They must have really wanted it as a society and hundreds of thousands must have been involved, one way or another. That's not the work of just a few crazy fanatics.
a) The fact that by 1933, the majority of the population was voting for parties that were explicitly against the democratic system. Even if there was no majority for the Nazis, there was also no majority in defense of protection of constitutional limits on power.
b) The government bureaucracy and much of the elite (including the then President, Hindenburg, and old military man) were loyal to the State/Realm (Reich) to which they swore their oaths, but not to the democratic order and the constitution, and so were not functional impediments to Nazi power. I was also struck, when reading about their actions and motivations, how little they realized that democratic protections and limits on power protected them as well - when the Nazis took power, the conservative establishment was removed from civilian power by force or the threat of force, using powers that the conservatives had originally intended for use against the Left.
c) Once the Nazis came to power, they succeeded in instilling in the German public apathy and an unwillingness to get involved in political opposition (though not necessarily active devotion to Nazi ideology). A fanatical minority can do a lot of damage if the majority is apathetic or is distracted by more popular policies (like national greatness and revenge on the WWI Allies).
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/01...
It is only funny until you realize the likely reason that IBM's lawyers are taking that term so seriously. (You think they don't still have clients who are despotic dictators?)
Has nothing at all to do with wanting to be evil; it has to do with liability and a cute, but legally-unwise license.
If the serious grumps are willing to play along and ask for an exception, then you may as well throw them a bone. In receiving such a request you've already extracted amusement from them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_t...
If anything I think it shows peoples ability to see circumstances as normal (even if they are horribly out of whack with morals from other times) if it appears to be the prevailing wisdom of the group at the time.
I would like to think though that it was pretty much the last possible time that this could happen in history on such a large scale. Today we still have outliers like north korea but in general the world is too connected for the same effect to happen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict
The sad part is that there are no clear stop to it in any time soon. It seems that as long it is a powerful enough nation/allied nation, they can do what ever crimes they like. Only once it is all over will people be look back and wonder why they let it happen.
Even somehow encouraging revolution could be dangerous, as long as the military stays intact, since one way to deal with a domestic problem is to start a foreign war against (what most of the population believe) is a serious adversary.
My evolving theory of intervention is that any militarily opposed action which can't be accomplished by a single brigade or smaller force in less than 3 months will bring more harm than good, and should only be executed in defense with all other options exhausted. Liberating the people of Equatorial Guinea or ending the MEND conflict (or destroying AQ presence in Afghanistan in 2001) probably would be a net win for humanity (and each could be accomplished by a very small force, maybe 500 + support); NK is at the extreme other end of the scale with occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
Quite frankly, the more likely prediction is that it will happen on a larger scale in a century or two.
42500 sites/12 years/365 days would be an average of 9.7 sites created per day. Hrm.
Germany had some of the most talented military leadership of the time[1][2][3] and were thinking on the bleeding edge of military theory/doctrine. It was basically von Manstein's plan (that Hitler took credit for) that pushed through the Ardennes and into France. However, following the campaign in France, Hitler assumed he knew what he was doing and generally ignored the advice and plans of his generals.
Speaking of Germany's invasion of Russia, Germany would have been in a much better position to defend against the USSR if Hitler had not been pulling the strings. Paulus[4] could have broken out at Stalingrad and avoided encirclement if a competent leader (instead of Hitler) had been pulling the strings.
Hitler also stonewalled many of the bleeding edge technology programs of Germany at the time because he thought he knew better than his military. One example was the Me-262 jet fighter[5]. It was scheduled for service in 1943, but was delayed until 1944, because Hitler felt it would be better suited as a fighter-bomber. Thankfully, Hitler was incredibly vain as well as insane and thought too much of his military leadership skills.
We had many great military leaders on the side of the Allies (Patton, Bradley, Zhukov, etc) as well as overall manpower (and generally competent leadership[6] that delegated control), but the incompetence of Hitler's leadership allowed us to turn the war back to our favor after initial German Victories. In many ways, Stalin was also very much like Hitler, except much more paranoid[7] (and proved it by killing his shrink that told him he was paranoid)--a megalomaniac despot that mass murdered his people (though not as logically and coldly calculated as Germany) and thought more of his abilities than he should have. However, Stalin was smart/sane enough to know when he should let his generals do their jobs.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Guderian
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_Manstein
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Paulus
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me262
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_barbarossa#Reasons_fo...
