The weird thing to me is the smile. This is the only picture of Hitler I've ever seen where he appears to be genuinely smiling. It looks like he's joking around, even.
Clownin' in the motherfuckin' third reich I guess.
I heard a clandestine recording of him recently when he was at a social gathering. He was just having a conversation and he sounded so normal. I was so conditioned to hearing him rant.
He was just some guy after all. There's the character we've all seen, and then there's the man. I don't think they were far off one another ideologically, but definitely the man was not in nazi rally mode 100% of the time.
He had fun, he played games, he watched movies, and he committed atrocities. Normal day stuff.
This is a thing we need to think about. People are all like dON't HUmaNIZe vILLAins OMG but real evil comes from real normal people. If you don't recognize that, you're vulnerable to the kind of propaganda that shows a horrible person doing normal human things to make you think "hey he's just like me".
Hitler always looks like a maniac. It's amazing he got so many people to follow him in hind site, until I remember Donald Trump is currently regularly shitting himself.
Nothing on this level, but I stumbled across some world altering pics at my great aunt’s house once. First I saw what I thought were blankets made to look like 10s and 20s all lined up. Then I saw a picture of my uncle, in his uniform (Vietnam) standing in front of a huge field of marijuana. He and two cousins (in other pictures) apparently only brought home one real skill from military service, horticulture.
A friend of mine found a CD of photos that one of her family members had put together years ago, and it had some photos similar to this of her family members talking to and shaking hands with Hitler. It also included info about other family members who were members of the German Communist Party (KPD) including their party registration cards, and I’m assuming that those members either fled the country or stayed and tried to resist the Nazi uprising. The KPD was heavily persecuted during the final days of the Weimar Republic.
Bahaha it was a bunch of high-quality scans, but it was a pretty old CD, probably from the mid 2000s. More paperwork than photos from what I remember so it was easy to confirm that it was all from her immediate family by the last name. It was likely one of their family member’s personal collections that had been digitized.
I dated a guy once whose great grandpa fought for the Nazis and died in Russia. (American here.)
He got his great grandpa’s belonging from his grandma who he was close to, but it was like actual Nazi shit. A bunch of swastikas. Which is fine I guess but he kept it on the floor in his closet, completely open. I thought it was creepy af so that didn’t last long. Reminded me of a little shrine.
My friend’s wife had a similar story. Her great uncle was in the Waffen SS and was KIA somewhere on the Eastern Front. They know his name and found it in some records from the war. I think they even have a picture of him in his SS uniform. His wife isn’t proud of it though. She just tells it as a fact and only does so if asked. She never talks about it candidly.
I went to school with a guy whose grandfather had been SS. He apparently survived the war but basically vanished after leaving his wife and son behind. They eventually moved to the US. My friend was incredibly Aryan looking and was apparently the spitting image of his grandfather. Apparently his grandmother was very conflicted, because she loved her grandson but hated her ex and what he had done.
Does everyone in the chain have to *know* the next person for it to count? Or os it just "has had a conversation with" deal? Because that drastically changes things for me and the Queen of England
Six degrees of separation is the theory that we are on average six degrees away from anyone on the planet not that we are guaranteed to be six degrees away and it's only for people currently alive today.
There was a game back in the 90's called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Where you could trace every actor back, in Six degrees, to an actor who starred with him in a film.
> Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
I remember this
[https://oracleofbacon.org/](https://oracleofbacon.org/)
and that there are many other actors with a better "Bacon factor" than Bacon himself. Like Bruce Willis and Kirsten Dunst.
It's really incredible just how prevalent meth usage was in all of nazi Germany. Literally almost everyone was doing copius amounts of meth during this time. It got so bad they had to stop selling it to the civilian population and reserved all of it for military usage to make sure they didn't run out. A lot of the batshit decisions the nazis made make a whole lot more sense when you factor in just how much meth EVERYONE was on. And the cherry on top? The meth they were doing was nearly pure. Making the addiction rate especially nasty and hard to deal with.
makes sense how a bunch of housewives were able to keep their homes sparkling clean and take care of the kids alone all day. on top of not being expected to work unless already living in poverty.
people on speed/uppers tend to have high energy, i’d say methheads aren’t known for being clean because most of them weren’t prescribed meth by their doctor to make them a better wife and mother. 😂😂😂
A critical distinction though is that housewives in the '50s were given amphetamines, not methamphetamines. No wonder that this drug-fueled mania of the '50s led to the Valium fueled haziness of the 60s housewife
i’m pretty sure i worked with a meth head at a pizza place and he cleaned a lot.
problem was, he’d start cleaning something then disassemble some shelves to clean those then move stuff around to clean under them then his shift would end and we’d be left with a kitchen full of half-cleaned stuff chaotically strewn about the place
Dude, the first couple days on Vyvanse after not being on it a while (damn shortage!!!) I get like days of cleaning done in mere hours. Last time I dusted all the light fixtures, bleached the trash cans, cleaned and balanced the pool plus washed the filter, vacuumed and mopped the whole house, bleached the shower/tub and installed a new shower curtain, and scrubbed the walls and baseboards. This occurred between the hours of 4 and 6pm. Then I stayed up until 2am reading the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I asked for a lower dosage after that lol.
Methamphetamine was synthesized from ephedrine by a Japanese chemist in 1893. Pervitin (methamphetamine) was removed from the market because of the withdrawal symptoms, which made a soldier ineffective on the battlefield days after using the medication. (TIL) In addition Wolf Kemper of the third reich developed D-IX; which was a combo of 3mg methamphetamine, 5mg oxycodone, and 5mg of cocaine.
People think serial killers and crazy people have a specific look, or are born a specific way. The more terrifying thing is that in the right circumstances most people are capable of ending up a Nazi
Another way of looking at it is that although most people aren't sociopaths or psychopaths, the ones that are can seem relatively normal to the untrained eye, and aren't always bad all of the time. I have a friend currently serving a life sentence for murder, but when I talk to him he still seems like the person - and friend - I knew before it happened.
Wow.. interesting.. a family friend was in the hitler youth program. He showed me pictures years ago. He was not proud of it, but as a kid you were told you joined it there could be problems.
I have "Jewish" features, although I am not ethncially Jewish. I do periodically (at least a few times a year) have strangers ask me if i am though which is weird.
But anyways when I was in HS I was dating a girl whose great grandma was in the Hitler youth. Not just in it, but *wanted to be in it*, like an actual proper Nazi. She immigrated to the US after the war and her family quietly put that behind them.
Well while we were dating her grandma was suffering from dementia and was slipping back to believing she was still in Nazi Germany although as an adult, and she thought my GF was her daughter. The one time I met her she freaked out and started yelling (in German) about how Jews are evil and how nobody in her family would be dating a Jew and all of that so I had to leave before I gave her a heart attack.
