helmet is German
now i know where has fled that unfair SS-brigade “Beavers”, escaping from advancing Red Army:)
I though in Argentine, but it turn out to be in Canada:)
Though they are still somewhat prone to mishaps…
…partizanen kaput:D
That’t what migh to heppend if to drink the pure 95% spirit, not diluted by water.
The second coming of Crist?
mate, they have brutally killed the Christ First just 2000 years ago.
Don’t please let them one more such a murder to repeat.
Call me a tolerant agnostic, or just a crazy fool, but I’m willing to allow people to have their beliefs about someone who was the son of a god and who was born of a virgin through the visit of an angel and who died a couple of thousand years ago coming back to life to save people who believe in that (which, hard to believe, I know, probably excludes me) so that we can all face Armageddon and mostly go to hell.
I , if you please , call you as - reasonable atheist.Kind atheist.
Just like me is.
as for Bible fary tells about saving the peoples by the God.
This is just nonsense for lazy ones, who don’t wish to work hard to be saved by himself.
The religiua is the opium for the people.This’s has been told.
At least the Jews had the sense to stop their biblical fantasies before that and confine themselves to realistic events, such as the parting of the Red Sea, not to mention cramming in to the Ark all the breeding stock for everything that is now alive in the world. Or made extinct between the launching of the Ark and now, due to human intervention in divine intention. Or something like that.
I just pray that the jews has enough the sense not to start the nuclear Armageddon with Arab world, and then - don’t involve the Rest of Wrold into the Third World war , before they would has been finaly distressed of failure of the Christ Second comming .
Don’t forget it.
First chance you get, drive some elk or moose or something with hammer and sickle brands across the land bridge, under the Yanks’ early warning radar, and frighten the shit out of them. Better still, fit systems to the elks or meese which make incoming missile sounds. And stay away from major military and population centres in Russia for a day or so.
Hmmn mate that a great idea.
I think we migh to apply such an effective tactic it in Poland against the newest American radars and aa- misles bases:)
Just remind me please this idea when the ww3 will be started.
The Americans probably think that that is the best place for it.
I don’t think so , coz the American bagain the panic in mass media right after that event:)
).
