How can the world forgive Germany?

I've heard recently of "disgruntled German soldiers" after WWII uniting as "Werewolves", attacking Allied installations and people.
My family went there in 1950 as part of the occupation, and never heard of this!
MOF, we had complete freedom as kids to walk around unguarded in any West German city!
A couple of my female school chums took off from Wurzburg and ran away to Garmisch, on public transportation, with nothing other than whatever Mom and Dad had to say to them after they were located.
 
dudalb said:
With this being the centennial of the start of World War One, I am sure there will be plenty of threads in the near future on who exactly was to blame for the start of World War One.
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If I can then recommend a book, which I am 90% completed. CATASTROPHE 1914: Europe Goes to War, by Max Hastings. Heavy reading (560 pages) covering the August-December 1914 start of WWI. Hastings makes the case that Germany bears the brunt of the causation of the War, but does not let the rest of Europe off easy. The incompetence of the Military leaders on all sides, the brutality towards the peasants caught in the way, the complete lack of understanding of what kind of war this was--one between societies that had undergone the Industrial Revolution (the last mainland European war had been the brief Franco-Prussian War of 1870--and general conflict between multiple Great Powers hadn't occurred since Napoleon).

Fascinating read, even if you disagree with some of his conclusions. Should be available now in most bookstores.

If you want to cover some of the same territory, but not quite as deeply, Barbara Tuchmans' "The Guns of August (or August 1918) still, 50 years after it's publish date, is still a very readable book.
 
I Ratant said:
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Speaking of Vietnam, I ordered some parts for an r/c helicopter from a company in Canuckia... the parts came from HO CHI CITY... which we had called Saigon.
Capitalism is alive and thriving there.
ST gets her nails done at a Vietnamese nail parlor here, which has a live feed from Ho Chi Minh city.. amazingly, there is still the Saigon Zoo there! Not been renamed, looking at the signs.
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Saigon remains an area of Ho Chi Minh City, and from what I understand a lot of people who live there still refer to the city as Saigon.
 
dudalb said:
With this being the centennial of the start of World War One, I am sure there will be plenty of threads in the near future on who exactly was to blame for the start of World War One.
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Somebody shot Archie Dukes' ostrich because he was hungry?
 
Germany is nothing more than an oddly-shaped spot on a map.

There were extremely evil acts carried out by evil people, some of whom should never be forgiven.

The country itself? That doesn't matter. People do evil stuff anywhere and everywhere. People stand by as their leaders perform evil acts anywhere and everywhere.

It's the people who matter, not where they live.
 
ehcks said:
Germany is nothing more than an oddly-shaped spot on a map.

There were extremely evil acts carried out by evil people, some of whom should never be forgiven.

...
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Probably ALL of those people are dead at this time. The sins of the fathers are NOT placed on the children.
 
I Ratant said:
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Probably ALL of those people are dead at this time. The sins of the fathers are NOT placed on the children.
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If somebody learns about the holocaust and decides a race must carry the guilt of their ancestors and be forever unforgiven for sins they did not commit then clearly they have learned nothing of the holocaust.

Perhaps, if Germans are not to be "forgiven" for their apparent evils we should do something about it... concentrate those with German blood to some kind of hollding camp...
 
I Ratant said:
I've heard recently of "disgruntled German soldiers" after WWII uniting as "Werewolves", attacking Allied installations and people.
My family went there in 1950 as part of the occupation, and never heard of this!
MOF, we had complete freedom as kids to walk around unguarded in any West German city!
A couple of my female school chums took off from Wurzburg and ran away to Garmisch, on public transportation, with nothing other than whatever Mom and Dad had to say to them after they were located.
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Here is why they likely never heard of it (beware, this has woos too - not this article, but the topic does): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werwolf
 
Tomtomkent said:
If somebody learns about the holocaust and decides a race must carry the guilt of their ancestors and be forever unforgiven for sins they did not commit then clearly they have learned nothing of the holocaust.

