This is from the comments on that article in The Epoch Times:
"On April 26, 1933, the interior minister for the German state of Prussia issued a decree creating a new secret state police, or Geheime Staats Polizei, abbreviated: Gestapo.
It operated by collecting tips from ordinary citizens, including even school children. And this network of Gestapo informants changed Germans’ behavior almost overnight.
Even a joke about the ruling party could land you in a Gestapo interrogation room. Talking politics around your children became a dangerous gamble. According to Erik Larson’s book In the Garden of Beasts, 37% of denunciations “arose not from heartfelt political beliefs, but from private conflicts with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial.”
The new Chancellor— who encouraged the behavior — was so shocked by the citizens’ eagerness to rat out their neighbors that he remarked, “We are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.” That Chancellor, of course, was Adolf Hitler.
The secret police didn’t need wire taps in every home or spies on every street corner. They found an army of willing, eager informants in the general population.
The volume of denunciations was so great, in fact, that the Gestapo actually had to ask people to stop reporting political crimes to them, because they were overwhelmed and found it impossible to process them all.
The similarity, however, is how quickly things changed. In Nazi Germany, just as now in America, the entire culture changed literally within a few months."
",,,This was around 1945, when the Allies were capturing the camps and rescuing survivors. Although the Germans sought to destroy all evidence of the camps, it was their own copious notes, Janice says, which preserved many of these events for posterity. She cites the “Auschwitz Chronicle” as one record, which actually denotes her uncle’s number as one of the survivors.
Joseph was taken to a hospital for treatment, and it took a year for him to recover. After leaving the hospital, he was sent to a mental institution for anger issues and was declared mentally unstable. “With therapy, he eventually was released and offered passage back to Salonica,” said Janice, but Joseph declined to return, for “he had no one there anymore, everybody was gone.”
Instead, as fortune would have it, many Jews in New York were seeking to sponsor Holocaust survivors, and a letter reached the hospital where Joseph was staying. He was selected to go to America where he would be cared for by his new family. He accepted...."
This is from the comments on that article in The Epoch Times:
"On April 26, 1933, the interior minister for the German state of Prussia issued a decree creating a new secret state police, or Geheime Staats Polizei, abbreviated: Gestapo.
It operated by collecting tips from ordinary citizens, including even school children. And this network of Gestapo informants changed Germans’ behavior almost overnight.
Even a joke about the ruling party could land you in a Gestapo interrogation room. Talking politics around your children became a dangerous gamble. According to Erik Larson’s book In the Garden of Beasts, 37% of denunciations “arose not from heartfelt political beliefs, but from private conflicts with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial.”
The new Chancellor— who encouraged the behavior — was so shocked by the citizens’ eagerness to rat out their neighbors that he remarked, “We are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.” That Chancellor, of course, was Adolf Hitler.
The secret police didn’t need wire taps in every home or spies on every street corner. They found an army of willing, eager informants in the general population.
The volume of denunciations was so great, in fact, that the Gestapo actually had to ask people to stop reporting political crimes to them, because they were overwhelmed and found it impossible to process them all.
The similarity, however, is how quickly things changed. In Nazi Germany, just as now in America, the entire culture changed literally within a few months."
",,,This was around 1945, when the Allies were capturing the camps and rescuing survivors. Although the Germans sought to destroy all evidence of the camps, it was their own copious notes, Janice says, which preserved many of these events for posterity. She cites the “Auschwitz Chronicle” as one record, which actually denotes her uncle’s number as one of the survivors.
Joseph was taken to a hospital for treatment, and it took a year for him to recover. After leaving the hospital, he was sent to a mental institution for anger issues and was declared mentally unstable. “With therapy, he eventually was released and offered passage back to Salonica,” said Janice, but Joseph declined to return, for “he had no one there anymore, everybody was gone.”
Instead, as fortune would have it, many Jews in New York were seeking to sponsor Holocaust survivors, and a letter reached the hospital where Joseph was staying. He was selected to go to America where he would be cared for by his new family. He accepted...."
AMERICA AMERICA AMERICA