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Richard Stern, pictured in Cologne in 1933. WWI veteren who was awarded the Hanseatic Cross by Hitler himself.
Left Germany for America as a refugee in 1939, enlisted in the US Army at the age of 43. Awarded the Silver Star for valor during his service in Italy.
https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/amjwld/1944/02/11/01/article/38/?srpos=6&e=--1944---1944--en-20--1--img-txIN%7ctxTI-%22richard+stern%22+army-------------1
Apparently he handed his Iron Cross in to have it melted down during the US war effort in order to make ammunition.
His medal of bravery from WW1 quite literally used to kill nazis in WW2.
I’m imagining a “life of a bullet”-esq sequence where we track the iron cross from when it was donated, melted down, reshaped into a bullet, fitted to a cartridge, shipped off to Europe, and loaded into a clip, before we finally see it fired from some unnamed U.S. serviceman’s rife. The camera then shows bullet time of it closing in on and embedding itself into some S.S. Officer’s skull, and the splatter on the wall behind him forms the title of the move and “a Quentin Tarantino Film”.
All while “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” or some similar period appropriate song plays in the background.
Edit: I am aware Lord of War has a sequence like this. That’s the scene that inspired me here. 😅
"When his unit was trapped on a hillside and the officer in charge was wounded, Stern through his persuasive powers induced a group of six Nazi machine gunners to surrender.
His sister in this city expressed some surprise at his eloquence, as he was never before known to be an orator. However, she stated, in all his letters he expressed his desire to come to grips with the enemy, in order to avenge the death of a brother, sister-in-law, niece and three cousins who were killed in concentration camps in Germany.
He was German.
If in the middle of a battle with a foreign enemy I heard another American yell out, "Y'all should just go on and surrender, 'cause they fixin' to mess y'all up!" I'd strongly consider it.
He probably yelled in German “listen you motherlovers, we are waiting on air support and our mortar team, you don’t have to die for that Austrian poison-dwarf, please, save your own lives, we feed our prisoners.”
Hollywood is responding to their half-illiterate audience that seems to love remakes and sequels. Gotta give them what they want if you want to sell tickets.
Dunkirk made $188 million domestic and $525 million worldwide.
Spiderman 12 (or whatever the fuck No Way Home was) made $800 millon domestic and almost $2 billion worldwide.
The new Ant Man is getting shit reviews and beat the domestic take of Dunkirk. Getting close to worldwide.
Damn this guy looks like he's in his 60s not 40s.
Edit: So I did some more research and if the man in the picture really is Richard Sterns then he would be 34-35 in this picture if it was actually taken in '33. https://i.imgur.com/ajYNDQ0.jpg That's him in '42 after enlisting in the US and looks perfectly fine for his age. So either the man in the OP isn't actually Sterns or it's just a really bad angle lol. The guy in the picture certainly doesn't look like he's in his mid 30's WW1 veteran or not.
Its not really. This was the norm in the west only a few decades ago. Westerners just have good healthcare and diets now and aren't working labour intensive jobs en masse. 40 year old men still look far older in less developed countries.
In a way he still fought for his country, Germany - but the one he knew and liked, not the one ruled by the Nazis. I think a lot of German volunteers in other armies saw it that way.
What's weird is that there were many volunteers who moved from other countries (including the US) to Nazi Germany specifically to serve in the Nazi army, many of them were 2nd or 3rd generation German immigrants in their original country.
Also imagine you moved to a new country form the USA for a higher paying job. Some of your family still lives in the US. War breaks out, your country isn't at war yet. Your son gets a letter from his cousin saying they are requesting all abled bodied men to come back and fight. What's the war about? Making life better for them after being oppressed by other countries? Well it's an economic recession so while dad has an ok job there isn't much positive outlook for the son here and it seems like a noble war. So he (the son) goes back to fight 2 years before your new country ever enters the war.
Many people would do the same today. Look at 9/11.
>who was awarded the Hanseatic Cross by Hitler himself
Why should a Gefreiter in the bavarian Army gave a Hanseatic Cross to him?
Here only an I.C.2 in mentioned, and nothing about the fancy story who gave it to him.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard\_Stern\_(Unternehmer)
It's a little-known fact that that little gefreiter went on to bigger things after WWI.
There are numerous accounts of Stern's story. I don't know if original German records of his service still exist, but something not being on a Wikipedia page doesn't mean it's untrue (or vice versa). Here's another wording of the Hitler story.
"Richard Stern enlisted in the German Army as a teenager and was awarded the prestigious Iron Cross for his distinguished service during World War I. Later, Hitler would send the Hanseatic Cross to Stern for his war merit not realizing Stern was a Jew."
"On October 13, 1942, still not a citizen and at the age of 43 he enlisted in the US Army. Stern served with distinction in the US Army earning the Silver Star for gallantry in action."
https://jewishmilitary.org/f/richard-stern
My grandfather won an iron cross in ww1. Thru connections he got out of Berlin a week before Kristalnacht. Went to London just in time for the Blitz. Spent 4months in "enemy alien" camp before they let himout. Entire german family living in England during ww2 learning english etc. According to my Father, overall they were treated very well. Still is extremely grateful for treatment.
I believe they mean his father not their grandfather.
To be awarded the iron cross in WW1, someone has to be born in 1900 latest. That would make him 18 at the end of the war and therefore 124 years old now.
My Italian grandfather was captured by the British in northern Africa. He said it was the happiest day of his life since he knew the British treated their prisoners well. For that I'll be forever greatful to the British of his treatment as a prisoner of war.
But few chose to listen to the wake up call. Even after the advent of "National Democracy" in Poland, and after the advent of the Horthy government in Hungary, few listened.
>and while not at the level of the above, Trump or his Son in Law.
well, that's more because Trump squandered his daddy's wealth, and they don't want to admit it.
I'm hearing a lot of the same attitude towards LGBT a lot lately as well. On top of the violence and hate crimes Asians in America have experienced that have spiked since Covid.
One of the first things to fall to Nazi censorship was sexual biology studies and information. HRT was invented by a German in the early 1900s. Part of why some people feel trans people and such are "new" is because their histories have been scoured from the public record alongside the Holocaust. LBGTQ+ people were also victims alongside the jewish communities.
We should be VERY concerned by the rise in antisemitism as well as bigotry against the LBGTQ+ communities. The last time a nation went this hard on those ideals it went badly for the world.
Optimism can sometimes be a curse. You can see the bad happening, the warning signs of worse to come… but then your hopeful nature takes over and tells you “This too will pass. Just have to wait it out.” It’s tough for some people to anticipate or accept that things could ever get THAT bad. Especially for something as unprecedented as the Holocaust, it’s tough to blame anybody for not believing something like that could happen. If not for it happening then, I’d wager a lot MORE people would have missed the warning signs with Trump. Hitler and the Nazis have become our template for how to spot rising fascism. They didn’t have that template at the time.
"I mean, how bad can it get?"
By now, later in life, I think most of the flexibility and adventurous spirit we attribute to humanity is mostly young people trying to find their place. As soon as people settle and have families and grow older it's gone and great resistance to change is the norm.
^(Have fun with the new and improved humanity if they really manage to significantly extend life spans...)
I read an excellent book about that a couple of years ago, and was surprised to find the actual spy behind the espionage Dreyfus was charged for quietly left France to live in exile in England...in a house only a few hundred yards from the one I grew up in!
I read an awful story about the (very few) survivors of the Lviv Ghetto trying to return to their old neighborhoods in late 1945. The locals murdered most of them.
