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Thousands of communists and radicals were already in concentration camps by 1934 and many more fled the country so the sort of people who would have been the most active in resistance against the Nazis were basically out of the picture.
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Jun 13, 2014 20:59
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One of the things to keep in mind when it comes to resistance against Nazi Germany is that European resistance, period, was very disproportionately participated in by communists (I'm using the term 'communists' here as shorthand for the far political left, usually highly influenced by Marxist Socialism and very frequently actually self-identifying as a national "Communist" party - I don't want to get bogged down addressing internal disputes in the splintered pre-45 European left or the tensions between some national communist movements and the Comintern). Whether you're talking about France, Poland, Germany, Yugoslavia, etc. among the people who organized first, organized the most effectively, and actually got out there and did things pre-1944 communists are way, way better represented than they were as a voting percentage of the population as a whole. For Germany in particular this has a number of direct consequences for resistance: 1) as noted already a lot of communists are already in the camps by the mid 30s. The KPD being declared illegal did a lot to drive a lot of people either out of the country, into seclusion, or got them quickly arrested on political grounds. 2) the camps themselves became hotbeds for "resistance" although this is highly contingent on how you define the term. If you limit it to the most physical forms than you disqualify almost all resistance attempts by the KPD, and indeed all German resistance period. Political prisoners weren't exactly sneaking out of Dachau at night to blow up trains a la Hogan's Heroes. What you see instead, especially post-42 as the eventual fate of the Third Reich becomes ever more apparent to everybody, are secret planning committees among the political prisoners for post-war rebuilding and restructuring of both society and the government. Dachau in particular had a very organized resistance cell of SPD and KPD members, many of whom walked straight out of the camp and into prominent positions in the occupation governments after the war. 3) after the war there was a huge reshuffling of the population in Germany. Part of this was as a result of the refugee crisis that central Europe was plunged into as ethnic Germans were resettled from territories that they lost in the post-war settlement, part of it was as a result of the internal wartime refugee problem created by the bombings of major population centers and the general chaos of the final military advances into the Reich, and part of it was a result of the new political landscape caused by occupation. As part of this you had a certain degree of political self-sorting during the mid-late 40s, with people who felt very strongly anti-communist tending to move away from the Soviet Occupation Zone and people who felt very strongly pro-communist tending to move into it. 4) Fast forward a bit and you're into the Cold War with the twin-state solution to the question of German nationhood. For all sorts of reasons, ranging from the obvious Cold War political tensions to the eventual discrediting of Stalin among the Western European left, communism in general became pretty marginalized west of the Elbe. Meanwhile the political situation in the DDR solidified into a true one party state behind the SED. In the pre-wall era both of these factors contributed to a ratcheting up of the political self-sorting that was started in the late 40s. The net result of all of this is that what German resistance took place was conducted by people who, if they survived, tended to be living in East Germany by the mid-50s, where they were celebrated and frequently prioritized for good government jobs based on their wartime conduct. Hell, the entire nation was founded on the principle of anti-fascist resistance under the banner of Marxist Socialism. Meanwhile their actions and those of others like them were increasingly minimized and ignored by a post-war western political order that was attempting to build its own wartime narrative that emphasized a different set of national heroes. There was some level of German anti-Nazi activity, but Cold War politics led to a lot of it being ignored in the west and what academic research was done on it in the east tends to be problematic for various reasons (this isn't to say that the entirety of the E. German scholarly apparatus was suspect, but that it has to be approached significantly differently than most of the contemporary W. German historiography). There is a lot of work that remains to be done integrating this research into our current understandings of both life in the Third Reich as well as in the immediate post-War era. This is all very stream of conscious and poorly organized, but I知 hoping it helps a bit. While German resistance was certainly muted compared to, say, Poland, France, or Yugoslavia it certainly existed beyond The White Rose and it really did have some pretty profound impacts on the post-war order. Edit: this is also completely ignoring the contributions of various Germans in exile during the war, both in the West and in the USSR. There was a lot of activity on that front, both in the forms of groups organized from among POWs by the various allied