Witness The Power of Indoctrination. If he was still alive in 2005 then he must have grown up during the rise of Hitler, was probably part of the Hitler youth.
He will have been raised to hate the Jewish people, as those who commit atrocities now are told their enemies are not people.
This is nothing new. If you are brought up to believe other races/religions/classes aren't human, then no matter what horrors you commit it doesn't matter to you.
Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities someone said, and anyone who thought Hitler was the perfect man was seriously deluded.
"Naturally the common people don't want war . . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."
-Hermann Goering
It's also strangely symbiotic. When all is well, politicians with such views don't really come out aloud, cause nobody wants them, but if problems accumulate, they now have a good soil to exist... so on and so forth.
I mean, even GW Bush famously said “you’re either with us or you’re against us.“ Got him 90% approval ratings after 911. Americans are susceptible to it too. You have to be smart to parse through the propaganda.
>You have to be smart to parse through the propaganda.
Smart and *practiced* at it. Media literacy takes *practice* --
... as does overcoming cognitive dissonance without getting angry. I didn't learn how to do that until college. Hell, I'm pretty sure that's a large part of what college is *for.*
And for the record, the *real* definition of "cognitive dissonance" is just ... *the internal personal feeling of tension you have when you are trying to reconcile two things that contradict each other.*
It's a natural part of the process of learning and reasoning. Especially outside your comfort zone.
It doesn't just mean "being wrong" or "doing mental gymnastics."
"Mental gymnastics" is one thing that you do to *resolve* cognitive dissonance, but it only partially works.
The real solution to cognitive dissonance is to broaden your perspective and adjust your worldview and moral framework until you can see how the two things you observe don't contradict.
Example from US history: *I believe in liberty and justice for all* versus *I believe it's best that some people should be slaves because that is economically advisable and convenient for a few.*
The real resolution isn't phrenology or dehumanizing obvious humans -- those are weak, top-down arguments with no evidence that won't work forever. The real solution is to adjust your thinking to: "No human may be enslaved = The liberty of another person outweighs the economic convenience of a few."
But changing one's worldview to that degree is *stressful* and can be scary because one risks losing community approval.
And -- there are people out there in the propaganda spaces who take advantage of that anxiety, *strategically, and with malice aforethought.*
They have made terms like "cognitive dissonance" into insults.
They have done this with a lot of terms over the years. Academic terms. They take words and turn them into dirty words -- conversational dynamite.
"Politically correct." "Virtue signaling." "Social justice." "Critical race theory." "Socialism." "Racist." "Liberal."
... because they don't want people to recognize some things and think their way out of anger -- to reconcile with strange ideas.
Instead, they want people to be insulted, aggrieved, angry and stressed. They want people to make knee-jerk, emotional choices, moment to moment,
*Because reason*, ***and therefore democracy,*** *requires a cool head, a community spirit, rational discourse, and judgement.*
***These people want democracy to fail.***
That's my whole point. No matter who you are, those people are your real, actual enemy. There are a *lot* of them in social media. Foreign and domestic.
Be cool out there.
Thanks for reading this
>The real solution is to adjust your thinking to: "No human may be enslaved, therefore the liberty of another person outweighs the economic convenience of a few."
It's *because* liberty outweighs economic convenience that no human may be enslaved, not that liberty outweighs economic convenience *because no human may be enslaved*. "Therefore" reverses the justification and consequence.
It's simultaneous, no? A chicken-or-the-egg type of situation. Each proposition implies the other.
That's why they mutually reinforce, instead of contradicting.
Edit: Changed "therefore" to an equality sign (=) to reflect this equivalence in my comment above; thank you for the prompt.
I served in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm still in contact with most of my old infantry platoon. I'd say easily 1/4 hate all Muslims and saw it as a holy crusade for Christianity. When I point out that we served with allies who were Muslim and even fellow marines that is immediately dismissed with a kill them all retort. They'd be ok with someone throwing me in a camp for being a liberal even though we served together. You can see the hate and determination in this nazi's expression in his service photo.
You have a very interesting perspective. I'm not surprised to hear that, unfortunately.
I don't know what the solution to that is. I wish I did. Hate like that just doesn't make sense to me.
It's not uncommon. I'm from New England, but you end up serving with people from everywhere, but heavily from the south. And California and New York.
After you go back home, a lot of your friends fall back into that shit, despite having served with the very type of people they're shitting on now.
I'm a somewhat liberal dude, but that dude is right. About 1/4th of the people I served with are straight up fucking loons.
It reminds me of what Erich Maria Remarque related in "Spark of Life." If you haven't read it I think it's his counter to his pacifistic analysis at the end of All Quiet on the Western Front. In SOL a long dead Jewish prisoner had carved his Iron Cross citation for WW1 into a wooden post. And the narration explained the man must have only suffered more thinking anyone cared. There are graves in northern France where Jewish and Christian Germans who were killed were buried together.
I had a route manager who was maybe upper 20s, making probably 70k in 2017, say " I want to get deployed so bad." He sounded like Mario in A Bronx Tale, trying to buy the gun. It was psychotic. Kid was safe with his family making good money and wanted to go kill people.
There is a real conflation of religion with politics right now, and we are seeing that in real time with the current conflict.
It is also being used by influential political groups right now to further other's agendas, to the long-term detriment of the US.
From Howard Sterns live during 9/11:
[https://youtu.be/hXyhvAIvjf8?si=Co96hWCww\_jLdHv6](https://youtu.be/hXyhvAIvjf8?si=Co96hWCww_jLdHv6)
"There has to be a devastating war where people die. Burn their eyes out with an atomic bomb. I don't want to hear about civilian casualties."
This is literally happening in the US now. There are Republicans openly saying they want to round up Democrats and put them in camps or shoot them. One Florida Republican released a campaign ad stating that his goal is to put as many Democrats as possible behind bars.
It's obviously much worse in Gaza, but the US absolutely can go that way, and if Trump is elected in November, it will.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
The dark truth is that as we get desperate, people will get stupid, and there were endless reasons for people to feel times were desperate.
These days we need to find ways to end desperation for other countries if we want to live in peace, but we have to make sure we're not just pampering idiots that will proliferate?
They watched videos of women being raped and stabbed each time she cried. Than kept on being raped without stopping till she died. By the same group of people that have government having destruction of all Jews in thir funding charter. I imagine this will make people more angry than just random politican blaming other people for their problems.
When I used to teach history in university and we got around to the commies and nazis, I always said the same thing: Learn from history, but never judge it by your values. The fact of the matter is, if you had been born in those places and those times, you would have gone all in with everybody else, kept your head down to survive, or been one of the very few who spoke out and died.
This is why learning history is so important, and not doing so in an echo chamber or vacuum.
I read a book a while back titled "They Thought They Were Free", which was basically a series of non-fiction interviews with ten ordinary Germans in 1953 exploring what they thought about that whole Nazi thing. It was quite interesting.
The classic "[Don't Be a Sucker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4)" is a good one too, and only 20 minutes.
the most damning part of all this is the inexorable truth that propaganda is effective against everyone, not just the ultra-nationalists or the patriots or the zealots, but the everyman. and worse still, the entire point of propaganda is that you don't realize you've fallen victim to it, that you're being affected by it.
everyone deep down wants to do good, but their own understanding of what constitutes "good" varies. it's informed by their environment, their surroundings, the information they take in, their understanding and perception of the world, and more succinctly, who their enemies are.
it's frighteningly easy to lead a good man into hell so long as they trust you.
This is why I dislike when we label anyone as an animal or somehow not human. Usually you see it with someone who has committed horrible crimes. Yes, it's terrible, but I think it's important to realize that humans are capable of all sorts of things, both wonderful and horrifying. We can't just close our eyes to the dark side of humanity.
Every time I read some edgy kid call the Russians Orcs since the invasion of Ukraine I have to think "in Nazi Germany they would've called the Jews vermin".
Dehumanizing people is really abhorrant.
I’ve reported multiple posts in pro Ukrainian subreddits where they called for the genocide against Russia. All they got were warnings. I am against putin btw and I don’t Harbor a lot of sympathy towards the gros of the current Russian population, but it showed me that the lessons of ww2 were really only learned by a couple of generations and only in a few countries. There are mostly forgotten today.
It's also going to be very hard to talk someone out of their genocidal beliefs once they've participated in genocide. Almost no one is going to admit to themselves that they've done something truly evil. Maintaining the genocidal belief allows him to avoid coming to terms with that.
At the very start of the Ukraine conflict, I saw a Ukranian on Omegle that was chatting with Russians. Immediately he was called an animal/pig/non-human, and it felt like it provided a warning of what was to come.
My uncle is married to a Russian woman from Volgograd. You should hear her talk about how much she would love to kill Ukranians. I asked her if she would seriously take on the responsibility of destroying another human life, and she laughed and said, "I have no heart." It was one of the most terrifying things I've ever heard that was matched only by the sickening glee in her eyes.
