The suicide of members of the Party, such as Himmler and Hitler himself, is seen as an act of cowardice on their part. Thus, rather unique in history, the opposing forces who were victorious are not generally seen in a negative light by those they defeated.
Far from it. This choice of words, however, comes with the emphasis that by losing the war, the German people were freed from Nazism. An interesting example comes from alternative history broadcasts that contemplate a world after supposed Germany victory.
These paint a horrific dystopia in which the Germans as well as the occupied people would be suppressed by a ruthless Nazi regime. Reflecting all of this in popular German cinema, German war films, especially in the last few decades, tend to deal with the subject with honesty, showing the gradual shift to madness caused by hollow mass delusions, often in a tone more fatalistic than heroic. However, an issue for Germans, of course, is the sense of collective responsibility, despite no student today or their parents or even potentially grandparents having anything to do with any of that.
How much weight does the idea of original sin have? How is a person born in the s responsible for the Nazi atrocities? It is still heavily frowned upon to display the modern-day German flag — despite officially and explicitly not being a Nazi symbol — in most contexts other than international football matches. On a similar note, a nationalistic display such as pledging allegiance to the flag during class every morning would have the worst possible connotations in Germany, despite being common in places like the United States.
Furthermore, there is a high percentage of population with immigrant heritage just look at the German national football team. As you might expect from all this, there is some concern that the German school systems may go too far with the seeming obsession with the Nazis and all the mistakes that were made, instead of spending more time on broader history as is more typical in many other nations. Unsurprisingly, this was not exactly successful. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
August 2, Nasser Ayash 4 comments. In: Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, Jg. Der 8. Mai als politischer Gedenktag in Deutschland.
It was a six-hour tour, and pricey, and you could sense the Americans we were traveling with growing weary of the information dump, wondering if the Christmas shop would still be open once the bus dropped us back off on the restored town square. We wandered around the rally grounds and the man-made lake surrounding the building, once a Nazi headquarters and now the site of an extensive display of memorabilia and analysis.
Our guide began by telling us that the impressive, forbidding structure we were looking at across the placid lake was not a museum. Museums are for sharing cherished cultural artifacts, he said. There are plenty of those in Germany, and we encourage you to visit them. A documentation center, on the other hand, is a public record of a human failure— one for which Germany was responsible. Our guide was an earnest, youngish man in a plaid shirt, crooked tie and glasses, who carried two notebooks full of tabbed information and could give the veteran who asked precise information about range of Messerschmitt war planes.
A lot of the questions, in fact, came from men asking about military equipment and strategies, and not so many about the Holocaust or impact of the rise of fascism in Europe. Asked whether Austria had a similar urge to document their own involvement with racial and religious discrimination, our guide made a face and declined to comment.
Lesson 1 is that we speak for ourselves, he said. He spoke of regional political differences pre-War , how a country in acute financial distress could be utterly divided about causes and solutions. He talked about generational differences and how it took Germans three full generations to understand how a handful of men turned a fundamentally decent people into killers, persuading those for whom horrific prejudice was just not a deal-breaker, if Germany could be restored to greatness.
His grandparents, he said, were impressionable young people, just starting their family, during the rise of the Third Reich. They were gone now, but as a child he had been instructed by his parents not to listen to what Oma said about the terrible war years. Then, as grandchildren of the Nazi legacy, his generation could finally claim to have actively worked to make sure it never happened again. In Germany, at least. Questioned, he shared extensive data about the skinhead movement, a serious worry for the moderate government.
But then he compared incidents of far-right violence in Germany to gun violence in America, a sobering contrast for anyone who was inclined to feel superior. Ah, he said.
This is where people from every nation must pay attention. Hitler was a genius at using available media and technology. Crystal radios were made cheap, and the same sticky message—an alternate, economically driven message of national pride—was pumped into all homes. Public rallies were enormously effective. I still feel shitty whenever someone calls me a Nazi or accuses the Germans of being racist war criminals.
We spend about a year in school talking about it. Writing it all down is going to take pretty long lol. One important thing to point out — we spend a lot of time explaining why everything happened like what was going on in Germany and everyone else that actually ended up causing WWII. Not as an excuse, but more as an attempt of making us understand how everything got so fucked up. German here, we learn as much as possible about it. The general atmosphere in Europe that led to the nazis rise to power, how they were able to take control of the government, the major battles and figures who are associated with the war and of course the Holocaust.
Most schools include visits to at least one concentration camp during field excursions I have been to Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Theresienstadt and there is a very interesting art project called Stolperstein , which indicates where jews were persecuted in Germany. Most Germans are like that with World War 2 and the Holocaust. As we can see from the accounts, the German schooling system does not pull any punches when it comes to how is WW2 taught in Germany. For me, the focus on the environment and climate in that the Nazis exploited during their rise was interesting — and I think that is an important aspect.
It also serves as a stark reminder that it happened once and it could happen again. Also fascinating was the brutal nature of the schooling that all of the participants mentioned. No detail is off the curriculum and the harshest of topics like the Holocaust are particularly focussed on with trips to concentrations — multiple concentration camps for some.
By the sounds of the accounts provided, I think Germans think so too. The conversation also prompted discussions from other Axis countries which you might find interesting. Italians have almost taken a victim role in WW2, dissociating themselves from the crimes of the Nazis.
Mussolini was actually quite well liked in the early days because while being absolutely insane, he did a lot of good for the country which had lagged behind the rest of Europe. Japanese high schooler here. Spent most of my elementary life and some of my middle school life in the US, went to middle school in Japan.
We learned what caused it to happen including the sino-Japanese war and the Russo-Japanese war. However most of the actual war was turned strategic. Japan did something in year to reason. We did talk about how awful it was for the Japanese, the highlights being Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
It was said that we used Koreans and Chinese for slave labor, but it was skimmed a lot. Eg The rape of Nanking This is out of class, but every fucking summer the tv networks play the same it was miserable, we need peace, we hate war cliche.
Swede here. We were neutral during the war and helped the Nazis with transportation and war material mainly ore, I think. Especially considering what we gained. After the war, due to not being bombed like the rest of European nations and not needing to cope with the great costs of war, we became one of the richest countries in the world. I am from Bulgaria which was also one of the losing countries.
We blew through WW2 very quickly but I had a very big interest in the war so I learned most of what I know by myself. I might get myself mixed up sometimes in what exactly we were taught but I can tell you what we werent taught. For background, Bulgaria joined the Axis in Before that we lost 2 major wars- The second Balkan war which we started and ended up fighting against all our neighbors over Macedonia Which then had a massive Bulgarian population and WW1 where we joined the Germans because they promised us Macedonia.
In , though, the Axis organised the Craiova treaty which returned the territory to us, obviously the Axis became very liked in Bulgaria after that. The treaty of Craiova plus the promise of guess what Macedonia made us join the Axis in
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