https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(experiment)
While Jones taught his students about Nazi Germany during his senior level Contemporary World History class, Jones found it difficult to explain how the German people could have accepted the actions of the Nazis. He decided to create a fictional social movement as a demonstration of the appeal of fascism. Over the course of five days (or nine, according to student Sherry Toulsey), Jones – a member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS),[6] Cubberley United Student Movement sponsor[7] and Black Panthers supporter[8] – conducted a series of exercises in his classroom emphasizing discipline and community, intended to model certain characteristics of the Nazi movement.
As the movement grew outside his class and began to number in the hundreds, the experiment had spiralled out of control. He convinced the students to attend a rally where he claimed that the classroom project was part of a nationwide movement and that the announcement of a Third Wave presidential candidate would be televised. Upon their arrival, the students were presented with a blank channel. Jones told his students of the true nature of the movement as an experiment in fascism, and he presented to them a short film discussing the actions of Nazi Germany.[9]
I remember we watched the movie Die Welle about this in secondary school german class
Ich will auch :(
Wieso? Ich bin nicht Deutsch. Wir schauten es als Vorbereitung fürs DSD.
Habe den Film nicht in der Schule gesehen, hätte aber gerne.
We read the book. I…don’t think my fellow students understood the impact it was meant to have. They joked most of the class.
I wish teachers went this hard today. In Germany, the Nazi regime is covered extensively in school and definitely not shown in a good light, but evidently Germany didn’t learn its lesson as well as it should have, especially in the “this couldn’t happen today” and “I’m not a nazi, I’m just really fucking racist and authoritarian and that’s fine” ways. Though I guess you probably can’t school your way out of relentless far-right propaganda.
Looking at the response to the gaza invasion, it seems rather than learning to recognize fascism, people learned only to recognize the specific ww2 era german version of it and use that as criteria to recognize fascism as a whole.
You agree hitler was a piece of shit, so you can’t be a fascist. You think israel should exist, so you can’t be a fascist. You think israel’s actions are horrific, you must be a nazi. Etc.
I’ve long said that the German response has been not that fascism is bad from the root to the fruit, but that Jews are good and maybe queer people as well.
Germans (and other Europeans) have displayed some appalling levels of racism towards Roma and Turkish people just casually. They sound just like elderly white people in the American south when talking about these groups. Many still also believe that Germany is for Germans.
To inocculate people against fascism you have to teach them about the disparate ideologies and the long running ideological undercurrents that coalesced into the NSDAP regime. Like, Germans and Americans alike largely just see it as big totalitarian antisemitism that wants to kill everyone. But otherwise reasonable people weren’t attracted to it for that, they were pulled into things like the volkish movement (similar to modern homesteading movement) out of a fear of the costs of modernity, or they had concerns about changing morals and mores with regards to gender and sexuality (similar to the modern anti feminist and transphobia communities), or they got into conspiracism after unexpected and uncomfortable world events like the Soviet revolution, the 1918 flu, and the shattering of the German front in the first world war, all of which led to blaming others. Hell even “tough on crime”, anti drug, and health concern attitudes were some people’s inroads.
We see so much of this again today because we’ve created an image of 1930s fascist Germany and for many people their interpretation of that image has become the whole of the real thing in their eyes. They don’t understand that these ideas can be tempting and that a Jewish nation is capable of fascism because they think fascism requires hating Jewish people rather than just that diasporic people with a different religion and a history of persecution are really easy targets for it
Don’t forget the indignity about comparing anything to the Nazi era! We’re basically taught to put the Nazis on this pedestral of evil, and anytime someone recognizes that some current-day far righter is doing something that’s just like the Nazis, some influential asshole comes out and complains that no one did evil better than the Nazis did and how DARE you even compare anything to it! It’s not like we’re supposed to learn from history or anything like that.
Germany was never denazified so there were always nazis in politics, army, police, secret agencies and all other parts of government which heavily influenced their way of thinking and decision making in the crucial early parts of democractic development. The Bundeswehr with their old Wehrmacht officers even had plans to coup the government straight after its founding.
Britain, France and US quickly realised that if they locked up the guilty, there would be no-one left to use as cannon fodder if the Soviets got frisky.
You’re not wrong. Many German generals were retained to advise NATO during the 1950s and 1960s because of their experience with the Soviets.
It was more “we won’t have anyone to run the arms of government/teach/administer various agencies, and we don’t want to import talent from our nations to fill the gap while we find and train people as administrators etc”.
we don’t want to import talent from our nations to fill the gap while we find and train people as administrators etc”.
But… we do need more builders, so let’s get a bunch of Turks to come do it
They should have just dissolved Germany. A country that started one world war, was mainly responsible for another one to start and also committed two genocides has no right to exist.
Splitting Germany up doesn’t solve the lack of denazification. And it’s not like Germany is any worse than most other european countries nowadays.
With a past like that, that’s not enough.
Sure. How would splitting up Germany have changed the outcome?
There wouldn’t have been a government, police and army full of old nazis which is already enough.
Splitting Germany up doesn’t solve the lack of denazification.
I mean, they did that too.
What movie is that?
From the Amazon adaptation of Catch-22
It’s really good
My favorites part is when Yossarian finally meets his mission quota, outsmarts the colonel, and gets to go home.
Yossarian caught the 22
Shad up