militaries and other groups and individuals, operating both in conjunction with the Allies and on their own. While most of it wasn稚 explicitly military in nature and did little to win the actual war, a lot of it involved post-war planning. This in particular was of an importance that is difficult to under-state precisely because of how utterly lacking Allied wartime planning for the post-war order was. Now if you値l excuse me I知 going to go sob and rock myself gently in the corner while I flash back to sections of my dissertation. edit x2: ZombieLenin posted:PS I'm a Political Science PhD candidate (Political Theorist) so my interest is kind of academic. In lieu of (or in addition to) any answers to my questions, I'd love you forever if you pointed me towards some good sources doing work on the bureaucracy, institutions, and civil servants in the Nazi state. Can you read German? Also how detailed are we talking? To really understand the way a lot of this works you really need to get into the weeds with the way professionalization and the bureaucracy/civil institutions worked - both politically and socially - prior to the Nazi takeover. I don't want to overload you with a massive list of niche books if you're looking for a specific thing or more of an overview. This is smack dab in my wheelhouse, as most of my work is on a lot of those structures in the immediate post-war era. If you'd like to talk a bit off site either PM me or email me at my username at gmail and I'll hit you back at my real address. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 14, 2014 22:00
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Cyrano4747 posted:One of the things to keep in mind when it comes to resistance against Nazi Germany is that European resistance, period, was very disproportionately participated in by communists (I'm using the term 'communists' here as shorthand for the far political left, usually highly influenced by Marxist Socialism and very frequently actually self-identifying as a national "Communist" party - I don't want to get bogged down addressing internal disputes in the splintered pre-45 European left or the tensions between some national communist movements and the Comintern). Whether you're talking about France, Poland, Germany, Yugoslavia, etc. among the people who organized first, organized the most effectively, and actually got out there and did things pre-1944 communists are way, way better represented than they were as a voting percentage of the population as a whole. One tidbit I would add is that Germany People who were anti Fascist enough to fight Franco in Spain, and thus were very likely to be willing to fight Hitler in Germany actually went there as the Interbrigades, and didnt exactly came back.
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Jun 15, 2014 18:01
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Low content personal anecdote: William Patrick Hitler (Stuart-Houston) was a neighbor and friend of my grandparents and his sons went to high school with my mom and her siblings. Stuart-Houston's business basically did all of the bloodwork for local physicians. Apparently they were really nice folks and no one really knew the full story, at least not while my mother was growing up (50s and 60s). My mom said that the first HS reunion she went to ('78 or so?) it was the big topic of conversation. Years after he died(mid to late 90s), his widow came to my parents' house to visit with my grandmother- I was probably 10 or 11 and basically had to be restrained by my parents from asking all of the Hitler related questions my young WW2 addled mind could come up with.
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Jun 18, 2014 21:30
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JaucheCharly posted:Communists, socialists and clerus I did a bit of googling and never saw anything about Clerus. Who were they?
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Jun 20, 2014 06:51
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I did a bit of googling and never saw anything about Clerus. Who were they? That's Latin for clergy.
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Jun 20, 2014 07:30
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what happend with (nazi) german embassies and their staff in neutral countries after VE day
Trench_Rat fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 05:50
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Well, the embassy in Ireland was accepting condolences for Hitler's death.
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Jun 27, 2014 06:39
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Nckdictator posted:Well, the embassy in Ireland was accepting condolences for Hitler's death. Couldn't be helped. After centuries of oppression the Irish will take any and every opportunity to troll the Brits.
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Jun 27, 2014 09:58
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I'll add questions as I read the thread, but to start: Were any of Hitler's top aides Jewish? Was there any "Well, you're a dirty Jew, but I like you so you can stay" mindset Hitler adopted? Dopilsya posted:If nobody minds, I'm not near the expert that the OP is, but I know a little about the situation and thought I might chime in: This is something I've always wondered about. How many proud Nazis and followers of Hitler suffered a major kick in the balls after hearing he'd killed himself and left them to sort out the hell that would be immediate post-war Germany?
