Nazi Germany - The Blame Game.

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Do you know what I'm sick of? I'm sick of people blaming Nazi Germany on stuff that doesn't make sense.

I'll start with Karl Popper. He blamed Nazi Germany on Plato's vison of a "Philosopher King" - a philosopher who is also a king. This does not make sense because pretty much everyone - at some point in their life - has thought, "maybe if we put this smart person in charge it will solve all the world's problems."

Next there's Ben Stein. He blames Nazi Germany on Darwin's theory of evolution. He asserts that the reason Nazis killed Jews is because of the "survival of the fittest" aspect of Darwin's theory. This does not make sense because people in Germany had been talking about killing the Jews for centuries. Martin Luther talked about killing the Jews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_jews_and_their_lies

But perhaps the most ridiculous idea for what caused Nazi Germany comes from Bertrand Russel. He blamed Nazi Germany on the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. This notion is simply absurd. First of all there is no evidence that Hitler read Nietzsche. Second of all Nazism and Nietzsche's philosphy are completely different. Nietzsche wanted a world in which any strong-willed person could achieve political power. Under Nazism the Fuhrer opresses all the masses - strong-willed or not - and prevents anyone from achieving the wisdom nessasary to achieve political power by controlling the media and burning books. Also, Nietzsche hated nationalism, anti-Semitism and socialism.

The truth is that the closest thing to Nietzsche's philosphy that has a significant following is Objectivism. Nietzsche's living legacy is Objectivism, not Nazism.

So what did cause Nazi Germany? The answer is simple. Germany was treated too harshly after World War 1 (Treaty of Versailles ect.) and it had a long history of anti-Semitism. That's about it.

So what did we learn from Nazi Germany? We learned the same thing we learned when Seung-Hui Cho went on a rampage. If you bully a man enough he'll go nuts. If you bully a country enough it'll go nuts.

That, and perhaps you should recognize that while the German people were complicit for what was done as a nation, Adolf Hitler came in and was embraced for what eventually would follow. Absent his presence in the equation, I doubt a "Nazi Germany" would have rose to power.

There may be underlying sentiment, but it doesn't tend to congeal into something real until a powerful individual uses it to drive the people towards a goal...usually one of his own making.

Suppose, further, that Piłsudski had lived a couple of years longer, and Germany had turned her attention to the Soviet Union with Poland as an ally, rather than a doormat.

I agree that the blame for the most part be placed on the aftermath of WWI. I wonder how the world might of turned out of if the US didn't foolishly get involved in that pointless war.

They were not the only one at the time - anti-Semitism and military nationalism was rising all across the Europe - from Germany to Romanian and "Independent State of Croatia".

Germany allowed the Independent State of Croatia to happen, to, of course, eliminate as many Gipsies and Jews are were there, but they didn't ask them to slaughter in between 100 000 and 700 000 Serbs in Jasenovac and the other camps just for the sake of ethnic cleansing. And of course, we haven't been taught that in schools, not from 1990 when the communism fell. I had to read it in the Wikipedia.