My father is 96 years old and grew up in Nazi Germany in a small town called Bautzen. I did several hours of interviews with him about his experiences growing up, which I am turning into a book. This is what he said about Kristallnacht: "I remember Kristallnacht. I was 11 years old. You heard that on this street a house burned down or that there are rambunctious people coming. There may have been five buildings vanda…
> It just seemed to me like, “Well some people don’t like other people.” I didn’t even realize it was against the Jews. This is one of the most fascinating parts of the Nazi rise to power to me. The sheer mundanity of it all. So many questions. - what events today seem like ‘not a big deal’ but will go down in history like kristalnacht? - Hitler is a byword for evil now, but at the time he was just another mundane ta…
Could it have been prevented at the time? I highly doubt it, what the nazis did was push to the extreme and industrialize what many European nations had been doing already for centuries. Socially the concept of universal human rights was still very recent and not widely accepted.
Yes we can tell, and it is happening right now, the warning signs are in plain sight. Look at the rise of right wing extremism in the United States, resulting in increasing numbers of terrorist attacks. It has been directly enabled by the language used in political discourse and what it has rendered permissible. Can it be prevented now from getting worse? Time will tell, but at least the election results from yesterday show that there is yet some hope. One should not be complacent though, the Nazis never achieved more than 30 some percent in open elections before they completely took over.