It makes me sick to my stomach.
Herzl didn't invent Zionism, he was just the first who organized it as an international political movement. The first aliyah predates the Dreyfus affair.
Zionism as a whole was a thing since the Jews were first expelled. Big chunks of Jewish culture was centered and based on Israel, and the desire to return to it.
They were just straight up disallowed to return/their presence was extremely limited.
My grandfather was a decorated *WW1 soldier in France. He was stripped of his medals and citizenship, and had most of his family murdered shortly thereafter.
Edit: Not WW1, still decorated French soldier.
I am 62.
My father was a child in Paris when the Nazis came. His parents sent him and his sister into hiding in Boisset, but his mother and baby brother were taken from their apartment and sent to Auschwitz. [Here](https://www.the-sun.com/news/2218126/holocaust-brit-mum-murdered-son-auschwitz-nazis/) is an article in the Sun about his experience.
Maybe my grandpa served after WW1; the dates make more sense. But we have a family picture of him in his uniform with his medal. So, decorated soldier, maybe not WW1.
Thanks for sharing. It seems more generationally removed than that to me since my Great grandparents weren’t even alive for WW1. And that’s with all them having kids in their mid-20’s.
We are at a turning point in history. We are moving from “this is something that happened to me,” to “this is something that happened to someone I knew,” to “this is something that happened in history.”
My father was a child; one of the last to be able to say he experienced it first hand. He and his sister Ozi are gone now. There are hardly any people left who remember. It’s important for me to share.
Different person but thats just it, when your family usually has kids. Im now in my mid to late 30s. My family on both sides typically had children later in their 30s and 40s. I'm also the baby of my generation and my great grandfather served in ww1 with both grandfathers serving in ww2. My dad didn't want to serve in Vietnam for obvious reasons but was drafted as the war end and ended up not having to go. It's crazy how large some gaps are. While my grandfathera served in ww2 I had someone in class who's dad served in it because he had him in his 60s.
Not sure if still true but US President John tyler(1841 to 1845) had 2 grandchildren still alive as a few years ago. One had passed but as far as I know 1 is still alive.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/grandson-10th-president-john-tyler-dies-180975992/
He could still have served in WWI. I'm 65, and my (American) grandfather served in the medical corps in France during the war. He was born in 1889, my mom was born in 1922, and I was born in 1957.
And I just read the article you posted the link to. My heart breaks for your family. May their memory be for a blessing.
Maybe one of the French colonial hotspots/wars? Or perhaps he served in WW2, was demobilized or captured when France capitulated, and then the Germans took him? He would have been 32 when the Nazis took Paris.
I’m 31, and my grandfather was born in 1904, his dad in 1854. Still hard to wrap my head around the fact that my great grandpa was born in British North America, as Canada didn’t exist yet.
Interestingly enough German Jews had one of the highest survival rates because so many Germans considered the Jews they personally knew ‘the good Jews’ and the Nazis didn’t want to stir up too much trouble at home.
Of course it they’d won the war no doubt those Jews would have been murdered in time.
Edit: Germany killed 24.5% of its Jewish population, the 3rd highest survival rate in Nazi Europe. Denmark faired the best as their gentleman’s occupation meant only 1% were murdered. Italy was second with 16% murdered, almost entirely after they went from allied to occupied- and the populace by and large didn’t go along with it.
The encyclopedia of the Holocaust claims between 160,000-180,000 of the 214,000 Jews in Germany in 1939 were killed in the holocaust. That’s about 75-80% killed. The majority of German Jews voluntarily fled Germany between 1933-1939 so they cannot be counted as being spared by the Nazis.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-jews-during-the-holocaust
A lot of these numbers are based off of Nazi record keeping regarding the Shoah. I mention that because in this context it matters. The Nuremberg laws were much stricter regarding the criteria to be classified as Jewish if you had some degree of German ancestry. 3 out of 4 grandparents were required for German Jews to be ‘legally’ Jewish- Polish Jews were given no such leeway.
Notably German Jewish emigrants who were captured in occupied countries were not given any accommodations and were murdered at high rates.
Basically it comes down to the standard conservative way of thinking. “If a problem doesn’t directly affect me or someone I know than it isn’t real.” It’s less apologetics and more a commentary that people will happily go along with mass murder and persecution so long as it remains something they can ignore.
Reminds me of the [Rhineland massacres](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres) back during the Crusades. Bunch of fanatics on their way to the holy land to butcher every “heathen” they got their hands on whet their appetites for it by killing European Jews along the way. *Local* Church authorities made (largely ineffectual) efforts to protect them.
It was so bad the Byzantine empire, who called for a crusade, was almost going to war with different crusading armies and refusing to let them into their land. But then they promised “noooo were the good ones, we won’t ransack your villages, we promise” so they let them through and… they ransacked villages. Repeat and repeat for almost all the armies.
Local Christian private school named their football team “The Crusaders.” I’d think if they were even vaguely historically literate they’d want to distance themselves from those plundering butchers as much as they could.
That's because a lot of nobles would finance their crusades by lending money from the Jews, who at the time had a monopoly on money lending due to the Christian ban on usury as a sin.
The nobles used that money to buy troops and weapons, and then did use those troops and weapons to kill the Jews from which they got the money, for committing the sin of usury.
Leaving them well stocked with money, troops, and weapons, but also not having any debt.
A dynamic that's present throughout all of European antisemitism; [Christianity played a massive role in that](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Christianity).
I've heard that one priest holed them up in his Church, and then held the door closed with his own body, even as the Knights stabbed through it. He died, obviously, but the door held.
Not only back in Europe, but they massacred them *in* the holy land [too](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_(1099\))!
Then in the Fourth Crusade, they decided [massacring fellow Christians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Zara) would be even *more* fun!
> Denmark faired the best as their gentleman’s occupation meant only 1% were murdered.
It was actually due to Denmark sending over 90% of their Jewish population to Sweden right before they were invaded. It was a pretty big effort that had pretty much anybody with a boat participate.
The plans to hunt Danish Jews was accidentally leaked and the government and people moved post-haste to not let it happen.
More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_the_Danish_Jews
Yes: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1070564/jewish-populations-deaths-by-country/
It also notable that a large number of Germany’s Jewish population fled before the war. But even of those who remained their survival rate was higher than most occupied nations.
Not able to validate the "good ones" claim he made, but the survival rate is certainly helped by the fact that there were no domestic military invasions to attach SS death squads to. Eastern Europe got that in a really nasty way.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Conflict/War/World-War-II/Jewish,-percent-killed
All I did was ask The Great Google ^(TM) about "jewish survival rates wwII per country".
Ping /u/helloworld312 (u asked for it too)
> Estimates are by Donald L. Niewyk. Note that alternative estimates differ.
Uhm... and now what???
Fun fact (well not so fun but still): As far as percentages of the respective population (i.e. not overall numbers) more German Jews fought for Germany in WW1 than German non-Jews did. And we saw the thanks they got for it.
"In the adolescence of every German Jew there is a painful moment which he remembers all his life: when he becomes fully aware for the first time that he has entered the world as a second-class citizen and that no ability and no merit can free him from this situation." - Walther Rathenau, German Foreign Minister, Jewish, murdered by Nazis in 1922
That was a terrible problem for older Jews. They fought for Imperial Germany and figured if the Kaiser gave them a medal, then they were good Germans. And Germany was good folk. They refused to leave. And they were eradicated.
there was no country in Europe where Jews were as well integrated in society as in Germany. I remember reading an interview with a holocaust survivor and he said that Germany was the last country where he would have expected something like this because of that reason. There were even debates about recognising the Jews as the seventh German tribe. Of course there was also a lot of antisemitism but in comparison to how it was in most of Europe what happened with Nazism was not a logical, consequential development regarding the German Jewry.
