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Centripetal Horse posted:Can this also be the catch-all World War II thread? I was listening to Coast to Coast AM, this morning, and the guest was absolutely spraying crazy all over the place. Here are some of his claims: By the time we got to the moon (in '75, not the Hollywood crap you saw in '69), the Third Reich in exile had left their moonbase and moved on, possibly to the hollow earth, but more likely to Atlantis. Unfortunately, the Manchurian Candidate Bush 1 scrapped the Trident assault fleet on orders from his Japanese masters to give them more time to summon the Dai Oni back to earth, so that they can turn America into Yomi.
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Dec 8, 2014 15:08
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Centripetal Horse posted:Can this also be the catch-all World War II thread? There's a military history thread that's probably a better place for catch-all WW2 questions. Frankly WW2 is kind of where the third reich stops being interesting for a whole lot of reasons, as from there on everything just kind of solidifies really fast and then turns to poo poo even faster so all the really interesting topics stop having much meaning. Also, it's kind of hard to argue that anything to do with Japan (except maybe the odd bit of foreign policy) belongs in a Nazi Germany thread. As to your questions, I have no idea. That guy is clearly off his meds and I've never heard of him at least.
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Dec 8, 2014 15:22
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And here I thought Cooper, Rezun, and Kuptsov were a bit loony, but this guy took it to a whole new level.
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Dec 8, 2014 15:44
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 Yeah, this guy seems legit. Actual Nazi history question- is there any evidence that Nazi officials feared a repeat performance of the Night of the Long Knives? Was there ever any public discussion of it after the fact?
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Dec 8, 2014 15:57
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Veritek83 posted:Actual Nazi history question- is there any evidence that Nazi officials feared a repeat performance of the Night of the Long Knives? Was there ever any public discussion of it after the fact? Not really. It seems oddly popular to point to it as evidence that the Nazis had a Stalin-esque purge thing going on, but really it was just a one off after they got into political power to shake off some of the more populist/left-leaning elements of the older, broader base of what was essentially a coalition party built around ideas of social progress (admittedly, "progress" as defined by a bunch of Nazis) in order to please a lot of the cultural conservatives they had to get in bed with to achieve governmental prominence. Hitler and his inner circle were also profoundly sensitive about public opinion and once in office really didn't want the SA loving things up for them. The SA had a pretty negative reputation among a lot of the German middle classes due to their street fighting, thuggish antics and the fact that they were involved in a long-running struggle for dominance with the SS didn't help matters. Things just kind of got to the point where Hitler had to pick a side and give permission for the other to get bumped off, otherwise he could have been sitting on an intra-party civil war in a couple of years. It wasn't at all about killing people who were somehow recalcitrant or didn't say/do the right things. Hell, if anything the people who got killed were some of the hardest of the hard core true believers who just became a bit of a problem in polite company once the Party moved from street fighting to political respectability. It was a strictly one-off thing that has to be understood as part of the 1933-1934 consolidation of power. If anything it can be seen as the reverse side of the Gleichschaltung that the government and the rest of German society as a whole underwent over the next couple of years, just focused inward rather than outward.
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Dec 8, 2014 16:13
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Cyrano4747 posted:It was a strictly one-off thing that has to be understood as part of the 1933-1934 consolidation of power. Ok, so would it be fair to say that once done, there wasn't ever really the need for that sort of violent house cleaning again? Was there any backlash from rank & file party members? Seems like it was broadly a welcomed move, but the wikipedia article seems to be focused on viewpoints from outside the party.
