A lot of people are unaware that Germany partook in the scramble for Africa and that the concentration camps it ran in Europe were not its first.

I know you’re unaware of this b/c you continue to assert that Germany learned all its evil from America.

We hail Germany as an exemple of progressive politics; one major reason is b/c people believe that Germany has claimed responsibility for the Holocaust and dealt with its antisemitism.

I disagree with those statements, for the record.

Every time you claim that the Nazis just copied American racism and eugenics, you’re erasing something that modern day Germany would very much like you to erase: its genocide of the Herero and the Nama peoples in German Southwest Africa.

It is perfectly possible to trace the interconnections between American bigotry and Hitler’s thought without erasing German race science and European antisemitism.

These things are, to some extent, all interwoven.

It is perfectly possible to decry American concentration camps and American eugenics, and to call them Nazi-esque, without erasing German atrocities against the Herero and the Nama, atrocities which already too few know about.

and yes, this thread is in response not just to one tweet of this nature, but to MANY that i have seen over the past few days.

every time i have gently tried to correct the misinformation, i’ve ended up ignored.

The Germany defenders have shown up. I’m not going to engage w/ people out here in these twitter streets defending ~Germany~. Can you imagine? lol, couldn’t be me

muting this thread for now

plz do not send this to your Hist of the Holocaust prof; I guarantee y’all did not read an essay that posited that America in the 1920s was cribbing off Germany in the 1930s, or whatever made-out-of-paradoxes, time-loop, ahistorical blather this is.

Girl, WHAT.

Okay, I think I see what they’re trying to say. It’s still an oversimplification that depends upon the erasure of Germany’s genocides in GSWA.