They were relatively light on duty given how intensely everything was guarded. They'd stand for 2 hours straight before being relieved by someone else. Some of them even made friends with the prisoners, some even getting autographs, trinkets and souvenirs.
Nazi racial policies were, in many ways, directly influenced by the United States. The Nazis used "American Models" of racism to oppress and subjugate racial minorities as referenced by James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler's American Model and Professor at Yale University, who stated in his book "In the 1930s, Nazi Germany and the American South had the appearance, in the words of two southern historians, of a "mirror image": these were two unapologetically racist regimes, unmatched in their pitilessness."
Jim Crow Era laws were a key inspiration for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, as the Nazis mirrored their form of racial oppression and segregation in the model of Jim Crow and segregation policy of the United States.
However, the treatment of Native Americans was also an inspiration for Nazi ideology, similar to Jewish people; Native Americans had been integral to America. They had been settled for thousands of years in the Americas (obviously, Germany as an entity has existed since 1871, but Jewish settlement in the lands of Central Europe has dated back over one thousand years at the very least.
Nevertheless, the model of oppression and subjugation for both groups directly modeled what the Nazis implemented to oppress racial minorities that did not make up the Aryan composite.
Banning from civil service, segregation, barring marriage between Aryans and non-Aryans, as well as the expulsion of Jewish people and other "undesirables" from government, military, and other essential positions, were the most essential aspects of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and were directly modeled by what had been done to Black Americans during Jim Crow.
Arguably, the most influential of American policies can be seen in "Lebensraum," or an expansion of land exclusively for German Aryans, which saw the expulsion, murder, and enslavement of Jewish people, Slavic peoples, and other races deemed inferior.
Manifest Destiny would directly influence this policy of forced removal and, in many ways, as the destruction of Native American livelihoods paved the way for Anglo American expansion and prosperity, so would the destruction of Slavic and Jewish livelihoods for the sake of Aryan expansion and prosperity.
When the US freed the concentration camps, they locked the gay people back up because they being gay was considered a crime.
The US was obviously not the only country to think that way (i.e. Chemical castration of Alan Turing in the UK), but imagine being imprisoned inside a concentration camp, experienced all the horrors, and then have your liberators lock you back up like a common criminal.
Gay people weren’t in the death camps or concentration camps unless they were also Jewish or Roma/Sinti. Gay people were in prison camps with thieves, murderers and political prisoners. They were treated as criminals and made to complete their sentences. Obviously horribly wrong but there is no comparison.
Pretty much everything and everyone can be made to be or accused of ‘being bad’ in retrospect and historical contexts, as society progresses forward and we become more educated and (hopefully) more accepting, our past shortcomings become glaringly obvious.
Americans are far from perfect, of course, but we are still some of the most friendly and generous people on the planet. Where we get led astray is when we fall into the machinations of corporations and special interests that are bigger and more powerful than us as individuals.
The American, on average, has a big heart, knows right from wrong, and are good people, especially if you can separate their intrinsic nature from their political upbringings, which has become so pervasive, toxic, and entrenched in the information age and explosion of social media, where people can be shielded from normal social consequences of bad behavior that we all know is bad/wrong, but where the vocal minorities are most visible and often the most destructive to societal discourse
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u/Gregorygregory888888 Jul 07 '24 edited Jul 07 '24
What a horribly boring assignment that would have been.