[stannol]

I'm German but spend a lot of time in the US. I don't mind Nazi/WW2 jokes (even though I've heard all of them a hundred times), I don't mind that as soon as I mention that I'm from Germany someone will eventually bring up the Nazis/WW2 in conversation, I don't even mind that (very few) people think I'm a Nazi. What gets me every time though is how many people think that it could have happened only in Germany because the US is somehow different (as you said "genetically"). It's really unsettling.

[CmonDev]

Just start asking them whether any of their ancestors owned slaves. Also why do they let people without insurance and money simply die helpless.

[throwaway344]

You can blame the American healthcare system, but the idea that people don't get immediate life-saving treatment is simply not true.

They will get the immediate treatment that they need. It might be more complicated, expensive, and painful than if it was dealt with earlier, but it will still happen.

Look at the EMTALA. The wiki page is pretty good.

[Tycho]

'That it could have happened only in Germany' is an open question IMO. Or at least, if it isn't, then it's not obvious why (bearing in mind most people are not historians).

[ajuc]

There's no question at all. It happened in many countries outside Germany, just with less publicity.

For few pre-WW2 examples:

Even Hitler refered to genocide of Armenians in Turkey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

Just before WW2 there was ethnic cleaning of Poles in USSR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD_%2...

> The NKVD personnel reviewed local telephone books in order to speed up the process and arrested persons with Polish-sounding names. In Leningrad alone, they rounded up almost 7,000 citizens. A vast majority of such "suspects" were executed within 10 days of arrest.

Just 100 000 people, not during war against west, so nobody knows about this.

It was really common in history to kill the inconvenient people. We only hear about this when it's convenient for someone else to bring this up (and he wins the PR battle).

Today Holocaust stand on its own and it's evil to even try to compare it to anything other. I think it's bad for humanity.

[Tycho]

Armenian genocide seems like a similar phenomenon, although interestingly not very far removed from Nazi Germany in time and space. So while it might show that such things could happen 'elsewhere' it doesn't really prove that they could happen 'anywhere.'

The example of the NKVD seems a totally different matter. The wikipedia article describes it as a top secret operation. And obviously against a backdrop of numerous other political murders by the same regime.

[ajuc]

Killing all people of one nationality by state. Seems the same for me.

[stannol]

Care to explain how that is an open question? I was not speaking specifically about WW2, I guess at that time it 'made sense' that it happened in Germany. My point is that something like the Holocaust can happen anywhere. There is no populace on earth that is somehow 'immune' against supporting regimes with such agendas.

[peterashford]

I believe the Milgram experiment conclusively proved that a significant number of people can be coerced into doing the unthinkable when an authority figure tells them to. And this effect is universal.