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Jul 20, 2014 17:17
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CBJSprague24 posted:I'll add questions as I read the thread, but to start: Anti-Semeticism in Nazi Germany wasn't nearly as clean cut as most people imagine it was. It was very important to the Nazis that everything they were doing be done legally, at least in so far as German law was concerned. This is why they went to all the trouble that they did to systematically strip Jews of their rights as citizens during the 30s. The problem is that like all legal processes clever people find loopholes and political realities make other groups hard to directly target. Jewish veterans of WW1 are a good example of this. There were a bunch of laws that made it much more difficult to exclude them from jobs and politics, and as a result a number of them remained active in public life until relatively late in the game. In the end, as power was consolidated more and more, most of them lost their jobs, citizenship, etc the same as everyone else (and suffered their ultimate fate) but they lasted a lot longer. Then there's also the question of how you legally define a Jew. Legally sorting the population by race was a big part of the Nazi project in the mid 30s, and a lot of what you could and could not do was contingent on being able to prove your racial background. It's important to note that the Nazis never adopted a "one drop" rule for mixed-race backgrounds. If I remember correctly 1/4 was where things could get ugly professionally for someone (it could preclude promotion to top positions etc) and it could gently caress up some marriage prospects, but it wouldn't get you included in the worst of the racially discriminatory legislation. That said, there were exceptions that could be made if the person was important enough for whatever reason. I know there were a few senior military officers, politically connected persons, people with necessary scientific or industrial skills, etc. who had some problematic aspects of their family backgrounds wiped clean with what amounted to special certificates granting them full Aryan status. That said, all of the people who got that treatment were fairly important and/or connected in some way and they weren't what you or I would consider "Jewish." They didn't self-identify as Jewish, they certainly didn't practice Judaism as a religion, and it was a distant enough part of their family history that it could be glossed over with a bureaucratic exemption. You didn't see any Einsteins or Freuds allowed to stay on just because they needed or wanted their expertise. quote:This is something I've always wondered about. How many proud Nazis and followers of Hitler suffered a major kick in the balls after hearing he'd killed himself and left them to sort out the hell that would be immediate post-war Germany? Cults of personality tend to die with the personality they're built up around. The only real instances where this isn't true is where they survive long enough to become political dynasties, a la North Korea. That said, a lot of the true believers thought of the war as a great tragedy that befell Germany, Hitler included, and blamed other people around him for having basically hosed things up. Basically the notion of a great prophet let down by the frailties and weaknesses of his followers. I don't have it in front of me right now, but somewhere I've got a copy of a report on a questionnaire that was administered to middle school aged children in Hesse in 1946 or so, and a majority of them expressed views along those lines; Hitler was a great man betrayed by corrupt lieutenants who were responsible for getting Germany into the war etc. In the immediate post-war period most people who weren't already anti-Nazi to begin with were just trying to pick up the pieces of their lives and find some way to make it through to next week. A lot of reconciliation and moral reckoning with the Nazi era was put off until the 50s-60s.
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Jul 20, 2014 20:36
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Now here's a question: what did class struggle look like in nazi germany? Literally first thing Adolf Hitler did wasdestroy the working-class movement, ban strikes and all trade unionism, forced all workers to join a(n obviously pro-employer, pro-production) state union, and forced all workers to become accomplices to the nazi war machine until the very end. So my question: did german workers ever go on strike, legit? What about the mineworkers in the Ruhr?
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Jul 20, 2014 22:19
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Filippo Corridoni posted:So my question: did german workers ever go on strike, legit? What about the mineworkers in the Ruhr? During the Nazi period? Ehhhhhhhh. . . nothing major that I'm aware of. The German Labor Front had things locked down pretty tight and they were pretty aggressive with regards to tackling unemployment via state projects, mandatory service in work brigades, and the final out of just labeling any long-term unemployed "work shy" and throwing them in the camps as political prisoners. Actively organizing any other labor group would be a good way to get yourself labeled a communist and prosecuted accordingly. That said, I'm equally sure that there was the usual back and forth of informal give-and-take that happens even in the most regulated systems. Individual factories or shifts organizing work slowdowns and stoppages, local management making small scale concessions to get things moving again, etc. But nothing company wide and certainly nothing industry or region-wide.
