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Alchenar posted:The vast majority of people did not end up in the SS. You had to be a special kind of true believer in the Nazi cause to get in and everyone who did deserves all the condemnation the world can muster. That isn't necessarily so for the later war conscripts, which I think is what we're talking about. Even then, if you're raised in wartime Nazi Germany from the time you're a little kid, how much free will do you think you can really apply to your choices in view of the Nazi party? Again, I'm not excusing the crimes, but I do think that people tend to overestimate their own senses of morality when condemning those who went through the era.
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Feb 21, 2014 18:12
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Monuments Men: How historically accurate was it? The current discussion made me recall a scene where the team is being shot at by what looks like an pre-teen child in an SS uniform
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Feb 21, 2014 18:17
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Alchenar posted:The vast majority of people did not end up in the SS. You had to be a special kind of true believer in the Nazi cause to get in and everyone who did deserves all the condemnation the world can muster. I don't know, the SS was kind of amoebic and wars have a strange way of causing people end up in places where they probably don't belong (or simply are too daft and naive to understand what they're signing up for)...   Whether later maturing should be taken into account when judging old crimes is the kind of hard philosophical question that I feel any courts would run into deep trouble with. Take for example "affluenza" as a DUI murder defense - something that might be a good idea in a perfect world, but in this reality it only reminds us of our world's imperfection.
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Feb 21, 2014 18:22
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bewbies posted:Again, I'm not excusing the crimes, but I do think that people tend to overestimate their own senses of morality when condemning those who went through the era. Lines of thought like this remind us to be humble, that the line between good and evil is drawn down the middle of every human heart. It's not about grand pronouncements or abstract principles, it's about being alive to the worth of each person you meet, one person reaching out to another: if we're capable of doing evil, we're also capable of doing good. (Oh Lord, look at all this tryhard and care.) As far as moral judgement of the past goes, that's a murky and difficult question--especially considering eras like my specialty, in which what we would call war crimes (and what they kind of did) were Plan A. But if you simply condemn the people you study you haven't learned anything. Killing noncombatants and taking their things (which will make them starve to death) is wrong. OK, and? Edit: WoodrowSkillson posted:I actually was confusing that discussion with some other ones unrelated to this and misrepresented the discussion in this thread. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Feb 21, 2014 |
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Feb 21, 2014 18:30
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Pharmaskittle posted:SS members working at a concentration camp is a really specific volunteer job that makes you a willing participant in what are obviously atrocities. No doubt there were some really really bad guys in the Red Army, some certainly as monstrous as a given SS member. This kind of relates to the whole 'banality of evil' argument, that the whole warcrimes thing from Nazi SS to Red Army conscripts are committed by Just Guys in lovely situations egged on by totalitarian propaganda and situation. It's easy to fold your arms like a good goon and talk about how you would have reacted to constant propaganda from age 7 upwards on your races superiority, or how you would have held back on raping and murdering across eastern europe under the influence of alchohol, constant wartime propaganda and commissars egging you on. There are shitheads today who have the same opinions as Nazis who need to be called out and condemned, but these are different times and it becomes a much more difficult thing to just give unreserved condemnation from the computer chair on people in entirely different circumstances. Understanding this is the only way I can ever actually play Soviets or Germans in games without feeling constant levels of :|. I remember turning off the Reichstag / Ruins of berlin garage in World of Tanks because I'd just finished The End and every time I saw it I just kept thinking of the bullshit that went on there.
