Traudl Junge was Hitler's secretary and witness to his suicide in the Fuhrerbunker. A lot of our historical knowledge of what life was like in the Fuhrerbunker in the days leading up to Hitler's suicide, and the immediate aftermath, as the Soviets shelled and occupied Berlin, comes through her and a few other key witnesses.
Hanna Reitsch was a luftwaffe test pilot who was also in the Fuhrerbunker in the days leading up to Hitler's suicide.
I recently watched the 2004 German Movie Der Untergang or Downfall, because it's been memed to death since the 00s because of a scene where Hitler crashes out and screeches at his general staff. People used to put fake subtitles over it. The movie Downfall is mostly from the perspective of Traudl Junge, but Hanna Reitsch also visits the bunker before Hitler offs himself.
I find these two women fascinating because neither of them were executed and they represent opposite mental strategies for handling the downfall of a fascist regime in which one is not only present and complicit, but an active participant.
Traudl copes: She always said in all her autobiographical work and interviews that she was young, she was merely a secretary, she didn't know what was going on, that she didn't realize what a monster Hitler was right away, etc. She was in her 20s. But in an interview very close to the end of her life she admitted: Her youthful inexperience and naivete were no excuse.
Hanna Reitsch on the other hand was never ashamed to be a nazi. She seethed after the war instead of coping. She always said that Germans were mostly still nazis, they just pretended otherwise because they lost. She would go around even until her death in the late 1970s wearing the diamond-studded iron cross Hitler had given her. She wanted to die in the fuhrer bunker with him while Traudl escaped through soviet lines when she had the chance.
If and when the the collapse of the major reactionary nations of today finally happens, will most people cope and pretend innocence like Traudl Junge, or will they openly seethe that they lost like Hanna Reitsch?
>>2375803>>2375698>thread that makes a few casual observations<weird angry emotional reactions that don't really address anything that was said or outright seem confusedEven AI can craft a more coherent and relevant response. Sad!
>>2375827>You didn't see ordinary Russians (white emigrés notwithstanding) coping or seething after the collapse of the Russian Empire despite that being one of the most reactionary states of its dayI think the peasants, who made up a majority of the country, were a little too shellshocked by WW1, the civil war, and the rapid changes in their lifestyle due to industrialization to really cope or seethe.
>>2375647>She seethed after the war instead of coping. She always said that Germans were mostly still nazis, they just pretended otherwise because they lost.People are strange animals. The only thing I'll say is that most Germans weren't hardcore Nazis in the same way that Hitler and Himmler were, but many supported them for various reasons including them just being on Team Deutschland. Or that it's better to win than to lose, stuff like that.
There were soldiers who witnessed atrocities who were like "man, we're really doing some awful stuff, so I better hope we win because we're going to get it really bad if we lose." Most people aren't die-hard emotional fanatics all the time because they can't sustain it. What leads to genocide is the indoctrination and dehumanization of the enemy getting drummed into people over and over again through repetition so it buries itself deep in the mind below the level of consciousness. People followed orders in a cold-blooded kind of way and with the individuals involved being like little cogs in a larger machine. People were responsible but a lot of them were like Traudl who just had this one job as a secretary.
>>2376278When it came to atrocities themselves there was also a psychological component that is almost apolitical in terms of how it works on the individual soldier. Much is made of how participation in horrific shit like anti-partisan reprisals or rounding up Jews was totally voluntary, that German troops could opt out of these things with no formal punishment. This is taken as proof that the participants were convinced Nazis who did it because they believed in the ideology and wanted to carry out these killings. However a big part of it had more to do with the psychology that prevails in all military settings which is that you stick by your comrades in arms, which in turn is a basic survival mechanism with obvious importance in any military at war. Sure, you could sit out this anti-partisan operation, but then your buddies (guys who were likely your neighbours, friends from school, coworkers, etc) are going to have to do it by themselves, and you'd be abandoning them to carry this alone. It was in many cases leveraging the inherent espirit de corps of any armed force to guilt people into participating. This doesn't of course excuse the horrors these people inflicted, and every one of those mfs belonged at the bottom of a Yugoslavian coal mine for what they did, but it's important to understand the varied psychology of these kinds of actions in order to prevent and move beyond them.
>>2377550>However a big part of it had more to do with the psychology that prevails in all military settings which is that you stick by your comrades in arms, which in turn is a basic survival mechanism with obvious importance in any military at war. Yeah that's a big one. I'd maybe sum it up as "peer pressure," but another thing is that war changes the context in which everything else is happening, and shooting people often takes on its own justification which occurs after the fact. You see this a lot with, for example, police killings in the United States and how people have this way of being like "that guy deserved it"
because he was shot by the police. They will find some absurd reason like, he was a bum, he shouldn't have knicked that cigarillo, whatever. "FAFO." Really because the guy is black and he's a n
_r and the cop isn't, and that's how they're thinking deep inside, even if they're not wholly conscious of it, because it's been drummed into them. That's what some of that intersectional / confessional "let's admit to our racism" stuff that some liberals could get carried away with was really trying to get at.
