quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:
Thanks, Rogue. Thought it looked familiar. And the others? Shall I try and find others to make up for my faux pas? Does my point fail because of it?

Showing photos of 1 person executing another proves nothing.

Follow that individual after the fact. Observe him/her/xir killing others, or not. See how they sleep, how they dream, what their nightmares are. A still photo captures an event, but not the aftermath - and the inevitable suicides, recrimination, and self-loathing that occur, all wrapped up in a PTSD cocktail.

Are there genuine physcopaths out there? Undoubtedly, and when you mobilize entire nations it’s easy to find the 0.5-2% who qualify. There is no moral equivalence, what the Nazis did is abhorrent.

Yet even on this forum, which is full of honorable individuals (or so we would like to think), there have been expressions that boggle the mind; from killing prisoners, to condoning rape, to burning people alive.

Humans are animals. It is a thin veneer of civilization that prevents our inner beast from awakening, and we err in assuming we are any different from the Nazis, Soviets, Mongols, Romans, Assyrians etc under the right circumstances.

My point all along is that was brutal war and that both sides engaged in horrible atrocities and that this notion that the bulk of the German populace had no idea what was going on, didn’t have a mindset that was willing to partake in it and carry out such horrors is complete revisionist bunk. It’s every bit as revisionist to say that those who defeated Germany didn’t go completely overboard after the war and that everything that happened to them, they deserved and worse.

I don’t see how you’ve proved the

quote:

didn’t have a mindset that was willing to partake in it and carry out such horrors is complete revisionist bunk

part.

You’ve shown the photos of a half dozen atrocities, in a war with 70+ million deaths.

That scale is incomprehensible. There are hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of people that were all of the above... and that still would not be the bulk of the population of any of the combatant countries.

And anything you've posted so far disproves anything I've been talking about? You've dismissed it and downplayed it, but the onus is on me to prove something? I've provided some very quick, easily found examples. What level of evidence and proof and discussion do you require? I mean, it's getting late and I'd like to move on from this wonderful topic before bedtime.

Some of you are really sick people and you know who you are. And don’t get all sanctimonious about your ancestors. There are plenty of us on the forum who can point to horrific actions that occured to our ancestors - some even in the United States by our own citzens against each other.

quote:

Originally posted by reloader-1:
I don’t see how you’ve proved the

quote:

didn’t have a mindset that was willing to partake in it and carry out such horrors is complete revisionist bunk

part.

You’ve shown the photos of a half dozen atrocities, in a war with 70+ million deaths.

That scale is incomprehensible. There are hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of people that were all of the above... and that still would not be the bulk of the population of any of the combatant countries.

Why don't you get to the point you are trying to make, it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff in your statements.

quote:

Originally posted by reloader-1:
Smudge, given army discipline at the time, if any of those soldiers had refused duty they would be beside the partisan being shot.

At some point you have to stand for something and put your life behind it or just become another coward.

(separate from the photo, if given due process via the rules of warfare, death by firing squad can be appropriate - however I doubt anything like that happened in the this case)

quote:

Originally posted by RHINOWSO:

quote:

Originally posted by reloader-1:
I don’t see how you’ve proved the

quote:

didn’t have a mindset that was willing to partake in it and carry out such horrors is complete revisionist bunk

part.

You’ve shown the photos of a half dozen atrocities, in a war with 70+ million deaths.

That scale is incomprehensible. There are hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of people that were all of the above... and that still would not be the bulk of the population of any of the combatant countries.

Why don't you get to the point you are trying to make, it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff in your statements.

My point is it’s damn near impossible for any us to prove that “x” amount of people did “y” during WWII, especially with 7 photos.

People do fucked up things constantly, and even more so when it is condoned or a blind eye is turned by society. Did horrendous things happen in WWII? Yes. Can we blanket condemn entire populations? No.

Okay, I think this has been a generally very good and remarkably well-informed debate so far. I hope we can keep it together.

quote:

Originally posted by Hound Dog:
The allies knew about the Holocaust, but what could they do? Bomb Auschwitz, wiping out the camp and killing every man, woman, and child there?

