Originally posted by ~Caligula~
Think about that once more.
Hitler was quiet excited about wiping out jews,slavs,gipsies and who knows what else.
Whatever were his private plans, his publicised ones never included extermination of anyone untill well into the period when WWII turned sour for Germany. Then he turned his concentration camps into death camps.
There are no reasons to believe that proportion of germans who would knowingly support xenocide was any higher then that of poles, dutch, french, ukrainans, etc. - some of which gladly cooperated with nazis in rounding off their jewish neighbours for slaughter.
Most germans never expected such turn of events and did not condone it in the least. Not that the measures they approved were nice, but outright killing was not one of them. In fact most things that they approved of - forbiding inter-racial marriages, segregation, refusal to do business with, etc. - was quite common in US of A at that time.
Very few germans would risk their lives to kill a jew - even among those who wanted to do so.
By the way, Hitler, unlike Satan was a real historical personage. What he said and what he did and how he did it and when is well documented - including by himself.
Coming up with any bad things imaginable and attributing it to Satan's influence may be a valid method in religion but not in science. It may be tempting to think that blaming the bad guy for more stuff - real or not - cannot hurt, but in history details do matter.
Ignoring a little matter of timing like when Hitler made his mind (or made public his plans) to physically eliminate jews may not make much difference in our opinionn of Hitler's character, but it makes a world of difference in our opinion of german character.
miko
