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The Nazis had quite a bit of trouble with the Catholic parts of Germany when things like crucifixes were forced to be removed from schools and such. There was actually mass protests that led to the Nazis giving in as strange as that sounds.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:32
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There's been some recommendations for books on Barbarossa generally, but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas for good books on the debates around whether or not the Soviet government was going to stay in Moscow or not? Around the psychology of the Soviet leaders in that time, and the debates and politics around whether to stay or flee?
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Feb 12, 2014 02:44
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Pornographic Memory posted:I guess to not make this a total derail, what, roughly, was Nazi policy on religions that were not Judaism? Did they favor any particular denominations? I know there was some non-Christian occult stuff espoused by some Nazis, but I'd imagine that even for Nazis it would be pretty fringe. As with with most other things in Nazi Germany, there was not a coherent policy with regards to religion. Fringe sects, such as Jehova's Witnesses, were persecuted for various reasons and many ended up in the camps. Hitler and many other high-ranking Nazis were critical of traditional Christianity, which they viewed as weak, passive and influenced by Jews. This led to the regime encouraging movements such as the German Christians or Positive Christianity, anti-semite and nationalist versions of Christianity that sought to remove Old Testament and other Jewish influence from the Christian faith. Neither of these ever gained much ground with ordinary Germans, though. The Catholic Church in Germany was persecuted with varying degrees of severity, though it was targeted at Catholic institutions rather than individual Catholics. This was mainly a part of the effort to remove any social and cultural institutions outside of the control of the party. A number of Nazi high-ups such as Rosenberg and Himmler were definitely dreaming of a neo-pagan Germany sometime in the future, but there was never any serious effort to "paganize" the population or to stamp out Christianity. The whole "Nazi Occultism" thing has definitely been overblown by media, and never amounted to much more than fringe movements. It is interesting to note that atheists were not allowed into the SS - an aspirant had to list himself as either Catholic, Protestant or "God-believer". I think the reason that the Nazis didn't try more seriously to reshape German religion was Hitler's ever-present fear of a repeat of the 1918 revolution. Many of the Nazi's more weird decisions - not switching over to a war economy, not recruiting women into either the armed forces or the factories etc - can be traced to this.
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Feb 12, 2014 09:02
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Raskolnikov38 posted:CoH2 is also awful. I don't know how well this plays, but apparently there's a fairly big Eastern Front total conversion mod for Company of Heroes 1
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Feb 12, 2014 09:18
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:For the love of god, I was using over simplistic terms to try and explain something I didn't understand.. In a thread called "ask me about Nazi Germany" One of the best books I read was Stalingrad by Antony Beevor, which, though is it primarily a discussion of the siege of the city and its consequences, did a really really good job explaining the differences in military psychology between the German and Soviet forces, and the vastly different goals they had in mind. Basically, the loose structure and high casualty nature of the Russian army meant that you were never attached to a single unit for very long, and were very likely to be executed by your own forces if there was a hint of treason. However, since you were fighting for your family and your country against genocidal maniacs who would rape and murder your family, you got back on the line and picked up the group's rifle when the guy who dropped it fell, and kept shooting until you died. There would be desertion, sure, and there would be mutiny, but if you did either, you'd never see your family again, and it's very likely they'd all be executed. Get back on the line like a good Stakhanovite and do your duty, citizen! You might not like Comrade Stalin, but you don't want your family to die, do you? This notorious Russian duty bound fatalism stands in stark contrast to the German exceptionalism that Hitler was preaching. Germany was boasting about how wonderful their unbeatable military machine was; Russia was training dogs with bombs strapped to their backs to run underneath tanks to blow them up. Another important bit to keep in mind is that Russia used a different gauge of railroad track than Germany (Russia's tracks were 5 foot across, Germany's were 4' 8 1/2"). This seems like it should be such a minor thing, but it was utterly crippling when it came to moving supplies quickly. You either had to completely redo the lines, or had to somehow adjust the wheels on the train. Which was exactly Russia's plan when they were building the railroads in the first place... The Germans were wasting precious fuel and in some cases even using horse drawn carriages to transport materials to the front lines. edit: Another good book on this aspect of Soviet psychology is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, which is literally just that, one day in the life of a guy in a Russian prison camp. He'd been a POW in WW2, and was imprisoned as a spy after the war was over, though there is little to no evidence he gave the Germans anything while imprisoned by them. The work he is forced to do is awful, but the men in the work gang have one another; disloyalty to the group is unthinkable. It is the only way they can survive the brutal treatment from the guards and the commandants above. The book is soul crushingly depressing and amazingly good, and if you can imagine what this guy's life must have been like during the war... There's no way he would have ever considered joining the German forces. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Feb 12, 2014 |
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Feb 12, 2014 16:48
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I think the attention that Nazi Occultism or Esoteric Hitlerism gets is more down to people like Miguel Serrano and Savitri Devi being nutbags trying to prove that Hitler is a god (or more accurately an avatar of Vishnu) and in Serranos case an entire theory on Aryans being descended from aliens. Crazy makes for interesting documentary programmes on NatGeo and Discovery Channel though, and it really is quite interesting to read about.