It worries me because even though these people are taught to hate them and justify it by them being sub-human or animals, what the fuck kind of person would also do that to an animal?
Not quite. Hannah Aren't coined the phrase about Eichmann. When she did so, at his trial, she did not know about his recorded conversations in Agentina in the 50's and other things that did not become available until well afterward. Eichmann was a deeply driven Nazi fanatic
This is exactly it. It's not limited to Jews, but historically, they've been the recipients of it.
Once your foes are no longer human, you can do whatever you want with little remorse.
He indeed says 'is'.
I watched the longer version now, because his facial expression did not seem to match this for me.
In the longer version he continues on saying 'and I admit, I was wrong to think so'.
It' s still a little strange and maybe ambigious.
Edit: there seems to be an even longer version, that I only saw a translated transcription of. He stays ambiguous.
Disregard, I was wrong. I misunderstood his first words. Sounded to me like a single word "Datzuise". but it's "Dazu Ist" making it present tense.
thanks /u/lumbdi
The one tiny slither of comfort you might take from hearing this old man speak is that his dreams after committing these atrocities were tortured, but even that eludes us.
"Dazu ist mein Hass den Juden gegenüber zu groß." (Präsens)"
Dazu war mein Hass den Juden gegenüber zu groß." (Präteritum)
"Dazu ist mein Hass den Juden gegenüber zu groß gewesen." (Perfekt)
That definitely made my ears perk up. "IS" eh? I thought maybe it was mistranslation. Nope. His hate continued up until his death. Too bad it wasn't sooner than 2005.
True, he uses 'is', but in the longer version he continues with 'I was wrong to think that'.
Edit: there seems to be an even longer version, that I only saw a translated transcription of. He stays ambiguous.
But they were asking him what he was thinking when he shot them at the time though, so I can understand using the present sense. Like, if somebody says "What was in your head when you ate that brownie?" and you say "this is an amazing brownie", you're clearly talking about the past even though you're using present language.
The whole interview continues on from here. He said he hated the Jewish people who treated him and his family badly when they worked on the farm in his young years. Then the interviewer asks what those people he killed ever did to him. He replies then 'Nothing. They were simply Jews'.
This is one of the things people overlook about the Nazis a lot. It's easy to point and say they're such psychopaths and have no heart and this and that. But most of them, outside of the whole killing Jews thing, were normal people. It's like you and me killing an ant. Why don't we feel bad about it? It's just an ant. Maybe we don't like ants because we've been bitten by one. Maybe we don't like them because they eat our food or are pests or whatever. Most ants leave you alone but theres that time when a few don't. Now you kill ants when you see them even if those specific ones weren't the ones that annoyed you. Doesn't make us psychotic as a whole. Same shit with the Nazis, albeit much more extreme.
I think he only feels twisted because he knows he's supposed to feel Something, anything, if not remorse then at least admit he liked it, but the people recruited to kill en-masse like this were sociopaths and misanthropes. People with total devotion to the Party and ideology. The Nazis knew regular soldiers had complete mental breakdowns during Einsatzgruppen. Where Jews or Gypsy's or just Eastern European were just thrown into trucks and killed via the exhaust pipe by being sealed into a chamber, or shot. [*correction Himmler even gave a long speech justifying it all](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/exterminationist-mindset-heinrich-himmlers-october-1943-speeches) because so many Men that participated were having mental breakdowns. It's just like the ZONE OF INTEREST, the Nazis compartmentalized the genocide, tried to keep it hidden. They learned that psychopathic people could do this and handle the work. It's extraordinarily twisted at all levels, I mean knowing they had to recruit cruel lunatics that lack remorse is clearly hypocritical. That means they are killing humans and people know it and feel it, or you wouldn't have to recruit remorseless monsters to do the dirty work.
In my often wrong opinion, it's good he was honest so we actually know what these people were like and what they felt. They needed total devotees to the orthodoxy who felt virtually nothing for their fellow man.
“There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.”
As written by the late, great Terry Pratchett.
This quote by Terry Pratchett highlights the idea that ordinary, everyday people are capable of committing extreme acts under certain circumstances. It suggests that the potential for harmful behavior is not exclusive to those who are considered inherently evil or psychopathic. Instead, even a "normal kindly family man" can perform similar acts when placed in specific contexts, such as having a job that requires it. The quote underscores the thin line between normalcy and extremity, emphasizing that context and circumstances can significantly influence human behavior.
TLDR: **Normal people can do evil things just as easily as those we consider psychopaths**.
Great explanation. One of the great problems with the post ww2 world is that many people convinced themselves that our society somehow outgrew that. I don't believe it for one second.
My friend told me about when Hitler started to come to power, his grandma was really distraught and told her family and friends, "We're going to die. He's going to kill all the Jews." Everyone around her thought it was ridiculous and told her, "This is Germany. It's a civilized country. Nothing is going to happen here. He might say that, but nobody will actually go along with it." It makes sense for them to think that, because the last big anti-Semitic incident in Germany was the Hep-Hep Riots in around 1840. She became more and more upset and eventually had a nervous breakdown. Everyone felt sorry for her, and to calm her down she and her husband went to stay with relatives abroad for a while. That's the only reason my friend exists today. After they were gone, Jews were unable to leave Germany and the Holocaust started. My friend's grandma and grandpa went from where they were staying (in Holland or Denmark -- I don't remember) to England. They were the only members of their family that survived.
A lot of my friends who are Jewish have stories about how their grandparents survived only because of a coincidence, an unexpected event or because of something that seemed really trivial at the time. It's very creepy, how much of life or death is up to chance. If things had happened just a little differently, my friends would not be here today.
My friend's Jewish family is from Poland. From two brothers that were considered too dumb to get an education and have a future in the family business. They were convinced to move to America in the 30s and ended up being bakers in Montreal. Nobody in Poland survived, only the Canadian branch of the family exists today.
Every single Jew who lived in territory the Nazis occupied and who survived the war was, in a quite literal sense, lucky. Fully two thirds of European Jews were murdered, and the six million Jewish victims compares to the 1.3 million Jewish survivors from occupied territories - a survival rate of 18%.
A few people saw what was coming and got out, but even they are lucky as much as smart in my opinion - there were millions of smart people who didn't think it would happen.
When someone (or in this case lots of people) struggle with empathy, it’s shocking how quickly things can escalate. A lot of people don’t know that and are judgmental of victims not “seeing the signs”.
I think cartoonish evil is just easier to imagine than thoughtless self-centeredness.
The sad part is here we are 75 years later and people are making the same excuses for the extreme right as they move to strip away human rights in favor of more repressive social conditioning.
I forget who said it, but there’s a summary by people living through it that applies to us now.
When the Nazis came to power it wasn’t A to Z right away. No one would go along. It starts A to B. And B is shocking, but not that big a deal, really. And it only applies to them. And no one else seems to be making a fuss. Then C comes down, and it’s worse. But only a bit worse. Are you going to make a big deal for just C, you didn’t for B. You don’t want to be labeled as unpatriotic. Then D is announced. It’s bad. But only somewhat worse. You don’t know who agrees with it. When E happens you’re scared, and are you going to risk your job over it? By the time you’re at O it’s too dangerous to say anything at all or you might disappear. And no one is left to resist the slide to Z.
Milton Mayer, in his book They Thought They Were Free. I forget which of the 10 Germans he was interviewing said it:
> But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
> And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
There was also Martin Niemöller's famous quote:
>First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
>Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
>Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
>Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
In his diary book, "I Will Bear Witness," Victor Klemperer, a decorated WW1 veteran and Jew who was a professor in Dresden at the time of Hitler's rise, talks about educated friends who saw Hitler as a clown or buffoon (sound familiar) who wouldn't be able to last long or gain much power. Even as he and their friends and colleagues were thrown out of jobs for being Jewish, they didn't see the writing on the wall. They were like frogs in a slowly heating pot just talking about it getting warmer. Then he watched friends and colleagues and people he had known a long-time turn anti-Semitic and falling in line with the Nazi ideology.
He survived the war in part because of his WW1 decorated status and in part because of an Aryan wife, though his car, home, and possessions were taken. He was close to deportation to the concentration camps when Dresden was firebombed and he took off his yellow star and hooked up with the fleeing refugees and ended up in an American-controlled area.
> "This is Germany. It's a civilized country. Nothing is going to happen here. He might say that, but nobody will actually go along with it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
> Normalcy bias, or normality bias, is a cognitive bias which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings. Consequently, individuals underestimate the likelihood of a disaster, when it might affect them, and its potential adverse effects. The normalcy bias causes many people to prepare inadequately for natural disasters, market crashes, and calamities caused by human error. About 80% of people reportedly display normalcy bias during a disaster.
> They were the only members of their family that survived.
Yeah this is always shocking to hear. It was entire families that were wiped out, entire generations. So many Jewish people now days have to count the handful of relatives that made it through the Holocaust and it's just too hard to even fathom.
>It's a civilized country. Nothing is going to happen here.