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Dec 8, 2014 16:27
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Veritek83 posted:Ok, so would it be fair to say that once done, there wasn't ever really the need for that sort of violent house cleaning again? Not that I've ever seen. People seem to have understood it for what it was. Politics in central europe, especially Germany, was just a much, much bloodier affair between the wars than anyone today really has day to day experience with. As for if it might have become necessary in the future? Who knows. One of the most important things to remember about Hitler's Germany is just how short lived it was. Between 1933 and the outbreak of WW2 (when, as I said before, things go on a wartime footing and get relatively boring, fast) you only have six years. That's basically nothing. In the US that wouldn't even be two full presidential terms. Even counting the war you only get up to 12 years in power. To put things into perspective, we're naval-gazing about one famous night in a roughly 72-hour window of rapid political violence and interior score-settling among party underbosses in a regime that lasted 12 years and a political movement that only existed in a serious way for about 10 years before that. Meanwhile, if you study Stalinism, The Great Purge lasted for six loving years, the man himself maintained political dominance for two decades, and in addition you have a further ~15 years before that where he's a high level functionary in the Soviet state engaging in power struggles and pushing his own agendas. As a political movement German fascism is amazingly short lived for the amount of chaos it creates.
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Dec 8, 2014 16:52
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If we compare the Nazi and the Stalinist purges, they are very different beasts. The Night of the Long Knives was an opportunistic, but very focused, event. It played out quickly, and Hitler and his closest associates used it to rid themselves of obvious, outspoken rivals as well as the core of what could turn into an uncomfortable "second revolution". It neutered the radicals of the party, placating the army and Hitler's conservative allies. The Great Purge, as Cyrano points out, lasted for six years. Its targets were, well, everyone. It ramped up slowly, and I'd argue that its roots can be traced back to Lenin forbidding the formation of intra-party blocks in the 20s. In the end it reached pathological levels, culminating in the bizarre Moscow show trials were old, loyal Bolsheviks who had led the revolution confessed to being bourgeoisie saboteurs, counterrevolutionaries and fascist agents. I'd argue that there was no aim or logic to the Great Purge, just a hysterical lashing out that targeted anyone who happened to be in the way. I don't think we've seen anything similar since the days of Ivan the Terrible. In comparison, the Night of the Long Knives was an office spat.
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Dec 8, 2014 18:41
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Cyrano4747 posted:the outbreak of WW2 (when, as I said before, things go on a wartime footing and get relatively boring I think you understand how contra intuitive this might sound to the layman. Mr. Sunshine posted:Its targets were, well, everyone. ... In the end it reached pathological levels, culminating in the bizarre Moscow show trials were old, loyal Bolsheviks who had led the revolution confessed to being bourgeoisie saboteurs, counterrevolutionaries and fascist agents. I'd argue that there was no aim or logic to the Great Purge, just a hysterical lashing out that targeted anyone who happened to be in the way.
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Dec 8, 2014 19:23
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Mr. Sunshine posted:I don't think we've seen anything similar since the days of Ivan the Terrible. In comparison, the Night of the Long Knives was an office spat. I don't know about that. I think you can find similar mechanisms at play anywhere that a sudden social upheaval gives people a venue for settling personal scores. If you want to look at a parallel in Nazi Germany it's not the night of the long knives but the role of the secret police in society later on and the power of political denunciation to ruin careers, relationships, and even lives. Then you've got the obvious parallel example of the same behavior (often coming form the same people and reporting to the same secret police under new management) in East Germany. There are also aspects of this in most of the Maoist attempts at perpetual revolution, especially the Hundred Flowers campaign and the Cultural Revolution. Hell, you can even see shades of it in the 40s-50s era Red Scare in the US and McCarthyism in general, although it never reached anything like the levels of the Stalinist purges mainly due to the structural limitations it was operating under. Cingulate posted:This is interesting. Leaving aside any questions regarding the "objectivity" of this statement, is this generally how people in the field feel about this? Well, it depends on what aspects of Nazi Germany you're studying. Someone who is narrowly studying the military history of Germany is obviously going to find that period far more compelling than someone who is studying the intellectual underpinnings of the Nazi Party, for example. Meanwhile most Holocaust scholarship looks at the war as mostly an unfortunate event that simultaneously sped up and radicalized trends in Nazi treatment of Jews, blocked off non-annihilatory pathways for solving the 'Jewish question,' and brought millions more Jews under the direct control of German authorities. But, for the most part, yeah. A lot of the really interesting things in history that we discuss are the moments of transition and change. German society during the inter-war years undergoes an incredible amount of rapid change which is part of what makes it such a compelling era to look at and write about. A lot of that is radically slowed, if not put on hold altogether, for the duration of the conflict and then the total collapse of the German state abruptly ends the entire Nazi project and requires a lot of ground-up rebuilding and restructuring. That in and of itself is fascinating, but if what you want to study is German fascism it puts a fairly hard cap on how far you can really take things.
