It's typical that most people will tell you their grandpa was in the resistance, rarely they will tell you that they collaborated.
They might be willing to leave your great-grandfather's name out of it, if that's a concern for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIOD_Institute_for_War,_Holoca...
> Even today, interesting things from the Second World War resurface. When people move house, when a house is demolished or when an attic is cleared. These finds can range from a pile of letters, to photos, films, diaries, documents or objects. Don’t throw these documents away. NIOD welcomes donations of new material.
Oh, yeah, undoubtedly. "History is written by the victors" is one of the truest cliches. But whether crimes or atrocities are acknowledged or punished tells you nothing about the impact or severity of the actions.
So, while one could certainly recite a laundry list of atrocities committed by the Allies which a victorious Nazi Germany would have prosecuted, and many by Imperial Japan that went unpunished (though you're wrong that none of them were charged with war crimes - many were, even if many others like Unit 731 escaped prosecution due to the US wanting their research [edit: I see someone else responded with this before I finished my reply]), WWII is difficult to write off as "everyone and everything was awful" like a lot of wars.
Every side was indeed awful, but Nazi Germany's and Imperial Japan's actions in particular were so unprecedentedly awful that far-future generations in those countries probably would've eventually had a reckoning and realized they were the worst actors in the war, like what eventually happened in the US when it comes to treatment of Native Americans, propping up brutal dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere, and other things.
All this to say - if the parent poster's great-grandfather was a member of a Waffen-SS division that tracked down and executed civilians en masse due to their ethnicity, for example, it can't and shouldn't be dismissed as "well, that's war, everyone is culpable, and you can't know what it was like to be in their shoes, and either side would be considered as evil if the other side won". (I know you didn't quite say that, but there is a certain false semi-equivalence here, I think.) It's not exactly wrong, but it misses a lot of the bigger picture.
Britain and Belgium especially have this all over their history, and no one cares.
"division that tracked down and executed civilians en masse due to their ethnicity"
I thought you meant that. It's not more palatable, but actions abroad have a different complexion somehow. Governments can get away with actions the citizenry don't witness (or citizens can claim ignorance) which is different to if there's literally squads picking people off the streets in front of your own eyes; which is what you referred to.
Like I said, I'm aware of many atrocities by British people but just not of that particular one in recent history?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_war_crimes
Even today that are recent British war crimes where the perpetrators are alive and yet will never be prosecuted.
You honestly think Americans are aware of even the most common atrocities committed in the name of colonization? My read is a) they mostly don't and b) there is an ongoing effort to victim-blame Native Americans going back centuries.
The alternate reality where Nazi Deutschland won would likely similarly deal with the occupied USA/UK/etc like the US treated the natives.
For example, CNN's Rick Santorum:
> We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture.
https://twitter.com/JasonSCampbell/status/138668534052253696...
Santorum is on CNN's payroll. Who or whatever is supporting Santorum isn't stupid, likely it supports some revenue/marketing scheme. All of this is fully funded.
[1] https://www.worldcat.org/title/indians-and-the-us-constituti...
Increasingly, yes. I'm sure it'll be many more decades before it becomes more widely accepted, though.
>The alternate reality where Nazi Deutschland won would likely similarly deal with the occupied USA/UK/etc like the US treated the natives.
Very likely, yes.
It really, really isn't. Like, at all. No Historian would agree with you.
Of course, writers are a diverse set, and so this is far from a magical solution to solving the problems of bias. The painful truth is, each source simply needs to be evaluated on its own merits.
Maybe it'd be more accurate to say "the immediate history that holds the most power in a certain area tends to be the history that's written by the most powerful entities in that area at that time", or something?
Nazi Germany wasn't able to spread its narrative anywhere once it lost its power, while the Allies were able to spread theirs in most places. If Nazi Germany had decisively won and became the top global superpower, I that situation probably would've been reversed.
Genghis Khan didn't hold the most power in certain areas after a certain period of time. When he did hold that power, even if the literary classes under his rule hated him, I assume their narratives probably wouldn't have spread or been believed very widely? Due to self-censorship, direct censorship and violence from his forces, and his counter-narratives. But maybe I'm wrong; I know very little about historiography.
The Nazis invaded countries and then systematically got to the task of murdering their entire totally harmless Jewish population, simply because of their ethnicity.
There was no possible military or tribal gain or anything, it was just pure racial hatred.
