If the shoe fits: the 'good' Germans
By: Barbara Hollingsworth
Local Opinion Editor
04/25/09 12:05 AM EDT
Here’s an excerpt from Future of Freedom Foundation president Jacob G. Hornberger’s unsettling essay entitled: “How Hitler became a dictator”
" For their part, the German people quickly accepted the new order of things. Keep in mind that the average non-Jewish German was pretty much unaffected by the new laws and decrees. As long as a German citizen kept his head down, worked hard, took care of his family, sent his children to the public schools and the Hitler Youth organization, and, most important, didn’t involve himself in political dissent against the government, a visit by the Gestapo was very unlikely.
Keep in mind also that, while the Nazis established concentration camps in the 1930s, the number of inmates ranged in the thousands. It wouldn’t be until the 1940s that the death camps and the gas chambers that killed millions would be implemented.
Describing how the average German adapted to the new order, [William] Shirer [author of “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”] writes:
“...The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation....
“The Nazi terror in the early years affected the lives of relatively few Germans and a newly arrived observer was somewhat surprised to see that the people of this country did not seem to feel that they were being cowed.... On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.”
Here's a link to the whole article: www.fff.org/freedom/fd0403a.asp
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