Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Unfortunately, some people never learn from history. "

 perhaps a reference to the Night of Broken Glass, the 1938 Nazi pogrom against German Jews..

The Nazi pogrom, not the German people's pogrom .

Memories of Kristallnacht reported by Deutsche Welle this week:

Authorities announced on Tuesday, November 18 that unknown persons had desecrated a pair of Jewish cemeteries near the Eastern German city of Erfurt. Unfortunately, some people never learn from history. 

A pig's head was found stuck to the entrance gate at a Jewish graveyard in the town of Gotha next to a section of cloth with the words "six million lies" written on it.

Police said a blood-red liquid had also been thrown at the gate and that the ground was covered with broken glass -- perhaps a reference to the Night of Broken Glass, the 1938 Nazi pogrom against German Jews.

I mean I worry about mental health, Malcolm, when conversing with Eliot!

I take onboard all your points, Ernest. I have no problem with Jewish Holocaust Museums, I've visited Sydney's twice and it's an eye-opening experience and as I regularly drive past there I'm pleased to see it's invariably being visited by groups of schoolkids.

My only problem in all these types of memorials is that they can become a bit skewed as  there is no memorial I know of in Australia for the 11 million Russian troops who died and without whom the Allies could not have gained victory.

Instead we turned the USSR into a new 'enemy' and allowed the myth to perpetuate that the Russians somehow wanted to kill us all.

We well know the results of not learning lessons from WW2 - we began decimating Vietnam about 20 years after the end of that war.

And after watching SBS's A Well-Founded Fear I feel pretty depressed that Austalia still has a DIMIA with employees who think nothing of sending people off to their deaths, of faking documents, of basically capable of being as calllous as no doubt hundreds of petty German officials were during WW2 as they enforced the "rules".

The events of the past may as well just be in history books - it's not like we have learnt much from them, except perhaps how to refine the methods used then and use different PR .

Evil people are still amongst us, still in charge. The problem is it's actually getting harder to identify them.

You must know what the make-up was of Germany's forces - the regular army led by old style Generals who believed in a sort of honour for Germany that meant that even while they disagreed with Hitler's policies and actual war tactics, still felt they were honour bound to obey the Führer who had granted himself absolute power. Ordinary soldiers of course obeyed orders and were given the barest of information.

Not too dissimilar to thousands of Australian and US troops who set out to kill Vietnamese during the Vietnam War despite Vietnam never having done the slightest harm to Australia. Or as the boxer Mohammed Ali said at the time when he refused to join the draft, "Why would I want to go and hurt some Vietnamese peasant who has never done anything to me?"

And even though Hitler and the Nazis had built themselves a private army of nearly one million members - the Waffen-SS - there were at all times various plots within Germany's armed forces to dispatch Hitler, some of which did not happen because the right circumstances didn't arise, some because they struggled with their conscience about assassinating a leader and how that would affect the old world reputation of army commanders. Or like von Stauffenberg's complicated plot that needed a variety of circumstances to fall into place to go forward, and when the time was right, it was still foiled by a table leg, thus resulting in a savage retribution to hundreds who may or may not have been involved.

About 12 years ago I had lunch with a one time popular newsreader named Roger Climpson, who has just completed an exhaustive book based on numerous interviews with a Jewish couple who had survived Auschwitz and made it to Australia to start a new life and put the horrors behind them.

What Climpson hadn't expected, when the couple agreed to grant him a series of lengthy interviews on the basis that the story should be told - which they did, was that the couple's relationship eventually collapsed after hours of rigorous examination of the events that led them through these awful times.

As Climpson describes it, the couple brought up long suppressed memories and ended up accusing each other of not doing enough, or of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, or told tales of wealthy relatives who could have helped but didn't, basically a series of recriminations that destroyed their relationship which a distraught Climpson viewed as his fault when the couple parted and never reunited.

Thus he realised - the story was far more complex than he had possibly imagined and the real story, of how humans react under dire circumstances, was lost, leaving him with a book of actual events but not much human content.

Had you been born into a German family, Eliot, and recognised terrible events were happening around and it just wasn't right - how would you have reacted to the events at the time and what would you have done?

And they were very important. If you want to get on in that army ...

By the mid-1960s, the Mekong Delta, with its verdant paddies and canal-side hamlets, was the rice bowl of South Vietnam and home to nearly 6 million Vietnamese. It was also one of the most important revolutionary strongholds during the Vietnam War. Despite its military significance, State Department officials were "deeply concerned" about introducing a large number of US troops into the densely populated area, fearing that it would be impossible to limit civilian carnage.