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Feb 12, 2014 18:59
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Has Ancient Aliens gone more contemporary and claimed that Hitler was an evil demon alien yet? Because I know it's coming.
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Feb 12, 2014 19:03
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Spoilers Below posted:The Germans were wasting precious fuel and in some cases even using horse drawn carriages to transport materials to the front lines. In some cases is actually pretty often. The Heer was not the mechanized monster it's often portrayed as. Also in regards to supplies I've read from some German soldiers that even at the very start of Case Blue the supply situation, particularly of fuel, was already pretty critical, partly from stockpiles, partly from having to get the fuel all the way to across the Don and Donnets
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Feb 12, 2014 20:15
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A book worth taking a look at is Heather Pringle's The Master Plan. It's about a specific strain of esoteric nazism, namely the "scientific" parts of it. The SS-Ahnenerbe spent a lot of money outfitting expeditions into Sweden, Finland, Tibet and France for various pseudoscientific studies. Pringle is pretty great because she doesn't overstate the importance of nazi esotericism unlike many shittier writers. It was mostly unimportant and the only one at the top who was really into that poo poo was Himmler and people made fun of Himmler because of that.
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Feb 12, 2014 22:03
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Amused to Death posted:In some cases is actually pretty often. The Heer was not the mechanized monster it's often portrayed as. Also in regards to supplies I've read from some German soldiers that even at the very start of Case Blue the supply situation, particularly of fuel, was already pretty critical, partly from stockpiles, partly from having to get the fuel all the way to across the Don and Donnets There's a great podcast episode about this very topic. The ratio of men to horses in the Wehrmacht was as high as 1:4 at times, and so many horses were killed in the Falaise Pocket in 1944 that I'd say it was a zoological calamity (not that the rest of WW2 wasn't calamitous in all other respects)
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Feb 12, 2014 23:26
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I know that the Nazi's told their people that Poland had started the conflict, did they make up a similar story when they started Barbarossa?
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Feb 27, 2014 12:09
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Didn't they justify it as a pre-emptive strike by saying the Soviets were planning an invasion central Europe?
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Feb 28, 2014 02:30
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I believe so, the only reason the Nazi's bothered with the Gleiwitz radio station was to try to avoid French/British intervention. Once you're already at war with most of the world and are about to get what (big) little that isn't in, providing rear end covering isn't really needed.
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Feb 28, 2014 02:36
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Reading this thread has been a gas (sorry) but I thought I would link this video narrated by Jonathan Meades about the architecture and design aspects of the Nazi's. It's not just about that though, it goes into the motivation behind the designs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTfbBvIEbfA A Winner is Jew fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Mar 17, 2014 |
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Mar 17, 2014 17:34
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So what was the stance on murder of "unacceptable races" before the holocaust, say if some member of the regime or a sympathizer decided to kill a couple of unacceptables in the ghetto along the lines of an adrenaline junkie decided to take his edge off acceptable targets.
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Apr 15, 2014 16:47
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gyrobot posted:So what was the stance on murder of "unacceptable races" before the holocaust, say if some member of the regime or a sympathizer decided to kill a couple of unacceptables in the ghetto along the lines of an adrenaline junkie decided to take his edge off acceptable targets. Even during the Holocaust, killing a Jew in Germany itself was by German law a murder. The Nazis went through a lot of effort to strip Jews of their German Citizenship before they killed them. There was never a point where the official line was "killing a Jew is not a crime, go hogwild". There is a world of difference between the state killing someone and a private person killing someone (see also: why Police killing a bank robber isn't murder or manslaughter).