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Dec 8, 2014 20:18
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This is the thread you want: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3569772 E: going off the conspiracy track though, what's the lowdown on Himmler and the occult? Obviously the topic is the stuff of (urban) legend nowadays and Indiana Jones saved the Allies from annihilation (twice!) and that's why they made those documentaries about him. But what's the truth and what's the bullshit? site fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Dec 8, 2014 |
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Dec 8, 2014 22:16
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site posted:This is the thread you want: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3569772 Basically Himmler had a lot of whackdoodle beliefs about history (above and beyond those required for high office in the Nazi regime) and the power and money to fund lots of research on them. Wikipedia has a reasonably good overview although if you're looking for an actual book on the subject you should read Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism, which is way more academic than the title suggests.
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Dec 8, 2014 23:02
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I'm reading Heather Pringle's Master Plan. It tells about Himmler's quest to find Aryan roots for Germans. Basically Himmler and his cronies just make up crazy stuff and reinterpret history, so that Aryan master race has invented all that is good and holy. Himmler had a few historians and archeologists, who made some observations at acheological sites and reinvented everything to justify their crazy Aryan theory. Their version of history does not hold up to any closer examination and after few years thing got so out of hands that Hitler told Himmler to shut up with his stupid Nordic master race ideas. in Hitler's ideas, his Aryan master race was a continuation of the Roman empire and a not a descendant of the Vikings. Himmler's occult history was just a giant LARP for the nazi SS elite.
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Dec 9, 2014 11:49
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Pyle posted:in Hitler's ideas, his Aryan master race was a continuation of the Roman empire I don't know that I'd argue that at all. I mean, if you've got a solid citation on that I'll shrug and grant the point as I don't really study much on the specific crazy beliefs that various Nazis held, but Nazi racial theory in general was huge on the idea that races were in a darwinistic struggle for survival and those best fitted to survive were the ones that best protected themselves from outside pollution. It wasn't so much about a master race the way modern white supremacists articulate it and more the notion that Aryans were a distinct group that needed to purify themselves of foreign influences least they be overwhelmed by their neighbors. Those races that they considered basest weren't that way because of what they naturally were, they became that way through generations of inter-breeding with their neighbors. As far as they were concerned a people like the Jews or Roma without a homeland was all but feral. This is also why, for example, the Germans didn't really have a beef with the Japanese. They didn't give a poo poo that the Japanese had different looking facial features or a different shade of skin, and as far as they could tell the Japanese hadn't really been 'polluted' by inter-breeding with Mongolians or whatever. Plus they were far enough away that they just weren't a credible threat to the German Volk. Meanwhile a country like the US was considered a loving disaster zone. The idea of a cultural/ethnic melting pot of a nation was utterly abhorrent to this way of thinking, and they held up the Roman Empire specifically as an example of a once great nation that got really hosed up by immigration and generally allowing non-Roman peoples inside it. All of this gets complicated when they start looking at Europe and trying to assess who is too mixed up to be worth salvaging and who is close enough to being German that they can kinda call them racial cousins. Nordic countries? A-OK. The English? Yeah, sure. French? Eeeeehhh OK but refer to the appended racial chart to make double-extra sure there isn't some Jew in there or whatever. Polish? There are actually polanized Germans who need to be racially and culturally re-Germanized, time to open up "German Schools" (this is no bullshit a thing they did) and bring them back into the fold. What about the other ones? Bastard mix of Slavs and Aryans, big thumbs down. How about Slavic Peoples in general? Totally different ethno-cultural people, major competitor. It's