Most Germans didn’t know about the atrocities being committed by the Nazis, most soldiers didn’t know.
This is an outright lie. They all fucking knew, they didn't give a shit because they materially benefitted from it. It's also more clean Wehrmacht shit.
Can't believe I have lived to see the day when libs are not only repeating the clean Wehrmacht myth but now including the FUCKING SS.
They dragged Jews from their homes and gathered them in public places before deporting them. They did this in the open, in broad daylight. They had them standing there in parks surrounded by dense urban housing. They checked everyone walking in the vicinity and grabbed any Jew that happened to wander to close. They seperated the men before deportation from the women and children. The commotion and wailing must have been loud. The cruelty plainly visible. In the midst of densely populated cities like Munich, Berlin, Hamburg.
Even my greatgrandpa in some Podunk Swabian village knew. He went to Poland as a teacher, fervent Nazi and came back shook while the eastern front was still advancing. Saying "we will pay for this dearly, everyone of us". Still sent his daughter to the Napola the coward.
There was also, as you surely know, some level of public killing towards the end, babies dashed on walls, disabled people thrown from windows, etc. There was a huge level of violence even in the observable background of public life, though magnitudes less than in the camps, of course.
Most of them were doing it. The Wehrmacht was drenched in blood up to it's eyeballs and it took decades of diligent propaganda work to bury their role in the killing of millions and millions of people.
There's a great Primo Levi quote about this that I think still rings very true today, especially for those living in the imperial core:
It is true that the great mass of Germans remained unaware of the most atrocious details of what happened later in the camps: the methodological industrialized extermination on a scale of millions, the gas chambers, the cremation furnaces, the vile despoiling of corpses—all this was not supposed to be known, and in effect few did know it, up to the end of the war. Among other precautions, in order to keep the secret, only cautious and cynical euphemisms were employed by the official language: one did not write “extermination” but “final solution,” not “deportation” but “transfer,” not “killing by gas” but “special treatment.” Not without reason, Hitler feared that this horrendous news, if it were divulged, would compromise the blind faith that the country had in him, as well as the morale of the fighting troops.
And yet varied sources of information were available to most Germans. Knowing and making things known was one way of keeping one’s distance from Nazism. But most Germans didn’t know because they didn’t want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know. It is certainly true that the German people, as a whole, did not even try to resist. In Hitler’s Germany a particular code was widespread—those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers. Shutting his mouth, his eyes, and his ears, the typical German citizen built for himself the illusion of not knowing, hence of not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door.
There is so much information available that it's impossible to stay ignorant unless it is done willingly.
as more and more holocaust survivors and WW2 veterans go to their graves, as the crisis of capitalism gets worse, this deliberate pro-fascist revisionism will increase.
They took black slaves because they were trying to integrate into the white colonial agrarian society around them! They did it because they thought embracing that shit would allow them material benefits and acceptance. Jesus christ! It's not a war is hell "gee it's complicated" bullshit they wanted to join the winners and then the war broke out and their loyalty got them all fucked. They joined the bad guys and it was a fuck up. That makes them bad guys. Yeah ill blame them for doing it. If you got some Pawnee blood I'm not going to blame you but yeah ill blame a 19th century Pawnee scout who led a cavalry regiment to murder a village. He was a bad guy!
Pre-Columbian tribes did war and took slaves but it still wasn't black chattel slavery. Fucking reddit. Goddamn.
if there's one thing I've learned about settler-colonial consciousness, it's this worm-like tendency to concern troll about the past crimes of the conquered, and to use them as a not-so-subtle post-hoc justification for the ongoing crimes of the settler-colonists.
As far as I've ever read, not even the ones trying to integrate with practiced perpetual, heritable, racialized chattel slavery
Presumably individuals integrating fully into white society did, but in any indigenous group I've read about remaining separate and holding slaves, slaves had far and away more rights than did black slaves in the US
Pretty much. You might be enslaved but it would be closer to indentured servitude with later release or assimilation. The idea of inherited status as a slave? There's pretty much no record of it. Chattel slavery really only works if you're getting regular boatloads of more Africans to replace the ones that escape or die because of appalling treatment.
I'm not sure if I would want to take this at value, but what particular source says that pre-colonial slaves had more rights than post-colonial Black ones anyways.... it feels like the argument that Atlantic slave trade was less worse, compared to the Arab one....
i've found the pathetic equivocating throughout this nonsense to be extremely frustrating. Like i don't expect much from capital L Liberals but this whole thing has been just deeply disappointing regardless.
This whole episode has really just confirmed my existing bias that most libs don't really have any beliefs and are unscratched fascists arouse by the smell of blood.