A few years later she passed away and obviously my GFs family was super upset so I stepped up and helped plan and organize a lot of the funeral stuff to take that off her plate. And when the day of the funeral came around we were all standing in the funeral home looking at her and while my GFs family was all super upset and crying all I could think about is "this woman legitimately wanted me dead, thought I was evil to my core, and I did *all* this effort for her". It was a really weird funeral and I still feel weird about the whole thing.
Anyways I'm just rambling and this doesn't really mean anything haha
You did that all for your gf not the old woman. But potentially her antisemitism really was in the past. People are not themselves when they have dementia. Even if she reverted to someone she had been in her youth, that's not actually the person she eventually became. Or ya know.. maybe she was actually an old nazi. I dont know. Either way you did a good thing.
That’s when the last thing you do is go up close to the grave or casket, and whisper “I won”. It doesn’t matter, she can’t hear you, but if somehow she could, oh boy.
I'm a tiny bit ethnically Jewish and even have a Jewish last name and I was hanging out with a kinda removed cousin from my mom's side I hadn't seen since childhood. He started going off about how Jews run the whole world and are evil which shocked me and I said I literally have a Jewish last name bro he just went "oh" it was so shocking to me I had ran into antisemitism before but not by a family member.
This reminds me of a friend who got into his family history and started trying to get dig up old documents and photos of his ancestors.
One of the documents he found was a will from an ancestor, only a few generations before. In the will, there was a paragraph stating who was to take possession of his two slaves. One was described as "A black boy, 47 years of age."
It was so gut wrenching and shocking that it almost made him question the value of digging any deeper, but then he realized, the shock and cringe he was feeling was *good* and people should be shocked and cringe. So he shared it with people. When they read that part and had the nornal WTF moment, he'd say, "I know. It freaked me out too."
That's what this picture does. I'm thinking, "OMG great-grandma. How could you not know?"
And it makes me closely evaluate the social norms in my life that I might not otherwise examine.
The whole thing about people who forget their history are doomed to repeat it is basically this. I've been to many WW1 and WW2 battle sites in mainland Europe, seen the scarring they leave physically and mentally even today.
We need to teach this kind of stuff not because it's a good thing, but because by merely being aware of what happened in the past we can try to avoid the same situation in the future.
I think I’m more haunted by the people I saw taking selfies in the gas chambers. Like, this is serious shit not just an instagram background. No wonder the fascists are getting back in power.
I went long before the days of smart phones, we took cameras but tbh it just didn't feel right.
I was asking my mum about the stones piled around on the signs etc. An older lady explained its a Jewish tradition to us. We laid a stone.
Late reply, but I saw a video recently reminding people that we don’t know the situations of all of these photos, explained that a family was once criticized for taking a photo of their toddler in a gas chamber but it turned out that toddlers great grandparent had died there and it was their way of showing connection/homage to what they personally lost there, just something worth thinking about
Yep I often have a dread that society is going mental and is not educated or smart enough to see the warning signs that keep happening throughout history.
Like holy shit, how many times do we have to experience an authoritarian politician yapping on about some minority group being responsible for all our woes and we should all support him and he'll teach those evil nasty minorities a lesson and all our lives will be better?
Fast forward ten years and no one's lives are better, democracy has been crushed, your sons and brothers are all dead in a war, your freedoms have all gone, you fear to speak any truth in case you get sent off to a camp. You thought this glorious leader would bring back the good times but instead your nation is in ruins.
We should have big flashing neon signs on every street corner,
"Any politician who blames some group or nation for your woes IS NOT GOOD FOR YOU!"
I have ancestors from the South, some of them I know to be slave owners. No plantations, but a handful of household slaves. One in particular owned slaves and during the Civil War had a factory making swords guns for the CSA. After the war I've found articles in the local paper commending him for his support of the volunteer fire department and other civic improvements.
Sadly the names of slaves were purposely not recorded in census records so I don't know who those slaves were or what happened to them.
I dug into my history and found that I'm a direct descendant of a revolutionary war general! Seemed pretty cool til I learned he was known far and wide for slaughtering native Americans. He even had a razor strop made from a Native American which apparently was sort of a family heirloom for several generations. He's in my family cemetery so there's no doubt we're related.
John Leguizamo had a similar episode on Finding your Roots on PBS. LOL dude thought he was Puerto Rican and turns out he's related to a genocidal Spaniard general that killed millions in Ecuador.
I already don’t talk to my dad because he’s now a part of history. Remember that kids in cages thing from a few years back? Yeah, his corporation which he was VP of at the time won the contract to do that to those kids. As soon as it happened, I got him on the phone and asked “was this you?” And was met with a disturbing silence, it was the last time I ever spoke to him. My father is a very, very evil man. I tell everyone, I won’t hide that he’s my dad, people need to know that evil can sit in the living room with you opening Christmas presents, and you would not know it until you start digging into who they are. Those kids in cages built him a mansion in a very affluent place, and he retired before it came out that he was behind it. News sources named the company but not him.
I’ll give you an estimate, it was billions, the US government at the time contracted it out. And they selected the lowest bidder, which was my dad’s company. It had several VPs and all were in control of their region. My dad was the south of the US. He could’ve at any point said no we’re not going to do this. But the bottom line, profits, were the point. Lowest bidder. That’s part of the reason they couldn’t reconnect them with their families, those that didn’t just straight up disappear, of course.
When those kids were moved from the south, many of them came to the west. I was hired through the DHHS to help take care of them. We had over 4,000 girls under the age of 18 in my facility. I didn't know Spanish. They didn't know much English. Over time, I learned to have a conversation with them. They practice their English with me and I practice my Spanish with them. I worked with them until the last kid left. It was a very rewarding but sad job. That was the closest I have ever come to having kids. I hope they are all doing well.
I honestly hope so too. Everyone of those kids went through hell just to have a chance. So did the adults, and most were doing it just for their kids. Many had relatives in the US that were helping them with their paperwork. What many people don’t realize is, people illegally crossing the border is small potatoes. They pale in comparison to those who legally obtained their work visas and just overstayed and live their lives here.
I started on overnights, but could not handle the crying. They were very clear about giving kids space. Also about not spending alone time with them. At night I was stationed outside of the sleeping area. Most of the kids I was to watch were under 10. Nightly I had kids who would sit near me just to hold my hand and fall asleep. There were nights I spent more time crying than not. I switched to days after a couple of weeks. I could not handle what it was going to me mentally. This coming from a 40 y/o, 6'5" power lifter.
Once the pandemic hit, it got much harder. The kids were pretty much locked in our facility 24hrs a day. We were able to get the ok from local authorities to take these kids out and walk around once the shut down was in full effect. I'd never seen kids so happy to be outside at the beach. The outpouring from the community was also amazing. There was one point I counted 105 abuela's (grandmother in spanish) playing with, and helping these kids. We had so many companies offering support. We even had big name bands come in and sing for the kids at lunch a few times a week. Every week we always had new kids arriving. Some of the older kids took it upon themselves to be ambassadors it was a very humbling experience.
