Saturday, May 09, 2009

The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich by Ian Kershaw

My review

For those Catholic-bashers out there, Kershaw points out that Catholic leadership vocally resisted Nazi doctrine and openly attacked Hitler as "the incarnation of evil". For their efforts, heroic resistors such as Dr. Fritz Gerlich and Fr. Ingbert Naab were murdered or sent to the concentration camps. There exists, especially in the United States, a popular misconception that the Holocaust was the product of 'good people doing nothing'. Many good people did stand up to the Nazis and paid for it with their lives. History is rarely as simplistic, and moral, as most would have it. The good people of history are all too often pushed aside or eliminated by the mass of idiots. Kershaw shows how relentless Nazi propaganda, with a complete monopoly of media control after 1933, converted the good to idiocy. Few 'good people' existed. however, to raise their voices against the murder and extermination of German Communists, who went to the concentration camps two years before the passing of the Nuremberg Laws against German Jews.

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