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View Full Version : "Reeducation": How The Victorious Allies Imposed Their Worldview on Defeated Germany


Dr. Brandt
09-30-2004, 05:21 AM
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FadeTheButcher
09-30-2004, 06:24 AM
I looked this up the other day:

"Re-education failed for a variety of reasons: poverty of resources; the initial emphasis (made in the documentary film Your Job in Germany, for example) on conquest and collective German guilt, responsible in part for German resistance; the shift from fear of Fascism to fear of Communism; and, above all, the irony of a military government as a model and a symbol of democracy. Edward Peterson has phrased this tellingly: 'General can scarcely command a society to become more democratic', and he added a further reason: 'Most Americans were poorly trained ideologically. They knew democracy was the best system, that it had something to do with freedom, with being tolerant and peace-loving, but that was about it as far as ideological discussion usually could go.'

Ralph Willett, The Americanization of Germany, 1945-1949 (New York: Routledge, 1989), p.27

mugwort
10-04-2004, 06:48 AM
It's interesting he says it failed. In fact, it was a spectacular success. It's sixty years later, and if a German is told they weren't responsible for the war, or they didn't exterminate Jews, they get very scared and can't deal with it, many of them.

Hopefully some of it's wearing off now--but in the condition Germans were in after the war, when each person's individual survival and that of their families were at risk, there was, or seemed to be, no possibility of resisting. The Allies, with their incredible, unprecedented brutality in combination with a massive campaign of deception (which of course many of the Allied soldiers did not know was deception), administeredwith a truly sickening self-righteousness, succeeded in breaking Germany's spirit and make her grovel in remorse for something she hadn't done

Truly evil.