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Jul 20, 2014 23:21
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Wasn't von Manstein part Jewish?
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Jul 21, 2014 05:11
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What was the German civilian economy like, particularly in the late war? Did they get hit by hyperinflation? Did Germany have a war bonds drive similar to the US and UK?
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Jul 21, 2014 12:18
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Dwarf posted:Wasn't von Manstein part Jewish? Some historians believe so, but the evidence is inconclusive. He certainly did not identify as such. There were some high-ranking figures who had their Jewish ancestry "overlooked" due to being well-connected: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Milch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Maurice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Rogge Special mention goes to this fellow; featured in propaganda as "the perfect German soldier", he was expelled from the army due to being half-Jewish and later had to rescue his own father from internment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Goldberg Otherwise, there is this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischling#Prominent_Mischlinge
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Jul 21, 2014 15:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:What was the German civilian economy like, particularly in the late war? Did they get hit by hyperinflation? Did Germany have a war bonds drive similar to the US and UK? The Nazis put a huge emphasis on keeping the civilian economy stable for as long as possible. A huge part of their over-all strategy was to keep life good enough for a majority of Germans that there was never any real incentive for most people to get politically active against them. This is why, for example, that they never really got their economy on a war footing the same way that you see with Britain, the US, or certainly the Soviets. Most of this was due to the disastrous German experience with home front rationing in WW1. Even things like hyperinflation take a bit of time to develop. For the German home front the bottom fell out really goddamned fast, in the span of a couple of months in late 1944/early 1945. As long as you weren't in a major urban industrial center and dealing with frequent bombing things stayed pretty normal for most of the war, and then all of a sudden everything went to complete poo poo, with a over-night transition to occupation rationing and a black market economy. As far as bank policy goes, the Nazis never held a public bond drive. A lot of their liquid assets were generated by confiscating and re-selling assets owned by Jews, and later by forcing the banks of countries that they occupied to buy state bonds at favorable rates.
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Jul 21, 2014 16:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:2) the camps themselves became hotbeds for "resistance" although this is highly contingent on how you define the term. If you limit it to the most physical forms than you disqualify almost all resistance attempts by the KPD, and indeed all German resistance period. Political prisoners weren't exactly sneaking out of Dachau at night to blow up trains a la Hogan's Heroes. What you see instead, especially post-42 as the eventual fate of the Third Reich becomes ever more apparent to everybody, are secret planning committees among the political prisoners for post-war rebuilding and restructuring of both society and the government. Dachau in particular had a very organized resistance cell of SPD and KPD members, many of whom walked straight out of the camp and into prominent positions in the occupation governments after the war. Can you say more about these organised camp resistance cells? When you say 'many' of them walked out of the camps it surprises me a bit, as it seems the case to me that a resistance cell would necessarily have more attrition than the general camp population, few of whom can be said to have left the camps.