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Feb 21, 2014 18:34
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Koramei posted:Presumably they're being executed. Multiple fallacies here. 1. Different people are having different reactions. For different reasons. You can't lump the thread together as though they were a single person. 2. Re: the red army thing, I, for one, was questioning the matter of how common rapists were in the Red Army. And so potentially how reasonable it is to tar the entirity of Red Army with a broad brush. No one was defending the *actual* instances of rape, and certainly not *actual rapists* in the red army. If you can find them, shoot them. The majority of Red Army infantrymen didn't even survive to 1945. 3. Drawing an equivalence between people who rape in an orgy of vengeance and rage after years of deprivation and combat, and people who assist in the mass murder of women and children happily isolated from fighting and going to the biergarten on saturdays will be at least somewhat controversial, so I'll just leave that here. 4. Those people were exposed to nazi propaganda, but the official nazi line was that the Jews were being resettled to the East. So yeah, on the nazi genocide stakes, these people were going somewhat beyond the average. quote:I don't know, the SS was kind of amoebic and wars have a strange way of causing people end up in places where they probably don't belong (or simply are too daft and naive to understand what they're signing up for)... Fangz fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Feb 21, 2014 |
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Feb 21, 2014 18:36
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Nenonen posted:I don't know, the SS was kind of amoebic and wars have a strange way of causing people end up in places where they probably don't belong (or simply are too daft and naive to understand what they're signing up for)... The SS guards were not members of the Waffen-SS, so I don't get what Grass is doing there. The Waffen-SS did use conscripts in the later years of the war (which is what Grass was), and I don't doubt there was a fair number of volunteers who were just blinded by patriotism/wanted to serve in an elite unit. But the regular SS were volunteers to a man. It gets a bit more complicated with guards recruited locally, who can at least claim that they weren't exactly able to say no to a job offer. And it should also be noted that these guys never came forward after the war. I can understand lying low while the trials in Nuremberg went on, but by the 70ies or later they could have expected a more lenient treatment depending on how much they cooperated. I'm not saying they are diehard Nazis to this day, but it does strike my as somewhat lacking in reflection. The Holocaust was a crime, and if you were a major part of it, then you are a criminal.
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Feb 21, 2014 18:43
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Fangz posted:
It isn't controversial, warcrime is warcrime. Equivalence doesn't have any part of it unless you're engaging in some warped contest of best/worst murderers.
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Feb 21, 2014 18:58
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ArchangeI posted:The Holocaust was a crime, and if you were a major part of it, then you are a criminal. It's not quite as easy as that, unless you're talking about the literal architects and members of the Nazi state who enabled and planned it. The violence and completeness in which the Nazi state forced it's authority on its subject people is breathtaking. By 1945 persecution of it's own people who refused to follow the party line to the letter, on every societal level, were basically brutally murdered. Note: When you talk about World Warcrimes 2, this will nearly always become a focal point of debate. So why don't some milispergers talk about something else, like, um.. the cold war (Curse you wargame  )
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Feb 21, 2014 19:08
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maev posted:It isn't controversial, warcrime is warcrime. Equivalence doesn't have any part of it unless you're engaging in some warped contest of best/worst murderers. The death camps were a crime against Germany's own people, not a warcrime. The in-field executions on the Eastern Front would be examples of war crimes. Nenonen posted:I don't know, the SS was kind of amoebic and wars have a strange way of causing people end up in places where they probably don't belong (or simply are too daft and naive to understand what they're signing up for)... Foreigners couldn't join the regular army, so they had no choice besides the Waffen SS. The Indian Legion had nobler goals than most, but the volunteer SS formations were the worst of all.
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Feb 21, 2014 19:12
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maev posted:It isn't controversial, warcrime is warcrime. Equivalence doesn't have any part of it unless you're engaging in some warped contest of best/worst murderers.
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Feb 21, 2014 19:15
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maev posted:It's not quite as easy as that, unless you're talking about the literal architects and members of the Nazi state who enabled and planned it. The violence and completeness in which the Nazi state forced it's authority on its subject people is breathtaking. By 1945 persecution of it's own people who refused to follow the party line to the letter, on every societal level, were basically brutally murdered. However, "Maybe the Nazis weren't actually all that bad" isn't a very good note to end a conversation on. I'm reading this conversation, and nobody said that all Germans who were alive during WW2 were horrible people who deserved punishment, and nobody said that the Soviets never committed any warcrimes. So you're kind of confusing me. Being a concentration camp guard is somewhere near the top of the list of horrible atrocities an individual with no subordinates can be responsible of. Those are the people who stood by and watched as countless people were butchered, and their job was to shoot anyone who tries to avoid their fate. Even if the guards in question never shot anyone, which we can never know, and even though they were only 18 or so, they contributed heavily to one of the most effective machines of human death that ever existed in the entire history of mankind. Them being caught and given a (fair) trial sends a message that the people who participate in such atrocities will not get away with it.
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Feb 21, 2014 19:19
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Can I suggest that we just ditch this entire line of discussion and just move on? It's getting hostile and this is a nice thread full of nice people normally.