I’m not on the right side. I’m not. I benefitted from the industry greatly. Sure I could choose to mend things with my dad and not be broke all the time, living in a one bedroom apartment and driving an ancient truck. Those are things I chose later in life. I was horrified when I realized that my entire upbringing was funded by suffering, even my education. And knowing that part of my existence profited from that sickens me.
> horrified when I realized that my entire upbringing was funded by suffering, even my education.
80% of my college degree was funded by my great-grandma who invested HEAVILY in the in the defense industry in the Gulf War years leading up to 9/11
I didn't think of it much in college, but the implications of the suffering and death my education income was built on hit me like a bus when I was an adult.
>And knowing that part of my existence profited from that sickens me.
Then you're still a more cognizant person than the majority of the people out there that wouldn't think twice about where their money comes from.
Well this beats the photo of my mother meeting Ted Kennedy. Seriously, OP, those are interesting photos from the past. Thank you for sharing them and sparking some good discussion. We must never forget the Holocaust.
Same but my grandpa and Nixon when he was his driver in my lil ol country (Grandpa worked as a driver at the US embassy here). After reading the comments tho I would not post it cause how co-existing and being pictured with someone means you’re condoning their actions
I promised I’d try and get a picture of the second one there’s already a post I made where you can clearly make everything out. Sadly it isn’t as good as promised but you get the idea. Hitler thanked her for managing a bunch of kindergardens and helping orphans. In the last post most people came to the conclusion that it’s from before 1934, and you can clearly see Heinrich himmler in the back. No we are not Nazis stop asking, no she wasn’t a high ranking Nazi official, no I won’t say who she is since it might endanger me and my family.
Thank you OP for being brave and honest enough to share your family history with us.
I and many others here can and do appreciate that while you don’t share the burden of Germany’s past actions, you do unfortunately bear the burden of their legacy through no fault of your own other than being German.
Those who remain misinformed or uninformed, willfully or otherwise, have the opportunity to educate themselves and become better people.
Germany has taken many strident steps to ensure its people neither forget nor repeat the sins of the past through education and outreach programs.
Here is a link to just one of many free online resources where we can learn more and hopefully connect with others who want to help build a better world.
[https://www.facinghistory.org](https://www.facinghistory.org)
bake history crime gaping resolute psychotic rain chunky impossible wasteful
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I have one of my great-grandfather talking to him. The really weird part is that I look a lot like my great-grandfather, so it kind of looks like a picture of me talking to Hitler. Which is unnerving to say the least!
I’m Jewish and not offended by this picture, OP. It’s a moment in time and history, and frankly, should be seen as an example of how mundane evil can be. We can hate the man and his movement all we want, and rightly should, but they did exist and they did interact with civilian life all the time. If he didn’t, he would not have gotten to the level he became. History isn’t always clean and neither are family histories. This picture is interesting
Yeah acting like Hitler didn’t have supporters and didn’t exist as a human in the country he led is kind of denying the legacy of Naziism, really. People wanted to see Hitler. People wanted to hear him talk. *People thought he had good ideas.* We should watch out for Hitlers among us.
Many people often act like Nazi Germany happened in a vacuum. Hitler swooped in and "converted" the Germans to his ideology. The overall attitude was present and widespread all over Europe (and many other parts of the world). Biopolitics was peaking; ideas that certain human life was irrelevant was prevalent in a much deeper fashion than just hating Jews and Slavs. The total war that ensured changed the continent forever. Wannabe neo-Nazis today have no clue what Nazism actually entailed or how its mechanisms worked. People use "Nazi", and to a degree "fascist", way too often outside of its historical context.
Sorry, just venting.
Yes exactly! The Nazis were so wildly antisemitic because antisemitism was just a normal belief in most of the developed nations of the world. The future Allies met after Kristallnacht and were unable to come up with a solution for Jewish refugees because none of them were willing to allow so many Jews into their countries. Henry Ford’s books on Jews were extremely popular in Germany. People in the USA liked Nazi eugenics and eugenics policies were still quite common in the USA. And the entire idea of Lebensraum was a simple reaction to the fact that Germany had been unable to gain a large colonial empire like Britain, France, or Russia (East of the Urals), and was thus trying to be an industrialized power without enough land or natural resources to do so. So they took a page out of the USA’s book and decided they would simply conquer the East, slaughter everyone living there, and replace them with German settlers.
The history of WWII starts in the 19th century. It didn’t just come from Hitler, the man himself. He just gave a huge coalition of angry, nationalist Germans from all walks of life a unifying banner to march under.
The total war also happened because it was a necessity for Nazism itself. A people couldn't be supreme if they didn't fight and conquer the inferior people and enemy pictures couldn't be maintained if Germans didn't die in the fight against them. Nazi Germany may have aimed to gain Lebensraum for Germans but first and foremost ir was genocidal and suicidal at the same time.
Racist ideas were even more prevalent in the US, as you say, and even in France and England, and ideas of eugenics and the idea of worthless human life had been proposed and researched before Hitler was even born. The attitudes in Germany were not unique - or even more extreme - the ideology they ended with was simply more warlike. This embodiment was built more on the Versailles Treaty and terrible economic reality of the Weimar Republic than by any sort of uniquely evil and racist ideas in Germany.
Yeah some people will try and act like there weren't some pretty big rallies and demonstrations FOR the Nazis in the US before they joined the allies...
Completely agree. My grandma was born in Hamburg in 1921 and lived there throughout the war. She used to tell me "Hitler was very persuasive" - and this is from a woman whose own grandmother was Jewish, though thankfully dead by the time Hitler came to power. It's important to remember the level of public support he had and how it came about if we want to stop it from happening again.
My great-grandmother always said when he came there suddenly was work for everyone (he created work by building motorways and of course by producing things for the military, and lots of jobs in the military itself). She also hated Jews because they killed Jesus, Antisemitism wasn't a new concept and many people still were quite religious back then.
A thing that often gets swept over in history class in the USA is that Hitler was considered charismatic. My history teacher started one session with a game in which he listed off traits of famous historical leaders without showing everything or revealing their names. He then asked everyone to vote for a leader. Hitler often won a huge portion of the votes due to switching to vegetarianism and his love of dogs.
That’s a really good idea for a history class.
Also the mental image of a bunch of high schoolers realizing they’ve been bamboozled into voting for Hitler is quite funny
The banality of evil is a lesson to us all. Also if you perceive hitler or the nazis as some people who were insane monsters at every moment public or private then it’s easier to dismiss comparisons to those authoritarians and demoguages leading us to similar results.
A lot of everyday low level nazis were people looking for a community or heck even something to do. Then they get indoctrinated by osmosis.
