Milhist Thread: Ok, so get this: we name the army groups 1, 2 and 4...

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Milhist Thread: Ok, so get this: we name the army groups 1, 2 and 4...

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Xakura: Jan 10, 2019; A safety-conscious little mouse!

Lemony posted:

I've been told that the guy who had tentatively been identified as a Marine was supposedly KIA at Iwo Jima. Amusingly, I've also been told the RCN guy wasn't actually in the original photo and was composited in afterwards.

Shadows on his face is opposite everybody else, so I buy it

# ? Nov 29, 2022 17:44

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# ? Jun 1, 2024 12:43

Xiahou Dun: Jul 16, 2009; We shall dive down through black abysses... and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.

Xakura posted:

Shadows on his face is opposite everybody else, so I buy it

Also he looks like a ghost.

Mid 20th century photo-compositing wasn't a well-refined art.

# ? Nov 29, 2022 18:46

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Have another fine composite I had at hand from telling people in BFC why, specifically, they should hate the Quandts.

(Dude in the uniform isn't actually there)

# ? Nov 29, 2022 19:07

Xakura: Jan 10, 2019; A safety-conscious little mouse!

Xiahou Dun posted:

Also he looks like a ghost.

Mid 20th century photo-compositing wasn't a well-refined art.

Very mean to canadian complexions

Cyrano4747 posted:

Have another fine composite I had at hand from telling people in BFC why, specifically, they should hate the Quandts.

Is sin inherited :shrug:

# ? Nov 29, 2022 19:11

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Xakura posted:

Very mean to canadian complexions

Is sin inherited

If by "sin" you mean "the tens of billions of ~~Reichsmarks~~ ~~Deutschmarks~~ Euros my family made under the Nazis expropriating Jewish property and running slave labor in our factories and which we continue to use to make political donations with" then yes.

~~Billions of euros of stolen wealth and slave labor profits~~ sin is absolutely inheritable.

# ? Nov 29, 2022 19:14

Xakura: Jan 10, 2019; A safety-conscious little mouse!

Cyrano4747 posted:

If by "sin" you mean "the tens of billions of ~~Reichsmarks~~ ~~Deutschmarks~~ Euros my family made under the Nazis expropriating Jewish property and running slave labor in our factories and which we continue to use to make political donations with" then yes.

~~Billions of euros of stolen wealth and slave labor profits~~ sin is absolutely inheritable.

Yeah, nvm, I can't read.

I read it as "this picture proves why you should hate them" and not "I have this picture from proving to people why they should hate them"

# ? Nov 29, 2022 19:21

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

If anyone wants to know more about the Quandts there was a documentary made in Germany about them a while back, "The Silence of the Quandts" and the whole thing is on Youtube. I think I've effort posted about them in this thread? Anyways, it's worth a watch.

Warning: You're going to end up pissed off at German billionaires

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shkgyrual2g

# ? Nov 29, 2022 19:22

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Cyrano4747 posted:

I think I've effort posted about them in this thread?

Lol yep. It was. Here's me being Mad About Quandts:

Cyrano4747 posted:

The SS rented concentration camp labor to private business.

German industry also made extensive use other kinds of forced labor which you can slide under the rubric of slavery as well.

Fortunes were made doing this. Fortunes which I may add still exist.

Let me introduce you to someone. This is Stefan Quandt.

Hi Stefan!

Stefan is a billionare. One of the richest, if not THE richest, people in Germany. He owns something like 20% of BMW, which he inherited from his dad.

His dad was Herbert Quandt, who became a bit of an industrial celebrity in West Germany for saving a struggling BWM from bankrupcy.

In the 1940s Herbert was on the board of a bunch of businesses that his family owned, as well as the manager of one factory. Long story short the Quandts were already industrialists before WW2 and in the inter-war years scooped up a lot of the wreckage of the old Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken (DWM), as well as large chunks of the electrical and automotive sectors. Plus some other poo poo I'm probably forgetting. Anyways, during the war he personally ran a factory that used slave labor and had a really high "turn over" in employees due to the high concentrations of acid vapors on the factory floor. And by turnover I mean "they loving died, working as slaves for the Quandts."

So all that's bad, right? Hold on to your assholes because that isn't even the tip.

This is his dad, G�nther Quandt.

