No, he's not "absolutely right."
How many of you are professional historians? A lot of people like to read history, and think they know "the truth" because they liked something that they read, and they accept IT as the truth, and anything that contradicts it is "revisionist" or b.s.
I'm a professional historian, a sports historian, whose well-received Masters Thesis was about racial segregation in major league baseball, and the efforts of the fringe in the US to abolish it, during the WWII era. I do not make "emotional" posts about it, because I've read more primary sources about this era of history than any of you ever could - it was my job to do it. I spent years in the bowels of libraries, reading microfilm, micrfiche, and books, getting to the heart of racism in sports in the first half of the 20th century in the US. The people who championed the desegregation of major league baseball also covered the Berlin Olympics heavily, too, because Hitler's hatred of anything not white and German was already known.
What you all don't understand is that OUR idea of "race" isn't what THEY understood to be "race." Back then, Italians were a "race." To us, it's an ethnicity. To them, Jews were a "race," to us, Jews are a cross between a religion and a culture. So all of you are using the term "race" incorrectly as far as what people in the 1930s would use. Jews were a race separate from whites, no matter what country they came from, as far as Hitler was concerned.
And no, Hitler did NOT appreciate the black men showing up all his lily-white Aryans in the Olympics. He, in fact, fumed about it. He thought the 1936 Olympics would showcase just how much his Aryans were superior to everyone else on the planet, and when they lost to blacks, of all people, he was NOT gracious about it. He may have been forced to make a display of graciousness, but it was not what he was recorded as feeling. He was disgusted.
But yes, black Americans were treated better in Europe than they were in the US. That's a no-brainer. We're talking about the time of jim crow laws in the South, of segregation, lynchings - none of that existed in Europe, directed solely at black people, especially not at black foreigners. But at the same time, Hitler was interning millions of Jews and Eastern Europeans in concentration camps, experimenting on them like lab rats and exterminating them by the millions (and yes, this is well-documented and substantiated, even my own grandpap, a WWII soldier who helped liberate concentration camps at the end of WWII, saw the horrors, but it has been filmed, photographed, millions of soldiers from all over the world witnessed it and former SS soldiers have admitted to it, it's not rumor). This, and the fact that blacks were drafted into WWII and served with distinction, only to come home to segregation, gave more steam to the Civil Rights movement. There were also many blacks who went to Russia at the same time, looking for better treatment, and many influential African-Americans felt they were treated better by Stalin, also, another leader who, despite being one of the Allied powers, was practicing mass genocide at the same time.
None of you really has any of it right. I'm not surprised. People who don't do history for a living, who don't go to college and graduate school for it, think they can pick up some books and are experts. You have no idea the rigorous training and years upon years of training we go through, the thousands of secondary sources and multitudes of primary sources we are *required* to take in to give us as much information as we can possibly get, even on topics that are tangential to what we are studying. It's like everything else in the world: I wouldn't let someone who isn't an expert mechanic work on my car, so I'm not trusting anyone who's not an expert historian to tell me anything about the past. There's so much background information you all obviously don't know, it's no wonder this argument will go on and on amongst you.
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Goliard (1421)
3 years ago
Six years later, I would like to thank you for your response and your perspective. +1,000
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