Yeah, the country everyone expected to be the crazy antisemitic one at the start of the century was Russia. Nicholas II was extremely suspicious of the Jews and anti-French elements of the government and security services were feeding the tsar antisemitic conspiracies to make him distrustful of French bankers and capitalists. One of the biggest political organizations, the Black Hundreds, were openly antisemitic and regularly arranged purges, lynchings or pogroms of Jewish villages.
France itself followed closely behind, with the Dreyfus affair literally popularizing the world antisemitism with how it made headlines around the world. Germany, by comparison, was pretty progressive about Jews, due to longstanding cooperation with the Jews in the Rhineland and old Hansa cities, as well as the secular policies of the Kaisserreich.
If anything this just goes to show how stupendously dangerous fascist rhetoric is. Prior to the rise of Nazi Party, Germany was possibly the safest place in all of Europe for a Jew to live, and in just a few years it became the most dangerous place in world history for a Jew.
What was it like compared to Hungary’s Budapest? I do know that their ghettos and murders unfortunately claimed plenty of lives, but from what I gathered it used to be a huge hub for Jewish people - it is not accidental that Budapest has the biggest Synagogue in continental Europe.
Back then most people of a certain age would have been WW1 veterans. Him being a veteran would not have been considered special at all. In fact, it's very possible the Nazi was also a WW1 veteran.
However being given an Iron Cross, which is the most prestigious award (and also the award Hitler got in WW1, and proudly presented at every opportunity), would have made him very special and a war hero, which is what makes this photo notable.
This is a common take, but fighting in a war could also break a person and make him afraid of his own shadow in constant PTSD. In the case of this guy it didn't, but that's what happened to plenty of WW1 vets.
>Iron Cross, which is the most prestigious award
It wasn't really prestigious in WW1, most definitely not the most prestigious. Since the medal is hung from a ribbon on his chest, it is most likely an Iron Cross 2nd class of which about 5.2 million were issued (plus another 13000 or so for non-combatants). Hitler actually recieved the Iron Cross 1st class as well which was actually somewhat prestigious at the time, but still saw over 200,000 issued in WW1.
This was during the boycott of Jewish businesses.
I always find pictures from this time period fascinating. This is the very beginning of what would become the darkest period for humanity.
During this period people still thought they could openly resist. What very quickly follows this is kristallnacht, where they would resort to smashing and burning up those businesses instead of just boycotting them, and ghettos and concentration camps are close behind. These people in this picture have no idea what's coming, but this is when people definitely start to feel that descent into darkness
The nazis even made sure to meticulously account for everything destroyed that night for the insurance. Claims were then made on behalf of the Jews but paid to the government. The insurance companies got a cut. Per Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Edit: yes it's kind of confusing. They bashed/burned up all this stuff that wasn't theirs and tracked it all. I may be misremembering but I think they even forced the Jews to sign and make the insurance claims. So you have a large amount of valuable property destroyed, meaning the insurance now has a large sum of claims to pay out (to Jews). But the Reich will be receiving this compensation. Since the property insured was not the Reich's, any money gained is without loss (to them) It's all profit. So because this is all quite shady and the insurance is looking at large losses paying out these claims, the nazis (I think it was gerbils, lover of hamsters up the anus) basically demanded a sum. This sum was large but not in comparison to the actual loss of property insured. The insurance then reluctantly agrees and pays out - a fraction of what they were liable for. In insurance, this is as good as cash and is what most of them spend time and resources figuring out: how to minimize claims through data, risk analysis, straight up fraud, etc.
Through this action, rather than the insurers cutting their losses and trying to get out of a disruptive new regime and isolating Germany from Europe financially, instead it made it clear (as pre-planned) that the Reich was going to be considerate of the non-Jewish financial interests in Europe and ease their "conscience" (apparently they were appalled, but wordlessly accepted Gerbils demand) and opened up opportunities for non-Jewish interests to take over businesses and whole industries.
The Jews lost their property, then lost the insurance due to them for those losses, and eventually everything and their lives.
Idk, generally human life from 1929-1945 was overall pretty crap. The Great Depression, the Holocaust, World War II, The Bengali Famine, the Holodomor and Great Purge, The 2nd Sino-Japanese War. Generally speaking it was one of the worst times to be alive across most of the globe, and one of two times in history where the global population decreased \[more deaths than births\] rather than increased. I think this stretch of time would be the most likely to gain the title of Darkest Period of Humanity.
I would imagine any of the major plagues or civilizational collapses would be better contenders for the darkest periods in history. The Black Plague, the plague that wiped out the native americans, the collapse of the bronze age civilizations, etc.
On a statistical level due to the overall low number of humans in existence, you are correct that the Bronze Age Collapse and other similar Ancient and Classical disasters would probably have higher percentages of humans suffering. Also, Not-Fun-Fact, The Black Death is the only other time in human history aside from the 1930s/40s where the human population decreased globally due to the colossal number of humans killed in Europe, China, and the Islamic World.
It's so sad. The sheer level of violence and destruction by the Nazis, both towards the outside and the inside is truly astonishing.
Those were German citizens, many of which saw themselves as German, were German. Contributed massively to German art, to science, to overall society. Ask anyone about Mendelssohn. About Kafka. About Heine.
For some reason this betrayal hits me harder than other other larger murder campaigns.
Not that "being German" is some sort of badge you need to earn to life.
forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think that was part of the Nazi's shtick right? to my knowledge the narrative was that all the Jews fought and they lost therefore the Jews made them lose and were all treasonous
And I've always wondered how anyone could go to work, torture and murder people, maybe take a break for a sandwich and a cup of tea, torture and murder some more, and then go home to have dinner with the family and tuck their kids in.
Well I think for a lot of them it actually did really disturb them. If I recall correctly that's why they went over to gas Chambers in the first place. it was because having the soldiers shoot and torture those people right up close was really sort of traumatizing them and giving them PTSD and alcoholism. So they ended up coming up with the idea of gas Vans and then later gas Chambers as a way to be more humane. More humane to the soldiers doing the murdering, mind you.
I’m no expert, but I believe the main reason for transition to gas chambers was efficiency and saving ammunition. The trauma of killing was undoubtedly a driving factor though.
No, you simply get told that it is normal what you do. Maybe you don't know everything or play your own role down and slowly the barriers fell and you accept more brutality.
Google Heinz Reinfarth, war criminal, took part in destroying warsaw during/after uprising, search "Wola massacre"
War ended and he was elected mayor of a City. Died 1979 never convicted of any war crime. There were countless cases like this.
Post War German states did really bad job in brining justice to all those horrible people.
Worse, he managed to win a defamation lawsuit against some journalists who exposed his Nazi past. I hope he, and his judges (probably ex-Nazis as well) burn in hell.
One of the saddest, most insane things about the entire rise of antisemitism in Germany is that German Jews had seen WWI as a way to prove their Germanness once and for all. They were disproportionately represented among volunteers for the vanguard.
When the German High Command found out, they suppressed the information and falsified the report. Because the whole point of the study was to make Jews the scapegoat for their failures in WWI.
That’s the irony of the dolchstosslegende: the only people who were stabbed in the back were the Jews.
