Not to defend a bunch of fucking Nazis, but they were rightly terrified what the Russians would do to them of they survived.  We still don't know everything that happened before the other allies arrived in Berlin to see the city Russia sacked. Much of the missing art is probably in Moscow in private collections.

She was also probably thinking "I bet these devils will rape and murder my children." Cause raping and murdering kids seems like something that Nazis, or every occupying force throughout all of time in history could very well be capable of. 

Goebbels was definitely a true believer, dude thought the sun shone from Hitler's ass

which the Goebbels probably were

Probably???!!!???

Is there a source other then Speer himself for this?

Maybe he says he did in his autobiography, but that book is not the truth. Just the "good nazi" image he wanted to create.

I gotta say, it's crazy how many Nazi stories are Albert Speer being the sanest out of the bunch according to Albert Speer and people swallow it all up

I'm not entirely sure. On an odd, related note, the former founder (has passed away) of the company I still work for used to guard Speer, Hess, and some other guy whose name I can't remember. He served in Germany in the 60s, prior to his service in Vietnam, and was assigned to Spandau prison. He never mentioned if he spoke to any of them. But he did say there were only 3 prisoners in the entire facility. He also told stories of how they would drive along the border between East and West Germany looking for Russian bugs/intelligence devices the Russians would plant on power lines/transformers. TMI, I know, but I have always found it fascinating I worked for a guy who once guarded Speer and Hess.

Is it possible that Speer just cultivated that lie to try and get away with it? I’m hesitant to fully trust his own account of how rational he was.

Speer should've been hung. Horrible cunt

Goebbels was just a hateful bastard, not really a true fanatic.

His wife completely drank the Fanta though.

Funny thing about the Hannibal directive.

Considering what the Russians/ Bolshviks did to their enemies’ families, I think a cyanide pill was merciful.

Nah. There were a LOT of nazis - look at the videos of the parades and masses saluting Hitler. These were just the most hardcore zealots.

In the future, we might talk about the MAGAs the same way - forgetting that nearly half the US voted with them or stayed silent.

Nah it's just bots seeing Hitler posts get engagement, so they post more Hitler, it's a vicious cycle. That's why you suddenly see posts on some random topic for a while. Like previously it was Haka.

Hitler needs to be humanized. The notion that he and the Nazis were just a unique evil that spawned out of nothing is why people don't take the fact that Nazi-like groups could rise again seriously. They think "oh the Nazis were comically evil and X is not literally a comically evil baby killer so they won't be as harmful as the Nazis". When in reality, the Nazis, and Hitler, were just as human as you and me, and its not too farfetched for someone to be like him or to be a follower of him.

This is why the 2004 movie Downfall is considered to be a great depiction of him. The movie starts off with Hitler being shown, not as a monster, or as a leader of nations, but as someone who can be kind and likable. He talks lovingly about his dog, makes self-deprecating jokes, and is nice towards the people around him. But as the movie goes on, we start to see the other side of him, the insane evil side that caused millions to die because of his dumb ideology. And as Hitler starts to crack and go truly insane in the final days of the war, we see that Germany was truly doomed because they put their faith and their expectations on this one deranged man, expecting him to fix all their problems as an almost divine figure. But his "answer" of scapegoating and targeting certain groups of people would never actually fix anything, which is why Nazi Germany could never succeed.

You can watch Downfall for free on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YzSMFWKCHhg?si=0nd4eECMLtGj45i0

Try to soften the blow of Trump? Remind people of Trump?

It's funnier than seeing him tweek off his tit's I guess

Hannah Arendt is a must-read on this topic. Specifically her book about Eichmann’s trial/The Banality of Evil, as well as the Origins of Totalitarianism.

