If we had lived in Germany in 1930s would you or me have stood up to Hitler ? A tough question to ask.

I have just read this comment which I agree with :

"If we don't stand up and say I RESIST...if we are too scared....then they have already imprisoned us all."

FRom the 28 March to 2 April we need to show our support for the Peaceful Protesters against the apathy our society shows to those who are poor and disadvantaged and the creep of Big Brother Society.

The PUT PEOPLE FIRST march expects a million to march - which is some sort of record surely for a non single cause march in London. This shows the depth of feeling in society in general against the policies of ALL political parties and the Leaders of The World.

A reminder. The BAIL OUT they found for the banks would have fed the poor of the world forever several times over. The Bankers were considered more important than food for the starving around the world whose countries have been bankrupted by expensive foreign loans and wars fed by the Arms Manufacturers of the UK and USA. This is the fact of how we live our lives - and it no wonder that society is in such a mess. Sadly I agree with JK that we are hurtling towards extinction on this current path as a species.

it's an argument I've had often..and the answer is NO !

The German race is often unfairly blamed for the allowing the Nazis to rise to power but they had few of the communication means available to us today.

There was radio and newspapers and that's it !.Once they were controlled, it was all over.

They had no knowledge of concentration camps-or at best it was merely a rumour. Most of the country was provincial and knew little of what was happening outside it's own area.

By contrast, most young Germans are the most knowledgable (apart from neo-Nazis)of the evils of fascism, the history of their own country and how it can happen.

The rest of the West could sleep walk into fascism without blinking.

And there plenty of politicians, business leaders and the vast general public who would readily agree with Hitler, as there were in the 30's.

veritas wrote:


They had no knowledge of concentration camps-or at best it was merely a rumour. Most of the country was provincial and knew little of what was happening outside it's own area.


That's absolute bullshit. These camps were not in forests or out of sight and vast numbers of citizens were taken away at gunpoint from EVERY single town and village. They knew alright and just chose to turn a blind eye out of fear or because they didn't care.

The concentration camps came later in the Nazi years I think. In the early 30s it was very much the "economic" miracle of National Socialism. The AUTOBAHNS are an incredible achievement by Hitler.

Even though he was very evil - he still did normal things as a leader of their country.

This is what people seem to forget in the stereotype that the UK media and schools push onto our population.

As one cartoon points out - if the Fascists tried to take control again would they wear Nazi uniforms and stomp up and down the street ?

I think you have to try and place yourself in the era and imagine what it was like when the only communications were newspapers, radio and telephones.

Only few had telephones and by the time the Nazis began the programs they controlled all output in news.

Most people-no matter which country they live in will not believe their government is capable of evil things.

BR is correct-Hitler was giving the appearance of re-vitalising German industry. And the Nazis were the smaller political party-socialists were bigger-but used every bully tactic in the book. Most people try to avoid bullies rather than confront them.

If you take the USA as an example-the majority of Americans have little understanding of what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. They still believe either were involved in 9/11. Thus we-the allies- have now been killing innocent citizens in vast numbers in both countries for years now..longer than WW2.

Despite that millions in the UK & USA demonstrated about these invasions and were ignored. Short of rising up and having a revolution they are powerless.

The most the UK government could do was demand it's own citizns be returned from Guantanamo Bay but Abu Grahb is as worse with ten times the prisoners. We do nothing about it.

My mother was a Polish Jew who fled to Britain with her family..others disappeared. But she really didn't do much about her homeland..worked in armanent factories in the UK and such. Getting her to talk about that time was impossible except towards he end of life when she would talk about her inablity to change events, guilt over escaping and not staying to help etc.

Reality is far more complex and history easy to judge in hindsight.

veritas wrote:
I think you have to try and place yourself in the era and imagine what it was like when the only communications were newspapers, radio and telephones.




I don't have to imagine it or try to place myself there. My mother in law is German, now 78 years old and as a child she could walk to the camp nearby in Oranienburg and look through the meshed fences, covered in barbed wire and guarded by "soldiers with guns". Her entire school was taken outside the fences to see what was going on. "Look at what we are doing for our country. For our great homeland" was what the children were told by a very important military man. They brought a child over to them and then shot the child in the head and laughed.

She could see men women and children wearing very little, clearly starving and exhausted. You heard the screams everyday and gunfire every day. Bodies were piled up in full view of anyone who wished to see it.
These were pointed out to the local children as bad men even though some were babies and very small children.

There were over 1,000 of these places and not only in Germany, but also in Croatia, France, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Austria, Belarus, Poland, Norway and others. The means to communicate via satellite wasn't there but people knew.

