That’s more or less what I’ve read.
In the movies it’s portrayed as if Nazis made everything clean, orderly, “civilized”, but the unfavorable people were removed and killed, slave labor was used and so on, and all of it in the atmosphere of “civilization and normalcy”.
It’s probably to communicate the shock, but in fact things were like you describe them.
Nazis would rule in a medieval way, so to say, minus divine right to rule. Random murders (again, without normalcy or formality, just so, and quite brutal sometimes), torture locations in buildings with windows always open amid crowded enough places, where sounds of someone being beaten to death were heard day and night, such stuff.
The other guy is right too, most people learned to perceive this as normal and not everyone was killed for being not loyal enough, just a few.
Like in today’s Russia not every 16 years old schoolgirl gets into prison for 8 months for blowing up a petard in a public place, the number of whose who does is not big enough to imprint in the public that this even happens, but enough to spread non-verbal fear. Similar with posting a random protest text, or saying something about war, etc. That’s called making an example.
OK, Russia’s regime has that innovation of doing these things covertly enough for there to not be open intimidation. Cause open intimidation causes public reaction more than they need. They are more careful.
Auntievenim@lemmy.world 4 days ago
This is absolutely inaccurate and borderline revisionism. Germans were not held at gunpoint to heil Hitler or risk being shot, the average german was perfectly happy and enjoyed the comforts naziism brought them. This inaccurate portrayal does nothing but abstract naziism to be an entity that only exists under specific horrifying conditions and not the reality that for the vast majority of Germans they were happy to be nazis.
Please go read about nazi germany before you make up some fanfic about how it was just like the wolfenstein games. “They Thought They were free” is a book entirely centered around the experiences of the average German during the nazi regime and not one word of your description is in his book.
From Milton Mayer:
Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we—you and I—saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, “the democratic part.” The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 3 days ago
Now there’s only one of us telling bull & fiction. I don’t know your games and I stay with what my relatives and some neighbors have told me.
Ok, not many were shot in such a way, or in worse ways, but when it happened, then it got told.
Auntievenim@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Im saying your family stories are probably not as accurate as historians and authors who spoke to Germans in Germany in the 1950s about being nazis. Im very sure you’re not lying about that being what they told you.
I’m calling you fantastical and wrong because painting a picture of nazi germany as a nation captive to a despot without any agency is holocaust revisionism. To say the German people were prisoners to the nazi regime is objectively false and all the documentation and research around the subject shows as much. They were very pleased with the reich and only started to sour once the war came home and started to get in the way of Germany’s greatness. Please read the book I recommended. Anecdotal evidence doesn’t prove this point wrong.