code words ...humor perhaps?
Yes there was a lot of that of course, as in all dictatorships.
I'm of a generation where my parents and their siblings where old enough as the war ended to understand well enough what was happening to their world, they were all about between 6 and 11. And so some of that has been passed on, (and I've been keen to pass on some of the lessons from that to the next generation)
A very common code word after Stalingrad was 'Gröfaz' which was a lampooning of the Nazi tendency to form contractions, like Gestapo and so forth; it was supposed to mean 'Größter Feldherr aller Zeiten' i.e. '
Greatest military commander of all times', referring to Hitler, ironically. Anyone referring to him as that was sending coded disapproval.
"What's the difference between Christianity and National Socialism? In Christianity, one gave his life for all..., in National Socialism on the contrary..."
"What's an example of the perfect Aryan? - as blond as Hitler, as tall as Goebbels, as fit as Göring!"
What would happen to people hugely depended on chance. Most of the time, there wouldn't be anyone denouncing, but you could never be sure. A joke like that would be told a thousand times and maybe ten persons would get reprimanded ... and then suddenly one executed but that would strike fear in the hearts of the other thousand and make sure that things hardly ever went beyond jokes. There was a lot of randomness. That's one of the most important lessons. You can try to keep your conscience but as for outcomes, it's just ruthlessly random.
yet the fact that the war was lost had to have been so obvious
An SD report from 1943 said,
Sicherheitsdienst said:
The exchange of vulgar jokes that erode the national character - even jokes about the very person of the Führer - has increased considerably since Stalingrad. In conversations at restaurants, on the job, or other gatherings, the newest political jokes are exchanged without consideration whether they are of innocious content, or undoubtedly noxious and oppositional. Even people who hardly know each other exchange such jests. It is apparently mutually presupposed that nowadays one can tell any joke at all without having to expect the deserved energetic rebuke and report to the police. Large parts of the population and even some members of the Party seem to have lost any consideration for the fact that being exposed to certain kinds of humor is an impossible notion for any decent German and National Socialist"
So that was the
general turning point in the population, it just wasn't possible to keep secret that something had massively gone wrong at Stalingrad, and that a huge number of men had been left to die.
There were however a lot of 'outliers', some people who figured from the beginning, that not despite, but because of the early victories there could be no other outcome than total defeat; and on the other hand the utterly unrepentant, those who really believed close to the end, and even continued believing afterward that while lost, it had been a worthwile cause, 'if only not for this and that'.
For a soldier at the front, the war being waged as it was, the truth was that it didn't matter much what belief you carried in your heart, it dind't matter whether you were one of those who told those jokes or one of those who reported them.
Where family trees got pruned had little to do with convictions.
If your unit got massacred in an ambush and the men of the other side threw all the bodies in a cave they didn't ask that question either.
And that's the horrible effect of that, all those individual lifelines that are subjected to that collectivism, those collectivist totalitarian fates, to kill and be killed en masse.
And it's also an incredible fatalism.
In terms of death and destruction, imagine September 11 every day, for six years;
...and then remember that here we're talking about German war casualties, we haven't even touched on the death camps, Russia, the many countries occupied and terrorized by Germany during the war; or China, or Japan, etc. etc. etc., - and thinking of that, one should remember that for many people, World War II effectively started on July 7 1937.
Perhaps Custer is just drunk. Where did you find him Jolly? Was he sober?
Not sure that's the answer either 
You always have to come up with some inconvenient facts, don't you RR !!!! 
I suspect Mr. Phlebas may have posted an, er, unrelated picture. Yeah. That must have been it.
