Will Hitler be seen differently in the future?

ask the average American what the rape of nanking was, and then ask what the holocaust was. I bet the % who know one and not the other is way off balance.

 

But everybody has heard of the Bataan Death March.

 

yes sure that was " our people" nanking was just some Chinese....

 

The Japanese and the Germans both committed horrible atrocities. WE in the Western world have a different perception of the mindset of those who perpetrated the crimes. We don't have the same cultural identification with the Oriental experience as we do with the European. Yes, the Nazis promulgated the idea of an Aryan Master Race but I don't think most Germans actually bought into that. They didn't hate the British, French, Italian, Dutch, ect people while the Japanese people looked at all non Japanese as inferior. Especially other Asians.

The Japanese pursued their crimes with a personal passion. The lowly soldier who gutted or shot a prisoner for falling down or not being able to continue actually hated the person he killed. On the other hand the Germans, while they did tend to be anti semitic were at the level of ordinary low level military persons had the attitude that they were just doing their jobs. Maybe some considered what they were doing to be wrong but they did it anyway because they were told to do it by superior officers. Almost to a man when captured and questioned by the Allies their answer was that they were just following orders and were probably perplexed that their interrogators didn't see it the same way.

Its easier to understand a true believer committing horrible acts in a fervored frenzy that it is to understand ordinary people just doing it because its their job and they were told to do it. It's the very banality of the German evil that makes it more horrible than the Japanese evil. It's easy to tell yourself that you would never do what either a Japanese or a German did but are you so sure deep down that you wouldn't be led into ultimate evil as the Germans were.

There was an experiment at an Ivy League university psychology department. Subjects were given a box with a dial on it. There was an open window where the subject could see a person strapped into a chair with electrodes connected to his body. The subjects were told some story about the person in the chair and how he had to be punished. When told to turn the dial to a low lever everybody did it without reservations. Even when the person in the chair started to squirm and look uncomfortable the subjects would turn the dial up another notch when told to do so by the authority figure. At the higher levels the victim would look in obvious agony and begin to scream. At that point a few of the subjects quit and walked out but most of the subjects continued to punish the guy in the chair when reassured by the authority figure that it was OK. Most of the subjects went the limit and buried the needle on the punishment dial.

 

Is the United States of America the superpower it is today without WW2?