I watched the Netflix documentary, Ordinary Men: The “Forgotten Holocaust” last night, and I recommend it as an hour well spent, albeit a fairly harrowing one in lots of ways.
It’s not generally known it seems that almost two million of the Jews and others that the Nazis killed were shot by Nazi Police firing squads in mass killings. There were apparently around 60,000 of these police especially created just to carry out these atrocities.
The real point being made is that, unlike the myth that these people had to carry out the orders or be shot themselves, this was not actually true.
These were ordinary well-educated people who actually had a choice about whether or not they took part. These were your local butcher, teachers, shop keepers and more. These were not born and bred SS fanatics but ordinary men who opted to carry out mass killings.
How did this happen? How could it? What happened to them?
All of this is discussed and revealed in the video. We should learn from history and it’s from the work of real researchers (this is originally a book) that these revelations come. If we don’t learn then we can make the same mistakes.
Unfortunately, when I look across the world at the neo-Nazi groups and far-right fanatics, many of whom are ordinary men and women too, there would be no shortage of volunteers to carry out such killings.
What we should try to understand, nevertheless, is why it happened and how. The why is, in reality, very simple, and it’s as simple as allowing a man like Hitler into power and then worshiping him as if he were a God. He was treated like that by the general population of Germany and I’ve seen the videos.
There are remarkably and perhaps not so remarkably many mini Hitlers out there today, petit fascists, wannabe dictators. I make no apology for the comparison because it is an observable fact.
All of these mini Hitlers seem like crackpots up until the point someone votes them into power along with their cohorts (of which they always will have some to back them up). Then the immense and leviathan effort to remove them is out of all proportion to their lack of value to society and the damage they cause.
Little Hitlers never sleep. They continue to manifest their lunatic psychopathic schemes and behavior until the last breath. That also is an observable fact. The rest of us need to maintain constant vigilance and be willing to fight back wherever these people raise their heads above the parapet.
But anyway, enough of that for a Sunday morning. Do watch the documentary, the real truth is always worth knowing.
And for those who are on the side of denial, we also know because the Nazi regime meticulously documented all of their killings and kept records. We also know from the testimony of those at the Nuremberg trials who carried the killings out and from those who survived.
Dr. David Evans Bailey, PhD
Dr Bailey is an artist, author and educator in New Zealand who earned his PhD studying the influences of immersive technologies in Art. His background is in Photography, Education and Information Technology and he combined these professional skills in projects using Virtual Reality and immersive types of technology. He wants to understand how ‘Digital Mergence,’ the merging of the digital and physical worlds, will influence Artists and more generally society in the future. He also a published fiction author as well as being a keen political observer and more recently commentator, inspired by his father a lifelong Liberal. Bailey engages in historical research of many periods including WW2. He has taken a keen interest in subjects such as how dictators like Hitler come to power, and what drives populations to support them. Bailey endeavours to try and present some insights into what we can learn from history's recent and long past, and the dangers of letting history repeat itself.
