Mere Songs?

My mother was brought up in the Third Reich. Her earliest memory, she said, was that of troops marching into Poland, in Stettin. In school, they taught her malicious ditties: "Amo amas amat / Ich ging mal in die Stadt ..." and so on. For whatever reason, she taught these ditties to me. I know, through the historical record, that these ditties were not mere ditties. They, and everything that surrounded them, turned into genocide. In South Africa, there is a raging debate about songs. These cannot be treated as mere songs.