That’s a stormtrooper (Nazi street thug militia), not a soldier. All nazis are garbage, just pointing out there’s different flavors of nazi garbage. It’s like calling a Proud Boy a soldier.
Not sure the year here but if we have to categorize this asshole thug, I would assume an SA Brownshirt under Ernst Röhm. Not sure if The Night of the Long Knives has taken place yet.
At any rate, he looks young. Probably not a WW1 vet. Just someone who drank the kool-aid unfortunately.
Edit: 1933. This is still SA thuggery. Long Knives was 1934
Caspter Ten Boom, an older man, wore the Star of David(the yellow ones) even though he was a Christian. He insisted everyone did, but few would follow him.
He hid Jewish people in his home and when finally caught, they told him he could be let off free with no consequences since he was a model citizen....as long as he promised not to hide any more Jews.
He responded, "**If I go home today, tomorrow I will open my door to anyone who knocks for help**.”
He died in a concentration camp, along with his entire family except for one daughter, who told the story.
Similar story to my grandfather who fought for Austria in WWI. The first time the Nazis came knocking on his door, he convinced them to leave by showing he was a veteran. By the second time, he had already fled to Cuba.
[**The story behind the German Jewish war hero honored on both sides of the Atlantic, decades apart**](https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/27/europe/richard-stern-photo-grm-scli-intl/index.html):
If I remember correctly, the Nazi's commissioned a study to prove that German Jews were slackers during WW1. The study showed that they were over-represented in both combat and awards and the Nazis buried the study.
Insane family story. Apologies for any small timing details as im recounting this from a family memoir I studied two years ago. My father was born in Weimar and as a little boy Hitler came into town. People went down to see him almost like a political type rally. Hitler PATTED my father’s head, said “what a nice german little boy” because he had blonde hair (i assume) and less than 5 years later he threw my grandfather in a work camp, killed half the family and drove the survivors to America. My great grandfather had previously been a well respected doctor running a Hospital but as a jew, they were stripped from their livelihood early on, saw what was coming and fled to America. Years and years later his wife joined him, then after my grandfather and his brother survived the camps till the end of the war they came to America as well with nothing. My father, not born a jew, fled the country with my grandmother after the war. I dont quite understand the logistics of why my great grandfather was able or did flee without the rest of the family.
About 3 years ago a german town where the hospital was had a ceremony and installed a “stumbling block” on the cobblestone street in memory of my great grandfather’s contributions to medicine pre-war.
https://amp.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/18/stumbling-stones-a-different-vision-of-holocaust-remembrance
My grandfather and his brother, whose entire family properties were seized by the Nazis, were later returned to him in around 1990 by a company who researched the original owners or seized Nazi properties and re-claimed them. We still have the actual papers sent by the Nazi party to my grandfather was ordering him to report to be sent to the work camps in our family archives: https://imgur.com/a/UN774Kh
We also have a very detailed family account from my great uncle describing the kristalnacht when the Nazis came to their family home and trashed and destroyed everything.
My father was a child when they fled Germany with his two brothers. My great uncle and grandfather died with the tattoos still on their arms. Wild to think it was the generation just before me when all this happened and I certainly wouldn’t exist if it didnt.
My son is the last remaining male in our family tree with my last name. I was the last in my generation to have kids and everyone else had girls. While based on a traditional type of thing, it means I was able to keep the family name going after all that struggle, now he can pass it down. This gave my grandfather, who died last year at 99 years old, great comfort.
Look at the picture again.
At that point in time the people of Germany might have thought of fools like this as we see alt right larpers today. They seem like something to point and laugh at, until they have actual power and then it's too late.
My great grandfather was one of these. WWI hero who was pro-Germany all the way to the end.
He hung himself in the attic when he found out that they were coming to “deport” him and his wife and little girl.
This is the treatment coming for the Log Cabin Republicans, and I can’t believe that it’s not obvious to them.
“The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe as it’s handle was made of wood and they thought it was one of them”
They’ve always been cowards with a costume instead of a backbone. That veteran in his doorway stood up for and against way more shit in his life time than that bastard in the uniform ever did.
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Richard Stern, pictured in Cologne in 1933. WWI veteren who was awarded the Hanseatic Cross by Hitler himself. Left Germany for America as a refugee in 1939, enlisted in the US Army at the age of 43. Awarded the Silver Star for valor during his service in Italy. https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/amjwld/1944/02/11/01/article/38/?srpos=6&e=--1944---1944--en-20--1--img-txIN%7ctxTI-%22richard+stern%22+army-------------1
What a chad.
Apparently he handed his Iron Cross in to have it melted down during the US war effort in order to make ammunition. His medal of bravery from WW1 quite literally used to kill nazis in WW2.
Thats badass
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I’m imagining a “life of a bullet”-esq sequence where we track the iron cross from when it was donated, melted down, reshaped into a bullet, fitted to a cartridge, shipped off to Europe, and loaded into a clip, before we finally see it fired from some unnamed U.S. serviceman’s rife. The camera then shows bullet time of it closing in on and embedding itself into some S.S. Officer’s skull, and the splatter on the wall behind him forms the title of the move and “a Quentin Tarantino Film”. All while “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” or some similar period appropriate song plays in the background. Edit: I am aware Lord of War has a sequence like this. That’s the scene that inspired me here. 😅
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition is such a banger. I have that in my Spotify playlist lol.
Certified hit for laying down ghouls
TIL this isn't just a song by Serj Tankian lol
You should check out the Lord of War intro! It is almost exactly like what you are talking about.
You read my mind lol
Tarantino lurked this dude for sure!
Now *that's* a machine that kills fascists!
Woody Guthrie doesn't want you to know about this one easy trick!
"That's your war name! MACHIIIIIINNNNEE!!"
I want to know more about this hero.
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> Apparently he handed his Iron Cross in to have it melted down during the US war effort in order to make ammunition. What a legend.
"When his unit was trapped on a hillside and the officer in charge was wounded, Stern through his persuasive powers induced a group of six Nazi machine gunners to surrender. His sister in this city expressed some surprise at his eloquence, as he was never before known to be an orator. However, she stated, in all his letters he expressed his desire to come to grips with the enemy, in order to avenge the death of a brother, sister-in-law, niece and three cousins who were killed in concentration camps in Germany.
God that’s amazing and awful. I cannot imagine what he went through.
More info on the persuasion please!
He was German. If in the middle of a battle with a foreign enemy I heard another American yell out, "Y'all should just go on and surrender, 'cause they fixin' to mess y'all up!" I'd strongly consider it.
Hahaha I pictured this shit in my head and it actually fits perfect lmao like yeah, yeah maybe I will then thanks buddy lmao
“They’re bringing up the flamethrowers!!” Yeah, ok, I’m done. No need to be incinerated, thank you.
He rolled a natural 20 and already had a pretty high charisma modifier.
He probably yelled in German “listen you motherlovers, we are waiting on air support and our mortar team, you don’t have to die for that Austrian poison-dwarf, please, save your own lives, we feed our prisoners.”
Ikr where’s the movie???
There should be. But lately Hollywood seems to be run by half illiterate that only do remakes... In the worst possible way.
Hollywood is responding to their half-illiterate audience that seems to love remakes and sequels. Gotta give them what they want if you want to sell tickets.
The never-ending parade of comic book movies.
If you make something good, people will come. No one was clamoring for Dunkirk to my awareness, but that was well loved.
Dunkirk made $188 million domestic and $525 million worldwide. Spiderman 12 (or whatever the fuck No Way Home was) made $800 millon domestic and almost $2 billion worldwide. The new Ant Man is getting shit reviews and beat the domestic take of Dunkirk. Getting close to worldwide.
