Talking about which: today I log onto the forum and what do I see?
Axis Victory galore:
THIS,
THIS,
THIS,
THIS,
THIS and
THIS. And related topics like
THIS.
And then there's the whole Germanophile exercise is whitewash and excuses, like
THIS and
THIS.
And that's just the first two pages (at the time I was logged in this morning).
Clearly there's a trend, and that trend says that this is by far the greatest chiche topic ever. I shall not speculate on the reasons why.
I can deal with people underestimating the capabilities of the Red Army as late as 1945.
I can also deal with people overestimating the willingness of the Western Allies to make a conditional peace (
especially after 1943).
What I can not deal with is the idea that the "average" German citizen knew extremely little to nothing about what was happening to the holocaust. I put average in sneer quotes because I have seen this claim (sometimes here, sometimes elsewhere) extend to such an incredible length as to include high-ranking officers of the German General Staff.
This, I will say, is complete, apologetic, revisionistic,
bullshit!
Churches and bureaucrats supplied birth records to show who was Jewish or slavic. The post office delivered notices for the victims to report to those trains that would take them to the camps. Transport bureaucrats arranged for the cattle trains that would take those souls to their death. Pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on prisoners. The Dehomag punch card machine was used (with the companies full permission) to catalog the camp inmates. Hell, companies bid on contracts to build the
ovens that they would use in the death camps!
All of this would create a vast amount of paperwork, all of this would also involve the work of vast numbers of upper, middle, and even some lower-class Germans. And that's not even getting to the fact that humongous numbers of Soviet Prisoners of War were shot out of hand by not just the SS, but the Wehrmacht too! And plenty of German generals had the massive amounts of POW's they did take
walk back to Germany... the majority of whom were
still in Western Russia when winter struck. It's not as simple as it sounds, as those prisoners would, you know, have to be supervised, and such large amounts ment the need for lots of supervisors.
The German people had all the evidence they needed to work it through, but did not... because they
knew they would
not like the answer. After all, they were being offered the quite horrible choice of being guilty of complicity in the murder of millions... or standing up to the State that cheerfully commited those murders.
Thus, largely, they didn't think it through so they would not have to
make that choice. But by not doing so, the choice was made for them.
I once heard a great saying, which goes like this.
Ignorance is bliss... until the bombs start falling.
And one can easily be wilfully ignorant, not just on a individual level, but also on a collective level. Stalin
wilfully fooled himself into thinking that Hitler would not attack him in 1941, the leaders of Britain and France
wilfully fooled themselves that Hitler did not have or want any further territorial ambitions after Munich, 1938. Hitler himself
wilfully chose to believe that the war was going well up until April, 1945.
All of these self-applied delusions were broken, one way or the other. For Stalin, it was the German troops invading his nation on June 22nd, for the leaders of Britain and France it was the annexation of the rest of Czechslovakia in early 1939, for Hitler, it was Red Army shells and rockets exploding in central Berlin that finally broke that delusion (and even then, not completely).
The German people
wilfully fooled themselves into thinking that the murder of up to eleven million people (not to mention the millions more who died in the rest of the war) was not happening. That delusion was broken by Germans being marched through those concentration camps by the Western Allies. Yet, it still is not broken fully, if the rash of post-war Holocaust denial and apologism that continues today is any indication.
The 70-or-so million the Germans who lived, fought-in, and survived the Second World War were complicit in the grimmest genocide in history. That is the historical fact, that is what happened.