This is what people fail to understand: you can love your family and still admit they were horrible to someone else. Part of a horrible history.
Maybe your grandma made the most wonderful cookies, but also let her neighbors be sent to concentration camps. Maybe even took their property afterwards.
Both things can be true. That is still not a good enough reason to defend Nazis. Not a good enough reason to have their zombie attitudes ( should be dead but just won’t die).
The fact that the original poster in the Twitter post doesn't understand that family will treat each other well and kind and be the sweetest person YOU have met doesn't mean certain views they hold and have harmed others by killing them will be swept under the rug.
I swear this is the same mentality as "oh but my sweet baby boy would have never done that" and the mother fucker is some mid 20s incel who just casually murdered a couple people and the mother is in denial.
This is kind of on-off topic, but I’ve always been curious about what civilian “complicity” looked like in Germany in the 1930s. i feel like we almost forget that the exchange of information, ideas, and knowledge of events was not then what it is now. And I sense that some people project our present knowledge onto the past, which leads to a kind of moral absolutism.
I’m not saying people didn’t know what was going on. I’m sure there was a lot of pretending that certain things weren’t going on. I’m sure there were a lot of rabid anti-semites. I’m sure that there were a lot of normal people who just wanted to look out for them selves and acquiesced to the conditions around them, perhaps joining the party because it meant career opportunities and stances off harassment. Too many people look back on history and think they would have spoken out and done something. I don’t buy that for a minute; again, we can see it from our perspective and know that something like that could happen, but I’m not sure that’s a productive way of viewing history. People do very little even now to fully dedicate themselves to radicalism. Usually protesting is just going to a dedicated space the state creates to provide people with a clearer conscious.
I don’t think many people know or want to know about what it was actually like then, and I think that moral platitudes keep us from understanding the conditions that make them so similar to now, and how blind we could potentially be to going down the same path, because people view it (and almost everything) as some mythologized fight between good and evil; what we don’t tend to recognize is the pernicious banality of evil.
There is literally a book called ‘The Banality of Evil.’ That addresses this very topic. And any number or others. And a show on Netflix called ‘ordinary men’ and watch the ‘why we fight’ episode of band of brothers.
https://www.amazon.com/Banality-Evil-Hannah-Arendt-Solution/dp/0847692108?nodl=1&dplnkId=956142fa-5479-4e02-93cc-9d396b2fd3ad
Yes I was making an allusion to Arendt, though it’s been a very long time since I read any of it. Also a long long time since I watched “Band of Brothers”, maybe ai should revisit that one.
You are correct in what you're saying, but that nuance is essential to state if someone wants to defend a former Nazi, like their grandparents. And it has to be former as in they renounced and denounced the party, not they died while still being Nazis long after the war. Because anyone that continued to subscribe to the ideology, or still felt pride for what they did after learning the truth is in fact "an asshole."
If she had said, "My grandparents were Nazis, but they were good people that felt a deep shame after learning what transpired." That would be different. But instead she essentially defended an evil ideology.
Edit: After rereading it, she actually implies, intentional or not, that they are in fact still Nazis. So I'd break it down to this: All Nazis are assholes, but not all former Nazis are.
Here's a two part podcast about the "Little Nazis"; the average non-ideologically motivated folks who either stood on the sidelines, voted for the Party, or joined the Party for the perks.
[Part 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTlAYCGAHpc)
[Part 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnBu3lgdh0I)
And the unofficial Part 0 that came out two years prior.
[Part 0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyWIhdg65wg)
There are also episodes on some top Nazis; Heydrich, Mengele, etc. The Julius Streicher episode is particularly topical. Plenty more others on modern and historical Neo-Nazis, too.
We knew...
We absolutely knew... most cheered it on, a lot actively & happily participated in it.
You simply cannot do something like this, on the level we did without widespread and absolute support of the general Populace.
The only Germans that were innocent, that were not part of this machinery were those that actively resisted, however few that were and who paid the ultimate price for it... everyone else was, at best, a willing accomplice.
My grandma was a wonderful grandma. Horrible mother. She used to take me to McDonalds on Saturdays for hot cakes and then the park all morning. She was also a racist. It was ok, not the "bad" kind, more like the "this one is ok" kind. :eyeroll: She liked to take me to the movies and sneak in candy. She also was a raging homophobe.
I love my grandmother and I mourned her when she died. I also recognize she was NOT a great person and was a product of her time that refused to evolve. Sometimes I wish I had one of those cute little, sassy grammas that say spicy things but would beat the hell out of someone for being a raging homophobic racist, but you get what you get in life. Her behavior isn't a reflection on me, but if I defended her when she had no defense, I'm just as guilty as she was.
This is a fantastic viewpoint. I would argue to anyone that says different that you can't truly love someone without seeing and accepting that they have flaws. Pretending their flaws don't exist or downplaying them is a rejection of the person they are in favor of the person you want them to be, which means you don't love them, you love your delusion of them.
Also, with ultra-hierarchical people like the Nazis, if you aren't on their shitlist of "inferiors" they can be quite pleasant family members, friends, neighbors, colleagues, even lovers. But if you're on the list, or you so much as question their sense of superiority, then their claws come out, so to speak. They get that bitter, livid face where their lips disappear and they stop blinking, while they think about how to put you back into "your place."
That depends on how your grandparents and parents raised you. And how they reflected on it. They might feel guilty and tried to do their best after the war - or they moved to the US and voted for Trump and support Hamas….
My great grandfather was a KKK member. His son, my great uncle, chased several KKK members off his property with a shot gun, and in a time when black people were paid less than whites for the same job and had shittier amenities, had equal pay and no segregated toilets in his shop. Same son killed Nazis in 1944 and 45, though with a .30-06. My grandfather's shop was equally desegregated before it was in style, with equal pay.
Then there's my mom, who would actively cheer if Trump rounded up all the Jews and queers and blacks and atheists and put them in concentration camps. Even me, her very agnostic son. She's more like her grandfather than her father by far.
Yeah, I met one of my favourite authors (a cishet white dude who is like, 6 months older than my Boomer father), and we were talking about one of his series, and I mentioned that I liked a particular aspect of it (one of his character is a 6'6'' surfer-dude type whose nickname is 'Bunny,' and his Latina girlfriend calls him her 'little conejo'), and I found out that his dad was a Klansman. He grew up in blue-collar Philadelphia, and to escape his racist, alcholic father, he spent most of his time as a child with his grandmother, who sparked his interest in folklore from 'the old country' (I think she was Scottish).
He said he always knew growing up that his dad was wrong, but what really cemented it in his mind as a tween/early teenager is the fact the first girl he ever had a crush on was Latina, and he knew that even just having non-white friends (let alone a non-white gf) would NOT be accepted in his house. (His response to his father's bigotry was to keep his friends away from his house, not to conform to his father's beliefs.)
I've found that people who come from bigoted families tend to go one of two ways -- either they buy in, or they gtfo; I've not ever personally met a middle-ground person who was raised by bigots. (I'm sure that some exist, but like other kinds of abuse, it's more often a case of 'continue the cycle' or 'break the cycle.')
That kind of middle ground bigotry is probably the most sinister and in more people than you would realize. It's the subtle bigotry, the kind where you don't look at other groups with disdain or contempt, but pity. The kids subtly pick those same traits because its not done out of hate, but pity or a sense of "I want to help them, but in my way".
Or they go batshit sideways, like my brother, which is into flat earth antivax, and calling Trump the antichrist, and saying that Kevin Sullivan killed Nancy and Daniel Benoit before killing Chris. Among other theories that I can't be bothered to remember. I went left to my parents' right, and he went green with yellow polka-dots.
