Dennis - Your last comment in your first post was right on the nose. I just finished an extended University study on the Nazi movement (not that that makes me an expert, but I finally learned about a subject that I always wanted to know more about.)
It is so easy to sit here now and criticize the German people for going along with the Nazis but it just ain't that easy when YOU are the one suffering under a miltaristic, totalitarian, police State. You speak up, you get shot dead. Even others that agree with you if you speak up will run the other way to save their own skin. If you speak up, you are on your own, and they will simply come and kill you.
Not only that but the whole Jew killing thing was encroached very slowly and quietly. For one small example, propaganda said that the Jews enjoyed the "reeducation" camps and did not want to leave. The average person had no idea of the atrocities going on. All they knew is that if they did not greet their neighbor with "Hiel Hitler" instead of "good afternoon", then someone would put in an anonymous phone call and the SS would come take them away. (Seems like we are not far away from that in America - an anonymous phone call with any given accusation, and the Police come take you away and it is up to you to prove your innocence. How many steps are we from a Police State?). On the topic, Are we so sure that we would do anything differently if we were unarmed and under a murderous totalitarian gov't? What do you do when the gov't goes sour and you are unarmed, and if you speak up they kill you??? That is reality, and I hope it never happens with our gov't (other countries are not so lucky, they are already there). If you asked Germans in 1932 if they thought that in ten years time they would be ruled by a totolitarian murderous bigot, they would have scoffed at the idea. In America, the average person could never imagine that that could happen in ten years, or twenty, but we never know what can happen when the gov't get's out of control. History is our lesson.
What we would really do in that situation is something I hope to never know.
One thing I do know for sure though, and that is that if the regular German populace and surrounding areas had open access to guns, it could not have happened. The SS was not a large organization, and they murdered about 11 million people (not including war fronts but just murdering people in their own cities and occupied territories for various racial and behavioral reasons). Now tell me, how could a relatively small group of hate mongers have murdered 11 million ARMED people? It could not have happened!
For example, how would Reserve Police Batallion 101 have pulled up into the Warsaw Jewish ghetto and start murdering thousands of Jews in the streets and in the woods, if those Jews had been armed? Imagine for a moment (this is not fantasy, a but reality) that a few truckloads of middle aged guys pull up into your neighborhood, get out with guns, and start kicking down doors and shooting your neighbors, and gathering up others and taking them to the woods to shoot them. Men, women, children. They killed people all day long. After they gathered up as many as they could and stripped their valuables, the battalion would take them all out in truckloads to the woods to kill them. They would walk down the lines of women and children and put bullets into people's heads for hours at a time (I can hardly imagine that) and then go get drunk to drown the horror of what they just did. So, maybe less than 100 middle aged volunteers with guns managed to murder thousands of Jews a day, with little or no resistance because the Jews were helpless and unarmed. This is reality, even though it is hard to imagine it happening in your own neighborhood, the people were in as much shock as we would be because no one can even fathom this kind of thing happening in their neighborhood. But it did, and this is only one lesson from history.
The Nazis were hugely outnumbered by their victims....but the Nazis had guns and the victims did not. An armed populace makes this type of tyranny impossible. It all comes down to gun control.
Sorry for the rambling...
[This message has been edited by Red Bull (edited August 25, 2000).]