not that they're strictly inferior (until the war and the needs of wartime propaganda dictate that we change our line on this) they're just different enough that we shouldn't be mixing and they are a resource competitor with us so we should probably try to kill them and take their poo poo. Think of a wolf and a bear competing for the same game in the same ecosystem. You wouldn't try to cross breed them, and really neither one gains by having the other around. If you're really interested in Nazi racial theory you need to give yourself a solid backing in the pre-war Völkisch Movement - ultimately it's what most of this is derived from. And, as I mentioned earlier, none of this stuff is really a coherent philosophy that has a single, accepted doctrine. It's more like a school of ideas that are competing to become dominant that gets abruptly flushed in 1945 before anything really solidifies and becomes established as 100% The Way Things Are. Think of way early Christianity (say 2nd or 3rd century) if you want an example of a similar period in something that becomes very dogmatic a thousand years later. I'll also add that you shouldn't even expect continuity of thought with one person if you look into them enough. Hitler himself says and does all sorts of contradictory poo poo, especially on subjects like race. This is doubly true if you're looking at what he says publicly vs. privately or what he says in his way early days vs. later on when he's campaigning and/or in office. As for Himmler and his cronies? Who the gently caress even knows. As Pyle so righfully pointed out, even Hitler though he was a loon. He might have been powerful, but he sure as hell wasn't what you'd call 'mainstream' among the NSDAP elite. That said, what I've outlined above is probably about as close as you'll come to "mainstream Nazi" ideas on race etc. At least, it's what they were teaching the kids in their Racial Hygiene classes, which is where I draw most of my own knowledge of the subject from.
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Dec 9, 2014 16:12
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I think the confusion might come from Hitler's Third Reich being explicitly a continuation from the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.
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Dec 9, 2014 17:30
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Has anyone else read Look Who's Back? I'm not particularly well read on the subject - really the only thing relevant I've read at length is Hubris, but wow it was like one amazing inside joke from start to finish. Funniest thing I've read all year.
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Dec 9, 2014 18:14
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Cyrano4747 posted:Meanwhile a country like the US was considered a loving disaster zone. The idea of a cultural/ethnic melting pot of a nation was utterly abhorrent to this way of thinking, and they held up the Roman Empire specifically as an example of a once great nation that got really hosed up by immigration and generally allowing non-Roman peoples inside it. This strikes me as rather funny since, you know, the Germans migrated into the Roman Empire.
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Dec 10, 2014 01:04
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brozozo posted:This strikes me as rather funny since, you know, the Germans migrated into the Roman Empire. Germanic tribes. Not the same thing. Saying Germans migrated into the Roman Empire would be like saying that Germans and Indians are the same because "Aryans"
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Dec 10, 2014 02:06
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Cyrano4747 posted:Germanic tribes. Not the same thing. Saying Germans migrated into the Roman Empire would be like saying that Germans and Indians are the same because "Aryans" Oh of course, there's lots of steps between the tribes of late antiquity and Germany of the modern era. Still, it comes off as so silly to me. "Those filthy migrants brought down the Roman Empire... Pay no attention to their Central European origins!!"
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Dec 10, 2014 05:18
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Didn't the nazis more or less play fast & loose with all of their silly rules when it suited them?
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Dec 10, 2014 07:07
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Geoj posted:Didn't the nazis more or less play fast & loose with all of their silly rules when it suited them? Rules are the people being ruled, not the rulers. That is a more or less universal thing. But yeah, when you start having honourary aryans the whole racial thing kinda goes out the window.
