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Richard Evans' book Lying About Hitler is good if you like reading about crazy holocaust deniers et al.
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Jan 3, 2015 13:47
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While looking through some material for Vergangenheitspolitik, I've noticed that there's a docu about the Wehrmachtsausstellung by Michael Verhoeven called "The unknown soldier". It is quite powerful, so if you have the chance to see it, do so.
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Jan 28, 2015 11:55
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Some of you may have already found it, but the Wolfenstein New Order LP has a lot of Nazi history chat going on. I'm only a few pages in, but figures someone might be interested. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3685382
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Mar 20, 2015 18:23
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moths posted:My understanding is that Germany didn't start rebuilding their airforce until the 30s, so the radar story sounds unlikely. Why? Appeasement was a mid-late 30s thing, generally, and Chain Home wasn't started until 1936. Not that radar specifically was something Chamberlain would have known would be vital (the theory in the 30s was that the bomber would always get through anyway), but that extra year did allow for the construction of a lot more Spitfires and Hurricanes which would turn out to be pretty important. On the other hand, Czechoslovakia was pretty well defended and was known for its tank and artillery knowhow, so who knows how it would have balanced out if the Germans had ended up breaking their teeth on the (mountainous, fortified, tank-unfriendly) Sudetenland instead of rolling through the flat plains of Poland?
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Mar 31, 2015 19:11
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feedmegin posted:Why? Appeasement was a mid-late 30s thing, generally, and Chain Home wasn't started until 1936. It seems pretty likely that the Germans would have been able to win against the Czechs, but then they'd need to spend significant time rebuilding and rearming to pre-war-with-Czechs strength. And they wouldn't have been able to easily seize a bunch of czech weapons and other materiel to use next year, like they did in history. To say nothing of if the Czechs were willing to sabotage their world class armaments factories to deny their use to the invaders. That could have, among other things, severely delayed invading Poland or anyone else,
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Mar 31, 2015 19:53
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Nintendo Kid posted:It seems pretty likely that the Germans would have been able to win against the Czechs, but then they'd need to spend significant time rebuilding and rearming to pre-war-with-Czechs strength On their own, yes. We're positing a world in which it's Germany versus the Czechs and France and the UK, as opposed to Germany plus Russia versus Poland, France and the UK.
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Mar 31, 2015 21:12
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Nintendo Kid posted:It seems pretty likely that the Germans would have been able to win against the Czechs, The German high command didn't share this opinion. They were shocked when the Allies backed down.
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Apr 1, 2015 03:24
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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/the-system-books-kirsch A double book review about new history being written on the day-to-day operation of Nazi concentration camps. A pro, if depressing, click. quote:The failure of the factory, as Wachsmann describes it, was indicative of the incompetence of the S.S. and the inconsistency of its vision for the camps. To turn prisoners into effective laborers would have required giving them adequate food and rest, not to mention training and equipment. It would have meant treating them like employees rather than like enemies. But the ideological momentum of the camps made this inconceivable. Labor was seen as a punishment and a weapon, which meant that it had to be extorted under the worst possible circumstances. Prisoners were made to build the factory in the depths of winter, with no coats or gloves, and no tools. “Inmates carried piles of sand in their uniforms,” Wachsmann writes, while others “moved large mounds of earth on rickety wooden stretchers or shifted sacks of cement on their shoulders.” Four hundred and twenty-nine prisoners died and countless more were injured, yet in the end not a single brick was produced.
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Apr 3, 2015 14:11
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This isn't technically about Nazis but I'm crossposting here hoping to get lucky... So I'm just getting around to reading about Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism concept and I was wondering if anyone could give me a rundown (or at least provide a link to one) of why it's full of poo poo. I've seen it criticized here on the boards in passing before so I guess there's problems with it.