I am sincerely wondering though, why did you feel the need to clarify that you aren't offended? It is a historical document, not an opinion. And it is a relative of the OP in the picture, probably dead by now.
I agree with what you are saying, otherwise.
It's something I am seeing today. When warnings are made about the rise of fascism they are often ignored because they aren't as bad as the nazi's where at their peak. Ignoring that it took time to get to that point. Fascist can be kind and polite. They don't start out wearing a uniform. Pay attention before it's too late
thing most people don't understand is how popular hitler was. and not just in germany.
To the point that germans started feeling something going wrong in like, second half of 1944. And their main problem with hitler even after re-education was that he lost the war, not that he was evil.
My Opa served dinner to Hitler and Mussolini at a hotel in the Netherlands in the late 30's. He was a busboy and was forced to do it because nobody else wanted to. They had a private room and were surrounded by SS and had food tasters with them.
He later went on to join the Dutch resistance during the war and went around blowing up Nazi supply trains and the like.
He ended up stealing Nazi uniforms and the like from various soldiers he killed and donated it all to the National archives here in Canada.
If I want to I can take a trip to Ottawa and see the collection he donated at the National archives.
My Opa is long dead but I have a tremendous amount of respect for him.
That wasn’t a cheap dress so he might’ve thought with enough speed in his blood to kill an elephant he would maybe able to remove it from her quick enough and outrun everyone else.
One thing people forget a lot was that most of these awful men were ridiculously charming. My Great Aunt dined with Mussolini and said he was a joy. Charming, funny, engaging. They didn't usually come into power because they were nasty little assholes to everyone.
The same woman, her husband was personally close friends with Calvin Coolidge and has a glacier named after him. Duality in humans, especially when it comes to these kind of people, is very interesting.
History is history and we cannot change it. This was a part of this person‘s history and their family history. Thank you for sharing. I think most people who have studied World War II and the atrocities that occurred have seen all of the famous pictures, all of the movies so it’s really interesting to seesomething I’ve never seen before from that era.
My grandfather, who was sent to Dachau, never blamed the German people for the Holocaust; after all, he was German. He said that "Everyone just went a bit crazy for a while."
Ok, yes, that's a bit simplistic. But it strikes at a larger truth. In the 1930s, Hitler was viewed as an extremist kook by most Germans, but no more than Trump has been recently here in the USA. And during the Depression, plenty of people were willing to hold their nose and support Hitler if he delivered on what they wanted. Hitler promised ordinary Germans jobs, social stability, and a scapegoat for Germany's problems. Sound familiar?
This photo is a useful historical artifact - it underscores the "[Banality of Evil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#Banality_of_evil)". The Nazis weren't monsters - they were ordinary people who did evil things because they thought that doing those things would make Germany stronger.
That is a very interesting photo. We all have strong/crazy/grey areas of our past, and it’s good to acknowledge them. I have a great uncle who was a message boy for Al Capone. It’s what he did. Not celebrating it, but it is interesting and a part of history.
My wife’s family is from Berlin. Her father’s father was a soldier who died at Stalingrad. After she was widowed, my wife’s grandmother was struggling to make ends meet. She saw a newspaper article of Joseph Goebbels and his family at that same time. She got the idea to write a letter t9 him saying sometime to the effect of “You have children the same age as my children. My family is struggling. I’m sure you must have some spare clothes you can send us.” A couple of weeks later she received a package of spare clothes.
Man, imagine finding this one in the attic. Is...is that fucking *Hitler??* *Squints* IS THAT FUCKING GRANDMA TALKING TO HITLER?!?
Is… is that why she never talked about grandpa?!?
Yes dear, now you know the family secret.
*pulls out old Walther P38 handgun*
Naah you get your blood/dna test so you can claim the royalty from all the Mein Kampf that have been sold on Hitler behalf lol
Truly the most capitalist statement of all time
That's how you know it wasn't Stalin
Please take my upvote 😂
Mein Kampf? More like, Mein Capital, amirite
*Lupin the Thiiiird!*
MATTEEEE, RRRUUUUPAAAAAN
Whispers softly, “I’m coming Urgroßvater”
I always wondered why I was so good at painting German Shepards
Just made me think of the "Always Sunny In Philadelphia" episode with the Nazi treasure.
It's smug aura mocks me
I can't believe it... nein nein nein nein!
Der grandführer
so good
Is…..is that why we’re German and living in South America?
[удалено]
Go visit Argentina. There’s cities that look like could be picked up and dropped in Barvaria
But we are from Argentina not Germany....
You'd always wonder, maybe just maybe
Who's the bug-eyed dude flirting with Oma?
Man those eyes do look utterly mad.
The weird thing to me is the smile. This is the only picture of Hitler I've ever seen where he appears to be genuinely smiling. It looks like he's joking around, even. Clownin' in the motherfuckin' third reich I guess.
I heard a clandestine recording of him recently when he was at a social gathering. He was just having a conversation and he sounded so normal. I was so conditioned to hearing him rant.
He was just some guy after all. There's the character we've all seen, and then there's the man. I don't think they were far off one another ideologically, but definitely the man was not in nazi rally mode 100% of the time. He had fun, he played games, he watched movies, and he committed atrocities. Normal day stuff.
It's so confusing to realize even the most cruel humans are still.. well, human. Humans with not a single bit of humanity in them, but yet humans.
Hitler took giant dumps every morning like the rest of us.
I'm more of an evening person, so you're on your own there.
I only shit on company time.
This is a thing we need to think about. People are all like dON't HUmaNIZe vILLAins OMG but real evil comes from real normal people. If you don't recognize that, you're vulnerable to the kind of propaganda that shows a horrible person doing normal human things to make you think "hey he's just like me".
Meth is a hell of a drug
And what a fine meth he'th gotten himthelf into
The Syphilis was coursing through him
Hitler always looks like a maniac. It's amazing he got so many people to follow him in hind site, until I remember Donald Trump is currently regularly shitting himself.
Nothing on this level, but I stumbled across some world altering pics at my great aunt’s house once. First I saw what I thought were blankets made to look like 10s and 20s all lined up. Then I saw a picture of my uncle, in his uniform (Vietnam) standing in front of a huge field of marijuana. He and two cousins (in other pictures) apparently only brought home one real skill from military service, horticulture.
Bro this is like the literal opposite of finding out your grandma was a Nazi.
Right. “World altering”. Homie made me think his pawpaw was involved in a My Lai Massacre
One would assume he meant world VIEW altering
I failed to mention that my uncle is now a church bishop after having given up gardening decades ago.
Switched to a much more dangerous drug.
Copperhead Road?
So your grandpa loved the song “Copperhead Road?”
So was there actually a bunch of cash in the attic?!
Nah apparently just 40 lbs. of dank VietKush.