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Dec 10, 2014 07:30
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There's the old rumor that Göring once said, regarding a close subordinate that turned out to have insufficiently pure blood, "I decide who is a Jew". Now, this never happened, but in interviews/interrogations at Nürnberg, Göring himself acknowledged it, basically going "I never said it, but I could have". The nazi racial ideas and the laws they enacted were never adhered to 100%, and many higher-ups didn't give a gently caress as long as they looked good in the führer's book.
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Dec 10, 2014 08:33
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Geoj posted:Didn't the nazis more or less play fast & loose with all of their silly rules when it suited them? I'm just rechecking Heather Pringle's Master Plan to find that Hitler quote about Roman empire and nazi continuity. I just found this quote from Himmler when Werner Best's wife confronted Himmler about the racial purity. Himmler: "I want nothing but 100% pure-blooded Aryan members to join the Nazi party from now on." Best's wife: "This sounds ridiculous. Nobody in Germany can meet your standards. We could not have Hitler or Dr. Goebbels in the Nazi party since they don't fit your requirements. You yourself don't look like the Aryan ideal of a super man. Indeed you look like an opposite of an Aryan." Himmler: "So what? Perhaps I don't look like an Aryan, but in my heart I am 100% pure-blooded Aryan."
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Dec 10, 2014 08:52
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What is the primary source for Himmler throwing up after watching his first mass shooting (or otherwise not being able to handle it)?
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Dec 10, 2014 12:31
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Karl Wolff I am pretty sure. He was interviewed for BBC's World At War (a must watch) and I don't remember if he says he vomited it but definitely that brains splattered on his coat during an execution and that he looked quite green around the gills.
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Dec 10, 2014 17:45
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That was after a visit to shootings in the Mogilev area. This visit seems to have made an impression on him, since shortly afterwards he notes that the shootings take their toll on the men and that they should evaluate other solutions for the task.
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Dec 10, 2014 18:16
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I've been catching up on the general MilHist thread and was just reading some posts from a few months back about how ineffective the Nazis' foreign intelligence operations were. Anyone able to add to the commonly discussed Garbo/XX stuff, or recommend good books on the topic?
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Dec 10, 2014 18:56
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Big Willy Style posted:Karl Wolff I am pretty sure. He was interviewed for BBC's World At War (a must watch) and I don't remember if he says he vomited it but definitely that brains splattered on his coat during an execution and that he looked quite green around the gills. If I understand it correctly, almost the same story (again without puking) is also told by Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski as a witness in the Eichmann trial. http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/peopl...ach_Zelewski-02 I found the incident interesting because in Himmler's Posen speech, he seems to refer to that and/or similar events: "Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when 500 lie there or when 1,000 are lined up. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person -- with exceptions due to human weaknesses -- had made us tough." So he specifically emphasises being tough in such a situation. I guess pointing out examples of Nazi hypocrisy is not the most challenging task, but it's particularly interesting because the specific brain-on-Himmler anecdote is also sometimes claimed to have led Himmler to ask for more "humane" methods of mass murder, leading, eventually, to gassings.
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Dec 10, 2014 19:20
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He asked for that, because of the men in the EKs and SKs, not because he thought that it was more humane for the people that they killed. The setting for the speech in Posen is hardly the place where you could expect him to lay down the real problems that you run into when you move to kill large numbers of people. I'd have to find the quote, but as far as I can recall it, it was taken either from his notes, or from his correspondence.
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Dec 10, 2014 20:19
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I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with me ... either way, in von dem Bach-Zelewskis testimonies, he clams after the shooting, he brought Himmler's mind to the fact that this style of executions was putting a high strain on the psyche of the executioners, and in a following visit to an asylum, Himmler orders a further aide, Nebe, that future executions should be done in a different way so as to spare the executioners mental health. The Posen speech could possibly indicate how Himmler personally remembers these events - in his mind, he's re-interpreting himself as a stone-hearted dark hero, because surely, getting sick after watching one of the many executions he himself had ordered is not what his self image looked like.