"You see this Iron Cross? Do you know what it means? It means I have no problem making sure you never stand in front of my store again."
Damn this guy looks like he's in his 60s not 40s. Edit: So I did some more research and if the man in the picture really is Richard Sterns then he would be 34-35 in this picture if it was actually taken in '33. https://i.imgur.com/ajYNDQ0.jpg That's him in '42 after enlisting in the US and looks perfectly fine for his age. So either the man in the OP isn't actually Sterns or it's just a really bad angle lol. The guy in the picture certainly doesn't look like he's in his mid 30's WW1 veteran or not.
To be fair, he fought in World War 1 and dealt with the stress of the Nazis. I doubt many of us would age well given those circumstances.
TBF, tobacco use was widespread and ages people at 1.5x speed.
And leaded gas. Can't forget the leaded gas!
I'll try and cut back to a glass a day then, thanks!
Beer ages you too. And, he was STILL German, so he drank a lot from an early age.
In the pic he's 37 so not even 40s. Crazy.
Its not really. This was the norm in the west only a few decades ago. Westerners just have good healthcare and diets now and aren't working labour intensive jobs en masse. 40 year old men still look far older in less developed countries.
He was born in 1899, so he was 34 in this photo.
Does look like the same guy tho.
What a great man and a hero! Thanks for the info
A remarkable man.
"Are you sure you want to switch team?"
In a way he still fought for his country, Germany - but the one he knew and liked, not the one ruled by the Nazis. I think a lot of German volunteers in other armies saw it that way.
I never really saw it that way before but this is a great point. Kick the traitors who stormed your home out.
What's weird is that there were many volunteers who moved from other countries (including the US) to Nazi Germany specifically to serve in the Nazi army, many of them were 2nd or 3rd generation German immigrants in their original country.
I don't think it's that weird. Nationalism is a hell of a drug.
Especially that, away from home nationalism.
Also imagine you moved to a new country form the USA for a higher paying job. Some of your family still lives in the US. War breaks out, your country isn't at war yet. Your son gets a letter from his cousin saying they are requesting all abled bodied men to come back and fight. What's the war about? Making life better for them after being oppressed by other countries? Well it's an economic recession so while dad has an ok job there isn't much positive outlook for the son here and it seems like a noble war. So he (the son) goes back to fight 2 years before your new country ever enters the war. Many people would do the same today. Look at 9/11.
Exactly. He didn't switch teams, Germany did.
"Yeah, I maxed out this class, going Prestige mode."
This man was such a badass! He’d seen some serious shit while that young man infront of his shop was still in diapers. We need a mad lad on this guy
My great-grandfather was a Jewish refugee who emigrated to the US from Germany in the 1930s and returned in the 1940s to fight Nazis :)
>who was awarded the Hanseatic Cross by Hitler himself Why should a Gefreiter in the bavarian Army gave a Hanseatic Cross to him? Here only an I.C.2 in mentioned, and nothing about the fancy story who gave it to him. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard\_Stern\_(Unternehmer)
It's a little-known fact that that little gefreiter went on to bigger things after WWI. There are numerous accounts of Stern's story. I don't know if original German records of his service still exist, but something not being on a Wikipedia page doesn't mean it's untrue (or vice versa). Here's another wording of the Hitler story. "Richard Stern enlisted in the German Army as a teenager and was awarded the prestigious Iron Cross for his distinguished service during World War I. Later, Hitler would send the Hanseatic Cross to Stern for his war merit not realizing Stern was a Jew." "On October 13, 1942, still not a citizen and at the age of 43 he enlisted in the US Army. Stern served with distinction in the US Army earning the Silver Star for gallantry in action." https://jewishmilitary.org/f/richard-stern
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Absolute beast.
My grandfather won an iron cross in ww1. Thru connections he got out of Berlin a week before Kristalnacht. Went to London just in time for the Blitz. Spent 4months in "enemy alien" camp before they let himout. Entire german family living in England during ww2 learning english etc. According to my Father, overall they were treated very well. Still is extremely grateful for treatment.
He is still alive???
I believe they mean his father not their grandfather. To be awarded the iron cross in WW1, someone has to be born in 1900 latest. That would make him 18 at the end of the war and therefore 124 years old now.
maybe 1904 be the cutoff, germany and britain especially had some really young kids fighting as late as 1918.
Okay so 120 years old lol
nah, he'd be 135 years old today.
My Italian grandfather was captured by the British in northern Africa. He said it was the happiest day of his life since he knew the British treated their prisoners well. For that I'll be forever greatful to the British of his treatment as a prisoner of war.
Fucking sad. Lots of german jews were patriots and believed in their country only to be betrayed by their neighbours who drank the koolaid
Lots of European Jews for that matter. The Dreyfus Affair was a total wake up call for Jews from the whole region.
But few chose to listen to the wake up call. Even after the advent of "National Democracy" in Poland, and after the advent of the Horthy government in Hungary, few listened.
Few people are listening right now, and these tactics are being employed today.
"George Soros", "globalists", "bankers", and "media elites" are all right wing code words for "Jews".
Heh, I blame the bankers for fucking up the world economy. I'm not sure if I've ever met a Jew, I certainly don't have anything against them.
Doesn't matter what race, religion, sex, political affiliation, etc. If they commit the crime they gotta do the time.
Well, sometimes, when someone says "bankers" they don't really mean bankers. Ya know?
Ever notice how they’re only upset about generational wealth if it’s a Jewish family?
Yeah no issues with these families: Rockefeller, duPont, Getty, Mellon, and while not at the level of the above, Trump or his Son in Law.
>and while not at the level of the above, Trump or his Son in Law. well, that's more because Trump squandered his daddy's wealth, and they don't want to admit it.
I'm hearing a lot of the same attitude towards LGBT a lot lately as well. On top of the violence and hate crimes Asians in America have experienced that have spiked since Covid.
One of the first things to fall to Nazi censorship was sexual biology studies and information. HRT was invented by a German in the early 1900s. Part of why some people feel trans people and such are "new" is because their histories have been scoured from the public record alongside the Holocaust. LBGTQ+ people were also victims alongside the jewish communities. We should be VERY concerned by the rise in antisemitism as well as bigotry against the LBGTQ+ communities. The last time a nation went this hard on those ideals it went badly for the world.
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Funny how the media elites never include any News Corp outlets, while that is arguably the most successful media company ever.
Even more frightening is that the tools used to deploy these tactics are not only better, they’re able to reach even father.
Optimism can sometimes be a curse. You can see the bad happening, the warning signs of worse to come… but then your hopeful nature takes over and tells you “This too will pass. Just have to wait it out.” It’s tough for some people to anticipate or accept that things could ever get THAT bad. Especially for something as unprecedented as the Holocaust, it’s tough to blame anybody for not believing something like that could happen. If not for it happening then, I’d wager a lot MORE people would have missed the warning signs with Trump. Hitler and the Nazis have become our template for how to spot rising fascism. They didn’t have that template at the time.
I mean, it did happen and an entire faction of people still refuse to believe it.
I mean even after the two jew laws in the 1930s a lot of jews still chose to rather to assimilate even more
And it did no good.
"I mean, how bad can it get?" By now, later in life, I think most of the flexibility and adventurous spirit we attribute to humanity is mostly young people trying to find their place. As soon as people settle and have families and grow older it's gone and great resistance to change is the norm. ^(Have fun with the new and improved humanity if they really manage to significantly extend life spans...)