Yet in late 1968, as peace talks in Paris got under way in earnest, US officials launched a "land rush" to pacify huge swaths of the Delta and bring the population under the control of the South Vietnamese government in Saigon. To this end, from December 1968 through May 1969, a large-scale operation was carried out by the Ninth Infantry Division, with support from nondivision assets ranging from helicopter gunships to B-52 bombers. The offensive, known as Operation Speedy Express, claimed an enemy body count of 10,899 at a cost of only 267 American lives. Although guerrillas were known to be well armed, the division captured only 748 weapons.

In late 1969 Seymour Hersh broke the story of the 1968 My Lai massacre, during which US troops slaughtered more than 500 civilians in Quang Ngai Province, far north of the Delta. Some months later, in May 1970, a self-described "grunt" who participated in Speedy Express wrote a confidential letter to William Westmoreland, then Army chief of staff, saying that the Ninth Division's atrocities amounted to "a My Lai each month for over a year." In his 1976 memoir A Soldier Reports, Westmoreland insisted, "The Army investigated every case [of possible war crimes], no matter who made the allegation," and claimed that "none of the crimes even remotely approached the magnitude and horror of My Lai." Yet he personally took action to quash an investigation into the large-scale atrocities described in the soldier's letter.

Westmoreland didn't want to know.

And something that is happening now.

The latest tightening of Israel’s chokehold on Gaza – ending all supplies into the Strip for more than a week – has produced immediate and shocking consequences for Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants.

The refusal to allow in fuel has forced the shutting down of Gaza’s only power station, creating a blackout that pushed Palestinians bearing candles on to the streets in protest last week. A water and sanitation crisis are expected to follow.

And on Thursday, the United Nations announced it had run out of the food essentials it supplies to 750,000 desperately needy Gazans. “This has become a blockade against the United Nations itself,” a spokesman said.

And a commemoration for an event 52 years ago. Not always easy to do. Readers might think about the principle of making the punishment fit the crime when the fates of the perpetrators are detailed.

I travel to Germany often. I've never met a generation of young people and their parents (on the whole apart from the usual ratbags) who have faced up to what their past was. I can't think of any country that has done likewise.

Not only would your services not be needed, I doubt you would have offered them.

Sergeant Schultz was of course, an American TV comedy invention. Complete nonsense like most of your comments.

On Saturday night I watched one of the worst films I have ever seen. It is called Winter Soldier and is the film of Vietnam vets describing the atrocities, murders and war crimes they committed against civilians from 1966-71.

They filmed their own atrocities and took photos. There was one photo of a dead Vietnam prisoner who could easily have been fast forwarded to Sabrina in Abu Ghraib gloating over the dead.

Torture chambers, phosphorous bombs, skinning and gutting of civilians, raping and murder of women and children.

This film and the tapes were hidden and covered up until 2002 when the film was released in the US and is now available on DVD in Australia.

Now in 2002 the US were well aware of the atrocities carried out in Vietnam, yet they sat around silent while the atrocities were allowed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Gitmo. They even supported the atrocities in the name of keeping the US safe from "terrorists."

3 million Vietnamese civilians died for nothing and one of the vets walks along the black wall years later saying "this is all we have to show for it".

Why the hell does the world only focus on atrocities committed by Germany against Jews as if Jews were or are the only people who mattered?

Over 100 million people were slaughtered in wars last century and all we ever complain about are the few million Jews.

Time to grow up and get over it because the Jews are no better than anyone else and they are no more important than everyone else.

The Geman people are little different to you and I (except perhaps I like doing business with them as the invoices always get paid on time).

Roughly half will be conservative in their thinking and the rest more liberal in thought. Like us, like the British (who they have more in common with than differences), a large swag of people in the middle swing one way or the other and thus elections are won and lost . We know Hitler stole power.

I ask again: what was the great mass of German people expected to do even if they heard rumours and stories of horror, second or third hand?

These atrocities weren't publicised as official policy. There weren't newsreel films of the camps, of the beatings of Germans who did speak out. There weren't a series of Sunday newspaper installments detailing the horrors with a colour supplement inducing you to get the next week's copy and read more. A Winston Churchill speech wasn't run on front pages or radio and regarded as compelling listening! He gave his speech in English after all.

