Groupthink!

A British Army bulldozer pushes bodies into a mass grave at Belsen. 19 April 1945

Over the weekend I watched two movies, which were not great, but touched me none the less.

The first was 'Valkyrie', a Tom Cruise, starrer, about a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. You can see the quiet desperation in the team led by the Colonel as time ticks away and it is clear that the war is lost. The only hope that remains is to kill Hitler, get a pliable government, in place in Berlin and sign a truce with the Allies, before the Russian's from the East & American's from the West, reach Germany. This was one of the twenty plots that failed to kill the fuhrer & many of the assassins were then caught and summarily shot, while others were hung from meat hooks.

The second flick is 'The boy in the striped pajamas'. A little boy, Bruno, moves with his family to a new home, as his father, takes over as the Commandant of a concentration camp at, what I suspect is Bergen Belsen.The boy thinks that the camp is a farm, till the horror's of the camp slowly come home.

Both movies, for me were a stark reminder, of what one man's madness can deliver and hijack the entire psyche of a nation. Hitler & Germany here.In OB terms we would call it 'group think' and it is fundamental that any nation, organization, team or family reserves the right to question and protest, without which you would find yourself led up the garden path and when you do realize that it is not the right path, the time for redemption would be gone.

The following short piece, gives you a picture of life at a Nazi Concentration camp:

The camp was liberated on April 15, 1945 by the British 11th Armoured Division. 60,000 prisoners were found inside, most of them seriously ill,and another 13,000 corpses lay around the camp unburied.The scenes that greeted British troops were described by the BBC's Richard Dimbleby, who accompanied them:
“
...Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.
"This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.”
"I could not believe the horror of these camps," said one liberator. "We found piles of bodies in train cars that had been dead for days.

Strangely, the only people who seem to abhor, the senseless, killing are Bruno's mother & and grand mother.The Government in Germany recognized the efforts of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and his resistance team and declared them war heroes. This happened a few years ago!