G�nther ran, well, all sorts of businesses during the war because he was the big cheese on top of this industrial empire and holy poo poo was he ever "hiring labor" from his buddies at the SS left right and center. Notably and embarrassingly for the modern company, BMW used a fuckload of slave labor. We'll come back to that in a moment.

So that's bad, but honestly it's kind of a side show. See, G�nther's wife (and Herbert's mom) died of the Spanish Flu in 1919. Being a loaded as gently caress dude he remarried pretty soon, a lady named Magda.

Everyone, meet Magda Ritschel.

Well, poo poo didn't work out between them. They had a kid, Harald Quandt, who I'll get to in a moment, but eventually I guess she got kinda bored at being married to some old fart billionare and started having affairs. He found out about one, they divorced.

One of those affairs was with a strapping young political up-and-comer who she ended up marrying. The new guy's name was Joseph.

Everyone, meet Magda's new husband, Joseph motherfucking Goebbels.

Remember Magda's son Harald? The one she had with Daddy Warbucks up there?

Here's a charming and famously doctored family photo. Harald's the one in the uniform. It's a doctored photo because he was off serving in the war when it was taken. The other kids are the ones who Magda and the new guy would murder in the bunker of a madman when the long arc of history finally caught up with them in the form of the ballistic trajectory of Soviet artillery pounding central Berlin.

Ok, to recap, we've got Magda ~~Quandt~~ Goebbels with one kid of her own from the previous marriage, and that guy has a half-brother who's deep in the Quandt business. So far this is scandalous and all, but we're just doing some Nazi celebrity gossip. Well, daddy might have gotten dumped in favor of Joseph goddamn Goebbels (which has to be an all time low in getting dumped) but that doesn't mean we can't make use of the new family ties to turn a buck. See, the Quandts made out like loving BANDITS during the "Aryanization" of the German economy. With the capital-P Party connections they had they were first in line to buy businesses that were deemed too important to be owned by subhumans. Oh, and they also got some really sweet contracts on slave labor too.

So the war happens, Magda murders most of her kids, and when the dust settles Harald's life was saved because while mommy dearest was murdering his half-siblings in a bunker he was stuck in a POW camp because he'd gotten shot down. As the dust settles the two Quandt (half) Bros get right back into the family business and set about rebuilding. What's that about returning ill gotten gains? Don't be silly. Daddy Quandt dies in 1954, Harald crashes an airplane 13 years later, and the only Quandt left standing is Herbert.

Now let's come back around to Stefan, the dashing young man who I started this with. In the early 2000s a German TV company does their homework and realizes holy poo poo Nazi loving royalty still own half the economy and makes a film about it titled The Silence of the Quandts. I highly recommend it, it's a hell of a watch. It's also on Youtube, although it gets taken down periodically.

So the Quandts, including Stefan who's basically the public facing head of the family at this point, try and get out ahead of this and promise to investigate fully because this is nothing that anyone could have known. Poor me, I'm a billionaire industrialist and my step-grandma was married to Joseph Goebbels how ever was I to know there was an ugly Nazi past in my family? Truly this is the sort of dirty laundry every German family has to deal with and there is no way we could have been aware of it.

So they hire a historian named Joachim Scholtyseck who digs loving deep and puts out a big report full of fancy words and citations that tl;dr's down to "Quandts Nazi as FUUUUUCK." I believe the actual wording used was something like "inseparably linked with Nazi crimes." We're not just talking grand-daddy was a fucker who murdered some Jews in a field in Russia, we're talking personally linked to the major decision makers in the Third Reich and structurally linked to the criminality endemic in the entire loving economic system. Also props to Scholtyseck for writing a real history and torpedoing the people who wrote his paycheck.

What do the Quandts do? loving NOTHING. No response, they go loving radio silent and have been since then. They're basically shutting up, enjoying being billionaires, and trying to wait long enough that people forget that they're still turning a massive profit off of an industrial empire that was in no small part built off of the murder of Jews and other "undesirables."