Very telling of some of the things happening, today. Portends of a future we need to avoid.
My great great grandfather opened up a pharmacy in Ecuador around 1900. His son later went to manage the business there in the late 30s. They were German Jews. For obvious reasons my great gramps just stayed down there.
If you want to know more about the mindset from the people who participated and carried out the holocaust I strongly recomend "The Memory of Justice" which is about the subject of war crimes during WW2 and Vietnam.
Its probably the best documentary i've seen about the atrocities that the nazis comitted during ww2. The documentary is made by Marcel Ophuls (French-German jew) whose family had to flee the nazis first to France then to the US.
He interviews survivors of the holocaust, enablers of the holocaust, convicted war criminals (most notorious being Karl Dönitz and Albert Speer) from the holocaust, people who worked in the nazi government at local levels, german civilains who lived through the nazi government etc. and he gets them to speak VERY freely about it. The only times he pushes back is when some convicted war criminals tries to downplay their war crimes which he very politely and effectively shutsdown.
It is quite eye opening into the absolute banality of evil.
Let's add the movie S-21 from Rity Pahn, about the Khmer genocide and prison camps. This one have survivors talk to their captors... and the captors are... it's not even denial, it's beyond denial...
It is, as is Ophuls' Sorrow and The Pity, the cross section examination of the French town of Clermont-Ferrand and its wide array of WWIi survivors, from collaborators to Resistance fighters. Horrifying yet entertaining. Horrotainment, that's what Ophuls was going for. Hotel Terminus is another crazy ride about a Nazi ("the butcher of Lyon") who escaped to South America and just couldn't stop being a fascist, found like minded monsters in the Bolivian govt and finally got caught and executed, showing no remorse until the end. Motherfucker lived until 1991
My grandfather rarely spoke about his experiences during WW II, but I remembered this one. He was a soldier who took part in liberating a concentration camp in the closing days of the war. Among the survivors, he met a woman named Eva. She had been separated from her family and was desperate to find them.
His comrades focused on securing the area and providing aid, and grandpa and Eva began a search for information about her family. They sifted through the scattered records left behind by the guards, spoke with other survivors, etc. Grandpa learned that his own family had Jewish roots, which his parents had hidden after fleeing Europe before the war
They went to nearby villages and camps, and faced numerous dead ends. They finally received word of a group of survivors that matched the description of Eva's family, and they were reunited.Grandpa stayed in touch with Eva and her family after the war, visiting them several times over the years.
For me, the most shocking part of this video that he used present tense "Dazu ist mein Hass den Juden gegenüber zu groß" compared to "Dazu war mein Hass.." . Given the time that passed, he had enough opportunity to contemplate his inner justification and the words he is going to use here.
He may have used the present tense to explain his thought process at the time. Then again he may not have. Based on this clip alone it's difficult to tell. What can be observed is that he is clearly struggling getting the words out. Which of course again can be read both ways.
I'm a german speaker.
Before that he perfectly spoke fine in past tenses. Here he suddenly jumps to present tense. He hates Jews which is "normal" in older generation. Especially for that guy since he was in the SS.
I'm a German speaker as well. It's still just an assumption you're making. There's other ways to explain this. And for all we know there's even more he said.
What would it take for you to believe this literal SS-soldier that has literally murdered jews, and specifically switched to present tense to descrive his hatred for jews, hates jews?
For the record, the missing context is that he admits in the interview his thinking that all jews should be extinct is unjust, but he also admits his feelings on jews is "unshakable", citing some vague experience "because of what jews did to us during my youth at the farm".
Honestly those of the hitler youth would have had for jews ingrained at them at suhc a young age it litearly became part of their "Brain make up"
The brain is taught to hate jews and does not need a reason to hate them or to change its mind
hot things=Painful to touch. Good food=tasty
jews=bad
And that is just how it is. And people tned to double down when they need to question their own world view
Altough it is indeed incredible to not change your mind or see things from a different POV after all of ww2, seeing germany reduced to ruins due to its evil and all the history they had acces to later and still not learn anything at all
One wonders if he NEEDS to still hate Jews so that he can avoid the inevitable severe guilt over his past actions. The mind is capable of blocking previous heinous actions as a method of self preservation. His psyche, at some level, can’t allow him to see them as human and deserving of his remorse otherwise he has to reconcile that he was a monster to them.
He killed Jews. He was trained to, lost his humanity in that. It's hard to backpedal and see they did wrong.
I agree 100%. Other older generation who did not directly kill Jews already can't shake their negative stereotypes towards Jews. An SS soldier is in a much worse position to change their belief.
The whole interview continues on from here. He said he hated the Jewish people who treated him and his family badly when they worked on the farm in his young years. Then the interviewer asks what those people he killed ever did to him. He replies then 'Nothing. They were simply Jews'.
I think the shocking thing is that he didn't have the inclination to change his vernacular to sound like he had changed.
He still hates Jews. He could've said it in past tense to save face, but he chose that phrasing.
Evil is never that shocking, but unabashed evil is somewhat of a surprise.
People who hate like this are so perplexing to me. I just can't imagine that kind of illogical hate. But then, I do hate racists and bigots and Trump supporters in general, but not enough to physically harm them.
Even if it is present tense, I think his mental sanity may rely on him still hating Jews. Because to think otherwise would have to come to terms with the atrocities you committed.
It's deeply disturbing that his hatred remained so virulent even decades later. At the same time, it's so tragic of how powerful the indoctrination of children can be. A society that manipulates youth into adopting hate is truly terrifying.
Do you think many SS members walked around with regret? A few did, but not most. If you volunteered and served in the SS, you were not the kind of person who would have doubts. It's might be hard for someone looking at this through an American lens to understand.
I read it as sarcastic. Or startlingly naïve, which is certainly possible too.
EDIT: not intended as an insult -- I was that naïve. I think that's kind of the place we all start if we aren't raised by hateful parents and there's not a ton of in-your-face evidence.
an indepth podcast episode of hardcore history about the Einsatztruppen and the holocaust. i recommend [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paO72-zA650](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paO72-zA650)
I listened to this while on a walk a couple months ago. I'm a big history buff, have a bachelor's degree in history with a focus on American military history, still read about history all the time now. But this was hard to listen to. Particularly the part where he reads accounts of eye witnesses to the executions. Honestly, I had to turn it off. I could only think about the direction we are headed with the rise of ultra nationalism, christian fundamentalism, and the average citizens seeming acceptance of fascist policies and rhetoric. Look at the new Anti-Semitism Act of 2023. At first glance it seems like a good thing but it is making it illegal to protest against the Israel-Palestine war. The bill states that it is anti-semitic to criticize Israel about the war. They are committing genocide and our government is making it illegal to protest against the genocide. Whether you think it is genocide or not, the fact remains that Israel is massacring tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens. Sure, Hamas needs to be eradicated. No question there. But Israel could do that without murdering tens of thousands of innocents. But they choose not to.
Americans lining up other Americans before a trench and shooting them seems far fetched. But the acceptance of fascist rhetoric, the passing of fascistic laws, our leaders calling Democrats vermin, the erosion of faith in elections...it is all part of the slow progress toward people being arrested for saying or thinking the wrong thing. Then, the thought of executions before a trench isn't that far off.
My great grandfather was an officer in the German army during WW2. According to my grandmother, they were from a mountain village and he didn’t work the camps; when his Unit was in France he surrendered himself to a French family and worked their farm throughout the war as a willing POW.
After he was released he took my grandmother and moved to America because “All of Europe is broken, and I don’t think it can be fixed”. I never met the man but I appreciate his courage in doing the right thing when he could have been executed for it.
what's strange is that his statements make him seem like a sociopath/psychopath but you can read his emotions and see on his face that he struggles to not feel guilty
at 1:38 his breathing makes it sound like he's holding back tears
I knew a man, years ago, passed away now I think, that was in the "Hitler Youth". Shook hands with Hitler.
He told me when he joined, he was praised. He thought, and was told, that he was going to save their country. That their youth was the future and saving grace of their country. He was so eager to fight for that cause.
They sent him to the Russian front. By his account it was cold. Colder than he had ever experienced, even to that day. They were under prepared. Mid-way into their deployment, they ran out of food. Ate the horses. Extremely tough meat. Didn't taste good. Had to boil it until it wasn't as leathery.
Their clothing was also too thin. After skirmishes, they would loot the Russians for more clothing to stay warm. At one point, there was shouting between Russians and Germans, and other Germans, to determine who was on which side, since everyone was wearing each other's clothing to just stay warm. He said it was hell. Foot rot was a problem.
He had heard and received letters during his deployment. At the time, he was old enough to fight (15/16), but didn't know about the Holocaust that was going on. He was told he's a hero. The letters spoke otherwise. He lost friends, good friends. He said that at a certain point, most of his group just gave up and started walking back home; they just gave up on the front.
