Yesterday's "Fresh Air" featured an interview with German-born jazz and caberet singer Theo Bleckmann. I listened to the entire interview despite my complete lack of interest in the subject.
I do that a lot. Terry Gross must be a good interviewer.
Anyway, there was one little nugget that got me thinking. They touched upon Bleckmann's family and what effect WWII had upon his childhood.
I don't recall precisely which family member did what, but an uncle or some-such lost a leg on the Russian front, and his mom or aunt or somebody was a resister, etc.
I have no reason to doubt his version, or anyone's, for that matter, but I've begun to find something very odd about all the various stories I've heard about Germans during WWII.
Have you ever noticed that every fighting-age German male of that era was either actively involved in the war effort or else resisted on moral grounds? Didn't anyone avoid military service just because they really didn't like the idea of being in the military?
Surely there were some who didn't mind the Jews and didn't want to take over Europe, but were too indifferent to oppose the war, but avoided service primarily as an act of self-preservation. And there must have been a few who sort of liked the idea of 'the master race' and thought it was all a great idea, except that they really didn't want to be bothered to get involved.
I mean, I know political apathy is more rampant today than it was then (rampant apathy? Oh, well, I guess it's no worse than my militant agnosticism), but surely there were a fair number of German men who got out of military service who did so merely because they didn't want to serve.
I think I'll chalk it up to historical whitewashing.
By the way, the tiny picture above is of Kenneth Mars as Franz Liebkind in "The Producers."
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