FITSNews “Gun or no gun, I’d have gone down swinging.”
Why,” so many have asked, “didn’t the Jews in Germany fight back before things got completely out of hand? Before the boxcars arrived, and swept them away to hell on earth?”
Others ask, “Why didn’t the German people who sympathized with them stand up, and fight back on their behalf?”
Germany wasn’t, after all, a nation of anti-Semites — at least no more so than anywhere else. Germany was recovering from the Great War, and your average resident was scrapping and scraping to rebuild their destroyed world. Sweating side-by-side for a common goal has a way of putting prejudices in the corner.
“If I’d seen that happening,” so many people in modern times have said, “I would have fought back. Gun or no gun, I’d have gone down swinging. I’d have led a guerilla group, and we’d have shut it down!”
Hmmm.
Before declaring oneself ready to strap on a Rambo headband, let’s remember the evil of Nazism initially came about in slow-motion … and as every new form of persecution slowly unfolded, the Jews in Germany probably couldn’t believe their eyes or ears. This was modern times. In a modern nation. With all the trappings of civilization. With laws protecting its citizens.
Many German citizens probably rolled their eyes at Adolf Hitler: Some mentally-unbalanced failed artist with a stupid mustache was running around spouting anger … that’s politics as usual. I’ve got mouths to feed. Besides, Charlie Chaplin and his extremist followers were only a tiny percentage of the nation.
The events that led to the meltdown of Germany’s sanity didn’t happen in a day. Insidious creep is what happened. The Nazis conducted a slow march through the institutions that made Germany a civilized country.
Consider what slowly, slowly, slowly rolled out. First, Jewish businesses were marked with boycott signs, as were the stores belonging to Germans who supported them — which made separating the “bad guys” from the “good guys” easier.
Next, assaults on Jews by Brown Shirts began to happen in broad daylight … sometimes for failing to return a Nazi salute, sometimes for nothing. The courts took no legal action, as they were reading the prevailing winds and preparing themselves to go-along-to-get-along. Or perhaps, the judges agreed with the messages of hate and acts of savagery.
It must’ve been so unthinkably bizarre to these Jews. They posed no threat to anyone; in fact, their efforts to assimilate into the German culture had some Jewish religious leaders concerned their culture would simply be absorbed, and the result would be secular Jews who thought of themselves as little more than German.
“Why is this happening?” Jewish citizens must’ve asked a thousand times. Despite comprising only a tiny part of the population, German Jews accounted for 25 percent of the nation’s Nobel Prizes. Surely, no sane nation would want to harm many of its best and brightest.
On November 9 and 10 of 1938, though, Kristallnacht occurred. Nazis torched synagogues, and vandalized Jewish businesses, homes, and schools. Over 100 Jews were murdered.
Kristallnacht served as a perfect example of the old saying, “It can’t happen… until it happens.”…
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