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Feb 21, 2014 19:20
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maev posted:It isn't controversial, warcrime is warcrime. Equivalence doesn't have any part of it unless you're engaging in some warped contest of best/worst murderers. I define controversial as 'liable to spark a gigantic argument'.
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Feb 21, 2014 19:22
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Arquinsiel posted:Can I suggest that we just ditch this entire line of discussion and just move on? It's getting hostile and this is a nice thread full of nice people normally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI5B7jLWZUc
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Feb 21, 2014 19:23
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maev posted:It's not quite as easy as that, unless you're talking about the literal architects and members of the Nazi state who enabled and planned it. The violence and completeness in which the Nazi state forced it's authority on its subject people is breathtaking. By 1945 persecution of it's own people who refused to follow the party line to the letter, on every societal level, were basically brutally murdered. To my knowledge, there hasn't been a single documented case where an SS-guard who demanded a transfer to another assignment was denied or punished. They had nothing to fear.
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Feb 21, 2014 19:29
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gradenko_2000 posted:Monuments Men: How historically accurate was it? The current discussion made me recall a scene where the team is being shot at by what looks like an pre-teen child in an SS uniform I didn't read the book but looked around on wikipedia but it seems decently accurate. The only 'error' that sticks out to me currently is when the alcoholic guy gets killed, IRL he got killed by a random shell rather than the awful 'shootout' scene in the movie. Really the movie suffers far more from its writing and directing rather than historical accuracy. fake edit: oh also the story behind the last mine shaft is true except for the ticking clock plot device they put in. e2: oh also the french woman was real, no one idea if she tried to sleep with Matt Damon IRL though. Raskolnikov38 fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Feb 21, 2014 |
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Feb 21, 2014 19:30
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So the movie isn't that good? Shame, I really would like a movie on that subject. How's the book?
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Feb 21, 2014 21:06
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So coincidentally a friend of mine posted this which is of mild interest to those early aviation interested sorts.
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Feb 21, 2014 21:14
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wdarkk posted:So the movie isn't that good? Shame, I really would like a movie on that subject. How's the book? It's a period piece and I enjoyed it a lot, but (IMO) it was rather light on plot and excitement and most of my like of it just came from seeing a lot of WWII stuff with contemporary cinematography, but I imagine most other people would find it boring.
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Feb 21, 2014 21:23
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wdarkk posted:So the movie isn't that good? Shame, I really would like a movie on that subject. How's the book? Eh its worth one of those old people/the unemployed tickets during the day that's cheaper. Some review described it as Clooney being unable to decide if he wanted to do it seriously or like Oceans 11 which I found to not be too far off the mark.
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Feb 21, 2014 21:25
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ArchangeI posted:To my knowledge, there hasn't been a single documented case where an SS-guard who demanded a transfer to another assignment was denied or punished. They had nothing to fear. This. The same goes for people who were in the Einsatzgruppen. You may decline your assignment and the worst that could happen is that you lose face in front of your comrades or get branded as "you don't have the stomach for this line of work". There's really a red line running through the complex of extermination, and that is that no matter where you look, the men picked to lead or get their hands dirty were people of 2nd or 3rd choice. Shady and unsteady characters - "verkrachte Existenzen". Look at the kind of people higher up in the hierachy like Kaltenbrunner, Globocnik and Stangl, then take a guess who did the work on the ground. Nobody would have given these people another chance in civilian life or in the Wehrmacht. Every other way to start a career or further their position was blocked to them, so they sign up where things look good. East. Special assignment. You might make a career. There's really all kinds of opportunists you can imagine. Lots of Austrian Nsdap members. People that were in the party, but found that the good jobs were already taken when Austria got annexed. Naturally, the party didn't pull alot of highly talented or educated people, but ambitious they were. The war in the east set off some kind of "gold rush" for careers. Opportunists, fanatical Nazis and Adventurers, but however you twist and turn it, you don't get into these places unless you want to. Anyway, you don't become a member of the SS by chance. Don't fall into the trap of believing what propaganda might suggest, namely that the grip that it had on people, or the control that the party liked to display: the knowledge about the extermination was deemed unfitting for the public by the leadership and Hitler was ever worried about public opinion. Of course everybody knew and spoke about it. If you happen to find a book about the field post of the east in a library, lend it out. People write about stuff that will make your hair stand up like recounting a picknic (and ofc, you find all kinds of varied response to events). That stuff was regulated by censorship, but people still talked about it openly, and also when they were on leave. Anyway, opportunism. That war was like a force of nature, and people are no different than we are today. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Feb 21, 2014 |
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Feb 21, 2014 21:34
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Arquinsiel posted:Can I suggest that we just ditch this entire line of discussion and just move on? It's getting hostile and this is a nice thread full of nice people normally.