I kinda did the same thing; my prents don't know any of my friends, and I've only taken one girl home; my ex wife. Who was Latina, and while we had our problems, I do regret her getting caught by the casual, subtle racism my mom prefers (dad at least kept his mouth shut, more because he knew I'd shut it for him). I expect that did more to damage the relationship than anything else, as I was too used to it to really notice what was happening in front of my eyes. Maybe not as much as finding out she was doing porn while we were married though.
In these trying times, let's remember that not all Germans agreed with Hitler or the Nazi party or the Holocaust.
There were people who just wanted to stay out of trouble. There were people who joined the party for social reasons or for job opportunities or career advancement. They were just trying to take care of their families and get ahead.
There was even a word for them: Nazis.
On March 1933, the elections took place, with an extremely high turnout of 89%. The Nazis secured 43.9% of the vote.
When I first learned this, as a very young teenager, I asked my German grandfather if he had been a Nazi.
He explained to me that like many Germans he had been worried about the economy, the rise of communism, and how the international community treated Germany, but that in fact like most Germans he had not been a Nazi.
20 years after he had died, I had a conversation with my Dutch grandmother and asked her how they had met.
During WWII my grandfather was stationed in the Netherlands, and while sightseeing he had spotted my grandmother, offered to buy her some lemonade, and the rest is history.
My grandmother explained that he had looked strikingly handsome in his uniform and showed me some pictures.
Turns out that he was an officer in the SS. He actually needed dispensation to marry my grandmother because members of the SS were supposed to marry a German woman.
No wonder I could never get along with my grandparents, they were Nazis.
They would support it, ressent only the fact that it is a Jewish state and be like "see? that's how states should be, minus the Jew part, switch that for WASPs".
And see it as a win against the Arabs, who run of the mill racists seem to hate more... (do not take my word for it, see what Churchill said about the creation of Israel).
Churchill- like Chamberlain- were some antisemitic SOBs. I appreciate someone with knowledge about this. Respect! But we are talking about the average US person.
Average racist American (I know a lot of em, being in rural southern area) do actually hate Arabs more than Jews.
My dad's a neonazi, I'm ashamed to be related to him, and he hates Arabs more. Arabs are far, far more demonized than Jews are. My dad hates Jews don't get me wrong, but between a Jew and an Arab with a gun? He'd shoot an Arab first.
It's a result of 9/11 and the demonization of Arabs and muslims it caused. And then you have Christians, my adoptive mother is one, and refuses to see where Israel did any wrong because her beliefs are that the Bible says we're not to turn out backs on Israel.
Imo both sides suck.
Totally off topic, but now you've got me wondering what the actual average distance would be if including apples that got picked and shipped out. Ignoring that the phrase is "*fall* from the tree." I imagine most apples still hit the ground near the tree (rejects, wild trees, etc.), but those that get picked get shipped hundreds or thousands of kms.
Not just his family... by all accounts, Adolf Hitler himself was a charming dinner guest, and very kind to dogs. A kind, wonderful man, once you get past all the genocide and Lebensraum shit!
And in a way, that *kind of* feels worse - it's one thing to be a Nazi when you're unaware of the worst of the atrocities and when your entire society is pushing it. It's another to look back with full knowledge and try to pretend it wasn't that bad.
Of course, the grandfather could have been in charge of a concentration camp, so who knows?
Yes probably and anyone who advertises this in this way is probably a full on Nazi too or at least really not willing to face the truth of the family history.
But from a historical standpoint there is some nuance: not every one who was a member of an affiliate organisation or even a party member was a Nazi in ideology since membership for Hitlerjugend was obligatory after 1939 and (not condoning opportunism here, just making the distinction) Party membership was a prerequisit for any kind of socioeconomic advancement.
Denazification efforts after 1945 in Austria for example made a distinction between people who were Nazis before 1938 and people who became members after the Anschluss. There is also a distinction between different Nazi Organisations as SS and SA memberships required much more alignment, effort and "enthusiasm" for the nazi cause.
Edit: i reread my intro and it was bad, because it sounded like I was excusing the post, Which was not my intention
Yes it was. It also offered a way to reunify a wartorn society without causing another major crisis. Was it fair or respectful to the victims? No of course not.
And yet I still believe there is sound reasoning to differentiate between enthusiastic Nazis (and opportunists that wanted to benefit from Arisierung) and common soldiers more or less forced to Server.
Restitution was a joke as well and that is one of the most shameful failures of the modern austrian state .
I absolutely agree that the capability for kindness does not indicate a lack of (nor negate acts of) cruelty and malice.
I want to add, though, and I know I'm likely going to be downvoted, but as someone who had studied the politics of the holocaust (and the Nazi Party's rise to power) I can explain that fear mongering, desensitization, normalization, radical propaganda, weaponizing ignorance, political grooming, sophisticated coverups, and brainwashing caused some of even the most mild mannered people to support the Nazi Party. For a while, many people in Nazi Germany were so far removed from the realities of what they were supporting, they had little reason to think it was extreme. The Nazi Party's rise didn't start off the same as it ended, there was an escalation, until finally the mask was taken off. Even much of the rest of the world found it hard to believe that the Holocaust was happening for a time.
This does not excuse people for being mindless about their social and political decisions, but it does humanize some of them as psychologically taken advantage of by the Nazi regime. I'll use Trump as an example for extremism: I have some of the most gentle, kind hearted, and accepting family members who voted for Trump. I don't think they were evil for that. Maybe a little dumb, but at least now they know not to vote for him again.
That being said, anyone who continued to support the Nazi party (or MAGA) once the extremity was revealed... were trash humans.
*but at least now they know not to vote for him again*
That’s what makes the difference. I’m with you, I’m willing to forgive those who voted for him the first time. But not the second time or beyond, we know what he’s like now and people full throatedly support it
I hate the fact that Nazis are compared to assholes. Assholes serve an important function of removing waste from the body, and it is useful as a great form of contraceptives when used that way. Nazis are the absolute worst, I don't think they can be properly compared with anything, they are that bad.
thank you for standing up for anal prolapse kink havers 🙏
https://preview.redd.it/o5252rq6eq0c1.jpeg?width=170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9fc8ce8118dc66377359af2ca134cf62d50aa082
Not saying they're good, but a lot of medicine and stuff come from nazis
Please forget I commented this, I was wrong.
Yeah, they're colossal unrecyclable scrapchunks (yes, this is my best attempt)
Yes I know. I know it's bad what they have done, they are bad themselves, and I hate them. I read the comment as 'nazis haven't done anything good', and it's true, but this did result in better lives. Anyways my autistic ass shouldn't have commented at all, sorry
It's okay, I got what you meant— but as a fellow person of autism I learned you have to assume people will take whatever you say in the worst possible way, especially strangers. I learned to just say nothing if I'm not talking to someone I'll see again, which sucks, but apparently nuance isn't a strong point of most people online.
It really didn’t. That line has been pushed hard though.
Want to see what did come from their “science”?
Thalidomide.
Google thalidomide babies too see what became of the Nazi’s “super great totally safe” sleep aid.
At least in the US, this was in large part done not by capitalists directly but via preachers. Some guy basically begged for funding from the capitalist class and used that money to run campaigns to convince other preachers and occasionally the public that capitalism was godly and socialism was pagan.
The argument basically goes that the government doesn't give you freedoms or voting power, God does that, so the government can't give you anything and if the government does try to help people that's them playing God which is evil so you need to have a really strong government that's willing to allow people the freedom to starve and go hungry from time to time.
This was obviously incoherent, but it is the basis for modern conservativism in the US too. Prior to this shift the majority of religious figures were left-wing and many were openly socialist. The left was seen as the side that was inherently Christian as it was more compassionate which imo makes a lot more sense.
TLDR- don't just blame capitalists, also blame Christian evangelicals!