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Apr 9, 2015 22:02
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site posted:This isn't technically about Nazis but I'm crossposting here hoping to get lucky... I think it's not bad per say but a. it's rather ironic how often it gets trotted out and parroted and b. it's just a very general sort of observation on human nature and the actual ways fascism happened are much more specific. "Always strong enough to unfairly oppress us always weak enough to be beaten by our true heroism" describes, for instance, how most sports fans react to anything other than a championship win.
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Apr 9, 2015 22:32
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Yeah, Eco's attributes for ur-fascism are pretty broad, and with a bit of ill will you can get almost any movement to fit many of them. It's useful as a guide to what gives rise to fascism and fascist sentiment, but it's a pretty crude tool for judging whether a movement is fascist.
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Apr 10, 2015 10:16
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Ugh I have a friend works at the Carnegie Museum and he keeps trying to tell me this stuff about how pre-War Germany was great because of the system that they were setting up for their citizens what with universal health care and vacations and etc (basically everything was going to be dandy for the Germans and how amazing it was they went from 3rd world to 1st world in 5 years). But the thing that galled me was that he claimed at some point Hitler and the German government offered the Jews living in Germany 2 million to move to Poland and the Jewish leaders refused. That has to be complete bullshit. Another hosed up thing is while he agreed that the Holocaust was awful, he told there was a reason for antisemitism being a thing because there was some truth the Jews running all the finances and businesses.
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Apr 19, 2015 06:12
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achillesforever6 posted:Ugh I have a friend works at the Carnegie Museum and he keeps trying to tell me this stuff about how pre-War Germany was great because of the system that they were setting up for their citizens what with universal health care and vacations and etc (basically everything was going to be dandy for the Germans and how amazing it was they went from 3rd world to 1st world in 5 years). But the thing that galled me was that he claimed at some point Hitler and the German government offered the Jews living in Germany 2 million to move to Poland and the Jewish leaders refused. That has to be complete bullshit. Another hosed up thing is while he agreed that the Holocaust was awful, he told there was a reason for antisemitism being a thing because there was some truth the Jews running all the finances and businesses. why is this person your friend?
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Apr 19, 2015 07:05
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That's great. Suppose that wasn't just some insane blabber. What would happen if your Reichskanzler would offer all catholics to move to Poland?
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Apr 19, 2015 07:06
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achillesforever6 posted:But the thing that galled me was that he claimed at some point Hitler and the German government offered the Jews living in Germany 2 million to move to Poland and the Jewish leaders refused. That has to be complete bullshit. This is actually a thing, if I remember right. Or, at least, I read it somewhere. I don't visit any crazy white supremacist sites, so it probably has some validity
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Apr 19, 2015 07:21
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I would think that any offers also included the Jews leaving most of their wealth and goods right in Germany.
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Apr 19, 2015 07:26
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Nintendo Kid posted:I would think that any offers also included the Jews leaving most of their wealth and goods right in Germany. Yeah, that was the catch. Also, wasn't it Austria and not Poland?
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Apr 19, 2015 07:51
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Mycroft Holmes posted:why is this person your friend? He's just a guy I can shoot the poo poo about anything and like most things I have found in my 23 years of life its you should never bring up politics because holy poo poo can you destroy friendships that way. Said guy also considers himself a Jeffersonian Libertarian (who hates corporations at least), but yeah mainly I'm friends because we just shoot the poo poo when we should be in our positions working.
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Apr 19, 2015 08:07
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He's basically pushing the same anti-Semitic line that is pushed by a lot of European far right parties today.
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Apr 19, 2015 10:59
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I assume your friend somehow frames this offer to leave Germany as a benign gesture? Also, ask him how many Jews died in the Holocaust, and what of. Oh, and ask him to explain the experiences of people like Wittgenstein. Cingulate fucked around with this message at 11:45 on Apr 19, 2015 |
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Apr 19, 2015 11:39
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achillesforever6 posted:But the thing that galled me was that he claimed at some point Hitler and the German government offered the Jews living in Germany 2 million to move to Poland and the Jewish leaders refused. So that would have worked out to, what, each Jew gets four reichsmarks? What a deal!
