All of Germany's history, achievements, hopes and dreams, obliterated by 3 wordsNope,
all that stuff was obliterated by pure hate. That's the power of hate, ten years of it can wipe out centuries of achievement. Germany didn't make a bad political decision, they committed cultural suicide and pretty much took the rest of Europe with them. Up to that time Europe was the dominant cultural, scientific, technological and financial power in the world, now that's shifted to China and the USA, and it's going to be a long time - if ever - before Europe regains that.
So many lies were spoken in German in the 20th Century that it will take two or thee more centuries before anyone can ever believe anything said in that language again.The sign was over a nazi death camp; not over Germany itself.The hell it wasn't. That sign became the totality of German Culture. Germany put it up, they have to live with it. It may have only been at one camp (out of how many? Oh say about 1,200 camps and subcamps in countries occupied by Nazi Germany) but that one camp becomes the symbol for all the camps, and with that Auschwitz, and it's three million people who died there (2.5 million gassed, and 500,000 from disease and starvation according to the camp's first commandant, Rudolf Höss) serves as the icon of the unspeakable horrors that Germany inflicted on just about everyone they came into contact with during the Nazi period.
Arbeit macht frei - which, by themselves are true
Work does not make people free, it does not liberate people. What makes people free is the willingness to suffer the insecurity that freedom brings instead of trading it for comfort.
Though it's pretty hysterical that in part creating those slave labor camps to produce for the Nazi war machine went a long way toward losing the war for Germany. Dig it. Germany had an astronomical rate of weapons failures. Particularly explosives, which after the people in the camps had assembled them had a tendency not to explode. The slave workers did everything they could to sabotage production.*
The American idea was slightly different. We put women into industrial production. Over 11 million women went to the factories and shipyards during World War II, Rosie the Riveter was the all-American girl. And you know what they did? They built the toughest
>-bleeped-< ever tossed into combat. US planes could get shot to hell, get half a wing shot off and still make it back home. You know why? Because those girls were not building those planes at the point of a gun under the orders of a self-proclaimed "master race," they were building them for their dads, their brothers, their sons, their boyfriends and the boy next door. They also built ships - right here in the Bay Area. How good were the girls? The first ships required about 230 days to build (Patrick Henry took 244 days), but
the average eventually dropped to 42 days. The record was set by the Robert E. Peary, which was launched
4 days and 15½ hours after the keel was laid. Them girls rocked! Pretty much they rocked twice. They rocked once over here building the weapons, and then they pretty much rocked Germany into rubble when the weapons were delivered. Work does not make you free, but free people do much better work. Like everything else the Nazi's had it ass backwards.
But perhaps if we look at it another way work does make you free, by way of prisoners doing the work so badly, Germany lost and America showed up and liberated them.
* -
At the Gustloff factory in Buchenwald, prisoners succeeded in systematically reducing the production of carbine barrels over a period of months, while at the same time wearing out enormous numbers of special tools. In Natzweiler, during the disassembly of damaged airplane engines, prisoners also damaged the parts that were still intact. At the Heinkel Works, young Russian prisoners from Sachsenhausen regularly removed valves that were extremely difficult to replace. In rocket assembly at Dora-Mittelbau, prisoners diverted materials being transported, disposed of small parts on the sly, rendered tools unusable, and welded seams in violation of all technical specifications. The success of such acts of sabotage rose in direct proportion to the extent the SS itself was involved in monitoring productionhttp://thirdreichseasternlegionsandpows.devhub.com/blog/534473-slave-labourers-and-sabotage/
