tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9284635.post115615998337347608..comments2023-10-19T10:21:32.190-05:00Comments on In Other Words: The Scarlet SwastikaPaul Drewhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00974655628067266530noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9284635.post-1156169339236875582006-08-21T09:08:00.000-05:002006-08-21T09:08:00.000-05:00You ask a lot of qood questions? There is more po...You ask a lot of qood questions? There is more power in questions than in answers.<BR/><BR/>A couple of thoughts on what it must have been like to have been a 16 year old boy in Germany in the early 1940s. I don't expect that they saw too many copies of the London Times or listened to too many hours of the BBC.<BR/><BR/>People today know nothing of history but shallow stereotypes. And they proceed from the assumption that that boy (or girl) possessed the information that we do today.<BR/><BR/>That's foolish and shows a great deal of their ignorance.<BR/><BR/>There is a great deal of difference between what a teen age boy would do when faced with a government and society telling him that he was needed for the Fatherland than what an Adolf Eichmann or a Dr. Josef Mengele did when employed in the bureaucracy responsible for running the death camps.<BR/><BR/>Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was some years older, but I doubt that aspiring opera singers in wartime or peacetime, spend a lot of time reading the newspapers and debating government policies with their pals.<BR/><BR/>Even though they did not directly contribute to Nazi atrocities (that we know of), Guenther Grass and Schwarzkopf should have admitted their Nazi associations. But they thought they could get away with it. And they almost did. I don't know what I would have done had I been in their shoes.<BR/><BR/>The situation gets a lot more dicey when you are talking about a 30 year old Ukrainian peasant with fresh memories of the forced starvation deaths of much of his family and millions of other countrymen, volunteering to help the invading Nazis guard Soviet soldiers, Communist officials and Russian Jewish prisoners in concentration and death camps.<BR/><BR/>I'm glad that I was never called upon to sit on that court.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08332138030182107580noreply@blogger.com