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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, I cannot accept in my head that in one part of Europe Nazis were shaving men, women and children to use their hair as industrial filling before throwing them in gas chambers by the thousands, but somewhere else Nazi general was gracious enough to allow British troops to airdrop a prosthetic leg for their pilot - they even remained friends after the war! I'm sorry but it just sounds like.....some kind of joke? Like it happened in a different reality than the one that happened in Europe at the time? Why was that general even allowed to visit the UK and not in prison? Oh that's right - because Churchil has personally advocated against prosecuting nazi generals because it would be "unsporstmanlike".

I'm sorry, I cannot enjoy this article in the spirit it was written in. I grew up next to Auschwitz and the idea of borderline friendly(sorry, "diplomatic") relationship with nazi forces makes me sick.

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They maybe just forgot the extend of it. Don't forget that many don't even know the difference between the "normal" (already incredibly horrible and vile) concentration camps like Dachau and the pure extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka or Sobibor. The Brits and Americans only liberated the first kind, and it (mostly) wasn't their citizens who were gassed or shot by Einsatzgruppen.

Also doesn't help that some think it was only done and caused by the SS or Hitler / Himmler / Göring, as if there was no connection with the remaining government, the police or the Reichsbahn, and as if the Wannseekonferenz[1] and Reichskristallnacht[2] had never happened.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference, also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URSNN5mnI2g

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht

It makes the horrible things the Nazis did even more horrifying. It's easy to think of the Nazi regime as a pure, isolated evil, but when articles like this show that there was room for even a little humanity, it makes it clear how many individual choices for evil were made elsewhere every step of the way.

It makes more sense, if you consider that the Nazis did not really wanted to fight the british in the first place, but would have rather fought with them against the communist hordes in the east and the jews in general. Racism in the british empire was pretty established at that time, so it was not an outlandish goal. Hitler was fine with the british empire oversea (white rule) while he ruled the continent..

But luckily the Nazis were really bad at diplomacy.

The reason the two co exist in the same regime is (awfully) that they didn’t consider Jews to be people while they considered the British worthy opponents. It’s horrible and disgusting but if one can wrap their head around the idea that a population can be indoctrinated into believing there are two levels of people (effectively people and not people) then Nazi Germany becomes more … comprehensible. The shockingness of it doesn’t go away though.

I thought Churchill was against the trials because he thought the Nazi leadership should just simply be executed or imprisoned for life without the bother of a trial? Churchill was very much a fan of unsportsmanlike behaviour, the more devious the trick the better in his view.

Humans are complex. If we want to be serious about preventing a re-occurrence of the Holocaust, we should remember that it was carried out by ordinary people like you or me. Even today, many - perhaps most - people will make excuses for any amount of evil as long as it's being done by their side.

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