Some people are determined to not learn anything
Video (25 mins): But Hitler Fixed the Economy!
Germany was in dire straits when Hitler took office and my understanding is he was genuinely creative in providing employment opportunities in an extremely ugly situation. For people on the ground in Germany, it did matter at the time and it doesn't in any way justify atrocities but it does help explain why he got support for a time.
I intensely dislike pieces like this because it's essentially a hateful piece based almost entirely on buying propaganda a la "History is written by the victors."
We ALL already KNOW that planet Earth enthusiastically AGREES that Hitler was A Bad Guy. Repeating that widely accepted view adds nothing scholarly to any conversation and isn't in any way essential to a video about "the German economic miracle."
It's hardly shocking news that rapid recovery is typically financed by debt, as is revolution.
My understanding is that two things were going on not typically covered by most pieces that helped add real value:
1. In kind payment or barter.
2. The LGBTQ community within Germany was thriving economically and in other ways doing creative works and much of the world was jealous.
Remember: It was a GLOBAL Great Depression that preceded World War II, not a local issue with just those German assholes who obviously deserved it.
Probably most records of such are lost and any surviving records would be in German. My German isn't that good. It's good for making casual conversation in person, not for doing serious scholarly research.
The LGBTQ crowd was also sent to concentration camps and marked with a pink triangle. I don't actually know why but it's possible that it was partly to try to appease the outside world.
I've read things suggesting Germany was pioneering trans rights practices, such as changing your gender listed on your ID.
People today seem largely ignorant of the reality on the ground during World War II. It aggravates me when Donald Trump is compared to Hitler because Trump's situation is nothing like Hitler's situation during World War II.
If Trump gets away with his SHIT, it's because spineless morons LET it happen.
Hitler rose to power before television was widely adopted. Television started in the 1920s but was not the norm even in the US during World War II.
The US was still a very rural country when the war began.
And in 1935, only 10 percent of the nation’s farms had electricity. Rest assured, the roughly 45 percent of the US population that lacked electricity at home were not watching TV at home.
News reports about World War II were commonly broadcast at movie theaters prior to the main feature. Newspaper and radio were also widespread, but, no, people weren't seeing live video or even recent video everyday as is common for much of the world today.
The world mostly didn't know about the concentration camps until liberators arrived. Foreign troops were shocked by what they found at the END of the war following Hitler's suicide.
And most Germans didn't know either. Someone created a game to educate people about how locals doing their jobs and helping to move people to camps weren't being told the big picture and may not have had enough information to piece together the story.
This contrasts starkly with the Internet era we live in where dirt poor people have access to a global megaphone via a phone.
It's enormously difficult to try to sort out what really happened even if you were there and experienced it firsthand. People born later into a dramatically altered world have great difficulty trying to parse even the broad strokes of an era from what is essentially an alien world for us.
My father was old enough to be my grandfather and fought in World War II. My mother was born in the 1930s in Germany and was a small child during the war.
I personally knew firsthand sources that probably relatively few people alive today and my age would have ever had such access to. What little my parents said doesn't jibe with the oft-repeated, overly simplified propaganda so many people happily parrot today.
And when I try to talk about that I am usually accused of "being a Nazi." We've universally agreed to just trash talk Germany and doing anything else gets you called a word that has come to mean "ultimate evil."