Bomber boys - bbc one

[csThor]

Originally Posted by kendo65

While agreeing that there is some truth in the 'history is written by the winners' idea, I wonder if it is perhaps a little too simple and dismissive of other factors. To accept it you need to believe that there is no real moral sense in the world - that all morality is relative and a construction of particular cultures. You rightly say above that from our modern perspective Nazi Germany is viewed as beyond the pale morally, but it's the conclusion that if they had won we would now all view their actions as heroic and right that I want to question.

My own position (maybe unfashionable these days) is that there is a natural and deep moral sense in people that finds certain actions repugnant and indefensible. There is evidence for this in Nazi Germany - how many amongst the general German populace knew what was being done in Belsen or Auschwitz? When a regime chooses certain extreme actions it can typically only carry them through by either concealing them from the bulk of their own people, by using lies and disinformation, or by terrorising large segments of the population into complicity.

In my understanding one of the reasons for the construction of the 'industrial scale' extermination camps was the unforeseen psychological toll on the members of the SS death squads in Soviet Russia. Even amongst the most polically-committed members of the regime close-up exposure to slaughter on that scale had psychological consequences that proved difficult to sustain.

Many ordinary German citizens felt moral repugnance towards the Nazis at the time. Many chose active resistance and paid for it with their lives.

Surely the main idea in 'Fatherland' is exactly about this natural, moral 'reality' breaking through the massive repression that would be needed by the victorious regime to sustain their image as heroic, just, winners.

Given the above I would suggest that if the Nazis had won they would not have been able to sustain the 'fiction' of their justness or rightness because inevitably truth would prevail. Tyrannies ultimately colapse because in time their actions prove to be out of alignment with the deep needs of their own people.

Then how do we explain people like Reinhard Heydrich? How can we square the essentially two persons in one body: the loving father and husband, the lover of classic music and gifted violinist vs the ice-cold planner and executor of the Holocaust? How do we explain the involvement of so many utterly respectable people in key positions of the Holocaust (like the engineers who designed and built the camps - who did not question their orders and kept working despite any kind of misgivings they may have had)? How do we explain the trainload of ordinary people working as informants for the secret service in pretty much any kind of totalitarian society (see NKVD, see Gestapo, see Stasi, etc etc)?

The way I see it there is an animalistic streak of ruthlessness in most of us which pertains to one's own advancement. It is weaker in some, stronger in others ... and it is the perfect tool for dictatorships not only to detect opposition within but also to push its own more drastic projects by offering economical and social benefits for those who do this dirty work.