[7] http://books.google.com/books?id=nA7YzQMzO9YC&pg=PA349&#...
I think he wouldn't even have truly entered the city once he noticed how unfavorable the conditions were to his troops. He would have crossed the Volga and starved them to surrender. That could have become a second Leningrad, but that seems unlikely as the Germans already controlled the waterways into Stalingrad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad#Attack_on_... 1 September, the Soviets could only reinforce and supply their forces in Stalingrad by perilous crossings of the Volga under constant bombardment by artillery and aircraft")
Stalin, on the other hand, never lost touch with reality to the degree that the nazis did. His essay "Marxism and the problem of linguistics", written in the 40s, certainly showed that he was thinking clearly and pragmatically in his later years and hadn't fallen into the bizarre delusions that so many totalitarian dictators do. The problem with Stalin was that he was to rational. He didn't believe in gratitude, compassion or have any response at all to human suffering. He also probably though that the Nazis would behave rationally and be more strategic and instead focus on pummeling Western Europe and not attacking Russia, thus leaving it for Stalin's easy conquest.
(1) Authority. At one time, Germany was a battle ground with the children eating by thawing out frozen soldiers in the snow. One reaction was Prussia that became intensely 'militaristic'. Somehow that Prussian development spread over Germany and created an 'intensity' and a big respect for 'authority'. At best there are pros and cons with that direction, and somehow, on balance, Germany long went too far.
(2) WWI. That was a disaster. England, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, and more suffered. Finally the US came in and broke the stalemate and ended it. Yes, the US lost, too. Among all the suffering, Germany was near the top of the list and, much of Germany had a hugely bitter reaction.
(3) Versailles. There were 'reparations'. So, Germany printed money to pay off the reparations more quickly. Then the inflation ruined the finances for much of Germany and created more bitterness.
(4) Democracy. The German efforts at democracy in the 1920s were clumsy -- more bitterness.
(5) The Great Depression. Sure, the stock market crash was in the US. So, people had borrowed from the banks to buy stocks and suddenly had no hope of paying back. So, the banks went bust. So, the economy slowed enormously. The 2008 housing crisis was similar; we did it to ourselves and didn't often enough see the disaster coming and haven't been very smart about fixing the problem, and the same song, first verse was in the 12 years after the 1929 crash. Then somehow the more developed economies were much more closely linked than one would expect. So, the US slowed down buying from Germany, and some Germans lost their jobs; they didn't buy, and more Germans lost their jobs; they didn't buy from the US, and more in the US lost their jobs; etc.
(6) Hitler. He was mad, and in particular he was mad about all the disasters that happened to Germany. And did I mention, he was mad? Determined. Ambitious. Ruthless. Can think of various 'reasons' from his relationship with his mother, with girls, his struggles in his career, his WWI experience, etc., but none of these factors has any 'predictive' power since many others with similar backgrounds didn't go nuts.
(7) Fertile Ground. Hitler found fertile ground for organizing and leading, especially leading out of work, angry, ex-WWI German soldiers. Hitler wanted to be able to speak and get his followers up on their hind legs, practiced a lot, and got good at it.
(8) German Army Politics. The German Army had some funds for political activities, liked what they saw in Hitler, and provided just enough 'seed' money to keep Hitler going in politics.
(9) Communists. In politics it usually can be helpful to have a visible enemy, and Hitler had the Communists. And they were also likely a genuine threat.
(10) Elections. By 1933 or so, Hitler had enough political followers to start to make some waves in elections. He didn't do really well, but he did stay in the game.
(11) Industry. As might be expected, German industry had some political power. Well, they thought that Hitler could help them, and Hitler no doubt was good at playing along. So, eventually Hindenburg asked Hitler to form a government.
(12) Double Down. Then Hitler and his Nazis were the government, but they still didn't have much power. Hitler called for new elections and used the power he did have to 'stuff the ballot boxes' and do better in the second election. So, he had more in the Reichstag, i.e., congress. Then there was some rough and tumble politics, i.e., before a vote in the Reichstag some of Hitler's tugs could 'arrange' that the majority they wanted was present and voting and the rest were still outside.
(13) Hindenburg Died. Then Hitler got Hindenburg's job, also, which made Hitler close to a dictator. E.g., his buddy Goering was head of the police force in Prussia. Generally his buddies were running things.