Why do you think Josef Goebbels is often referred to the inventor of the modern PR industry? Because his propaganda worked.

And it works just as well today as we see in the USA where still a huge mass of people believe that the Iraq War is about fighting Osama Bin Laden (an all encompassing bogey-man).

I'll repeat again - certainly rumours would have swirled around but when has a country of people moved en masse to act upon rumours which may or may not be true? And why did the majority of German Jews foolishly believe they were safe, not flee and believe they could ride out what was obviously a pretty awful period, despite some of their own family and friends uprooting themselves and guessing correctly what the next move would be?

You need to study human behaviour a bit more and realise that we are all basically the same.

And tell me, what is it you expected the mass of German people to have done and how were they to go about riding hemselves of Hitler and his crew?

Michael de Angelos: " It should also be noted that despite the claims that the German people should have known of the extermination camps, the Allies had little knowledge of them despite an excellent spy network."

That's odd, because a frequent criticism of the Allies is that they didn't act soon enough to destroy the camps, given how early they did learn of them.

Winston Churchill knew of the mass execution as early as August 1941 - the knowledge of the camps was the basis of his famous "a crime without a name" speech of 24 August that year.

Precisely how tens of thousands of Germans working in and around the camps, some of which which were gigantic and incorporated factories and other large scale economic centres, could not know is beyond comprehension.

And there were hundreds of them!

Peasant children in Poland and Russia knew. Railway workers in Holland knew. Policemen in France knew. MI5 in London and the OSS in Washington knew.

But strangely, the Germans themselves, from Albert Speer down to the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of police, camp doctors, technicians, perimeter guards, clerks and countless others engaged in the process itself didn't know.

Goldhagen even cites letters and post-cards home to wives and girlfriends from executioners bragging about the killings!

There's even mob who try to pretend that Hitler didn't know!! David Irving is particularly fond of that lie.

I'm beginning to wonder just who in Germany did know!

What rubbish we are expected to believe to keep alive the myth of of the moral innocence and existential nobility of the German working class!

At no stage have I said Speer did or didn't know about certain events - I've merely said he always denied knowledge of them.

I personally haven't got a clue what Speer knew and or pretended to himself and that is the reason I point to Angela Lambert's book on Eva Braun as Braun was close to Speer.

Like Sereny, Lambert was an excellent and comprehensive researcher as she examines the manner in which many of the Nazi hierarchy - excluding the murderous band who executed or interpreted Hitler's orders - were able to cocoon themselves from reality.

By mainly basing themselves at Berchtesgaden where Hitler spent most of his time, until Germany really began to rapidly decline militarily, they lived a life of luxury and plenty, unlike the German people who were suffering great deprivations as their country fell apart.

Of course Sereny demolishes Speer's claims and I haven't said anything to the contrary (apart from ask where your quote came from which wasn't in the link you provided). Lambert basically confirms Sereny's writings as she attempts to examine whether these people deliberately or subconsciously divorced themselves from reality.

NB: It should also be noted that despite the claims that the German people should have known of the extermination camps, the Allies had little knowledge of them despite an excellent spy network. For that reason, when the American army first arrived at Buchenwald, the US Commander ordered the filming of the camp and bodies as he didn't believe the outside world would believe his accounts unless he had proof on film.

You do well to point to the election of Barack O'Bama as it is a great example of how fear and prejudice has been used in the USA (and here as well) by those with an agenda.

That fear has been finally overcome (for now) as enough Americans voted one way to swing in Obama's favour and chose not to believe the determined campaigns of McCain and Palin to paint Obama as a friend of terrorists (Bill Ayers who Palin claimed wanted to "blow up Congress"), a communist who wanted to "spread the money around" as a simple statement is taken out of context said to some ridiculous and fake Joe The Plumber. Their whole campaign was based on promoting fear that Obama wasn't a "real" American like them. It seemed to work for around 47% of the US who voted for McCain/Palin.

And a closer examination is needed as to why people voted for Obama and how much the Wall Street fiasco and rip-off affected the vote.

I'm not sure what your interpretation of fascism is but there are certain key pointers that indicate a country is heading that way. Such as the "military industrial complex" that Republican president Eisenhower recognised could easily happen in the USA, warned against, but certainly describes how government has been run under Bush and Cheney.

Perhaps the way Bush placed himself above all law (legally)and claimed executive privilege as a "war time" president which meant he was beyond any restraints like the necessity to obtain court orders for his illegal wiretaps. (As did Dick Cheney who claimed as vice president he was accorded similar status despite no such provision existing in the Constitution).