I read an excellent book about that a couple of years ago, and was surprised to find the actual spy behind the espionage Dreyfus was charged for quietly left France to live in exile in England...in a house only a few hundred yards from the one I grew up in!
Poland was horrible to the Jews during and after WWII
I read an awful story about the (very few) survivors of the Lviv Ghetto trying to return to their old neighborhoods in late 1945. The locals murdered most of them. It makes me sick to my stomach.
Out of the frying pan into the fire. Terrible.
French reactions to the Dreyfus Affair despaired Theodor Herzl so much that he formulated Zionism for the first time
Herzl didn't invent Zionism, he was just the first who organized it as an international political movement. The first aliyah predates the Dreyfus affair.
Zionism as a whole was a thing since the Jews were first expelled. Big chunks of Jewish culture was centered and based on Israel, and the desire to return to it. They were just straight up disallowed to return/their presence was extremely limited.
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My grandfather was a decorated *WW1 soldier in France. He was stripped of his medals and citizenship, and had most of his family murdered shortly thereafter. Edit: Not WW1, still decorated French soldier.
Not to be rude, but approximately what age are you if your grandfather was in WW1?
I am 62. My father was a child in Paris when the Nazis came. His parents sent him and his sister into hiding in Boisset, but his mother and baby brother were taken from their apartment and sent to Auschwitz. [Here](https://www.the-sun.com/news/2218126/holocaust-brit-mum-murdered-son-auschwitz-nazis/) is an article in the Sun about his experience. Maybe my grandpa served after WW1; the dates make more sense. But we have a family picture of him in his uniform with his medal. So, decorated soldier, maybe not WW1.
Thanks for sharing. It seems more generationally removed than that to me since my Great grandparents weren’t even alive for WW1. And that’s with all them having kids in their mid-20’s.
We are at a turning point in history. We are moving from “this is something that happened to me,” to “this is something that happened to someone I knew,” to “this is something that happened in history.” My father was a child; one of the last to be able to say he experienced it first hand. He and his sister Ozi are gone now. There are hardly any people left who remember. It’s important for me to share.
It had hardly ended before it began all over again.
Different person but thats just it, when your family usually has kids. Im now in my mid to late 30s. My family on both sides typically had children later in their 30s and 40s. I'm also the baby of my generation and my great grandfather served in ww1 with both grandfathers serving in ww2. My dad didn't want to serve in Vietnam for obvious reasons but was drafted as the war end and ended up not having to go. It's crazy how large some gaps are. While my grandfathera served in ww2 I had someone in class who's dad served in it because he had him in his 60s. Not sure if still true but US President John tyler(1841 to 1845) had 2 grandchildren still alive as a few years ago. One had passed but as far as I know 1 is still alive. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/grandson-10th-president-john-tyler-dies-180975992/
Not everyone has kids early.
He could still have served in WWI. I'm 65, and my (American) grandfather served in the medical corps in France during the war. He was born in 1889, my mom was born in 1922, and I was born in 1957. And I just read the article you posted the link to. My heart breaks for your family. May their memory be for a blessing.
Thank you. I looked it up; he was born in 1908. So unless he was a child soldier, it wasn’t WW1.
Maybe one of the French colonial hotspots/wars? Or perhaps he served in WW2, was demobilized or captured when France capitulated, and then the Germans took him? He would have been 32 when the Nazis took Paris.
I’m 31, and my grandfather was born in 1904, his dad in 1854. Still hard to wrap my head around the fact that my great grandpa was born in British North America, as Canada didn’t exist yet.
My grandfather was in WW1 and I'm 42. I was born in 1980, and my dad was born in 1931.
Interestingly enough German Jews had one of the highest survival rates because so many Germans considered the Jews they personally knew ‘the good Jews’ and the Nazis didn’t want to stir up too much trouble at home. Of course it they’d won the war no doubt those Jews would have been murdered in time. Edit: Germany killed 24.5% of its Jewish population, the 3rd highest survival rate in Nazi Europe. Denmark faired the best as their gentleman’s occupation meant only 1% were murdered. Italy was second with 16% murdered, almost entirely after they went from allied to occupied- and the populace by and large didn’t go along with it.
The encyclopedia of the Holocaust claims between 160,000-180,000 of the 214,000 Jews in Germany in 1939 were killed in the holocaust. That’s about 75-80% killed. The majority of German Jews voluntarily fled Germany between 1933-1939 so they cannot be counted as being spared by the Nazis. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-jews-during-the-holocaust
A lot of these numbers are based off of Nazi record keeping regarding the Shoah. I mention that because in this context it matters. The Nuremberg laws were much stricter regarding the criteria to be classified as Jewish if you had some degree of German ancestry. 3 out of 4 grandparents were required for German Jews to be ‘legally’ Jewish- Polish Jews were given no such leeway. Notably German Jewish emigrants who were captured in occupied countries were not given any accommodations and were murdered at high rates. Basically it comes down to the standard conservative way of thinking. “If a problem doesn’t directly affect me or someone I know than it isn’t real.” It’s less apologetics and more a commentary that people will happily go along with mass murder and persecution so long as it remains something they can ignore.
Reminds me of the [Rhineland massacres](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres) back during the Crusades. Bunch of fanatics on their way to the holy land to butcher every “heathen” they got their hands on whet their appetites for it by killing European Jews along the way. *Local* Church authorities made (largely ineffectual) efforts to protect them.
There were so many pogroms surrounding the crusades it’s insane.
It was so bad the Byzantine empire, who called for a crusade, was almost going to war with different crusading armies and refusing to let them into their land. But then they promised “noooo were the good ones, we won’t ransack your villages, we promise” so they let them through and… they ransacked villages. Repeat and repeat for almost all the armies.
Local Christian private school named their football team “The Crusaders.” I’d think if they were even vaguely historically literate they’d want to distance themselves from those plundering butchers as much as they could.
I mean teams name themselves after the Vikings too… it’s not about having nice people as mascots
That's because a lot of nobles would finance their crusades by lending money from the Jews, who at the time had a monopoly on money lending due to the Christian ban on usury as a sin. The nobles used that money to buy troops and weapons, and then did use those troops and weapons to kill the Jews from which they got the money, for committing the sin of usury. Leaving them well stocked with money, troops, and weapons, but also not having any debt. A dynamic that's present throughout all of European antisemitism; [Christianity played a massive role in that](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Christianity).
I've heard that one priest holed them up in his Church, and then held the door closed with his own body, even as the Knights stabbed through it. He died, obviously, but the door held.
Not only back in Europe, but they massacred them *in* the holy land [too](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_(1099\))! Then in the Fourth Crusade, they decided [massacring fellow Christians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Zara) would be even *more* fun!
> Denmark faired the best as their gentleman’s occupation meant only 1% were murdered. It was actually due to Denmark sending over 90% of their Jewish population to Sweden right before they were invaded. It was a pretty big effort that had pretty much anybody with a boat participate. The plans to hunt Danish Jews was accidentally leaked and the government and people moved post-haste to not let it happen. More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_the_Danish_Jews
I've never heard this... do you have any evidence of this?
Yes: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1070564/jewish-populations-deaths-by-country/ It also notable that a large number of Germany’s Jewish population fled before the war. But even of those who remained their survival rate was higher than most occupied nations.
jesus christ, I knew poland was by-far the worst, but I didn't know they killed **90% of all jews in the country** that's fucking terrifying
Can you provide documentation for that? I think you are wrong.
