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Message:: [QUOTE="bluumz, post: 2582828, member: 649"]I find all these photos fascinating, thanks for sharing [USER=11044]@Requiem[/USER]. While some may find the sharing of WW2 German, especially Nazi, items/ephemera disturbing, I believe it has educational purposes and it's good to have a reminder of what can happen in the world when racism, greed, etc are permitted to spiral out of control. My father was an intelligent and logical man, a math genius who became a design engineer for Chrysler Corporation. As a teenager in Poland, he fought in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. He was captured and spent his 18th year in a German POW camp. His parents, who were patriots and resistance organizers in Poland, had been previously arrested by the Gestapo. His mother was sent to Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, and Ravensbruk (survived), but his father was never seen nor heard from again. Fast forward to the 1980s, my parents have finally bought their little dream cottage on a canal off Michigan's Lake Huron. Directly across the canal was a cottage owned by "Mike". Mike, it turned out, was German and had been a "common" soldier during WW2. My father and Mike became good friends, spending many a day side by side in chairs on each other's lawns by the canal, talking on many subjects, including the war. When, out of curiosity, I asked my father how he could be friends with a former German soldier after fighting so determinedly against them, my father's answer was simply, "That was wartime." (I doubt, however, my father would have thought so generously of a true Nazi.) It was my mother, who was a young child in London during the war, that had trouble accepting the fact that a "jerry" owned the cottage across the canal.[/QUOTE]

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