Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/01/10
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 12:39 PM 1/10/02 -0500, B. D. Colen wrote: >She WASN'T EXPOSED TO THE LATTER? Give us all a break - Poor Germans, they >didn't know what was going on, they were just duped by that evil Adolph who >pretended to love the Jews while he was secretly killing them. When does >this shit end? Go do a little reading, Mark. BD Calm down a bit. Riefenstahl was a flibbertigibbet of the time. She was and is an artistic genius but she did not delve too deeply into the background of those who bought her work. Goebbels hated her and saw her as a lightweight who held no ideological commitment to the regime -- unlike, for instance, his evaluation of Curt Jurgens, of whom I have never heard you say a bad word. Speer related that he SHOULD have known the specifics of the camps and COULD have known this, but that he held off as an associate, who did visit the camps, advised him to ask no questions. And, as he testified at Nuremburg, this made him as culpable as those who were willing participants in horror and vileness. In this sense, Riefenstahl is culpable. But there is no evidence that she was ever even accorded the opportunity to ask. She was, in the end, at the artistic pole of Hitler's entourage, and not at the political or the military. (By Hitler's order, for instance, Keitel was forbidden any knowledge of the Final Solution; his Nuremburg verdict acknowledges this.) In other words, let us keep things in perspective. Riefenstahl is, in the end, a very minor player in a very big cast of characters, many evil, many nasty, many simply moral eunuchs -- for instance, have YOU ever read much on Eichmann? A typical bureaucrat, who applied for and got a job. The job happened to be shipping folks off to die but, to Eichmann, it was a job. His final rank was Lieutenant Colonel, a rather lowly rank for the evil he did. But, to him, it was just a job, without any moral side to it at all. In another circumstance, he might have been the Postmaster of bad Kreuznach or the superintendent of a minor rail line. No one of us condones evil, but evil comes in many shades. I have yet to hear you, BD, condemn the photographers who have cheerfully worked to advance Communism, for instance. Again, let us keep things in perspective. Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bąs fir gun ghrąs fir! - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html