When one contemplates on the events leading up to the WW-2 and the systematic and professional butchering of around 5.6 million Jews during the Holocaust, you wonder if by some colossal accident all the evil masterminds of the century were born into Germany instead of being distributed equally across the world like so: one super villain in Turkey, one murderous penguin in Antarctica, one serial killer in New York etc….
There seems to be no rational explanation for the fact that almost an entire nation agreed to this huge massacre. How on earth did Hitler get Tom, Dick and Harry (or their German versions anyway), to participate so enthusiastically in a massive genocide? But before we delve into the philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Dewey and look into the phenomenon of dictatorship, we need to understand what happened to Germany.
When Germany came out of the WW-1 (1918), they were enraged that they had lost, especially because it meant that all the sacrifices that they made and all the difficulties they had endured for the past four years came to nothing. Ouch!
They might have taken this out on Kaiser Wilhelm (Kaiser is not a first name, it means Emperor), who abdicated shortly thereafter. Then the people and the political parties decided to hold elections and a parliament was formed: The Weimar Republic.
The Germans were not only devastated about their loss but they were also humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles which they were forced to accept. The German army was made tiny and the air force and marines were banned completely. The only thing doing any flying was probably the pheasants and they actually prefer to walk.
The new German government also had to pay $33 billion in war reparations and give up its overseas colonies and parts of its home territory to France and Poland. One British official was quoted as saying "We shall squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak!" and they did. The German economy crashed and by 1923, four billion German marks had the equal value of one American dollar. The people needed a wheelbarrow to carry enough paper money to buy a loaf of bread…..............
Conspiracy theories were floating around because when you have a bunch of ignorant people and something bad happens, like gloomy weather, nothing cheers them better than a convenient condemnation.
Imagine that you are giving an exam, let us say that you are also sufficiently intelligent and the question paper is said to be super easy. Two weeks later, you come to know that you failed the test. You are in shock and your friend comes and tells you that he personally knows the teacher who corrected it and that she is positively evil. What are the chances that you will still think it is your fault? What are the chances that you will give this teacher the benefit of doubt? I'd say none.
That, my friends, is what happened to the Jews. The Jewish officials of the government were unjustly blamed for 'backstabbing the army' and signing the armistice (the peace treaty) even before the army lost and all the German VIPs unable to face their military defeat repeated the word 'backstabbing' a thousand times till it became a fact and thus started a story of mass destruction...... which we will continue later…
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That was a fantastic article.... i really like the way you have presented our history in such an interesting manner. Waiting for part-2.
after seeing this !! The Germans be like: Finally! there's someone who knew that the brutal Hitler and the Nazis weren't the only history of the never praised Germany!!