Bad People : German Military and German Nazis

From the late 1860s until sometime in the late 1960s, the general German military culture was excessively fearful -- and extremely wicked as a result.

It was far far too willing to see civilian snipers behind every glint of light reflecting off a farm pond and far far too willing to shoot masses of civilian hostages in a panicky response.

Only when German baby boomers finally rose to command posts in the postwar German military did this terrible period finally end.

We saw this sort of behavior in France in the 1870s, in South West Africa in the 1900s and in Belgium during WWI ---- long long before the Nazis took power.

Plenty of the crimes that the German military committed during WWII hardly need to be laid at the feet of the Nazis alone.

One could of course be a Nazi and a military man --- but it wasn't necessary to be so to be evil during the war --- plenty of non-Nazi military men and non-military Nazis demonstrated this time and again.

Too many books & movies about non-Nazi German violence

I argue that from 1945 and until the1980s, most in the world focused on the plentiful examples of non-Nazi type violence rather than Nazi-specific violence.

I mean focusing on the shooting of civilian hostages, firing up churches crammed with civilians in a village allegedly harbouring guerrillas in times of combat stress, together with all the concentration camp dead  - dead socialists, trade unionists and political opponents.

While all armies of the world have been guilty of such extreme behavior on occasion, it is generally agreed that it was nowhere as casually practised as in the German military culture of the 1860s-1940s (the Japanese 1930-1945 aside).

Every other army felt it had never act as the Germans did against tiny Belgium, only a few days into the war.

Other nations' outrages against civilians have usually come months and years into fighting stressful wars against guerillas, staring at invisible death lurking in the shadows.

We were comfortable raging on about German and Japanese behavior of this sort then because our own conscience is pretty clear.

Only very slowly did we come to accept that the Nazis had layered a whole new type of murderous violence over the traditional German military brutality.

And this one was based on a scientific ideology that we in America and Britain invented and put into practise and only then imported into Germany and Japan.

Modernity is Eugenics is an obsession with purity and certainty

It was Modernity (or Eugenics - I do not seen one iota of difference) that we had developed as an unconscious response to the inconvenient scientific truths that the un-coordinated forces of modernization kept throwing up.

The Nazis had killed tens of millions of people for eugenic reasons - believing that these people were genetically inferior and an impure threat to the pure Master Race.

Jews of course, but also communists, gays, Gypsies, Negroes, alcoholics, the mentally & physically challenged, the work shy and the habitually petty criminal.

Killed not because they were political opponents or 'criminals' but purely because they were seen as infectious germs or fungi of impurity and thus potential weakeners of the Aryan bloodline.

Many in the rest of the world had talked of their states killing these sort of people but it had remained only talk - though doctors and nurses certainly killed many, off the books.

But strict laws against these types of allegedly non-worthy people had certainly in put into practise in the West - ever increasing until about 1943 during the war years, not falling away after the 1920s, as postwar academic apologists for western eugenics frequently claim.

Many such existing practises continued right into the 1980s, even if no new laws were passed after 1943.

Modernity the science was all about purity concerns - be it in food and medicine in household and personal cleanliness - as well as in race and blood.

And we need to start admitting this awkward fact...