OT: Fascism didn't come from Protestant culture.

This film was interesting but full of subtext. Considering the opening sentences about the troubles that Germany would face in the years to come, it is always important to remember that these children are the very people who became the Nazis and their supporters.

However, I do disagree with the idea which some here hold that old school, strict Protestant culture spawned Naziism/Fascism. In the short era of Fascism, the large majority of Protestant countries remained monarchist or (for the time) relatively liberal democracies. The old Protestant nobility, especially those with ties to the German military hierarchy, remained largely monarchist throughout Hitler's reign.

Fascism actually came largely out of Catholic areas and countries, and it was created to preserve something of the existing social order by harnessing nationalist feeling in order to protect the country from Communist revolution. With the possible exception of France which had global interests and something of a democratic tradition, the Catholic countries generally lagged behind the Protestant ones in terms of industrialization, global trade, and political development. The economic and social structures (were not always but tended to be) much more rigid, resulting in a greater gap between rich and poor. This fueled the popular appeal of communism, which resulted in a strong movement against it. Austria had a large socialist movement after the First World War, then it got Dolfuss as a reaction against that movement. Hungary had a short experience with a particularly nasty communist government under Bela Kuhn, afterward it got the authoritarian (if not exactly fascist) Miklos Horthy and later Szalasi's very fascist Arrow Cross party. Spain teetered on the brink of radical socialist revolution, and in came Franco and the Falangists. Mussolini was created out of economic troubles resulting from a war that failed to gain much for Italy. He coopted the left and created a way for the aristocracy to join him in common cause with the suffering of the Italian people. Hitler fed on anti-communist resentment from the failed revolutions of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and Eisner. His initial stomping ground was the very Catholic and nationalistic province of Bavaria, where Eisner had failed to firmly establish a communist state and where Archbishop Eugenio Paccioli was nearly assasinated by communist radicals. As Pope Pius XII during World War II, he would be reluctant to oppose fascism largely (it is widely speculated) for this experience. Don't forget Juan Peron and (initially) Getulio Vargas in South America as well.

There were movements in certain Protestant countries to support fascist parties, but they never got anywhere near the success that they had in the Catholic countries. Not a single Protestant nation became Fascist before German occupation save for Germany itself. In German lands, the Fascist movements all started in the Catholic regions.

Fascism would never have existed without Communism, and it's unthinkable to imagine otherwise. Again, this film shows where vindictive and resentful social attitudes existed before the wars in a society that had problems. I think that these feelings exist in a lot of societies for different reasons. However, the starving people of Weimar Germany, continuous Communist threats both foreign and domestic, the collapse of the German middle class, and the occupation of the Rhineland by French and Belgian forces in 1923 to enforce ruinous, impossible reparation payments did much to make people and angry, resentful, fearful, and vindictive.

I'm not excusing what became of Germany and the Fascist movement, but only explaining why it happened.