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Feb 21, 2014 22:40
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When did prosecuting people for war crimes become a thing, anyways?
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Feb 21, 2014 23:25
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SlothfulCobra posted:When did prosecuting people for war crimes become a thing, anyways? After the second world war 2.
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Feb 22, 2014 00:28
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SlothfulCobra posted:When did prosecuting people for war crimes become a thing, anyways? 1945. Unless you count single instances in which someone has been court martialed by their own army for unauthorized murdering and raping of civilians, but even there I honestly can't think of any examples prior to WW2. Because even if those hussars weren't supposed to rape and murder that entire enemy village, it would be bad for morale and your honour to make a big fuss about it. Better just to demote their commander and forget that boring chapter in your illustrious military history! Not to mention that most of the time during the last 300 years that hussar commander would actually have been promoted for a job well done. The practise of trying (the losing side's) civilian and military authorities and actors started in WW2. Then some time later (Yugoslavia, Rwanda) it has become normal to try to make all war criminals face justice, regardless of whether their faction 'won' or not, as wars these days tend to be chaotic civil wars with only losers. You can contribute this to the end of cold war. Great powers (USA, Russia, China etc.) and their BFF's (namely Israel) are still immune to prosecution, though. Rabhadh posted:second world war 2 You mean the first WW2. The second WW2 will be our last WW1. e: unless the third world war is literally limited to the third world (excluding the ones with nukes). Nenonen fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Feb 22, 2014 |
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Feb 22, 2014 00:29
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Rabhadh posted:After the second world war 2. Nobody could be bothered to do it right after the first world war 2, and when the third rolled up, Nuremberg airport raised prices in advance.
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Feb 22, 2014 00:30
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Its a Simpsons joke
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Feb 22, 2014 00:39
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SlothfulCobra posted:When did prosecuting people for war crimes become a thing, anyways? Depending on how you count 'war crimes' the commandant of Andersonville was tried after the Civil War for abusing and murdering prisoners. I think Hegel mentioned a 30YW general tried for war crimes by his own side, but I may not be remembering that correctly.
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Feb 22, 2014 00:42
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I wonder if you can make a case for the Catholic church acting as a sort of international court for a period. Or is this a videogame invention?
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Feb 22, 2014 00:44
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Nenonen posted:Because even if those hussars weren't supposed to rape and murder that entire enemy village, it would be bad for morale and your honour to make a big fuss about it. Better just to demote their commander and forget that boring chapter in your illustrious military history! Not to mention that most of the time during the last 300 years that hussar commander would actually have been promoted for a job well done. Not exactly historical, but didn't the British army in Spain Napoleonic era hang soldiers who raped and looted the local population?
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Feb 22, 2014 00:50
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Chillyrabbit posted:Not exactly historical, but didn't the British army in Spain Napoleonic era hang soldiers who raped and looted the local population? Pretty much, but those are more crimes against the general population not military state sponsered acts of genocide and terrorism. And this couldn't be controlled all the time, as the bloody sack of Badajoz revealed.
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Feb 22, 2014 00:55
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Were there any persecutions for the Rape of Belgium or did they take care of that in the Treaty of Versailles?
