blame hitler?

[Adrian II]

Because people are basically stupid, if someone offers a simple answer then they grasp it.

't Is a tad more complicated.

Hitler never convinced more than one third of the electorate to vote for him. He probably managed to 'convert' more of them (including part of the former Communist electorate) after 1933 because he delivered on the economic front: six million jobs, moderate wealth for every German family and the promise of a Volkswagen around the corner. And this after years of crisis during which many people worried of they could afford to buy bread the next day.

Many were indifferent to his war cries and did not believe it would come to that, nor to the wholesale deportation and mass murder of Jews. When push came to shove in 1938 and onward, ordinary Germans did not have a say in the matter anyway.

The atmosphere in those days was surreal, not only in Berlin, London, Warsaw, Paris and other capitals, but also in the German streets. On the day war with Poland broke out, young Heinrich Böll went to the swimming pool, lay in the sun and smoked as if this were just another day. When he came home, his mother sat at the kitchen table with as ashen face. His conscription letter had arrived. They knew it would, yet they had never believed it would. The officially sanctioned parades, mass meetings and staged 'hurrays' could not conceal that the German public was much more reluctant about going to war than in August of 1914.

(..) people are stupid and want an easy answer, if that answer can make them feel better about themselves and somehow superior then they will swallow it even easier.

Böll, for one, was far from stupid. Take it from there and you will gradually discover that there is much more to this dramatic historical episode than just 'people being stupid'.

@Fragony. That would be Defying Hitler: A Memoir. Haffner also once said that all Germany's ills in the modern age were the consequence of its position and size: 'Too small for a tablecloth, too big for a napkin.' Great man. He died listening to Bach, go figure.

[Fragony]

@Fragony. That would be Defying Hitler: A Memoir. Haffner also once said that all Germany's ills in the modern age were the consequence of its position and size: 'Too small for a tablecloth, too big for a napkin.' Great man. He died listening to Bach, go figure.

That would be from 'from Bischmark to Hitler', and of course the faction info from medieval: total war . Great book, seems like WW1 was inevitable as well.

[Adrian II]

That would be from 'from Bischmark to Hitler', and of course the faction info from medieval: total war . Great book, seems like WW1 was inevitable as well.

I never read that. Not surprisingly, he took up that same notion in his memoirs though. In those, he wrote that for many boys of his generation 'the war never stopped between 1914 and 1945'.