It wouldn’t hurt for me to re-read the book, i suppose.

Secondly, the idea that Holocaust only or should only refer to the Holocaust of the Jews during WWII is even more bunk. Nuclear holocaust is a readily used term and has been for decades. Holocaust means great loss of life, especially by fire (but not necessarily). So while you can squabble over whether or not the term should be used as freely as it sometimes is, saying or implying that it only should is not only wrong, it’s overtly PC. I won’t take that from a Dem and I won’t take it from a Republican.

Darfur is a holocaust. Somalia was/is a holocaust. The Soviets had a bigger holocaust. China had THE biggest holocaust. And yes, natural causes are included so the Tsunami was a holocaust. Any great loss of life can be applicably called a holocaust. And I say this as a person who doesn’t call anything a holocaust but The Holocaust in conversation. So don’t lecture me or anyone else on words we should use or not use. That kind of thinking is how textbooks are created.

How many Jews for example were smuggled out of the death zone?

To characterize all countries as being equally passive is totally unfair.

There was no Vichy Poland.

There were no Poles serving in the SS.

There was no Paris uprising.

Never Forget.

Yes, you’re right; there were resisters; few, proud, and brave. There were supporters of the resistance, more but not nearly so brave nor reliable. Maybe 10-20% did something, some actual action, in resistance. The rest either helped the Germans or stood idly by.

For some reason hearing that the entire Final Solution made it through the German Democratic process as the will of the people makes me regret our constitutional amendment in favor of the direct election of Senators.

For example, the Polish underground did a heck of lot of sabotage, intelligence gathering, Jew smuggling, etc.

Moreover, unlike the French, there were no Poles in the SS.

The Poles resisted far more tintensely and pervasively than the French did. The active Polish army units that fought throughout the war also got screwed repeatedly by Allied command.

No WWII statement should be made in which the French are deemed to have been more resistive to the Nazis than the Poles.

I had to argue for a grade once on an economics paper. First the instructor told me the paper was too good and ran it through the system to make sure it wasn’t plagiarized. Then he gave me a “C” on the paper. We argued back & forth a bit and then admitted he was wrong and gave me the “A”.

After going through that section in the museum at Dachau I’d say you’re right. There are more similarities between where we’re headed now and that time than most people are willing to admit. Funny how once you start compromising on morality there’s really nothing to stop you. It truly is a slippery slope.

The thing that struck me most was the fact that Germany was far and away the most developed, sophisticated, educated, and democratic country in the developed world at the time. Almost everything that they did and that we later named Crimes Against Humanity was done through the processes and with the authority of a democratic government and supported by their court system. It was a very dark, ugly world and I don’t recommend spending a semester there. I can hardly visualize a sunny day in Germany of that era.

I initially got B on my paper from my very leftist professor who just ripped into me for my conclusion that the elimination of any moral absolutes turns a democracy into a monstrous system capable of doing anything that comported with “the healthy opinion of the Volk.” I wasn’t taking a B, though I’ll admit it wasn’t a particularly well done paper, so I asked to see some of the A papers. I knew that only a small minority of the mostly juniors and seniors in college could even write in complete sentences, so I wanted to see what he thought was an A paper. Of course he refused, so I said I was appealing the grade to the chancellor and we could all see the A papers together. He relented and I got my A.

Comrade Obama mastered the “healthy opinion” of 52% of the American “Volk,” and all it would take is a few tweaks of those moldy old documents to render those who don’t share the “opinion” of the 52% non-persons outside the protections afforded persons under the law. That is the ultimate danger of secularism. We’ve removed people from the protections of civil society in this Country before; the slaves before 1866, the Nisei, unborn children now. A few words in a USSC decision or in an Act of Congress would be all it took.

A very, very solemn place. It can’t really be described in words.

The other thing that I find worthy of mention is the fact that they fully controlled media, academia, entertainment , and all venues of information dissemination. It just goes to show that when you have such control you can get a majority of people to believe the most outrageous things. This is not the dark ages in Africa. We are talking about 20th century Western Europe. Not that I am comparing liberals to Nazis, but Its not hard to understand how they can successfully persuade people to believe in the most absurd things like global warming due to their full control of information dissemination.

BBC German language broadcasts presented irrefutable stories of the holocaust to the German people. So by the end of the war, no German could credibly deny that they didn’t know. But while no one was exempted from membership in the Nazi party, there are vast records of German citizens brought up on charges for “Jewish sympathies” – enough to bully their neighbors into silence. Those deemed “unenthusiastic” in participating in Nazi Youth activities were assigned hard labor, or worse.

Certainly the holocaust, conducted as a separate national initiative from the war, could not have been possible without the silence of the population in general. But you make your case against all Germans without exception by sheer assertion. To say “The “Good German” who wasn’t a Nazi and didn’t do or even know about the atrocities was a fiction” is refuted, among other places, at the end of the rope from which Dietrich Bonhoeffer hung.

No excuses for Germany. IMHO, it deserved the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki more so than did Japan. But to say there was not a good German soul to be found strikes me as a morally flawed argument.