UnSubRocky wrote on Jul 11
th, 2021 at 2:31pm:
Two generations after the war had ended in Germany, you would imagine that the Germans would have had access to information about the Nazis that the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s had available. Declassified documents notwithstanding. Historians and revisionists would have come to some kind of consensus about what went on in the lead up to Hitler's reign. And they would have been able to gather documentation and video footage to further elaborate on what was public knowledge at the time.
People in Germany over the age of 80 today would likely disassociate themselves from the Nazi regime as much as they could. Only the Nazis themselves would have found themselves in great peril to the punishment meted out to them post-WW2. The "great silence" you talk about would be the general self-censoring about talking about the war and the Nazis. Germans do not want to be associated with Nazis. They want to shake off the stigma associating Nazis with their countrymen.
I put it to you that the seven decades of post war studies into the war would be what the majority of Germans knew of what happened with the brutality. Even though many people that lived during the war are now elderly or dead, when they were in their prime years, they would have understood the information about the Nazis in an post-thought based on the records being released.
You have to understand the mood of the German and Austrian people, not just through the lenses of the loss of WW1, the humiliating reparations demanded from Germany by the Allies, the forced demilitarisation and the loss of all overseas territories... But also through the collapse and disintegration of their respective empires.
Germany in 1933 had relatively only recently become a singular entity under a Kaiser.
Austria was the dominant partner in the Austro-Hungarian Empire which ruled from (what is now) the South Tirol to as far east as Romania to as far north as parts of Poland. Kaiser Franz-Josef was a deeply respected emperor and was the living embodiment of the Hapsburg dynasty that had ruled the empire since the 13th century...
In an historical blink of an eye Germany and Austria had lost everything.
The abdicated Kaiser Wilhelm II was the first to blame the destruction of Germany on the Jews as a fifth column. In his words: 'Let no German ever forget this, nor rest until these parasites [Jews] have been destroyed and exterminated from German soil'.
Then, in another historical blink of an eye (15 years and 20 years in the wilderness for Germany and Austria respectively) in 1933 then 1938, a son of Austria was to restore all of that former glory and maybe expand it further.
Hitler was not just a leader, he had become a mythical 'teutonic' demigod.
Kristallnacht was timed to be carried out on the anniversary of Martin Luther's birthday as a 'birthday present' to him, so the mythos of Hitler attained the highest possible of religious heights. The message was clear: The rise of Nazism was equivalent in historical importance to the birth of Protestantism itself.
Nothing that Hitler asked of the German people was too much and eliminating 'the Jew' was an easy ask of Germans and Austrians (Poles and Ukrainians also had little moral problem with it).
And you can reasonably be assured that the vast majority of those old Germans and Austrians who were indoctrinated by Nazism went to their graves in their 80s and 90s with the same sense of being on the side of right with regard to what Nazism demanded of them; including genocide... Whether they partook or were just aware of it. As far as they concerned, the Jew deserved it. I never met one that felt even the slightest sense of remorse.
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