How can the world forgive Germany?

Navigator said:
Yes this is true, and they are mentioned in this thread.

The question being:

How can the world forgive Germany?

It is an interesting question but also comes with the implication that somehow the world is wrong to forgive Germany.
Click to expand...

I agree.

That in doing so this could pave the way for a repeat of Holocaust with the focus being on those called 'Jews' once more.

I think though that forgiveness does not led to such things. Does not open one up for more of the same.
Click to expand...

I don't understand what you just said.

I am still puzzled by exactly what qualifies one to be a 'Jew' but my particular frame of mind at present time is that a 'Jew' is anyone who is not the same as the one hating...the one doing the hating, the racist.

I know that this is not very correct, because it implies that Jews cannot be racist.
Click to expand...

I understood what you said there and I agree with you: your definition of a 'Jew' is not very correct. But on so many levels.
 
EeneyMinnieMoe said:
This is rather personal. I've very rarely shared this with anyone. Here goes. I heard this story twice from someone who was relating it decades after it had occurred, so my telling might not be 100 percent accurate.

When my grandmother was 18 or 19 or so, she rented out a room in her house in Legionowo, Poland to a middle-aged gentleman who was a retired lawyer and his wife. Grandma's father was killed by the Germans early in the war, leaving her the breadwinner for her mother and two younger sisters. I believe the people she took in were from another town and introduced themselves to her as acquaintances of acquaintances. She happily took them in.

The gentleman, though a very nice person, behaved oddly at times. One thing that should have set off Grandma's internal alarms was that he was devoutly religious and was constantly praying or praying the rosary. Another woman Grandma was renting a room to told her flatly "Those people are Jews!" Grandma defended him and tried to brush her housemate off. Her housemate hotly told her "I guarantee they are Jews! I'm telling you, they are Jews! They are Jews if I've ever seen any!" Grandma either didn't believe it or didn't want to believe it. Maybe she figured it wasn't any of her business. Maybe she needed the rent money. Maybe she was fooled because both the retired lawyer and his wife "didn't look it", being blond and blue-eyed. Maybe it was because she liked both of them and so couldn't believe that they were actually Jews. She had grown up with certain prejudices, unfortunately.

One day, she had the incredibly bad luck to have her home raided by German soldiers. A couple of teenaged Polish boys who were resistance fighters had hopped over her wall and trampled through her garden because they had a gaggle of Germans hot on their heels. They made a run for it into the woods behind Grandma's home. The Germans had pursued them to the walls of the garden and naturally assumed they had hid in Grandma's home. They burst in, overturned furniture, ripped down curtains and paintings and turned the house upside down looking for the boys.

The gentleman Grandma had rented the room to had an epic meltdown. He decided to confess right then and there, though they had not interrogated him yet. He told them he had been born a Jew but converted upon marrying a Polish Catholic woman. He begged for his life, telling them he was a devout Roman Catholic. That didn't save him. They searched him, patted him down and probably checked to see if he was circumcised (he obviously was). Then they marched him out, shot him and left to arrest my Grandmother, who was at work when all this had happened. (The man's wife arrived home later that day and was obviously heart-broken and furious at what had happened in her absence. She later moved out and went heaven knows where.) They also lined up all the numerous inhabitants of the house, adult and child, and interrogated them. They asked them to recite Roman Catholic prayers and asked them questions about the Roman Catholic faith. Thankfully, all of them passed the test.

They interrogated my Grandma for hours upon hours. They threatened to shoot her. They threatened to shoot her mother, cousin and two younger sisters. They threatened to shoot all of her housemates and even a few neighbors. They wanted to exterminate the entire house, as if the people inside were roaches. The only thing that saved her was that the man had told them he lied to Grandma upon arriving at her home. He pleaded with them not to punish her and insisted that she didn't know. These animals made Grandma sign document upon document attesting that she didn't know before they let her go. Because of this and the multitude of other horrors that she experienced during the occupation, my Grandma is still somewhat mentally unhinged to this day. She was never the same, as you can imagine. She's ninety years old now and is still living with what happened during the war.

Do I personally forgive them for nearly killing my entire family? And me, decades before I was even born? Yes. I grew up with an enormous dislike (a downright hatred) of both Germans and Russians, for obvious reasons, but am over it now. This hatred was instilled in me by my parents and others in early childhood. It lasted well into my teens- it was very strong and robust in adolescence- but I've gotten over it as an adult. I'm long past it now.

Does my Grandmother forgive them? I honestly don't know. I never asked her. But I wouldn't be surprised if she said "No, never".
Click to expand...
Some story. See, doesn't that show that forgiveness is a personal thing? You're mother is entitled to not forgive 'the Germans' but the question does not arise for me. They didn't do anything to me. By extrapolation, 'the world' has no business sitting in judgment on 'the Germans' either. Likewise, your hatred seems perfectly justified and reasonable. As is your putting it behind you (or not). 'The world' is not in the same position.
 
Navigator said:
Yes this is true, and they are mentioned in this thread.

The question being:

How can the world forgive Germany?

It is an interesting question but also comes with the implication that somehow the world is wrong to forgive Germany.

That in doing so this could pave the way for a repeat of Holocaust with the focus being on those called 'Jews' once more.

I think though that forgiveness does not led to such things. Does not open one up for more of the same.

I am still puzzled by exactly what qualifies one to be a 'Jew' but my particular frame of mind at present time is that a 'Jew' is anyone who is not the same as the one hating...the one doing the hating, the racist.

