And a boy fascinated by history I really took the time to understand how an entire country could fall for propaganda.
I've watched as rural America has fallen for the same antics from right wing media the last 30 years. I really think it lifted up by plain ole jealousy.
Since they see the Dems overall as snooty college educated elites they can blame their problems on someone else.
They don't understand government or history so that vacuum can easily be filled.
The one thing that has always irked me about the Democratic party is they think everyone passed their constitution with flying colors and should just understand what they are talking about.
Dems have to do a better job at gov education. A lot of prominent Dems might roll their eyes but Ross perot had it right with all the graphs and such. I still remember his talks and I was 10

Good things he is talking about the economy which was fueled by slave labor. He's likely also repeating what his parents said.

After the war, the new German government tried to hide the facts of the Jewish holocaust because they thought it would harm them on the new world stage. The Nuremburg Trials were literally the tip of the iceberg. It wasn't until the 1960s that concentration camp survivors started getting their stories told. As the war was ending, German officers tried to destroy all records of what they had done but the allies found out and retrieved them and created a huge warehouse of those records in Berlin. A German policeman began investigating the concentration camp stories and he went to the American command in Berlin who took him to a warehouse and explained, "The Germans wrote down everything they did, no matter how horrible, because they wanted to impress their superiors." That's when they started hunting down the worst of the Nazis even though many had fled to South America. A German language movie was made about this several years ago.

impressed with how devastating it was to the German crowd who said "We didn't know about these things," which were the growing encroachments of a Nazi party intent on wiping out Jews and other "unacceptable" people, i.e. mentally challenged individuals, for instance. FIND THIS MOVIE AND SEE IT! Probably one of the finest moments Hollywood has ever had...

that Reagan eliminated federal funds for civics education. The time-line fits and has become another item on my long list of "I blame Reagan" accusations.

Friends and loved ones grow weary of my I blame Reagan comments and certainly many others since then have contributed to our current peril but even the outsized voice given to right wing broadcasting can be traced back to his destructive reign.

Also recently read that if enough people are kept miserable enough for long enough, they will choose Authoritarians. That certainly seems to be playing out here and now.

Thank you for the story and fresh perspectives (to me).

ended. He told me about how, in his town, when they heard Hitler had died and Germany had fallen, everyone took their uniforms and Nazi paraphernalia and threw them in the river. He said the river was clogged with all the Nazi cast-off items. I took it to mean that they were afraid they'd be judged guilty when the foreign troops arrived, and wanted to get rid of the proof.

In Miami, in the early '70s I worked on a crew headed by a man named Helmut. He'd been a lieutenant in the German army on the Russian Front. He was taken prisoner, and had frozen so bad he lost all the hair on his body. He owned a BMW motorcycle. He often talked about the war from their perspective, and the lead-up in Germany. Like many Germans from that time, he still held on to the "good things" Hitler had done to restore Germany's faith and confidence in itself. He was an old-school carpenter who'd apprenticed himself at 15. He was probably the best boss I ever had. The entire crew loved him for his staunch advocacy for his workers. He always made sure to have a large population of Black workers on his crews. He said the Black mess staff at the prison camp was the only reason he survived his Russian wartime prison ordeal.

There's a good chance that Germany would STILL BE NAZI if the Allies hadn't won the War. And Naziism would have spread to other countries, e.g., France, the U.K., the rest of Europe.

Once you're in a dictatorship, you don't get to vote it out.

Thanks so much for sharing. It must have been incredible to hear directly from someone who was there when it happened Pototan.

is when you said he visited rural areas during his campaign. I have often asked why trump was going to all these small, sparsely populated rural towns on his campaign trail. After all, he knows he has those people's votes (mostly all white, mostly not college educated). He is following Hitler's playbook.

Yesterday I took a drive out to the rural area for my fall pumpkins, etc. Up until yesterday I had seen very few trump signs if any. The trip was about ten miles. The farther I got away from my town I started to see trump signs everywhere. By the time I got home the rest of my day was very unsettled. This is Michigan and for the first time I had this feeling that Michigan may not be a lock for Kamala.

I still think that a vast number of people do not believe that he would ever do the things he says such as be a "dictator on day 1". They still think "oh, that's just trump being trump." That's what scares me the most. There's a lot of them out there.

The German people suffered humiliation in the wake of WW1 and terrible economic hardship during the Depression, whereas the USA has the strongest economy in the world and we are still the pre-eminent nation.

The popularity of Donald Trump stems from ignorance and bigotry, not trauma and desperation.

This is not to ignore the poverty which still afflicts many in this country, but to believe Donald Trump or Republican policies will rescue the poor is delusion.

Julia Boyd wrote an excellent book about the foreigners who visited pre war Germany and were sucked in

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Travellers-Third-Reich-Fascism-Everyday/dp/1783963468#:~:text=Travellers%20in%20the%20Third%20Reich%20is%20an%20extraordinary%20history%20of,%2C%20athletes%2C%20poets%2C%20journalists%2C

lol I'm just going to call him that.

His entree was via Hitler-Jugend - Hitler Youth. He was an excellent athlete and they were among the first recruited. In the case of the young people, who were essentially isolated in summer camp-style environments, I believe them when they say they didn't really know what was going on as far as the heinous things, not until they were conscripted into active duty.

He said you absolutely could not say no to be in Hitler Youth; it was obviously authoritarian enough from the onset that they realized they had to join. But they were treated like young gods.

Then shit got real, fast, especially since it was toward the end of the war by the time he, at 14, was forced into active duty. Holding that swastika patch was surreal, to say the least.