[freddie]

"I would have preferred it if he'd followed his original ambition and become an architect." — Paula Hitler, Hitler's younger sister, during an interview with a U.S. intelligence operative in late 1945.

You know… I really don’t understand Germans. Their attitude these days is like none of the two World Wars ever happened. It is illegal in post-WW2 Germany to mention or paraphrase anything remotely relative to Nazi symbolism. I don’t mean just obvious stuff like wearing an idiosyncratic swastika T-shirt while parading around downtown Frankfurt chanting “Sieg Heil!” Even ambiguous stuff like discussing 3rd Reich ideologies in a local pub might as well land you in prison. Why this mindless ultra-sensitivity towards the subject in general? It’s not something that could EVER be elegantly swept under a rug for all eternity. Yes, it happened. Yes, it was bloody and inhumane. Yes it showed the worst conceivable part of the human psyche imaginable.

Nazis have been regarded in most of the world as synonymous with evil. Condemned by all and none so with more zeal then Germans themselves. Conveniently forgetting or rather dismissing the fact most adult Germans living today had Nazi-flag-waving fathers and grandfathers, seeing Adolf Hitler as a deity of Germanic pride who’ll save them from the pitfalls of Semitic conspiracy. It doesn’t take much to turn a nation into a bunch of blood thirsty mass-murderers and convince them Jews are in fact natural enemies of the so called “Aryan race”. If anything this was the ultimate lesson to be drawn from those grotesque 5 years.

All ex Yugoslav nations have had their fair share of vices and regrets over the turbolent history of last 60 years. Speaking for my nation alone I can say that we’re well aware and we fully accept consequences of the communist-led partisans killing thousands of innocent people after WW2, under the pretense that they were all German collaborates, which they weren’t. Whole families of German and Slovene noblemen disappeared, so their possessions could in turn get nationalized by the Red Army. Only after we gained independence in 1991 has it been officially recognized that a great majority of these unfortunate people were taken to hidden bunkers and burned alive. Old people are still telling hair-raising stories of hearing their screams as flames overwhelmed them. Yes… my nation did that – our ancestors. It was partly down to post-war hysteria and mostly a part of a master plan of the Communist Party lead by Tito and backed by Stalin. Yet when it all comes down to it – it was the people who did the killing. Everyday people like you and me. Despite this we're not ashamed of these things. It happened and we won’t deny it. It’s not illegal to mention the communist party, the partisans, nor abhorrent mass murders that happened. It’s a lesson and we take it as such. Not denying it is actually the part that shapes it into redemption.

It is my opinion that modern Germany has to embrace those 5 years and take them for what they are. No use in hiding from shame, pretending nothing ever happened because it sure as hell did. Call it the burden of a nation but also the responsibility of a nation. Making sure it will never, ever happen again, yet not treating it as the unmentionable. The forbidden, mysterious aspect of it only adds fuel to its already iconic status among extreme nationalists, turning it into a new-age manifestation of Satanism. And that’s what modern ultra-liberal Bundesrepublik Deutschland doesn’t seem to comprehend. They think evil can be stifled into submission with passive oppression. It can’t. Such is the nature of humanity. The prime evil of animalistic instincts is always here, bubbling under the surface of this illusion we call civilization, just waiting for the right opportunity to burst out. And it will. Faster than you can say: "Ja, mein Führer!”