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Jul 21, 2014 21:09
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Deep Thought posted:Can you say more about these organised camp resistance cells? When you say 'many' of them walked out of the camps it surprises me a bit, as it seems the case to me that a resistance cell would necessarily have more attrition than the general camp population, few of whom can be said to have left the camps. I'm not an expert on them specifically, so I really can't say much about them beyond the fact that they existed. However, you have to remember a couple of things: 1) these are the camps for political prisoners. Places like Dachau and Buchenwald were loving awful and lots of people died, but ultimately they were holding facilities for prisoners and not extermination or work camps. Some of them had work camps that were attached to them or were part of larger camp complexes that included other types of camps. As a result you didn't have anything like the attrition rate that you see at places like Auschwitz or (god help you) the Operation Reinhard camps. It wasn't all that uncommon for people to spend 3-5 years as political prisoners in these camps, and you see some unlucky people who were there longer. 2) the concentration camp system is a key component of the Holocaust, but it predated the Holocaust and was used for many things besides simply killing Jews. 3) a lot of how you evaluate the work that they did is highly contingent on how you define "resistance." In the specific example of Buchenwald I'm very familiar with a small group of ex-KPD inmates who organized what they hoped would some day be the foundations of a communist government for the state of Thuringen, mostly because one of the men who I study was part of that group and went on to become the Turingian Minister of Education for the first few years of the Soviet occupation. These were all highly educated men and really most of what they were doing was kinda theoretical bullshitting and generally just trying to keep their minds occupied. As it turned out when the war ended they were among the first Germans in the region with a solid grasp on how they wanted to organize the reconstruction of German civil society, and were put to work in doing so by the Soviets. For the men themselves it was probably more of the sort of fantasy that people engage in to stay sane in those kinds of ugly circumstances, but some people also categorize that as a form of resistance. 4) I probably should have used a less ambiguous term than 'many.' They were fairly over-represented in immediate post-war German civil administration, mostly due to the impeccable political credentials that having spent the war in one of the camps gave you during the period of active denazification, but this isn't to say that they were exactly common within the population as a whole. I don't have my notes in front of me, but as I recall the group of men at Buchenwald was a dozen or two guys.
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Jul 22, 2014 02:15
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Filippo Corridoni posted:Now here's a question: what did class struggle look like in nazi germany? Nazism outmaneuvered Communism as the mass terror movement of Germany. The few who remained with the left were imprisoned or killed, or fled to avoid being so. There was no "class struggle" because the entire premise of Nazism is that the real struggle is racial, and people basically bought into this or were coerced into silence. Most of the people who are ripe for recruitment to "class struggle" became enthusiastic Nazis instead.
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Jul 22, 2014 03:56
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Just saw the obit and figured I'd make note of it here, since this is about as close as we come to a German history-specific thread. Wehler died earlier this month. Say what you will about some of his theories and assertions, he was important as all hell and knew how to write.
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Jul 24, 2014 22:45
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CBJSprague24 posted:Were any of Hitler's top aides Jewish? Was there any "Well, you're a dirty Jew, but I like you so you can stay" mindset Hitler adopted? Not a top aide, no, but there was a Jewish man that Hitler showed special treatment to: Dr. Eduard Bloch, his family physician as a child and the man who tried (unsuccessfully) to treat his mother's fatal cancer. Hitler referred to him as an Edeljude. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Jul 25, 2014 |
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Jul 25, 2014 00:41
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Not a top aide, no, but there was a Jewish man that Hitler showed special treatment to: Dr. Eduard Bloch, his family physician as a child and the man who tried (unsuccessfully) to treat his mother's fatal cancer. Hitler referred to him as an Edeljude. Would you say he was an honorary edelweiss?
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Jul 25, 2014 03:25
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One of Hitler's favorite film directors, Fritz Lang, was sort of Jewish. Lang was raised Catholic but his mother had converted from Judaism. Goebbels apparently told Lang in the early days of the regime that the style and content of Nazi cinema would be largely based on his films. Lang's film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was banned when the Nazis took power because it's depiction of terrorism was thought to be subversive and the titular villainous doctor parrots various Nazi phrases throughout the film. According to Lang Goebbels called him personally to inform him that the film had been banned but since his filmography was still seen as the pinnacle of German cinema by Hitler he could get a prestigious position as the head of UFA. Whether this actually happened is a but fuzzy since it was not mentioned by Lang until years later. Lang did leave the country in 1934 not wishing to risk being caught being sort of Jewish in Nazi Germany.
