Does John Banner's character as Sgt Schultz in Hogans Heroes show that not all German officers were evil.?

Question

In his classic line 'I see nothing', to me indicates that at the end of the day he was just a German soldier trying to get through the war as best he could, like most other people in this situation. Regardless of whether he believed in the cause or not, he seemed like someone who was just waiting for the war to be over so he could get back to his 'normal' life.

Do you believe this to be true in general of some German soldiers, or do you believe they were all evil during WW2?

Discuss :)

Answer 1

Funny story, the actor only took the role on the promise that the Germans would lose every episode... I think the character was written that way to get the actor to do the part... He had to be an idiot, the actor wanted him to be.

Answer 2

I think that he was an ordinary person caught up in an extraordinarily evil situation. He had no choice but to be a soldier, he was trying to survive as well, but by "seeing nothing" was maybe more that just getting through the day, he was acting in independent resistance to the Nazis.

I don't believe all German soldiers were evil during WWII. They were mostly regular guys who were drafted, fed all sorts of propaganda, thrown into an evil situation and had to make impossible choices. Of course there were evil ones. But most were going along to get along and survive, and some few very brave ones actively resisted.

I know some very elderly Germans who remember the years before the war, and the Nazis rise to power. They say that it was very much the way the US has been since 9/11, only their trauma was the treaty after WWI. They had crazy inflation, and people were really suffering. Hitler promised to fix all that. They say that the difference is that Hitler used bully enforcers in neighborhoods, so that if you didn't go along you were in danger of at least getting beaten. Intimidation of a people whose natural inclination is to follow the law leads to a people who "see nothing" like Americans today who don't see the problem with redefining torture, with warrentless searches, with suggesting that the Geneva Convention is outdated, and we don't have to follow it. Even Germany in WWII paid lip service to the Geneva Convention when it came to how prisoners of war were treated

. There is also the very human phenomena of behaving differently in a group than if a person were alone. The individual gets caught up in the mood and actions of the group, and loses personal identity. Later, they are shocked at what they had done. But I think most Germans were just trying to live ordinary lives. German soldiers were no different. That doesn't hold true of those who chose branches of the military that had reputations for brutality, but that is true here, today as well. It is possible for the same thing to happen anywhere, among ordinary people. It has, since WWII, in Rwanda, Sudan, Cambodia...We shouldn't think that Germany was any worse, they just did it on a larger scale.

Look at Germany today to see that these are ordinary people. The children of the generation that were adults during WWII demanded explantions from their parents. Where were you when this was happening? Why didn't you try to stop it? And the answer was usually that they didn't know or want to know, and they just wanted to live an ordinary life. It could happen here, or anywhere.