Just watched one of those documentarys in TV about the Waffen-SS. They showed some very rare colour films about them and also about the concentration camps. Seeing those unbelievable curel and well organized crimes my country has done in colour makes them so much more real than in B/W and much more affecting. What I didn't know before is that many of the SS-guards in Auschwitz and the other camps were just 17 years old boys.
Teenagers, who lived almost their whole life under that Nazi system, who just passed puberty were killing hundreds, thousands of innocent men, women and children.
I asked myself: If I would have lived in that time and been in that situation/position, how would I have acted? Would I have refused to obey or would I have participated in genocide?
Someday my father told me the story when he was a refugee, fleeing from the Soviet Army in winter 1944/45 with his mother. He was 14 years old. One day the group of refugees from the eastern part was told to rest for a night in a concentration camp, and not really understanding what kind of place he were, he saw those prisoners in their striped thin clothes running around and some SS-men giving orders.
Things sometimes make me speechles. Any word I could speek seems so useless and unappropriate.
But I know being silent makes you vicious too.
Teenagers, who lived almost their whole life under that Nazi system, who just passed puberty were killing hundreds, thousands of innocent men, women and children.
I asked myself: If I would have lived in that time and been in that situation/position, how would I have acted? Would I have refused to obey or would I have participated in genocide?
Someday my father told me the story when he was a refugee, fleeing from the Soviet Army in winter 1944/45 with his mother. He was 14 years old. One day the group of refugees from the eastern part was told to rest for a night in a concentration camp, and not really understanding what kind of place he were, he saw those prisoners in their striped thin clothes running around and some SS-men giving orders.
Things sometimes make me speechles. Any word I could speek seems so useless and unappropriate.
But I know being silent makes you vicious too.
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Weetabix packets are deffinately the worst cereal package!! They should seriously work on improving that!!!
Cherry xx
My grandfather was named Hurst, and he was partially responsible for the many bombs that fell on Dresden as an officer of the US Air Force. He regards his role in the war as the greatest thing he ever did, or ever could do. But war is violent and he was a peace loving man, after the war he was melancholy for the rest of his life. Many innocent people died there in a bombing campaign that, even though the allies used conventional weapons, was more destructive than the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Americans who study the war often ask themselves the same questions you're asking. If I had been in Germany in the 1930s, would I have supported nazism? As a German-American, what part of me is the part that is vulnerable to fascism? What part of me is responsible for the tragedy?
I don't think that there is much to be gained by sharing in the guilt of our ancestors. It's wrong to feel responsible for the crimes of our ancestors. We can only hope to take responsibility for the prevention of present and future crimes.
In that department, Germany succeeds by opposing the invasion of Iraq without evidence justifying it. We all thought Schreder would back down after the election, he didn't. What do you know, Deutschland! Maybe it was just a game of good cop, bad cop, but we now have weapons inspections and not war.