I'll add that all of this stands in marked contrast to loving Volkswagen of all companies, a corporation that no bullshit started as a loving Nazi ponzi scheme. Modern VW did something similar, commissioned a report into its ugly past, and has spent a fair bit of cash trying to both support Israeli businesses and make reparations to Holocaust survivors. Now, there's a whole conversation to be had about what they're doing, how they're doing it, and if it's sufficient. Does supporting modern Israeli business help make up for the sins of the past? That's . . . debatable, to put it mildly. Regardless, whatever someone may think of their efforts and however much criticism they might be owed for it, it's significantly more than the giant goose egg and continued dumb silence that the Quandts have offered.

In summation: gently caress the Quandts, they're Nazi motherfucking royalty and they're still behind the wheel of some of the largest companies in modern Germany.

# ? Nov 29, 2022 19:26

PittTheElder: Feb 13, 2012; Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

Lemony posted:

Amusingly, I've also been told the RCN guy wasn't actually in the original photo and was composited in afterwards.

I was gonna say, that's exactly what that looks like. My family had something similar, though I'm not sure for what generation/war. Don't have the pic or else I'd post it

# ? Nov 30, 2022 02:33

Xiahou Dun: Jul 16, 2009; We shall dive down through black abysses... and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.

This is much more interesting and well done than it looks at first. It's a documentary that's really just an academic presentation done via video. A pretty rad dude lived in medieval shoes for an entire year and documented it, dude is a historian, here it is with an overview of the topic, a review of the relevant literature, the outline of the experiment, various stages, preliminary conclusions, works cited.

There's a pretty yikes part for a second but it's nothing. He brings up some source that seems kind of like that high-octane crunchy granola woo-woo pseudoscience you only get when anthropologists on the very furthest humanities end of that discipline try do science. But eventually you realize he doesn't give a poo poo about the source, he just needed a citation for a really basic fact that everyone just kind of agrees on so we never checked (your body changes over time as a result of how it moved in the past, e.g. exercise and calluses and injuries and stuff).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NttYt2UjWEo

# ? Dec 2, 2022 08:07

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Does anyone remember how exactly the French code worked in that particular episode of Sharpe where Harris needed to find a copy of the book Candide?

Was it that the cipher text letter was a series of numbers corresponding to the page number and the nth word on the page to form the plain text message?

# ? Dec 2, 2022 18:07

Xakura: Jan 10, 2019; A safety-conscious little mouse!

Raenir Salazar posted:

Does anyone remember how exactly the French code worked in that particular episode of Sharpe where Harris needed to find a copy of the book Candide?

Was it that the cipher text letter was a series of numbers corresponding to the page number and the nth word on the page to form the plain text message?

That is such a common technique that it has its own wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_cipher

Sharpe is mentioned under "in fiction"

# ? Dec 2, 2022 18:17

Raenir Salazar: Nov 5, 2010; College Slice

Xakura posted:

That is such a common technique that it has its own wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_cipher

Sharpe is mentioned under "in fiction"

Excellent thanks, I'm looking for puzzle ideas for my D&D campaign. :devil:

# ? Dec 2, 2022 18:24

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Note that this works a lot better before modern day commercial printing. Basically a lot of the time book shops would also be printers, and a lot of shops would run off their own editions of popular works. Which means that you'll have a lot of different typesettings for something that's popular, and also a lot of smaller books that were only run off by a particular printer in a particular city. You would also have shops that would contract out the printing but do the binding themselves, and sometimes add little extra bits to give some value added and draw customers, which means things like page numbers are going to move around even if typeset on a page doensn't.

So even if you know the cypher is using the bible, and even if you know it is a bible from Durham, and even if you know it's a bible sold by "Bookseller Hutchinson" in Durham, it might not be enough because there was a William Hutchinson selling books in Durham in the 1650s and 60s and a Hugh Hutchinson (his son) selling books there in the 60s-80s.

They can be surprisingly durable cyphers.

edit: If you wanted to make a movie about an 1700s spymaster, having a bookshelf full of paired identical copies of old books would be a nice touch.

# ? Dec 2, 2022 18:31

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

The Beale Cipher is an intriguing book cipher, and it was a profitable hoax. One cipher can be decoded with a particular copy the Declaration of Independence to describe buried treasure, including more than a tonne of gold. The cipher supposedly listing the treasure's rightful owners, using the same copy of the Declaration, can be decoded as abcdefghijklmnop. The third cipher, which supposedly has the treasure's location, sold thousands of copies and has never been solved.

