Memorial Day*

I was a child during WW II, and the only contact with it I had were the weekly newsreel movies I saw.  For about ten cents a theatre downtown showed films of naval air battles in the Pacific, but only the ones we won.  They supplemented them with a cartoon, a travelogue, and other news, so that there was about an hour of viewing..  On Wednesdays. I took the bus in after school, and met Mother afterward for dinner.  She, of course, had spent the day shopping, her major source of entertainment.

I first became conversant with the war in my fourth year of college when I enrolled in "Abnormal Psychology" which was taught by a man who had interrogated famous Nazis at Nuremberg.  I was, and still am, fascinated by how many ordinary Germans allowed them to continue.

Curiously, today in America, research reveals that the  largest ethnic group is persons of German descent, and very few of them, including myself, are Nazi sympathizers.  Therefore, recently. my continuing study of Nazism took me to a film on TCM entitled "The Mortal Storm" (1940) which I actually began watching at 7 p.m., an hour before I usually start prime time viewing.  I hoped it would shed new light on Hitler's Germany.  It didn't.

The story revolved around a professor, portrayed by Frank Morgan (The Wizard of Oz) and his family and friends.  It appears he taught at the famous college in Heidelberg, because TCM played one of those aforementioned travelogues about it moments before.  The professor was referred to as non-Aryan, which I assume meant Jewish, because he was neither black, nor dark-skinned like a gypsy, nor likely, with a wife and three adult children, homosexual.

Filmed in 1939-40, the movie was set in 1933.  The professor, his family and friends were at dinner at his nice house when one of his servants came in and announced that the radio said that Hitler had just been appointed chancellor.  Immediately, his two sons and his daughter's boyfriend began Sieg Heiling and spouting intolerance.  I know that movies accelerate events, but that was ridiculous.  Of course, the story went downhill (there was actually some skiing) thereafter.

I am still left with the question," If, in 1939, we thought so many men were instantly infected with hatred and intolerance, why didn't all people of good will do something to avert the holocaust?"

* To borrow an idea from a popular pundit, " Today we honor those who fought and died to preserve capitalism which has given us freedom and prosperity, and which President Obama would eliminate."