It would be much more efficient to develop a search tool to find the tiny handful of ancestors who weren’t in the party.
New online search tool in Germany reveals if ancestors were Nazi Party members – In partnership with American and German archives, the weekly ‘Die Zeit’ has launched a searchable tool granting access to more than 12 million documents, cataloging the bulk of Nazi Party (NSDAP) memberships from 1925 to 1945.
That means “those were the days!”
When everything still worked in Germany. Before German reunification.
5 facts about German Unity Day – On October 3, Germany celebrates the reunification of East and West. How did it come about — and how is it celebrated? How do Germans feel about reunification today?
Following the end of World War II in 1945, a defeated Germany was divided into four occupation zones, controlled by the Allied powers: the United States, France, Great Britain and the Soviet Union.
In 1949, two states emerged: the democratic Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the West, and the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East, with the latter being under Soviet control. From that point on, Germany was divided…
The means the fall of the wall. The Berlin Wall.
Thirty-five years ago today.
I don’t doubt that for a moment.
There are so many “too challenging” things in today’s enlightened leftist world already, don’t you think? Remembering the past belongs in the past. Or some things do, anyway. It’s not like that type of thing could ever happen again today.
Germans rename Anne Frank daycare centre to avoid upsetting immigrant children – Parents and staff said the name of the Dutch Holocaust victim was too ‘challenging.’
A German daycare centre named after Anne Frank has been renamed to avoid upsetting children from immigrant backgrounds.
The building in Tangerhütte, Saxony-Anhalt, is to be rebranded “Weltentdecker” (Explorers of the World) to spare local children from being exposed to the thorny issue of the Shoah and the murder of six million Jews.
That means complacency or smugness.
A long and highly valued German state of mind.
I still recall the sardonic, patronizing response I received in the German Chancellery around 2010, when I tried to warn my interlocutors about the danger of Russian hybrid warfare tactics—the cocktail of disinformation, economic coercion, subversion, espionage, and threats of force that Russia uses against its neighbors. “You are not seriously saying that Russia would conduct these operations against the Federal Republic of Germany?” my hosts asked, incredulously.
“Duh, yes,” I replied.
Scholz publicly hankers for a return to Europe’s “pre-war peace order,” suggesting that the lessons of 2022 have yet to sink in.
But it’s still better than a Nazi dictatorship and a totalitarian communist regime. I guess.
Study: Germans more satisfied with democracy as a form of government – Public satisfaction with democracy in Germany has risen over the past two years, while in some cases extreme right-wing attitudes have declined significantly. At the same time, hatred of migrants, women, Muslims and other groups in Germany has increased and become widespread. In addition, stronger desires for authority can be observed in the wake of the pandemic. These are key findings of the representative “Leipzig Authoritarianism Study.”
My guess is it’s because they are closer to Russia. Western Germany is further away. Get it?
What’s behind eastern Germans’ empathy for Russia? – For decades, many in former East Germany felt closer to Russia than their western compatriots. But opposition to Russia’s war on Ukraine now outweighs historical grievances about the West…
East Germans’ residual suspicion of the West and sympathy for Russia are visible in plenty of surveys, especially those that date from before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A survey carried out by pollster Forsa in July 2021 found that 50% of eastern Germans would have liked Germany to have closer ties with Russia, compared to only 25% of western Germans.
Pretty much in half.
And it sure is reassuring to know that a big European war like that could never, ever happen again. Cold or otherwise. Right?
The situation in Germany after World War II was dire. Millions of Germans were homeless from Allied bombing campaigns that razed entire cities. And millions more Germans living in Poland and East Prussia became refugees when the Soviet Union expelled them. With the German economy and government in shambles, the Allies concluded that Germany needed to be occupied after the war to assure a peaceful transition to a post-Nazi state.
What the Allies never intended, though, was that their temporary solution to organize Germany into four occupation zones, each administered by a different Allied army, would ultimately lead to a divided Germany.
“Only over time, as the Cold War eroded trust between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies, did these occupation zones coalesce into two different German nations.”
Is that all?
In the 1980s, he began collecting postcards, posters, leaflets, coins, newspapers, magazines, documents, stickers, figurines, photographs and films that testify to anti-Jewish sentiment with the express purpose of making them available to museums and archives as educational tools. He invested an estimated €1m in his collection, which includes an array of posters relating to the Dreyfus Affair, the armbands, diaries, passports and drawings of Jewish people imprisoned in concentration camps, and advertising material for the infamous antisemitic Nazi propaganda film Jud Süss (1940).
The collection “will help us and our visitors reach a deeper understanding of how widespread antisemitic views, images and hate propaganda were in Germany and other European countries from the middle of the 19th century,” says Raphael Gross, the director of the German Historical Museum.
That means “when the world was still in order.”
You know, when people at least felt they could believe what they read in the media? That’s been quite a long time ago.
ON THIS DAY in 1944, Germans race on.
Observing Hermann 