How many examples are needed? Deliberate lies used to invade the sovereign country of Iraq? Rendition and torture of prisoners of war (or just those suspected of being ones) on the claim they were "terrorists" and had no rights under Hague conventions (just as the Nazis executed German, French, Dutch citizens en masse on the claim they were "partisans" because they simply didn't accept Hitler as the almighty leader). Perhaps the fact that Bush had the CIA deliver the head of an Al Qaeda leader, packed in ice, to the Oval Office for viewing gives a slight insight into the man.

Obviously the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis (and I'm erring on he side of caution with the figure to be generous) doesn't seem to bother either Bush or Howard. Howard said he sleeps soundly at night, Tony Blair says it's OK as he believed he is doing the "right thing at the time" (despite evidence he knew the Iraq invasion was not only illegal but based upon lies).

Read Milton Meyer's And They Thought They Were Free and see how it's the small incremental steps they take a nation on a path to dictatorship and fascism.

And again, these small steps, despite the speeches of Hitler who claimed all in his path would be mown down, still didn't convince the majority of German or Polish Jews to pack up and flee at the first sign.

In retrospect, why aren't we asking them why they remained? It's as a legitimate question to ask why the German people simply accepted the small daily and weekly pronouncements as necessary to guard against some unknown enemy.

Just as millions of Americans still believe they are fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq and that Iraq was behind 9/11and that they needed a so-called "soldier" like McCain or a fiery Palin to protect them from "Muslims "(that diverse religion of so many divided groups who can't agree on so many things just as Christians can't) are intent upon invading America because they "hate them for their freedoms".

If you haven't been watching what has been happening in the USA, UK and Australia over the past 8-10 years you have either been asleep, agree with the methods or like a person when a pain is finally relieved, the mind erases the memory.

As for the Bush family, they are a dynasty like a "royal" family. They aren't individual politicians who have striven to finally arrive where they are. Like the Kennedys, they have used wealth, privilege and connections to gain power. The greatest example of their dynastic qualities is that the dumbest , the most inept , the most ignorant and ill-informed like George W. finally claimed the biggest prize of all.

In the end it's so much easier to blame the German people for Hitler. It's a way of saying we are different and would never allow it to happen.

When asking how the Germans allowed Hitler, Kristallnacht and the Holocaust to occur, we should look to ourselves for the answers.

I read Gitta Sereny's biography of Albert Speer (indeed I don't think there is a book by a credible author on the Nazi era I haven't read) some years ago and my memory is that Speer denied knowledge of the Holocaust until the bitter end.

Your link confirms my memory of Speer but nowhere does it quote him saying "the sparrows were singing the Holocaust from the rooftops", but it was widely ignored by the greater mass of the populace." It would be an odd quote for a man still in denial or hiding the truth either from himself or his interviewer.

I haven't checked your other links but you seem to be confirming what I have said - that a great many Germans did not support the Nazis and did protest and many suffered the consequences.

How can you make a sweeping statement like "There was no similar protests against Kristallnacht despite its very public nature - because it was popular"? It's impossible to see into the minds of 60 million Germans. Standing by allowing it to happen does not signify support. The Brown Shirts were a well organised bunch of thugs who brutally smashed anyone who got in their way.

We can only make assumptions based upon what was one of the most civilised countries in Europe at the time. And that is most likely a good percentage of Germans supported Hitler's industrial policies as they began to work, and a great deal didn't, as it was a country of well organised unions and a huge Socialist party - the one that the Soviet Union most supported as they judged that Germany could be the most likely to become socialist. These people were the enemy to Hitler & co. And indeed, during the early rise of Hitler and while he was in power, the majority of German Jews didn't perceive themselves to be under threat.

The "science" of eugenics was popular with many well placed medicos and thinkers in the USA and the UK. But the Nazis (not "Germany") were the political party that put it into practice.

Another book which puts into perspective life in Nazi Germany is The Lost Life of Eva Braun by German born author Angela Lambert who was brought up in England but who was able to interview many of her relatives including her mother (amongst numerous others) who remained in Germany, about life during WW2.

It gives a great insight into the capacity of the upper echelons to delude themselves that all was going well to isolate themselves from the horrors that were happening (which appeared to include Hitler himself, especially as the war became a lost cause and he rapidly mentally deteriorated). But her book also gives numerous accounts of family, friends and anecdotal evidence of a general civilian populace who were cowered and kept in place either by force and financial restrictions.