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Dec 10, 2014 20:38
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I don't personally doubt that the event, or something close enough, happened but I also think that it's over-emphasized as far as its importance in making the push towards gassing and away from simple mass killings. First off experiments with various different forms of more efficient killing had been going on as early as the T4 program and accelerated with the Baltic 'gas truck' tests. This wasn't some kind of sudden epiphany that shooting a bunch of civilians - including women and children - and dumping the bodies in mass graves was rough on the trigger pullers. This is backed up by both archival and anecdotal evidence that they had specific protocols for how shooting details were organized and how those shooting details were treated in the hours and days following their "special duty," and a recognition that they had to limit those duties to those special details. We're talking detailed information about keeping lots of grain alcohol on hand for the shooters before and after the shootings, not assigning the units directly involved any duties at all for at least a day after the shootings, and keeping them on light duty for a while afterward so they could get their poo poo back together. If anything I have to say that the best way to approach the mindset that they were working with is to think about how we view euthanizing an animal. On the one hand you could go full Old Yeller and hand your kid a gun, but everyone knows that's kind of hosed up and probably isn't going to be a favorite childhood memory. Instead we try to distance ourselves from the killing, do it in a way that is at least bloodless, and leave it to professionals who can at least approach the task with a bit of distance and detachment. That's not to minimize or excuse any of what the Nazis did, of course, but that's the best way I have of explaining the way they framed the transition from shooting in situ to gassing at prepared locations.
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Dec 10, 2014 20:39
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I think that's one of the things that really set Nazi killings apart from other genocides. There's been attempts to exterminate entire peoples for as long as there's been people, but most if it has been pretty straight forward - "We hate these fuckers, and we sort of like seeing them suffer and die" kinda deals. The Nazis actually sat down and figured out how to turn exterminating people into a 9-5 job. E: not to say that there weren't a lot of outright hate-fueled killings going on as well, but the extermination camps was something morbidly different.
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Dec 10, 2014 21:31
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Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians? etc
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Dec 10, 2014 22:03
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Alright, I thought you said that he meant more humane way of killing. The gas waggons were already in place when Himmler visited Belorussia. They're another example for several programs running at the same time, but they were ill suited for the area, as you had to drive them around and unload and clean them elsewhere, or otherwise it was hard to get the next load of people into them. So, I don't know how they handled them exactly, but driving them around for a longer period was needed for the gas to work, but considered problematic, because of the partisans. Anyway, the theoretical number of people that you could kill with each was about 400 per day, but they either broke down frequently, or couldn't move out, because of said fear for partisans. So not practical at all. There is another important aspect to consider, that would have been more weigthy to Himmler, namely that by late summer '41, they're trying to starve the unwanted population. So what you see is migration from ghetto to ghetto in search of food. You have lots of people on the move, although it's very dangerous. As a reminder: Judentum ist Partisanentum. From the point of the EG you've got exactly those people slipping through the nets that you consider as partisans. The process of liquidating ghettos speeds up as the nutritional situation gets worse, but they fail at concentrating and controlling the population in a way that they had envisioned. The next logical step is...
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Dec 10, 2014 22:06
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Mr. Sunshine posted:There's the old rumor that Göring once said, regarding a close subordinate that turned out to have insufficiently pure blood, "I decide who is a Jew". Now, this never happened, but in interviews/interrogations at Nürnberg, Göring himself acknowledged it, basically going "I never said it, but I could have". The nazi racial ideas and the laws they enacted were never adhered to 100%, and many higher-ups didn't give a gently caress as long as they looked good in the führer's book. That's a quote from Karl Lueger, who was the mayor of Vienna and died before the start of WW1.