# ? Dec 2, 2022 18:47

Goatse James Bond: Mar 28, 2010; If you see me posting please remind me that I have Charlie Work in the reports forum to do instead

Xiahou Dun posted:

Nah they let the equivalent of weeaboos culturally metastasize.

oh god this is terrifyingly accurate

# ? Dec 3, 2022 08:25

zoux: Apr 28, 2006

Those who don�t know history are destined to make really awkward marketing tweets

zoux fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Dec 3, 2022

# ? Dec 3, 2022 16:21

Cyrano4747: Sep 25, 2006; Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

zoux posted:

Those who don�t know history are destined to make really awkward marketing tweets

Looks like Kanye is getting work at least.

# ? Dec 3, 2022 16:27

Xakura: Jan 10, 2019; A safety-conscious little mouse!

zoux posted:

Those who don�t know history are destined to make really awkward marketing tweets

lol I thought "1939 was a vibe #HappyPlace" was something a sarcastic twitter commenter put on it, and tried looking for whatever was wrong in the video.

lmao

# ? Dec 3, 2022 16:50

ilmucche: Mar 16, 2016; What did you say the strategy was?

Xakura posted:

lol I thought "1939 was a vibe #HappyPlace" was something a sarcastic twitter commenter put on it, and tried looking for whatever was wrong in the video.

lmao

Oof, yeah that took me a minute

# ? Dec 3, 2022 17:23

LightRailTycoon: Mar 24, 2017

ilmucche posted:

Oof, yeah that took me a minute

https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939
Is a vibe, alright!

# ? Dec 3, 2022 17:54

Nenonen: Oct 22, 2009; Mulla on aina kolkyt donaa taskussa

1939 was the year when Spanish Civil War ended, bringing peace to Europe again :yayclod:

# ? Dec 3, 2022 20:08

Fangz: Jul 5, 2007; Oh I see! This must be the Bad Opinion Zone!

What was the actual context of that tweet? It's been deleted. Some kind of history exhibit?

# ? Dec 3, 2022 20:18

Epicurius: Apr 10, 2010; College Slice

Fangz posted:

What was the actual context of that tweet? It's been deleted. Some kind of history exhibit?

First modern drawing of Mickey? 1939 was the year Mickey was firat drawn the way he is now. It was also the year Disnwy win a special Oscar fie Snow White.

Epicurius fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Dec 4, 2022

# ? Dec 4, 2022 18:45

chitoryu12: Apr 24, 2014

Epicurius posted:

First modern drawing of Mickey? 1939 was the year Mickey was firat drawn the way he is now

Disney made its first big live appearance with merchandise at the 1939 World�s Fair, which had a setup and giant ball that inspired Epcot.

# ? Dec 4, 2022 18:48

Scratch Monkey: Oct 25, 2010; 👰Proč bychom se netě�ili🥰kdy� n�m P�n Bůh🙌🏻zdrav� d�💪?

Also Disney loved Hitler

# ? Dec 4, 2022 19:22

chitoryu12: Apr 24, 2014

Scratch Monkey posted:

Also Disney loved Hitler

Yeah he made all those anti-Nazi propaganda films as a joke.

# ? Dec 4, 2022 19:53

Libluini: May 18, 2012; I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...; Grimey Drawer

chitoryu12 posted:

Yeah he made all those anti-Nazi propaganda films as a joke.

too bad we can't laugh about them

# ? Dec 4, 2022 20:04

Molentik: Apr 30, 2013

chitoryu12 posted:

Yeah he made all those anti-Nazi propaganda films as a joke.

Or to make a shitload of money.

# ? Dec 4, 2022 20:19

Scratch Monkey: Oct 25, 2010; 👰Proč bychom se netě�ili🥰kdy� n�m P�n Bůh🙌🏻zdrav� d�💪?

chitoryu12 posted:

Yeah he made all those anti-Nazi propaganda films as a joke.

I was joking because it's funny to think of Disney being fascist.

# ? Dec 4, 2022 20:22

Fangz: Jul 5, 2007; Oh I see! This must be the Bad Opinion Zone!

AFAICT there's zero basis for "Disney loved Hitler".

Scratch Monkey posted:

I was joking because it's funny to think of Disney being fascist.