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Jul 25, 2014 04:22
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Dunno if there are any WW1 buffs in here but my friend made a video about the start of the war and the subsequent destruction of the french forces... It's his first video. I knew nothing about it and i found it interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKLW2-kqmH8
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Jul 25, 2014 09:21
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Rocksicles posted:Dunno if there are any WW1 buffs in here but my friend made a video about the start of the war and the subsequent destruction of the french forces... It's his first video. I knew nothing about it and i found it interesting. You might want to try re-posting this in the military history thread. I don't know if your friend is looking for any kind of feedback but I'll make a couple of basic observations: 1) the history is a bit shaky in places. The descriptions of the politics leading up to the war are fairly problematic. I'd suggest he read "Germany's Aims in the First World War" or "The Guns of August" to get a better grip on that. 2) the slide presentation format really doesn't work with text that long. If you want to do the Ken Burns-style sequential flipping of photos you really need a narrator. It's also important that the photos tell a story as you go through them, one that the narrator describes. As it is it's just a collection of photos that are thematically related to a text block set against almost entirely unrelated period music. It's not a bad first effort, and I'd highly encourage him to keep on working with it.
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Jul 25, 2014 13:51
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He tried to narrate it, but he's a big old cockney and doesn't think he suits it. One thing i know, if a book exists on a subject he's into, he's read it. He told me that his opinion on the subject could be viewed as controversial. I'll forward him this thead and i'll post in in the history thread. He loves this stuff, but he's no goon
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Jul 27, 2014 14:14
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How much of the monumental architecture planned for Hitler's redone Berlin was even feasible? The Volkshalle in particular looks like it would have been impossible to build, especially since they wanted to avoid reinforced materials to preserve "ruin value". A marble dome big enough to cover an audience of 200,000? What's holding it up? And speaking of infeasible, Blut und Boden might have been the single stupidest part of the Nazis' plans, and considering the Nazis' plans that's saying a lot. Wikipedia posted:While discussing the question of Lebensraum to the east, Hitler envisioned a Ukrainian "breadbasket" and expressed particular hostility to its "Russian" cities as hotbeds of Russianness and Communism, forbidding Germans to live in them and declaring that they should be destroyed in the war.[33] Even during the war itself, Hitler gave orders that Leningrad was to be razed with no consideration given for the survival and feeding of its population.[34] This also called for industry to die off in these regions.[35] The Wehrbauer, or soldier-peasants, who were to settle there were not to marry townswomen, but only peasant women who had not lived in towns.[1] This would also encourage large families.[36] Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Sep 10, 2014 |
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Sep 10, 2014 15:12
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I might be able to do an effort post on this later (might not - work's a bitch for the next few weeks) but there is a ton more to Hitler's policy in the east than that. Look into his planned resettlement campaign; the Nazis were very self-consciously resettling Germans on the conquered territories and tying them into local German minorities where possible. This wasn't just an issue of dropping handfuls of Germans in the middle of nowhere, they were also shipping out teachers, doctors, etc. and had plans for what amounted to small kit-built cities with full educational and cultural amenities in the more fully gutted out parts of the Ukraine. Look into, in particular, the resettlement campaigns in Poland and in the Baltic states to get a general feel for what they were looking at. A lot of what they actually accomplished took place in 1939-40 before the Ukraine was on the table, but the Polish areas were generally understood to be a dry run of what they would do further east.
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Sep 10, 2014 16:24
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Woolie Wool posted:How much of the monumental architecture planned for Hitler's redone Berlin was even feasible? The Volkshalle in particular looks like it would have been impossible to build, especially since they wanted to avoid reinforced materials to preserve "ruin value". A marble dome big enough to cover an audience of 200,000? What's holding it up? Take a look at this. Basically, no, those monumental buildings would never have worked out. Lesson to everyone else: don't let your dictators go into architecture.
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Sep 10, 2014 16:30
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Woolie Wool posted:And speaking of infeasible, Blut und Boden might have been the single stupidest part of the Nazis' plans, and considering the Nazis' plans that's saying a lot. I read in a book about the drive on Moscow that the Germans had planned to do the same to that city: instead of taking it by force, the Wehrmacht was supposed to surround it, establish a cordon around it, starve it out and shoot anyone that tried to flee. That was why they had Panzertruppen swing around as far north as Kalinin and as far south as Tula. It just struck me as being incredibly stupid because they couldn't even pull that off with Leningrad, a city that borders Finland on one side, the Baltic on another, the Germans on a third and Lake Ladoga. How the hell would they have managed that with a landlocked capital?