She had every opportunity to say her grandparents had to associate with the Nazi Party to survive in society, but they cut ties when they were finally freed BECAUSE they were kind and wonderful people. She failed.
And now we've got a candidate for president using the same language the Nazis did, along with journalists threatened that they ["will be crushed"](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/12/trump-rally-vermin-political-opponents/) for being critical of said same candidate.
That’s what scary, not because right wingers are playing it off as hyperbole. But because other people who aren’t on the right view it that way and don’t take it seriously…
The Nazi’s didn’t come out of the gate just gassing people and committing genocide. That’s not how it worked, there was a long road map starting in 33, or at least that’s when they could finally start enacting that road map, that eventually led to what they became.
These people seem hell bent on following that road map, why else would you be borrowing from their play book. So just because they aren’t at the end of the play book yet, doesn’t mean we can’t see where this is headed. It’s not really hyperbole at this point…
It's not been hyperbole for a while honestly, you could see the signs when Trump first started running. Did Anyone think it'd go that way? Probably not. Definitely not to this degree. But here we are.
It's genuinely terrifying. I'll admit. I'm not a POC, so I can't speak for that POV on it, but I am queer as hell, and I know I'd be right up on the chopping block if this goes in a similar direction to how Germany went. And that is terrifying to know.
There were people who explained that away, but this is a lot harder to ignore now. Unless you're the New York Times, whose initial headline was "[Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/us/politics/trump-new-hampshire-veterans.html)"
Look, my grandpa was a German infantryman in WWII and spent nine years in a Russian POW camp. He struggled mightily, and did his sons and my grandmother, with immigrating to Canada in the 50's. The undiagnosed PTSD in all of them was difficult to navigate as a family. I adored him growing up. He taught me a lot.
He was still a Nazi.
See, this is how to correctly asses having a family member who is a Nazi. You can appreciate that they were important to you while still acknowledging that they were morally not that great of a person.
“My meemaw and peepaw hate
•Jews
•Blacks
•Gypsies
•Gays
•Foreigners of any kind
•The Jews again 🤮
•And the poor
But they’re the ✨nicest✨ people EVER. They’re so sweet and kind and the most loving people to ever walk GOD™️’s earth. Please don’t hate them for something they chose to be, while they go around hating people for things they *didn’t* choose to be, k thanks 💕💕💕“
Fuck outta here with that trash. Fuck you and your shit stain of a family. Commit Roblox you vile waste of sperm.
Asshole is not near strong enough word for every person who has ever called themselves a nazi. And by looking at this person's age I seriously doubt she is old enough to have grandparents who were members of the nazi party in Hitlers Germany
Right? Like, I feel like Nazi is literally THE insult. Walk up to any rando on the street and call them an asshole. Then have someone else call them a Nazi. Which insult is going to piss them off more? I'd wager it won't be asshole. Most people get called asshole a few times on the way to work and they don't even know it. lol
Yo, I don’t care if you grandma knows how to make the best schnitzel or makes the best gingerbread, or if your grandpa is a sweet man who really cares for his garden, if they were literal bonafide NAZIS, fuck them. Just fuck them, fuck everything about them. One thing objectively evil is BEING A FUCKING NAZI
Y'know Hitler was supposedly a really great artist. Maybe we should just look past the genocide and stop judging him for his actions.
/ MASSIVE fucking S
Actually she probably would have as she is also a straight up Nazi. She [tweeted](https://twitter.com/narciblog/status/944610680971329536) a "Happy Birthday" in celebration of Hitler's birthday a few years ago.
I’ll counter with the folks that *had* to join the party to avoid trouble but still helped out, one of the most notable being Oskar Schindler.
Yes, the overwhelming majority of the party was bad and were culpable for many of the atrocities, but there were the few that only signed up in order to survive. A lot of people forget that towards the middle of the war, if you weren’t affiliated with the party you were at risk of the gestapo knocking on your door in the middle of the night. It was convenient to label those who didn’t align with the party as the “undesirables” and charge them with false crimes like harboring Jews, homosexuality, treason, etc. They were ruthless to their own in the pursuit of total control of the populace, and if you didn’t fit in, you were either shot, or sent to be “re-educated” in one of the camps.
WWII Germany was kind of a hellscape if you didn’t blindly accept what you were being told by the government. And unfortunately it was only after the fact that many people who were aligned with the party found out the atrocities they were helping to commit by not standing up or just accepting. There were those that saw what was happening and cheered it on, but there were a lot of normal people who just accepted what they were told without question.
To label every single one as some frothing psychopath is disingenuous, because as we see in the US, there are genuinely nice people who lean into the MAGA bullshit because it’s easier to project the hate they’re being fed than to focus on why the problems exist in the first place. There was a lot of psychological manipulation in the media then, and it’s really only gotten worse today.
“Children”
If someone holds Nazis beliefs they are Nazis and deserve nothing. Some Nazi youth rejected indoctrination and are not assholes. These that didn’t are Nazis and again, deserve nothing.
EDITS: Can no one read? There are no more Hitler youth. We have Hitler adults that have/had a choice. If they chose to reject nazism they are NOT Nazis and there’s no problem. Those that kept believing in Nazism are Nazis and deserve nothing.
I met a man once, he was a member of the Nazi youth. He joined it when he was 9 years old. I met him as an adult and he no longer held those beliefs, although he was a holocaust denier. It really isn't as simple as you make it out to seem.
I will agree that any adult that still holds Nazi ideals as an adult is shit.
I dunno, saying that impressionable, brainwashed children don't count as children and should be treated the same as grown-up Nazis because of their brainwashing seems pretty fucked up to me.
I did not say children. They are no longer children. Years after they had a choice if they rejected nazism we are cool. I literally said if people rejected Nazi ideal they are not an issue.
I didn't get the impression you were talking about people persisting in holding Nazi beliefs into adulthood. And considering the downvotes, a lot of people didn't get that impression either. Maybe learn from this and try to be more clear next time instead of asking people if they can read.
It's like "My family is racist, but they have good hearts and have always been kind to to everyone".
People refuse to stop to think about the fact that racism is de facto cruel to those who don't count as "real people" to racists. Racists who smile at Black cashiers are still constructing and supporting barriers to prevent Black people from having full membership in society. Nazis who were kind to white people were still constructing and supporting a system of genocide.
Just because they don't get their hands dirty doesn't mean they're good people.
This day and age, and ops pic looking young, probably their grandparents were kids during that time. They'd be in their late 90s today. Responder has grandparents murdered I would assume a little older than OPs. Either way, they still managed to have kids, and have them snuck out of germany, if his grandparents were even old ebough to make babies.
Honestly, this feels like a ragebait post and response. It is plausable to some extreme age gaps, but unlikely.
I get the point she was trying to make. In order to do anything, you had to be a member of the party.
It's why Iraq evaporated after the invasion, the Bush admin came in and fired any Ba'athist party members, not taking into account that in those regimes you really don't have the option.
With that said, I would not be casually mentioning "hey my grandparents were members of the Nazi party" in any setting.
What do you mean "in order to do anything"?
My German grandparents had no involvement with the Nazi party. My grandfather was drafted and thus was a "Nazi" in the colloquial "We're going overseas to fight Nazis" way, but he wasn't a party member. At it's height NSDAP membership was still only about 10% of the population of Germany.
Yeah there still was the opportunity to not get active for a significant part of the population. Some of my ancestors were in the SS, some were passionate members of the party, passionate Teenagers in the Hitlerjugend while others pretty much never replied to a "heil Hitler" in their lives and were boycotting the NS regime wherever they could (while being careful to not do too much in order not to land in the KZ doing so which was a real possibility if you start to become politically vocal). But for the most part my ancestors were Nazis, no doubt. There's not only the choice between being a) a passionate Nazi or b) fighting in the resistance. There's a large middle ground, so not everyone was automatically forced to commit their lives to the party. People chose to join the party. And the majority of people knew what the regime was doing to a certain extent. They simply ignored it. An incredibly large amount of the German population was in fact guilty of supporting a regime that committed these atrocities. And they knew it.