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Feb 22, 2014 01:01
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StashAugustine posted:Depending on how you count 'war crimes' the commandant of Andersonville was tried after the Civil War for abusing and murdering prisoners. I think Hegel mentioned a 30YW general tried for war crimes by his own side, but I may not be remembering that correctly. Edit: And technically, you weren't supposed to plunder/rape/kill non-hostile civilians even if you were exacting contributions from them. It's just that it was impossible to stop--nobody would eat if they didn't take others' food, and there was no modern or 19th century style surveillance in place to keep it decent, if it even could have been "decent" to consign other people to starvation. A guy I met at that conference spoke about the "despair" felt by people who drew up 18th century military regulations, and I see this in the 17th century as well--people want to put a limit on atrocities, but everyone believes that it's impossible. Golo Mann calls the atmosphere surrounding Wallenstein's headquarters "an island of gold floating in a sea of poo poo." Order was the ideal; I think ArchangeI said that it was like the cultural good for these people, so far more important on a symbolic level than it would be for us. But in practice it was unattainable everywhere out of direct communication with a high-level authority figure (if he cared; some didn't). In response you'd get rapid pendulum swings of laxity/exemplary punishment: there's an anecdote in Mann where a soldier comes from plunder "flushed with exertion, as guiltless as though from haying" and a high level commander, I forget the rank, who just happened to bump into him starts screaming at the guy "You must hang! You must hang! Hang! Hang!" HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Feb 22, 2014 |
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Feb 22, 2014 01:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:Monuments Men: How historically accurate was it? The current discussion made me recall a scene where the team is being shot at by what looks like an pre-teen child in an SS uniform The film takes some substantial liberties with the facts. Most of the characters are composites of real ones (or outright fictions), so the "six guys in a Jeep save Europe's art" is a bit of an oversimplification, since the real MFAA unit was 400+ strong by 1945. The Hitler Youth did enlist some very young kids to fight, so it isn't farfetched that they took a couple of potshots at MFAA guys. But I'm not aware of any instances like the one shown in the movie 
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Feb 22, 2014 01:07
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Bacarruda posted:The film takes some substantial liberties with the facts. Most of the characters are composites of real ones (or outright fictions), so the "six guys in a Jeep save Europe's art" is a bit of an oversimplification, since the real MFAA unit was 400+ strong by 1945. Were there any Hitler Youth formations besides the 12th SS?
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Feb 22, 2014 01:22
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gently caress you woodrow. I saw that link and knew immediately before clicking that you beat me to the joke. e: I'm not really mad. Just tremendously disappointed.
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Feb 22, 2014 02:09
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Am reading about the 14th century, and the book was talking about all the lawless soldiers/mercs transitioning into banditry during times of peace. The authorities recognized this as a problem, but were unable to restore order, so the French came up with a clever solution... Hire them for a foreign adventure, and then lose the war. So it became someone else's problem.
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Feb 22, 2014 03:11
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Was reading up on John Paul Jones on wikipedia for some bizarre reason (seriously, I have no clue what train of thought led me to here), I came across a (potential) example of grenades getting used in ship of the line combat:Wikipedia posted:With Bonhomme Richard burning and sinking, it seems that her ensign was shot away; when one of the officers, apparently believing his captain to be dead, shouted a surrender,[citation needed] the British commander asked, seriously this time, if they had struck their colours. Jones later remembered saying something like "I am determined to make you strike", but the words allegedly heard by crew-members and reported in newspapers a few days later were more like: "I may sink, but I'll be damned if I strike."[citation needed] An attempt by the British to board Bonhomme Richard was thwarted, and a grenade caused the explosion of a large quantity of gunpowder on Serapis's lower gun-deck.[citation needed] I have never before heard of this being used in boarding actions. I guess it maybe makes sense to have an anti-personnel indirect weapon to chuck down into the lower gun decks to harry the gun crews (maybe set off some powder?) but I can't imagine it would be more useful than swivel guns from a prominence firing down, having probably a larger payload of pistol or rifle balls being spat out at much higher velocity with the benefit of aim, let alone the havok caused by the big guns firing grape and canister and even langrage. Unless they really were meant to be tossed down into lower decks. I don't know much about the era. Were cannon ever mounted on weatherdeck, or was that generally avoided but out of necessity since you seem like easy pickings to any rear end in a top hat in the fighting tops or crow's nest with a musket or shotgun. If nobody used the weather deck I do guess that would explain why a grenade might work better than the swivel gun.
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Feb 22, 2014 06:24
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cosmosisjones posted:Would anyone be able to suggest any good books about the Chosin Resevoir campaign during the Korean War? Breakout by Martin Russ is an excellent telling of the Chosin campaign down to the very low level. Starting at $0.01 used and it's way more than worth that.
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Feb 22, 2014 06:44
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