Maybe I read too much Vonnegut as a teenager, but....

[pot_t_mouth]

All this talk about the new Pope and Hitler's Youth has got me agitated. Super agitated, for a few reason. I have been stewing on it all day so hopefully, I can get my point across. I wish I were a better writer

Comments

[puschia]

i agree with everything you said. its nice to hear other people feel the same way. in high school, we would always have these sorts of discussions in social studies and it used to piss me off. all these kids would be like 'i would NEVER do that! i would stand up to the gestapo!' and its nice that they believed that. but seriously, these are kids who could even stand up to their own peer groups in term of stupid shit like what clothes they wore, i hardly see them staring down the muzzle of a gun for a stranger...

my mom is german so its also a personal thing for me. i know my grandparents were in the german army. my grandmother was a nurse, so i view that as a noble thing, even if it was on the 'wrong' side. but my grandfather, i just don't know. my mom always said he was conscripted, but i don't know. she also said he was stationed up in finland where not much happened, but i don't know. i do know that some of the Nazi crap did infiltrate his thoughts, even though he is not someone who likes to follow authority. but i also know he was almost shot for treason because he wanted to convince his commander to let a bunch of soviet soldiers go instead of fighting them. i like so many things about my grandfather, but then there is that. i kind of want to know the truth but i kind of don't. and the worst thing is that it is all an issue only because of the accident of where and when he happened to be born.

as for the hitler youth, i could be wrong but i don't think it was voluntary. i think you had to do it. if not literally, than simply by the force of public pressure. i think that was the real problem of Nazi Germany, not that they were all evil or hated Jews so much, but that everyone was scared shitless into going along with it all. and anyone who was young then was indoctrinated with all this crap and there was no one to tell them that it wasn't true. i read this book once, i forget the name, it was about German women's experiences in WWII. a few on these women talked about the hitler youth (i forget what the female equivalent was called) - it was basically like being in the boy/girl scouts, they at the time were not aware of any political aspects of it. it was only as adults, being interviewed for this book and being shown lyrics, that they realized the content of the old songs they used to sing and whatnot. these things were much less black-and-white and overtly insidious to the average person at the time than anyone nowadays would like to admit. its much easier to say that everyone was just bad. like you said, it makes it easier for us to be smug about ourselves.