They dragged Jews from their homes and gathered them in public places before deporting them. They did this in the open, in broad daylight. They had them standing there in parks surrounded by dense urban housing. They checked everyone walking in the vicinity and grabbed any Jew that happened to wander to close. They seperated the men before deportation from the women and children. The commotion and wailing must have been loud. The cruelty plainly visible. In the midst of densely populated cities like Munich, Berlin, Hamburg.

Even my greatgrandpa in some Podunk Swabian village knew. He went to Poland as a teacher, fervent Nazi and came back shook while the eastern front was still advancing. Saying “we will pay for this dearly, everyone of us”. Still sent his daughter to the Napola the coward.

Everyone knew. There is no excuse.

Most of them were doing it. The Wehrmacht was drenched in blood up to it’s eyeballs and it took decades of diligent propaganda work to bury their role in the killing of millions and millions of people.

There’s a great Primo Levi quote about this that I think still rings very true today, especially for those living in the imperial core:

It is true that the great mass of Germans remained unaware of the most atrocious details of what happened later in the camps: the methodological industrialized extermination on a scale of millions, the gas chambers, the cremation furnaces, the vile despoiling of corpses—all this was not supposed to be known, and in effect few did know it, up to the end of the war. Among other precautions, in order to keep the secret, only cautious and cynical euphemisms were employed by the official language: one did not write “extermination” but “final solution,” not “deportation” but “transfer,” not “killing by gas” but “special treatment.” Not without reason, Hitler feared that this horrendous news, if it were divulged, would compromise the blind faith that the country had in him, as well as the morale of the fighting troops.

And yet varied sources of information were available to most Germans. Knowing and making things known was one way of keeping one’s distance from Nazism. But most Germans didn’t know because they didn’t want to know. Because, indeed, they wanted not to know. It is certainly true that the German people, as a whole, did not even try to resist. In Hitler’s Germany a particular code was widespread—those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers. Shutting his mouth, his eyes, and his ears, the typical German citizen built for himself the illusion of not knowing, hence of not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door.

There is so much information available that it’s impossible to stay ignorant unless it is done willingly.

The lemmy.world users are at it again.

Can’t believe I have lived to see the day

as more and more holocaust survivors and WW2 veterans go to their graves, as the crisis of capitalism gets worse, this deliberate pro-fascist revisionism will increase.

I’d seen it. The mask of humanity fall from Capital. It has to take it off for one second to kill everyone, everything you love.