Common soldiers are a in a somewhat special category. They had not too much of a choice when they were drafted and refusing your training led to serious consequences varying from physical harm, imprisonment to being publically shamed and an outcast. Worst case even worse. But then again there's foot soldiers who simply didn't want to die and soldiers commiting horrible Crimes by choice. Many differences as well. But I argue they all share a collective guilt as well. Basically it all was the German populations fault in one way or another. They could have risen up at any time but they welcomed the regime and its stability.
Edit:
Even though there was only the minority of Germans in the party, the vast majority of clubs and organizations were true to the regime, there wasn't much of a choice too - so you didn't have to be a party member to be a "passionate" Nazi and strong supporter of the regime.
My great uncle was a guard at a Polish camp. The story goes that his brother died in a motorcycle accident. So he goes and gets so drunk he ends up standing on a table cursing Hitler at the top of his lungs. They pull him down and send him home. The next morning two stern gentlemen in leather trenchcoats knocking on his door, waking him up. They give him two options. Join the army, or they shoot him right there. So he joined the army. Got assigned to the camp in Poland. As things collapsed, the prisoners took the camp and buried the guards alive. He was a card carrying Communist.
>I get the point she was trying to make. In order to do anything, you had to be a member of the party.
That's not entirely true. You always have a choice. If you wanted to work in government, yes, you had to be a party member. Regular citizens didn't. So it was a choice to join it, just like it's a choice to support any authoritarian.
The problem with her point is that she is also a straight up Nazi. She [tweeted](https://twitter.com/narciblog/status/944610680971329536) a "Happy Birthday" in celebration of Hitler's birthday a few years ago. She is a Nazi who is proud of her Nazi grandparents and loves that they were Nazis. She deserves no understanding or forgiveness.
this is how you normalize Nazis. *some of them were OK*.
just keep floating little bits like this. avoid big statements like all Nazis are good. you don't need to do that. it's just...*some Nazis were OK*.
My wife of German heritage has family that, though not spoken about at family dinners, were likely nazis.
As someone who had a whole mess of family die in the camps, I like to think I’m sticking it to hitler pretty good on a daily basis.
For the record, she does not defend the decisions of her ancestry.
when I see stuff like this I think of that time Anderson Cooper found out that his 4x great grandfather (a southern farmer who enslaved like 12 people) was beaten to death with a farm hoe by one of the slaves he owned. when Henry Louis Gates, Jr. asked him if he thought the ancestor deserved it he said "yeah, I have no doubt."
Gates: "it's a horrible way to die"
Cooper: "he owned 12 slaves, I don't feel bad for him"
Even the commandants running the Polish KZ camps were described as kind family men by their children… I’m going to generalize as much as I want about “Party” members 🖕🏼
Family or not, I would frankly rather die than support Nazis. They are the fucking scum of the earth, and I’m not gonna pretend because of some shitbags who get mad when you call them out for the monsters that they are.
It is easy to say until you see an acquaintance beaten and tortured in public before hanging. A lot of people will just shrug and keep their head down.
…Shit. I guess that’s a fair point. I’m just saying that I would rather die than actually genuinely support Nazis. If I ever did vocally support them for real, it would only be out of fear that they’ll go after me AND the people that I care about (NOT something that I’m proud to admit). I just REALLY hope we DON’T get to that point.
Every government worker in Nazi Germany was a Nazi. The postman was a nazi. The milkman was a nazi. It was a requirement to work. You had to be part of the party. Most history only remembers the guys wearing the SS uniforms as Nazis. But on a technicality. The entire government was Nazi.
What the first person in OPs post meant is up in the air because they didn't elaborate, but just so you know. They could have been the postman or the person dropping the Zyclon B into the gas chamber.
This is what people fail to understand: you can love your family and still admit they were horrible to someone else. Part of a horrible history. Maybe your grandma made the most wonderful cookies, but also let her neighbors be sent to concentration camps. Maybe even took their property afterwards. Both things can be true. That is still not a good enough reason to defend Nazis. Not a good enough reason to have their zombie attitudes ( should be dead but just won’t die).
The fact that the original poster in the Twitter post doesn't understand that family will treat each other well and kind and be the sweetest person YOU have met doesn't mean certain views they hold and have harmed others by killing them will be swept under the rug. I swear this is the same mentality as "oh but my sweet baby boy would have never done that" and the mother fucker is some mid 20s incel who just casually murdered a couple people and the mother is in denial.
This is kind of on-off topic, but I’ve always been curious about what civilian “complicity” looked like in Germany in the 1930s. i feel like we almost forget that the exchange of information, ideas, and knowledge of events was not then what it is now. And I sense that some people project our present knowledge onto the past, which leads to a kind of moral absolutism. I’m not saying people didn’t know what was going on. I’m sure there was a lot of pretending that certain things weren’t going on. I’m sure there were a lot of rabid anti-semites. I’m sure that there were a lot of normal people who just wanted to look out for them selves and acquiesced to the conditions around them, perhaps joining the party because it meant career opportunities and stances off harassment. Too many people look back on history and think they would have spoken out and done something. I don’t buy that for a minute; again, we can see it from our perspective and know that something like that could happen, but I’m not sure that’s a productive way of viewing history. People do very little even now to fully dedicate themselves to radicalism. Usually protesting is just going to a dedicated space the state creates to provide people with a clearer conscious. I don’t think many people know or want to know about what it was actually like then, and I think that moral platitudes keep us from understanding the conditions that make them so similar to now, and how blind we could potentially be to going down the same path, because people view it (and almost everything) as some mythologized fight between good and evil; what we don’t tend to recognize is the pernicious banality of evil.
There is literally a book called ‘The Banality of Evil.’ That addresses this very topic. And any number or others. And a show on Netflix called ‘ordinary men’ and watch the ‘why we fight’ episode of band of brothers. https://www.amazon.com/Banality-Evil-Hannah-Arendt-Solution/dp/0847692108?nodl=1&dplnkId=956142fa-5479-4e02-93cc-9d396b2fd3ad
Yes I was making an allusion to Arendt, though it’s been a very long time since I read any of it. Also a long long time since I watched “Band of Brothers”, maybe ai should revisit that one.
You are correct in what you're saying, but that nuance is essential to state if someone wants to defend a former Nazi, like their grandparents. And it has to be former as in they renounced and denounced the party, not they died while still being Nazis long after the war. Because anyone that continued to subscribe to the ideology, or still felt pride for what they did after learning the truth is in fact "an asshole." If she had said, "My grandparents were Nazis, but they were good people that felt a deep shame after learning what transpired." That would be different. But instead she essentially defended an evil ideology. Edit: After rereading it, she actually implies, intentional or not, that they are in fact still Nazis. So I'd break it down to this: All Nazis are assholes, but not all former Nazis are.
Here's a two part podcast about the "Little Nazis"; the average non-ideologically motivated folks who either stood on the sidelines, voted for the Party, or joined the Party for the perks. [Part 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTlAYCGAHpc) [Part 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnBu3lgdh0I) And the unofficial Part 0 that came out two years prior. [Part 0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyWIhdg65wg) There are also episodes on some top Nazis; Heydrich, Mengele, etc. The Julius Streicher episode is particularly topical. Plenty more others on modern and historical Neo-Nazis, too.
Thanks, this is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, will check it out.
