Welcome to Getting Curious!

I'm Jonathan Beness and every week I sit down for a 40 minute conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, we're trumping right back in where we left off with the associate professor Pascal Arboss from the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas Austin, where she goes on to answer what happened after World War II.

Welcome back to Getting Curious! This is Jonathan Beness. So, in recapping World War II, I guess the point that I'm trying to get to is that Germany was committing genocide and work, and genocide against Jewish people, LGBTQ people, the...

Disabled, that's where they started actually, several years early, the Sokol T4 program, taking people from all of these different clinics who they considered unworthy of life, and they were people with some such really quiet minor disabilities, developmental or physical, and this is also the group on which they tried outgassing as a method of killing.

They did that in Germany proper, but they got enough pushback from the Germans to say, hey, this is my nephew, sure, my nephew had these and these issues, but where did he go to?

And the clinics would just say, oh, died, and so forth. And the rumors started going around, you know what? It looks like these people are being killed, the so-called Euthanasia program.

Euthanasia, I say, so-called because Euthanasia, of course, presumes that you give permission. Nobody gave permission. This is murder.

So it's also because of the pushback of these German relatives that the Nazis realized we better do the murdering somewhere else.

So they very deliberately create the places to murder people, primarily in Poland. A number of camps in Germany at a later point when the full... the war is in full swing and nobody can actually check what the Germans are doing.

Anyway, also have gas chambers, but the majority of the murdering by those methods happens in Poland and offside and out of sight of the Germans.

This is also one of the reasons why Germans after the war could claim, you know, the Ahab and this Niskowlust, we didn't know what happened, which is true and not true.

They knew what the Nazis and what that group was up to and they didn't protest it and they didn't say anything when their neighbors disappeared.

But would they have known exactly that there were camps in Poland where Jews were gas to death? True, they wouldn't have known details.

And also I would not defend, you know, but it's like 0.75% of the population is like you maybe wouldn't, like you maybe wouldn't necessarily like all of the people who are just, you know, thinking about like going to work, doing hair, doing this, doing that.

Like it's like something you hear about on the news and it's like you don't, but they didn't even have TV. It's just like a different...

So I guess I understand what you're, I understand how it could some would say I didn't necessarily exactly know, but obviously the rumors, you know, that is really...

So, but I guess the other point that I was going to make is that it isn't until Pearl Harbor.

It's not like America was like this is fucked up what they're doing to Jewish people and to disabled people and to certainly LGBTQ people.

I was probably not crossing anyone's lips at 1945, but it's like it was Pearl Harbor that really got us into it. It wasn't that there was like some moral imperative on the American public that like spurred us into helping.

No, and actually what's important to keep in mind is that even once the US gets involved in the war, the entire purpose is to defeat the Nazis.

And even when the Americans get more and more absolutely reliable intelligence from the British, but also they themselves take aerial photographs for instance of outrids

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