General Discussion

My mom died when I was a teenager, after a long illness that saw her pretty much incapacitated the year before she passed away. I used to blame my father, but really: it was cancer.

My father, aside from being an anti-Semite and supporter of Hitler to his dying day, was an alcoholic who had difficulty telling fantasy from reality. Anyway, I have some stories of his but he was a most unreliable story teller.

I've had a bit more luck with my extended family on my mother's side. They've told me some little bits about being children during the war and having to rush to the shelter during bombing attacks. My mom grew up in the Ruhr, her father was a coal miner. The area came in for heavy bombing, the Americans by day, the British at night. My uncle, who was also a child at the time, tells the story of coming out of the shelter to see his neighborhood in flames, and bodies on the street. He lost both of his older brothers in the war, the one in Africa with Rommel, the other in Russia.

There's an account in Shirer's Berlin Diary of a joke Germans told 1939-1940.

Q: A Luftwaffe plane crashes. On board are Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Goebbels. Who is saved?

A: The German people.

And then there's this joke my mother told me, which I later learned was also commonplace.

One of the Nazi's favorite slogans was: "And for all this we have the Fuehrer to thank!"

This was repeated in newsreels, on posters, on the radio. The end to unemployment, the building of the autobahn, the curbing of inflation, and then eventually the victories in Poland and France. "And for all this we have the Fuehrer to thank."

Then, later in the war and at its end, looking at the rubble, the bodies in the street, the curtailed rations, the lousy coffee, the shortage of coal so that homes were unheated in the winter, the lists of war dead, some Germans--those who weren't brainwashed idiots--would look at each other and say, "And for all this we have the Fuehrer to thank."

My father of course never appreciated that sort of wit.

Best wishes.