Politic?

This is a blog dedicated to a personal interpretation of political news of the day. I attempt to be as knowledgeable as possible before commenting and committing my thoughts to a day's communication.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

 The Topography of Terror

"The rise of the Nazis was made possible because the elite of German society worked with them, but also, above all else, because most in Germany at least tolerated this rise.
"Human rights do not assert themselves on their own, freedom does not emerge on its own and democracy does not succeed on its own. No, a dynamic society ... needs people who have regard and respect for one another, who take responsibility for themselves and others, where people take courageous and open decisions and who are prepared to accept criticism and opposition."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel
With frank deliberation, Germany's 21st-Century chancellor has unflinchingly countered what her immediate post-war successor, Konrad Adenauer could not admit. He claimed on behalf of his defeated, war-weary and odiously conflicted and complicit countrymen that most Germans had opposed the crimes of the Nazis, particularly the horrors of the Holocaust. He insisted that many Germans had aided Jews to escape their dreadful fate prescribed for them by Hitler's fascist Final Solution.

"If only that had been the truth", said Inge Deutschkron, 90, a Jewish survivor of the unspeakable. Who remembered well how Germans had celebrated Hitler's rise to ultimate power. She had been invited to address Germany's parliament during a ceremony held as a special session in tribute to those who had perished during the shame of Germany's tryst with a Third Reich.  Yesterday represented the 80th anniversary of fascist Germany's rise on the world scene. She recalled paramilitary black-shirt SA thugs roaming the streets.

"Often, I couldn't get to sleep in the evenings and listened for footsteps in the staircase. If they were boots, I became afraid they could be SA men coming to arrest my father."  She spoke, before German lawmakers in the Bundestag, of recognizing the indifference of most ordinary Germans to the fate of their fellow citizens who happened to be Jewish. Citizens who were forced to wear an outer demonstration of their presumed inferiority as human beings.

"The majority of Germans I met in the streets looked away when they saw this star on me -- or looked straight through me", she recalled. Germans, she understood from what she witnessed in Bonn after the war "had simply erased from their memory the crimes for which the German state had set up its own machinery of murder."

To help elderly Germans recall those years, and to aid the younger generation to fully understand the cauldron of poisonous terror that brewed in Nazi Germany when it set out to conquer the world and to dominate it, while destroying world Jewry, gypsies, political foes, Christians, the elderly and the ill, and those who suffered mental illness, a new exhibition was launched at the Topography of Terror memorial, documenting Hitler's ascension to power.

Chancellor Merkel made especial note of the fact that the German academics of the time and students - German intellectuals in other words - were happy to join the Nazis. And to give proof of their faith in the Nazi ideology, burned all those books deemed to be of a subversive nature.  When Hitler was named chancellor on January 30, 1933, he set Germany on its path to world war and genocide.

"This path ended in Auschwitz", said Andrea Nachama, the director of the Topography of Terror.

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