jillian said:
No reason to just plan our own demise through an unwillingness to face our enemies either.
No, it's not!
And isn't that what Israel does?
It's an old story but if Israel hadn't put up with world condemnation back in 1981 when their planes bombed the Osirak Nuclear Reactors in Baghdad, the entire history of the region might be very different today!
And the question of whether it was the Nazi's or the Germans per se, who perpetrated the Holocaust, is a curious one. If you go to Germany today, they refer to the Nazi's as if they were an entirely separate race of beings who temporarily took over Germany for a while - nothing to do them whatsoever.
Not quite as simple, I'm afraid. The persecution of Jews was begun very publically as soon as the Nazi's gained political power and involved a precisely orchestrated propaganda campaign. Most Germans were aware of it and if not participatory, passively allowed it to happen.
Siemens, Bayer, Volkswagon, Mercedes, many of the prosperous and surviving German industrial bases, were happy to use 'work till you drop' slave labour. Bayer and some of the other pharmaceutical companies went a step further and utilised some of the results gained by doctors such as Mengele, which were gained by involuntary human experimentation.
From a logistics POV - vanishing people, cattle trains travelling across countries, the sheer number of Germans required to operate the 'Holocaust Industry' made it virtually impossible that ordinary Germans were unaware of what was going on. Open legislation banning Jews from parks, resorts, schools, universities, shops, hospitals, cinemas and other public places, was in-place and accepted in German and other occupied territories.
The orchestrated atrocities of Kristallnacht where Jewish shops, businesses, homes and synagogues across the whole of Germany were burned and vandalised, and many Jews were attacked and murdered, couldn't have been done more openly.
It's as the saying goes today - 'Not all Muslims are terrorists - but most terrorists are Muslim!'
Not all Germans were Nazis - but most Nazis were German!