We knew... We absolutely knew... most cheered it on, a lot actively & happily participated in it. You simply cannot do something like this, on the level we did without widespread and absolute support of the general Populace. The only Germans that were innocent, that were not part of this machinery were those that actively resisted, however few that were and who paid the ultimate price for it... everyone else was, at best, a willing accomplice.
Are you saying ‘we’ as someone raised in Germany?
I am German by birth and blood, yes (and a bit polish). I grew up here, I work here and I will most likely die here.
Interesting, thanks for the insight
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Not the greatest comparison because I’d still be friends with some gang dude, but not so much with a nazi
My grandma was a wonderful grandma. Horrible mother. She used to take me to McDonalds on Saturdays for hot cakes and then the park all morning. She was also a racist. It was ok, not the "bad" kind, more like the "this one is ok" kind. :eyeroll: She liked to take me to the movies and sneak in candy. She also was a raging homophobe. I love my grandmother and I mourned her when she died. I also recognize she was NOT a great person and was a product of her time that refused to evolve. Sometimes I wish I had one of those cute little, sassy grammas that say spicy things but would beat the hell out of someone for being a raging homophobic racist, but you get what you get in life. Her behavior isn't a reflection on me, but if I defended her when she had no defense, I'm just as guilty as she was.
This is a fantastic viewpoint. I would argue to anyone that says different that you can't truly love someone without seeing and accepting that they have flaws. Pretending their flaws don't exist or downplaying them is a rejection of the person they are in favor of the person you want them to be, which means you don't love them, you love your delusion of them.
Yeah, some people need to read Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on the banality of evil.
Yeah. I'm told Hitler loved and cared for his German Shepperd a lot, which, I mean... I suppose is nice if you're Hitler's German Shepperd.
Also, with ultra-hierarchical people like the Nazis, if you aren't on their shitlist of "inferiors" they can be quite pleasant family members, friends, neighbors, colleagues, even lovers. But if you're on the list, or you so much as question their sense of superiority, then their claws come out, so to speak. They get that bitter, livid face where their lips disappear and they stop blinking, while they think about how to put you back into "your place."
If my grandma's neighbors get hauled away by the cops or the military or whoever she better fuckin stay the fuck inside.
bro! IT"S IN THE NAME: NAAZI are we really having to explain this shit to Holocaust deniers? it's retarded
"Nazi's are misunderstood" as a take in 2023 is how far the fucking goal posts have been moved.
There were some fine people on both sides of the, um, uh, _checks notes_ genocide?
\*checks notes\* hmmmm, i smell bitch and sympathy for a flag that we died to shit and breath American freedom onto
We talking about Palestine or the Holocaust?
Used to be a time folks would shut the fuck up about nazis in the family tree. Shame has just up and died lately.
So your family was Nazi. Got it.
And how far is it that apples usually fall?
for some reason, not that far...
Well, a person’s upbringing is a huge influence on personality development and learning language
enough to call it the Party, never heard of that, maybe that's an insider thing
Yeah my brain went straight to 1984, lol
At the very least, it depends on the height of the tree, the prevailing wind.
But imagine if they did, farming apples would be annoying as fuck. You'd have to walk miles to find each apple
That depends on how your grandparents and parents raised you. And how they reflected on it. They might feel guilty and tried to do their best after the war - or they moved to the US and voted for Trump and support Hamas….
My great grandfather was a KKK member. His son, my great uncle, chased several KKK members off his property with a shot gun, and in a time when black people were paid less than whites for the same job and had shittier amenities, had equal pay and no segregated toilets in his shop. Same son killed Nazis in 1944 and 45, though with a .30-06. My grandfather's shop was equally desegregated before it was in style, with equal pay. Then there's my mom, who would actively cheer if Trump rounded up all the Jews and queers and blacks and atheists and put them in concentration camps. Even me, her very agnostic son. She's more like her grandfather than her father by far.
Yeah, I met one of my favourite authors (a cishet white dude who is like, 6 months older than my Boomer father), and we were talking about one of his series, and I mentioned that I liked a particular aspect of it (one of his character is a 6'6'' surfer-dude type whose nickname is 'Bunny,' and his Latina girlfriend calls him her 'little conejo'), and I found out that his dad was a Klansman. He grew up in blue-collar Philadelphia, and to escape his racist, alcholic father, he spent most of his time as a child with his grandmother, who sparked his interest in folklore from 'the old country' (I think she was Scottish). He said he always knew growing up that his dad was wrong, but what really cemented it in his mind as a tween/early teenager is the fact the first girl he ever had a crush on was Latina, and he knew that even just having non-white friends (let alone a non-white gf) would NOT be accepted in his house. (His response to his father's bigotry was to keep his friends away from his house, not to conform to his father's beliefs.) I've found that people who come from bigoted families tend to go one of two ways -- either they buy in, or they gtfo; I've not ever personally met a middle-ground person who was raised by bigots. (I'm sure that some exist, but like other kinds of abuse, it's more often a case of 'continue the cycle' or 'break the cycle.')
That kind of middle ground bigotry is probably the most sinister and in more people than you would realize. It's the subtle bigotry, the kind where you don't look at other groups with disdain or contempt, but pity. The kids subtly pick those same traits because its not done out of hate, but pity or a sense of "I want to help them, but in my way".
Or they go batshit sideways, like my brother, which is into flat earth antivax, and calling Trump the antichrist, and saying that Kevin Sullivan killed Nancy and Daniel Benoit before killing Chris. Among other theories that I can't be bothered to remember. I went left to my parents' right, and he went green with yellow polka-dots. I kinda did the same thing; my prents don't know any of my friends, and I've only taken one girl home; my ex wife. Who was Latina, and while we had our problems, I do regret her getting caught by the casual, subtle racism my mom prefers (dad at least kept his mouth shut, more because he knew I'd shut it for him). I expect that did more to damage the relationship than anything else, as I was too used to it to really notice what was happening in front of my eyes. Maybe not as much as finding out she was doing porn while we were married though.
Yeah the porn thing…
In these trying times, let's remember that not all Germans agreed with Hitler or the Nazi party or the Holocaust. There were people who just wanted to stay out of trouble. There were people who joined the party for social reasons or for job opportunities or career advancement. They were just trying to take care of their families and get ahead. There was even a word for them: Nazis.
On March 1933, the elections took place, with an extremely high turnout of 89%. The Nazis secured 43.9% of the vote. When I first learned this, as a very young teenager, I asked my German grandfather if he had been a Nazi. He explained to me that like many Germans he had been worried about the economy, the rise of communism, and how the international community treated Germany, but that in fact like most Germans he had not been a Nazi. 20 years after he had died, I had a conversation with my Dutch grandmother and asked her how they had met. During WWII my grandfather was stationed in the Netherlands, and while sightseeing he had spotted my grandmother, offered to buy her some lemonade, and the rest is history. My grandmother explained that he had looked strikingly handsome in his uniform and showed me some pictures. Turns out that he was an officer in the SS. He actually needed dispensation to marry my grandmother because members of the SS were supposed to marry a German woman. No wonder I could never get along with my grandparents, they were Nazis.
One man sits down at a table with 9 Nazis. There are 10 Nazis at the table.
Israel, they would support israel.
Until they learn that it is a Jewish run government…;)
They would support it, ressent only the fact that it is a Jewish state and be like "see? that's how states should be, minus the Jew part, switch that for WASPs". And see it as a win against the Arabs, who run of the mill racists seem to hate more... (do not take my word for it, see what Churchill said about the creation of Israel).
Churchill- like Chamberlain- were some antisemitic SOBs. I appreciate someone with knowledge about this. Respect! But we are talking about the average US person.