The allied plan for stopping the Holocaust was "Win The War As Soon As Possible."

In a way, it was a very hard call. Any ressources Germany put into the Holocaust, it couldn't put into the overall war effort to delay its defeat, thus permitting earlier allied victory, ending the Holocaust. Of course as has been noted, the Nazi mindset was so hellbent on destroying the Untermensch that critical transport capacities etc. were devoted to keep the camps running to within weeks of them being liberated, so attacking the Holocaust infrastructure would probably just have made them pour even more ressources into repairing it.

But then again - would you risk aircraft that could be used to degrade the German war industry on missions deep into Poland (if the sites were even in range with available types) to bomb the railroads to the camps, as has been suggested? That's a similar challenge to bombing the Romanian oil refineries at Ploiesti in Operation Tidal Wave, which was very costly, but in this case for no obvious military gain; nevermind that rail tracks are notoriously hard to destroy from the air, and comparatively easy to repair. I also understand there were some concerns about protecting intelligence assets, since part of the information came from the British ULTRA codebreaking program, which was kept top secret to defend the critical Atlantic supply convoys against the U-Boat threat.

The book you mentioned is "Ordinary Men" by Christopher Browning BTW, dealing with Reserve Police Battalion 101, which committed massacres in Poland in 1942. One main point is that its commander at one point gave his men the choice to opt out if they found it too hard to continue, but less than a dozen out of 500 did. Browning puts it down to human obedience to authority, as shown in the Milgram Experiment. This conclusion was subsequently criticized by Daniel Goldhagen, who postulated a specifically German eliminatory anti-semitism in his controversial "Hitler's Willing Executioners".

Personally, beyond the sickos who actually enjoy killing and torturing which you'll find anywhere, and the brutalization any war brings with it by making people getting used to killing others, I think it was a mix of peer pressure, degrees of anti-semitism, but also a rather German shape of obedience to authority and diligence at work - even if it's murdering people. I'm wary of the "I had no choice, or it would have been me" line. Like in any period war, people were executed for refusing orders of course, often for the most minor offenses as the end approached, but I know of only one case where a member of a firing squad chose to join the executed, for example. Which IIRC was not part of the Holocaust proper, but an act of retribution in the Wehrmacht's brutal counter-partisan warfare - another huge messy topic (I think a lot of the previously posted pictures fall under this).

There were certainly too many people involved in the Holocaust to put it down to some psychos. Even if the actual killing was done by comparatively few, it was an integrated effort, particularly in the East. The Wehrmacht enabled it by military conquest, and provided logistics for the death squads; architects designed the camps, scientists developed the gas, railway staff transported the prisoners, industry used the slave labor, etc. I think the evolution of the system was not just to avoid the psychological stress on the actual killers, but so that any individual could come up with some plausible deniability to himself about what kind of monstrosity he was contributing to as a little cogwheel.

There is a bit in my own family history I've never quite gotten to the bottom of. My grand-grand-father, a WW I veteran re-activated as a slightly overage officer during the buildup of the Wehrmacht in the 30s and eventually promoted major general, was sent to the Eastern Front in charge of a replacement brigade in 1941. Deployed to Krakow, Poland with his HQ in July while his troops were fed piecemeal into the front; re-deployed to Vitebsk, Belorussia under Commander Rear Area Army Group Center in January 1942, his own command being renamed a security brigade the next month and tasked with anti-partisan duties. He apparently became a bit of a crank and general pain in the ass for his superiors, probably owing to the fact that both his sons went MIA in Russia, his command was fleeced of its original troops and his health was failing (in winter 1941/42 he went temporarily blind).

