The Difficulty of Analyzing Nazism

For the past few weeks, it's been really hard to force myself to read articles in the HBB reader, or to pay attention during the documentary.  It's really easy to just say, "They're Nazis.  They're not normal people.  Why should I care what any of them have to say?", and I've had to keep myself from doing just that over and over and over again throughout this process.  It's really hard to listen to these stories, mostly because of how atrocious some of them are, (You mean they killed disabled children?  Ones who had never done anything wrong?) but beyond that, I've mostly seen Nazis as cartoonishly (sometimes literally) evil villains my entire life.  It's so much easier to think that Nazis would never talk or act like the rest of us, that I would be able to spot someone who believed in Nazi ideology from a mile away.  But the people in the documentary aren't like that.  They almost sound like any random person on the street, until you listen to them and go, "What do you mean you Jews controlled all of the media?  That's never been true!"

And there's the tough part.  It's impossible to truly understand an event unless you can at least comprehend the motivations behind both sides' actions, but that's really difficult to do with something as horrible as the Holocaust.  It's so much easier to ignore why Hitler's ideology became popular, not just because of laziness, but also because of how damaging that can be emotionally.  By far the easiest choice is to say, "They hated Jews.  Case closed," without asking why an entire nation was willing to hate a small and harmless group of people.