I’ve just realized that there is a no equivalent in English or Russian to the German word Reichsrassenhygieneamt.
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Я даже не представляю как это словосочетанием перевести на русский 
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Hi,
“Rassenhygiene” is a term translated as “расовая гигиена” or “race hygiene”. To my mind, Reichsrassenhygieneamt is “ведомство Третьего рейха по расовой гигиене” (Third Reich’s Authority for Race Hygiene). It’s impossible to translate it with one word.
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Exactly, it is impossible to translate into any language because its level of evil is beyond any imagination. Except for the Germans no other nation has ever been able to create a state run system that exercised this kind of cruelties and I hope no other nation including the Germans ever will.
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Torsten, I don’t agree that the whole German nation was guilty. It was a small group of people who came to power. The rest people were victims who had to obey. When I watched “The Reader” (Der Vorleser) movie, many things became clear to me. Hanna Schmitz, a former guard at Auschwitz, had no choice at that time.
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You always have a choice. A large percentage of the German population turned a blind eye on all the atrocities that were being committed by the Nazis. Membership of the NSDAP (the Nazi party) rose to 8! million at its peak in 1945. That was about 10% of the entire population.
Also, the Nazis introduced Rassenlehre as an official school subject when they came to power in 1933. Any person in their right mind would understand that teaching kids that there different human races and that those races have various levels of value is just a crime.
So, no excuses for the generation of Germans who collectively is responsible for the holocaust and other atrocities.
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Certainly, there are no excuses. But, please, answer my last three questions to put everything in place:
- Do you mean that the all nation got suddenly mad?
- Could many people leave Germany? By the way, the Nazis tried to persuade Thomas Mann to return many times and finally he and his family were withdrawn their nationality. Would they have stayed alive if they had returned?
- Could young and healthy men avoid military service at that time?
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Hi Irina,
No, the nation did not go mad, because the Nazis knew very well what they were doing. If Thomas Mann and his family had returned to Germany they probably would have been killed.
I agree with Torsten that you always have a choice, however, I must say, this does not go for children who have not enough knowledge to form an opinion about such issues. I don’t know if young and healthy men could have avoided military service back then, I’ll have to look it up. So, I owe you one.
Talk to you later.
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Let’s focus on this question since the answer to it is quite complex. No, the entire nation did not just ‘get mad’ and the process did not happen suddenly. Several factors and developments led to the catastrophic results caused by the Nazi regime. The Nazis eventually succeeded in persuading large parts of the German population that there was ‘scientific proof’ of the existence of the ‘Herrenrasse’ (a race superior to all other ‘races’) and that the survival of this super race was under thread. This idea of belonging to the ‘superior race’ was the core element of the Nazi ideology and it explains how they were able to persuade the German nation to perfect the process of genocide to a point where it reached industrial levels. Since you understand German I suggest you read the following to get an idea of the what the Germans were capable of:
For some strange reason this entry is available in German only.
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Thank you, Torsten, for the link! I heard about Auschwitz but I didn’t know about its scale and the number of victims. I was shocked!
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My parents and grand parents told me a lot about what the Nazis did and we also covered this era extensively at school including the way the Nazis systematically created their special language and misused existing expressions and proverbs such as ‘Arbeit macht frei’ or ‘Jedem das Seine’.
Then, at the age of 13 I went on a special school trip with my class to the concentration camp in Buchenwald where I saw the gas chambers and crematoria ovens built by the German company Topf & Söhne. We spent a total of 3 days and two nights inside the former concentration camp and I will never forget the atmosphere and what this experience did to me. It taught me what the German nation is capable of and since that day I have always tried to do everything I can to prevent something like this from happening again. Later I went to many places in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine and Russia) including Volgograd where I was again confronted with the atrocities committed by my ancestors so there is no excuse for what they did and there never will be. I will always remember how it all started and it would be a naïve illusion to assume that fascism in Germany has been eradicated for ever. Unfortunately, the roots are still there.
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Concerning your article:
What you mean then is that the Nazis sort of conditioned their underlings, as it were, into what they wanted them to do. This contradicts your belief in the fact that everyone always has a choice. I wonder what choice you would have made and why you always quickly change your mind so fast. That is quite complex too. It could even lead someone to believe that all Germans were Nazis. However you do not convince me. I was in Germany a few years ago, I spoke to a lot of people saying that they had no choice or were not Nazism-minded at all. They all had very good arguments as to why not. By the way has it ever crossed your mind that some of your forebears might have been Nazis? I’m changing my mind too, because since you appropriate that right, there’s no reason why I should deny it myself, don’t you think? By the way the roots of fascism are everywhere, because of dodgy, crazy Dolfie, who committed premeditated murder on a massive scale.
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I pretty much agree with the following excerpt:
Debate continues on how much average Germans knew about the Holocaust. Robert Gellately, a historian at Oxford University, conducted a widely respected survey of the German media before and during the war and concluded that there was substantial participation and consent from large numbers of ordinary Germans in various aspects of the Holocaust, that German civilians frequently saw columns of slave laborers, and that the basics of the concentration camps, if not the extermination camps, were widely known. The German scholar, Peter Longerich, in a study looking at what Germans knew about the mass murders concluded that: “General information concerning the mass murder of Jews was widespread in the German population.” Longerich estimates that before the war ended, 32 to 40 percent of the population had knowledge about mass killings…
Thank you very much for your polemic analysis. You say the debate on how much the average German knew about the Holocaust still continues. This is precisely what happens when historians do not agree with each other’s theories or even hypotheses. By the way, what makes you think that an Oxbridge education is so good and do these scholars also mention the reasons why the average German did or did not counteract the Nazis? I wonder what they have to say about that? I’m pretty sure that a lot of Germans feared Adolf Hitler so much they did not dare to say or do anything about his cruel (I wish I could think of a more accurate word) ‘policy’. So, what I would like to know is: why didn’t the average German counteract the Nazis? Fear is one of them. And I’m sure that you’ll agree with me, as I’ve said in a previous message, that children certainly weren’t guilty of anything, because they did not have the knowledge to form an opinion about such issues.
P.s.: Did you know that a lot of Protestant Germans were influenced by the great church reformer, Martin Luther (16th century). He loathed the Jews. Moreover, Adolf Hitler committed premeditated killing on a massive scale, because when he had been taken P.O.W during the first World War, he had all the time in the world to write his book: “Mein Kampf”. Remember?
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