In a post-war letter claimed he threatened to have his men fire on an SD Einsatzkommando that came to his HQ's town to erase the local Jewish population (which he described as "Jews of the worst, most dirty kind" in the same letter without breaking stride). Allegedly he managed to smuggle part of them out of town on trains as "work parties", but was temporarily dispatched from the place while the SD did their thing. In summer 1942 he was retired on health reasons, which was entirely credible given his abovementioned condition. Except an acquaintance of the family brought them an allied propaganda pamphlet made up to look like the official German soldier's honor code, but among other things containing a list of German generals fired for political reasons, with his name in it. He got to make good use of that when he was arrested by the Americans after the war; allegedly he showed it to his intelligence interrogator, who told him "yes, I know that list - it's real, and you're lucky to be alive".

I'm not sure the story is true; the Vitebsk massacre by Einsatzkommando 9 happened soon after the town was taken by the Wehrmacht in late 1941, before his brigade HQ would have moved there at the start of the next year; though it seems some Jews remained after the liquidation of the local ghetto to be murdered with involvement of the brigade. I can see where guilt about things done or not done in the war could lead a man to tell such anecdotes even in private correspondence where he wouldn't really need to defend himself against anything but his own conscience. Notably, he commented the alleged affirmative answer of his troops to the question if they would fire at the SD with "such would have been the reply of the German people if they had been asked about the issue!" - which sounds just a little too much like "it was just a few Nazis who did it". OTOH I can find no confirmation the HQ was actually in Vitebsk proper, and it might just have happened that way.

As for what happened to Germans during and after the war - sure, there was retribution and injustice, sometimes grossly, and some outright allied war crimes, too; you get people breaking the rules on either side in most wars involving huge armies (see above under sickos and general brutalization). All the domestic relativists pointing to the firebombing of German cities, Russian mass rapes or displacement of Germans in Eastern Europe have to contend with the fact though that Germany started the whole thing, and in many cases like indiscrimate bombing did the same first - the eventual victors just did it better. Not to speak of the folks who try to get on even moral ground with WW II's winners and victims by going "but Hiroshima!" or "Israel treats the Palestinians today just like the Jews back then!".

Also, other regimes may have racked up greater body counts, but the official German line remains that the carefully planned industrial elimination of targeted groups in the Holocaust cannot be compared with any other crime in history. That wasn't just embraced overnight after the end of the war, of course; the development of the German attitude towards guilt and responsibility for that period is an interesting topic in itself.

quote:

Originally posted by c1steve:
I don't have a problem with the Russians raping every female they came across, during the push to Berlin. The Germans created two world wars, perhaps a little suffering by the surviving Germans might work it's way into the mindset of the German population.

If it was any of us, who's friends, family, wives, etc. that were killed by the German army, most likely we would be pretty merciless on the way to Berlin. The German army was exceedingly vicious to the Russian population, they got what they deserved.

I wonder if you're smart enough to find the irony in what you just said.

Probably not.

There was a movie on Netflix/Hulu/Amazon prime about the meeting where “The Final Solution” was first discussed by the nazis (I wish I could remember the name). It was based on historical facts. It is eye opening when you realize their plan was to wipe out an entire group of people from the face of the earth in a year. It’s a large task and required planning and manpower to achieve.


Note: I just looked up the name of that movie. It’s called “Conspiracy “ and it’s free with Amazon Prime. It’s worth seeing, I may watch it again today.

Another interesting story of WW2 is Germany's occupation of Lithuania, and how the Jews were treated there.

And trying to sell the idea that the common German did know, well, that is a bit tough considering the antisemitic laws that were being passed as far back as 33, the antisemitism from 33 on, the looting of Jewish businesses and homes as the people were being displaced. Sure, maybe "some" did not completely realize the extent of the death camps, but did they even care? Where did they think they were going, on vacation?

quote:

Originally posted by RHINOWSO:
This "The German People DIDN'T KNOW ANYTHING" argument is as convincing as the "The Southern State seceding from the Union had NOTHING TO DO WITH SLAVERY, AT ALL" argument.

Both are completely full of shit.

