I’m finally watching Band of Brothers (had it for a long while, just getting around to it) and a few things strike me.
The intensity of fighting in these populated areas is upsetting. I think I may have assumed that most civilians were evacuated as troops moved in, but that was naïve on my part. Families with kids trying too cope with mortar fire, that’s unbelievably traumatizing.
The casual disregard for the fact these are people’s homes is jarring to me. Soldiers setting up camp in houses with people’s family photographs still on the wall, using all their things, breaking or taking stuff without a second thought. It’s intensely disrespectful.
The casual looting our troops did was unconscionable. Nothing they were put through gave them the right to take valuables out of people’s homes just cuz there was nobody to stop them. It just adds insult to injury those people had already suffered.
The camps. There is no fucking way people in the towns near those camps had no idea what was going on. The local farmers would know, the people working in and supplying the camps would know and in small towns, everyone talks. They knew. They just weren’t bothered by it.
The Third Reich was more than just Hitler. There was a vast and intricate power structure supporting him. Ordinary Germans supported him, most for the same reasons MAGA people support Trump. We MUST learn from history. We do NOT want to repeat that chapter here.
The only thing that saved Germany from Hitler was his ambition drawing an international military response. Can we please get our shit together so we don’t have to live through that hell here?? Please?
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