Comment by kgarten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kgarten | Hacker News Reader

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There are 2 major problems I have with world war II stories (the article tackles the first one extremely well) ... First of all, most Holocaust memorial articles etc. in general just focus on jews, however, there were other people also equally affected by it (sinti and roma, homosexuals, political left etc.). They all were systematically identified and killed with the knowledge and help of "normal" people in Germany.

Why does the US not focus on their own wrongs in history? I'm German and as a consequence as adolescent I was "forced" every year during high school to hear about Nazi Germany (in German and History courses). This is very important and shaped me as an individual and a lot of my friends. So don't get me wrong, it is important to remember and it's important to understand what happend (and to realize that it's easy to do/support similar ideologies .. most of the German people at the time were no monsters and had also support from people all over the world, who believed that Hitler was needed against Communist Russia ... This is sad to hear yet important. Also a lot of the German scientists who did abysmal things to Humans continued working for the US after the war). I believe the lessons we should draw from Nazi Germany in World War II is that it is very easy for us (for everybody) to accept inhuman behavior, racism and genocide :(

Maybe as German, I don't have the right to say that ... yet,I find it hypocrite to hear from US researchers, French, Austrians or Swiss how much we Germans did do wrong ... When part of the Austrians/French/US actively supported it and some Swiss took the money and gold from Nazi Germany and closed the borders for the victims. This is by no means meant as a justification of the crimes towards humanity my ancestors did, it's important to remember. everybody should visit Dachau or a similar concentration camp and remember not what cruelty we Germans were capable of but what cruelty we as human race are capable of.

*edit: typos

>Why does the US not focus on their own wrongs in history?

Because they won the war. That, plus they are the top dog internationally, or one of the top dogs. So they can continue to march around as morally superior despite what they have done (and continue doing). I mean, had the Germans won the war, they would have done the exact same thing.

From agent orange to nuking civillian towns, to having segregation until the sixties, to insisting on capital punishment, to shoving their black population in jail (through systemic racist imbalances and injustices to people their 2-3 generation ancestors they f* up as slaves), to toppling legitimate governments and supporting dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere, to "world cop", to drone attacks, to "patenting" farming seeds and genetic material and enforcing it world-wide, to mass-surveillance and creepy related laws, and what have you.

And when all else fails, they can always blame it to the acts of their "bad government" (or to some "bad apples" in the government) all the while benefiting from those actions, supporting them, voting those people in office, and maintaining that they are a democracy (which implies citizen responsibility in state actions).

I particularly took notice of this:

>Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

>“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps, P.O.W. camps, concentration camps,” he said. “They were everywhere.”

We all know that the allies were almost oblivious to these concentration camps during the war.[1] I would be surprised to learn that the allies did not have agents, spies or informants stationed in Germany during the war. How did these people also fail to notice what - according to Dr Dean - would have been obvious?

Even 40'000+ sites takes few people to pull off in a country of over 50 millions. It was a very different time, and as the parent correctly points out, people accepted genocide, torture and blatant racism. Not just in Germany, but everywhere.

A lot of people seem to think that it is something inherently German that made the Holocaust so terrible, but truth be, any other country could have fallen victim to the same propaganda had their situation been similar.

That being said, I still find the Second World War rather uninteresting.

[1] Although, as their progressing through German held Europe moved forward, the true picture began to emerge.

>A lot of people seem to think that it is something inherently German that made the Holocaust so terrible, but truth be, any other country could have fallen victim to the same propaganda had their situation been similar.

If not "any other country", surely, "a lot of similarly thinking countries".

Belgium, France and Britain for example, also committed terrible atrocities and countless murders and deaths in their colonies at the same time (and even after world war 2).

>A lot of people seem to think that it is something inherently German that made the Holocaust so terrible

I'll quote a drunk Austrian friend: "All Germans are Nazis. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say, if there must be Nazis, Germans make the best ones"

It's interesting to hear this perspective on German culture now. Actually, Americans are brought up learning about their wrongdoings during the years of slavery and discrimination. We learn about other injustices we're accountable for as well but racial discrimination seems to be the one we learn about pretty much every year of school to some extent.

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