(14) Then, in the words in one of the Star Wars movies, Hitler pushed through some 'special powers' for, as I recall, 4 years, to get the economy going again. Amazingly, he actually did it. So it was roads, bridges, ships, planes, whatever. The US should have done as well over the last 4 years. Of course, it's easier to put people to work when also have thugs trash the unions and just dictate what people will get paid -- we don't do such drastic things in the US. Hitler ran what can be called a 'command economy'. Why most economies run from the center flop and his didn't, I don't know. But German industry had reason to be happy with Hitler.
(15) Progress. By 1936 and the Berlin Olympics, Hitler had Germany looking good, if didn't look too closely. There was a lot of 'authoritarianism', but Germany was 'susceptible' to that.
(16) Dictator. Then Hitler got his second term of special powers, was an absolute dictator, and the real monster started to come out. "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.". Plenty of people in Germany with good sense saw the threat, but opposing Hitler was not possible.
(17) Dreams. Hitler had 'dreams'. One of his dreams was to take over the land to the east, essentially from Germany to the Arctic, the Urals, and the Black Sea. He wanted to turn this land into 'farms' owned by Germans and with Slavs as slave labor on deliberate starvation diets. Everyone else in that land he wanted just to kill off right away.
So Hitler started making war. E.g., he took half of Poland and half of France. For war production, he would turn captured people into slaves.
(18) England. Hitler thought that he could quickly take England. But before a landing, he had to defeat the Royal Air Force -- thus started the Battle of Britain. But Hitler's air force was really just not up to the job: Both his fighter planes and his bombers had range too short. Hitler got angry and tried to bomb London, but his fighters could not provide protection as far as London, and, net, in The Battle of Britain Hitler's air force took unacceptable losses, and Hitler gave up.
(19) Russia. Hitler came close actually to capturing and holding the lands to the east he had in mind. But, he got delayed: (A) Stalin was also running a 'command economy'. So, as Hitler moved east, Stalin packed up nearly everything of value and moved it much farther east. (B) As Hitler moved east, his front grew to be too wide and his supply lines, too long. (C) Hitler planned badly for the Russian winter. (D) The Russians regrouped and pushed back against Hitler and gained time. (E) Due to events elsewhere, Hitler ran out of time, got over extended and, basically, was not able actually to win in Russia. His losses were huge.
Hitler's buddies in Japan declared war on the US, so so did Hitler, and now he was in a two front war, with the US, and on a long walk on a short pier.
Hitler was going to take North Africa, move east and take the Suez Canal and, thus, cut off oil, etc. to England, and continue to move east and take the Mideast oil for Germany, but he blew it. First, the US provided massive supplies to Monty a little west of Suez. Rommel got pushed back to the west. England broke the German code, and, thus, much of Rommel's supplies went to the bottom of the Med. Ike invaded North Africa, and Rommel went back to Germany. Hitler's efforts in North Africa were a bust.
So, Hitler had lost in England, North Africa, and Russia.
England. The US turned England into an unsinkable aircraft carrier, and the US Eighth Air Force along with the Royal Air Force started bombing anything and everything in Germany. Meanwhile the Russians were moving west. By D-Day, June 6, 1944, Hitler was unable to put much of anything into the air. The Normandy invasion was a great success, in spite of some cases of hard times, and then it was a fast charge all the way across France and into Germany. Germany was getting it from the air, from Russia from the east, and from the US, England, etc. from the west.
For the German submarines in the Atlantic, too soon for Germany the US and England looked at the maps, blimps, airplanes, radar, sonar, small aircraft carriers, etc. and from bases in Canada, Greenland, Iceland, England, etc. had fairly safe passage across the North Atlantic.
Hitler also had bought heavily into the whole 'eugenics' stuff, Darwin, the image of human breeding much like dog breeding, etc. and for that reason, his general resentment and madness, and some long 'tensions' in Europe, long a very bloody place, wanted to kill off everyone he regarded as undesirable. He did a lot, especially in Poland.
It appears that since WWII the main lessons were not lost on Germany: No more dictators, Nazis, hate speech, mass unemployment, big inflation, or militarism. A big social safety net. Work hard and smart and just do not mess up again.
Could it happen in the US? I'm too afraid it could. We have to be careful.
"(3) Versailles. There were 'reparations'. So, Germany printed money to pay off the reparations more quickly. Then the inflation ruined the finances for much of Germany and created more bitterness."
