BETRAYAL AT THE HANDS OF OUR FRIENDS

This is one topic that fascinates me (and my wife, who served in Austria on a mission and who is a German minor from BYU).  How the intelligent, organized, good people of Germany turned into what they did during WWII.  How did such an elevated people fall so far?  In difficult circumstances, we have a morally corrupt people shedding the thin veneer of civility and doing heinous things.  Many we surround ourselves with would do the same in order to meet their human needs.  Peter betrayed Christ in order to save his own skin.  Peter was/is instrumental in this final dispensation.  He stood approved, but not until after he was crucified upside down on the Appian Way outside Rome.  Not sure if Peter was betrayed before his final mortal act - but he understood what the Savior went thru after going through that ordeal.  We are all tested to our limits to see how we will respond and whether we will remain true and faithful.  Really, it is reality TV at its finest - Truman Show-style.....

If you look at your life objectively (from a third person perspective), it is really quite fascinating.....

Here is the LDSFF article that got me thinking on the matter - and the reason we need to make sure we surround ourselves with only the finest people who would die for us - who have a Zion spirit about them.  Lesser people will wither in the heat:

linj2fly wrote:Persecution and betrayal...a lesson from the holocaust:

http://www.fsu.edu/profiles/gellately/

(Robert) Gellately had already published a book on German anti-semitism before the First World War and was doing research in a German archive when a librarian alerted him to a collection of Gestapo files—19,000 of them—that Nazi officers had not had to time to burn before the Allies arrived.

"I started to read these files about all the victims in just one region of Germany that the Gestapo had processed," Gellately says. "It would have taken a large force of secret police to collect information on so many people. I needed to know just how many secret police there really were. So I asked an elderly gentleman who would've lived through those times, and he replied, 'They were everywhere!'"

That was the prevailing myth.

"But I had evidence right there in my hands that supported a different story," Gellately explains. "There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn't the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors."
This chance experience in an archive grew into his second book, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-45 (Oxford University Press, 1990). Gellately had begun his lifetime project: writing books as a way of righting inaccuracies about one of the most significant events in human history.

As he was uncovering who was acting as the Gestapo's unsolicited agents, he also began to discern what motivated neighbor to inform on neighbor. The surviving myth told the story of informers who were motivated either by a commitment to the Third Reich or by a fear of authority.

But the motives Gellately found were banal—greed, jealousy, and petty differences.

He found cases of partners in business turning in associates to gain full ownership; jealous boyfriends informing on rival suitors; neighbors betraying entire families who chronically left shared bathrooms unclean or who occupied desirable apartments.

And then there were those who informed because for the first time in their lives someone in authority would listen to them and value what they said.

Did informants know the consequences of their accusations? Did they know that the accused were frequently freighted to concentration camps? Tortured? Killed?

"If somebody tells you that they lived in Germany during the Holocaust and didn't know about concentration camps, they are self-delusional, at best," Gellately says.

Not only were the camps not a secret, Gellately's research revealed, but the Third Reich made them a part of most Germans' daily life.

"I tested the assumption that 'Germans didn't know about the camps' by looking at their daily newspapers. This research project checked a small sample of newspapers, collecting only those articles with literal references in the headlines to 'concentration camps' and other related terms," he explains. "Even within that limited sample we found enough articles to fill a large carton."

This revelation became a focus of his third book, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933-1944 (Oxford University Press, 2001) and set off a controversy that became the focus of an episode on the popular German television program Panorama (the German equivalent of 60 Minutes), for which Gellately was interviewed at length.

Interesting that the catalysts to one's internment were common and simple human weaknesses: jealousy, greed, petty differences, etc. (If I remember right, it is claimed that many of the guantanamo detainees were 'turned in' for the same motivations).

I should note that I haven't yet read this researcher's book, but as one amazon reviewer notes, the author "makes the startling claim that most Germans were aware of Nazi atrocities - though not necessarily the worst - and yet found them tolerable as a means to combat crime."

Politically, we tolerate, as a nation, many liberty abuses and now assassinations of suspected terrorists in the name of fighting terror. Now that that indefinite detention has been codified for civilians, how will our collective attitude translate when this actually begins to be applied, and the DHS line, 'see something, say something,' expands....will our human weakness, likewise, trump our conscience?

How do we prepare for such a possible, or probable, repeat? How do we, or should we, avoid those whose passions may overcome their better judgment?

(Then again, maybe informants won't be as necessary, given the massive surveillance infrastructure already in place)