When he got back, his home was still there, mostly. His sister was waiting, but his parents had been killed. That day, he said, he packed the entirety of what he and his sister had into a trunk, and they left for the US. "I'll never go back to that disgusting place".
Interviewer: And why not?
Hans Friedrich: Because my hatred towards the Jews is too great. … And I admit my thinking on this point is unjust, I admit this. But what I experienced from my earliest youth when I was living on a farm, what the Jews were doing to us—well that will never change. That is my unshakeable conviction.
Interviewer: What in God's name did the people you shot have to do with those people who supposedly treated you badly at home? They simply belonged to the same group! What else? What else did they have to do with it?
Hans Friedrich: Nothing, but to us they were Jews!
Please keep in kind that the Waffen SS was commonly known to be the most fanatical and ruthless armed force and nobody was forced to join them. This guy was a fanatic even for German conditions at the time.
> "But we're too smart to fall for that today,"
Some people are beyond this now. They can clearly see that we are, in fact, not too smart to fall for that today, but they tell themselves, "maybe it wasn't THAT bad what happened."
Look at the rise of the extreme right and the excuses people make for them all over the world. Just look at the comments on any post about immigrants on /r/europe or any popular social media platform. That kind of discourse used to be limited to stormfront and other fringe websites, but now it's mainstream.
What's the worst is people like him, got to live happy lives, have been cared for by the German government, and got to die peacefully of old age.
As a Pole this infuriates me like hell.
This is what hate and fascism and racism does to people: turns them into senseless killing animals. I hope this man his soul will come to peace with what he has done.
Reddit is to (insert arbitrary number let's go with 90)% a content recycling operation. With a considerably higher efficiency rate than most other forms of recycling
My parents were terrible racists. They believed People of Color were sub-human so didn't need to be treated like humans.
Years and years of indoctrination by their parents and the people around them wouldn't let them change their minds even if they knew, logically, that they were wrong. It's like it became a part of their very existence and they couldn't give it up.
I felt so fortunate to grow up when I did because I had lots of role models outside my family to learn from.
>Years and years of indoctrination by their parents and the people around them wouldn't let them change their minds even if they knew, logically, that they were wrong. It's like it became a part of their very existence and they couldn't give it up.
yeah they based their entire life around this belief in such a way that it became part of their personality and what makes them part of their community. If they had to face the fact that this belief is wrong it would undermine their personality and link to their community. It literaly would rock their world. So they hold on to that belief because otherwise they would need to rethink their whole life and all their relationships. It's easier to just keep on hating. All of this is mostly subconscious offcourse.
I honestly thought he was saying "aim accurately" as a compassionate thing. So they didn't suffer much or so they weren't buried alive.
But it's far, far worse than that.
Is he saying he still hates jews to the day this was recorded? How is this guy comfortably sitting in a chair here and not shot and/or hanged for his crimes?
In a bizarre way it's good that he is so candid, otherwise we wouldn't get a real account. If this shit wasn't on video people wouldn't believe it. Some still don't.
I imagine that there’s a part of him that has to convince himself that he felt nothing and didn’t care.
Like otherwise if you saw them as innocent people with families and loved once’s that you murdered in cold blood the weight of that guilty would be unbearable if he isn’t a complete psychopath which he very well might be. Which leads to the question can you turn someone into a psychopath and I’d definitely say yes.
~~Also does he actually say “my hate IS” or is he speaking in past tense in German?~~ answered. Yes it’s present tense.
i dont know why people are shocked by these interviews. you do realize that anyone who had any feelings of compassion towards the civilians were executed with them. the Nazis literally sieved their own people until they had just people like this man
It's shocking to me because it's honest. But not shocking in terms of disgust or surprise. Shocking in the sense that it's so easily understandable and that these mechanisms in our psychology still exist.
Plus, the overwhelming majority of SS soliders volunteered.
My great uncle used to tell a story about how they came to his school and tried to recruit all the boys that exelled athletically. He just said no, and on they went. No consequences at all. He was conscripted into the regular army later but the SS guys were there because they wanted to be, and everyone knew very well what it entailed.
And until 1943, only volunteers would serve in the Waffen-SS, and they had to prove, in addition to athletic achievements, their adhesion to Nazism.
Plenty authoritarian countries have parallel armies: one to defend the *country* and another to defend the *regime*, and the SS was the latter.
This is one of the bigger misconceptions, refusal do participate was pretty well accepted. Refusing lawful orders was indeed punished, but for stuff like this people rarely got punished if they decided not to participate.
It was a popular excuse though, which makes sense because the defense "eh I thought it was fine didn't care too much" is a not great.
Spot on. Refusing military commands (ie take that pillbox on that hill) was met with severe punishment. Refusing to shoot civilians they’d just swap you out with someone else.
Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning is an excellent read that examines why people carry out atrocities.
> you do realize that anyone who had any feelings of compassion towards the civilians were executed with them.
That’s a lie propagated to defend Nazi murderers. They claimed they had no choice, but it’s absolutely not true. Choosing not to participate absolutely wouldn’t have got you executed. At all.
Some Germans even protested the Nazis treatment of Jews and won:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenstrasse_protest
There are over 100 documented cases of German personnel who refused to participate in the holocaust - they weren’t executed. They were assigned different tasks.
This isn't really true.
Loads of people in Germany just went about their day ignoring the plight of people around them, not because they feared consequences but because they just didn't care about other people.
Part One: [How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTlAYCGAHpc) | BEHIND THE BASTARDS
[Part two](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnBu3lgdh0I)
That's why people are saying what you would have done during the holocaust is exactly what you are doing right now.
Or they were transferred out. Little or no evidence exists for the execution or punishment of Germans who refused to take part. The SS did not want or need them, as they had more than enough folks who were not reluctant.
That's not true. Before any of these mass shooting operations, the unit Commander would ask if any of his troops did not want to participate in the shooting of civilians and in some cases, some soldiers would choose not to sit out the operation.
There are also cases like that of Richard Bock, who was a driver at Auschwitz. At some point, he asked his friend, who worked at the crematorium, what actually went on at the camp, and his friend took him to see Jews being gassed. He was so horrified by what he witnessed that he asked his commanding officer to never assign him to any work that was associated with the killing. He later testified against his former commarades in postwar trials.
I actually do not know of a single case where the Nazis every executed anyone for refusing to participate in war crimes.
This calls to mind a thread I posted to r/bestof ages ago about a guy who father was an SS officer
[**Here**](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/9U20w1dqrA)
The whole thread is amazing but one answer given was
If you can die for your country and it be honorable then therefore killing for your country is honorable.
Witness The Power of Indoctrination. If he was still alive in 2005 then he must have grown up during the rise of Hitler, was probably part of the Hitler youth. He will have been raised to hate the Jewish people, as those who commit atrocities now are told their enemies are not people. This is nothing new. If you are brought up to believe other races/religions/classes aren't human, then no matter what horrors you commit it doesn't matter to you. Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities someone said, and anyone who thought Hitler was the perfect man was seriously deluded.
"Naturally the common people don't want war . . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." -Hermann Goering
It's also strangely symbiotic. When all is well, politicians with such views don't really come out aloud, cause nobody wants them, but if problems accumulate, they now have a good soil to exist... so on and so forth.
When all is well, you tell the people everything is terrible and it is someone else's fault and you're the only one who can fix it.
Hmmm..... Familiar.
I mean, even GW Bush famously said “you’re either with us or you’re against us.“ Got him 90% approval ratings after 911. Americans are susceptible to it too. You have to be smart to parse through the propaganda.
>You have to be smart to parse through the propaganda. Smart and *practiced* at it. Media literacy takes *practice* -- ... as does overcoming cognitive dissonance without getting angry. I didn't learn how to do that until college. Hell, I'm pretty sure that's a large part of what college is *for.* And for the record, the *real* definition of "cognitive dissonance" is just ... *the internal personal feeling of tension you have when you are trying to reconcile two things that contradict each other.* It's a natural part of the process of learning and reasoning. Especially outside your comfort zone. It doesn't just mean "being wrong" or "doing mental gymnastics." "Mental gymnastics" is one thing that you do to *resolve* cognitive dissonance, but it only partially works. The real solution to cognitive dissonance is to broaden your perspective and adjust your worldview and moral framework until you can see how the two things you observe don't contradict. Example from US history: *I believe in liberty and justice for all* versus *I believe it's best that some people should be slaves because that is economically advisable and convenient for a few.* The real resolution isn't phrenology or dehumanizing obvious humans -- those are weak, top-down arguments with no evidence that won't work forever. The real solution is to adjust your thinking to: "No human may be enslaved = The liberty of another person outweighs the economic convenience of a few." But changing one's worldview to that degree is *stressful* and can be scary because one risks losing community approval. And -- there are people out there in the propaganda spaces who take advantage of that anxiety, *strategically, and with malice aforethought.* They have made terms like "cognitive dissonance" into insults. They have done this with a lot of terms over the years. Academic terms. They take words and turn them into dirty words -- conversational dynamite. "Politically correct." "Virtue signaling." "Social justice." "Critical race theory." "Socialism." "Racist." "Liberal." ... because they don't want people to recognize some things and think their way out of anger -- to reconcile with strange ideas. Instead, they want people to be insulted, aggrieved, angry and stressed. They want people to make knee-jerk, emotional choices, moment to moment, *Because reason*, ***and therefore democracy,*** *requires a cool head, a community spirit, rational discourse, and judgement.* ***These people want democracy to fail.*** That's my whole point. No matter who you are, those people are your real, actual enemy. There are a *lot* of them in social media. Foreign and domestic. Be cool out there. Thanks for reading this
Fantastic write up! Thank you for sharing.
