> This in turn made it hard to explain what Hitler was even trying to achieve with the war.
Perhaps ironically, the best way to understand what Nazi Germany was trying to accomplish is to read what they wrote about it - which is pretty much tantamount to "teaching the Nazi narrative," isn't it?
WW2 looked very different from the perspective of each state actor. It even looked substantially different to a common soldier or citizen of each state than it did to the state's leadership.
The Nazi leadership wanted expansion of the German state to include all of Europe. Most of the Nazi leadership wanted to exterminate "undesirables" within the borders of that state as well - but to the German citizen drafted into the Heer in 1942, it was about keeping the Communists at bay, and as the war wore on, about keeping the advancing Red Army from raping and pillaging what they saw as their homeland.
Honestly, I don't know how we should teach it as a society. I know how I teach my kids - I give the best overview I can of the motives of each major state actor and then reference individual accounts of people living under the regime. I do my best not to assign right or wrong to their actions, excepting things that are obviously morally repugnant like the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the actions of Unit 731, and the Rape of Nanking.
> The Nazi leadership wanted expansion of the German state to include all of Europe.
No they didn't. They wanted to expand the German state to include areas with significant German population (Austria, Sudentenland, Elsass, Slovenia etc.) and then they wanted to expand the state eastwards into Poland and Western USSR for "Lebensraum".
Germany occupied France, Belgium, Denmark, Norway etc. for military strategic reasons. They had no plans of incorporating these countries in the Reich, which would be counter to the whole Nazi ideology of a German ethnostate.
This is exactly the primary point of my post - yes, the Nazis didn't consider those countries to be "German", but they intended to include them in their conquests to build "Festung Europa" ("Fortress Europe").
You're right, I didn't differentiate between the areas they aimed to conquer for Lebensraum and the areas they intended to conquer for strategic purposes. Should I have? Why? Should I have gone so far as to mention that while they didn't intend to occupy Britain, they certainly intended to bomb them into submission?
"Nazi Germany wanted the German state to include all of Europe" is accurate, just incomplete. They also didn't intend to invade Switzerland or Sweden. They fought alongside the Finns for most of the war, until they fought against them.
Hell, you could even go so far as to color the actions of some of the German military staff as anti-Nazi even as they fought against the Allies - Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, for instance. Things like that are important pieces of information for historians and other interested people, but are they really important enough to cover in a high school history class?
This isn't accurate. As I understand it, the theory was that the state should control "the race". Which means that it would decide who has children with whom, control marriages, who educates them, how, where and why. In other words, control everyone, everything, to get a perfect society. The goal being improving/purifying "the race" further. The thing that makes it different from a bond movie is that it's not a singular "evil genius" type of guy but 20-30% of the population trying to do that.
I pity whoever had children in Germany in the 1930s because that must have been terrible, no matter how German you were. Granted, the experience was vastly different for Jews, but it wouldn't have been a good experience for anyone.
The "first" holocaust, so to speak, the beginning, was the state euthanizing psychiatric patients with no hope of recovery (real ... and imagined, like gays). Then they went after the long-term ill, like people in coma or with serious illnesses (this was before widely available antibacterial treatments so there was no shortage of such people), and generally everyone who was a burden, eventually including everyone who was perceived to not be 100% dedicated to the state, in the opinion of the idiot bullies that worked in the police and the various state services.
Like in the Soviet Union, what the Nazi state did was give people like teachers, police officers, army, gestapo (let's call it their FBI equivalent), ... absolute control over normal citizens. Needless to say, this power was not really used for the stated purpose, but to allow sadistic bullies to utterly control everyone around them. God help you if your kid did better in school than the assistant principal's kid. To let scared politicians torture 100 people to death because someone let their dog poop on their niece's law. To let moral busybodies in the state arrest all children and have them perform hard labor in a camp because there was a girl that got pregnant unmarried (Nazis arranged marriages), or had a kid with someone other than the arranged partner. To let bureaucrats take away children from their parents "because they didn't raise them right", and then (usually) torture those children (given the motivations of those people, like the assistant principal referenced above, I think you can "understand why" they would torture those children). To have the mayor declare that the fact that 10 people died from starvation because there's no food in any store, and it's the fault of that evil enemy, not the fault of him diverting all the food to a party in his garden for his wife's cat's birthday.
The thing people don't seem to understand is how the human mind works. Under such circumstances, you might expect people to revolt, but that didn't (and doesn't) happen. People wouldn't revolt, not even the Jews being deported. What do people do when they're tortured ? The vast majority ... try to join the torturers. That part is not different from the Taliban to the Soviets, to the Holocaust, except perhaps in scale and just how far they went.
That's why such a system can keep existing and continue itself. It's victims want to join, not revolt. That's why these systems can grow. In the Soviet Union, such a system existed for a further 30 years at least. Ask a few ex-Soviets, the bureaucrats were let loose there for much, much longer than in Germany.
The important thing to realize is that the US police/FBI/CIA/... contains many people that aren't all that different from their counterparts in 1930s Germany and, given the chance, they would do the same.
But of course, people have forgotten. We just need more laws, more powers, more investigations, to make society just and to make sure those damn rich bankers don't get away with everything, don't we ?
> Under such circumstances, you might expect people to revolt, but that didn't (and doesn't) happen. People wouldn't revolt, not even the Jews being deported.
Not true, there are multiple instances of Jewish uprisings - most famously the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the Sobibor uprising and multiple others. They just lost.
By the way, why do you use the euphemism "deported"? They were murdered.
True, but I would argue there has been serious persecution at least from 1936 onward.
I guess I meant they first got deported, then murdered. This is also what it looked like where they lived. They were put on trains (and I would argue, things were rather clear from, say 1941 onward. "Wir haben est nicht gewusst" is bullshit). Before 1940 or so, it was only deportation. Later forced labor, then mass-murder. This was accepted and even assisted (e.g. the "Jewish councils") by perpetrators ... and by victims, and by wittnesses.
Please don't think that I intend to deny what happened, that is not at all what I intended. I guess I've just read the term deported many times online, and in movies. I feel somewhat ashamed that I do see what you mean complaining about that being a euphemism and I do apologize deeply. That was not clear to me, but it should have been.
Perhaps ironically, the best way to understand what Nazi Germany was trying to accomplish is to read what they wrote about it - which is pretty much tantamount to "teaching the Nazi narrative," isn't it?
WW2 looked very different from the perspective of each state actor. It even looked substantially different to a common soldier or citizen of each state than it did to the state's leadership.
The Nazi leadership wanted expansion of the German state to include all of Europe. Most of the Nazi leadership wanted to exterminate "undesirables" within the borders of that state as well - but to the German citizen drafted into the Heer in 1942, it was about keeping the Communists at bay, and as the war wore on, about keeping the advancing Red Army from raping and pillaging what they saw as their homeland.
Honestly, I don't know how we should teach it as a society. I know how I teach my kids - I give the best overview I can of the motives of each major state actor and then reference individual accounts of people living under the regime. I do my best not to assign right or wrong to their actions, excepting things that are obviously morally repugnant like the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the actions of Unit 731, and the Rape of Nanking.