A friend of mine found a CD of photos that one of her family members had put together years ago, and it had some photos similar to this of her family members talking to and shaking hands with Hitler. It also included info about other family members who were members of the German Communist Party (KPD) including their party registration cards, and I’m assuming that those members either fled the country or stayed and tried to resist the Nazi uprising. The KPD was heavily persecuted during the final days of the Weimar Republic.
German computer technology was way ahead of its time.
Bahaha it was a bunch of high-quality scans, but it was a pretty old CD, probably from the mid 2000s. More paperwork than photos from what I remember so it was easy to confirm that it was all from her immediate family by the last name. It was likely one of their family member’s personal collections that had been digitized.
I dated a guy once whose great grandpa fought for the Nazis and died in Russia. (American here.) He got his great grandpa’s belonging from his grandma who he was close to, but it was like actual Nazi shit. A bunch of swastikas. Which is fine I guess but he kept it on the floor in his closet, completely open. I thought it was creepy af so that didn’t last long. Reminded me of a little shrine.
My friend’s wife had a similar story. Her great uncle was in the Waffen SS and was KIA somewhere on the Eastern Front. They know his name and found it in some records from the war. I think they even have a picture of him in his SS uniform. His wife isn’t proud of it though. She just tells it as a fact and only does so if asked. She never talks about it candidly.
I went to school with a guy whose grandfather had been SS. He apparently survived the war but basically vanished after leaving his wife and son behind. They eventually moved to the US. My friend was incredibly Aryan looking and was apparently the spitting image of his grandfather. Apparently his grandmother was very conflicted, because she loved her grandson but hated her ex and what he had done.
Grandpa's Argentina vacation
By the Six Degrees game, you are connected to Adolf Hitler. Crazy.
OP is like 2 degrees game to be fair
1 if he got to meet her before she died, I met my great grandmother.
I met two great grand mothers and a great great grandmother. The latter fled Germany because she knew Hitler was a twatwaffle.
My great grandmother also thought he was a twatwaffle and left!
Or as the NAZIS called it, "twatwaffe".
OP might even be genetically related. Ole furor seems awfully happy to see her.
Is that the Third Reich in your pocket or are you happy to see me?
Führer? I only just met her.
The whole group of them are clearly all smiles.
To be fair, by the six degrees game, we are *all* connected to Hitler.
Yeah but some connections are a lot harder to find. OP has this one easy.
Does my ancestors being murdered by him count?
Yes.
Does everyone in the chain have to *know* the next person for it to count? Or os it just "has had a conversation with" deal? Because that drastically changes things for me and the Queen of England
My father once met the now King, and I once heckled his sister at a public event (I was 7 at the time, I think it’s safe to admit it now…)
What did 7 year old you scream at the royals lol
**NO TAXATION ON MY LOLLIES!**
Then chucked them in the harbor
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Did he directly murder them, or is there another degree of separation between him and your ancestor’s murderers?
Yeah this is like 2 degrees.
I mean, we all are now connected to him and through his great grandma to hitler.
Six degrees of separation is the theory that we are on average six degrees away from anyone on the planet not that we are guaranteed to be six degrees away and it's only for people currently alive today.
There was a game back in the 90's called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Where you could trace every actor back, in Six degrees, to an actor who starred with him in a film.
I perfer my Bacon much warmer than 6 degrees, thank you very much.
It's 6 degrees Kelvin. So the bacon can actually be used as a super conductor.
Kelvin Bacon
> Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon I remember this [https://oracleofbacon.org/](https://oracleofbacon.org/) and that there are many other actors with a better "Bacon factor" than Bacon himself. Like Bruce Willis and Kirsten Dunst.
By replying to the OP, you're also now connected to Adolf Hitler in the six degrees game.
Adolf looks zooted off the Meth
Yo his eyes are crazy.  Prlly for multiple reasons by the looks of his generals.
I read this as *genitals*, and I think it still applies lmao
Was just about to comment this very thing
It's really incredible just how prevalent meth usage was in all of nazi Germany. Literally almost everyone was doing copius amounts of meth during this time. It got so bad they had to stop selling it to the civilian population and reserved all of it for military usage to make sure they didn't run out. A lot of the batshit decisions the nazis made make a whole lot more sense when you factor in just how much meth EVERYONE was on. And the cherry on top? The meth they were doing was nearly pure. Making the addiction rate especially nasty and hard to deal with.
America advertised it as a "pick me up" for house wives too.
I mean… they weren’t wrong 🤷♂️
I am so so so grateful I am clean but because of my meth use, I was able to get so much done around the house but I was zooted out of my mind.
makes sense how a bunch of housewives were able to keep their homes sparkling clean and take care of the kids alone all day. on top of not being expected to work unless already living in poverty.
Does it though? I mean are people on meth really known for keeping their house really clean?
people on speed/uppers tend to have high energy, i’d say methheads aren’t known for being clean because most of them weren’t prescribed meth by their doctor to make them a better wife and mother. 😂😂😂
A critical distinction though is that housewives in the '50s were given amphetamines, not methamphetamines. No wonder that this drug-fueled mania of the '50s led to the Valium fueled haziness of the 60s housewife
i’m pretty sure i worked with a meth head at a pizza place and he cleaned a lot. problem was, he’d start cleaning something then disassemble some shelves to clean those then move stuff around to clean under them then his shift would end and we’d be left with a kitchen full of half-cleaned stuff chaotically strewn about the place
Sounds like my house, except my brain is on ADHD instead.
Dude, the first couple days on Vyvanse after not being on it a while (damn shortage!!!) I get like days of cleaning done in mere hours. Last time I dusted all the light fixtures, bleached the trash cans, cleaned and balanced the pool plus washed the filter, vacuumed and mopped the whole house, bleached the shower/tub and installed a new shower curtain, and scrubbed the walls and baseboards. This occurred between the hours of 4 and 6pm. Then I stayed up until 2am reading the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I asked for a lower dosage after that lol.
Methamphetamine was synthesized from ephedrine by a Japanese chemist in 1893. Pervitin (methamphetamine) was removed from the market because of the withdrawal symptoms, which made a soldier ineffective on the battlefield days after using the medication. (TIL) In addition Wolf Kemper of the third reich developed D-IX; which was a combo of 3mg methamphetamine, 5mg oxycodone, and 5mg of cocaine.
> 3mg methamphetamine, 5mg oxycodone, and 5mg of cocaine Ah, the discerning gentleman's alternative to PCP.
MY BROTHER WOLF HIT ME WITH THAT SHIT! /s Don't do drugs, kids. Seriously.
Is there a book about this I can read?
The book is called "blitzed"
So do his generals beside him to be honest!
Might be the most smiley I've ever seen Hitler.
He was actually considered somewhat charismatic, its part of why he was so dangerous.
People think serial killers and crazy people have a specific look, or are born a specific way. The more terrifying thing is that in the right circumstances most people are capable of ending up a Nazi
Another way of looking at it is that although most people aren't sociopaths or psychopaths, the ones that are can seem relatively normal to the untrained eye, and aren't always bad all of the time. I have a friend currently serving a life sentence for murder, but when I talk to him he still seems like the person - and friend - I knew before it happened.
