Every now and then I’ll hear some piece of information back to back from very different sources which amplify the importance of the information.
That just happened to me today. In the broadcast referred to in the previous post about George Marshall I learned that George Marshall was appointed Chief of the Army the night that Germany defeated France. He was woken at 3AM and given the news.
Just now I was watching BBC Newsnight when an interview about German author Hans Fallada took place. I’d never heard of him. He was an opponant of Hitler and fascism during the war and when it was over wrote a novel Alone in Berlin about a middle class couple who defied the Nazi’s and paid for it by being beheaded by the Gestapo.
The book has been well known in Germany but until now has not had a good English translation. Apparently it has finally been successfully translated and its a cracker jack story.
For as long as I can remember going back to my years in elementary school I’ve heard people ask why Germans rolled over and let the fascists get away with what they did. The folks on the BBC interview said that while 12,000 folks are estimated to have been resisters in Berlin almost all Germans fell into line when France fell to Germany and it was obvious that resistance was futile.
In both America and Germany most people thought that a war would proceed along the lines of the First World War and end up in a long stalemate along the French border where my grandfather earned his Congressional Medal of Honor.
History doesn’t always repeat itself. For instance, I don’t always lose elections.
