Thread by @jdpoc

A thread : Germany - #Facing Its #Nazi Past Is Still Troubling For Many - The Whitewashing of Nazi Crimes.

I was recently introduced to a TV mini-series I hadn't seen before, surprising as it was quite controversial at the time.

"Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter" (Our Mothers, Our Fathers) (also broadcast as 'Generation War') was created and broadcast by ZDF TV in #Germany in 2013, and the politics that it addresses are relevant to now just as much as it was to the early days of WWII.

It displays so clearly how an impressionable youth, fed nothing but Goebbel's output, can be convinced that evil is right, truth is false, and lies are real.

The opening scene :

How close, again, we are to this; the rise of European Neo-#Nazism, #Trump, #QAnon, and #Brexit.

In support of the series, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote that the series would give the remaining survivors of the World War II generation opportunity to discuss it with their families.

faz.net/aktuell/feuill…

But many considered that the series had introduced the next phase in historical films on the Nazi era.

The problem is, this next phase is disturbing : the series perpetuates the 'new truth' - that of the Germans being the real victims.

"It depicts how totalitarianism corrupts almost everything in its path - including individual responsibility for actions."

"... young men and women were seduced and then savagely betrayed, their complicity, in this account, is forced, never chosen."

- David Dency, New Yorker.

Holocaust ? Didn't happen. War Crimes? That was mainly the Russians. AntiSemitism ? That was the Poles. Resistance to Nazism ? There was none.

The historian Ulrich Herbert wrote that the series showed Nazis as "others", different from "Our Mothers and Fathers". It showed all Germans as victims.

The Poles are shown as even more anti-Semitic than the Germans and are presented as convinced ideological anti-Semites.

The Polish ambassador to the US, Ryszard Schnepf, made a written complaint.

Plans to broadcast the series in the UK led to a demonstration by Polish activists in London.

For a series about World War II in which the troublesome question of how six million Jews were murdered has been simply blanked out ... it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

The underlying message is : "These are our Mothers, our Fathers, and it wasn't their fault, really."

Now that the participants are long gone, the whitewashing of WWII has recommenced in earnest, and the current generation will think nothing of following in the footsteps of Greta, Charly, Freidhelm, Victor and Wilhelm.

Fuill article is here :

farrightwatch.net/2020/08/german…