Saying things that aren't true is notably hilarious

# ? Dec 4, 2022 20:22

Phanatic: Mar 13, 2007; Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Fangz posted:

AFAICT there's zero basis for "Disney loved Hitler".

What about that short film he did, �Nazi Supermen are our Superiors�?

# ? Dec 4, 2022 20:38

Remulak: Jun 8, 2001; I can't count to four.; Yams Fan

Scratch Monkey posted:

I was joking because it's funny to think of Disney being fascist.

Abigail Disney, grandniece of Walt Disney, via her Facebook page back in 2014 posted:

�And if you are going to have mixed feelings about a family member (and we all do) take it from me, you really need to be as honest as possible about those feelings, or else you are going to lead yourself into many a blind alley in life!! � Anti-Semite? Check. Misogynist? OF COURSE!!

�Racist? C�mon he made a film (Jungle Book) about how you should stay �with your own kind� at the height of the fight over segregation! As if the �King of the Jungle� number wasn�t proof enough!! How much more information do you need?�

Also a strikebreaker that hired zero black people in customer-facing roles, excepting Aunt Jemimah, until 1968.

Here�s a picture of him smiling with an SS Major that ran a factory staffed by constantly dying slaves:

Remulak fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Dec 4, 2022

# ? Dec 4, 2022 20:56

FishFood: Apr 1, 2012; Now with brine shrimp!

Walt Disney was a right wing corporate shithead so while he probably would have supported a hypothetical powerful American fascist movement in the 40s, that didn't exactly exist so it's a bit of a counterfactual. A very bad person, for sure, but fascist might be a bit of a stretch. I don't think he was that ideological, he was just a pretty bog standard bigoted capitalist.

# ? Dec 4, 2022 21:18

Scratch Monkey: Oct 25, 2010; 👰Proč bychom se netě�ili🥰kdy� n�m P�n Bůh🙌🏻zdrav� d�💪?

Fangz posted:

Saying things that aren't true is notably hilarious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBbioa6cSaM

# ? Dec 4, 2022 21:32

Greg12: Apr 22, 2020

she's just mad because she got named after webigail

# ? Dec 4, 2022 22:49

Edgar Allen Ho: Apr 3, 2017; by sebmojo

Der F�hrer's Face is a banger if you ignore the extremely racist depiction of Tojo Hideki.

# ? Dec 4, 2022 22:49

SlothfulCobra: Mar 27, 2011

Reportedly, Walt Disney wasn't very interested in politics, although he was really big on sentimentality for Americana and trying to reclaim some idealized vision of what the world was when he was a kid, which tends to be an implicitly conservative perspective. There are some accounts of him being fairly naive.

He hated unions specifically because he wanted full control over his company and workforce and had a weird paternalism where he thought he knew best how to manage his employees (despite in practice his treatment of employees being fairly arbitrary because despite what he thought, he only really knew a small segment of his staff personally and was paying them more than the rest). I think that's a common perspective from people who built up their business from almost nothing; they overestimate themselves. He took unionizing as a personal betrayal.

Late in life he had weird plans to be dictator of his own city to display his prospective solutions for everything he saw as problems, but that didn't really manifest into anything.

# ? Dec 4, 2022 22:54

ChubbyChecker: Mar 25, 2018

disney's three little pigs was so antisemitic that they revised it after the war

# ? Dec 4, 2022 22:58

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# ? Jun 1, 2024 12:43

feedmegin: Jul 30, 2008

chitoryu12 posted:

Yeah he made all those anti-Nazi propaganda films as a joke.

To be fair, 'America the country I live in and and from is literally in a worldwide conflict with the Nazis after they declared war on us' is a very different context to pre-war. How many of them was the guy making pre-Pearl Harbor? As opposed to, for example, Charlie Chaplin where the Great Dictator is from when the US was still neutral.

One of these situations is 'being a lovely person and a Nazi sympathiser' (not specifically saying Disney was that but it would not surprise me if like a lot of people his age/in his social position he was aligned there to some extent). Still being publicly sympathetic after the other is straight up treason which is a whole other thing.

feedmegin fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Dec 4, 2022

# ? Dec 4, 2022 23:23

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Milhist Thread: Ok, so get this: we name the army groups 1, 2 and 4...

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