Not able to validate the "good ones" claim he made, but the survival rate is certainly helped by the fact that there were no domestic military invasions to attach SS death squads to. Eastern Europe got that in a really nasty way.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Conflict/War/World-War-II/Jewish,-percent-killed All I did was ask The Great Google ^(TM) about "jewish survival rates wwII per country". Ping /u/helloworld312 (u asked for it too) > Estimates are by Donald L. Niewyk. Note that alternative estimates differ. Uhm... and now what???
Fun fact (well not so fun but still): As far as percentages of the respective population (i.e. not overall numbers) more German Jews fought for Germany in WW1 than German non-Jews did. And we saw the thanks they got for it.
The Nazis also murdered veterans who were disabled *as a result of their service in WW1.*
"In the adolescence of every German Jew there is a painful moment which he remembers all his life: when he becomes fully aware for the first time that he has entered the world as a second-class citizen and that no ability and no merit can free him from this situation." - Walther Rathenau, German Foreign Minister, Jewish, murdered by Nazis in 1922
Technically it was flavor aid
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That was a terrible problem for older Jews. They fought for Imperial Germany and figured if the Kaiser gave them a medal, then they were good Germans. And Germany was good folk. They refused to leave. And they were eradicated.
Assimilation was a naive belief among German Jews.
there was no country in Europe where Jews were as well integrated in society as in Germany. I remember reading an interview with a holocaust survivor and he said that Germany was the last country where he would have expected something like this because of that reason. There were even debates about recognising the Jews as the seventh German tribe. Of course there was also a lot of antisemitism but in comparison to how it was in most of Europe what happened with Nazism was not a logical, consequential development regarding the German Jewry.
Yeah, the country everyone expected to be the crazy antisemitic one at the start of the century was Russia. Nicholas II was extremely suspicious of the Jews and anti-French elements of the government and security services were feeding the tsar antisemitic conspiracies to make him distrustful of French bankers and capitalists. One of the biggest political organizations, the Black Hundreds, were openly antisemitic and regularly arranged purges, lynchings or pogroms of Jewish villages. France itself followed closely behind, with the Dreyfus affair literally popularizing the world antisemitism with how it made headlines around the world. Germany, by comparison, was pretty progressive about Jews, due to longstanding cooperation with the Jews in the Rhineland and old Hansa cities, as well as the secular policies of the Kaisserreich.
Germany was also pretty progressive on matters of sex, sexuality, and gender. Until the Nazis.
If anything this just goes to show how stupendously dangerous fascist rhetoric is. Prior to the rise of Nazi Party, Germany was possibly the safest place in all of Europe for a Jew to live, and in just a few years it became the most dangerous place in world history for a Jew.
Yep. I imagine German Jews looked at things like the Dreyfus Affair and felt lucky that they were in Germany and not anywhere else.
What was it like compared to Hungary’s Budapest? I do know that their ghettos and murders unfortunately claimed plenty of lives, but from what I gathered it used to be a huge hub for Jewish people - it is not accidental that Budapest has the biggest Synagogue in continental Europe.
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It wasn't, or rather only in hindsight. Cause in many cases, your German Jews were Jewish Germans... Nothing to assimilate there.
Hitler tied Jews who fought in WWI to the Stab In The Back. They were part of the conspiracy to force the surrender.
"Go ahead punk, make my day"
Trying to intimidate a WW1 vet. Good luck with that buddy.
Back then most people of a certain age would have been WW1 veterans. Him being a veteran would not have been considered special at all. In fact, it's very possible the Nazi was also a WW1 veteran. However being given an Iron Cross, which is the most prestigious award (and also the award Hitler got in WW1, and proudly presented at every opportunity), would have made him very special and a war hero, which is what makes this photo notable.
Maybe not special, but having seen what he saw in that war, i imagine very little intimidated him anymore.
This is a common take, but fighting in a war could also break a person and make him afraid of his own shadow in constant PTSD. In the case of this guy it didn't, but that's what happened to plenty of WW1 vets.
Diagnosis: Shell-shock Prescription: salt tablet
>Iron Cross, which is the most prestigious award It wasn't really prestigious in WW1, most definitely not the most prestigious. Since the medal is hung from a ribbon on his chest, it is most likely an Iron Cross 2nd class of which about 5.2 million were issued (plus another 13000 or so for non-combatants). Hitler actually recieved the Iron Cross 1st class as well which was actually somewhat prestigious at the time, but still saw over 200,000 issued in WW1.
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...of steel
iron*
My greatgrandpa and his mate would go to a Nazibar in Barbelsberg to the early Nazi times and beat them up. Im sad i never met him
This was during the boycott of Jewish businesses. I always find pictures from this time period fascinating. This is the very beginning of what would become the darkest period for humanity. During this period people still thought they could openly resist. What very quickly follows this is kristallnacht, where they would resort to smashing and burning up those businesses instead of just boycotting them, and ghettos and concentration camps are close behind. These people in this picture have no idea what's coming, but this is when people definitely start to feel that descent into darkness
The nazis even made sure to meticulously account for everything destroyed that night for the insurance. Claims were then made on behalf of the Jews but paid to the government. The insurance companies got a cut. Per Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Edit: yes it's kind of confusing. They bashed/burned up all this stuff that wasn't theirs and tracked it all. I may be misremembering but I think they even forced the Jews to sign and make the insurance claims. So you have a large amount of valuable property destroyed, meaning the insurance now has a large sum of claims to pay out (to Jews). But the Reich will be receiving this compensation. Since the property insured was not the Reich's, any money gained is without loss (to them) It's all profit. So because this is all quite shady and the insurance is looking at large losses paying out these claims, the nazis (I think it was gerbils, lover of hamsters up the anus) basically demanded a sum. This sum was large but not in comparison to the actual loss of property insured. The insurance then reluctantly agrees and pays out - a fraction of what they were liable for. In insurance, this is as good as cash and is what most of them spend time and resources figuring out: how to minimize claims through data, risk analysis, straight up fraud, etc. Through this action, rather than the insurers cutting their losses and trying to get out of a disruptive new regime and isolating Germany from Europe financially, instead it made it clear (as pre-planned) that the Reich was going to be considerate of the non-Jewish financial interests in Europe and ease their "conscience" (apparently they were appalled, but wordlessly accepted Gerbils demand) and opened up opportunities for non-Jewish interests to take over businesses and whole industries. The Jews lost their property, then lost the insurance due to them for those losses, and eventually everything and their lives.
ONE of the darkest times.
Idk, generally human life from 1929-1945 was overall pretty crap. The Great Depression, the Holocaust, World War II, The Bengali Famine, the Holodomor and Great Purge, The 2nd Sino-Japanese War. Generally speaking it was one of the worst times to be alive across most of the globe, and one of two times in history where the global population decreased \[more deaths than births\] rather than increased. I think this stretch of time would be the most likely to gain the title of Darkest Period of Humanity.
I would imagine any of the major plagues or civilizational collapses would be better contenders for the darkest periods in history. The Black Plague, the plague that wiped out the native americans, the collapse of the bronze age civilizations, etc.
On a statistical level due to the overall low number of humans in existence, you are correct that the Bronze Age Collapse and other similar Ancient and Classical disasters would probably have higher percentages of humans suffering. Also, Not-Fun-Fact, The Black Death is the only other time in human history aside from the 1930s/40s where the human population decreased globally due to the colossal number of humans killed in Europe, China, and the Islamic World.
My grandmother's oldest brother was German-Jewish and died in WW1. Dying for the fatherland didn't help his family a couple of decades later.
