An online retailer I order a lot of clothes from (Duluth Trading Co.) is forcing a password change. Something tells me somebody got hacked, and they don't want to admit it.
@hazardwarning It's out of fashion with most historians these days, but I still think the best one-volume resource for a broad overview is The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. It's not perfect, but it is exhaustive in its scope. Follow that with more recent and specialized reading, such as the book on IBM that Konrad mentioned. (Edited to remove the recommendation of the Goldhagen book, as I haven't read it in a while and it has become extremely controversial.)
The Israel-Palestine thing is vexing. For my own part, I don't think anyone can look at it and conclude that the blame lies all with one side. It's a cursed history. And in truth, Israeli settlements on the West Bank don't help. Neither do Hamas rocket attacks, nor the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
I look at it and tend to side with ordinary people who just want to be left alone. I'm a pragmatist; neither side is going anywhere, so both sides need to ratchet down the violence. I'm on the side of Palestinians who face Israeli destruction of their homes, and on the side of Israelis who get blown to bits when a suicide bomber blows up a bus in Tel Aviv. May they all someday decide they love their kids more than they hate each other.
// @matigo @konrad @gtwilson
@konrad It's an excellent question, and many books have been written on the subject of how the nation of Beethoven and Schiller ended up producing the most industrialized mass murder in human history. It's fascinating, and one of the reasons I've spent a lifetime reading about it.
The man I referred to meeting was named Kurt Krüger, and he was an early Nazi and an enthusiastic supporter of the Party program (and the father of the woman who became my high school German teacher). Something apparently changed for him when he got to Poland after the camps were established, and he saw (and by his own account, enabled) the atrocities, and he was one of the Germans lucky enough to survive Soviet captivity, but unlucky enough not to be released until 1955. One can only wonder what ten years in the gulag taught him. It did change him in some ways. By the time I met him, he was in his 80s and had become an enthusiastic Green Party member, and was living in a small town in the Schwarzwald.
Everything I've read leads me to believe that Hitler and the Nazis could not have taken and held onto power if their only supporters were the obvious ones, the demobilized soldiers, the men in brown shirts and their families. It also required the willing assistance of the industrialists like Thyssen and Krupp, the auto manufacturers like the Quandt family, the lawyers, the salesmen, the booksellers, the grocers, the teachers, the farmers, the priests and pastors, and the Volksdeutsche in places like the Sudetenland.
The ones who actively supported the party were, without question, deserving of the label "Nazi." The opportunists also did. What about the people like your wife's family, who kept their head down and just tried to survive, and who did not actively resist? Their lack of resistance enabled the regime to some degree, but it's worth noting that by 1934, the Enabling Act had been passed, the Gestapo had been established, and the first KZ-Lager had been built at Dachau. After that point, resistance required significant risk, not only to oneself but also to one's family. I'm not going to condemn those who were just trying to live long enough to see another day. There's a reason why we call the ones who did resist, who hid Jews from the SS and saved lives, heroes.
All of the above is why I and many others have sounded the alarm about what's going on in my country. If you understand how and why Hitler (and other dictators) came to power, and how he held onto power, you have insight into the risks we all face and what could come next. It is not yet too late here, but nobody should be complacent. We're just not that special.
Oh, and to answer your question about IBM: corporations are made up of people, and the people who organized the information that allowed the Holocaust to happen are every bit as guilty as the SS-Oberscharführer who dropped the Zyklon-B crystals into the gas chamber.
// @matigo @gtwilson
@gtwilson I lean very left, but I'm officially registered as a nonpartisan voter.
// @matigo
@gtwilson I saw an ad for a GOP candidate in Virginia that said something about Tim Kaine and his Communist ideas. That's about on the same level as calling Nelson Rockefeller a Nazi. It's nuts.
// @matigo
@gtwilson I actually think it's a useful and accurate word. People who think Nazis were only the jackbooted thugs in black uniforms in the camps are woefully misinformed. The average Nazi was the average German. I met a former SS officer in 1981 who basically said exactly that, and who was extremely repentant for what he'd been part of. Ten years in Soviet captivity helped.
// @matigo
@gtwilson I'm with you on that. I have strong, visceral feelings about antisemitism that stem from having had friends whose grandparents left Auschwitz through the chimney, and from a visit to Dachau 33 years ago.
// @matigo