Lambert describes her own father as a vehement anti-Nazi and hater of Hitler's policies but still deciding to join the Nazi Party in order to survive. That is one of the great horrors of fascism - the total control and compliance of society either through force or total control of all aspects of life.

Again, most people seem to accuse the German people of supporting Hitler en masse, and stating they should have done something about him but are unable to say what exactly. It defies the concept that the majority of people are not ruthless and vicious but whilst they can see horrors happening, they feel impotent in trying to stop evil acts, and more importantly, when they are ruled by a tough and all powerful state, they are incapable of action if they want to stay alive.

Nor are the German people any different than most European people in this. Read this weekend's SMH and Petro Georgiou's attempts to get Howard to cease his inhumane treatment of asylum seekers using the awful example of a 3 year old girl, born in a detention centre who was now banging her head against walls, something that unmoved a man who was more intent on party unity.

It doesn’t mean Howard is a Hitler but it's a good example of how easy it is for one man to decide awful actions can happen as they believe it's for the greater good (although in Howard's case we will never know if he really was just on a personal power trip).

Again, the lesson of Kristallnacht are that we could very easily allow it to happen under the right combination of circumstances, and we have any number of times since the end of WW2.

The Cronulla riots are a good indication of how easy it is to whip up a frenzied mob and unleash them on a rampage. That only took one radio station in Sydney - imagine when the state controls all media outlets.

Just as German Jews thought they could safely ride out Hitler's time, whilst others fled, just as many Jews co-operated with the Nazis in order to survive (and no-one can blame them) or did deals to survive knowing the fate of others, or pulled strings with those in power, the idea of placing blame upon the entire German people is a psychological move to distance ourselves from the era and present ourselves as being above recrimination.

Yet just 20 years after the horrors of WW2, we Aussies were active participants in another holocaust in Vietnam. Nor are we above racism as I recall in horror when returning from nearly two decades of living in the UK and weary of the incessant talk of "wogs" taking British jobs on the buses, or "Pakis" taking over the corner store, open talk amongst Aussies (including my own family) of "slope-heads" who were apparently taking over the place.

Even though these were the very Vietnamese we claimed to have been saving from those in the North.

Instead we ease our guilt by placing it upon an entire nation - the German people. It's a way of absolving ourselves.

Your claim that there is a "marxist historical revisionists etc' is most odd given that after the Jews, or perhaps even more so, Hitler regarded the Slavic races as sub-human.

Michael de Angelos: "The majority didn't know and they didn't witness. They certainly knew after a time that something was dreadfully wrong but were helpless against an all-powerful machine."

The obvious disproof of this line is the vigorous protests conducted by ordinary German citizens against the regime's so-called Euthanasia program (referred to as T4) and the large scale protests by Gentile German women married to Jewish German men who massed in protest on behalf of their husbands who had been interned by the Nazis.

German women "massed in Berlin and demonstrated for three days for the release of their recently incarcerated Jewish husbands. How did the regime respond in the face of this popular opposition? It backed down. The six thousand Jewish men were freed. The women suffered no disabilities."

- DJ Goldhagen, Hitler's willing executioners: ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Little Brown & Company, London 1996

The outcry against the euthanasia program was even more intense.

"The outcry, initially from relatives of the [70,000] murdered [mostly handicapped] people, spread throughout the country and found leadership among priests and bishops."

- DJ Goldhagen, op cit.

It was impossible to keep the T4 program secret, given that thousands of doctors, nurses and administrators were involved in it, and given that the majority of those killed had families who were actively concerned about their welfare.

Despite the strictest orders to maintain secrecy, some of the staff at the killing centres talked about what was going on there.

By August 1941 the protests had spread to Bavaria. According to Gitta Sereny, Hitler himself was jeered by an angry crowd at Hof – the only time he was opposed in public during his 12 years of rule.

On 24 August 1941 Hitler ordered the cancellation of the T4 program, and also issued strict instructions to the Gauleiters that there were to be no further provocations of the churches for the duration of the war.

There was no similar protests against the Kristallnacht despite its very public nature - because it was popular.

Similarly, as Albert Speer pointed out to Gitta Sereny in his series of interviews of him by her, "the sparrows were singing the Holocaust from the rooftops," but it was widely ignored by the greater mass of the populace.

