THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES

 

What is it about blogger. I write the entry in Word, with paragraphs. I paste into Blogger and the pragraphs are gone. Good thing I stick with Left Justify or I'd never find the darn things.

I'm a member of a science fiction page on FB. The other day one of the other members asked us to name what we were reading right then. No matter that the genre was. As is happens I was working on part of the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Got the answer back, "it's a big book."

Well it is a big book. Which I pretty much swallowed whole when I was a fourteen. Right after Judgment at Nuremberg on the movie of the week. For a kid growing in up in a logging town in Oregon. I mean I was raised Methodist, in Oregon. The only Jews I had heard of  lived on the other side of the world. A long time ago. The film clips shown during the movie were a "what the heck was going on, the war was bad enough."

And what I knew about WWII was couple of stories my uncle Jack told about the navy in the Pacific. (that's a whole other story to be told later). So I went to the library. And took home a brick of a book. Which I pretty much swallowed whole. I'm not really sure how many hooks I had to hang the information on at the time. I mean what did I know about wars for heaven's sake.

However one chapter did stick. The New Order. This wasn't just about the Holocaust. It was the whole program laid out for the occupation of conquered Europe. The deportations. The victims hauled off the street to be executed in retaliation for attacks on German soldiers or authorities. The slave laborers who were basically worked to death. The companies that were more than happy to use those slave laborers. The companies that vied for contracts to build crematoriums and supply the Xyclon B. The medical experiments. And genocide. When I finished that chapter I never looked at the human race the same way again. Incidentally, once the war was over Hitler planned to spare just enough Slavs to serve as slave laborers. The rest could starve.

Shirer was a journalist. He never claimed to be a neutral, or semi neutral historian. He despised Hitler and just about everyone in power around him. In his opinion the history of Germany and its philosophy created a people who were obedient to authority. An opinion that has been challenged as the war years have faded.

William Shirer was a journalist in Germany in the thirties. He watched Hitler's rise to power. Watched as the rest of Europe basically stood by as Hitler's Germany swallowed one piece of real estate after another. He covered the trial in Nuremberg and had access to the literal tons of translated and declassified documents.

Anyway you don't have to read the whole book at once. It is divided into sections that include the rise of Hitler, the years leading up to the war, the "successful" war years, the beginning of the end, Germany's fall, and an overview of the trials.

Judgment at Nuremberg is a hard movie to find. It deals with one if not the last trial. In this case of the German judges. With pressure on the court to deal leniently. The Cold War was on the horizon and it looked like the west was going to need Germany. After all the war was over and all that.