No worries. I wasn't talking about child abuse, that surely is far more complex. Kid aged 7, whose parents may have been thick as pigshit nazis for all I know, grows up being told how Jews are at the root of all evil, bombarded with propaganda, potentially surrounded by people who keep reaffirming all that... That's why I say which surroundings/relationships they were born into are just random luck.
At which point do you expect them to come off it? How exactly? Following whose guidance and example? People here holding the average kid to Sophie Scholl standards... well, you know name and surname of this one person so that alone should tell you it wasn't the norm. We would all like to think being born at that time we too would be Sophie Scholls but it's statistically very fecking unlikely.
Fact is, we know feck all about how we would have turned out so I think there's a far stronger case for compassion than getting all vindictive.
Again, marrying an SS soldier after doesn't sound great and avoiding the trial doesn't sound fantastic to me. I would like to think IF that had been me I would have moved on, been an outstanding citizen for the next seven decades and would relish the chance to speak out, condemn, apologise, point to a life well lived... But what the feck do I know? She may be fed up of running through that and people not responding well to it or, more likely, she probably has dementia or doesn't actually remember that much at all and knows it will be torture.
We are really at a point were the exercise is worthwhile, but if you do the maths you can hardly get all that angry at the individual in question. It wasn't their doing but that of the two generations prior to theirs.
I think that level of propaganda is child abuse, specifically emotional abuse. To cause a child to
other specific groups is to take them away from a natural state of empathy, forcefully changing their emotional responses through controlling behaviour.
Teenagers in general tend to push boundaries and rebel. Children of Republicans turn Democrat, children of religious people turn secular, I mean, how many movements like CND, climate change BLM etc are known for their student activism element. That time, that exact time 13 to 25ish, is when they were supposed to say, no, those are human beings who I'm not going to kill, not because you say Jewish People or Gay People or Gypsy People or Disabled People are bad. No I'm not going to listen to that shouty man, he's chatting a load of bollocks. If you lot are gonna lock up that kid I've known all my life, I'm gonna help them escape. It was at
that time that she decided to work in a concentration camp.
The point about child abuse is that the vast majority of abuse victims don't go on to abuse and an even tinier proportion become active predators. I concede that the societal and economic pressures of the great depression may have caused some people to make bad work decisions, but not to the point of knowingly working in concentration camps.
The fact is that the research we have on childhood abuse and complex PTSD points to society not acting in the way the Nazis did, but tending to more emotional and compassionate behaviours, especially after thinking independently. This kind of predatory behaviour that needs to be punished with no time limit, the same as we would do to a paedophile who themselves were abused as a child. Its not being vindictive, firstly, its justice and secondly, its a deterrent.
The fact that she's lived nearly 80 years on, makes me the most angry. How many 18 year olds didn't get to 96 because of her direct actions? No amount of apologies, condemnation or "living life well" will make up for that, when she is responsible for many, many much better lives being snuffed out.
At some point intergenerational trauma has to be stopped, and that can only happen when one of those trauma victims takes responsibility, possibly more than their own share, for the good of the following generations. This lady, trying to evade again, is not taking on that responsibility.