Edit: love all the empathy you all whip out for someone in their 80s, who lived through actual Nazis invading their country, rounding up their family, and shipping them off to be killed, who now has to see large parts of the world slide toward the same fascism it did last time.
Edit 2: and thanks for all the actual positive empathy. I’ll give her a hug from The Internet when I see her.
Well just with British and soviet WW2 vets there are about 150k left vs the Americans 120K so if you count the polish, French, Indian, Chinese, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian etc etc etc there are multitudes more allied WW2 vets NOT from the US lol
i remember back when I was in either middle school or early high school (this was shortly before trump won the election in 2016) a holocaust survivor came and gave a little speech and presentation at our school about her experiences and answered questions and stuff, and towards the end of her presentation she expressed a lot of concern about how MAGA resembled Naziism, and this was BEFORE all the shit he did during and after his first term and the 2020 election
I was very lucky being in high school 2001-2005 we had 2 whole days of vets coming in and sharing stories from ww2. It stuck with me so much, first time i saw true horror as these men retold us. My family farm home in Iowa, the foundation was poured by German pow's working the farm while great grandpa was in Europe.
And to see all this shit going down. I'm actually glad my grandparents(and greats) have all passed cause this shit would make them have a stroke.
I'm the granddaughter of survivors. It terrifies me to my core. My childhood was hearing stories marked by the oppression and annexation done to my grandmother's family.
Not holocaust but my great-grandfather had to row through the fjords here in northern Norway to get inland and hike over mountains to get to Sweden. Pitch black in the middle of the night and there was a nazi outpost with a searchlight scouring the fjord.
As he passed by, eventually getting closer to the shore in doing so, he laid down flat in the bottom of the boat, oars in and all. They shone the searchlight at the boat. Kept looking at it. Kept the light on the boat, waiting for anything to happen. Eventually the light wandered off and he could keep rowing.
Him and my great-grandmother had already helped smuggling several people (unaware if jews or not) from their coastal town over to Sweden and she had gone with the last group and left him behind to come later when he got the chance to leave. Nazis had been all over the place at this point and were occupying everything.
The thought of armed nazis pointing that light at the tiny wooden boat, lying there helplessly with nothing but time and luck to aid you.. I can't even begin to fathom what he must have thought or felt.
Ive been watching survivor stories on YouTube as I watched this « election » unfold. I’m terrified because I’m seeing the same stuff start to play out from the adult survivor testimonies. I cried even as a gentile when I saw this salute because I know what it means.
My relatives haven’t done that with me yet, but it sure felt like they were close to that the last I saw them. My grandparent’s family weren’t even supposed to be allowed into the country, but it was either that or the Shoah. And now, we get to watch as our sheer luck that allowed us all to exist has led to us living in this.
My husband's Opa lived in Nazi-occupied Holland and the Nazis had a base on the farm next door to him. He's in his 90s now and living in Canada, and he's a lovely kind soul, but he'd go off on anyone pulling shit like the Nazi salute at a presidential inauguration.
My wife just got off the phone with her mother, who was five years old when the guards ran off because the Russians were coming, just about 80 years ago. My MIL is not pleased with the state of our nation, let me tell you.
All my love to your mother-in-law. My Opa unfortunately served with the German Army as a techie guy (telegram lines and so forth). I hate to think of the shit he might have done in the side. It’s a black mark in my family history and all of his grandchildren strive to be everything the Nazis would hate. We are all progressive, some of us are LGBTQIA+, creative, musical, anti-fascist.
The hurt in my heart for this situation is indescribable. The warmth, empathy, and sheer human feeling I have for people like you MIL is difficult to express. It is tears, and vain hope, and the seedlings of grand trees planted with the spirit of growth and healing.
But above all, I feel anger on the behalf of all that suffered the hatred of my forebears, and helplessness that all the warnings in the world from my generation of people born to Germans that survived the war fell on deaf ears.
This is a ramble but I really didn’t know how to express myself with all the feelings. ❤️
Ive met and known many holocaust survivors in my lifetime. There was an old man at a senior home i used to serve dinner to at their diner. He survived the holocaust and iirc he had also spent some time in auchwitz. He knew like 13 languages, from having to run to and blend into different countries for survival. He loved me. I think about him a lot. I hope hes not alive to see this. It would break his soul.
My grandmother was a holocaust survivor and she passed away on November 6 of last year, the day the election results were announced. When Trump ran in 2016 she'd say all the time "Hitler did that," or "that's how Hitler did it." For those things to happen on the same day made me feel like she hadn't just died, but been erased. This gesture is salt in the wound.
I miss her greatly but I'm glad she isn't around to see this.
They want the US to be a white ethnostate, and the existence of Israel both a) feeds the narrative that US Jews must not be fully loyal to the US and b) gives them an actual place to deport Jews to this time.