Some of the Allies were going to make the same mistake in WW2 with repartitions once again. The French wanted to take the Ruhr, the industrial heartland in Western Germany and annex it into France. Other ideas were to make Germany an agrarian society. The primary reason the US created the Marshall Plan was to ensure the reparations and the initial dismantling of the German Industry (later repealed) that were forced on Germany (mostly the taking of IP, such as patents) would not cripple it and make it fall into the hands of the Soviets[1].
"(8) German Army Politics. The German Army had some funds for political activities, liked what they saw in Hitler, and provided just enough 'seed' money to keep Hitler going in politics."
The army did sort of a bittersweet deal with Hitler. Most of the army was not fond of Hitler, but they did see him as a way to restore their faded glory. They made their "deal with the devil" though when they agreed to take an oath to Hitler in return for Hitler dismantling the SA, which the Army saw as thugs and did not want integrated into the army (who thought of themselves as principled and aristocratic). Much of the army took that oath quite serious as well due to the Prussian tradition of loyalty to their country and leader--believing that betraying the oath was to betray their country. However, elements of the military still thought Hitler was mad all the way back to 1938 and had plotted to kill Hitler[2]. However, the capitulation of the UK and France in Czechoslovakia[3] and the later invasion of Poland quieted most of the planning to assassinate Hitler for the time being.
Also anyone who has not seen them, I reccomend the BBC's Fall of Eagles[4], BBC's The Great War[5] and the BBC's World at War[6]. Watching them back to back explains quite a bit about how the 19th Century Monarchies led to WWI and how WWI led to WWII.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_reparations_for_World_Wa...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1944_Adolf_Hitler_assassination...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Eagles
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_(documentary)
One of their explicit goals was basically to depopulate the east and settle it with German pioneers.
The Brits had a tough time with the Boers, who mostly used cavalry and light artillery to conduct guerrilla raids on the British soldiers. The British solution was to round up the non-combatant Boer population and starve them until the men surrendered.
The discovery described entailed new ghettos, forced labor camps, etc. In other words, it's not about new killing centers, and as such NOT about the Holocaust in the typical sense of the word.
Do read on in the link I supplied please:
"Many camps were built quickly by civilian contractors during the summer of 1942 based on designs for military barracks, making the buildings poorly equipped for cramped family living.
To describe the conditions in more detail, the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in northwestern Wyoming was a barbed-wire-surrounded enclave with unpartitioned toilets, cots for beds, and a budget of 45 cents daily per capita for food rations.[67]
Because most internees were evacuated from their West Coast homes on short notice and not told of their assigned destinations, many failed to pack appropriate clothing for Wyoming winters which often reached temperatures below 0 degrees Fahrenheit (−18 degrees Celsius). Many families were forced to simply take the "clothes on their backs."
Armed guards were posted at the camps, which were all in remote, desolate areas far from population centers."
In short: the new sites discovered were in many ways JUST like the Japanese internment camps (and vice versa), where Japanese people, often citizens of the USA, were kept against their will.
"A number of persons died or suffered for lack of medical care, and several were killed by sentries; James Wakasa, for instance, was killed at Topaz War Relocation Center, near the perimeter wire."
To compare to:
"Of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe before the Holocaust, approximately two-thirds were killed.[5] Over one million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust, as were approximately two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men."
You say:
"the new sites discovered were in many ways JUST like the Japanese internment camps"
and the article says:
"The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel."
Your sense of morality is totally broken if you can't differentiate these things.
Flexie: "They must have really wanted it as a society and hundreds of thousands must have been involved, one way or another. That's not the work of just a few crazy fanatics."
My point: terrible things were done right here, families uprooted, lives destroyed, hunger, fear, people stored in camps, in our own free country, with millions of witnesses, and yet... these crazy things happened, because society was told by those in charge that it was appropriate to do so.
Several years later we bombed 100k people to their deaths by fire (Tokyo). Tokyo was just one of 67 cities that was bombed with napalm (before we threw the nuclear stuff).
McNamara's comment on the bombing was this: LeMay said that "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." "And I think he's right," says McNamara. "He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals." . . . "LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
Keep on believing!
The striking thing about Nazi Germany is that it happened, and that people not too different than us let it happen. If your interest in studying this stuff is thinking about how we all keep it from happening again, studying comparable events - especially ones that happened right here - is potentially important. I could elaborate but it really feels like I'm just stating the obvious.