article
Los que sobraban.Historia de la eutanasia social en la Alemania nazi, 1939-1945
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ISSN: 0122-5197
EISSN: 2248-6992
Autor
Schuster, Sven
Institución
Resumen
When the Germans refer to the capitulation of May 8, 1945, they frequently speak of 'zero hour.' Thus, textbooks teach us that the defeat of the Third Reich meant the beginning of a new democratic and capitalist era for the west, and totalitarian and socialist for the east. As we know, both systems were dedicated to building certain collective imaginaries about the meaning of the Nazi dictatorship, but both interpreted the year 1945 as the great historical rupture. On the one hand, the elites of eastern Germany built an anti-fascist tradition represented by the constant communist resistance since the 1920s. The new socialist state would then be the legitimate heir to this noble struggle, without structural ties to the Third Reich. Western elites, on the other hand, accepted the heritage of the Nazi dictatorship, but only to the extent that it was clear that the people would have been seduced by 'dark forces.' The 'common people' would have collaborated to some degree, although not in the worst crimes, but in general they were deceived and dazzled by a powerful ideology. Furthermore, the 'zero hour' myth implied that after 1945 everyone would have had the same chances of social mobility, since money had lost its value. However, they 'forgot' to mention that many Germans had invested their savings in real estate or other material goods even before the end of the war. In the first two decades of the RFA, structural and personal continuities were also ignored across the board. Supposedly, the 'denazification' campaign imposed by the victors of the war would have solved the 'problem'. Finally, with the generational change of '68, the problem of continuities was debated in a more critical way, at least in the west. Radical students and left-wing intellectuals were the first to attack the cover-up vision popularized after 1945. One of them was the young Götz Aly, at that time a student of Political Science at the Free University of Berlin and a member of various communist groups, such as the 'Red Cells'. In the ideological rhetoric of the time, the disciples of the revolutionary left wanted to show that the RFA was nothing more than the equally 'fascist' successor of 'Monopoly State Capitalism' organized by Hitler. Since then various explanations for the time have been offered, such as the different theories of totalitarianism, in the tradition of Hannah Arendt; the thesis of the 'singularity of the holocaust', which supports the 'historical non-comparability' of the genocide due to the centralized and bureaucratic form of its execution; the thesis of the people 'seduced' by a small group of versatile demagogues in the management of collective psychology; up to the thesis of 'collective guilt', formulated in 1996 by Daniel Goldhagen.