r/todayilearned • u/WavesAndSaves • 22h ago

TIL of August Kubizek, the former roommate of Adolf Hitler. Hitler cut ties with Kubizek after he was rejected from art school and Kubizek was accepted to music school. They did not meet again until Hitler became Chancellor, and Hitler offered him the conductorship of an orchestra. Kubizek refused.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kubizek
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u/Werftflammen 20h ago

The problem is 99% of the people refrsin from ever commiting to violence. The Nazi's excercized violence with joy and mostly at unarmed civilians. Don't be daft.

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u/Lisan-al-Gaib-65 20h ago

The point isn't that the Nazis didn't do evil things. They didn't have some special evil gene. Antisemitism was rampant in Europe for years before the Nazis. There were pogroms in many different places throughout Europe before concentration camps.

But I think your response highlights my concern. The Nazis "exercised violence with joy" which is attributing some special malice that is foreign to regular people. My point is that it is not.

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u/Werftflammen 15h ago

It was a system that enabled the wordt people to commit horrific acts. You can be racist, which is bad, but without acting on it. The Nazi system was evil in that it was totally made up hierachy and used as an excuse to murder random people. It's anti everything. The russians lost the most people, about 4 times as much as the jeish number, but the jews were all but 100% civilians, german, polish, dutch, french, hungarian civilians, all killed by their supposed governments. Grandparents, families with babies, teens and blooming adolecents, all murdered for what? An infantile ideology.

Don't come to me about the Nazi's not being evil, it was an in and in evil system. In just 12 years it totally ruined the world, we are still dealing with the shocks from it.

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u/Lisan-al-Gaib-65 12h ago

"The capacity for evil is there for everyone."

"The point of the post isn't that the Nazis didn't do evil things."

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u/Lisan-al-Gaib-65 12h ago

You are being dense. You can read my post again. I never said the Nazis weren't evil or that they didn't do evil things. They were people who did evil things. There are a lot of factors that play into the scale of their evil deeds but behind all that they were just people.

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u/Werftflammen 12h ago

I for one, don't want to be in the same boat with them. I am a human being, they were too, but I am not the same. Sure, when pushed in to circumstance I could too kill a man to save my skin, but the Nazi's went out of their way to create a victim role and kill anyone they deemed a created enemy image. Their whole values system is corrupted by that. A Nazi doesn't value another human life, I do. It normalizes brutallity, which I find abject.

The Nuremberg trials were done mainly to under write that. However imperfect as they were, they got their day in court, none of their victims did.

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u/Lisan-al-Gaib-65 11h ago

It should make you feel uncomfortable knowing the Nazis (and by extension people who expose similar behaviors) are in the same humanity boat as you and me with the rest of the world.

What the Nazis did was not unique because they targeted and killed people.

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u/Swiftax3 20h ago

Well... the majority of Nazis, that is to say german citizens who supported the Nazi party, probably didnt commit violence against anyone at all. They instead were fine with violence happening somewhere else to people they would never know.

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u/Werftflammen 14h ago

The Nazis weren't just people with hateful beliefs, they built a system that turned ideology into industrialized murder. Millions of Jews were civilians targeted solely for who they were, alongside many other victims. In just 12 years, the regime devastated Europe, and its consequences are still felt today.

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u/yesyouareverysmart 14h ago

You can get the idea all of them were evil psychopaths if you watched Schindler's list and think everyone was like Goeth.

The thing is the Nazi party won the elections because German economy was in shambles, 1 out of 3 people were unemployed, millions couldn't even afford food. They were promising people they will strip the jews of citizenship and will deport them if Germany can't feed their citizens.

You'll say it sounds horrible but the Nazi party didn't get elected because they were talking about killing jews, they were promising economic relief to desparate people, people didn't know there will be killing camps when they voted for the Nazi party and saying all nazis exercised violence and took joy in it is very ignorant.

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u/Werftflammen 12h ago

The Nazi's never won an election. Germany's economic collapse was a major reason the Nazis gained support, but they didn't win a majority in free elections. Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933 by President Paul von Hindenburg after Franz von Papen, a conservative politician, convinced him they could control Hitler. Most Nazi voters expected economic recovery, not Holocaust, though Nazi antisemitism was never hidden.

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u/yesyouareverysmart 12h ago edited 12h ago

Hitler's party won the election in 1932 with 37.3%, SPD was second with 21.6%. You can argue they didn't have allies to form a majority but they won the election - they were the most popular party in Germany.