Reply #16: That's quite inexcusable. Everyone has had ample opportunity to learn [View All]

[struggle4progress]

that membership in the Hitler youth was required by German law (although the law was enforced unequally) and it was not synonymous with party membership (though the youth organization was intended to funnel children into the Party as they grew older). For the most part, obvious opponents of the Nazis did not survive the war except by leaving the country: handing out anti-Nazi leaflets or turning off the radio during a Hitler speech were likely to result in an appointment with the guillotine or the wrong end of a Nazi pistol, so the Germans mostly collapsed in a cowardly silence. That's not particularly admirable, of course, but it still requires a certain idiocy to sneer comfortably from a distance of sixty years, without understanding what would have been required from a fourteen or fifteen year old to stand up against it