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Apr 15, 2014 17:18
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:The Nazis had quite a bit of trouble with the Catholic parts of Germany when things like crucifixes were forced to be removed from schools and such. There was actually mass protests that led to the Nazis giving in as strange as that sounds. This has less to do with specific Nazi policy re: religion and more to do with the ongoing multi-decade clusterfuck that was attempts to reform German education through the 20s-50s. The tl;dr on it is that church and state were intertwined in German public education in ways that are go far, far beyond what most other countries had to deal with. You have an extensive history of school inspectors being drawn from the clergy on one hand coupled with state-mandated and funded religious instruction in secular schools on the other hand and then the entirely special and hosed up sets of issues that accompany parochial schools kicking around just to keep things interesting. A lot of this goes back to the really fractured and confused "German" (if we can even talk about that at that point) religious identity that comes out of the Reformation and the battles that the state(s) had to fight to have the majority say in what we would now call educational policy during the period when bureaucratic, centralized governments were really taking off in Europe. Then you layer on the political and cultural problems that rose out of the mid-19th century Unification, and in particular the rebirth of all the religious tensions. The Kulturkampf created some truly mind-bending allies of political convenience when it came to educational policy. On top of all this throw a major late 19th/early 20th reform movement that was aimed at making public schools a mechanism for cultural and economic upward mobility rather than a means for reproducing traditional power structures. Even though most of that was pretty secular in nature it also got mired in the state/religious bullshit just because of the nature of the beast by that point and late Imperial / Weimar-era politics. Enter the Nazis. One of their major priorities from day 1 was to usurp traditional government structures with parallel Party structures. Part of that was trying to finally untangle all the religion/state BS that was going on in the schools in order to have a better handle on educational policy for their own purposes. That's where you get things like the pushback against the reform efforts in Bavaria/Hesse/Thuringia. Hilariously enough you get a lot of the same protests when the Allies try a lot of the same reforms for a lot of the same reasons. Hell, you still get the odd newspaper article about it today. Here's an article from ~20 years ago about the German high court ruling that a Bavarian law flat out requiring a crucifix in every classroom was unconstitutional. The last time I saw it crop up in German news in a big way was about 2008 or so, but I doubt it's a settled issue.
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Apr 15, 2014 19:58
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ArchangeI posted:Even during the Holocaust, killing a Jew in Germany itself was by German law a murder. The Nazis went through a lot of effort to strip Jews of their German Citizenship before they killed them. There was never a point where the official line was "killing a Jew is not a crime, go hogwild". There is a world of difference between the state killing someone and a private person killing someone (see also: why Police killing a bank robber isn't murder or manslaughter). While this is true, there's a difference between the letter of the law and its execution (see also the American South at about the same time. In theory, killing black people == murder. In practice, there are souvenir photos of lynch mobs with their faces uncovered because they knew law enforcement wasn't going to do a drat thing to them).
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Apr 16, 2014 19:08
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Ensign Expendable posted:The Red Army was still unpurged, and various forward thinking officers were still around. Russia wasn't 'the allies' in 1936, though; the UK government considered them more of a menace to world peace than the Germans. It's also worth pointing out that the UK and France were both militarily less strong than they were in 1939, too - rearmament became a thing in the West once it became clear (to some) that Hitler wasn't going to stop. Britain in January 1936 has neither the Spitfire, nor the Hurricane, nor radar (in fact the RAF was still rocking biplanes), which would make the Battle of Britain interesting. Contrariwise the Italian army in 1936 was reasonably up to date rather than having obsolescent gear as it did in 1939.
