Originally written by John Bunch on November 20, 2008 6:20 PM We Americans never wanted the Germans to be pacifists. We wanted them in NATO. Or am I missing something ?

The US never wanted a German army that was able to do anything on its own.  Mostly the US wanted to base its own forces on German soil and work with token German forces that would follow US policy.  The last thing the US, or any of its other WWII allies, wanted was an independent and strong German military that could actualy exert power on its own, even if it was within NATO.  The US was displeased enough when France removed its forces from NATO control.

Ukrainian gendarmes and Latvian auxiliary police, Romanian soldiers or Hungarian railway workers, Polish farmers, Dutch land registry officials, French mayors, Norwegian ministers, Italian soldiers -- they all took part in Germany's Holocaust.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,625824,00.html

Originally written by John Bunch on May 21, 2009 1:04 AM Over half of the concentration camp guards were not Germans,

This is one of many instances described in literature:

http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/jewishsociety/Reunion_A_Holocaust_Memoir.asp

"Ana was our Kapo. She was the butt of our hatred. We couldn't assimilate the fact that a Jew just like us, stemming from the very same hallowed roots as ours, could treat her fellow sisters with such abject cruelty. That pain cut deep, and was the source of the intense hatred that we felt towards her.

"We, all of us from Barracks 267, were terrified of her. We shook at the very sight of her, we trembled at the sound of her voice, but mainly we feared her beatings. When she would enter the barracks, locking the door behind her, tap-tapping her way across the floor with her shining black leather boots, with the gold buckles glinting in the dim light of the barracks, we quaked in fear.

As was said before, there are no innocent victims:

Jewish Ghetto Police

Judenrat

All this blame game makes no sense whatsoever.

Jacek

Originally written by Jacek K. on May 21, 2009 1:19 AM Originally written by John Bunch on May 21, 2009 1:04 AM Over half of the concentration camp guards were not Germans,

Because the nazis made them do it: it is bad too of course that they agreed instead of dying but nazi tortures were more than waterboadring, which is a terrible torture, but nothing like what the nazis did to make people obey them: pulling out nails, injecting them with poisons and different medical substances, I would rather not think about the: rest throwing infants against concrete walls.      

Originally written by John Bunch on May 20, 2009 7:04 PM That is true. Over half of the concentration camp guards were not Germans, I read somewhere. And historically, Germany was not one of the more anti-Semitic countries.

I do not know if Germany was an anti-Semitic country or not but it was Hitler and nazi Germany that decided to kill all the Jews, not anybody else and they did everything to make sure their plan worked, although it did not in the end, because many survived regardless of what the nazis were certain about. I will admit that there probably was a certain kind of anti-Semitism in Poland, although where I lived there were not too many Jewish people so you could not really tell the total extent, but it was more in jokes and stories like the Scottish have about the English or the Swedes about Norwegians. They would probably laugh at some people just because they were different like they would laugh at me when I put on high heels in sixth grade, or at somebody's Silesian accent, not mine, because I never had any Silesian accent, but a lot of my friends did and I could see sometimes what was happening when we entered a different region of Poland, considered Polish as opposed to Silesian. Many young people would simply laugh at them and call them different names: such as Hanys, name coming from Silesian Hanek-male name, a short form of Johann or Jan. But I can assure you, that 99.9% of Polish people would not do anything harmful in a physical sense to Jews or even to Silesians. Many were saving the Jews during the war.

The reason why I am writing this is because of the propaganda of some extremely right Western groups, the history has been presented in such a way that some people are almost ready to build monuments to Hitler and to the nazi soldiers, Auschwitz was liberated by the Americans, the concentration camps were Polish, Poles were the biggest anti-Semites, waterboarding is the most severe torture, the Japanese including the World War II army just meditated, no one was decapitating POWs and eating their livers while they were still alive, for strength.

The source of some anti-Semitism in Poland or rather anti-socializing than anti-Semitism has its roots in Christian religion: they tell you from an early childhood that if you marry somebody out of your religion, you go to hell. Also I think people in Poland were quite conservative, so even if you were inappropriately dressed according to their concepts of Fashion they laughed. They found everything different suspicious, probably out of fear of the unknown

Originally written by Jacek K. on May 21, 2009 7:19 AM ...All this blame game makes no sense whatsoever.

 

The very emotional and highly charged story about Ana (the Kapo) is not helpful to anyone else but the person telling the story. I don't know how such a story can be told without resorting to emotional and highly charged language, but as far as I can see, it only underlines and reiterates an intense hatred that will surface to the conscious mind and once there...

I was very young but can still remember the incredible discussions (that I didn't understand), as well as the intense hatred in my mother's eyes when she discussed the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem with the rest of the family. Why, I wondered are they all so angry at this man? He is a nasty German and a Nazi, I was told. That is one way to inculcate fear and hatred of the Other.

Now, with the Demjanjuk trial coming up, we can look forward to another highly charged, emotional feeding frenzy.

It makes no sense...

Nanna

It is different, Nanna, I think if you lived through the World War II and saw all the atrocities of it, like your mother probably did. It is different if you see it in person, or even just see the camps , the hair of the people murdered, the neatly separated things taken away from them on their last journey to the chambers. Only then it becomes real. I grew up on the remembrance of World War II: all our trips from school were to the labor camp, except maybe one or two to the Zoo. These were the 70's. All we learned in school from the first grade was hatred towards nazism. Everything was arranged around the World War II. I agree we cannot feed hatred so it goes on and on for generations, but we also cannot forget, forgive yes, perhaps yes, but not forget,  nor let the history to be distorted again into mineralizing nazi crimes at the cost of accusing other nations of something they did not do, just for political reasons.

I really don't know, Lily, for I am born right after WWII, when the age-old vexation and hypersensitivity toward the Germans burned brighter than bright and the baby-boomers imbibed this with mother's milk. Certainly, to this day, there's no love lost between the Danes and the Germans. As far as I know, the Danes are not anti-Semitic, but they will tell fairly nasty jokes about the Germans, and their (supposedly) greasy diet of sauerkraut and big fat sausages. It's patently stupid, but the jokes are not harmless for underneath the veneer of telling a joke you can find real feelings.  

I have vistied the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I have never visted the site of any KZ camp and unless forced to, I won't do it. While in University, I attended classes (two semesters worth) about the Holocaust. The professor had lost family in the KZ camps, and while we all felt terrible for him, there was no room for anything other than his highly charged feelings about the Third Reich. At his request, I had to rewrite a paper because he felt that I failed to treat the subject with the right kind of seriousness. 

We should not, I agree, distort what happened during WWII, but there is more than way to distort an issue.

Nanna