You see this with Israelis a lot, like after the war started, there were Gazans hanging out on the beach on the other side of the Strip (mundane, ordinary things like this co-existing alongside war is actually commonplace), and some Israeli T.V. pundit was like "arrggh how dare these bastards act like this after [blah blah Oct. 7]" as if the Gazans were doing that as a deliberate insult and affront to him personally as an Israeli, and so he wanted to kill them all. I'd say that Hamas killed some civilians too (I saw a video as it was happening of an elderly couple gunned down at a bus stop, and the unfortunate thing is that these things happen) and people who support Hamas rationalize that because they either didn't kill anybody or killed "settlers" who were "living next to a concentration camp" or having a rave. Honestly I think that is more of a rationalization. Like, what did they expect having a rave right there? Ka-blammo! Don't these people realize they're partying in the middle of a war-zone? RAT-TAT-TAT BRRRRRTTT!!!! However, it's also a fact that the scale of the violence and butchery inflicted by Israel on Gazans is far greater in scale (and is still continuing), and Israel uses atrocity mongering stories alleged to other side to justify its atrocities.
Interesting OP, but it's impossible to tell how people will react about this hypothetical major collapse.
I think a lot of people on /leftypol/ tend to believe most citizens of first-world nations are completely in agreement with their own government and capitalist class, and that they are doomed to fall into irrelevance and suffer as China and Russia gains more influence.
First of all, it's important to realize the world economy is completely globalized at this point, and in constant flux. Something happening in one country can affect the whole world, it's all interwined.
For example, let's imagine the Global West would collapse soon in a brutal manner for some reason.
Despite what anti-imperialists might claim, this wouldn't be good for China. China is an export-oriented economy who peg their currency to the USD in such a way that the renminbi have a lower monetary value than Western currencies. The goal is to make sure Westerners consume a lot of Chinese products, and they do.
If the West isn't able to absord the glut of Chinese commodities anymore, this would be a big problem for China if salaries stay low in other countries and if their domestic consumers don't get Western-tier wages.
Second of all, like Sabocat said, it's all depend how the collapse would happen. It could be dramatic, but it could also happen over a long period of time.
Take Serbia in the 1990s for example. At first, the nationalist Milosevic government was pretty popular with the Serb population.
After the US and the IMF said to the Yugoslav government that provinces need to hold referendums on independence if they want financial aid, and Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia decided to split, Serbs declared war on them in 1991 and 1992, because there was problems regarding the status of Serbian minorities in Croatia and Bosnia. Slovenia gained independence after a very short war because they speak a different language and are pretty distinct from other Yugoslavs, but the wars with Croats and Bosnians were absolutely brutal. Everyone genocided their neighbors, the wars kept going on so some soldiers and generals of all three armies could loot villages, sell stuff on the black market, prostitute local women, it was horrible.
In the end, after a few years, Serbia lost, but now they had an other problem they wanted to deal with: Kosovo.
It was the original land of Serbs, but it was slowly depopulated as Serbs moved to Vojvodina in past history, and by then the majority of Kosovars was now Albanian.
So they went at war again with Kosovar Albanians, but this time NATO intervened at some point, in part because the US wanted to build a military base there and Albanians would be more in favor of it.
By 1996-1997, they were already protests against Milosevic due to election fraud but they didn't change much. I think the tipping point was when NATO started bombing Belgrade and Serbian infrastructure in 1999.
Serbians lost the war again and I imagine at this point, after 10 years of war on top of widespread corruption they had enough. The parliament burned and Milosevic was ousted in 2000. Some mention a backdoor deal from the opposition party, but I imagine everyone really had enough of him.
Nowadays, I think most Serbs realize the wars against Croats and Bosnians were wrong, though some still hate them. Most do hate Kosovar Albanians because there are still tensions between the two communities. And of course NATO is hated as well. But it goes to show that the collapse of a government can take a long while to happen, and people can turn from enthusiatic about their government to hostile in the span of 10 years. The downfall of Nazi Germany happened really fast but some changes took several decades if not a century or two, and the opinion of people drastically change overtime.
Look at the UK, it used to be the biggest empire in the world, and while they lost almost all their foreign lands, and the situation is rather grim, it's still one of the richest country in the world.
Some people might cope or never change their opinion, but some might be indifferent and only care about their family or friends, some might rejoice (if the collapse means affordable rents, I'm all for it), some might move to another country, some might take the opportunity to get involved in politics, some might take the grillpill or live off the grid.
Sorry for the hippie stuff I'm about to say but people are all different, and you can't really predict stuff like this.