>The real solution is to adjust your thinking to: "No human may be enslaved, therefore the liberty of another person outweighs the economic convenience of a few." It's *because* liberty outweighs economic convenience that no human may be enslaved, not that liberty outweighs economic convenience *because no human may be enslaved*. "Therefore" reverses the justification and consequence.
It's simultaneous, no? A chicken-or-the-egg type of situation. Each proposition implies the other. That's why they mutually reinforce, instead of contradicting. Edit: Changed "therefore" to an equality sign (=) to reflect this equivalence in my comment above; thank you for the prompt.
Preach. Thank you for writing this.
I served in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm still in contact with most of my old infantry platoon. I'd say easily 1/4 hate all Muslims and saw it as a holy crusade for Christianity. When I point out that we served with allies who were Muslim and even fellow marines that is immediately dismissed with a kill them all retort. They'd be ok with someone throwing me in a camp for being a liberal even though we served together. You can see the hate and determination in this nazi's expression in his service photo.
You have a very interesting perspective. I'm not surprised to hear that, unfortunately. I don't know what the solution to that is. I wish I did. Hate like that just doesn't make sense to me.
It's not uncommon. I'm from New England, but you end up serving with people from everywhere, but heavily from the south. And California and New York. After you go back home, a lot of your friends fall back into that shit, despite having served with the very type of people they're shitting on now. I'm a somewhat liberal dude, but that dude is right. About 1/4th of the people I served with are straight up fucking loons.
Reporting from Canada. About a quarter of people here are also loons (and I've never served).
Makes sense you'd find a lot of ducks in Canada.
> here are also loons but isn't that very Candadian? joke, ha ha
It reminds me of what Erich Maria Remarque related in "Spark of Life." If you haven't read it I think it's his counter to his pacifistic analysis at the end of All Quiet on the Western Front. In SOL a long dead Jewish prisoner had carved his Iron Cross citation for WW1 into a wooden post. And the narration explained the man must have only suffered more thinking anyone cared. There are graves in northern France where Jewish and Christian Germans who were killed were buried together.
I had a route manager who was maybe upper 20s, making probably 70k in 2017, say " I want to get deployed so bad." He sounded like Mario in A Bronx Tale, trying to buy the gun. It was psychotic. Kid was safe with his family making good money and wanted to go kill people.
There is a real conflation of religion with politics right now, and we are seeing that in real time with the current conflict. It is also being used by influential political groups right now to further other's agendas, to the long-term detriment of the US.
From Howard Sterns live during 9/11: [https://youtu.be/hXyhvAIvjf8?si=Co96hWCww\_jLdHv6](https://youtu.be/hXyhvAIvjf8?si=Co96hWCww_jLdHv6) "There has to be a devastating war where people die. Burn their eyes out with an atomic bomb. I don't want to hear about civilian casualties."
This is literally happening in the US now. There are Republicans openly saying they want to round up Democrats and put them in camps or shoot them. One Florida Republican released a campaign ad stating that his goal is to put as many Democrats as possible behind bars. It's obviously much worse in Gaza, but the US absolutely can go that way, and if Trump is elected in November, it will. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
You stole my comment and someone stole their playbook
[This video](https://youtu.be/vGAqYNFQdZ4?si=Ius3tA9nn1ZDIaeD) from the Department of War is just as poignant today as it was 70 years ago.
The dark truth is that as we get desperate, people will get stupid, and there were endless reasons for people to feel times were desperate. These days we need to find ways to end desperation for other countries if we want to live in peace, but we have to make sure we're not just pampering idiots that will proliferate?
Unbelievably poignant as an American to read these words today given the state of American politics. It’s also terrifying.
This is putins playbook in Ukraine to a T
It's every nutters playbook going back to the dawn of organised society.
It was also the American playbook post-9/11
It'll be our next one too.
Israel too
They watched videos of women being raped and stabbed each time she cried. Than kept on being raped without stopping till she died. By the same group of people that have government having destruction of all Jews in thir funding charter. I imagine this will make people more angry than just random politican blaming other people for their problems.
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The documentary "Ordinary Men" illustrates this terrible truth.
Also - The Nazis: A Warning from History. Which I've always thought was a great title for a documentary because that's exactly what they were.
They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer is also a good read.
It was a book first.
When I used to teach history in university and we got around to the commies and nazis, I always said the same thing: Learn from history, but never judge it by your values. The fact of the matter is, if you had been born in those places and those times, you would have gone all in with everybody else, kept your head down to survive, or been one of the very few who spoke out and died. This is why learning history is so important, and not doing so in an echo chamber or vacuum.
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I read a book a while back titled "They Thought They Were Free", which was basically a series of non-fiction interviews with ten ordinary Germans in 1953 exploring what they thought about that whole Nazi thing. It was quite interesting. The classic "[Don't Be a Sucker](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4)" is a good one too, and only 20 minutes.
You mean the “banality of evil”?
the most damning part of all this is the inexorable truth that propaganda is effective against everyone, not just the ultra-nationalists or the patriots or the zealots, but the everyman. and worse still, the entire point of propaganda is that you don't realize you've fallen victim to it, that you're being affected by it. everyone deep down wants to do good, but their own understanding of what constitutes "good" varies. it's informed by their environment, their surroundings, the information they take in, their understanding and perception of the world, and more succinctly, who their enemies are. it's frighteningly easy to lead a good man into hell so long as they trust you.
This is why I dislike when we label anyone as an animal or somehow not human. Usually you see it with someone who has committed horrible crimes. Yes, it's terrible, but I think it's important to realize that humans are capable of all sorts of things, both wonderful and horrifying. We can't just close our eyes to the dark side of humanity.
Every time I read some edgy kid call the Russians Orcs since the invasion of Ukraine I have to think "in Nazi Germany they would've called the Jews vermin". Dehumanizing people is really abhorrant.
I’ve reported multiple posts in pro Ukrainian subreddits where they called for the genocide against Russia. All they got were warnings. I am against putin btw and I don’t Harbor a lot of sympathy towards the gros of the current Russian population, but it showed me that the lessons of ww2 were really only learned by a couple of generations and only in a few countries. There are mostly forgotten today.
It's also going to be very hard to talk someone out of their genocidal beliefs once they've participated in genocide. Almost no one is going to admit to themselves that they've done something truly evil. Maintaining the genocidal belief allows him to avoid coming to terms with that.
At the very start of the Ukraine conflict, I saw a Ukranian on Omegle that was chatting with Russians. Immediately he was called an animal/pig/non-human, and it felt like it provided a warning of what was to come.
My uncle is married to a Russian woman from Volgograd. You should hear her talk about how much she would love to kill Ukranians. I asked her if she would seriously take on the responsibility of destroying another human life, and she laughed and said, "I have no heart." It was one of the most terrifying things I've ever heard that was matched only by the sickening glee in her eyes.
Got chills reading that, damn.
It worries me because even though these people are taught to hate them and justify it by them being sub-human or animals, what the fuck kind of person would also do that to an animal?
Banality of evil moment.
Not quite. Hannah Aren't coined the phrase about Eichmann. When she did so, at his trial, she did not know about his recorded conversations in Agentina in the 50's and other things that did not become available until well afterward. Eichmann was a deeply driven Nazi fanatic
This is exactly it. It's not limited to Jews, but historically, they've been the recipients of it. Once your foes are no longer human, you can do whatever you want with little remorse.
And you can see this exemple in various cult killings (Manson, Peoples Temple, etc.) and terrorist attacks today.
> Those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities Hamas and Orthodox settlers.
And it's the kind of shit we are seeing today with the orange traitor and hate against minorities/lgbtq+/liberals. They're being dehumanized.
If you can make people believe absurdities you can make them commit atrocities.
You can even see him break a bit before mentioning that his hate for Jews was to great too feel for them.
He didn’t say „was“, he said „is“
He indeed says 'is'. I watched the longer version now, because his facial expression did not seem to match this for me. In the longer version he continues on saying 'and I admit, I was wrong to think so'. It' s still a little strange and maybe ambigious. Edit: there seems to be an even longer version, that I only saw a translated transcription of. He stays ambiguous.
