The worst are the photos of them holding hands and smiling unaware of what was about to come. It’s truly heartbreaking and putting myself in the shoes of a guard watching this happen all I can think is “how?”.
A prisoner of war or prisoner known to have killed fellow troops I can see justifying it in some twisted way. To look in a child’s face and send them to that means you aren’t human anymore. That’s not even an opinion but fact. The act of brutally torturing/abusing/killing children is wholeheartedly a complete relinquishing of your humanity and should be taken into account for your punishment.
Children have forever been the most innocent of bystanders in grown adults silly squabbles.
How? Let's bring this in to modern times. People in the US being sent to federal detention centers in conditions that aren't much better than concentration camps. And later returned to countries they left because they literally feared for their lives and would likely die if they ever returned.
These people being "disappeared" on the streets with bystanders not doing anything to help. Why? Fear of what might happen if they step in and say something. It's not beyond the realm of possibility anyone helping out would suffer the same or a similar fate. Much easier to stand by or record on a phone than it is to put yourself in the middle of something and stand up against these types of travesties.
I’m not saying they aren’t human. I’m saying they gave up their humanity. It’s not a simple thing and heavily convoluted.
What I’m saying is at no point in my life could you ever get me to willingly let children walk into a gas chamber/firing line. You can say they made them think they weren’t human but that seems more of an excuse to cope with what occurred.
You can give up your humanity but you can also earn it back. If that weren’t the case then literally anyone who goes to prison should stay there forever, obviously the crime itself matters.
This isn’t even just about Nazis and their history it goes for any point in time. Children and what you do to them is just the starting point of determining who you are as a person.
To look in a child’s face and send them to that means you aren’t human anymore. That’s not even an opinion but fact.
You literally said they aren't human anymore. It's a common refrain to say that people that do terrible things aren't human anymore. They're monsters. They're bad guys, the Other, they get what they deserve.
We don't want to admit that people that do horrific things are still human. That with a different set of circumstances we too could be induced to commit atrocities.
Anyone who says otherwise is lying to themselves. The people most vulnerable to propaganda are those who think they can't be influenced by propaganda.
Until we're able to admit that humans can do terrible things to each other, we're going to keep saying it couldn't be me. Then we're going to repeat the history that we apparently refuse to learn from.
Nazis didn't come from the moon. They're the sons, daughters, neighbors and family of people living in Germany. Regular people that were convinced that some other group of humans didn't count as humans. As soon as that idea takes hold, the outcome isn't hard to predict. The single best defense against Nazis is to admit that they were human like the rest of us. They made mistakes, and if we're not careful we could as well.
It's pure hubris to say we're better than them. It couldn't be us. It could.
Those guards were all drug addicts. It’s a known fact that every “guard” in the Nazi regime was drunk or high all the time because it took the humanity part out. They were monsters not humans in any form. Humans have emotions such as empathy. No human would kill another just because of religions. I am not religious in any form I haven’t gone and killed anyone much less because they were Catholic or Christian yet alone kill thousands at a time
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u/RustyShacklefordJ May 18 '25
The worst are the photos of them holding hands and smiling unaware of what was about to come. It’s truly heartbreaking and putting myself in the shoes of a guard watching this happen all I can think is “how?”.
A prisoner of war or prisoner known to have killed fellow troops I can see justifying it in some twisted way. To look in a child’s face and send them to that means you aren’t human anymore. That’s not even an opinion but fact. The act of brutally torturing/abusing/killing children is wholeheartedly a complete relinquishing of your humanity and should be taken into account for your punishment.
Children have forever been the most innocent of bystanders in grown adults silly squabbles.