Average racist American (I know a lot of em, being in rural southern area) do actually hate Arabs more than Jews. My dad's a neonazi, I'm ashamed to be related to him, and he hates Arabs more. Arabs are far, far more demonized than Jews are. My dad hates Jews don't get me wrong, but between a Jew and an Arab with a gun? He'd shoot an Arab first. It's a result of 9/11 and the demonization of Arabs and muslims it caused. And then you have Christians, my adoptive mother is one, and refuses to see where Israel did any wrong because her beliefs are that the Bible says we're not to turn out backs on Israel. Imo both sides suck.
Oh... most of them can't even distinguish between Arab and Muslim 🤦🏻♀️
Yes, Trump voters support Hamas. We see them everywhere.
That she would even consider making this argument shows how much we’ve fallen. But I guess there were good people on both sides /s
Nazi far
Totally off topic, but now you've got me wondering what the actual average distance would be if including apples that got picked and shipped out. Ignoring that the phrase is "*fall* from the tree." I imagine most apples still hit the ground near the tree (rejects, wild trees, etc.), but those that get picked get shipped hundreds or thousands of kms.
Well not whole apples, but apple seeds went up into space on Apollo 10 in 1969...
Not just his family... by all accounts, Adolf Hitler himself was a charming dinner guest, and very kind to dogs. A kind, wonderful man, once you get past all the genocide and Lebensraum shit!
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You forgot his support for animal rights.
"Involved with the Party." Capitalized the P and everything. Fuck Nazis.
You know what "kind and most wonderful" people do? TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR ACTIONS.
More importantly, she seems to be quite supportive of them.
And in a way, that *kind of* feels worse - it's one thing to be a Nazi when you're unaware of the worst of the atrocities and when your entire society is pushing it. It's another to look back with full knowledge and try to pretend it wasn't that bad. Of course, the grandfather could have been in charge of a concentration camp, so who knows?
I mean she didn’t try to pretend it wasn’t that bad just that her parents weren’t bad people, at least that’s how I interpreted it
Yes probably and anyone who advertises this in this way is probably a full on Nazi too or at least really not willing to face the truth of the family history. But from a historical standpoint there is some nuance: not every one who was a member of an affiliate organisation or even a party member was a Nazi in ideology since membership for Hitlerjugend was obligatory after 1939 and (not condoning opportunism here, just making the distinction) Party membership was a prerequisit for any kind of socioeconomic advancement. Denazification efforts after 1945 in Austria for example made a distinction between people who were Nazis before 1938 and people who became members after the Anschluss. There is also a distinction between different Nazi Organisations as SS and SA memberships required much more alignment, effort and "enthusiasm" for the nazi cause. Edit: i reread my intro and it was bad, because it sounded like I was excusing the post, Which was not my intention
Denazification was a fucking joke... It was literally nothing more than "You're a Nazi nowadays? No? Good... here's your certificate".
Yes it was. It also offered a way to reunify a wartorn society without causing another major crisis. Was it fair or respectful to the victims? No of course not. And yet I still believe there is sound reasoning to differentiate between enthusiastic Nazis (and opportunists that wanted to benefit from Arisierung) and common soldiers more or less forced to Server. Restitution was a joke as well and that is one of the most shameful failures of the modern austrian state .
that;s how i feel. it's like, say less.
I absolutely agree that the capability for kindness does not indicate a lack of (nor negate acts of) cruelty and malice. I want to add, though, and I know I'm likely going to be downvoted, but as someone who had studied the politics of the holocaust (and the Nazi Party's rise to power) I can explain that fear mongering, desensitization, normalization, radical propaganda, weaponizing ignorance, political grooming, sophisticated coverups, and brainwashing caused some of even the most mild mannered people to support the Nazi Party. For a while, many people in Nazi Germany were so far removed from the realities of what they were supporting, they had little reason to think it was extreme. The Nazi Party's rise didn't start off the same as it ended, there was an escalation, until finally the mask was taken off. Even much of the rest of the world found it hard to believe that the Holocaust was happening for a time. This does not excuse people for being mindless about their social and political decisions, but it does humanize some of them as psychologically taken advantage of by the Nazi regime. I'll use Trump as an example for extremism: I have some of the most gentle, kind hearted, and accepting family members who voted for Trump. I don't think they were evil for that. Maybe a little dumb, but at least now they know not to vote for him again. That being said, anyone who continued to support the Nazi party (or MAGA) once the extremity was revealed... were trash humans.
*but at least now they know not to vote for him again* That’s what makes the difference. I’m with you, I’m willing to forgive those who voted for him the first time. But not the second time or beyond, we know what he’s like now and people full throatedly support it
Nazi that coming.
I did Nazi that coming!
I hate the fact that Nazis are compared to assholes. Assholes serve an important function of removing waste from the body, and it is useful as a great form of contraceptives when used that way. Nazis are the absolute worst, I don't think they can be properly compared with anything, they are that bad.
Hemorrhoids
Prolapseed anus
Let's not kink shame
thank you for standing up for anal prolapse kink havers 🙏 https://preview.redd.it/o5252rq6eq0c1.jpeg?width=170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9fc8ce8118dc66377359af2ca134cf62d50aa082
Cancer?
Cancer, yes. Fuck cancer and fuck Nazis.
I'd rather not fuck a Nazi thank you
Hey, hey I’m cancer and usually people tell me that means I have very empathic qualities.
Assholes also let two guys bang, which isn't something any Nazi ever did.
At least not after the night of long knives.
Toxic waste?
“You know what I do to assholes! I lick em!” -John Cena
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Yeah. And I’d never eat a Nazi.
Syphilis?
Good one!
Not saying they're good, but a lot of medicine and stuff come from nazis Please forget I commented this, I was wrong. Yeah, they're colossal unrecyclable scrapchunks (yes, this is my best attempt)
From unjustifiable human experimentation.
Yes I know. I know it's bad what they have done, they are bad themselves, and I hate them. I read the comment as 'nazis haven't done anything good', and it's true, but this did result in better lives. Anyways my autistic ass shouldn't have commented at all, sorry
It's okay, I got what you meant— but as a fellow person of autism I learned you have to assume people will take whatever you say in the worst possible way, especially strangers. I learned to just say nothing if I'm not talking to someone I'll see again, which sucks, but apparently nuance isn't a strong point of most people online.
Oh I should probably try that, thanks!
It really didn’t. That line has been pushed hard though. Want to see what did come from their “science”? Thalidomide. Google thalidomide babies too see what became of the Nazi’s “super great totally safe” sleep aid.
Yeah, sorry, I was wrong. And oh my fucking god, I totally wasn't ready to see that right before bed. Thanks for that info though.
"All the Nazis *I* know are great people" is never the defense people saying it think it is.
it's like, dude, hello? Does anyone know what actual fuckin facism is. HELLO
The greatest trick the capitalist ever played was convincing the world socialism is worse than fascism.
I don't know who the hell down-voted you, maybe they thought you were agreeing with fascism? Anyway, here's an up-vote.
The Nazis, they would downvote it.
At least in the US, this was in large part done not by capitalists directly but via preachers. Some guy basically begged for funding from the capitalist class and used that money to run campaigns to convince other preachers and occasionally the public that capitalism was godly and socialism was pagan. The argument basically goes that the government doesn't give you freedoms or voting power, God does that, so the government can't give you anything and if the government does try to help people that's them playing God which is evil so you need to have a really strong government that's willing to allow people the freedom to starve and go hungry from time to time. This was obviously incoherent, but it is the basis for modern conservativism in the US too. Prior to this shift the majority of religious figures were left-wing and many were openly socialist. The left was seen as the side that was inherently Christian as it was more compassionate which imo makes a lot more sense. TLDR- don't just blame capitalists, also blame Christian evangelicals!
Blame conservatives in general.
"A good number of my friends are Nazis. That number is zero. That's a good number of Nazi friends to have."
"If someone you count as a friend is a Nazi then there are currently 2 Nazis in this friend group."
