I am not as sure as you are that Germans have truly learnt that lesson yet.
history.[...] has a nasty tendency to repeat itself
It seems they truly have. Irrespectively of what one political group or another in Germany may say, the vast majority of Germans have now comfortably placed themselves on the side of peace and stability (and has stopped thinking about ever searching for this infamous Lebensraum in Eastern Europe). In this respect Germany may now resemble the change that occured to Sweden in the past. As we know, Sweden was for more than a century the biggest warmonger and aggressor in Europe, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, but after that it has slided into being one of the most peace-orientated countries in the world. Many historians draw a parallel between the course Sweden took in the past and the course Germany has taken after 1945 and is sticking to it all the time.
unremitting hostility to Germany and German citizens
Given all the atrocities the Germans committed in Eastern Europe, which were far more brutal than in Western Europe, one may say that such hostility towards Germany, particularly among those directly affected, may persist for yet many years ahead.
the most important ones were Austrian!(I think I fear them more than Germans!)
Contrary to the common belief that Adolf Hitler was Austrian, he always felt and described himself as German, even if technically he was an Austrian-born failed painter.
BB, there are tons of material on Hitler and the Third Reich in Polish e-bookshops (mostly tranlations from foreign authors) and on TV subject channels (National Geographic, Discovery, ViaSat History and such like) these days. Is that "Hitlermania" also present in Germany?
Adolf Hitler was Austrian, he always felt and described himself as German
He only became German and thus eligible to run in elections in February 1932, when a tiny state in the west of Germany (Brunswick) gave him citizenship. He then automatically acquired German citizenship. Before that he was stateless.
It doesn't really matter. We all know he was a lunatic. Who cares what a lunatic "felt" he was? Maybe he "felt" he was a woman too? He was an Austrian who gained German citizenship to further his political career..... that didn't work out too well for him.....
It would be an explanation for some of the more erratic decisions during his reign...
"....And he suggested that the decision to invade Russia in 1941 was a direct result of his addiction. The move caused many to consider Hitler "virtually insane for taking such a risk," according to the Huffington Post. His erratic military tactics and poor decisions in the Battle of the Bulge only added to those perceptions of insanity...."
That sheds an interesting light on the cruel, cold blooded craziness during this time...
"...the entire Third Reich was permeated with drugs: cocaine, heroin, morphine and, most of all, methamphetamines, or crystal meth, used by everyone from factory workers to housewives, and crucial to troops' resilience - even partly explaining German victory in 1940...."
Historians though, both German as well as foreign, have argued for now nearly a century, as to whether or not the German nation in particular has proven herself more susceptible than certain others to blind obedience to despotic authority and anti-democratic acceptance of whatever those above dish out, simply because they wear the uniform of control.
We may never arrive at any conclusive discovery, yet the investigation remains intriguing. Why, for instance, did societies such as Denmark, particularly Ireland, seem to eventually laugh off those weaklings who sought to sway others by systematic fear and terror?
A professor Leonard Krieger, in his famous volume "The German Idea of Freedom", came to the inescapable conclusion that the German's concept of liberty in the end was the freedom to be subjugated! The once well-known observation concerning the infamously failed "revolution" of 1848 (Vormaerz) was that if naturally had to fail; the police wouldn't allow it.
John Steinbeck's once famous quip still resonates, namely, that his worst nightmare was of being self-appointed dictator of Ireland for fear of being laughed to death:-)
Poland too never submitted to dictatorship, a point of considerable pride, I think. Instead, along with the French, boasted the largest single anti-Faschist resistance movement in Europe.
And for me the rule of the church is nothing less of a dictatorship and that lasted centuries, with a cruel opression and millions of killed! Obeyed mindlessly by millions!
In Germany the Protestants rebelled, not in catholic Poland or France.
What about Kings and Queens and their dictatorships, don't they count too? And Poles submitted, or they wouldn't had been partitioned...twice....
That historical fisheye on Germany is severely skewed...12 years...a history of 2000 years explained through 12 years, oh please!
"Elected" he surely was, yet scarcely democratically! Much as in the American South at that time, Blacks technically could vote by that time, yet KKK pole watchers sure did their level best to intimidate any who tried.
We all know, you surely more than the rest of us outsiders, that the Weimar Constitution was a bleedin' joke,' a faltering house of cards built upon an equally shaky foundation and doomed to collapse at any moment.
And he suggested that the decision to invade Russia in 1941 was a direct result of his addiction.
I was recently for the first time ever in Uzbekistan, whose national hero is Tamerlan (Amir Timur). The night when a Russian anthropologist opened Tamerlan's tomb on 22/06/1941, he discovered the following script in the grave "when I will return to daylight, the world will shake". It is on that very night that Hitler launched Barbarossa operation against Russia.
in 1942, Stalin ordered for Tamerlan's body to be reburied according to islamic ritual in his Gur Emir tomb. Shortly after this completed came the USSR victory at Stalingrad, widely seen as the turning point of WW2!
Why did Stalin order the body to be buried again? No one knows for sure, but a potential explanation might be sheer admiration: Tamerlan managed to slaughter around 17 mios people, more than Stalin and more than 500 years earlier, so with more limited means!
In that case Lenin (who is a commie darling as opposed to blood thirsty Stalin) whose direct and indirect decisions has managed to kill even more people by spreading "social justice" in the USSR. There would be no bolshevik revolution without Lenin and there would be no Stalin, who was Lenin's handyman, without Lenin also. Had he not died on syphilis he would put Stalin's "petty" crimes in shame. But seens neomarxist needs at least one leftist saint to justify their twisted ideology all the crimes are blamed on poor old Stalin :-)
Yet if Soviet citizens, including full-born Jews such as Kaganovitch, Sverdlov along with numerous other Politburo hacks, Isaac Babel in literature, Eisenstein in cinema etc. curried favor with Stalin implicitly, they certainly were free to live among their gentile fellow ethnic Russians, not fearing imprisonment in the gulags, if only to save their own skins along with those of their families!
Such was not the case in Hitler's Germany, where all full Jews, even those who sought naively to appease Hitler aka the Judenraete, were targets of imprisonment, later extermination, for the very fact of their being born Jewish.
This is a key distinction, often ignored in Revisionist or Revisionist-style debate.
How about the Nazi death camp Sylt located in Britain. Why is it never mentioned here as a death camp ? msn.com/en-us/news/world/forgotten-nazi-camp-on-british-soil-revealed-by-archaeologists/ar-BB11W0jU?li=BBnb7Kz Why wasn't Britain tagged with "British Death Camp" like Poland was tagged with "Polish Death Camp" ?