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Apr 16, 2014 19:27
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feedmegin posted:Britain in January 1936 has neither the Spitfire, nor the Hurricane, nor radar (in fact the RAF was still rocking biplanes), which would make the Battle of Britain interesting. I don't want to turn this into an airplane geek derail, but this isn't true. Even in the early days of aviation, when design took place with lightning speed compared to today, R&D and procurement didn't work like that. Neither airplane was in service in '36, abut both were around in one form or another. The hurricane was prototyped in 1935 and existed on paper and as government specifications back in '34. Hell, if you want to trace the linage of design and production elements that were lifted from other hawker designs (most notably the Fury) parts of it were around in the late 20s. As for the Spitfire, while it didn't prototype until March of '36 it was well under way as a coherant design project in 1934 and has roots in work Supermarine was doing even earlier than that, especially their sea plane work for the Snieder Cup. It's worth noting for comparison that the 109 prototyped in 1935 and was recognizable design in '34. These were things that were happening in parallel with each other as general R&D projects rather than in reaction to each other. As for RADAR, everyone was researching the hell out of it in the early 30s. Even in the late 20s it was clear that something could be done with it (although most were more concerned with naval or terrestrial than aerial applications) and basically every country worth mentioning was working on the problem. The first Chain Home stations were completed in 1936, but the first successful military trials were in 1935 and a lot of the breakthrough research for the Brits happened in 33 and 34. I forget what kind of timeline the German teams were operating on, but I'm pretty sure the US Naval research groups had even the British beat (although they were more concerned with it as a range finder for naval artillery). As for this: feedmegin posted:While this is true, there's a difference between the letter of the law and its execution (see also the American South at about the same time. In theory, killing black people == murder. In practice, there are souvenir photos of lynch mobs with their faces uncovered because they knew law enforcement wasn't going to do a drat thing to them). I'm sorry, but ArchangeI is correct. You really can't draw any useable parallels between the worst excesses of the Jim Crow south and what was or wasn't acceptable in mainstream German society in the 1930s. Setting aside whether your depiction of a lawless free-for-all where Southern blacks could be killed at will is accurate, German law still protected German citizens and there wasn't a terrible amount of public support for lawlessness of any kind. Let's take, as an example, the most infamous single night of anti-Jewish violence before the Holocaust got well under way, Kristallnacht. We remember it today as a shocking, terrible, cesura; a total interruption in the normal day to day life of German society that marked a distinct 'before and after' period for the treatment of Jews in Germany. A very significant part of why we remember it so today is because that's how it was seen at the time, both by the international community and within Germany itself. It was shocking in the extreme. That said, "only" 91 people were killed that night in all of Germany. This pales in comparison to even a minor liquidation action in any given occupied village 3 or 4 years later. It's also worth noting that, much to the concern of the more ideologically driven Nazis, German public opinion was almost unanimously against it. People were aghast. Goebbels et al had to make a full court propaganda press to turn it into anything but an unmitigated disaster, and November '38 stands as a low point in Nazi Party support before the war begins. It was condemned by drat near everyone outside the party who mattered and even most people inside the party who wasn't Goebbels or a known batshit crazy anti-Semite tried to play it off and move past it ASAP. Kristallnacht ended up not being a signal that you could murder a Jew in the street without repercussion, but a signal to the Nazi leadership that they lacked the public support needed to operate in the open. That's the whole reason they took advantage of wartime exigencies to solve not only the Jewish Question but all of their racial hygene-related concerns. This is the whole reason why they bothered going to such lengths to strip Jews of their citizenship and why they bothered deporting everyone first to ghettos then to camps rather than killing them in situ. They needed the extra-legal, quasi-colonial status of places like the General Government, Reichskommissariat Ostland, and Reichskommissariat Ukraine to give them the freedom not only to do what they wanted, but do it in a way that wouldn't be immediately under the public eye. Note that this isn't to say that people didn't know that bad poo poo was happening to the Jews. The notion that the individual, common German had no idea what was going on is equally false. The trick wasn't in hiding events from people, but in obscuring them just enough that your average citizen could quietly ignore them and maintain his individual belief that he was a good person who wasn't participating. That kind of trick becomes a lot harder when you're rubbing people's noses in it a la Kristallnacht. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Apr 16, 2014 |
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Apr 16, 2014 22:10
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I have Irish ancestry. Would I have been wiped out of existence in a Nazi-victory world, or were Hitler/the Nazis cool with the Irish?
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Apr 18, 2014 06:43
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The Irish government was down with the nazis, mostly as a gently caress you to Great Britain though. de Valera called up the German ambassador to give his condolences on Hitler's death which pissed off a lot of people for good reason. E: haha he also sent a congratulatory note to the guy Japan was setting up to be their puppet ruler in India on his declaration of said puppet state. Raskolnikov38 fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Apr 18, 2014 |
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Apr 18, 2014 07:18
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Just as Raskolnikov38 said, and I'm sure Himmler's guys would have constructed a nice PR story why you're a brother's people of the masterrace. Celtic people of the north, welcome on board. Too bad for you if you other heritage containes Poles, Russians, any Asians or Jews. Also, malus points for having a long crooked nose, thick lips, etc.
