We’re seeing in the US that majority of the people are being apathetic or ignorant to what is going on as it doesn’t directly affect them, and others are pointing out that we’re on the same route as Germany. Once Hitler seized power and then later when the county split, what was life like for those people that didn’t say or do anything? Assuming they weren’t in a targeted class, did they just go on and live their lives normally? I know there was a drop in the quality of living for them, but did they not know any better? Was it a state of constant fear, or was there “no war in Ba Sing Se”
I’m just curious what majority of the population here would potentially experience.
i know this from my grandma (other grandma didn’t even want to talk about it): it started out okayish, but soon things became super strict. lots of propaganda films. nazi stuff crept into everything. school etc… books got burned. different opinions forbidden. no free speech. misogyny. disabled ppl were killed. ppl were afraid to be suspected of anything. trials weren’t fair, if you even got one. the nazis printed money and inflation started to suck. many businesses were nationalised. slave workers were being used, taking peoples jobs.
then the war started. every familiy lost someone. bombs were dropped on cities. ppl had to go into bunkers often. (my grandma barely made it once and shrapnell hurt her hand.) at peak wartime men had to have 8 kids to not be conscripted as cannon fodder. ppl became even more poor than before the war, because many male workers were gone. brutal inflation. kids stepped on mines while playing. at that point the last idiot knew hitler was a loony, but almost nobody dared say anything, because it meant very likely torture and death.
when the US troops arrived, it was a big relief. finally ppl could speak their mind again. women flocked to the US troops, because there had been a general lack of men. many women were young widows, too. my grandma was very young, so nobody actually told her, but she suspected women wearing multiple US wrist watches were paid like that by US troops for sex.
What a testament… let’s hope that story isn’t flipped Germany<->US in the not so distant future…
Don’t worry. Germany always sides with genocide and the new government is eager to lick Trumps boots.
What a stupid take! Incredible
If you expect liberation or standing up for good in the world to come from Germany, you will be disappointed.
If you have such a simplified world view, you will be disappointed too. If you can’t see that the project of European integration, mainly driven by France and Germany, was standing up for good, I wonder what else you are thinking. As someone living in a bordering country I appreciate we didn’t have wars within the EU in my life time.
Of course you can always ask for more, but thats just such a simplified take, its annoying.
I think they were alluding to Israel.
My grandma had written some memoirs that of course also show her life in Nazi Germany. I haven’t read them yet because Long Covid has killed my ability to read long texts. My parents are trying to find a way to make AI read the book for me. No idea whether I will be able to handle an audio book.
Anyways, supposedly there are some nasty revelations in there. And the other relatives don’t want to publish it. At least not without changing names. I would rather publish it for free as is. If I happen to get my way I will post a link here. But I doubt that is going to happen.
All I know about that time is that my grandpa was an influential music teacher. And I always figured that at least kept him from having to enlist. But of course what really happened is more nuanced.
I wish I had read that when I still could. At least I have her art I collected at https://brigitte-tantau.de/.
Edit: I looked at the table of contents and it looks like the music teacher was her second husband whom she met after the war.
Well, the average people from then, they don’t live anymore in this world.
My mom, and my mom in law are still here. Both were very little children then, born in 41 and 43. For them, the only memories are the end of the war, and then the time after.
So, what I heard from other people before:
It was always fear. The Nazi’s methods were violent, unfair, inhuman and their power came from creating fear.
Of course the “average” people were not all affected equally. My folks all lived in very rural areas, and there things worked different. Fear was transported indirectly, by some “stronger” Nazis who controlled “medium” Nazis, who were then set to oversee “normal” people in some part of the country.
people that didn’t say or do anything?
Not existent after some point.
Everybody was required to actively support Hitler, for example with the infamous greeting. When you were greeted with “Heil Hitler”, then, in the beginning, you had a chance to respond something like “yea, it’s ok…” or “you can lick mine, too” (and of course, normal people said things like “Have a nice day”), but later, if you did respond with anything else than the same “Heil Hitler”, and loudly and clearly, you could get shot right there on the spot.
Of course there were still some exceptions, but therefore you had to know very good who that other person was, and what was possible to do then.
In these rural areas, what many people did was simply hiding when the “wrong” people were in town.
Thanks for sharing.
I’m guessing it felt a lot like the video games and books describe living in a fascist regime
Soldiers are everywhere, and you do your best to not stand out for any reason.