Perhaps, if Germans are not to be "forgiven" for their apparent evils we should do something about it... concentrate those with German blood to some kind of hollding camp...
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If you are planning that (:D:rolleyes: )you might want to lose that "concentrate". Might make them nervous.....:eek::jaw-dropp
 
The question posed is a difficult one. It's deep and perplexing. How does one forgive?

We all need to come to grips with what happened. We all need to ask what it meant, for the time it occurred, and for us today. Perhaps it's a mistake to hold the sons and daughters of the perpetrators accountable, but let's not forget -- the sons and daughters of the victims are suffering still.

So how do we forgive? Monketey Ghost -- don't let anyone tell you the answer is easy.
 
sphenisc said:
There is something about the German people that allows them to do this...they're human. They suffer the same human frailty that the rest of us do when surrounded by peer pressure, social expectation, misplaced loyalty, propaganda etc. etc.
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Another answer which is simplicity, and is the only answer.
I'd been struck by It could never happen here-ism.
Still, hard to imagine citizens of the US allowing such a regime to stand.

"Oh, that work camp a hundred miles away they shipped so and so from across the street to? No big deal, he was just a ______ (what have you)..."
 
Monketey Ghost said:
Another answer which is simplicity, and is the only answer.
I'd been struck by It could never happen here-ism.
Still, hard to imagine citizens of the US allowing such a regime to stand.

"Oh, that work camp a hundred miles away they shipped so and so from across the street to? No big deal, he was just a ______ (what have you)..."
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It's harder now, for the right circumstances to arise for something like this (killing on an industrial scale and with industrial methods) to happen. That's because we have the example of nazi germany as a warningbeacon for us. Something they didn't have then.

Mass killings and genocide though (whether by deliberate killings or by killing by neglect) have happened before and since.
It's not so long ago that a situation like this cropped up in Europe (former Yugoslavia).
So the right circumstances for mass killings are not that far from us. Not even in the USA (but possibly somewhat harder to realize, then in the rest of the world).
 
kedo1981 said:
What was the alternative?
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(modified from Nazi policy regarding occupied Russia) Their descendants will be serfs, servants for a thousand years.

But seriously, another simple question I have no answer for... if guys from death squads could go back to being ordinary citizens and having children after the war...

You know, I'm not Jewish, my grandfather fought in the Pacific, but as I contemplate the question, and set it against what was done, I only get confused.
I'm sorry, I have to drop the thread for another while because anger and confused sadness threaten to overtake me with desire to post stupidly again.
 
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Just yesterday, the UN was presented with evidence that Assad has methodically tortured, starved, and murdered some 11,000 "detainees" over the course of the civil war in Syria.
That's just the documentation by one individual, tasked with photographing these unfortunates.
Murder and torture on an industrial scale, meticulously documented. Sound familiar?

We humans have, as part of our nature, the ability to dehumanize the "other'. This has been well studied and it's just under the surface.
Folks who have been living in relative harmony will turn on each other quickly under the right circumstances, and our leaders have learned the lessons of how to provoke these circumstances well.
I don't know of anyone who's innocent of this. We slaughtered our brothers in droves during the Civil War, and starved POWs to death in huge numbers.
The Irish killed each other for years, and tortured each other as well over religion and politics.
The Euros fought civil war after civil war over religion, and engaged in dispicable tortures over the same.
The Chinese had their Cultural Revolution and the excesses of various Communist states are common knowledge.
It's there. Potentially, it's in all of us, I fear. It needs to be guarded against constantly.
 
Monketey Ghost said:
Another answer which is simplicity, and is the only answer.
I'd been struck by It could never happen here-ism.
Still, hard to imagine citizens of the US allowing such a regime to stand
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We are talking about the US citizens that were happy to displace, murder, rape and in general exterminate the native population?

Or the same US citizens that had no problem with internment camps for the japanese-american population?

The same US citizens that allowed racial segregation well into the 20th century?

If not, why not? Ask yourself why is it that you forgive your neighbors that their great-grandfather were accomplices to genocide, and you'll see how to forgive the germans...
 
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