How can I not...

We are studying Nazi Germany in History. Our teacher was talking about Hitler's ideologies, and he said:

"I hate Hitler, I hope you do too"

This made me look up from my notes on Aryan 'superiority', and look at the four pictures of Hitler on the board.

I don't hate him. I don't feel anything. I'm certainly not a fan, I don't agree with him, I don't ever want to be associated with him, or any Nazi symbols or anything at all like that, I am not racist, I'm pretty left-wing, and I don't believe at all with any of his policies.

Yet, I feel nothing. Nothing of the Nazis, nothing of Hitler, nothing at all. It just doesn't phase me, to hear about the brutality and extreme large scale of murders.

Why on earth is that? I don't know how my classmates feel, but I feel nothing towards it. Almost every British person of my generation, too, that I know of, will find it easy to talk about, in an almost jovial way at times, whereas my Polish friends, of course, find it either a) Difficult b) Upsetting or c) Take the complete piss and are worse than our relatively tame comments.

It is easy to talk and joke about Hitler and the Nazis, Firstly, humour is my way around many issues in MY life, but not my whole generation. I think that from the start, in year 4, we learnt about WW2 watching 'spywatch' and learning about the blitz. The enemies were the Nazis, right? Being the enemy seemed cool back then, the enemy with their big iconic flag, it did, we used to 'play' Nazis. Smart kids.

Then, as a history class, we didn't learn anything about Nazi Germany until year 8 and vaguely, and it wasn't until year 9, when our teacher got pissed at us not taking any lesson seriously he decided to make us all look at pictures of the ovens at Auschwitz and such. It shut us up for a while, whilst our teacher told us of it in cruel, disturbing ways that were sure to stick with us.

I just, I don't know, even though the idea of the death camps fills me with major unease, I just can't feel any hatred to the man responsible, or the Nazi soldiers responsible. I think that a large proportion of THEM were in an agentic state, or there's that crowd-personality behaviour thing as well, but the main man, Hitler, no.

No excuse for it, I don't believe in anything he did, it was awful, but I don't have an emotional response, I have no ability to relate, and I don't know anyone who was involved. Perhaps I am still too immature, or perhaps I'm just mentally detaching myself from deeply thinking of the horrors.

I answered what my history teacher said with the title. How could I not... but I don't.

Thanks...

Ray