..."and there were no Nazis in Hamburg"

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11. I heard the stories from my wife's parents and their friends

Last edited Thu Oct 25, 2018, 10:59 AM - Edit history (1)

The indoctrination was pervasive and complete. My wife's grandfather risked the death penalty by listening to British radio even after being discovered by a Nazi neighbor. The neighbor never did denounce him, and he returned the favor by not denouncing the neighbor after the war.

My wife's mom was inducted into the BDM, sort of a Hitler Youth for girls. She received the full indoctrination and had fights with her parents about who was right. Only after three of her five brothers were killed in the war did she begin to realize what had been done to her and her generation.

A good friend of theirs was ten when the war ended. I knew him. He was smart, generous, beloved as the very fair director of one of the biggest bicycle factories in his area of Germany. He told me to beware of indoctrination (I had told him about Fox "News" ), as it was a powerful force to spread evil. Until the war ended, as a ten year old, he had swallowed every lie the Hitler Youth had given him.

My father in law, a few years older (born 1924) was drafted off his farm at age 17, sent as cannon fodder to Stalingrad, and returned at age 18 minus a leg. He was a nice guy, but kept a lot of horror bottled up inside him. He used to grow cold and his jaw would tremble whenever any documentary about the Nazi era was on TV (and that was frequently, part of the West German government's continuing efforts to show how awful the Nazis were). He openly stated his wish that all his grandchildren would be girls so they would never have to serve in the military (compulsory for boys during his lifetime). It was one wish fate was to grant him. Only in his near-death delirium did he finally lose his defenses, and start calling out to comrades in his unit, who were being blown up by Soviet artillery shells, one of which had already torn his leg off. It was 40° below zero, and the city boys who had survived the shelling had already frozen to death. As a farmer in the far northwest of Germany (his native language wasn't even German), he was used to the cold, and was alive when a retreating unit spotted him, and took him along.

Beware the power of indoctrination, and beware the power of shame. Today's Trumpanzees live in households that have Fox "News" on 24/7 and they are indoctrinating a new generation of Trumpanzees to hate and commit violent acts. There is no death penalty (yet) for listening to Rachel Maddow instead of Hannity, but you can't tell me people in some households don't live under a very real similar threat.

Remember also, that not only were there no Nazis in Hamburg, a whole pseudo-nation of Germans was instantly cleansed by their new socialist masters, telling them that there were no Nazis at all in the Soviet-created "German Democratic Republic (East Germany)," and therefore, no de-Nazification programs were needed in their "real existierender Sozialismus." None of their new, enthusiastic Gestapo-style secret police had learned their craft under the Nazis, oh, no, not a ONE of them. It is no accident that the East German army marched with the very goose-step that the Nazis did, and that their uniforms were identical except for the helmets.

It was the same in France after the war. EVERYONE had been a member of the resistance. NO ONE had been a collaborator. Those people had vanished in a puff of smoke, too.

One thing that does encourage me is that the (still-) frequent documentaries on German TV today always refer to the "liberation" of Germany by the Allies. Today's Germany realizes that it had been "occupied" -- not by an evil foreign power, but by a mass psychosis so pervasive that they were unable to free themselves from it on their own. Let us fervently hope that we still have the internal strength to rid us of ours. Some day, Fox "News" will either be gone, or it will lead us where Göbbels led Germany, and the rest of the world will unite against us. It is no accident that anti Nazi laws still on the books here prevented a German-language Fox channel from ever starting up (they apparently had made inquiries).