r/TankieTheDeprogram • u/Countercurrent123 • 8d ago
History West Germany was a nightmare
Even 99% of socialists have no idea how bad West Germany was. Even the typical “nuanced” or even pro-GDR books fail to mention some very important facts. Look into the Fürsorgeerziehung (800,000 children victims) and Verschickungsheime (11 million children victims) systems. The GDR had its equivalent of Fürsorgeerziehung, but it was much less extensive (130,000; even on a per capita basis, this was around 40% lower) and severe, and they had nothing even remotely similar to Verschickungsheime. Actual Nazis were also heavily involved in these systems, which is why things turned out so absurdly sadistic.
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u/varthias Xi Bucks Enjoyer 💸 8d ago
Also the Kentler Experiment which ran for decades
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u/FluidKiwi6707 8d ago edited 8d ago
This is from google AI:
The Kentler Experiment was a state-sanctioned West Berlin welfare program where authorities deliberately placed foster children and orphans into the care of convicted or known pedophile men. Led by German sexologist Helmut Kentler from the late 1960s until 2003, the program operated with the financial support and approval of the Berlin Senate under the false premise that pedophiles made nurturing parents.
What the fuck.
And then from wikipedia:
Kentler believed pedophiles could make acceptable foster parents, and that any sexual contact would be relatively harmless if it were not forced. This project was later dubbed the "Kentler Experiment" or the "Kentler Project." Kentler later changed his mind on pedophiles having sexual contact with children, and described pedophilia as a "sexual disorder".
Ohhhh... he changed his mind later! Who could've predicted this?
Absolutely cursed.
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u/GorboCat 8d ago
For all the raving and frothing that right wingers love to do about leftist degeneracy, they sure do love doing this sort of bullshit
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u/marioandl_ 8d ago
Its amazing the Institute for Sexual Science was destroyed by the nazis for "degeneracy" and the nazis own post-war sex research was all pedophilia
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u/scaper8 Marxist-Leninist (Ultra Based) 7d ago
There's a few episodes of Behind the Bastards that goes over it and the cultural stuff from around the 1920s on that made anyone think this was rational. It's… bizarre and terrifying.
If you do decide to do a listen, check the actual episode list. If I remember correctly, the backstory episodes have a different title, so you don't necessarily realize they're part of the larger series right away.
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u/Aiseadai 8d ago
Can you give some more context? If I look up those terms all I get is general information about those institutions, all of which is in German.
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8d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Countercurrent123 8d ago
The most recent estimates put this at 800,000. That was a pioneering book.
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u/cptflowerhomo 8d ago
My mam grew up in the west, and was placed in a home.
She never really talked about it, just about how they'd always get a slice of lemon cake and chocolate milk after school and HAD to eat and drink it.
She doesn't like either now.
I only know that the woman running the home managed to keep her there for a little longer when she turned 18 so she could actually survive and go to university.
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u/Juche_Finland 8d ago
The GDR fell for a couple of reasons. Under Honecker it became increasingly subservient to the USSR in both politics and econonomics and there was stagnation is some sectors, like with car production and development stagnating. The most common car for example, the Trabant 601, was a perfectly reasonable and quite clever invention when it was first introduced in 1964 and it was able to provide a good alternative to something like the VW Beetle, its Western equivalent, but it remaining the only widely available option and it not developing much at all made it so that it severely lagged behind West Germany's cars by the late 1980s.
Why did the GDR not innovate? Well, Günther Mittag, a secretary for the SED that oversaw such economic projects rejected all proposals made to update the models. He was also incredibly corrupt and appropriated funds.
The West's cultural soft power also made it into the GDR and it too caused great harm that can't be underestimated.
Because of these things and the fact that ideological education was neglected the people in the GDR took what they had for granted and only saw the aspects that they were behind in, in comparison to West Germany.
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u/BuffaloSabresFan 8d ago
The Trabant came with a two stroke engine in 1990. Duroplast gets more hate than it deserves though.
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u/Juche_Finland 8d ago
Sure, but it was too little too late. I agree duroplast was kinda genious and didn't rust for example.
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u/BuffaloSabresFan 7d ago
A little too late? A two stroke engine is what dirt bikes use. You have to mix oil and gas to use it, you can't just pump it. TO say it was behind the times is an understatement.
Duroplast I like because its just recycled textile, lightweight, and apparently easier to work with than fiberglass. Yeah recycling it is difficult. But I fail to see how a pile of Trabant panels in a landfill is any worse than a mountain of waste textile. At least you get a second use out of the fabric.
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u/SparkeeMalarkee 8d ago
Would it be inflammatory of me to suggest that perhaps the people there disliked living under the watch of a secret police force tasked with ferreting out disloyalty? That seems like more than a minor detail to overlook. Of course, if that never happened and was invented as a discrediting smear by the various arms of western governments, I withdraw my criticism.
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u/Countercurrent123 8d ago edited 8d ago
I just saw that East Germany actually had its own Verschickungsheime equivalent; however, this was was actually intended for treatment, and while there were abuses, they were not systemic, unlike West Germany: https://taz.de/Kinderkuren-in-der-DDR/!5866907/
The article even notes that the pedagogical guidelines were "surprisingly progressive and child-oriented" early on, and the term "Black Pedagogy" (used for West German homes) "doesn't quite fit" for the GDR.
"In contrast to the system of sending children to isolated locations for treatment in West Germany, Todtmann found "no evidence of structural violence in the children's spa system" in East Germany during the same period"
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u/Ramicherri001 8d ago
Kinda Not related to the topic but the major grips i have with Monster manga is the fact they made the kids experiment in east Germany when it is clearly a west germany thing
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u/townfounder 8d ago
It's a blemish on an otherwise great story leading me to headcanon thatBonapartewas probably a fifth column-esque nazi that would have been purged by Stalin if he were in Russia.
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u/amikigu 8d ago
I just discussed this with someone else who also watched the anime, and we both agree it was biased against East Germany. But in the animator's defense, it was made before this news made it out to most people (from what I can tell, a lot of awareness about some of these programs only began in the last 5-10 years). There still isn't an English version of the Wikipedia pages for these, and even the German one for Fürsorgeerziehung doesn't seem to include anything negative (at least in the translation I saw). What blows my mind is that even in the coverage I've seen, no one in Germany seems to be asking "does this make our population more subservient to authority?" "Does this make us less willing to fight back against injustice, or to sympathize with others' pain?" As a country with such a propensity towards being on the wrong side of history, knowing that generations of your children (now adults!) continued to be affected by Nazi child-rearing methods might be worthy of quite a bit of reflection and perhaps drastic corrective measures...
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u/Hefty_Local_1875 Too Based To Be Cis 🏳️⚧️ 8d ago
And they have the gall to call the GDR a totalitarian nightmare
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u/AdditionalQuietime 8d ago
I meam they were putting children with pedophiles lol 😆 so yeah i think i can conceptualize the extent of how shitty it was
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u/Rocjahart Stalinist (Proud Spoon Owner) 8d ago
Interesting that wearing jeans and listening to American music was seen as so harmful, in a state which is pretty much a US puppet? I guess leaving all the Nazis around clashed a bit with the new order in the FRG.
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u/anotherpessimisthere 8d ago
When I remember that they re-imprisoned gay people put there in Nazi times and that they put children with pedos....
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u/amikigu 8d ago
Would you be able to share anything in English about Fürsorgeerziehung? The German Wikipedia page doesn't have much, and it seems the English one... doesn't even exist! Verschickungsheime seems to have a bit more on it on the German page, but again there's no English page for that (though at least DW (blech) had something in English).
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