You are always worried about someone turning you in on false accusations.
You have to hide your joy, and save it for only the deepest parts of your home.
That’s more or less what I’ve read.
In the movies it’s portrayed as if Nazis made everything clean, orderly, “civilized”, but the unfavorable people were removed and killed, slave labor was used and so on, and all of it in the atmosphere of “civilization and normalcy”.
It’s probably to communicate the shock, but in fact things were like you describe them.
Nazis would rule in a medieval way, so to say, minus divine right to rule. Random murders (again, without normalcy or formality, just so, and quite brutal sometimes), torture locations in buildings with windows always open amid crowded enough places, where sounds of someone being beaten to death were heard day and night, such stuff.
The other guy is right too, most people learned to perceive this as normal and not everyone was killed for being not loyal enough, just a few.
Like in today’s Russia not every 16 years old schoolgirl gets into prison for 8 months for blowing up a petard in a public place, the number of whose who does is not big enough to imprint in the public that this even happens, but enough to spread non-verbal fear. Similar with posting a random protest text, or saying something about war, etc. That’s called making an example.
OK, Russia’s regime has that innovation of doing these things covertly enough for there to not be open intimidation. Cause open intimidation causes public reaction more than they need. They are more careful.
This is absolutely inaccurate and borderline revisionism. Germans were not held at gunpoint to heil Hitler or risk being shot, the average german was perfectly happy and enjoyed the comforts naziism brought them. This inaccurate portrayal does nothing but abstract naziism to be an entity that only exists under specific horrifying conditions and not the reality that for the vast majority of Germans they were happy to be nazis.
Please go read about nazi germany before you make up some fanfic about how it was just like the wolfenstein games. “They Thought They were free” is a book entirely centered around the experiences of the average German during the nazi regime and not one word of your description is in his book.
From Milton Mayer:
These ten men were not men of distinction. They were not men of influence. They were not opinion-makers. Nobody ever gave them a free sample of anything on the ground that what they thought of it would increase the sales of the product. Their importance lay in the fact that God—as Lincoln said of the common people—had made so many of them. In a nation of seventy million, they were the sixty-nine million plus. They were the Nazis, the little men to whom, if ever they voiced their own views outside their own circles, bigger men politely pretended to listen without ever asking them to elaborate.
Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, “the democratic part.” The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.
Please go read about nazi germany before you make up some fanfic
Now there’s only one of us telling bull & fiction. I don’t know your games and I stay with what my relatives and some neighbors have told me.
Ok, not many were shot in such a way, or in worse ways, but when it happened, then it got told, and people knew who the victim was, and most times people knew who the shooter was. And they remembered long after. Even I was told some of the names, but I didn’t know the people, because it was so long before me.
Im saying your family stories are probably not as accurate as historians and authors who spoke to Germans in Germany in the 1950s about being nazis. Im very sure you’re not lying about that being what they told you.
I’m calling you fantastical and wrong because painting a picture of nazi germany as a nation captive to a despot without any agency is holocaust revisionism. To say the German people were prisoners to the nazi regime is objectively false and all the documentation and research around the subject shows as much. They were very pleased with the reich and only started to sour once the war came home and started to get in the way of Germany’s greatness. Please read the book I recommended. Anecdotal evidence doesn’t prove this point wrong.
Behind the Bastards made a two parter about this
I would also recommend “Travellers of the Third Reich” by Julia Boyd
I’ve often thought about it.
Generally probably you just slowly learn what not to say or do to not get in trouble and keep your head down and hope you get through it.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOsQDFuB3bqczBIz-a66NvwaOBSyiCo9z
Colditz is a nice show. The Kommandant isn’t a Nazi, but a member of the Reichswehr, and often finds himself in the difficult position of doing the right thing or following orders.
It’s a bit more nuanced than when Finn in the new Star Wars shows changes sides from the empire to the rebels and two seconds later is blasting his former mates accompanied by loud “yee-haas”.
Klemperer’s “Lingua Tertii Imperii” is a good read. It’s not all, just a bit to add.
“They Thought They Were Free” is also a fantastic literature about the NS-Regime
I don’t think the majority of people are ignorant or apathetic. I haven’t met a single person who was either of those. Seems like everyone is pretty solidly on one side or the other. I think most simply feel powerless to do anything about it, which is very different than apathetic or ignorant. I suspect that was true in Germany back then as well. Due to a lack of access to open media, many probably felt they were one against 1000 or something.