The idea that the German masses were "cowed" in "terror" and kept in "ignorance" by the regime but would have otherwise opposed the Holocaust is a propaganda myth spread by marxisant historical revisionists intent on explaining away the complacency of the German masses who took part in the events.

Hitler was never a popular leader with the majority of Germans. It should be remembered that outside Russia, Germany had the largest and best organised Socialist Party and a smaller Communist Party. If history hadn't taken the course it did, it's highly likely that the socialists would have gained power in Germany.

We don't need to discuss the manner in which Hitler snatched the role of Chancelor, but it certainly wasn't through true democratic elections. As difficult as it is, one must put oneself in a similar situation as to how many Germans felt at the time. A system was in place with a dictator and a ruthless SS private army to quell dissent which was brutally and ruthlessly enforced.

One could say that Germans could have risen up and attacked the state (and many did) but how does one actually organise against an all powerful state machine?

In fact Hitler kept himself at arms length from the many atrocities that took place. Having chosen a number of like minded individuals, he sat back and let a bunch of psychopaths wreak havoc.

In the beginning, Germany's economy was booming but certainly into the first year of WW2 as thousands of  German soldiers were dying, it defies description to believe that the majority of Germans were cock-a-hoop at what was happening. Their country was at war, with no successes (ruling France or Holland meant little to the German populace) and the mass of people were suffering the deprivations that war brings.

As the RAAF began to rain hell down upon German cities, in a fury never seen before, and in a deliberate attempt to terrify the general population on the bizarre belief that they would rise up and drag down Hitler, most people were even worse off. Day to day survival was all that mattered.

As for not heeding Edmund Burke's words - add Iraq to Rwanda and Srebenica, or indeed, the useless and dreadful Vietnam War, begun on a series of lies and in which a million Vietnamese perished (with Australia's willing help) on the flawed premise that communism was going to sweep the world.

People demonstrated, marched, got arrested, beaten and shot dead at Kent State University while that war raged on until public opinion finally turned aginst the war. How on earth could Germans have brought down Hitler when an atrocity like the Kent State massacre was just a daily occurence in Hitler's Germany?

The lesson of Kristallnacht is not that the German people simply sat back and allowed it to happen, it's that we are just as capable of allowing the same to occur.

The propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl were as phoney as the idea that the majority of Germans were willing participants in the Nazi regime.

And we aren't too removed from the effects of that same style of propaganda - as the world seems to be disintergrating into a financial quagmire, all our popular press including the state owned ABC can do is push the most meaningless and idiotic story of a PM and his supposed words to some dimwit US president as though it actually is important.

"They stood by as synagogues were set ablaze and Jewish-owned shops were looted."

By that stage, most Germans probably approved of what was happening. Hitler was, after all, a very popular leader with them at the time.

Marilyn Shepherd: "In her book Blind Conscience, Margot O'Neill has an interview with Philip Ruddock who states that German Jews should have waited in line to receive refugee status."

Could you quote the line in Blind Conscience in which Philip Ruddock states that, perhaps giving us a page number or other reference? I'd like to look that up.

Thanks.

In her book Blind Conscience, Margot O'Neill has an interview with Philip Ruddock who states that German Jews should have waited in line to receive refugee status.

In 1938 at the Evian meeting of 22 western nations the Australian representative was noted as saying "as we don't have a racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one".

Of course we did have a white Australia policy, we were allied with the Palestinians at the time, and we were stealing aboriginal kids from their parents.

But hey, we can't have racism.

Nothing could be more apt than to comment on the current Middle East situations when mentioning Kristallnacht, and the scary fanaticism of fascism for it is alive and thriving today.

The woes of the Palestinians deserves a mention on such an occasion and there would most certainly be no Israel nation if WW2 had never occurred. Of course both sides have committed terrible acts but some things cannot be ignored – that Palestinians are second class citizens, divided by a wall that dwarfs the infamous Berlin Wall (that became a shining beacon of freedom) yet which has received a fraction of attention the Berlin tragedy did, and their land has been stolen.

And the USA has been lurching towards fascism under the Bush regime with the bizarre (or is it?) coincidence that it was George W. Bush's grandfather and the Harrimans who helped provide finance along with German industrialists to fund the Nazi Party as it reflected their beliefs.

What they couldn't do to FDR (toss him out in a coup) instead they hoped a fascist Germany would rise and be a beacon for the plenty of like-minded wealthy individuals in the USA and UK who would surely see that Hitler was correct and convince their governments to take on his policies.

