Then there were the university students from Munich who were part of the White Rose Movement, which essentially handed out anti-Nazi leaflets. The leaders, whose names I now cannot remember, were beheaded.
The Scholl siblings. They were bloody fools - and IIRC a professor of theirs even told them that what they were doing wouldn't help anyone. Their story is a prime example of unnecessary martyrdom.
Nazi Germany was totalitarian, and there was no freedom of speech. During the final years, when it was clear the war would be lost, a single joke about the war, the Wehrmacht or the political leadership could get you executed - for "Wehrkraftzersetzung". The churches were, well, not suppressed, but given a hard time. Thousands of priests from both confessions were put in the death camps because they refused to collaborate. Artists and dissidents were either forced to emigrate or eliminated.
But the Nazi regime had a huge amount of support in the population. They were seen as responsible for the economic prosperity, and what they did was applauded as 'making Germany great again'. That's why the war was (initially) supported as well: It was seen as a war of revange, as a completely justified war.
And the people in general - my grandmother, may she rest in peace, apparently was an exception - didn't care much for the Jewish population, or for the other prosecuted people either. My mum grew up in the fifties and sixties, and she told me once that when that topic cae up - which was a very, very rare event -, people often said that what Hitler had done had been bad, and he shouldn't have;
if he had just put them in forced-labor camps though... It's a common joke or sarcastic saying here that everyone was in the resistance. And everyone hid a Jew in their attic, too. And of course nobody had been a Nazi, how dare you suggest that?
Ah, that resistance bit is funny too: Italy had the partisans, France had La resistance, Poland had the various Polish units in the Allied armies, all countries in the east had partisans... And in Germany we had to invent the term 'inner resistance'. Because nobody actually
did something. They just talked, and got killed for that without getting anywhere.
That last bit is not entirely true, though: There are actually two recorded instances where the population did not put up with Nazi orders and got their way. That was when - in Bavaria and in Lower Saxony, in the area where my family is from - they wanted to remove the crosses from the classrooms. That was their red line - not dead Jews, but a figurine of a man on two bits of wood.
The Lower Saxony bit may be the only instance of true resistance in Germany: During that time, Clemens August Graf von Galen was the bishop of Münster. He was no saint: He disliked the Weimar Republic, and supported the war against the Soviet Union. But
holy crap did he hate the Nazis. A true old aristocrat he was, and he spoke his mind. Bishop was a very important position then - even today the area is rather religious for German standards -, and the people listened. The Nazis thought about deporting him, but decided against it - Goebbels feared an uprising.
A goddamn uprising! That's how important he was. And that's why the handicapped people survived in that area. Elsewhere, they were deported and gassed, but in the Münsterland the Nazis weren't able to do that.
They still got the Jews, though.
And I don't think a lack of Article 46 could have prevented that. When the closest thing we have to a national hero was okay with Operation Barbarossa, a few words on paper can't do much.
Author
Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14842530 times)