What's especially horrifying is that Germany was a very advanced civilization using sophisticated and systematic means to accomplish this.
Edit: “sins” -> “war crimes”
I don't think Germany's singular goal of racial domination - and specifically extermination of world Jewry - is comparable to most wars. Nazi Germany is viewed differently historically because it was different.
That is not to say OP's grandfather is responsible for all of Nazi Germany's actions, but it is not just "lots of people did shitty things."
That wasn't the reason for the war. Nor were there any country actually try to help the jews before or during the war.
It's also not different from thoughts at the time held throughout the western world. Britain specifically didn't help the jews during ww2 because they thought they would flood Palestine (a british colony) after the war. A famous quote in Canada before ww2 was that "We'd take as many as we can, but none was too much." America as well famously turned away boat loads of jews.
Depending on how you define "country" (as opposed to just "a large fraction or majority of its citizens"), Denmark did in fact help Jews, at least Danish ones.
And the story of Bulgaria is .. complicated. Again, they protected Bulgarian Jews in practice.
Portugal helped not only Portuguese Jews, but many others as well. In particular, they generally allowed a huge number of refugees (16% of the country's population), including Jews, into the country.
It's true that the main Allied powers were not particularly going out of their way to help Jews, but "any country" is a high bar.
>It was only afterwards that evidence of holocaust was verified and/or believed.*
The reports from the Polish government in exile did not make front page news. I'd still stand by the earlier statement:
> Saving the Jews was not on any country's radar entering WWII.
You might argue that Poland wanted to save the Jews, but at the point that reports of mass murder were coming out of Germany in 1941, the Polish government no longer had a country to manage. They had exited WWII as losers.
Reports of mass murder of Jews weren't verified by the USG until 1942. I would still argue that saving the Jews did not even crack the top 10 reasons for the USG invading Europe. After all, they verified these reports and still waited 2 years before making landfall.
I absolutely agree with these.
> That wasn't the reason for the war.
This is false. Hitler spoke and wrote at length about the "Jewish problem." It wasn't the _only_ reason for the war but it certainly was _a_ reason for the war. Even the war against the USSR was framed as against "Jewish Bolsheviks."
This is aside from the fact that OP referenced their grandfather being a member of the SS. The SS was _not_ the German army. The SS was the military organization of the Nazi party - often conflicting with the army to achieve their goals. They enforced racial policy in Germany and its conquests, ran the concentration camps and death camps, and were specifically tasked with eliminating Jews.
Perhaps it is because of the collective guilt of not having done enough for Jews at the time, but people often gloss over the explicitly racial and antisemitic aspect of World War II. The extermination of Jews was not a byproduct, it was one of the key goals.
For further detail, I encourage the interested reader to check out "The War Against the Jews" by Lucy Davidowitz.
It doesn't care if its German run, Russian run (as long as it is market based and not marxist based), or “not-German” wink run like today
It would have been tolerable just like Saudi Arabia is tolerable
Liquidity, market depth, and less people to negotiate with is the American priority
The moral highground arguments that it upholds now and in hindsight are just to continue deriving support from its own people, who culturally eat that shit up, but it can successfully package any moral argument for any scenario even if they are complete lies
It makes very little sense to want simpler negotiations in lieu of a strong negotiating position
The country itself is a sideshow.
Very happy to make an introduction if needed
There was a strong desire for revenge in the first years after the war. That meant anyone who did anything 'wrong' was not going to talk about it.
And people are more likely to talk about their family past if it sounds cool and good. They are less likely to talk about ugly parts of it.
Regardless of whether ugly is personal, business related or political.
(Speaking as a Jewish American with no SSS relatives but many who perished in the Holocaust, FWIW)
And the worst case scenario is that his diary demonizes him. Given the stories they mention and the potential SS division they hint at (perhaps one of the mobile death squad or extermination camp divisions), it seems quite possible.
But, especially so long after he's died, it might be better to know who he really was, whichever way it turns out. If I had a relative who potentially did and expressed terrible things, even though it'd hurt, I think I'd want to know the truth.
Or, as another commenter said, they could ask someone else to read it and give a vague but honest summary. If the contents are bad, they can learn that fact without the additional serious emotional impact of reading the lurid details.
In my opinion, no. However, it gets complicated when one's status is derived from misdeeds of the predecessors.
You could then ask them about it in non detailed ways.