We had a few days coach holiday in Paris.Got talking to a nice 86 year old chap who was born in Vienna.
His family was Jewish and his father used to go to school with Adolph Eichmann.His father met Adolph later on in years and greeted him,they where friends as youngsters.
Eichmann told his school friend not to shake his hands and come to close to him because he was a Jew.Eichmann did warn his friend to leave the country in the next two days otherwise he would be arrested.
His father took Adolp Eichmans advise and ended up in the U.K.
Strange how faith works out for people.I will try to keep in touch with the old fellow.
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My late father in law knew Robert Maxwell during the war when serving in the Czech army in exile. He recalled Maxwell (he had another name then) was always into schemes and dodgy deals - not for nothing known as the bouncing Czech.
Interesting anecdote about Eichmann. Whenever one hears of a faint glimmering of compassion in one of these nazis it always sounds false, because of what we really know about them. I wonder if his tip-off was genuine, or said as a snarling threat?
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>> Interesting anecdote about Eichmann. Whenever one hears of a faint glimmering of compassion in one
>> of these nazis it always sounds false, because of what we really know about them.
>> I wonder if his tip-off was genuine, or said as a snarling threat?
I see it the other way, that perhaps even Eichmann etc., and certainly the majority of the Nazi party were people within the range of 'normal', who did, or subscribed to, very bad things. So it's not surprising that they would have some concern for their old friends, even when the friends in question were beyond the pale.
That makes it more worrying altogether of course. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and we are far too complacent.
Last edited by: Manatee on Tue 26 Aug 14 at 10:22
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>>
>> That makes it more worrying altogether of course. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
>> and we are far too complacent.
>>
Yes indeed. But one presumes that in the nazi example they were 99% bad and 1% good, so we are still safe in utterly condemning them.
But most people may well be the other way round - 99% good but a lurking nasty streak, possibly never actually finding opportunity to emerge.
So we can't condemn them and root out this evil within, because it exists in all of us. And it's not as simple as that anyway, of course.
So vigilance, yes, but in what way, and what action?
My FIL was a fount of stories from the past. Born in the Hapsburg empire, he had a brother who served in the army. Reviewed one day by the emperor, but only speaking Hungarian, he was told that the emperor only ever asked three questions, and he was primed up on the three answers, in German. On the day, he got the answers the wrong way round. There was a good joke there somewhere, but I never understood the German to appreciate it.
It was probably a standard one all soldiers repeated, possibly straight from the Good Soldier Schweik.
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>> So we can't condemn them and root out this evil within, because it exists in
>> all of us. And it's not as simple as that anyway, of course.
>> So vigilance, yes, but in what way, and what action?
Eggsactly. There doesn't seem to be a formula for it.
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One wonders, given the same set of circumstances - A power grab, upheaval, loads of opportunities for jobsworths to be given unquestionable control and power with little or no repercussions - how our society would have been perceived during that period.
Last edited by: Zero on Tue 26 Aug 14 at 11:48
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I think it was genuine listening to the old chap story about his father.
They where good friends at school.The things people will and can do in certain circumstances is beyond believe.Kindness and cruelty go hand in hand.
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>> Eichmann did warn his friend to leave the country in the next two days otherwise he would be arrested.
>> His father took Adolp Eichmans advise and ended up in the U.K.
There are many such stories. What they show is that not even Nazis really believed in the deeply stupid and nasty enterprise of the Third Reich, or at the very least that corruption was endemic in Nazi Germany and built into the system such as it was.
One has to remember that the Nazis didn't do it all by themselves. They had to sell the agenda to the Germans who ended up buying it in their majority. Few dared voice open opposition, although many must have felt secretly ashamed. Conversely, even leading Nazis had some human feelings, as shown by Dutchie's story and many others like it. Even Hitler is said to have 'liked children'.
Of course we British are well capable of fascist or cruel behaviour as we have shown many times in history. But personally I don't think we would have swallowed the nazi thing. Many aspects of it would have made us giggle uncontrollably.
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>> But personally I don't think we would have swallowed the
>> nazi thing.
>>
Perhaps not. But our "thing" might be something completely different, not nazi at all. Think of all the PC stuff we now subscribe to, or pretend to subscribe to, sanctioned and plugged by reputable centre-left newspapers and the chattering classes, and then imagine that it was hijacked by a cunning gang of crooks who rode to power on its back.
All the fellow-travellers would go along with it the same as ordinary Germans did. Once you have gone a little way along a road it's less embarrassing to carry on than to turn and push against the crowd.
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>> Think of all the PC stuff we now subscribe to, or pretend to subscribe to, sanctioned and plugged by reputable centre-left newspapers and the chattering classes, and then imagine that it was hijacked by a cunning gang of crooks who rode to power on its back.
