The point is, he didn't do it in a democracy. He had taken over, and the people didn't have a say. In a government without Article 46, it wouldn't have happened.
False. Hitler was democratically elected and the Nazi party enjoyed substantial support (as well as a large minority of ethnic Germans--something like 40% if memory serves--as party members) up until the point where they lost the war. There are a number of works out there (one that comes to mind is Peter Fritzsche's
Life and Death in the Third Reich) which document primary sources from within Germany and the occupied territory--letters, journals, etc., all of which show a rather disturbing level of awareness and support for the activities of the state. One that springs to mind are a number of different accounts by Germans about looking forward to the auctioning off of the property of neighbors who have been 'disappeared'.
The notion of the totalitarian dictator controlling an unwilling population with no support through nothing but terror and an advanced police apparatus is patently false to anyone who has done any sort of research on the political and social climate of the time--it's a delusion invented by post-war scholars to explain away the fact that people like Hitler (and to a lesser degree Stalin--who only inherited the Bolshevik support base, which was never more than 10% of the population of Russia, though admittedly that was due mostly to the relatively low level of urbanization at the time; the majority of people were peasant farmers rather than urban workers and soldiers)
did enjoy popular support. It's apologetics of the finest degree, attempting to absolve people of the responsibility assumed by supporting a poisonous political platform, and not too different from the gleefully ignorant declarations that began in 1989 with people like Francis Fukuyama declaring the end of history and the culmination of human civilization in the form of capitalist democracy. Never underestimate the capacity of scholars of history and politics for willful blindness and self-delusion, particularly when they bind themselves to a specific ideology--people like that will always frame events in a way which suits their worldview, regardless of how distorted the facts become.
There was no action taken against Germans who refused to join or spoke against the policies of the Nazi party; that would, after all, have been counterproductive to the goal of a unified German volk. Likewise, German citizens enjoyed a remarkable level of prosperity right up until the point where their cities began being bombed; IIRC they didn't even have imposed rationing during the war. There were a vast number of reasons for Germans to support Hitler, those who didn't actually buy into the genocide were at least willing to pretend for the sake of personal well-being, and those who
did protest didn't suffer for it. One of the most frightening aspects of the primary documents which survived the war, actually, is the number of people whose words suggested that they were not upset because of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but because they failed.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14460789 times)