Quote:
Originally Posted by Thunderball
The majority of Germans realized they elected a monster. But what could they do? Fear kept them in line once he switched from a "Great man" to a cartoonish supervillain. Like Cowboy said, in 1933, he seemed like a swell guy... even in 1936, he was Time's Man of the Year. In 1938, Canadian Prime Minister King called him a great man and compared him to Joan of Arc! The man had a lot of people fooled.
The ones that didn't were probably thirsty for revenge for WWI and the hardship that followed.
Lets not forget Canada, US and Britain severely limited Jewish immigration in the 1930s and in 1939, weeks before war, threatened to torpedo the M.S. Saint Louis carrying them towards their shores... what provoked these societies to send these people away and back to Germany and what would likely mean death?
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You always have the ability to choose right or wrong. Denmark choose to save their Jews, so did Bulgaria, both in the face of massive Nazi retaliations. 1000s of Germans died resisting the Nazis. Fear is never an excuse.
I'm not excusing the way the Western world treated the Jews before the war, but there is a big difference between racist immigration policies and gassing 10 million + people. However, we did fail, we failed to recognize a tyrant, but we succeeded in not following him down his path of evil. One of the express purposes of Winston Churchill in fighting Hitler to the bloody end was to end the atrocities against the Jewish people.
Hitler seemed like a swell guy to the intellectually lazy. However, not everyone thought he was a great guy. In 1933, after Hitler was elected, Churchill warned Parliament that this man would start a war in Europe. Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Eric Voegelin all had to flee Nazi Germany because of their anti-Hitler publications.
The lesson we should learn is that once we start viewing things like morality as being a construct and relative to outside perspectives is when we start missing moral evils like Adolf Hitler.