This was written in the book Star Trek Memories by William Shatner and made me pause. But today we are seeing it happen in real time in America and yet no one is truly trying to stop it. So with this we can see exactly how it could happen then.
Hell the media alone refuses to acknowledge we have Concentration Camps in the states.
Put your hand up their ass and wiggle your fingers just right and you can get a bigot/moron to do whatever you want.
Because the truth is people are not rational nor sane beings. We are emotional beings.
In 1953 Mayer interviewed ten male residents of “Kronenberg” (in reality Marburg) to understand how ordinary Germans felt about Nazi Germany. The town, located in Hesse with a population of 20,000 and a university, was controlled by the United States during the postwar period of occupation. The interviews occurred during Mayer’s term at Frankfurt University’s Institute for Social Research as a visiting professor. All ten were in the lower middle class. The author was not a German speaker, and the men did not speak English.
The interviewees had the following occupations: baker, cabinetmaker, bank clerk, bill collector, law enforcement officer, salesperson, student, tailor, and teacher. Walter L. Dorn of the Saturday Review wrote that the interviewees were from a pro-Nazi bloc that was the “anti-labor, anti-capitalist, and anti-democratic lower middle class”. The tailor had served a prison sentence for setting a synagogue on fire, but the others were never found to have actively attacked Jewish people. Mayer read the official case files of each interviewee.
The author determined that his interviewees had fond memories of the Nazi period and did not see Adolf Hitler as evil, and they perceived themselves as having a high degree of personal freedom during Nazi rule, except for the teacher. Additionally, barring said teacher, the subjects still disliked Jewish people. Mayer found that he sympathized with the personable qualities of his interviewees, though not their beliefs. Mayer did not disclose to the interviewees that he read their case files, nor that he was Jewish. Ernest S. Pisko of the Christian Science Monitor wrote “Had they known [that Mayer was Jewish] they would not have spoken frankly to him.” Pisko concluded that, therefore, the relationship built by the author and the interviewees was on “false pretenses.” At the time of the interviews, the interviewees were still not in favor of the democratic Bonn government. Pisko added that the interviewees could have objected to political developments that came had they known they would come, but that they failed to foresee how Nazi rule would develop.
The end of the book describes how the post-World War II United States took a pro-militarization stance, in the context of the Cold War, after initially rejecting the idea of militarizing Germany.
this is the book that answered most of my questions on that (But today we are seeing it happen in real time in America and yet no one is truly trying to stop it.) subject ☞https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free
The Nazis were inspired to create concentration camps by the US racial policies against black, jewish and asian communities. So, there’s that.
Sorry, I am German, and this might be one of the stupidest takes on the causes and history of the Holocaust I’ve ever heard.
I’m sorry, I forgot that on the internet nationality is a source of expertise. Sure, a German would hold that view. Because governments have never steered public opinion through education to hide facts.
But that’s not about the concentration camps dustyData was talking about, but about the “Lebensraum” doctrin to conquer the eastern European areas.
Completely different thing.
Concentration camps have been around in Europe already decades before the Nazis came to power, take the Russian Gulags for example.
Even the name the Nazis used is not new, the first camps called “Konzentrationslager” (the German name for concentration camp) were situated in the German colonies in Africa during the Herero massacres already in 1904, while the segregation into ghettos in Germany and much of the rest of Middle Europe, especially regarding the Jews, goes back to the Middle ages.What dustyData proclaimed is just plain wrong and one of the fake ideas that might in some form be used to relativise, downplay or pass of guilt. Just the kind of buzz that current day fascists like the AfD in Germany are happily spreading.
It is absolutely about concentration and relocation and systematic murder of people, though. That’s what the Native American genocide essentially entailed.
It also entails some of it, but it was not “the inspiration for the creation of concentration camps”.
That sentence is the wrong one which is the point I was getting at.
The Holocaust as the Nazis did it wasn’t just some established and common concept copied from somewhere else, but to 99% the work of the German people themselves.
There is no easy exit for the history-revisionist from the far right.
Thanks for your insight on this and for calling it out (and quite civily, I might add, well, once you started explaining at least haha.)
Partially inaccurate truths might as well be lies, with how they distort our understanding of the actual course of past events.
Thanks, I guess I should have explained it a bit already in my original comment.
But I sometimes forget, that the the more detailed knowledge about the Nazi rise to power and the Holocaust is naturally not as common outside of Germany (where it is e.g. an extensive part of school curriculums).
Partially inaccurate truths might as well be lies
I would even say they are often worse than lies, as spiked with some surrounding facts, the lies at the core can hide themselves. They than appear plausible, and if done right even more convincing (or at least, alluring) than the hard and inconvenient truth.
It’s true they were inspired by Jim Crow as well.
I don’t know why you have been getting downvoted, as that part seems to at least have a core of truth, as I just checked.
While not the inspiration for the pogroms themselves, the US segregation laws seem to have been at least reviewed while drafting the texts of the Nürnberger Gesetze, which would become the legal framework for persecution of Jews and other persons based on race in the Third Reich.I think I’ve angered a Lemming somewhere because all of my comments are being downvoted. Some people have a lot of time on their hands I guess?
Well, guess that happens. People are not always rational.
At least fits this threat, as this quite probably also is one of the main factors in the rise of fascistic regimes.
It is dumb but it’s also true. History tends to do that a lot, actually.
but it’s also true
Nope.
Konzentrationslager (concentration camps) have been a tool for the Germans under that exact name since colonial times.
Segregation of the Jews into Ghettos (and frequent blaming them for stuff and even killing them in local pogroms) has been common practice since at least the Middle ages in Germany, centuries before the US even existed.A tale like “we only got the idea because we were inspired by the Americans” is not only wrong, but also dangerous, as it plays right into the hands of the far right, which is currently actively trying to downplay the Holocaust and the responsibility of the German people during the Third Reich.