>> All the fellow-travellers would go along with it the same as ordinary Germans did.
Some of us giggle (or growl) at aspects of that PC stuff which is freely hijacked by all sorts of crooks CP. Nevertheless, there's a world of difference between soppiness, even fascizing soppiness, and Nazi ideology which apart from its comic, strutting, narcissistic side, believed in exterminating whole human categories and actually set about doing it.
We British in our time have been as militaristic, successfully sometimes, as the Germans at their worst.
When I quoted part of my first post here to herself, about aspects of Nazism making us giggle uncontrollably, she pursed her lips and said: 'One would hope so anyway.' That's about the real size of it.
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>> Nazi ideology which apart from its comic, strutting, narcissistic side, believed in exterminating whole human categories and actually set about doing it.
I am re-reading a very good, bitterly funny novel set in Central America, 'A Flag for Sunrise' by Robert Stone. Came across a sentence yesterday that might easily have been about Nazi Germany, something about people who 'enjoy saluting an animal in a tailor-made pink uniform'.
Must have been a good few of those in Germany in the bad old days.
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>>One wonders, given the same set of circumstances - A power grab, upheaval, loads of opportunities for jobsworths to be given unquestionable control and power with little or no repercussions - how our society would have been perceived during that period. <<
France 1940-1944. There were retribution assassinations around here long after the end of the war.
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>>an animal in a tailor-made pink uniform'.
>> Must have been a good few of those in Germany in the bad old days.
Change the colour to an equally unlikely light blue and you have Goering. (Appropriately, he came off as badly as do nearly all of the characters in a Stone novel.)
Yet even he had a good side, a great deal of charm, which he used to con his American warder into handing over his attaché case, containing his cyanide pill.
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>..aspects of Nazism making us giggle uncontrollably,
When we lived in Texas we used to meet up with friends a couple of times a week at TGI's. One of the regulars at the bar was a nice old german guy called Hans who just seemed to be there for the company.
Chatting to him one night while we played TGI's networked quiz game he prompted us with the answer to a question about the rise of Nazism.
When the answer was shown and he proved to be correct he stated:
"I lived under Hitler, you know."
Mrs K quipped back "What, in the flat downstairs?"
Everyone else had a fit of the giggles but it went straight over poor Hans's head.
To add a bit of motoring trivia, Hans's choice of transport was a stunning W128 220 SE Merc with gleaming black paint and immaculate chrome.
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>> >..aspects of Nazism making us giggle uncontrollably,
>>
>> When we lived in Texas we used to meet up with friends a couple of
>> times a week at TGI's. One of the regulars at the bar was a nice
>> old german guy called Hans who just seemed to be there for the company.
www.operationpaperclip.info
Was Hans any good with fireworks?
Last edited by: Zero on Tue 26 Aug 14 at 19:56
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>Was Hans any good with fireworks?
Good question.
Once you got to know him more than just chit-chat it was obvious that he was very well educated and quite well off.
Unfortunately, he never mentioned what line of work he'd been in and I never thought to ask him if he was a retired Nazi rocket scientist.
I did however meet another interesting character (again in a bar... hic!). A scotchman who was leading a project at the JJ Pickle Research Campus into hypersonic magnetic propulsion of projectiles. They had a very high speed wind tunnel (mach-something or other) and their own nuclear reactor to provide the power. JJ Pickle is on the other side of Braker Lane to ITSO Austin so I had students playing with a reactor a couple of hundred yards from my office.
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>> Lane to ITSO Austin so I had students playing with a reactor a couple of
>> hundred yards from my office.
You would be really surprised where Nuclear Reactors end up.
Greenwich
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JASON_reactor
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>> You would be really surprised where Nuclear Reactors end up.
Visited Miss B and her Beau this weekend. Apparently there are several nuclear piles from decommissioned subs within a mile or so of their flat in Devonport.
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"JASON was operational at the site from 1962 to 1996 (it had previously been operated by the Hawker Siddeley Nuclear Power Corporation from February 1959 at Langley, Slough),.."
So that's what happened to Slough.
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>> "JASON was operational at the site from 1962 to 1996 (it had previously been operated
>> by the Hawker Siddeley Nuclear Power Corporation from February 1959 at Langley, Slough),.."
>>
>> So that's what happened to Slough.
The truck with the reactor on the back went up the A4.......
Last edited by: Zero on Tue 26 Aug 14 at 22:48
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>> Perhaps not. But our "thing" might be something completely different, not nazi at all. Think
>> of all the PC stuff we now subscribe to, or pretend to subscribe to, sanctioned
>> and plugged by reputable centre-left newspapers and the chattering classes, and then imagine that it
>> was hijacked by a cunning gang of crooks who rode to power on its back.