Without their financial support, whilst holding their noses with contempt with their personal distaste for the vulgar working class Hitler, they invigorated and financed his political rise in the belief the ends justify the means.

The invasion of Iraq is yet another shining example of that tyrannical imperialism dressed up as some sort "spreading democracy" doctrine which seems to mean killing an awful lot of people.

I can't think of a more apt time to reflect that, 60 years after the end of WW2, not much has changed (unless you count the around 300 governments and administrations that the USA has had a hand in changing by manipulating events to overturn a variety of elected governments around the world).

I'd also question Mitchell Bard's sweeping statement that "During the Holocaust many Germans professed ignorance about what was happening in the concentration camps. On November 9 – 10 1938, however, the people of Germany all witnessed the brutality of the Nazis". It simply isn't true.

The majority didn't know and they didn't witness. They certainly knew after a time that something was dreadfully wrong but were helpless against an all-powerful machine.

A great many witnessed and a lot more heard of events second or third hand – just as we do today – yet that was a time of limited media (and by which time Hitler's henchmen had neutered most of Germany's many and highly circulated newspapers – yet another aspect to ponder on in these days of diminishing media owned outlets) whereas we almost suffer from an overload in media that can produce the same effect – a disconnect and a difficulty in actually believing what is true and what isn't.

Try to convince people today, especially Americans, that rendition exists as suspects are transported to another country for torture and they simply will not accept it.

And it demeans the many thousands of German resistors – helpless as they were to ever change the course of history – who nonetheless gave their lives in a futile attempt to rid Germany of the Nazis (and who were made to suffer terribly before they died). That also included around any one time, a third of the German military command who were constantly plotting to assassinate Hitler.

Their have been numerous accounts written of and by Germans and their reactions during the rise of the Nazis and the events of WW2 but it is unfair to make sweeping statements that imply that the majority of Germans could have actually done something about it.

It's taken 10 years here to democratically overthrow our own petty tyrant who has ruled by fear and outright lies and 8 years in the USA to boot out the ignorant Bush administration who turned deceiving the public into an art form, yet despite the knowledge of so many of us that the invasion of Iraq was illegal, that it would be a failure (as the successful commander of the first Gulf War Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf predicted it would be), that thousands upon thousands of innocents would die needlessly – as they did in Vietnam, and that nothing would be achieved in the end (except the shifting of wealth which is what war is all about), only one year out from the Australian elections and a fortnight away from the US election history is being rapidly rewritten to whitewash the horrors of the last 10 years.

Of course we should never forget Kristallnacht. Certainly one branch of my family won't as despite them not suffering from the actual event, it signalled the eventual disappearance of around 20 relatives – vanished from the face of the earth.

But it's through events like Kristallnacht, that we should view our current history. Perhaps we can learn something.

Dylan Kissane,  unfortunately evil sometimes still triumphs.

Most people are indeed good people. Not courageous; possibly fearful, anxious to care for their own patch, and almost certainly lacking a feeling of power to change anything.

A lesson from that era is that the enemy is embedded in ideas, lies, mistakes, untruths and propaganda, rather than in people's evil nature.

750,000 Palestinians in 530 villages and 13 urban centres were driven from their land, those remaining are 4th class citizens, they are walled in like bugs by Israel, not allowed to tend their flocks or their orchards, denied food and power and thousands upon thousands have been slaughtered by Israel.

Spare me the hypocrisy from these people please.  What happened to them was horrendous in anyone's language but they have no right to make others suffer as they did and they no longer are victims.

It is time the west stopped pandering to them and being guilted into supporting the worst of their atrocities in silence.

Mitchell Bard's op-ed in the Jerusalem Post this week included the following commentary on Kristallnacht (bold added):

The deportation of German Jews to their deaths began in October 1941. At the end of April 1943, 150 Jewish children who had been living on a farm training to be Zionist pioneers were deported in one of the final transports of German Jews. Most died in concentration camps. Fewer than 10,000 of the 131,800 German Jews targeted for extermination by the Nazis survived.

Of the 43,700 Austrian Jews who had failed to escape the Nazis, fewer than 2,000 returned to their homes after the war. These were just a fraction of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

On this 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht we should be reminded of Edmund Burke's warning: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Both Rwanda and Srebrenica suggest we haven't learnt Burke's lesson yet.