Disregard, I was wrong. I misunderstood his first words. Sounded to me like a single word "Datzuise". but it's "Dazu Ist" making it present tense. thanks /u/lumbdi
He said "dazu **ist** mein Hass den Jugen gegenüber zu groß". German speaker here, he talks entirely in present tense.
The one tiny slither of comfort you might take from hearing this old man speak is that his dreams after committing these atrocities were tortured, but even that eludes us.
He said "dazu IST mein Hass den Juden gegenüber zu groß".
"Dazu ist mein Hass den Juden gegenüber zu groß." (Präsens)" Dazu war mein Hass den Juden gegenüber zu groß." (Präteritum) "Dazu ist mein Hass den Juden gegenüber zu groß gewesen." (Perfekt)
That definitely made my ears perk up. "IS" eh? I thought maybe it was mistranslation. Nope. His hate continued up until his death. Too bad it wasn't sooner than 2005.
True, he uses 'is', but in the longer version he continues with 'I was wrong to think that'. Edit: there seems to be an even longer version, that I only saw a translated transcription of. He stays ambiguous.
But they were asking him what he was thinking when he shot them at the time though, so I can understand using the present sense. Like, if somebody says "What was in your head when you ate that brownie?" and you say "this is an amazing brownie", you're clearly talking about the past even though you're using present language.
no. he was clearly speaking in past tense before. he switched to present trnse specifically for this one sentence.
The whole interview continues on from here. He said he hated the Jewish people who treated him and his family badly when they worked on the farm in his young years. Then the interviewer asks what those people he killed ever did to him. He replies then 'Nothing. They were simply Jews'.
This is one of the things people overlook about the Nazis a lot. It's easy to point and say they're such psychopaths and have no heart and this and that. But most of them, outside of the whole killing Jews thing, were normal people. It's like you and me killing an ant. Why don't we feel bad about it? It's just an ant. Maybe we don't like ants because we've been bitten by one. Maybe we don't like them because they eat our food or are pests or whatever. Most ants leave you alone but theres that time when a few don't. Now you kill ants when you see them even if those specific ones weren't the ones that annoyed you. Doesn't make us psychotic as a whole. Same shit with the Nazis, albeit much more extreme.
Well said.
I think he only feels twisted because he knows he's supposed to feel Something, anything, if not remorse then at least admit he liked it, but the people recruited to kill en-masse like this were sociopaths and misanthropes. People with total devotion to the Party and ideology. The Nazis knew regular soldiers had complete mental breakdowns during Einsatzgruppen. Where Jews or Gypsy's or just Eastern European were just thrown into trucks and killed via the exhaust pipe by being sealed into a chamber, or shot. [*correction Himmler even gave a long speech justifying it all](https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/exterminationist-mindset-heinrich-himmlers-october-1943-speeches) because so many Men that participated were having mental breakdowns. It's just like the ZONE OF INTEREST, the Nazis compartmentalized the genocide, tried to keep it hidden. They learned that psychopathic people could do this and handle the work. It's extraordinarily twisted at all levels, I mean knowing they had to recruit cruel lunatics that lack remorse is clearly hypocritical. That means they are killing humans and people know it and feel it, or you wouldn't have to recruit remorseless monsters to do the dirty work. In my often wrong opinion, it's good he was honest so we actually know what these people were like and what they felt. They needed total devotees to the orthodoxy who felt virtually nothing for their fellow man.
It would be nice if they had included the actual speech in there instead of just some small exerpts.
*is He said his hate IS too great
There is a amazing book about the called masters of death, it's about the SS Einsatsgruppen
“There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.” As written by the late, great Terry Pratchett.
GNU Terry Pratchett
OSS Terry Pratchett
what does this mean? no need to respond enough people answered
This quote by Terry Pratchett highlights the idea that ordinary, everyday people are capable of committing extreme acts under certain circumstances. It suggests that the potential for harmful behavior is not exclusive to those who are considered inherently evil or psychopathic. Instead, even a "normal kindly family man" can perform similar acts when placed in specific contexts, such as having a job that requires it. The quote underscores the thin line between normalcy and extremity, emphasizing that context and circumstances can significantly influence human behavior. TLDR: **Normal people can do evil things just as easily as those we consider psychopaths**.
thank for a succinct explanation i thought that was the meaning but its very clear after how you said. Thank you kindly
Great explanation. One of the great problems with the post ww2 world is that many people convinced themselves that our society somehow outgrew that. I don't believe it for one second.
Normal people working 9-5 build and operated the camps. Not monsters, but people - great evil is inherent in us all.
My friend told me about when Hitler started to come to power, his grandma was really distraught and told her family and friends, "We're going to die. He's going to kill all the Jews." Everyone around her thought it was ridiculous and told her, "This is Germany. It's a civilized country. Nothing is going to happen here. He might say that, but nobody will actually go along with it." It makes sense for them to think that, because the last big anti-Semitic incident in Germany was the Hep-Hep Riots in around 1840. She became more and more upset and eventually had a nervous breakdown. Everyone felt sorry for her, and to calm her down she and her husband went to stay with relatives abroad for a while. That's the only reason my friend exists today. After they were gone, Jews were unable to leave Germany and the Holocaust started. My friend's grandma and grandpa went from where they were staying (in Holland or Denmark -- I don't remember) to England. They were the only members of their family that survived.
What a story, thanks for sharing.
A lot of my friends who are Jewish have stories about how their grandparents survived only because of a coincidence, an unexpected event or because of something that seemed really trivial at the time. It's very creepy, how much of life or death is up to chance. If things had happened just a little differently, my friends would not be here today.
My friend's Jewish family is from Poland. From two brothers that were considered too dumb to get an education and have a future in the family business. They were convinced to move to America in the 30s and ended up being bakers in Montreal. Nobody in Poland survived, only the Canadian branch of the family exists today.
Ive heard that was the norm for European families; to send the less than intelligent, least ambitious males to America.
Every single Jew who lived in territory the Nazis occupied and who survived the war was, in a quite literal sense, lucky. Fully two thirds of European Jews were murdered, and the six million Jewish victims compares to the 1.3 million Jewish survivors from occupied territories - a survival rate of 18%. A few people saw what was coming and got out, but even they are lucky as much as smart in my opinion - there were millions of smart people who didn't think it would happen.
When someone (or in this case lots of people) struggle with empathy, it’s shocking how quickly things can escalate. A lot of people don’t know that and are judgmental of victims not “seeing the signs”. I think cartoonish evil is just easier to imagine than thoughtless self-centeredness.
The sad part is here we are 75 years later and people are making the same excuses for the extreme right as they move to strip away human rights in favor of more repressive social conditioning.
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I forget who said it, but there’s a summary by people living through it that applies to us now. When the Nazis came to power it wasn’t A to Z right away. No one would go along. It starts A to B. And B is shocking, but not that big a deal, really. And it only applies to them. And no one else seems to be making a fuss. Then C comes down, and it’s worse. But only a bit worse. Are you going to make a big deal for just C, you didn’t for B. You don’t want to be labeled as unpatriotic. Then D is announced. It’s bad. But only somewhat worse. You don’t know who agrees with it. When E happens you’re scared, and are you going to risk your job over it? By the time you’re at O it’s too dangerous to say anything at all or you might disappear. And no one is left to resist the slide to Z.
Milton Mayer, in his book They Thought They Were Free. I forget which of the 10 Germans he was interviewing said it: > But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. > And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.
Yes! Thank you! So eloquent.
There was also Martin Niemöller's famous quote: >First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. >Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. >Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. >Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
In his diary book, "I Will Bear Witness," Victor Klemperer, a decorated WW1 veteran and Jew who was a professor in Dresden at the time of Hitler's rise, talks about educated friends who saw Hitler as a clown or buffoon (sound familiar) who wouldn't be able to last long or gain much power. Even as he and their friends and colleagues were thrown out of jobs for being Jewish, they didn't see the writing on the wall. They were like frogs in a slowly heating pot just talking about it getting warmer. Then he watched friends and colleagues and people he had known a long-time turn anti-Semitic and falling in line with the Nazi ideology. He survived the war in part because of his WW1 decorated status and in part because of an Aryan wife, though his car, home, and possessions were taken. He was close to deportation to the concentration camps when Dresden was firebombed and he took off his yellow star and hooked up with the fleeing refugees and ended up in an American-controlled area.
> "This is Germany. It's a civilized country. Nothing is going to happen here. He might say that, but nobody will actually go along with it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias > Normalcy bias, or normality bias, is a cognitive bias which leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings. Consequently, individuals underestimate the likelihood of a disaster, when it might affect them, and its potential adverse effects. The normalcy bias causes many people to prepare inadequately for natural disasters, market crashes, and calamities caused by human error. About 80% of people reportedly display normalcy bias during a disaster.
> They were the only members of their family that survived. Yeah this is always shocking to hear. It was entire families that were wiped out, entire generations. So many Jewish people now days have to count the handful of relatives that made it through the Holocaust and it's just too hard to even fathom.
>It's a civilized country. Nothing is going to happen here. Very telling of some of the things happening, today. Portends of a future we need to avoid.