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Apr 18, 2014 07:32
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Gen. Ripper posted:I have Irish ancestry. Would I have been wiped out of existence in a Nazi-victory world, or were Hitler/the Nazis cool with the Irish? Frankly 99% of the "would <insert group nowhere near nazi germany> have been wiped out in a Nazi victory" questions have zero basis in historical reality even ignoring the inherent hypothetical nature of them. The short answer is no, because contrary to how it was explained to the general public for the purposes of wartime support etc the Germans had no realistic plans for world domination. Their successful end-game wasn't landing troops in Virginia. gently caress, it's honestly pretty debatable if they even had an end-game in mind, but as best as we can piece together it was more or less to create a German great power situation in Central/Eastern Europe. Think more along the lines of the continental US after our 19th C. expansion or the USSR after it consolidated in the 20s-early 30s. They weren't gunning for the extermination of every non-Aryan on the planet as much as they were trying to secure what they perceived as the long-term racial health of their own nation and the space/resources to ensure that they stayed a dominant player on the world stage. Even taking the example of the Jews, they were all about expulsion and expropriation up until even the early 40s or so. This also helps put things like T4 and their anti Sinti/Roma campaigns into proper context. edit: just to be 110% clear because this is the internet - Nazis were horrid people and none of this is meant as any kind of justification or defense of their absurd beliefs and horrible philosophies. It's just that in its vileness it is still susceptible to the same kind of analysis and examination as any other belief system (whether well articulated and coherant or chaotic and self-contradictory), and they did have certain frameworks within which they were operating. It's also important to note that it can be really goddamned hard to pin down a single, coherant philosophy for any of this stuff. It's more of a collection of prejudices, pseudo-science, 19th C. romanticism, and other influences that forms a vague world view that even ardent National Socialists struggled to articulate and debated among themselves. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Apr 18, 2014 |
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Apr 18, 2014 17:10
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Celts were cool in H's book. The Bretons in France had a resurgence with fabulously kitsch paramilitary parades (and of course Vichy, like the Republic before, saw itself as Gallic in heritage).
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Apr 18, 2014 19:22
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The Irish not being proper white people was only really a thing in Britain, as justification for the colonization of Ireland, and America, as anti-immigrant rhetoric, and in America at least it wasn't really a popular view by the time Hitler became a person of interest. I doubt Germans of that era ever gave much thought to the Irish at all.
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Apr 20, 2014 06:07
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FreudianSlippers posted:The Irish not being proper white people was only really a thing in Britain, as justification for the colonization of Ireland, and America, as anti-immigrant rhetoric, and in America at least it wasn't really a popular view by the time Hitler became a person of interest. I doubt Germans of that era ever gave much thought to the Irish at all. Pretty much the Nazis only thought about the Irish in terms of how they could use them to cause trouble for the British. Even then most of the German intelligence officers who worked with the amenable elements of the Irish population (most of whom, despite everything, were apathetic at best towards Germany) thought the boasting of their contacts that they could engineer a major distraction to Britain was rubbish. Hell, the Irish defense forces happily worked with the British command in Northern Ireland on a joint defense strategy in case of a German invasion attempt, and a not inconsiderable number of Irishmen went over to Britain to either work in factories or fight as volunteers during the war. Not to mention the fact navigation beacons and cairns were set up in rural Ireland to aid American aircraft being ferried to Britain, or that Allied aircrews who landed in Ireland were generally given a lift north to Belfast while Axis aviators were detained in the manner that neutrals were supposed to treat combatants. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 07:12
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A nice look into finding new evidence of things that we already knew had taken place: http://www.livescience.com/44443-treblinka-archaeological-excavation.html?cmpid=514645_20140429_21340714
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Apr 29, 2014 21:44
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Would anyone have suggestions on articles or books on German civilian and low ranking military reaction to and opinion of the war, or German civilian and low ranking military reaction to atrocities by Germans and others? I recently read an ok article (The Techniques of Neutralization and the Holocaust) and want to read a bit more about the topic. I'm from a social science background fwiw.