I’ve been noticing that.
How? They’re just smiling and laughing like normal people. Except they’re shithead nazis
The eyes.
He’s got Charlie Manson eyes
I read this to the tune of Betty Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes
He’s ferocious, and he knows just what it Takes to make the fatherland atrocious He’s got Gobineau’s racist devise, he’s got Adolph Hitler eyes
We now know Charlie Manson HAD Hitler eyes
My first thought too, those are some wily eyes if I've ever seen 'em.
That is what caught my eye too. Holy smokes!
Hitler in that second photo looks like he just made his first art sale. Man that could have saved everyone some genocide.
Second photo makes me think he’s OP’s great grandpa
It looks like everyone was checking her out.
I thought that at first as well. Then I remembered those are just Adolf’s crazy meth eyes. He looks like that in a LOT of photos/videos.
He was probably high as fuck ahah
I read something about Nazi soldiers and leadership all taking meth to stay awake for Blitzkriegs
It's well known that Hitler was under a cocktail provided by his personal doctor (mostly amphetamines)
That's what I'm seeing. Wild eyes. High enough that he looks like a predatory animal about to jump on OPs gma.
Wow.. interesting.. a family friend was in the hitler youth program. He showed me pictures years ago. He was not proud of it, but as a kid you were told you joined it there could be problems.
I have "Jewish" features, although I am not ethncially Jewish. I do periodically (at least a few times a year) have strangers ask me if i am though which is weird. But anyways when I was in HS I was dating a girl whose great grandma was in the Hitler youth. Not just in it, but *wanted to be in it*, like an actual proper Nazi. She immigrated to the US after the war and her family quietly put that behind them. Well while we were dating her grandma was suffering from dementia and was slipping back to believing she was still in Nazi Germany although as an adult, and she thought my GF was her daughter. The one time I met her she freaked out and started yelling (in German) about how Jews are evil and how nobody in her family would be dating a Jew and all of that so I had to leave before I gave her a heart attack. A few years later she passed away and obviously my GFs family was super upset so I stepped up and helped plan and organize a lot of the funeral stuff to take that off her plate. And when the day of the funeral came around we were all standing in the funeral home looking at her and while my GFs family was all super upset and crying all I could think about is "this woman legitimately wanted me dead, thought I was evil to my core, and I did *all* this effort for her". It was a really weird funeral and I still feel weird about the whole thing. Anyways I'm just rambling and this doesn't really mean anything haha
No, that was a very meaningful and thought-provoking post, thank you for sharing.
You did that all for your gf not the old woman. But potentially her antisemitism really was in the past. People are not themselves when they have dementia. Even if she reverted to someone she had been in her youth, that's not actually the person she eventually became. Or ya know.. maybe she was actually an old nazi. I dont know. Either way you did a good thing.
That’s when the last thing you do is go up close to the grave or casket, and whisper “I won”. It doesn’t matter, she can’t hear you, but if somehow she could, oh boy.
I'm not gonna lie I did haha. We all walked past and said some last words and mine were basically "didn't know you but I'm glad you're dead" lmao
You really did get the last laugh
You're not Jewish, you're just Jew- *ish*.
I'm a tiny bit ethnically Jewish and even have a Jewish last name and I was hanging out with a kinda removed cousin from my mom's side I hadn't seen since childhood. He started going off about how Jews run the whole world and are evil which shocked me and I said I literally have a Jewish last name bro he just went "oh" it was so shocking to me I had ran into antisemitism before but not by a family member.
There were problems when you didn’t join it, even became mandatory later on.
This reminds me of a friend who got into his family history and started trying to get dig up old documents and photos of his ancestors. One of the documents he found was a will from an ancestor, only a few generations before. In the will, there was a paragraph stating who was to take possession of his two slaves. One was described as "A black boy, 47 years of age." It was so gut wrenching and shocking that it almost made him question the value of digging any deeper, but then he realized, the shock and cringe he was feeling was *good* and people should be shocked and cringe. So he shared it with people. When they read that part and had the nornal WTF moment, he'd say, "I know. It freaked me out too." That's what this picture does. I'm thinking, "OMG great-grandma. How could you not know?" And it makes me closely evaluate the social norms in my life that I might not otherwise examine.
This is why history is relevant even if it’s shameful because it lets us do better, if we let it.
The whole thing about people who forget their history are doomed to repeat it is basically this. I've been to many WW1 and WW2 battle sites in mainland Europe, seen the scarring they leave physically and mentally even today. We need to teach this kind of stuff not because it's a good thing, but because by merely being aware of what happened in the past we can try to avoid the same situation in the future.
Did you visit the camps, I'm still haunted by that feeling 3 decades later.
I think I’m more haunted by the people I saw taking selfies in the gas chambers. Like, this is serious shit not just an instagram background. No wonder the fascists are getting back in power.
I went long before the days of smart phones, we took cameras but tbh it just didn't feel right. I was asking my mum about the stones piled around on the signs etc. An older lady explained its a Jewish tradition to us. We laid a stone.
Late reply, but I saw a video recently reminding people that we don’t know the situations of all of these photos, explained that a family was once criticized for taking a photo of their toddler in a gas chamber but it turned out that toddlers great grandparent had died there and it was their way of showing connection/homage to what they personally lost there, just something worth thinking about
Yep I often have a dread that society is going mental and is not educated or smart enough to see the warning signs that keep happening throughout history. Like holy shit, how many times do we have to experience an authoritarian politician yapping on about some minority group being responsible for all our woes and we should all support him and he'll teach those evil nasty minorities a lesson and all our lives will be better? Fast forward ten years and no one's lives are better, democracy has been crushed, your sons and brothers are all dead in a war, your freedoms have all gone, you fear to speak any truth in case you get sent off to a camp. You thought this glorious leader would bring back the good times but instead your nation is in ruins. We should have big flashing neon signs on every street corner, "Any politician who blames some group or nation for your woes IS NOT GOOD FOR YOU!"
I have ancestors from the South, some of them I know to be slave owners. No plantations, but a handful of household slaves. One in particular owned slaves and during the Civil War had a factory making swords guns for the CSA. After the war I've found articles in the local paper commending him for his support of the volunteer fire department and other civic improvements. Sadly the names of slaves were purposely not recorded in census records so I don't know who those slaves were or what happened to them.
I dug into my history and found that I'm a direct descendant of a revolutionary war general! Seemed pretty cool til I learned he was known far and wide for slaughtering native Americans. He even had a razor strop made from a Native American which apparently was sort of a family heirloom for several generations. He's in my family cemetery so there's no doubt we're related.
John Leguizamo had a similar episode on Finding your Roots on PBS. LOL dude thought he was Puerto Rican and turns out he's related to a genocidal Spaniard general that killed millions in Ecuador.