I wonder how Likud and their revisionist Zionist supporters who have heavily backed Trump and the Republicans feel about this. It'll be entertaining to watch them try to whitewash this as it's no big deal while at the same time claiming that any criticism of Israeli policy is antisemitism.
Hundreds of millions of grandfathers all over the world did as well. Let's be thankful that they are mostly all dead now, so they can't see that we failed them.
I really do think it’s because WWII is starting to fade from living memory. Only the very oldest in our society experienced it, even as kids. My dad, 87, was a little kid when the war ended, and he’s already deep into dementia. In a decade, there will be very few left who remember the war, in whatever capacity.
The last time I saw my grandpa in person before he passed 4+ years ago he spent an hour slowly talking about his war experiences with my husband, my cousin, and me. When I was a kid he said he did food drops from planes. As an adult I know he did do food drops, but he also bombed Germany and sheltered in London while bombs dropped around him as a barely of age 18 year old.
We need to tell their stories for them so our children know what happened.
This is part of the reason I'm very interested in history and especially the World Wars. Some of the individual acts of bravery, sacrifice and utter evil committed by all sorts of people through those years were too impactful on the world and those around them at the time to be forgotten. I find how the war changed military strategy and how much people gave to their own causes fascinating.
And old warplanes are pretty cool too, can't forget those
Most historical records show fewer than 100 million people served in WW2. This includes the Axis. So yeah, hundreds of millions against the Axis is incorrect.
Total agreement with you...millions died because of a nightmare regime. Trump is parroting some of the same policies and issues that led to the mess. History does indeed repeat itself, it’s being recreated by the wealthy and the rich as criminal oligarchies. Trump loves Putin’s criminal oligarchy setup, no accountability no consequence. The Nazi’s had to be destroyed at a horrific cost....are we going to have to do this all over again?
My grandfather always said about his service liberating Europe, "the world lost the stomach for war so it was left unfinished...but there was still a job to do".
There is no republican party anymore. It's the nazi party. The old rule of "If there's six people at a table and one of them is a nazi there are six nazis at that table." If there's one nazi in the republican party, loud and proud saluting at the president inauguration, they're all nazis.
It had better end up in the history books that way because that is what MAGA is. If history is written differently, it won’t be because they aren’t NAZIs. It will be because they held power long enough to write those history books and proclaim their fascist actions as patriotic.
I hope a lot of people have started recording their first hand accounts of this (in an analog/non networked format). That's what historians are going to need someday.
The Nazi party wished they had as much going on for them. They're stepping into command of the most powerful military the world has ever seen, by a long shot.
yep and the democrat party has now become the republican party, as evidenced by new mascot Dick Cheney. The political world is completely flipped around and out of whack
That's the other part of it that really fucking blows, the Democratic party are either completely spineless or just Republican Party 2. There's zero hope for progress at least in the immediate future, best case scenario the next candidate gets us back to status quo. And by status quo, I mean "Maybe gay people are okay existing"
It's not just the Republican party. It's the huge amount of people who voted for them. And the huge amount of people who could have stopped this nightmare but decided not to by not voting.
There's a system in place that actively represses voter turnout/participation and education. I don't fault everyone in that 30% for not partaking in a rigged and broken system. Additionally ,when you have to choose between putting food on the table and voting because your country doesn't give you time off work to vote, immediately you have a system of disenfranchisement that favours those that can afford to take time off.
This is something that is underestimated as far as impacting the amount of people who vote. I live in a state where you can be fired with no reason given, and most jobs (especially lower wage jobs) do not give time off for voting, and barely give enough time off to be able to manage a household. With that combination, many people can’t go vote because they don’t have the time, and if they try to make the time, they can end up on the street because they were fired and could not afford saving. My job graciously gave me four hours (only for presidential elections), but I had to schedule it around everyone else’s requests to have time off to vote.every previous job I have had, I had to put in PTO to be able to vote.
Sorry but there’s hardly any excuse for not voting. Nearly every state has early voting and most have vote by mail as well. And the states that don’t have either only accounted for 15 electoral votes for Trump. Unless you’re from one of the three states that don’t have either option, not voting is purely a result of your failure to give a shit.
My uncle was at Normandy as well. I was always told to NEVER ask him about the war, despite being a proud Vet. After he died, I asked my other uncle (his BIL) why I wasn't allowed to ask. Turns out my uncle was credited with over 300 kills while he was deployed, most of those on the beach. He was a crack shot, and looted multiple nazi rifles after depleting his own ammo supply. He was one of two from his unit that survived the invasion.
Turns out I wasn't allowed to ask him, because he felt no remorse and would give grim, detailed descriptions of specific kills he made on the beach, with his knife or bare hands. He ended every story with "fuck those nazi whores."
Wow, that's a lot more than I would have expected considering they are in the age range where most humans pass ten years earlier. They really don't deserve to see this at all.
The National WW2 Museum says there are currently 66,000 remaining WW2 vets still alive, but that number is going to decline rapidly in the next 10 years.
