"SUM OF ALL FEARS" entering the picture.
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Thanks - I knew we did that (band of brothers shows this) - but had no idea about Germans.
The term "control freak" comes to mind...
German society then (and maybe even now, I'm not sure) was rigidly hierarchical and leaned toward obedience over anything else. I once saw a hilarious "Top Gear" episode where Jeremy Clarkson talked about driving without a license, said he had done it a few times and the other two guys admitted they had done it too.
He further said he talked about that to a German once, who told him, "It is IMPOSSIBLE to drive without a license!" Clarkson said it surely happened, even in Germany... "NEIN! It is IMPOSSIBLE to drive in Germany without a LICENSE!"
The German fellow just could not get his head around a purely administrative, civil disobedience of driving without a license, and that may sum up the general German attitude toward the administrative state and obedience.
Funny story... When I was born, my mom was in a lot of pain and the "govt people" in charge of assigning a SS number were pissing her off ...my old man, capable of getting so angry his feet would literally come off the ground, threw them out... and told them not to come back... Fast forward 18 years to the entry exam for a well known university - "What do you mean you don't have a social security number? HOW DO YOU EXIST??!!" It literally broke their brains! 😂😂😂
"How do you exist?" Oh Lord, that's funny. I'm old enough to have not been assigned a SS# when I was born but had to get one when I started working at age 16. I thought that I had "arrived" having a SS#... but now I realize it was just me becoming part of the vast, faceless chattel property of the US Government. I'm also old enough that when I joined the USMC, they didn't use my SS# but assigned me a separate 7- digit serial number, which I still remember to this day.