The Problem With History

 About once or twice a year, I'll read some piece (generally always written by an American with zero knowledge of Germany in the 1920s, the Treaty of Versailles to end WW I, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazis) which goes to suggest somehow (some way)....Hitler could have been easily stopped if German police/soldiers had just done their duty and 'refused' orders.

(as you might guess, I saw this suggestion come again today)

Maybe thirty years ago....I might have been willing to sit for 30 minutes and hear the discussion or debate.  At this point, my patience runs out after 30 seconds, and exit out of the discussion or reading.  

The general problem with this discussion is that a vast number of German police were guys who'd done duty between 1914 and 1918, and were generally inclined to believe in some type of blame-action.  

It might be true that half the German public wasn't buying into the 1929 to 1932 surge of the Nazi Party....but the alternate path with the Communist Party or the SPD Party....wasn't exactly selling well either.

As for the refusing orders?  People from this 1900s to 1940s era....weren't exactly the type to refuse orders (I'm not talking about just Germans....it goes across the board).  

The amount of history understanding from people?  Ninety-nine percent of Americans have virtually no real grasp of the era of 1900 to the initial days of WW  II.  It's not covered much in high school (in some cases, it amount to three pages of the book and mostly centers on the depression period starting in 1929), and marginally covered in college classes.   

So people get a brief introduction via some movie, and maybe a bit of text....which doesn't dig into topics.  The rest? They just fill in with 'fake-history' and run off with the rest.