>>
>> All the fellow-travellers would go along with it the same as ordinary Germans did. Once
>> you have gone a little way along a road it's less embarrassing to carry on
>> than to turn and push against the crowd.
Well said that man.
Luckily, in the example you quote, the tide seems to have turned somewhat.
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>> Luckily, in the example you quote, the tide seems to have turned somewhat.
Unfortunately, people use the "gone too far one way" argument to justify their old, generally abhorrent, ways.
Social history is always a sine wave with mean slowly moving one way or another.
Last edited by: VxFan on Wed 27 Aug 14 at 01:14
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>> >> Well said that man.
Not really Wp. The suggestion that PC crap is comparable with nazi crap is utterly ludicrous. They are in two different worlds. One is merely annoying, the other is poisonous.
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>> Not really Wp. The suggestion that PC crap is comparable with nazi crap is utterly
>> ludicrous. They are in two different worlds. One is merely annoying, the other is poisonous.
>>
tut, tut AC...it's the principle being discussed, not an exact comparison.
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>> >> >> Well said that man.
>>
>> Not really Wp. The suggestion that PC crap is comparable with nazi crap is utterly
>> ludicrous. They are in two different worlds. One is merely annoying, the other is poisonous.
>>
I wasn't saying they are comparable. I was saying imagine a British world where some commonly received virtues (eg PC-ism, for want of a better word) had been hijacked by crooks and then used for their own ends. The "good" subscribers would drift into conivance or acceptance just as "good" Germans did.
I am saying the warning "be vigilant" is lost if it is only applied to incipient nazism. That is a very narrow way of looking at it. The wider evil is any movement that captures people's minds with sweet blandishments but then uses it for evil purposes.
AC said the nazism thing couldn't happen here. I agree, but we need to look for our potential weaknesses, not the Germans'.
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>> AC said the nazism thing couldn't happen here. I agree, but we need to look for our potential weaknesses, not the Germans'.
I didn't say it couldn't, just that I thought we wouldn't have been able to be nazis without giggling. Herself modified that with 'One would hope', and I agreed.
However on the matter of Nazism and PC being poles apart (which they are of course), I have to agree that PC can be sinister and already has been: in the matter of not pursuing foreign paedophiles because council jobsworths were afraid of seeming racist. That of course is totally despicable, as well as being, well, sinister.
Even I am not right about everything first time.
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>> Unfortunately, people use the "gone too far one way" argument to justify their old, generally
>> abhorrent, ways.
Too sweeping a statement old boy. Some might be as you state and some might not be.. and what happens if those that moan are correct?
>>
>> Social history is always a sine wave with mean slowly moving one way or another.
..and?
If someone moans that the sine wave is moving in a wrong direction, are they wrong?
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>> If someone moans that the sine wave is moving in a wrong direction, are they
>> wrong?
Based on how we have evolved as a society I would say its moving the right way. I mean we don't put signs up in hotels saying no dogs and no blacks on guest houses any more, We don't throw people in jail for being homosexual any more, we don't lock unmarried mothers away in mental institutions any more. I would say society is capable of doing the right thing over time, wouldn't you?
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>>wouldn't you?
I think things in England are getting better but I still encounter bigotry in Wales where some people refuse to speak to me because I am English.
And as for some other countries, you just need to look at Missouri or Iraq, Syria, Iran etc to see all is not well with the world.
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>> Based on how we have evolved as a society I would say its moving the
>> right way. I mean we don't put signs up in hotels saying no dogs and
>> no blacks on guest houses any more, We don't throw people in jail for being
>> homosexual any more, we don't lock unmarried mothers away in mental institutions any more. I
>> would say society is capable of doing the right thing over time, wouldn't you?
I'd mostly agree with that, but with a proviso that keeping a close eye on it isn't a bad thing. Humans can be like sheep.. and therefore led easily. All I'm after is the right path being used.
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>>
>> >. I
>> would say society is capable of doing the right thing over time, wouldn't you?
>>
Yes, but you are looking at a very short span of sine-wave.
Move back to ancient Greece, and probably none of those things happened. certainly not the homosexual one. We have a very long way to go before the sine wave catches up with Greek sexual liberation.
Perhaps the sine wave only seems to be progressive on average because we declare off-limits things we don't even want to think about?
Incest will be the new "homosexuality" barrier. With same-sex marriage, the taboo is beginning to look a bit dated. "Brother","sister" "nephew" and "niece" (all currently within prohibited degrees of consanguinity) are taking on new meanings.
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Interesting story from the past. - Cliff Pope
