Sunday, March 24, 2013

Gunther Jauch continues the Nazi discussion

This evening's Gunher Jauch Show highlighted the years of the Nazi terror.

On the proramme were: 1. an 85-year old actor, whose father was a convinced Nazi. As a young woman she prayed that God would protect Adolf Hitler, 2. a 91-year old woman, who served in a field hospital in what was then Königsberg, 3. a 30-year-old historian, who in 2005 interviewed his grandfather, who fought on the eastern front, 4. a man who volunteerd to serve with the Herman Goering battalion, 5. Sigmar Gabriel, SPD president, whose father was a convinced Nazi until his death last year.

Fascinating television.

There was a general consensus that after the war families simply did not speak to one another about what had happened.

The young historian argued that in the programme instead of speaking about what happened at Auschwitz, they should ask how was it that the German people allowed Auschwitz to happen.

Also on the show was an interview with a man, who fought in Russia, his son and the old soldier's grand-daughter.

It was an insightful programme but not one of the participants ever hinted, that yes, he or she personally did wrong, shot someone, informed on someone, as millions of Germans did in the years of the Hitler terror.

It so happens that today German President Joachim Gauck, on the invitation of a survivor, visited a village in Tuscany, 150 kilometres from Florence, where Germans massacred more than 500 villagers on August 12, 1944.

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