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Sep 10, 2014 17:15
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gradenko_2000 posted:I read in a book about the drive on Moscow that the Germans had planned to do the same to that city: instead of taking it by force, the Wehrmacht was supposed to surround it, establish a cordon around it, starve it out and shoot anyone that tried to flee. That was why they had Panzertruppen swing around as far north as Kalinin and as far south as Tula. *shrug* How did they manage to encircle the Kiev and Minks pockets, to name just two of the larger ones? Leningrad failed for a number of reasons, the primary one being that they never quite cut it off. The bodies of water were godsends for the Russians, as the Germans could never secure them and they allowed a trickle of supplies in throughout the siege, whether by boat or over the ice in the winter. If anything a mass encirclement of Moscow would have been far more effective as Moscow didn't have the luxury of being near water. It's also a little problematic to blame Germans for not applying the failures of Leningrad to the drive on Moscow, since the two were happening roughly in tandem.
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Sep 10, 2014 19:08
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Also the Finns weren't really all that into the idea of besieging Leningrad and refused to help reduce it.
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Sep 10, 2014 20:22
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Cyrano4747 posted:*shrug* How did they manage to encircle the Kiev and Minks pockets, to name just two of the larger ones? There was also a pipe built underwater to deliver fuel to the besieged city year-round, so that there was no pause when the ice was too thick to boat through, but too thin to drive over. Edit: as for Moscow, I read that the plan was to blow up a bunch of dams and let the city flood, which would impede its defenders quite a bit and neutralize the subway network as a bomb shelter.
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Sep 10, 2014 22:53
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Woolie Wool posted:How much of the monumental architecture planned for Hitler's redone Berlin was even feasible? Woolie Wool posted:You can't run a 20th century society like this. You're just going to get a bunch of useless, ill-educated people who contribute nothing of value because their way of life is 500 years obsolete. How would they compete with mechanized agriculture?
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Sep 11, 2014 08:49
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Mr. Sunshine posted:They weren't going to run a 20th century society - or rather, the nazi definition of "20th century society" was so far removed from what we have as to be virtually alien. The native slavs were to live in pre-industrial villages, without schools, hospitals or electricity. What machines they needed for agricultural work would be supplied by the Germans. Each village or region would be encouraged to develop its own religion, language and culture, to keep them fractured and isolated from each other. The German overlords would live in fortified, supermodern cities connected by highways and railroads. Each year, a select few peasants would be allowed to visit these cities, so that they could marvel at all the wonders, and bring back tales to their fellows about the superiority of the German race. The miracle of eugenics! 
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Sep 11, 2014 16:31
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Mr. Sunshine posted:They weren't going to run a 20th century society - or rather, the nazi definition of "20th century society" was so far removed from what we have as to be virtually alien. The native slavs were to live in pre-industrial villages, without schools, hospitals or electricity. What machines they needed for agricultural work would be supplied by the Germans. Each village or region would be encouraged to develop its own religion, language and culture, to keep them fractured and isolated from each other. The German overlords would live in fortified, supermodern cities connected by highways and railroads. Each year, a select few peasants would be allowed to visit these cities, so that they could marvel at all the wonders, and bring back tales to their fellows about the superiority of the German race. Where are you getting this from? It's difficult, at best, to speak with authority on what the Germans ultimate plan was for the conquered areas of eastern europe. The evidence we have is fragmentary, and mostly consists of some real bullshitty speculation between nazi hire-ups and the writings of a few pre-war nutterbutter right-wing "philosophers" who were writing during the 20s and 30s. Yes, this includes Adolph Hitler. You can't take every last sentence of Mein Kampf as an iron clad statement of national policy - it needs to be looked at in its proper context as a book on political and personal philosophy written long before he came anywhere near office. What we do have is the "Germanization" campaigns that they began in Poland, especially those territories that were annexed directly to the Reich or included as Reich Protectorates - the Warthegau in particular. That is the only place where we have concrete examples of the (and thankfully only the) VERY early states