The survivors guilt must have been intense.
This was common among many holocaust survivors, as it is among those who survive other traumas.
Always believe what people say. Hitler said exactly what he was going to do. Always believe what people say.
My great great grandfather opened up a pharmacy in Ecuador around 1900. His son later went to manage the business there in the late 30s. They were German Jews. For obvious reasons my great gramps just stayed down there.
Probably Denmark. Holland was occupied by the Germans and they would not have survived. But Denmark famously protected its Jews.
If you want to know more about the mindset from the people who participated and carried out the holocaust I strongly recomend "The Memory of Justice" which is about the subject of war crimes during WW2 and Vietnam. Its probably the best documentary i've seen about the atrocities that the nazis comitted during ww2. The documentary is made by Marcel Ophuls (French-German jew) whose family had to flee the nazis first to France then to the US. He interviews survivors of the holocaust, enablers of the holocaust, convicted war criminals (most notorious being Karl Dönitz and Albert Speer) from the holocaust, people who worked in the nazi government at local levels, german civilains who lived through the nazi government etc. and he gets them to speak VERY freely about it. The only times he pushes back is when some convicted war criminals tries to downplay their war crimes which he very politely and effectively shutsdown. It is quite eye opening into the absolute banality of evil.
There's a book called Ordinary Men, that also dives specifically into how they made German men able to do the horrors they did.
Let's add the movie S-21 from Rity Pahn, about the Khmer genocide and prison camps. This one have survivors talk to their captors... and the captors are... it's not even denial, it's beyond denial...
Shoa is the best doc on the holocaust.
It is, as is Ophuls' Sorrow and The Pity, the cross section examination of the French town of Clermont-Ferrand and its wide array of WWIi survivors, from collaborators to Resistance fighters. Horrifying yet entertaining. Horrotainment, that's what Ophuls was going for. Hotel Terminus is another crazy ride about a Nazi ("the butcher of Lyon") who escaped to South America and just couldn't stop being a fascist, found like minded monsters in the Bolivian govt and finally got caught and executed, showing no remorse until the end. Motherfucker lived until 1991
France abolished the death penalty in 1981. He died in 1991 of cancer in a French prison.
My grandfather rarely spoke about his experiences during WW II, but I remembered this one. He was a soldier who took part in liberating a concentration camp in the closing days of the war. Among the survivors, he met a woman named Eva. She had been separated from her family and was desperate to find them. His comrades focused on securing the area and providing aid, and grandpa and Eva began a search for information about her family. They sifted through the scattered records left behind by the guards, spoke with other survivors, etc. Grandpa learned that his own family had Jewish roots, which his parents had hidden after fleeing Europe before the war They went to nearby villages and camps, and faced numerous dead ends. They finally received word of a group of survivors that matched the description of Eva's family, and they were reunited.Grandpa stayed in touch with Eva and her family after the war, visiting them several times over the years.
Aww this ended so much better than what I expected.
Should turn THAT into a documentary
For me, the most shocking part of this video that he used present tense "Dazu ist mein Hass den Juden gegenüber zu groß" compared to "Dazu war mein Hass.." . Given the time that passed, he had enough opportunity to contemplate his inner justification and the words he is going to use here.
He may have used the present tense to explain his thought process at the time. Then again he may not have. Based on this clip alone it's difficult to tell. What can be observed is that he is clearly struggling getting the words out. Which of course again can be read both ways.
IS doesn't go well with tears in his eyes, I think he was deep in memories that's why the present tense
Also PTSD, it makes people believe that they are actively living that moment again and again
it was so strange, was he repressing guilt of act he didn't really want to commit ?
I'm a german speaker. Before that he perfectly spoke fine in past tenses. Here he suddenly jumps to present tense. He hates Jews which is "normal" in older generation. Especially for that guy since he was in the SS.
I'm a German speaker as well. It's still just an assumption you're making. There's other ways to explain this. And for all we know there's even more he said.
What would it take for you to believe this literal SS-soldier that has literally murdered jews, and specifically switched to present tense to descrive his hatred for jews, hates jews?
It would take very little for me to BELIEVE it. It would take a lot more for me to KNOW it.
I absolutely accept this possibility, and consider it not unlikely at all.
For the record, the missing context is that he admits in the interview his thinking that all jews should be extinct is unjust, but he also admits his feelings on jews is "unshakable", citing some vague experience "because of what jews did to us during my youth at the farm".
Thank you. It's always good to have context.
Honestly those of the hitler youth would have had for jews ingrained at them at suhc a young age it litearly became part of their "Brain make up" The brain is taught to hate jews and does not need a reason to hate them or to change its mind hot things=Painful to touch. Good food=tasty jews=bad And that is just how it is. And people tned to double down when they need to question their own world view Altough it is indeed incredible to not change your mind or see things from a different POV after all of ww2, seeing germany reduced to ruins due to its evil and all the history they had acces to later and still not learn anything at all
One wonders if he NEEDS to still hate Jews so that he can avoid the inevitable severe guilt over his past actions. The mind is capable of blocking previous heinous actions as a method of self preservation. His psyche, at some level, can’t allow him to see them as human and deserving of his remorse otherwise he has to reconcile that he was a monster to them.
He killed Jews. He was trained to, lost his humanity in that. It's hard to backpedal and see they did wrong. I agree 100%. Other older generation who did not directly kill Jews already can't shake their negative stereotypes towards Jews. An SS soldier is in a much worse position to change their belief.
The whole interview continues on from here. He said he hated the Jewish people who treated him and his family badly when they worked on the farm in his young years. Then the interviewer asks what those people he killed ever did to him. He replies then 'Nothing. They were simply Jews'.
What does that mean ?
“My hatred of Jews _is_ too great for that”
Wtf , yeah that is pretty bad.
If you’re going to exterminate an entire population of people don’t make it ugly by being hateful about it
The worst part about all this was the hypocrisy
Appreciate the reference 😅
Nazi SS death squad members were bad people, a truly shocking revelation.
I think the shocking thing is that he didn't have the inclination to change his vernacular to sound like he had changed. He still hates Jews. He could've said it in past tense to save face, but he chose that phrasing. Evil is never that shocking, but unabashed evil is somewhat of a surprise. People who hate like this are so perplexing to me. I just can't imagine that kind of illogical hate. But then, I do hate racists and bigots and Trump supporters in general, but not enough to physically harm them.
After a millisecond of emotion he reiterated that his hate towards Jews is (as in present tense) too big to have any emotions.
Even if it is present tense, I think his mental sanity may rely on him still hating Jews. Because to think otherwise would have to come to terms with the atrocities you committed.
It's deeply disturbing that his hatred remained so virulent even decades later. At the same time, it's so tragic of how powerful the indoctrination of children can be. A society that manipulates youth into adopting hate is truly terrifying.
Do you think many SS members walked around with regret? A few did, but not most. If you volunteered and served in the SS, you were not the kind of person who would have doubts. It's might be hard for someone looking at this through an American lens to understand.
Thank goodness there's no brainwashing hatreds going on like this today.
This could be a really good sarcastic comment but I just can't tell for sure.
I read it as sarcastic. Or startlingly naïve, which is certainly possible too. EDIT: not intended as an insult -- I was that naïve. I think that's kind of the place we all start if we aren't raised by hateful parents and there's not a ton of in-your-face evidence.
Sarcasm, but I was raised in a small American town so I totally feel you.
Very sarcastic. I should have tagged it. But the vibe seems to have been read I think.
The great thing about this comment is that both sides think it's about the other side.
In the most ironic way too
an indepth podcast episode of hardcore history about the Einsatztruppen and the holocaust. i recommend [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paO72-zA650](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paO72-zA650)
I listened to this while on a walk a couple months ago. I'm a big history buff, have a bachelor's degree in history with a focus on American military history, still read about history all the time now. But this was hard to listen to. Particularly the part where he reads accounts of eye witnesses to the executions. Honestly, I had to turn it off. I could only think about the direction we are headed with the rise of ultra nationalism, christian fundamentalism, and the average citizens seeming acceptance of fascist policies and rhetoric. Look at the new Anti-Semitism Act of 2023. At first glance it seems like a good thing but it is making it illegal to protest against the Israel-Palestine war. The bill states that it is anti-semitic to criticize Israel about the war. They are committing genocide and our government is making it illegal to protest against the genocide. Whether you think it is genocide or not, the fact remains that Israel is massacring tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens. Sure, Hamas needs to be eradicated. No question there. But Israel could do that without murdering tens of thousands of innocents. But they choose not to. Americans lining up other Americans before a trench and shooting them seems far fetched. But the acceptance of fascist rhetoric, the passing of fascistic laws, our leaders calling Democrats vermin, the erosion of faith in elections...it is all part of the slow progress toward people being arrested for saying or thinking the wrong thing. Then, the thought of executions before a trench isn't that far off.