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May 4, 2014 18:55
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sugar free jazz posted:Would anyone have suggestions on articles or books on German civilian and low ranking military reaction to and opinion of the war, or German civilian and low ranking military reaction to atrocities by Germans and others? I recently read an ok article (The Techniques of Neutralization and the Holocaust) and want to read a bit more about the topic. I'm from a social science background fwiw. "What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany" is a great place to start. It talks about what people in Germany knew and how they could claim that they did not know about what was happening.
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May 4, 2014 19:00
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Hey folks, just noticed this thread. I, too, know an embarrassing amount about Nazi Germany, especially the military. I spent a ridiculous amount of my youth reading up on taboo subjects, and the Third Reich was of particular interest.sugar free jazz posted:Would anyone have suggestions on articles or books on German civilian and low ranking military reaction to and opinion of the war, or German civilian and low ranking military reaction to atrocities by Germans and others? I recently read an ok article (The Techniques of Neutralization and the Holocaust) and want to read a bit more about the topic. I'm from a social science background fwiw. Would memoirs work? Blood Red Snow is a good memoir from a cavalry division Corporal. Black Edelweiss, In Deadly Combat and The Forgotten Soldier all come to mind, too, especially TFS. FreudianSlippers posted:The Irish not being proper white people was only really a thing in Britain, as justification for the colonization of Ireland, and America, as anti-immigrant rhetoric, and in America at least it wasn't really a popular view by the time Hitler became a person of interest. I doubt Germans of that era ever gave much thought to the Irish at all. Hitler was chill with pretty much anyone of (relatively) white descent. Notable examples are the Middle Eastern nations of Greek ancestry and the Balkan nations. Obviously, Anglo-Saxons were preferred, but other Caucasian subraces were accepted. ArchangeI posted:Even during the Holocaust, killing a Jew in Germany itself was by German law a murder. The Nazis went through a lot of effort to strip Jews of their German Citizenship before they killed them. There was never a point where the official line was "killing a Jew is not a crime, go hogwild". There is a world of difference between the state killing someone and a private person killing someone (see also: why Police killing a bank robber isn't murder or manslaughter). Adding onto this, according to German law at the time, a member of the armed forces - including the Waffen SS (though legally this was more of a paramilitary group than a constituent of the armed forces) - would be tried in a military court for killing a Jew, prisoner of war or other undesirable, whether on duty or off. I'll post the "Ten Commandments of the Wehrmacht" when I get home - these are particularly interesting with regards to this topic. Here we go...spoilered because this is a huge wall of text: While fighting for victory the German soldier will observe the rules of chivalrous warfare. Cruelties and senseless destruction are below his standard. Combatants will be in uniform or will wear specially introduced and clearly distinguishable badges. Fighting in plain clothes or without such badges is prohibited. No enemy who has surrendered will be killed, including partisans and spies. They will be duly punished by courts. P.O.W. will not be ill-treated or insulted. While arms, maps, and records are to be taken away from them, their personal belongings will not be touched. . . . From 1941 to 1944 the Wehrmacht did not wage a "normal war" in the Balkans and the Soviet Union; this was a war of extermination of Jews, prisoners and the civilian population with millions of victims. . . . . . . [T]he Wehrmacht -- acting together with the SS and the police -- shot and burned women and children, the ill and the old, transforming the land around German bases into a dead zone. . . . Wolfram Wette Dum-Dum bullets are prohibited; also no other bullets may be transformed into Dum-Dum. Red Cross Institutions are sacrosanct. Injured enemies are to be treated in a humane way. Medical personnel and army chaplains may not be hindered in the execution of their medical, or clerical activities. The civilian population is sacrosanct. No looting nor wanton destruction is permitted to the soldier. Landmarks of historical value or buildings serving religious purposes, art, science, or charity are to be especially respected. Deliveries in kind made, as well as services rendered by the population, may only be claimed if ordered by superiors and only against compensation. Neutral territory will never be entered nor passed over by planes, nor shot at; it will not be the object of warlike activities of any kind. If a German soldier is made a prisoner of war he will tell his name and rank if he is asked for it. Under no circumstances will he reveal to which unit he belongs, nor will he give any information about German military, political, and economic conditions. Neither promises nor threats may induce him to do so. Offenses against the a/m matters of duty will be punished. Enemy offenses against the principles under 1 to 8 are to be reported. Reprisals are only permissible on order of higher commands. While I'm not going to contribute to the perpetuation of the "clean Wehrmacht" myth, I think a clear distinction needs to be made between the Waffen SS (who committed most of the "war" war crimes), the Allgemeine SS (those who orchestrated and organised the killings), the Totenkopfverbande SS (those who actually guarded and/or killed Jews en masse in the camps), and the Wehrmacht (the actual armed forces). Noctis Horrendae fucked around with this message at 01:41 on May 5, 2014 |
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May 5, 2014 01:17
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Yeah, there's still a lot of modern scholarship about how much the Wehrmacht was involved in the killings. In the East, they had their hand in massacring a lot of civilians and "partisans." They had a better record only because their duty was to kill Slavs who might have guns instead liquidating them in the woods.