I dont think the common Southerner even knew slavery was happening......

quote:

Originally posted by c1steve:
I don't have a problem with the Russians raping every female they came across, during the push to Berlin. The Germans created two world wars, perhaps a little suffering by the surviving Germans might work it's way into the mindset of the German population.

If it was any of us, who's friends, family, wives, etc. that were killed by the German army, most likely we would be pretty merciless on the way to Berlin. The German army was exceedingly vicious to the Russian population, they got what they deserved.

Atrocities do not excuse atrocities.

Damn man.

Points to S.FLAlaw for getting me to laugh in a thread on the Holocaust.

Your other point which I fully agree with is that the hatred of the Jew had been systematically and slowly ingrained into people's minds. I think a large number of people knew. I also think a large number both knew and didn't care, and a pretty large percentage of those who didn't know wouldn't have cared if they did know.

c1steve major negative points. I don't think it's ever acceptable to gang rape or rape people en masse. I don't care how brutal the Germans were in the war. You don't turn around and rape the children, elderly, and wives of those you just battled with. What they did was wrong the fact you can find any justification for it is disturbing.

quote:

Originally posted by c1steve:
I don't have a problem with the Russians raping every female they came across, during the push to Berlin. The Germans created two world wars, perhaps a little suffering by the surviving Germans might work it's way into the mindset of the German population.

If it was any of us, who's friends, family, wives, etc. that were killed by the German army, most likely we would be pretty merciless on the way to Berlin. The German army was exceedingly vicious to the Russian population, they got what they deserved.

Did you really think about what you wrote? As others have pointed out there is something so morally wrong with what you stated that’s it’s hard to fathom is was posted.

quote:

Originally posted by arcwelder76:
Atrocities do not excuse atrocities.

It’s not necessary to eat the whole egg to know it’s rotten.
Just based on a very few posts, I’m not going to steel myself to read this entire thread, but arcwelder76 has said all that’s necessary about the morality of atrocities.

Without attempting to address any particular claims, for the person who is truly interested in the story, just a couple of books that I recommend: Ordinary Men, by Christopher R. Browning, and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder. Both look at subjects that have not received much attention otherwise.

Having a jewish wife and children, this thread is disturbing on many levels.

My wife's grandmother was one of the lucky ones, she left Germany in 1939 with her husband and son, my wife's father. Siblings and parents weren't as lucky. They lived in a smaller town and due to visibility, attempts to justify the disappearance were made. Her husband was beaten to extract a confession which he wouldn't give and he suffered nerve damage preventing him working as a butcher. They lost their butcher shop and home. He was able to receive insurance payments for health policies he purchased as a shop owner decades later as well as compensation for his stolen property.

My wife's grandmother returned to her home town in the late 1970's where she saw neighbors from the past. The old neighbors said they didn't know and she vehemently refused to accept that claim. A tough and principled lady who never dealt in BS, didn't then.

quote:

Originally posted by c1steve:

Highly doubt he will be back in this thread...

I've read Ordinary Men, about the police reserve battalion and their involvement in rounding up and killing Jews. And the cost. They self-medicated with alcohol and often did the killing half or completely drunk. And drank loads after to help deal with they had done. They often got local virulent anti-semites to help with killing, especially the women and children.

One thing many folks don't know or truly appreciate is how much willing, local help the Nazis had when it came to identifying, collecting, concentrating, and killing the Jews. Ukranians spring to mind. Including former Soviet POWs who decided some food and clothing would be a nice alternative to dying of exposure and starvation and often fought against the Red Army, and staffed death camps.

As for reprisals against the Germans by Russians, it was brutal, state-sanctioned for months, and took a long time to subside. Of course, the Germans were horrid when they were doing well in 1941 and some of 1942, and payback was long-lived. And again, if rape and pillaging was not officially encouraged, it was totally ignored through late 1945. Really bad international press eventually made Stalin and the Stavka start to reign it in, but when "anything goes" for a year or so, it won't stop on a dime. When they actually started imprisioning and executing the repeat rapists, it returned to a semblance of lawfulness.

The only thing atrocities do is spawn more atrocities.