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Dec 11, 2014 16:48
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JaucheCharly posted:There is another important aspect to consider, that would have been more weigthy to Himmler, namely that by late summer '41, they're trying to starve the unwanted population. So what you see is migration from ghetto to ghetto in search of food. You have lots of people on the move, although it's very dangerous. As a reminder: Judentum ist Partisanentum. From the point of the EG you've got exactly those people slipping through the nets that you consider as partisans. The process of liquidating ghettos speeds up as the nutritional situation gets worse, but they fail at concentrating and controlling the population in a way that they had envisioned. Also, the conditions the Jewish populations were being kept in in occupied Poland caused epidemics and disease that scared their handlers. The German government of occupied Poland consistently applied pressure to do something about the ghettos. There is also the consideration that, as the war looks less and less as if it is going to have an immediate and decisive German victory, acceleration of the program of genocide becomes a higher and higher priority. The first set-backs in Russia as the winter of 41 sets in really set some individuals in the mindset that they don't want to wait until the end of a long war - particularly as Nazis blamed Jews for losing WW1 (and some for causing WW2! - certainly blamed them for the USA entering) and because some even realise that if Germany were to lose, the opportunity to wipe out world jewry could be lost forever. As a result, Germany expended precious war materiel on the genocide even at the expense of the war effort. The holocaust consumed enormous industrial resources that large numbers of German officials would have preferred to spend on fighting Soviets, but they were all railroaded by the senior Nazi leadership and the SS. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 11:45
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There's exactly the same problem in Belorussia and the vicinity of the front, all those starving people (when they also tried to starve the non-jewish population that wasn't deemed fit to work) are a real sanitary problem for the troops that rotate through, so there's additional pressure from the OKH to do something about it. They try to starve the cities, but the problem is that the few arteries of transportation run through these places, plus letting such huge numbers of people starve doesn't work at all. When Operation Typhoon fails, they have to face the reality that they need the local population for supplies and to keep the industry in Germany running, but the output of foodstuffs of the area and especially the Ukraine underperformend and declined. To meet the goals and keep Germany and the Heer fed, they have to get rid of *somebody*. So there's another self inflicted reason as to why the jews gotta disappear. These are just the main reasons, but you see that these open up the way, so that the guys in the WM's logistics give the ok that they can use the pretty strained trainsystems to transport large numbers of jews to these new places. Actually, this is a pretty big deal, if you consider the difficulty of managing these very dense train schedules.
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Dec 12, 2014 14:19
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In any event there was enormous pressure from the SS to get it done. These pressures formed positive feedback loops that fed more power and areas of responsibility into the hands of the SS - to many, it would have been a welcome relief, since the problem was offloaded onto another, powerful agency. But the keenness of the ideology still shines through when you see workers essential to the war effort being fed into the grinder, on trains meant for troops and supplies.
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Dec 12, 2014 14:58
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Was it ever a goal of the Nazis to reacquire German colonies lost during the first world war? Where did the Greeks place on Hitler's racial scale? Similar to the Italians?
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Dec 12, 2014 19:03
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Ego-bot posted:Was it ever a goal of the Nazis to reacquire German colonies lost during the first world war? Greeks are 'culture carrying', as I recall, and as such are similar to Italians - except that Greeks are actually largely racially Slavic and a bit Turkish, and Slavs were further down the Nazi racial scale. Of course, even modern Greece today has a race myth that the country is racially Hellenic, but that simply is not the case and I believe was more or less known to be the case at that time. There was no great love for Orthodox Christianity either; while elements of the Nazi state were anti-traditional religion, very large numbers of senior Nazis and SS men were extremely observant and conservative Christians (a disproportionate number of SS men, as I recall, were Catholic). It was the ambition of elements within the Nazi state to acquire colonies. Large numbers of Nazis were admirers of the British Empire - Von Ribbentrop is one of the most famous of these. However, the empire in Europe is the chief priority. Some early wartime diplomatic overtures to Britain have the innuendo of a promise that Britain will be allowed to govern the outside world if Germany can govern Europe. I don't think there is a settled 'Nazi' attitude to that question though. A lot of people always had a lot of kooky plans for the future in Nazi Germany, it wasn't necessarily a predictor of what they actually did. And it wasn't a very unitary state.
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Dec 12, 2014 19:11
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