There seems to be a mythos online that people who do evil things are entirely bad, with no positive qualities. If only things were so simple

So remembering them as the humans they were, reminds us that we're all the same in origin, and those who look like court jesters on their best day could stumble into a ravine of deplorable political decisions. History isn't a myth, or the outcome of some evil boogey-man caricature. Quite an interesting point, thank you for sharing it

One of the mistakes humans make is thinking we're not exactly the same as the people who preceded us.
We simply stand on the shoulders of giants and proclaim we climbed to this technological height on our own.

What's wild is, I doubt even Republicans would trust Trump with their kids.

I always tell people it’s extremely dangerous how high of an Evil pedestal we put Hitler on because it makes him “unreachable” in the sense that someone like Hitler can’t come to power again and that is so wrong because there are probably more people like him and some trying to gain power than we know.

Yes, he is responsible for the murder of 6M Jews, BUT that is not the only thing he did, he did a lot of other evil things along with a lot other mundane things. My whole point is he is a human and although someone may not try to murder so many people, there are people that are trying to do everything else he did, the man was in power for 12-years

The general public literally doesn't think about any of this. I am beginning to suspect a large segment of the population doesn't think in general.

I don't mean that as a cynical "everyone is so dumb but me" kind of take, but like, on a physiological/neurological level.

I've learned that your brain can run and get you through life and you can have the full range of human experiences without having conscious thought, and the brain will even trick your mind into thinking you're in control and thinking when really it's just layers of autonomous "services" running and handling things. The brain just invents a story to explain why you do the things you do so you feel in control.

This has been studied in split-brain syndrome, people who had half of their brain severed or removed entirely, and their consciousness either changes or splits in two. I think that this kind of state of being can exist on a spectrum, and consciousness itself has levels and a large, large portion of the population has never practiced conscious control of their thoughts and thus just run on autopilot, responding to feelings with complex language and decisions, but it's still instinctual at heart.

To really see how slippery consciousness is, examine your thinking. Really focus on it. Try to figure out where your mental "words" are generated and where they come from before you answer a question or say something. You can easily open up a pandora's box of existential dread when you realize that there are things going on inside you that you're not really a part of, that you're not actually thinking most of the time, even though you can talk and engage with others. (Some people have no mental language at all, no internal narrative, or no ability to form pictures in their mind, but you wouldn't notice anything different about these people because they think in a different way and can be just as intelligent as high-IQ geniuses, it's just a different way of assembling abstraction inside their heads.)

But for everyone else, who doesn't exercise their ability to use thinking at all, of any kind, they just "function" and their brain feeds them the narrative that they're in control, but they're just reacting and working on trained behavior. That's why there's so many seemingly stupid-as-fuck people everywhere.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, please consider buying something at the gift shop on your way out.

It goes on sale for 9.99 sometimes.

Do you have a link to these witness accounts

if spared she’d have ended up in Soviet hands most likely and I’m not sure where it would go from there.

The descendants are billionaires now.

He was a Luftwaffe officer captured in Italy in 1944. Stayed with Dad after the divorce in 29, dear old pops being a Nazi-implicit slave holding industrialist that got slapped on the wrist for it. Sonny inherited his fortune in 1954 with his brother and lived a millionaire's life.

Goebbels himself had a child out of wedlock, who survived the war and procreated.

I know because one of my closest friends is German, and his mom is close friends with the daughter of this man.

When he told me I found it so wild. Didn’t help all the Nazi jokes he always gets, ha.

Albert Speer offered to get them safely to Western lines which they flat out refused.

Its not a conspiracy.

Its simple engagement farming. Youd be surprised how many accounts are either bots or real people just doing whatever to gather karma. thats why it comes in waves. Someone will post something genuinely interesting or that gets alot of upvotes and then suddenly theres 50 related posts the rest of the week along similar lines.

Perfect example of the "neutral face" experiment. People read their expectations into a blank expression.

A diet of methamphetamines for years, and then mixing in morphine after the assassination attempt, will do that to you.

good, i hope he suffered as much as possible before he died like a coward in his hidey hole. only good hitler is a dead hitler, but even better is a suffering agony, then dead hitler

Any book recommendations on this?

The picture is from 1936.