of a Germanization campaign. What would have occurred in the Ukraine etc. further east is far more questionable, although it is reasonable to assume that it would have been a refinement of what went on in Poland. The basic pattern was this: 1) figure out what ethnicities, if any, in the target area could be "regermanized" - there was the general idea that you had some good german stock in these areas that had ben overtaken by its slavic surroundings and which could be re-absorbed if exposed to enough German culture. Those that were targeted in this way would go through what modern scholars term a cultural genocide - kill off all of the native intelligentsia, local religious leaders, etc. and forcibly educate their children in German schools, away from their parents if necessary. The thought was that within a few generations they'd be German again. The process has a lot of similarities and parallels to what went on in the early 20th century on American Indian reservations via the public schools operated there. 2) expel everyone else. In the case of the Warthegau this meant shipping them east to the Generalgouvernement Poland. This was a progressive process and they started off with the Jewish populations, since they were the least desirable - there was a lot of debate over how slavic vs. germanic the average Pole was that far west. Regardless, ultimately the Poles who were deemed unassimilable would be shipped further east, with tentative plans for them getting dumped in western siberia along with the more slavic Ukranians, Latvians, Lithuanians, etc. Note that these policies were, in their earliest forms, put together and enacted before they started the wide-spread systematic killing of the Jews. Initially "relocating Jews to the East" wasn't just a euphemism, it was a policy. Hence filling up the Krakow, Lublin, Warsaw, etc. ghettos to bursting in 1939-1941. 3) re-settle the area with displaced ethnic Germans taken out of surrounding countries (mostly the baltic states - remember, this is a pre-41 policy so there was a HUGE push to get as many Baltic Germans out of what von Ribbentrop had agreed to make a Soviet sphere of influence) as well as volunteers from the Reich. These people were to set up whole new towns and villages which would in turn be used to Germanize the surrounding countryside over time. There was a big push in particular to get people who were considered "cultural carriers" out to these areas - I've personally worked with the documents pertaining to their recruitment drives for teachers to resettle in these areas. They absolutely intended to create a modern society out east, and not just a couple of pockets of German god-kings living in a sea of slavs. A lot of their settlement policy was patterned after US American Indian policy, or at least what a lot of the Nazi leadership imagined that policy to be. Of course there are major differences between the N. American western planes in the 19th century and Poland in the early 20th that necessitated some really radical departures, but the basic idea was consistent: concentrate the existing, unwanted population into a few pockets which can be eliminated over time or later moved again to even more fringe areas, settle with your own people, and let nature take its course over a couple centuries. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Sep 11, 2014 |
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Sep 11, 2014 16:48
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Why did the Generalplan Ost crew have such a grudge against the Latagalians?
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Sep 12, 2014 00:43
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Baron Porkface posted:Why did the Generalplan Ost crew have such a grudge against the Latagalians? I wouldn't say they had a specific grudge against them, they were just local non-Germanic peoples living in an area that they wanted to eventually colonize. That isn't to say that they thought well of them, I just don't think that they thought of them specifically any more or less than the hardest-charging Manifest Destiny proponents in the US thought about any particular tribe of Planes Indian. It's worth noting, for example, that during the actual war they were more than happy to make use of local Latvian, Estonian, and Lithuanian auxiliaries, both in non-combat and combat roles. The behavior of the Red Army during the Baigais Gads pretty much guaranteed that they'd have people willing to lend hand, to use the Latvian example. If that seems a bit contradictory, it is. None of this poo poo is internally consistent from year to year which is what makes getting into the specifics of what plans were for the post-war east pretty akin to reading tea leaves. At the very best you can talk about how plans and dialogues changed over the course of the war. What they would have actually done in, say, the late 40s following a hypothetical German victory is anyone's guess.
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Sep 12, 2014 00:55
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I don't think it would have mattered, since within a decade or so you would have had a nuclear Nazi Germany and a nuclear US. I see that ending only one way, and it would make WWII look like a minor skirmish in comparison.
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Sep 12, 2014 02:10
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