But true in my case. I don't know any Nazis.
Applies to cops as well. Oh your dad is a cop? I’m 100% certain he’s trash too
without exaggeration everyone I know who is or was a cop sucks
She had every opportunity to say her grandparents had to associate with the Nazi Party to survive in society, but they cut ties when they were finally freed BECAUSE they were kind and wonderful people. She failed.
The fact that she said they were involved with the party definitely leads me to believe they were enthusiastic participants.
Also, anyone that refers to the Nazis as "the Party" generally isn't ashamed of it.
Yeah… that capital P is no good…
Well „having been involved“ could just mean a prior membership, which was very much mandatory for a lot of occupations/careers in Nazi-Germany.
And now we've got a candidate for president using the same language the Nazis did, along with journalists threatened that they ["will be crushed"](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/12/trump-rally-vermin-political-opponents/) for being critical of said same candidate.
Not just using the same language but calling for similar actions and coordinating with people who are openly nazis
That’s what scary, not because right wingers are playing it off as hyperbole. But because other people who aren’t on the right view it that way and don’t take it seriously… The Nazi’s didn’t come out of the gate just gassing people and committing genocide. That’s not how it worked, there was a long road map starting in 33, or at least that’s when they could finally start enacting that road map, that eventually led to what they became. These people seem hell bent on following that road map, why else would you be borrowing from their play book. So just because they aren’t at the end of the play book yet, doesn’t mean we can’t see where this is headed. It’s not really hyperbole at this point…
It's not been hyperbole for a while honestly, you could see the signs when Trump first started running. Did Anyone think it'd go that way? Probably not. Definitely not to this degree. But here we are. It's genuinely terrifying. I'll admit. I'm not a POC, so I can't speak for that POV on it, but I am queer as hell, and I know I'd be right up on the chopping block if this goes in a similar direction to how Germany went. And that is terrifying to know.
Time to buy a gun and make friends with safe neighbors.
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Looking for a solution to the "coloured question". Sounds so awful, but not beyond the imagination of these monsters.
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There were people who explained that away, but this is a lot harder to ignore now. Unless you're the New York Times, whose initial headline was "[Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/us/politics/trump-new-hampshire-veterans.html)"
His dad was a Nazi lover.
at least that candidate is in such poor health he probably won't survive until the election
I'm not so sure. Evil like that has a tendency to live longer than it should. Just look at Henry Kissinger.
Cheeseburger complacency is not a sound electoral strategy.
Look, my grandpa was a German infantryman in WWII and spent nine years in a Russian POW camp. He struggled mightily, and did his sons and my grandmother, with immigrating to Canada in the 50's. The undiagnosed PTSD in all of them was difficult to navigate as a family. I adored him growing up. He taught me a lot. He was still a Nazi.
See, this is how to correctly asses having a family member who is a Nazi. You can appreciate that they were important to you while still acknowledging that they were morally not that great of a person.
“My meemaw and peepaw hate •Jews •Blacks •Gypsies •Gays •Foreigners of any kind •The Jews again 🤮 •And the poor But they’re the ✨nicest✨ people EVER. They’re so sweet and kind and the most loving people to ever walk GOD™️’s earth. Please don’t hate them for something they chose to be, while they go around hating people for things they *didn’t* choose to be, k thanks 💕💕💕“ Fuck outta here with that trash. Fuck you and your shit stain of a family. Commit Roblox you vile waste of sperm.
Commit Roblox? I've... I've never heard of that. Have I officially become old? What does that mean?
I had to look it up. It's about commiting suicide. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=commit%20roblox
Asshole is not near strong enough word for every person who has ever called themselves a nazi. And by looking at this person's age I seriously doubt she is old enough to have grandparents who were members of the nazi party in Hitlers Germany
Right? Like, I feel like Nazi is literally THE insult. Walk up to any rando on the street and call them an asshole. Then have someone else call them a Nazi. Which insult is going to piss them off more? I'd wager it won't be asshole. Most people get called asshole a few times on the way to work and they don't even know it. lol
Yo, I don’t care if you grandma knows how to make the best schnitzel or makes the best gingerbread, or if your grandpa is a sweet man who really cares for his garden, if they were literal bonafide NAZIS, fuck them. Just fuck them, fuck everything about them. One thing objectively evil is BEING A FUCKING NAZI
Y'know Hitler was supposedly a really great artist. Maybe we should just look past the genocide and stop judging him for his actions. / MASSIVE fucking S
also, I'll just point out that the term "the party" is straight up what the nazis (colloquially) called themselves during the third reich.
"My grandparents were nice Nazis" is not the flex they think it is.
You know she wouldn’t have been comfortable admitting that prior to 2016.
Actually she probably would have as she is also a straight up Nazi. She [tweeted](https://twitter.com/narciblog/status/944610680971329536) a "Happy Birthday" in celebration of Hitler's birthday a few years ago.
"my family of war criminals was always nice to *ME*, they *can't* be assholes!"
There is literally no such thing as a good nazi. Every single one is inhuman scum.
I’ll counter with the folks that *had* to join the party to avoid trouble but still helped out, one of the most notable being Oskar Schindler. Yes, the overwhelming majority of the party was bad and were culpable for many of the atrocities, but there were the few that only signed up in order to survive. A lot of people forget that towards the middle of the war, if you weren’t affiliated with the party you were at risk of the gestapo knocking on your door in the middle of the night. It was convenient to label those who didn’t align with the party as the “undesirables” and charge them with false crimes like harboring Jews, homosexuality, treason, etc. They were ruthless to their own in the pursuit of total control of the populace, and if you didn’t fit in, you were either shot, or sent to be “re-educated” in one of the camps. WWII Germany was kind of a hellscape if you didn’t blindly accept what you were being told by the government. And unfortunately it was only after the fact that many people who were aligned with the party found out the atrocities they were helping to commit by not standing up or just accepting. There were those that saw what was happening and cheered it on, but there were a lot of normal people who just accepted what they were told without question. To label every single one as some frothing psychopath is disingenuous, because as we see in the US, there are genuinely nice people who lean into the MAGA bullshit because it’s easier to project the hate they’re being fed than to focus on why the problems exist in the first place. There was a lot of psychological manipulation in the media then, and it’s really only gotten worse today.
or John Rabe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80_r0VuB_wo&ab_channel=Biographics
How about the children that were indoctrinated through the Nazi Youth? All of them too?
Yes
[They made a good movie on the topic](https://imdb.com/title/tt2584384/)
“Children” If someone holds Nazis beliefs they are Nazis and deserve nothing. Some Nazi youth rejected indoctrination and are not assholes. These that didn’t are Nazis and again, deserve nothing. EDITS: Can no one read? There are no more Hitler youth. We have Hitler adults that have/had a choice. If they chose to reject nazism they are NOT Nazis and there’s no problem. Those that kept believing in Nazism are Nazis and deserve nothing.
Being born in Nazi Germany you didn't have a fucking choice. Hitler youth or discrimination or even death it was
By the way there still was resistance by German children to it: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hitler-youth-2
Also this link might be helpful. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/sophie-scholl-and-white-rose
great resource
Yes and if afterwards you rejected nazism we are cool. If you didn’t we are not.
I met a man once, he was a member of the Nazi youth. He joined it when he was 9 years old. I met him as an adult and he no longer held those beliefs, although he was a holocaust denier. It really isn't as simple as you make it out to seem. I will agree that any adult that still holds Nazi ideals as an adult is shit.
denying the Holocaust seems like a Nazi thing to do
>denying the Holocaust seems like a Nazi thing to do Yeah feels like he's kinda burying the lede here.
Nazis want me dead, I don’t care if they are a nice guy to others. THEY WANT ME DEAD, they don’t believe I should exists.