You might want to believe that it was a very unpleasant surprise when Nazis suddenly arrived at your town but the people already knew they were coming and they knew what they were doing.


I believe somebody who was there, who witnessed it with their own eyes while they grew up. My mother in law still has friends from that period of time and people she has befriended in recent years who tell of the same stories in Croatia especially, where the Serbs were rounded up, locked in cells for a month with no food or water, then they'd drag all the corpses out in full view or the locals. This Croatian lady still has letters sent to her by her husband, then a "soldier" who sent her photographs of the swimming pools , which they filled with terrified children and then ran a massive electric current through for a minute and watched as they floated to the top of the water. His words "They are too young to work".

There may not have been "Sky News" but people knew what was happening. They were just unable to do anything about it. Those who tried to, would lose their own lives.

I think more people would stand up to a similar situation these days although one wonders what proportion would just go along with it. What is chilling is the fact that they had such support in Germany despite the Ghettos, Kristallnacht and the obvious signs of oppression. People who did stand up to the Nazi's risked being tagged as political activists and therefore would have been shipped off to the same fate as the Jews. Hobson's choice really. Nowadays you would emigrate or seek asylumn.

What worries me about our current situation is this :

1. We have a Home Secretary who wants to tag us all and invade our privacy. She also wants to stereotype everyone as a potential criminal. Yet her own life does not stand up to any scrutiny. She is "bent" and her husband PAYS for Pornography and then the claim it off the taxpayer. Totally shocking. Yet they are still in power and nothing happens.

2. Our detention of suspects without charge is just as bad as anything HITLER did to German people - but we allow it to happen. Thousands of Muslims and political opponents of this government are being arrested and held with no charge - some on several occasions. Yet no one is protesting ? and it continues.

3. Our freedom of movement is being severely restricted with E BORDERs and ID. Yet no one is on the streets about this.

4. Our e mails - phone calls are all fair game for the Government. The Nazis never did that - they did not open every letter and do a copy in the 1930s. Yet our government is doing that to us by keeping records.

5. Every journey we take is now recorded and held for 10 years with the CCTV systems which have Number Plate recognition and FACIAL recognition built in ( They are the cameras you see in clusters by the way that look tubalar which have sprung up in the last 3 years ) Yet no one has opposed this ?

This is the scenario for UK 2009. If you are AGAINST this Government you WILL BE arrested ( I have been ) you will not be charged with anything ( I have not been charged with anything ) your DNA will be taken and your photograph. THEN you will be on the system and you WILL BE TRACKED. Every move I make in London particularly is tracked because I am on "Their" system.

I am on the system BECAUSE I SPEAK OUT publicly against them. This is the UK 2009.

I have had over £100,000 of my office belongings taken and not returned either. My lawyers said they could not get them back for me I might add. They have effectively been stolen by the state.

If this is happening TO ME then it is happening to many others as well - and I have spoken to others who are in a similar fix.

This IS A NAZI run country now. Of course they have been unable to detain me - but under Emergency Powers if they one day "call" an emergency then people like me who oppose NEW LABOUR vocally will be rounded up and put into holding centres. I have no doubt about that. All of it will be done to "counter the threat of non existent terrorism"

I feel that if that happens we may well try to rebel against what is happening - but they are doing what ICKE calls the "TOTALITARIAN TIPTOE" which means they are introducing things without the general public knowing - which is HOW Hitler managed to get into total power.

Once a leadership is in TOTAL power backed by the apparatus of the state it is virtually impossible to have a say. On Wednesday we will see whether the G20 protesters have a fair say or whether then will be herded up and beaten by the "security forces" in the name of crime prevention........we will then see how much freedom we have to be critical of this Government.

The PEOPLE FIRST march was hijacked by NEW LABOUR supporters. That is why it was such a disaster.

BR wrote:

This IS A NAZI run country now.


Bullshit.

What you quoted has been happening in other countries as well. In the coup dīetat against Allende in Chile 1973, thousands of opponents were brought to a stadium to be killed. That doesnīt make Pinochet a Nazi. It makes him a dictator, and what was installed later, in Chile, was a dictatorship.

You may say your country is a dictatorship and back it up with several arguments, but it would be wise not to confuse any dictatorship with national socialism.

As to the previous posters, "did people in Germany know or not".. well, some knew or believed, some did not. My grandparents lived in Germany at that time. I remember my father told me the whole family sat around dinner table, having food and discussing about it. Whereas most men thought the camps were working camps and Jews werenīt killed, my grandmother believed the situation to be worse.. she asked: "but where did they all go, and why did no one ever return up to now?" (she hadnīt liked the Nazis from the beginning). Only about 1943, when Germany started to loose, it became clearer what Hitler had done.

