"Half ten" - nine-thirty or ten-thirty?

Uriel   Sun Dec 11, 2005 11:22 pm GMT
True. Much of continental Europe was under German control at some point during WWII, but to my knowledge, the Poles still spoke Polish, the French still spoke French, etc.

I suppose a valid comparison could be made for the parts of Eastern Europe that were under Soviet control for decades. My stepmother grew up in Budapest, Hungary, but she still spoke Hungarian as her first language, and said that she had had to take Russian in school (one day a week was devoted to Russian). But Russian still never became the major language of everyday discourse for people.
klklklk   Mon Nov 19, 2007 9:06 am GMT
half ten in swedish(halv tio) means as in german 9:30 but i dont kknow about uk
Travis   Mon Nov 19, 2007 4:46 pm GMT
>>Pure silliness, Candy; don't bother your head with this drivel. I'm not minimizing our contribution to WWII -- my grandfather and his brothers all fought in Europe -- but really, the Nazi regime was a cult of personality -- once Hitler was gone, it imploded quickly. It was not a sustainable idea, and had WWII ended differently, things probably would have set themselves right at some point anyway.<<

The matter with Nazi Germany was that it was not really a matter of the Nazi Party controlling the rest of the population, which just went along with it all passively. Rather, a major factor in it was the Prussian militarist and industrialist types who were not Nazis but who favored or simply tolerated the Nazi Party while it was winning the war, overlooking their ideological differences with it, but who were fighting the war for Germany and not for Nazism. They favored the idea of a Greater Germany and of having Germany in a leading position within Europe but really had little time for Nazi ideology and whatnot.

Had the Nazi Party collapsed earlier on it would have been these who would have ended up ruling Germany; the only matter is that Hitler died at a point where Germany was for all practical purposes already completely defeated. It should be remembered towards the end of the war, many of these actually desired to (and unsuccessfully attempted to) overthrow the Nazis so that they could bring the war to a negotiated end with minimal losses for Germany or otherwise continue to wage WW2 in a somewhat more sane fashion (as Hitler really was not a very good military leader in reality).