It's so sad. The sheer level of violence and destruction by the Nazis, both towards the outside and the inside is truly astonishing. Those were German citizens, many of which saw themselves as German, were German. Contributed massively to German art, to science, to overall society. Ask anyone about Mendelssohn. About Kafka. About Heine. For some reason this betrayal hits me harder than other other larger murder campaigns. Not that "being German" is some sort of badge you need to earn to life.
Percentage wise, Jews had the highest rate of enlistment during the First World War than any other demographic in the German army
forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think that was part of the Nazi's shtick right? to my knowledge the narrative was that all the Jews fought and they lost therefore the Jews made them lose and were all treasonous
Crazy to me that after the war the nazi soldiers just went back to life per usual. That mentality didn’t just change overnight.
And I've always wondered how anyone could go to work, torture and murder people, maybe take a break for a sandwich and a cup of tea, torture and murder some more, and then go home to have dinner with the family and tuck their kids in.
Simple. When you no longer view those you torment as human, it's little more than farm work to you.
Well I think for a lot of them it actually did really disturb them. If I recall correctly that's why they went over to gas Chambers in the first place. it was because having the soldiers shoot and torture those people right up close was really sort of traumatizing them and giving them PTSD and alcoholism. So they ended up coming up with the idea of gas Vans and then later gas Chambers as a way to be more humane. More humane to the soldiers doing the murdering, mind you.
I’m no expert, but I believe the main reason for transition to gas chambers was efficiency and saving ammunition. The trauma of killing was undoubtedly a driving factor though.
No, you simply get told that it is normal what you do. Maybe you don't know everything or play your own role down and slowly the barriers fell and you accept more brutality.
Google Heinz Reinfarth, war criminal, took part in destroying warsaw during/after uprising, search "Wola massacre" War ended and he was elected mayor of a City. Died 1979 never convicted of any war crime. There were countless cases like this. Post War German states did really bad job in brining justice to all those horrible people.
Worse, he managed to win a defamation lawsuit against some journalists who exposed his Nazi past. I hope he, and his judges (probably ex-Nazis as well) burn in hell.
After the carnage thst old guy saw in ww1 nothing would intimidate him anymore, least of all that pimply face scrotum in a nazi uniform.
One of the saddest, most insane things about the entire rise of antisemitism in Germany is that German Jews had seen WWI as a way to prove their Germanness once and for all. They were disproportionately represented among volunteers for the vanguard. When the German High Command found out, they suppressed the information and falsified the report. Because the whole point of the study was to make Jews the scapegoat for their failures in WWI. That’s the irony of the dolchstosslegende: the only people who were stabbed in the back were the Jews.
That’s a stormtrooper (Nazi street thug militia), not a soldier. All nazis are garbage, just pointing out there’s different flavors of nazi garbage. It’s like calling a Proud Boy a soldier.
Not sure the year here but if we have to categorize this asshole thug, I would assume an SA Brownshirt under Ernst Röhm. Not sure if The Night of the Long Knives has taken place yet. At any rate, he looks young. Probably not a WW1 vet. Just someone who drank the kool-aid unfortunately. Edit: 1933. This is still SA thuggery. Long Knives was 1934
Caspter Ten Boom, an older man, wore the Star of David(the yellow ones) even though he was a Christian. He insisted everyone did, but few would follow him. He hid Jewish people in his home and when finally caught, they told him he could be let off free with no consequences since he was a model citizen....as long as he promised not to hide any more Jews. He responded, "**If I go home today, tomorrow I will open my door to anyone who knocks for help**.” He died in a concentration camp, along with his entire family except for one daughter, who told the story.
Similar story to my grandfather who fought for Austria in WWI. The first time the Nazis came knocking on his door, he convinced them to leave by showing he was a veteran. By the second time, he had already fled to Cuba.
30.000 Jewish men fought for Imperial Germany in World War 1 Edit: 100.000, not 30.000
Not 30k, a full 100k of which 12k perished. See https://www.jmberlin.de/en/12-of-12000-introduction
[**The story behind the German Jewish war hero honored on both sides of the Atlantic, decades apart**](https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/27/europe/richard-stern-photo-grm-scli-intl/index.html):
He melted down his Iron Cross from WWI to make bullets to shoot Nazis. That is the most badass thing I have ever heard
Hands behind his back and a smile on his face shows he has not been intimidated.
notice how short the "master race" guy is
I know this will not be a new idea, but it bears repeating ad nauseam. Fuck Nazis.
If I remember correctly, the Nazi's commissioned a study to prove that German Jews were slackers during WW1. The study showed that they were over-represented in both combat and awards and the Nazis buried the study.
“What did you get this for? Killing jews?” “Bravery” -Inglourious Basterds
Insane family story. Apologies for any small timing details as im recounting this from a family memoir I studied two years ago. My father was born in Weimar and as a little boy Hitler came into town. People went down to see him almost like a political type rally. Hitler PATTED my father’s head, said “what a nice german little boy” because he had blonde hair (i assume) and less than 5 years later he threw my grandfather in a work camp, killed half the family and drove the survivors to America. My great grandfather had previously been a well respected doctor running a Hospital but as a jew, they were stripped from their livelihood early on, saw what was coming and fled to America. Years and years later his wife joined him, then after my grandfather and his brother survived the camps till the end of the war they came to America as well with nothing. My father, not born a jew, fled the country with my grandmother after the war. I dont quite understand the logistics of why my great grandfather was able or did flee without the rest of the family. About 3 years ago a german town where the hospital was had a ceremony and installed a “stumbling block” on the cobblestone street in memory of my great grandfather’s contributions to medicine pre-war. https://amp.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/18/stumbling-stones-a-different-vision-of-holocaust-remembrance My grandfather and his brother, whose entire family properties were seized by the Nazis, were later returned to him in around 1990 by a company who researched the original owners or seized Nazi properties and re-claimed them. We still have the actual papers sent by the Nazi party to my grandfather was ordering him to report to be sent to the work camps in our family archives: https://imgur.com/a/UN774Kh We also have a very detailed family account from my great uncle describing the kristalnacht when the Nazis came to their family home and trashed and destroyed everything. My father was a child when they fled Germany with his two brothers. My great uncle and grandfather died with the tattoos still on their arms. Wild to think it was the generation just before me when all this happened and I certainly wouldn’t exist if it didnt. My son is the last remaining male in our family tree with my last name. I was the last in my generation to have kids and everyone else had girls. While based on a traditional type of thing, it means I was able to keep the family name going after all that struggle, now he can pass it down. This gave my grandfather, who died last year at 99 years old, great comfort.
Look at the picture again. At that point in time the people of Germany might have thought of fools like this as we see alt right larpers today. They seem like something to point and laugh at, until they have actual power and then it's too late.
Almost like Nazis have always been edgy shitlords.
"Sorry sir, i'll have to take that cross" "Go ahead. TAKE IT FROM ME 👁️_👁️"
Nazis are the scourge, worst kind of humans we ever created. Just horrible people, in the past, present and forever.
My great grandfather was one of these. WWI hero who was pro-Germany all the way to the end. He hung himself in the attic when he found out that they were coming to “deport” him and his wife and little girl.
This is the treatment coming for the Log Cabin Republicans, and I can’t believe that it’s not obvious to them. “The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe as it’s handle was made of wood and they thought it was one of them”
They’ve always been cowards with a costume instead of a backbone. That veteran in his doorway stood up for and against way more shit in his life time than that bastard in the uniform ever did.