I guess itīs safe to say many Germans knew, while others could not imagine.

One of my greatgranduncles had Jews working for him to save them from the camps. When it became clear that the war was lost and the allies were near, he let them flee into the nearby woods (because the SS approached to kill every Jew they could before being beaten by allies). When the SS officers wanted him to hunt them down, he refused with the words "As an Ex-Prussian commanding officer, for me it is not honorable to hunt down unarmed folks with arms". Luckily the SS didnīt kill him. Later, when the allies had arrived, this saved him from having a trial: Jews who had come back to his place (after war had ended) attested that he was "one of the good Germans".

As to the question "would we have stood up?" - not only depends on the people, but also on economy. Hitler would not have risen to power if he hadnīt had support and backing from the families of Krupp and Thyssen. Thyssen critisized Hitler later, I think he even was deported, but at the start he was one of the biggest supporters. Krupp was caught, got a trial and spent a couple of years in prison after the allies had freed Germany. (of course, when Western allies needed Krupp in the 50ies to help building weapons to fight in the cold war, he was released). In the early 30s, the German steel elite wanted to make money with arms. Wanted to fuel war.

and this is how it happens. Not overnight.

It takes a few years..a gradual eroding of rights and a general step-up in removing "troublesome" people and those not regarded as equals.

Hitler certainly ranted about Jews but the general public (with plenty agreeing with him) dismissed that as talk.They didn't believe it was the Jewish greengrocer, or doctor on the corner. They thought it was some cabal of bankers somewhere.

You either have a coup or takeover the way the Nazis did. The majority of people just want a peaceful life and feel powerless to do anything..and generally they can't do anything except form a "resistance" force. Even then they can do little except harass and need outside help to overthrow a tyrant.

I believe that conditions are perfect for a fascist takeover. Rights are chipped away until one day they are all gone. And try getting them back !

Jacqui Smith , Gordon Brown..the majority of MPs possibly abhor the idea of fascism. But they are increasingly putting in place laws that are making it very easy for the right person to fully implement it.

(Thyssen committed suicide but the Thyseen name is hated in New York with it's huge Jewish population)

And let's not forget the numerous US bankers and industrialists who aided and funded the Nazis..included George Bush's grandfather who still held Hitler's personal fortune safely in a New York bank up to 1943 whilst Americans were dying fighting Germany. He only avoided "trading with the enemy" charges by pulling strings.

The Nazi takeover is like a blueprint for every action taken by the Bush/Blair governments.

@veritas

"Hitler's personal fortune" - any information on this please?

Cheers

ETA I'm not thinking of his book royalties but stealing the nations wealth and stuffing it in foreign bank accounts like modern dictators seem to do - tried Google but no luck

I did a quick google for Hitler's personal fortune and found several sites mentioning it. They all seem to conclude that his fortune was seized at the end of the war. Here is one of the links.

http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/98/10/Hitler1.html

it isn't too difficult to track down the Bush/Harriman Hitler connections

Hitler was certainly very rich after his Mein Kempf manifesto was published and became a best-seller (try reading it though..booring. Perhaps it flows better in German !)

But indeed..whatever happened to all the Nazi loot ?. Afterall, they were a bunch of common thieves as well, "confiscating" Jewish assetts ,looting museums etc.

Switzeland ? Argentina ? ..guarantee much of it ended up there protected by friendly interests.

It's only been the last 10 years or so that we have been getting the real history of the Nazi regime and other Western countries invovlemnent with their rise.

Oswald Mosley may have been a public face of Britain's Nazis but there were plenty of other powerful figures who thought along similar lines about whipping workers into shape.

But we don't even know what happened to Iraq's wealth when those dozens of trucks , protected by tanks, looted the museums of Iraq of antiquities as Donald "Stuff Happens" Rumsfield chortled away on TV.

How can we ever hope to track the looted Nazi wealth ?

No-one will ever be able to track the missing wealth. When the Train Robbers fled the UK, the price of a fake passport or a midnight boat trip across the Channel must have risen enormously for such high profile fugitives. I gather that not much of the £2m was ever recovered and much was probably spent along the way - Ronnie Biggs hardly had the life of luxury once he got to Brazil.

The same must have happened for ex-Nazi's fleeing to Latin America - I imagine dodgy doctors must have charged fortunes for facial surgery - although they probably smuggled gold out which was easy to resmelt and untraceable. Also diamonds like in 'Marathon Man' because they too are untraceable and very easy to smuggle. Valuable paintings were too bulky and most likely left in Europe.

thanks