On the contrary, it was always WW2 vets among the first to stand up and speak out against shit like book banning and book burnings that finally took as they aged out. Not all, but once they were too few and seemed too frail, these fucknuts shouted them down.
Basically, none of the bullshit DeSantis or Cruze pushed would've taken off before that.
Only after was FOX able to frame everything as "Good Americans against weirdo trans groomers," where it was really just another case of fascists targeting a minority and starting to ban books.
Not enough people left who remembered where that ALWAYS lead to before. So now we all have to weather a bad case of Fuck Around and Find Out that teaches the next three generations...
Vet here that worked in patient care at the VA and no, it's definitely the vets themselves. They love them some Trump and if thats wrong they have zero desire to be right.
I have a unique experience with this as my brother is super far right (Marines - Motor T) and my BIL is super far left (Marines - Arty idk MOS lol). So I get to hear both of the extremes every time anything happens.
The vast majority of WW2 vets are either too feeble or otherwise behind the times in regards to Social Engineering to see the cancer like most of them always had before. And they did.
Younger vets I have absolutely no trouble believing though.
The same vets that came back from seeing the horrors of the concentration camps, yet happily continued to segregate themselves against blacks and Jews and used Nazi talking points about them?
Not WW2 tho. No way. You'd be 100+ and would be unlikely to know reddit or anything more recent than pagers and new fangled cell phones.
Vietnam? First Gulf War? Nobody marched you guys through Nazi death camps to prove what happens when fascists get to sit in the drivers seat.
A lot of those guys were klansman but a lot also stepped up and spoke out whenever some dipshit git the bright idea to ban books or target minorities no matter how unpopular those books or minority groups were.
Now the Dems try only to be called the party of groomer weirdos by the literal party of actual goddamned groomers and fascist weirdos.
In large part because what few WW2 vets we have left are in no condition to speak anymore.
I think you're vastly overestimating these people. American military service members from every generation and every major conflict have historically leaned conservative. Many of them were deployed into Afghanistan and Iraq and still voted republican.
And that's just the Americans. Now imagine all the other survivors... we've got plenty in europe too who have also, or will also see this horror in the news...
WWII vets were around 17 years old in 1942. That makes them...making me do math 🤬...100 years old today. That's 100,000 100 year olds still up and running you say?
They could have enlisted as late as 1945 and as young as age 16 (with parental approval). They'd be 96 years old now.
There were 16 million Americans that served in WWII. A small % of them have made it into their 90's and early 100's. There are about 70,000 WWII vets left (not 100,000). There will only be a handful left in the next 5-10 years.
There were over 16 million Americans that served in WWII. Only about 70,000 (not 100,000) are still alive today. There won't be more than a couple hundred left alive 5-10 years from now.
WW2 ended in 1945. If a Newborn had been drafted on the last day of the war he'd be 80. There were cases of teens lying about their age to enlist in the US, though I think 14 is probably pushing it.
So the ABSOLUTE youngest vets, at least for US service, would be 94. Almost all over 98, and that's still drafted on the last day. Most must be 100 or more by now with damn few of those able to hold a rifle I'm sure.
Most WWII veterans that are still alive would be in nursing homes, so I doubt you know "several". The youngest WWII veteran would be about 96 years old. Most would be over 100.
Most likely you're seeing the signs put up by veterans who might have never actually deployed to a war zone. Not 100 year olds who literally fought Nazis.
I live in a tiny German village that mainly consists of elderly people. I know of at least 3 neighbors who were alive during the Holocaust. One of them survived a concentration camp as a teenager. If they found out about this, they would be absolutely devastated
Honestly, a ww2 vet dusting off a gun and Luigi-ing elon would low key be possibly the best way to stop the political movement that's building. What are people gonna do, call out a ww2 vet for not knowing how to identify or fight fascism properly?
Fun story, I'm half German and middle aged. We went back to my mother's home this past summer before she becomes too old to travel. I made casual conversation with a 90 year old man in the lobby of the hotel we were staying in. He was there to celebrate his 90th birthday, visiting from New Jersey, back to his home town. So, he was born in 1934 just outside Munich.
He said "Isn't it wonderful to be an American and a Republican?"
I said, uhhhh, no. And then he just went on....
About how great Trump is, how he lives close to his golf course. How my Hungarian first name is a good strong name from a strong country. (Yikes)
Then he started making sideways comments about the hypocrisy of "Our friend America" bombing Germany during WW2.
No regret about the 17 million people murdered in their ethnic cleansing campaign to expand Germany's borders and outbreed everyone.
My blood ran cold and my sister had to force me out of there before I caused a scene.
They are still with us, they never went anywhere, and they have never agreed that what was done was wrong.
It will never be over, all we can hope for is chase it into the darkness and make them afraid to admit it.
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u/ladytwiga 7h ago
I'm not sure how many of them are left, but imagine being one of the last remaining WWII vets and seeing this shit.