I never referenced any picture... my comment was against your op.
Honestly the way you worded it wasn't great in the title of the thread.... "teaching her why we hate nazis" ... see it sounds like your teaching hate.... instead of the mistakes people made and what to learn from them. (Remember if you lived in Germany in 1930s you would have been a nazi too).
I guess I was trying to say... learn from the mistakes.... not WHO TO HATE.
The polar politics of the USA seems like it makes some of the same mistakes. Totally felt like trump tried to control the media.
Ps... I come from the greatest, most honourable country on earth
I am aware of my choice of title and am perhaps guilty of making it provocative. It is accurate nevertheless. I do hate Nazis. She knows it too and I feel the need for her to understand my hatred. There are reasons why. Any other inferences you may have drawn from that are not supported by the body of my thread.
As to your claim that I would have been a party member if I grew up as a German in that era: I understand how you could feel that way. I fit the Aryan mold in nearly every way except the blue eyes. I come from a German family and one of my grandfathers was very much a Nazi sympathizer and bund member. He had a beer hall in his basement that could have easily been found in Munich or some other German city. Above the bar was a beautiful officer's sabre from the wermacht - I used to play with it as a child My family was racist. Poles were refereed to as pollacks, blacks were schwartzers and the word Jew was almost always followed by the word bastard. As a child I thought nothing of it. And yet that seed of hatred never took hold of me. I was curious, precocious and an auto-didact, I read a lot. I was also fascinated by military history and took a certain level of pride in my German roots. When I was a child, you might have been right; I most certainly would have been a member of the Hitler Youth.
Yet by the end of my teens I had learned enough to understand things beyond what I experienced in my family. My friends were a diverse blend that included many, many Jews. After the death of my grandmother (she was a lovely, but obedient Hungarian woman - before she died, she fell in love for the first time to a very nice man name Rueben - fuck you grand-dad ), I inherited their archives - basically anything of historical interest' books, personal papers, valueless drawer contents of ephemera - all of it. Included in this were many, many pamphlets that were part of the volksdeutsch movement. A great number of them from the 1930s for German Universities designed to draw those of German extraction back to the fatherland - but he never did send any children to school there. One of the most telling documents of his was his world atlas. I collect maps and this atlas was not particularly special until on day I was looking at it in bright light and I noticed that the European portions were festooned with faint pencil lines. Knowing the history of the war, their significance was immediate to me. Every Nazi offensive was lightly outlined. The Bismark's breakout, the Invasion of Poland, France and Russia were all things that my grandfather tracked with fastidious earnestness. But there was nothing that showed the progress of the Allies - nothing. No D-Day, no Operation Cobra, no tracking of the relentless progress of the Red Army westward, not a single line.
Despite the fact that my grandfather owned a factory and became quite wealthy selling material to the US government during the war, it became quite clear that ole grand-dad was a full blown fucking Nazi. There was nothing saved that commemorated the US victory but every scrap of German paraphernalia was there. Funny, but his letters to the IRS entreating them to allow him to avoid the very high taxes of high income people during wartime survived - along with there responses telling him to fuck off.
Before these revelations, the question of "what would I have done?" became very important to me. Afterward it became nearly an obsession. I have thought of it for decades and never could really answer it with a high degree of certainty.
So the years go by. I live my life in a way that has no resemblance to my extended family who nearly all became racists but only expose it when they feel they are among friends. I go to college at a school populated by children of East coast Jewish families, fall in love with one and marry her. I educate myself about other cultures and fully embrace multi-culturalism - and yet still that same question is constantly in my head: What would I have done? But I still couldn't say for sure.
Then came Donald Trump and all the trash that came along with him. I now know for
certain what I would have done. Maybe I would have been a party member, maybe I would have worn a uniform. If it offered me an advantage to fight against the Nazis, I certainly would have done it. I would have also sacrificed my life to live up to my ideals and still would today.
The world has many honors to bestow, but in my opinion, the highest honor anyone can earn is that of "Righteous Among the Nations".