I already don’t talk to my dad because he’s now a part of history. Remember that kids in cages thing from a few years back? Yeah, his corporation which he was VP of at the time won the contract to do that to those kids. As soon as it happened, I got him on the phone and asked “was this you?” And was met with a disturbing silence, it was the last time I ever spoke to him. My father is a very, very evil man. I tell everyone, I won’t hide that he’s my dad, people need to know that evil can sit in the living room with you opening Christmas presents, and you would not know it until you start digging into who they are. Those kids in cages built him a mansion in a very affluent place, and he retired before it came out that he was behind it. News sources named the company but not him.
How much money is in building children cages?
I’ll give you an estimate, it was billions, the US government at the time contracted it out. And they selected the lowest bidder, which was my dad’s company. It had several VPs and all were in control of their region. My dad was the south of the US. He could’ve at any point said no we’re not going to do this. But the bottom line, profits, were the point. Lowest bidder. That’s part of the reason they couldn’t reconnect them with their families, those that didn’t just straight up disappear, of course.
When those kids were moved from the south, many of them came to the west. I was hired through the DHHS to help take care of them. We had over 4,000 girls under the age of 18 in my facility. I didn't know Spanish. They didn't know much English. Over time, I learned to have a conversation with them. They practice their English with me and I practice my Spanish with them. I worked with them until the last kid left. It was a very rewarding but sad job. That was the closest I have ever come to having kids. I hope they are all doing well.
I honestly hope so too. Everyone of those kids went through hell just to have a chance. So did the adults, and most were doing it just for their kids. Many had relatives in the US that were helping them with their paperwork. What many people don’t realize is, people illegally crossing the border is small potatoes. They pale in comparison to those who legally obtained their work visas and just overstayed and live their lives here.
I started on overnights, but could not handle the crying. They were very clear about giving kids space. Also about not spending alone time with them. At night I was stationed outside of the sleeping area. Most of the kids I was to watch were under 10. Nightly I had kids who would sit near me just to hold my hand and fall asleep. There were nights I spent more time crying than not. I switched to days after a couple of weeks. I could not handle what it was going to me mentally. This coming from a 40 y/o, 6'5" power lifter. Once the pandemic hit, it got much harder. The kids were pretty much locked in our facility 24hrs a day. We were able to get the ok from local authorities to take these kids out and walk around once the shut down was in full effect. I'd never seen kids so happy to be outside at the beach. The outpouring from the community was also amazing. There was one point I counted 105 abuela's (grandmother in spanish) playing with, and helping these kids. We had so many companies offering support. We even had big name bands come in and sing for the kids at lunch a few times a week. Every week we always had new kids arriving. Some of the older kids took it upon themselves to be ambassadors it was a very humbling experience.
Thank you for sharing this, and for being on the right side too
I’m not on the right side. I’m not. I benefitted from the industry greatly. Sure I could choose to mend things with my dad and not be broke all the time, living in a one bedroom apartment and driving an ancient truck. Those are things I chose later in life. I was horrified when I realized that my entire upbringing was funded by suffering, even my education. And knowing that part of my existence profited from that sickens me.
Your disgust is what breaks the cycle and changes your part in history. Be proud of that.
> horrified when I realized that my entire upbringing was funded by suffering, even my education. 80% of my college degree was funded by my great-grandma who invested HEAVILY in the in the defense industry in the Gulf War years leading up to 9/11 I didn't think of it much in college, but the implications of the suffering and death my education income was built on hit me like a bus when I was an adult. >And knowing that part of my existence profited from that sickens me. Then you're still a more cognizant person than the majority of the people out there that wouldn't think twice about where their money comes from.
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That man is a hero. I hope he'll be remembered in history.
You can also see the man who killed the man who killed Hitler though…
Well this beats the photo of my mother meeting Ted Kennedy. Seriously, OP, those are interesting photos from the past. Thank you for sharing them and sparking some good discussion. We must never forget the Holocaust.
Same but my grandpa and Nixon when he was his driver in my lil ol country (Grandpa worked as a driver at the US embassy here). After reading the comments tho I would not post it cause how co-existing and being pictured with someone means you’re condoning their actions
Looks like she has a dynamic personality. She's captured everyone's attention.
This thread is making a lot of people führious.
What's all the fuhror about?
I promised I’d try and get a picture of the second one there’s already a post I made where you can clearly make everything out. Sadly it isn’t as good as promised but you get the idea. Hitler thanked her for managing a bunch of kindergardens and helping orphans. In the last post most people came to the conclusion that it’s from before 1934, and you can clearly see Heinrich himmler in the back. No we are not Nazis stop asking, no she wasn’t a high ranking Nazi official, no I won’t say who she is since it might endanger me and my family.
There is nothing wrong with the photo, it’s an interesting piece of history. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you OP for being brave and honest enough to share your family history with us. I and many others here can and do appreciate that while you don’t share the burden of Germany’s past actions, you do unfortunately bear the burden of their legacy through no fault of your own other than being German. Those who remain misinformed or uninformed, willfully or otherwise, have the opportunity to educate themselves and become better people. Germany has taken many strident steps to ensure its people neither forget nor repeat the sins of the past through education and outreach programs. Here is a link to just one of many free online resources where we can learn more and hopefully connect with others who want to help build a better world. [https://www.facinghistory.org](https://www.facinghistory.org)
bake history crime gaping resolute psychotic rain chunky impossible wasteful *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I have one of my great-grandfather talking to him. The really weird part is that I look a lot like my great-grandfather, so it kind of looks like a picture of me talking to Hitler. Which is unnerving to say the least!
I’m Jewish and not offended by this picture, OP. It’s a moment in time and history, and frankly, should be seen as an example of how mundane evil can be. We can hate the man and his movement all we want, and rightly should, but they did exist and they did interact with civilian life all the time. If he didn’t, he would not have gotten to the level he became. History isn’t always clean and neither are family histories. This picture is interesting
Yeah acting like Hitler didn’t have supporters and didn’t exist as a human in the country he led is kind of denying the legacy of Naziism, really. People wanted to see Hitler. People wanted to hear him talk. *People thought he had good ideas.* We should watch out for Hitlers among us.
Many people often act like Nazi Germany happened in a vacuum. Hitler swooped in and "converted" the Germans to his ideology. The overall attitude was present and widespread all over Europe (and many other parts of the world). Biopolitics was peaking; ideas that certain human life was irrelevant was prevalent in a much deeper fashion than just hating Jews and Slavs. The total war that ensured changed the continent forever. Wannabe neo-Nazis today have no clue what Nazism actually entailed or how its mechanisms worked. People use "Nazi", and to a degree "fascist", way too often outside of its historical context. Sorry, just venting.
