Just suppose

[ritaxis]

You're a German in 1932, and you have some prescience.

What should you be doing?

Comments

[green_knight]

Emigrate.

Organise a network of people who are willing and able to help Germans from outside Germany.

But, really, getting out should be your first priority.

[ritaxis]

Really?

What if your sense of prescience also tells you "it doesn't have to go that way?"

Then what? What is the thing that people did not do in 1932 that they could have done, to prevent what followed?

(I'm thinking of the way that they had election after election, and the Nazis never got more than forty percent of the vote, and yet the government was handed over to them -- what could Germans do to prevent that? Or to prevent it from going forward when it was done?)

[green_knight]

I think 1932 is way too late for a single person to change anything, and in essence you are talking about a single person who needs to convince his friends and organise others - and by that time, the whole machine was far too much in motion. In the beginning, there _was_ strong support for the NSDAP - both direct and the 'well, everything is so messed up, let's just see whether they can deliver what they promise

[ritaxis]

The thing is, I think it's 1932 right now, not 1928.

[infernarl]

Are we assuming the individual is anti-(future)-government?

[ritaxis]

Consider who asked you the question. Of course I'm assuming you're not in favor of the Nazis.

I'm also taking as given that the killing of Jews was not about the killing of Jews. So that when we're looking at history, we're not just interested in the names of which people were at which end of the knife, or which people were at which end of the whip, but the processes that put them in their positions.

[ritaxis]

And that bit "the killing of Jews was not about the killing of Jews" so doesn't express what I meant to say. Which is that genocide isn't a Jew thing -- remember I say this as a Jew -- it's a political thing. And genocide is not the only thing to worry about in 1932. And that preventing the other things most likely prevents genocide too.

[infernarl]

Ok, so the person is not a nazi. They still might do something selfish. Leaving would be selfish. Or investing in the defense industry.

[green_knight]

I'm also thinking investing the army with greater backbone might have helped, as well as improving the global market and relieving some of the pressure on the working class.

[anonymous]

Move to England with your divorced daughter and her little girl.

I got an email some years ago from someone who was looking for relatives or news of his (great-?)grandfather (named Bornstein like me), who had stayed in Germany after the divorce in the 1930s.

I wasn't able to help him, because my line of Bornsteins came to the US in the late 1800s. I sent a copy of the email to my uncle who was into genealogy, just in case.

- Captain Button

[randwolf]

"Should" is a very slippery word, implying as it does a single right course of action, and who decides what is right? If, for instance, one felt general compassion for the world and its peoples and was very brave as well, one might choose to attempt to prevent the dissolution into authoritarianism. Given what was coming, however, that would involve extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice; this would be the course of action of what might usually be called a saint. A less brave person might try to protect themself and their family and close friends by, for instance, moving to Latin America. I would not reproach anyone who took this course of action; it seems unreasonable to reproach anyone for not being a saint. An opportunistic person might choose to try to profit and also escape the coming disaster. It would depend on one's place in society as well; a German communist leader or senior party member, having had a sudden flash of precognition, might have been able to make common cause with the German social democrats; even small