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May 5, 2014 01:48
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Last Buffalo posted:Yeah, there's still a lot of modern scholarship about how much the Wehrmacht was involved in the killings. In the East, they had their hand in massacring a lot of civilians and "partisans." They had a better record only because their duty was to kill Slavs who might have guns instead liquidating them in the woods. The Eastern Front is definitely an admittedly massive exception to the rule in this case, yeah. I would argue that officers and divisions assigned to the Eastern Front were a lot more ruthless than those who stayed in Western Europe. Also, the most war crimes were committed there, so that's a thing.
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May 5, 2014 01:54
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My point is to call bullshit on the myth that the Wehrmacht was restrained or more civilized, or really at any point "honorable" fighting men. When they weren't fighting a war of extermination, they tended not to kill civilians as much, but that's only because that wasn't their job. Rules of war were followed only when it was convenient.
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May 5, 2014 02:25
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Last Buffalo posted:Rules of war were followed only when it was convenient. I would like to think that they were marginally more civilized, but oh so marginally. Also, that point goes for every war and country ever, not just Germany in World War II.
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May 5, 2014 02:29
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If the largest theater of war by far for the Wehrmacht was the eastern front, wouldn't the "honorable " behavior they exhibited in the West actually constitute the exception?
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May 5, 2014 02:33
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Pornographic Memory posted:If the largest theater of war by far for the Wehrmacht was the eastern front, wouldn't the "honorable " behavior they exhibited in the West actually constitute the exception? That depends entirely on the period of time we're talking about.
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May 5, 2014 02:39
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Noctis Horrendae posted:Also, that point goes for every war and country ever, not just Germany in World War II. Not really. The western allies were miles a over the Germans in terms of how they treated civilians and captured prisoners, even when it made things a lot more difficult. Yes, the committed war crimes, but not on the scale or of the institutional variety that the Germans did. Even the Russians, who treated Germans and German military with much less mercy, still can claim the moral high ground. Stalin made an offer to follow the Geneva rules if Hitler would as well, but Hitler ignored him. Interestingly enough, the reason the Allies tried so many nazi leaders instead of just hanging them in mass was because Stalin insisted. Roosevelt was totally cool with summary executions of leadership and proposed stripping Germany of all heavy industry and turning it into an agricultural state when they were defeated.
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May 5, 2014 02:51
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Last Buffalo posted:Not really. The western allies were miles a over the Germans in terms of how they treated civilians and captured prisoners, even when it made things a lot more difficult. Yes, the committed war crimes, but not on the scale or of the institutional variety that the Germans did. Even the Russians, who treated Germans and German military with much less mercy, still can claim the moral high ground. Stalin made an offer to follow the Geneva rules if Hitler would as well, but Hitler ignored him. Interestingly enough, the reason the Allies tried so many nazi leaders instead of just hanging them in mass was because Stalin insisted. Roosevelt was totally cool with summary executions of leadership and proposed stripping Germany of all heavy industry and turning it into an agricultural state when they were defeated. It's kind of funny Stalin was totally fine with killing millions of people out of hand, but when it comes to the Nazis who were actually in charge of everything he wanted them to get a trial. Speaking of which, did the Japanese war criminals seem to get off easier than the Germans? I know there were some trials but if I remember right it wasn't on the scale of Nuremberg.
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May 5, 2014 03:14
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A gently caress load of Japanese war criminals ended up as directors of companies post-war so yeah.
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May 5, 2014 03:17
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