History is Awesome!

This is, I'm afraid, another review of a book that is More About Me than about the book.

I don't have the book. I've never owned the book. I haven't even picked it up in, well, decades.

Nevertheless, this is probably the book that got me interested in capital-H History. And I was reminded (even though I recommended it to someone a few weeks ago) of it by stardreamer's post on Kent State.

Fox News is pushing a "the students shot first" narrative.

Are we all clear that I do not give credence to Faux News? Good. My immediate thought was to compare them unfavorably with the Volksdeutscher Beobachter, the Nazi propaganda arm, at least until I realized that for everyone else, that's an obscure reference.

Yeah.

If I were seriously rich, I would buy a copy for all the "journalists" and make them read it demand a ten-page paper on it as a condition for hiring them (or retaining them if they're already hired).

Don't get me started...  We lived in Germany (military dependents) for three years, and of course the topic of the war was a sensitive one and we got a sort of quick summing-up of the history, and I had the idea that Nazis were not very nice people at the very least (there were a couple of old movies on TV with Undergrounds and heroics, but that couldn't happen to Us, we were the good guys), but as a kid, I had only the haziest notion of how any of that had happened.  When we returned, we lived in New York City for a couple of years, and then we moved out to an older suburb.  Now this was when New York City public schools were still pretty good, if crowded, and the public schools in the suburb?  Were not all that.  Particularly the high school.  I have no idea what clued my mother in (I should ask her); the only memory I have of that high school was the smell of old dried milk in the cafeteria.  So they looked at private schools and ended up parking the younger sibs in the local elementary and junior high and me in a small Catholic-but-not-parochial school.

At the time, neither my parents nor I were Catholic.

(Yes.  It's ironic.  May I continue?)

So I got the crash course in manners (stand when nun enters, end sentence with "Sister," stuff I've forgotten.  Morning prayer), but since I wasn't Catholic, it was agreed that I would spend the time during which everyone else was in religion class in the library.

(No, they never did manage to lock me in.  Opportunity missed.  Phooo.)

So I went through the magazines and a couple of books really quickly, and then I took down this book.

I don't remember how long it took me to read.  I do remember all sorts of data on post-Great-War Germany and the life of Hitler and how Nazism got started and spread, and how they came to power and began to implement and did implement their program.

Scary stuff.  Particularly noteworthy was the fact that the oppositions were divided from each other on ideological grounds.  Also, there was a certain amount of Not Taking It Seriously.

Shirer had actually been in Germany reporting, so some of this was first-hand journalism.  But he also marshalled his (terrifying) facts and built up a huge and detailed portrait of Nazi Germany such that no sentient being, after reading this book, would permit this sort of horror to happen ever again.

Sometimes people learn from history.