@Germlat,
Quote:I agree...for many there was shame in suffering and knowing how many looked away rather than helping. It was a terrifying time.
Many looked away out of fear of the Nazi machinery, rather than a lack of human caring, although, the general feeling of hatred for Jews was near public hysteria brought about by Goebbels, Minister of hyperbolic propaganda for the Nazis. On pain of death, some Germans helped Jewish-Germans to escape the Nazis, hid some of them until the war was over. Just the way some whites helped southern black slaves escape via the underground railroad.
Quote:Germlat wrote:
Things are not that easily put aside, particularly when so many have ancestors who gave a first hand account of the events (as they should have).
Also, even tho there are new laws in Germany regarding the protection of Jews and other minorities, feelings and emotions cannot be mandated. I have heard and read that just below the surface in Germany, anti-Semitism is alive and well by *
some* Germans. This is all the more puzzling since the Jewish-German population, before Hitler's rise, was very small, approaching 200,000, less than 1/2 a million. Many of this group was well assimilated with a few intermarriages, and many of these Jews had been there for so long they'd forgotten when their ancestors first arrived.
Quote:Germlat wrote:
Still..generations later, it doesn't entitle a victim to become a victimizer. If you abandoned something...it doesn't belong to you forever simply because it once did.
Touché! With respect to some Jews, if they took the claim to court after 2,000 years, saying Palestine rightfully belonged to them after the Romans had claimed it and later, along with some others, they would be hysterically laughed out of the Halls of Justice. The first thing the judge will ask: can you produce a certified document supporting your claim "Palestine belong to the Jews?" Especially in the absence of an invisible god.