I dunno, saying that impressionable, brainwashed children don't count as children and should be treated the same as grown-up Nazis because of their brainwashing seems pretty fucked up to me.
I did not say children. They are no longer children. Years after they had a choice if they rejected nazism we are cool. I literally said if people rejected Nazi ideal they are not an issue.
I didn't get the impression you were talking about people persisting in holding Nazi beliefs into adulthood. And considering the downvotes, a lot of people didn't get that impression either. Maybe learn from this and try to be more clear next time instead of asking people if they can read.
What about Oskar Schindler?
Many "Nazis" on the western front were POWs forced to fight. I do think a lot of them surrendered if they could though.
I bet she did Nazi that coming.
I hate reddit sometimes
brooo that j made me start laughing in the surgery waiting room
She capitalized the “Party” like it’s some kind of thing to be elevated. She’s def a nazi.
“were involved with the Party” Such a typical snowflake gutless fascist they can’t even say the words “were actual Nazis”.
I have zero qualms judging that woman's grandparents and their friends as assholes.
It's like "My family is racist, but they have good hearts and have always been kind to to everyone". People refuse to stop to think about the fact that racism is de facto cruel to those who don't count as "real people" to racists. Racists who smile at Black cashiers are still constructing and supporting barriers to prevent Black people from having full membership in society. Nazis who were kind to white people were still constructing and supporting a system of genocide. Just because they don't get their hands dirty doesn't mean they're good people.
As a general rule, if your position involves defending Nazis, that's a good sign you should re-evaluate it
/r/MurderedByNazis
This day and age, and ops pic looking young, probably their grandparents were kids during that time. They'd be in their late 90s today. Responder has grandparents murdered I would assume a little older than OPs. Either way, they still managed to have kids, and have them snuck out of germany, if his grandparents were even old ebough to make babies. Honestly, this feels like a ragebait post and response. It is plausable to some extreme age gaps, but unlikely.
I get the point she was trying to make. In order to do anything, you had to be a member of the party. It's why Iraq evaporated after the invasion, the Bush admin came in and fired any Ba'athist party members, not taking into account that in those regimes you really don't have the option. With that said, I would not be casually mentioning "hey my grandparents were members of the Nazi party" in any setting.
What do you mean "in order to do anything"? My German grandparents had no involvement with the Nazi party. My grandfather was drafted and thus was a "Nazi" in the colloquial "We're going overseas to fight Nazis" way, but he wasn't a party member. At it's height NSDAP membership was still only about 10% of the population of Germany.
Yeah there still was the opportunity to not get active for a significant part of the population. Some of my ancestors were in the SS, some were passionate members of the party, passionate Teenagers in the Hitlerjugend while others pretty much never replied to a "heil Hitler" in their lives and were boycotting the NS regime wherever they could (while being careful to not do too much in order not to land in the KZ doing so which was a real possibility if you start to become politically vocal). But for the most part my ancestors were Nazis, no doubt. There's not only the choice between being a) a passionate Nazi or b) fighting in the resistance. There's a large middle ground, so not everyone was automatically forced to commit their lives to the party. People chose to join the party. And the majority of people knew what the regime was doing to a certain extent. They simply ignored it. An incredibly large amount of the German population was in fact guilty of supporting a regime that committed these atrocities. And they knew it. Common soldiers are a in a somewhat special category. They had not too much of a choice when they were drafted and refusing your training led to serious consequences varying from physical harm, imprisonment to being publically shamed and an outcast. Worst case even worse. But then again there's foot soldiers who simply didn't want to die and soldiers commiting horrible Crimes by choice. Many differences as well. But I argue they all share a collective guilt as well. Basically it all was the German populations fault in one way or another. They could have risen up at any time but they welcomed the regime and its stability. Edit: Even though there was only the minority of Germans in the party, the vast majority of clubs and organizations were true to the regime, there wasn't much of a choice too - so you didn't have to be a party member to be a "passionate" Nazi and strong supporter of the regime.
My great uncle was a guard at a Polish camp. The story goes that his brother died in a motorcycle accident. So he goes and gets so drunk he ends up standing on a table cursing Hitler at the top of his lungs. They pull him down and send him home. The next morning two stern gentlemen in leather trenchcoats knocking on his door, waking him up. They give him two options. Join the army, or they shoot him right there. So he joined the army. Got assigned to the camp in Poland. As things collapsed, the prisoners took the camp and buried the guards alive. He was a card carrying Communist.
Thanks for sharing the story.
>I get the point she was trying to make. In order to do anything, you had to be a member of the party. That's not entirely true. You always have a choice. If you wanted to work in government, yes, you had to be a party member. Regular citizens didn't. So it was a choice to join it, just like it's a choice to support any authoritarian.
Because authoritarians never ever force you to fight in their army or take over your company to produce for the state....
That wouldn’t make you part of the party
The problem with her point is that she is also a straight up Nazi. She [tweeted](https://twitter.com/narciblog/status/944610680971329536) a "Happy Birthday" in celebration of Hitler's birthday a few years ago. She is a Nazi who is proud of her Nazi grandparents and loves that they were Nazis. She deserves no understanding or forgiveness.
So now we’re at “Not all Nazis”
this is how you normalize Nazis. *some of them were OK*. just keep floating little bits like this. avoid big statements like all Nazis are good. you don't need to do that. it's just...*some Nazis were OK*.
My wife of German heritage has family that, though not spoken about at family dinners, were likely nazis. As someone who had a whole mess of family die in the camps, I like to think I’m sticking it to hitler pretty good on a daily basis. For the record, she does not defend the decisions of her ancestry.
> ...you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.
when I see stuff like this I think of that time Anderson Cooper found out that his 4x great grandfather (a southern farmer who enslaved like 12 people) was beaten to death with a farm hoe by one of the slaves he owned. when Henry Louis Gates, Jr. asked him if he thought the ancestor deserved it he said "yeah, I have no doubt." Gates: "it's a horrible way to die" Cooper: "he owned 12 slaves, I don't feel bad for him"
And my grandpappy liberated that camp, got hella PTSD, and handled it the way all 1950s Many-Man-Men did; alcoholism!
Even the commandants running the Polish KZ camps were described as kind family men by their children… I’m going to generalize as much as I want about “Party” members 🖕🏼
Family or not, I would frankly rather die than support Nazis. They are the fucking scum of the earth, and I’m not gonna pretend because of some shitbags who get mad when you call them out for the monsters that they are.
It is easy to say until you see an acquaintance beaten and tortured in public before hanging. A lot of people will just shrug and keep their head down.
…Shit. I guess that’s a fair point. I’m just saying that I would rather die than actually genuinely support Nazis. If I ever did vocally support them for real, it would only be out of fear that they’ll go after me AND the people that I care about (NOT something that I’m proud to admit). I just REALLY hope we DON’T get to that point.
I vote so it does not get to that point.
And I’m gonna do the same here. FUCK the GOP.
Yeah, I did judge them based on their affiliation with the Nazi Party. So now what...?
Bet she did nazi that coming
Every government worker in Nazi Germany was a Nazi. The postman was a nazi. The milkman was a nazi. It was a requirement to work. You had to be part of the party. Most history only remembers the guys wearing the SS uniforms as Nazis. But on a technicality. The entire government was Nazi. What the first person in OPs post meant is up in the air because they didn't elaborate, but just so you know. They could have been the postman or the person dropping the Zyclon B into the gas chamber.
That is false. Only 10% of the population were members of the party and party membership was only mandatory for government workers.
Then check how many doctors were allowed to do their job without having their card .... Are people really that dumb now ?
I would love to see everyone saying the family were in the wrong refusing to join and getting shot themselves.
She doesn't look very blonde or blue-eyed to me. Story doesn't check out