I know that this is not very correct, because it implies that Jews cannot be racist.
Click to expand...

According to the thread started, he hasn't got to the episode about the Holocaust yet.
 
anglolawyer said:
Some story. See, doesn't that show that forgiveness is a personal thing? You're mother is entitled to not forgive 'the Germans' but the question does not arise for me. They didn't do anything to me. By extrapolation, 'the world' has no business sitting in judgment on 'the Germans' either. Likewise, your hatred seems perfectly justified and reasonable. As is your putting it behind you (or not). 'The world' is not in the same position.
Click to expand...

It's not just the Nazis. There are Australians who were POWS under the Japanese. If they never forgive the Japanese, I don't hold it against them. Some have forgiven them. The recent film The Railway Man is all about this. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2058107/
 
a_unique_person said:
It's not just the Nazis. There are Australians who were POWS under the Japanese. If they never forgive the Japanese, I don't hold it against them. Some have forgiven them. The recent film The Railway Man is all about this. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2058107/
Click to expand...

And the "comfort women", of course. ("women" being girls as young as 12 years old.)
 
CaptainHowdy said:
I don't understand what you just said.
Click to expand...

Some think that if you forgive, you are only sending out a message that you agree with the behavior and are inviting more of the same.


CaptainHowdy said:
your definition of a 'Jew' is not very correct. But on so many levels.
Click to expand...

I have no definition of a 'Jew'. I am struggling to find any logical definition. I am not so sure those calling themselves 'Jews' are any more able to define it.
 
Skwinty said:
I am still struggling to comprehend the barbaric behavior exhibited by the Nazi regime.
Click to expand...

Large collections of humans do not just do things like this for no reason. How did a nation of civilized people get talked into supporting such a regime and take it out on something calling itself 'Jew'?

The 'World' (the powers that be) separated Germany and made it an outcast of sorts. Much the same as the 'Jew' only not, because the Jew seems to be an outsider by reason of their own choice not to be seen as like the rest of the world...or is it the the world does not see the Jew to be part of what it is? I have no idea what a Jew is or why they call themselves Jews.

I don't even know if this is true.

ETA

and then I read about something called a 'half Jew'
 
Last edited:
Navigator said:
Large collections of humans do not just do things like this for no reason.
Click to expand...

And there, my question has been answered.

A large collection of humans did it. I was appalled by it. But what happened in Germany during those years was a **** sandwich of conditions in which a dictatorship could come to power and thrive.

Worse, because Hitler and his cronies were nutty with ideas of Aryan racial purity( in an interview with a German housewife, she says, "Suddenly, there were new words for everything, and we started hearing the word Aryan, which none of us knew before.") and Jewish inferiority.

My mistake was assigning an unspecified negative trait to the people of Germany in my search for an answer to how this could have happened, and still in my view nothing explains the insane cruelty.
But in my view, the Nazis were experiencing a collective insanity.
 
I should add that interviews with common German people made it clear that it all happened so fast that by the time many realized what was taking shape around them, the State was too powerful for any hope of a successful resistance to form.
 
When I think of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis, I always think that it was not just about the Jews, there were millions of other non Jew victims.

How many Russians died? IIRC it was about 20 million. The total dead for WW2 was in excess of 50 million.
 
Monketey Ghost said:
And there, my question has been answered.

A large collection of humans did it. I was appalled by it. But what happened in Germany during those years was a **** sandwich of conditions in which a dictatorship could come to power and thrive.

Worse, because Hitler and his cronies were nutty with ideas of Aryan racial purity( in an interview with a German housewife, she says, "Suddenly, there were new words for everything, and we started hearing the word Aryan, which none of us knew before.") and Jewish inferiority.

My mistake was assigning an unspecified negative trait to the people of Germany in my search for an answer to how this could have happened, and still in my view nothing explains the insane cruelty.
But in my view, the Nazis were experiencing a collective insanity.
Click to expand...

It is no more or less insane than the rest of the history of the evolution of the self named Great Apes.
 
Monketey Ghost said:
I should add that interviews with common German people made it clear that it all happened so fast that by the time many realized what was taking shape around them, the State was too powerful for any hope of a successful resistance to form.
Click to expand...

Precisely.
 
Apart from the technology, which facilitated mass slaughter, WW2 was no bloodier or nastier than many previous conflicts. Less so than WW1 in fact, unless we add Stalin's activities to the death count.

WW2 is just more recent.

We have pictures. Moving pictures with sound. We have people who remember, or we knew people who remembered.
(My mother, still alive, was in the womens' Royal Naval Service in 1944-45. My father (deceased) was at Anzio and a few other very nasty places.)
It was bloody awful. I count myself and my generation positively blessed by comparison.

But it was just a war, that happened as a result of a lot of pre existing historic reasons and was no worse (when corrected for scale and technology) than conflicts stretching back to the ice age.

The world cannot forgive anything , because the world is an abstract concept.

Personally, I get on just fine with most of the germans I know and don't feel they need my forgiveness, except for some of the bloody stupid stuff Volkswagen have done to the Golf Mk. 7.
 
Monketey Ghost said:
...
But in my view, the Nazis were experiencing a collective insanity.
Click to expand...
.
That's the core. Only crazies went the whole 9 yards for AH.
The SS were especially selected to be certain that all the members were insane.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom