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I don’t want to tea-bag anyone , as far as I’m concerned, the statues can stay, they’re a part of history, no need to re-write it. I do think history should be judged however, and not only on its own moral terms. I do condemn sparta, even though I recognize its martial excellence.
My grandma’s brother fell at 17 in the last months of the war. He didn’t want to go apparently. We could never mention him or the city where he died in front of her or she would start crying. I really can’t forgive the leaders, and even just regular adults who went along with it, for what they did to the country (to say nothing of all the non-german victims) . They all had their reasons of course, but they just were not good enough. Sure, most of the blame falls on the leaders, and the enthusiastic nazis, but in my view there is still more than enough blood left to mark every quiet follower as a murderer.
And it is true that rommel was tacitly supporting the stauffenberg attempt, but it was too tacit. As you say, even in his death he assisted the regime, keeping morale up. I’ll grant that he’s not morally in the same league as guys like schörner who were executing soldiers for refusing orders up to the very end (before abandoning his men to surrender to the americans).
It's this, I suppose, that really disagree with. I think the resistance to the nazis was admirable. But I also think that the "murderers" as you call them are by and far perfectly understandable. In between positive motivations like patriotism and martial ethos and just being law-abiding citizens and negative ones like peer pressure and the very real risk of getting executed as well as arrested and one's family badly harassed by the local nazi party barons, I'm fairly sure most of them had many good reasons for quietly following orders.
Then again, I guess it's ethically consistent to say that the man who surrenders his wallet when threatened with death by mugging is complicit in all further muggings, is an enabler and supporter of violent criminals, and a shameful failure of a human being next to the man who nobly attempts to overwhelm his would-be mugger.
A) It wasn’t always a gun to the head situation. The government dropped T4 in the face of popular opposition. Granted, if you told them head-on that you did not want to fight their stupid war, it would not take long before you were handed a death sentence.
B) That particular robber wasn’t asking for a few reichsmarks, but for your soul, and the lives of your children and brothers. I think it does change the calculus of what amount of courage can be expected of someone.
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