I've avoided, so far, using the phrase.  But I keep comingcloser.  My father-in-laws parents came to the US in 1939.  If you've been reading my posts for more than a month you know what that means and do NOT need it explained.  The phrase I've avoided?  "You DO realize, of course, that your parents came to the US to escape JUST that kind of thinking."

Came close late last month when I suggested that those who ran were as bad as those who supported.   Notphilosophically sure that's the case, but I posited the thought.  Those who ran, after allowing the thing to be set in motion, are at fault as well.  I'm labeled as a former slave owner because my family came to Ohio from a former slave owning state.  That was over 150 years ago.  My family did not participate in the activity - they were hard scrabble subsitance farmers about three hollars over from the Hatfields and McCoys.  So why can't Germans be held to the same standard?

It was with that from of mind that I read The War Against Truth.  It begins 

February 22nd was the 71st anniversary of the murder of Sophie and Hans Scholl and their friend Christopher Probst. They were young people, in their early twenties, who lived in Munich, Germany. They, along with other members of a peaceful, anti-war group known as White Rose, published leaflets informing fellow-Germans of the wrongs being engaged in by the Nazi regime. The three were caught with such leaflets, quickly tried for the crime of “high-treason” and immediately executed by guillotine.

At her trial, Sophie testified: “Somebody, after all, had to make a start.” Her final words were: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause.” When, in 2003, a nation-wide poll asked Germans to select the most important people in the history of Germany, Sophie and Hans Scholl finished in fourth place. They came out ahead of such men as Bach, Goethe, Gutenberg, Bismarck, Brandt, and Einstein!

Go read it.  Twice.