--- Damon Agretto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > But, Nazi Germany was not really a totalitarian > > regime. Damon pointed out > > they were not really fully mobilized until '43 or > > '44. > > To expand on this, theres a lot of evidence that > suggests that Germany didn't become a "police state" > until sometime in 1944. Before that time the German > government didn't interfere in the personal lives of > "normal" Germans. > > Damon.
Just to echo that (I've talked about this subject on the list as well) Germany becoming a police state is usually traced to the bomb plot against Hitler. After that, he really cracked down. Before the bomb plot you would (if you were an "Aryan" of course - and I wonder how Hitler would have felt if anyone had told him that I am one and he wasn't?) have had a non-trivial level of personal freedom, and even some ability to resist the government in minor ways. You could certainly be coerced into fighting in the German army, but so far as I am aware there is little or no evidence of any active coercion forcing people to work in the death camps, SS, etc. Hitler was able to rule the way he did because, as far as all the evidence I have seen says, he was very popular in Germany at least until 1943, maybe even later. And while we can argue about whether he was popular _because of_ the Holocaust, he certainly wasn't popular _despite_ the Holocaust. People knew about it, and it didn't seem to bother them all that much. It's worth noting, though, that (for example) lots of people in the West knew about Stalin's purges, which killed at least _twice_ as many people as the Holocaust did, and that didn't stop them from defending him either. Alger Hiss was a spy, to pick one example - there literally can no longer be any doubt about that fact. There were lots of other Soviet agents in the US and Great Britain. There were also lots of other people who were not spies, but were certainly sympathizers, pepole who knew what was going on in the USSR, and they _just didn't care_. Being passive in the face of, or even actively supporting, governments that carried out genocide in the middle years of the twentieth century was not a crime limited to German or Japanese citizens. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