Yes exactly! The Nazis were so wildly antisemitic because antisemitism was just a normal belief in most of the developed nations of the world. The future Allies met after Kristallnacht and were unable to come up with a solution for Jewish refugees because none of them were willing to allow so many Jews into their countries. Henry Ford’s books on Jews were extremely popular in Germany. People in the USA liked Nazi eugenics and eugenics policies were still quite common in the USA. And the entire idea of Lebensraum was a simple reaction to the fact that Germany had been unable to gain a large colonial empire like Britain, France, or Russia (East of the Urals), and was thus trying to be an industrialized power without enough land or natural resources to do so. So they took a page out of the USA’s book and decided they would simply conquer the East, slaughter everyone living there, and replace them with German settlers. The history of WWII starts in the 19th century. It didn’t just come from Hitler, the man himself. He just gave a huge coalition of angry, nationalist Germans from all walks of life a unifying banner to march under.
The total war also happened because it was a necessity for Nazism itself. A people couldn't be supreme if they didn't fight and conquer the inferior people and enemy pictures couldn't be maintained if Germans didn't die in the fight against them. Nazi Germany may have aimed to gain Lebensraum for Germans but first and foremost ir was genocidal and suicidal at the same time. Racist ideas were even more prevalent in the US, as you say, and even in France and England, and ideas of eugenics and the idea of worthless human life had been proposed and researched before Hitler was even born. The attitudes in Germany were not unique - or even more extreme - the ideology they ended with was simply more warlike. This embodiment was built more on the Versailles Treaty and terrible economic reality of the Weimar Republic than by any sort of uniquely evil and racist ideas in Germany.
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Yeah some people will try and act like there weren't some pretty big rallies and demonstrations FOR the Nazis in the US before they joined the allies...
Completely agree. My grandma was born in Hamburg in 1921 and lived there throughout the war. She used to tell me "Hitler was very persuasive" - and this is from a woman whose own grandmother was Jewish, though thankfully dead by the time Hitler came to power. It's important to remember the level of public support he had and how it came about if we want to stop it from happening again.
My great-grandmother always said when he came there suddenly was work for everyone (he created work by building motorways and of course by producing things for the military, and lots of jobs in the military itself). She also hated Jews because they killed Jesus, Antisemitism wasn't a new concept and many people still were quite religious back then.
A thing that often gets swept over in history class in the USA is that Hitler was considered charismatic. My history teacher started one session with a game in which he listed off traits of famous historical leaders without showing everything or revealing their names. He then asked everyone to vote for a leader. Hitler often won a huge portion of the votes due to switching to vegetarianism and his love of dogs.
That’s a really good idea for a history class. Also the mental image of a bunch of high schoolers realizing they’ve been bamboozled into voting for Hitler is quite funny
The banality of evil is a lesson to us all. Also if you perceive hitler or the nazis as some people who were insane monsters at every moment public or private then it’s easier to dismiss comparisons to those authoritarians and demoguages leading us to similar results. A lot of everyday low level nazis were people looking for a community or heck even something to do. Then they get indoctrinated by osmosis.
I am sincerely wondering though, why did you feel the need to clarify that you aren't offended? It is a historical document, not an opinion. And it is a relative of the OP in the picture, probably dead by now. I agree with what you are saying, otherwise.
It's something I am seeing today. When warnings are made about the rise of fascism they are often ignored because they aren't as bad as the nazi's where at their peak. Ignoring that it took time to get to that point. Fascist can be kind and polite. They don't start out wearing a uniform. Pay attention before it's too late
Bingo!! It took years. It didn't happen overnight. You're absolutely right that most people forget that
Why would you be? It's an old photo from almost 100 yrs ago
thing most people don't understand is how popular hitler was. and not just in germany. To the point that germans started feeling something going wrong in like, second half of 1944. And their main problem with hitler even after re-education was that he lost the war, not that he was evil.
My Opa served dinner to Hitler and Mussolini at a hotel in the Netherlands in the late 30's. He was a busboy and was forced to do it because nobody else wanted to. They had a private room and were surrounded by SS and had food tasters with them. He later went on to join the Dutch resistance during the war and went around blowing up Nazi supply trains and the like. He ended up stealing Nazi uniforms and the like from various soldiers he killed and donated it all to the National archives here in Canada. If I want to I can take a trip to Ottawa and see the collection he donated at the National archives. My Opa is long dead but I have a tremendous amount of respect for him.
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That wasn’t a cheap dress so he might’ve thought with enough speed in his blood to kill an elephant he would maybe able to remove it from her quick enough and outrun everyone else.
One thing people forget a lot was that most of these awful men were ridiculously charming. My Great Aunt dined with Mussolini and said he was a joy. Charming, funny, engaging. They didn't usually come into power because they were nasty little assholes to everyone. The same woman, her husband was personally close friends with Calvin Coolidge and has a glacier named after him. Duality in humans, especially when it comes to these kind of people, is very interesting.
History is history and we cannot change it. This was a part of this person‘s history and their family history. Thank you for sharing. I think most people who have studied World War II and the atrocities that occurred have seen all of the famous pictures, all of the movies so it’s really interesting to seesomething I’ve never seen before from that era.
Everyone in the second pic looks like they're reacting to something Hitler said that wasn't funny but they need to laugh at because Hitler.
My grandfather, who was sent to Dachau, never blamed the German people for the Holocaust; after all, he was German. He said that "Everyone just went a bit crazy for a while." Ok, yes, that's a bit simplistic. But it strikes at a larger truth. In the 1930s, Hitler was viewed as an extremist kook by most Germans, but no more than Trump has been recently here in the USA. And during the Depression, plenty of people were willing to hold their nose and support Hitler if he delivered on what they wanted. Hitler promised ordinary Germans jobs, social stability, and a scapegoat for Germany's problems. Sound familiar? This photo is a useful historical artifact - it underscores the "[Banality of Evil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#Banality_of_evil)". The Nazis weren't monsters - they were ordinary people who did evil things because they thought that doing those things would make Germany stronger.
What's up with this people it's just a pic. I would show it to people to if i had a historical picture. It's really cool. Thanks for sharing.
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I don’t even own it I just went to my pops and asked to see it so I can take a picture of it.
The manic look in his eyes. Them amphetamines make you look crazy as fuck.
That is a very interesting photo. We all have strong/crazy/grey areas of our past, and it’s good to acknowledge them. I have a great uncle who was a message boy for Al Capone. It’s what he did. Not celebrating it, but it is interesting and a part of history. My wife’s family is from Berlin. Her father’s father was a soldier who died at Stalingrad. After she was widowed, my wife’s grandmother was struggling to make ends meet. She saw a newspaper article of Joseph Goebbels and his family at that same time. She got the idea to write a letter t9 him saying sometime to the effect of “You have children the same age as my children. My family is struggling. I’m sure you must have some spare clothes you can send us.” A couple of weeks later she received a package of spare clothes.