quote:

Originally posted by P220 Smudge:
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.

“Historian Niall Ferguson calculated the mortality rates of POWs held by different nations as follows:

Percentage of POWs that Died:

Russian POWs held by Germans: 57.5%
German POWs held by Russians: 35.8%
American POWs held by Japanese: 33.0%
German POWs held by Eastern Europeans: 32.9%
British POWs held by Japanese: 24.8%
British POWs held by Germans: 3.5%
German POWs held by French: 2.58%
German POWs held by Americans: 0.15%
German POWs held by British: 0.03%”

Clearly treatment of POWs by the French, British and American’s resulted in extremely low death rates.

Was eventhing sweetness and nice? No. What should be pointed out is that the treatment of Germany after WWII resulted is a prosperous, ecomnonic power house. East Germany, as run by the Soviet Union, Clearly shows the difference in treatment.

First, a society can be judged by how it treats its prisoners, enemies, children, and domestic animals. From SS candidates killing their own pets, to burning humans alive, to the use of the guillotine, Germany as a nation can not be excused for it's place in history. I ,for one, will never forget what evil looks like.

Visiting the Holocaust Museum in DC does not prepare you for actually visiting the camps. It is a visit you will never forget or excuse.

Second, [Arc] "Atrocities do not excuse atrocities. Damn man.[/Arc] What the Russians did was inexcusable. Plain and simple. That they did it to some of those that were also evil, makes no difference.

Third, I lost loved ones to the camps, but I would never ask evil to be bestowed on those who are evil. Be careful when battling monsters, that you do not become the monster.

Fourth, this thread has acted as a mirror, reflecting what is in your heart. "Out of the heart's abundance the mouth speaks." I am ashamed by what some of your hearts display.

H&K-Guy

quote:

Originally posted by redstone:
Ernst tells numerous stories, all personal letters and journals of germans. Yes, ordinary soldiers were used at the onset but they quickly realized that sane soldiers would not participate in executions continuously. Yes it did start out that way, but many of them committed suicide etc. So, they moved on to murderers and the SS. The German army did not participate in the Final Solution. And many of them died for it. (Rommel).

It happened, it was evil, how it happened should be deeply studied. How can this have happened in a civilized world?

I read a book years ago about the death squads in Poland and Western Ukraine and the were numerous reports of "extra" schnaaps being issued and even then soldiers would disappear in the woods until the killing ended. Funny it.also mentioned the Western Ukrainians filled in happily.

Normal soldiers did not handle it well, they stayed drunk or shirked their "duties" the same way soldiers hve done so for a couple millennia.......they disappeared when shitty duty came down. In the German situation many NCOs covered for their men.

The nazi's had to industrialize the killing if they had any chance at succeeding

quote:

Originally posted by Icabod:
Was eventhing sweetness and nice? No. What should be pointed out is that the treatment of Germany after WWII resulted is a prosperous, ecomnonic power house. East Germany, as run by the Soviet Union, Clearly shows the difference in treatment.

So... they benefited from what happened post-war is your argument, so whatever else happened was all justified.

Look, here's where I'm at with it. My great uncle Joe Melka went to France in late summer of '44 after the invasion with the 69th ID. His fondest memory of the war was us shelling the crap out of Napolean's Monument for most of the day "and then we went in there and shot it out with those SS bastards that wouldn't surrender when the monument wouldn't crumble." He took SS prisoners, and was proud of it. He was one of the first guys to meet Russian troops in the link-up and I have a Russian parachute regiment pin he traded one of them for. He never talked about liberating a Buchenwald subcamp, but he was there for the whole ride, and he was the son of a Polish immigrant to the US and spoke fluent Polish, so what he saw or did died with him, but haunted him his entire life. Later, after the war, he became an art professor. A lot of his private art dealt with emaciated, dead bodies. Walking corpses.

I have a "Feldpost" box he stuffed full of coins, pins, and campaign ribbons and badges from his time in Europe that lives in my safe. When I was about ten, he nearly died and wrote out a short war memoir just for me since I was interested in the war. He got better, and a few years later, sent me his war journal and official division history book, which I was instructed to return and did. I scanned them, and the images are flaking off burned cd's in my parent's attic. The books themselves disappeared after he died and I have no idea where that legal pad he did his best to fill wound up, all to my great dismay.

Somewhere, I have a picture of him with his "battle buddy" somewhere in France in late fall of '44. I'll need to dig it up. His in-theater division patches and pin ride on either side of the slot in my safe where my M1 rests. Don't anyone dare mistake my comments against the Soviet reprisals against the Germans as anything other than simple humanity.

Photo added because it’s the Internet, and “pics or it didn’t happen.”

Smudge,

thanks for sharing that, and God bless your great uncle, for he sounds like a heck of a man.

Apologies for coming across as direct earlier - war is a terrible thing, and the Nazis were evil bastards (and there were a lot of them!). I was just trying to call out that there were a ton of damn good people wearing every color in that war, and we lost untold amounts of them.

It's like our American Civil War; nowadays, the trend is to label every Confederate soldier a racist and a bigot, and no doubt many were. However, there were fine, honorable and upstanding men on both sides during that war, just as there were downright evil individuals.

No worries, I have ancestors that fought on both sides of the civil war, and family wartime gear with provenance on both sides have trickled down to a cousin.

I guess I’m just a moron. My Beloved Granddad and great uncles fought in WWII and rarely talked about it. I just don’t understand the hate for the Jews or anyone for that matter. How could any human hate another for such shallow reasons? I guess I’ll never understand.