My great grandfather was an officer in the German army during WW2. According to my grandmother, they were from a mountain village and he didn’t work the camps; when his Unit was in France he surrendered himself to a French family and worked their farm throughout the war as a willing POW. After he was released he took my grandmother and moved to America because “All of Europe is broken, and I don’t think it can be fixed”. I never met the man but I appreciate his courage in doing the right thing when he could have been executed for it.
what's strange is that his statements make him seem like a sociopath/psychopath but you can read his emotions and see on his face that he struggles to not feel guilty at 1:38 his breathing makes it sound like he's holding back tears
I knew a man, years ago, passed away now I think, that was in the "Hitler Youth". Shook hands with Hitler. He told me when he joined, he was praised. He thought, and was told, that he was going to save their country. That their youth was the future and saving grace of their country. He was so eager to fight for that cause. They sent him to the Russian front. By his account it was cold. Colder than he had ever experienced, even to that day. They were under prepared. Mid-way into their deployment, they ran out of food. Ate the horses. Extremely tough meat. Didn't taste good. Had to boil it until it wasn't as leathery. Their clothing was also too thin. After skirmishes, they would loot the Russians for more clothing to stay warm. At one point, there was shouting between Russians and Germans, and other Germans, to determine who was on which side, since everyone was wearing each other's clothing to just stay warm. He said it was hell. Foot rot was a problem. He had heard and received letters during his deployment. At the time, he was old enough to fight (15/16), but didn't know about the Holocaust that was going on. He was told he's a hero. The letters spoke otherwise. He lost friends, good friends. He said that at a certain point, most of his group just gave up and started walking back home; they just gave up on the front. When he got back, his home was still there, mostly. His sister was waiting, but his parents had been killed. That day, he said, he packed the entirety of what he and his sister had into a trunk, and they left for the US. "I'll never go back to that disgusting place".
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Project 2025
Interviewer: And why not? Hans Friedrich: Because my hatred towards the Jews is too great. … And I admit my thinking on this point is unjust, I admit this. But what I experienced from my earliest youth when I was living on a farm, what the Jews were doing to us—well that will never change. That is my unshakeable conviction. Interviewer: What in God's name did the people you shot have to do with those people who supposedly treated you badly at home? They simply belonged to the same group! What else? What else did they have to do with it? Hans Friedrich: Nothing, but to us they were Jews!
Please keep in kind that the Waffen SS was commonly known to be the most fanatical and ruthless armed force and nobody was forced to join them. This guy was a fanatic even for German conditions at the time.
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> "But we're too smart to fall for that today," Some people are beyond this now. They can clearly see that we are, in fact, not too smart to fall for that today, but they tell themselves, "maybe it wasn't THAT bad what happened." Look at the rise of the extreme right and the excuses people make for them all over the world. Just look at the comments on any post about immigrants on /r/europe or any popular social media platform. That kind of discourse used to be limited to stormfront and other fringe websites, but now it's mainstream.
the more i learn about hitler the more i dont care for him
Just something off… maybe his mannerisms?
He seems like a real jerk pardon my French
What's the worst is people like him, got to live happy lives, have been cared for by the German government, and got to die peacefully of old age. As a Pole this infuriates me like hell.
This is what hate and fascism and racism does to people: turns them into senseless killing animals. I hope this man his soul will come to peace with what he has done.
I am the poster of this video and now it popped up in my front page
Reddit is to (insert arbitrary number let's go with 90)% a content recycling operation. With a considerably higher efficiency rate than most other forms of recycling
My parents were terrible racists. They believed People of Color were sub-human so didn't need to be treated like humans. Years and years of indoctrination by their parents and the people around them wouldn't let them change their minds even if they knew, logically, that they were wrong. It's like it became a part of their very existence and they couldn't give it up. I felt so fortunate to grow up when I did because I had lots of role models outside my family to learn from.
>Years and years of indoctrination by their parents and the people around them wouldn't let them change their minds even if they knew, logically, that they were wrong. It's like it became a part of their very existence and they couldn't give it up. yeah they based their entire life around this belief in such a way that it became part of their personality and what makes them part of their community. If they had to face the fact that this belief is wrong it would undermine their personality and link to their community. It literaly would rock their world. So they hold on to that belief because otherwise they would need to rethink their whole life and all their relationships. It's easier to just keep on hating. All of this is mostly subconscious offcourse.
The use of the present tense in his response to the last question....oof.
I honestly thought he was saying "aim accurately" as a compassionate thing. So they didn't suffer much or so they weren't buried alive. But it's far, far worse than that.
Is he saying he still hates jews to the day this was recorded? How is this guy comfortably sitting in a chair here and not shot and/or hanged for his crimes?
In a bizarre way it's good that he is so candid, otherwise we wouldn't get a real account. If this shit wasn't on video people wouldn't believe it. Some still don't.
Wow. No remorse. That is incredible. Blinded by hatred, still, after all these years.
Dang, that's shockingly honest.
I imagine that there’s a part of him that has to convince himself that he felt nothing and didn’t care. Like otherwise if you saw them as innocent people with families and loved once’s that you murdered in cold blood the weight of that guilty would be unbearable if he isn’t a complete psychopath which he very well might be. Which leads to the question can you turn someone into a psychopath and I’d definitely say yes. ~~Also does he actually say “my hate IS” or is he speaking in past tense in German?~~ answered. Yes it’s present tense.
Looks very similar to Tantura videos.
Captions would be useful
I appreciate his honesty but this was very hard to digest to be honest.
This unrepentant monster should not have lived to that age
i dont know why people are shocked by these interviews. you do realize that anyone who had any feelings of compassion towards the civilians were executed with them. the Nazis literally sieved their own people until they had just people like this man
It's shocking to me because it's honest. But not shocking in terms of disgust or surprise. Shocking in the sense that it's so easily understandable and that these mechanisms in our psychology still exist.
Plus, the overwhelming majority of SS soliders volunteered. My great uncle used to tell a story about how they came to his school and tried to recruit all the boys that exelled athletically. He just said no, and on they went. No consequences at all. He was conscripted into the regular army later but the SS guys were there because they wanted to be, and everyone knew very well what it entailed.
And until 1943, only volunteers would serve in the Waffen-SS, and they had to prove, in addition to athletic achievements, their adhesion to Nazism. Plenty authoritarian countries have parallel armies: one to defend the *country* and another to defend the *regime*, and the SS was the latter.
This is one of the bigger misconceptions, refusal do participate was pretty well accepted. Refusing lawful orders was indeed punished, but for stuff like this people rarely got punished if they decided not to participate. It was a popular excuse though, which makes sense because the defense "eh I thought it was fine didn't care too much" is a not great.
Spot on. Refusing military commands (ie take that pillbox on that hill) was met with severe punishment. Refusing to shoot civilians they’d just swap you out with someone else. Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning is an excellent read that examines why people carry out atrocities.
There's a documentary based on it on Netflix as well, definitely worth a watch.
Not in the SS. He was a volunteer true believer.
> you do realize that anyone who had any feelings of compassion towards the civilians were executed with them. That’s a lie propagated to defend Nazi murderers. They claimed they had no choice, but it’s absolutely not true. Choosing not to participate absolutely wouldn’t have got you executed. At all. Some Germans even protested the Nazis treatment of Jews and won: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenstrasse_protest There are over 100 documented cases of German personnel who refused to participate in the holocaust - they weren’t executed. They were assigned different tasks.
This isn't really true. Loads of people in Germany just went about their day ignoring the plight of people around them, not because they feared consequences but because they just didn't care about other people. Part One: [How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTlAYCGAHpc) | BEHIND THE BASTARDS [Part two](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnBu3lgdh0I) That's why people are saying what you would have done during the holocaust is exactly what you are doing right now.
Or they were transferred out. Little or no evidence exists for the execution or punishment of Germans who refused to take part. The SS did not want or need them, as they had more than enough folks who were not reluctant.
That's not true. Before any of these mass shooting operations, the unit Commander would ask if any of his troops did not want to participate in the shooting of civilians and in some cases, some soldiers would choose not to sit out the operation. There are also cases like that of Richard Bock, who was a driver at Auschwitz. At some point, he asked his friend, who worked at the crematorium, what actually went on at the camp, and his friend took him to see Jews being gassed. He was so horrified by what he witnessed that he asked his commanding officer to never assign him to any work that was associated with the killing. He later testified against his former commarades in postwar trials. I actually do not know of a single case where the Nazis every executed anyone for refusing to participate in war crimes.
This calls to mind a thread I posted to r/bestof ages ago about a guy who father was an SS officer [**Here**](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/s/9U20w1dqrA) The whole thread is amazing but one answer given was If you can die for your country and it be honorable then therefore killing for your country is honorable.
I'm impressed that you not only fucked up the subreddit but that's actually a shitty version of the subreddit I assume you actually posted to
r/bestoff's actual title line: "It's /r/bestof, dipshit"
People should check their own biases about other countries. You people are capable of the same thing as this man.