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Apr 19, 2015 15:51
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A free train ride and showers too.
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Apr 19, 2015 18:51
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I'm just going to join the echo chamber and add another voice to reiterating that while your "friend" is correct that there were numerous schemes to resettle the Jews in various places, all of these were predicated upon them leaving all of their possessions - both physical and financial - in Germany. It was less an offer to leave with just compensation and more a thinly veiled threat to GTFO, leave all your poo poo behind, and become a stateless refugee. Not many took them up on the offer, and those who did tended to be cultural or scientific notables who had the international connections to get immediately resettled with well paying and respected positions - see Einstein, Freud, etc. It should also be noted that no one in the world wanted to become the home to a couple million desperately poor Jewish refugees. Even the ones who took the Germans up on their "offer" to get an exit visa frequently found it almost impossible to gain admittance to any other country. Read up on the 1938 "Polenaktion" if you want a typical reaction. The short version is that in '38 the Germans forcibly deported about 12,000 jews to Poland, and the poles refused to take them. Those 12,000 people became literally stuck in a chunk of border territory between the German and Polish border control stations with neither side willing to let them cross, and it degenerated into a really ugly refugee crisis. This had dire consequences for Jews in general as a relative of a bunch of these deported poles, Herschel Grynszpan, assassinated a German diplomatic official in Paris out of frustration with what his family was suffering. This of course was spun by the German government into one of the proximate excuses for Kristallnacht. So yeah, your work buddy is full of poo poo and needs to take off the rose-tinted "at least he made the trains run on time" Hitler nostalgia bullshit glasses.
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Apr 19, 2015 19:44
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achillesforever6 posted:he told there was a reason for antisemitism being a thing because there was some truth the Jews running all the finances and businesses. Statistically German Jews were overrepresented in universities and professions. AFAIK it's still the case today in countries with Jewish minorities, like the USA. The Nazis complained about it a lot. Still they were a long, long way from running "all the finances and businesses", they just ran slightly more of them than you would expect from their share of the population. In any case it wasn't really a cause of antisemitism as much as it was something that got you riled up if you were already an antisemite.
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Apr 19, 2015 19:55
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A lot of the Jews who resettled wound up in Poland and France and got gassed anyway so it wasn't like Hitler was cutting the ones who left any breaks. Hitler had conquest in mind from the early days, so it's not like acquiring these territories full of Jews was in any way contingent or surprising either.
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Apr 19, 2015 20:26
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EvanSchenck posted:Statistically German Jews were overrepresented in universities and professions. AFAIK it's still the case today in countries with Jewish minorities, like the USA. The Nazis complained about it a lot. Still they were a long, long way from running "all the finances and businesses", they just ran slightly more of them than you would expect from their share of the population. In any case it wasn't really a cause of antisemitism as much as it was something that got you riled up if you were already an antisemite. How this in any way justifies anti semitism is, however, a bit of a mystery to me. The racist's explanation should be that Jews are genetically smarter (there is good evidence they just might be), in which case they should, according to the racist, be right where they are. On the other hand, the vast majority of the Jews Hitler murdered were not bankers, but poor poles and other eastern european people.
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Apr 19, 2015 21:48
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I once read a short book written in the early 20th century by a Jewish writer expressing his frustrations with the anti-Semitism of his day. The bit that stayed with me went something like "if you're a communist you'll claim to hate the Jews merely because they're capitalists. If you're capitalist then you'll say its because we're communists." Wish I could remember what it was called, I want to say something along the lines of "You Nations"? This is going back ten years or so though.
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Apr 20, 2015 00:18
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Disinterested posted:A lot of the Jews who resettled wound up in Poland and France and got gassed anyway so it wasn't like Hitler was cutting the ones who left any breaks. Hitler had conquest in mind from the early days, so it's not like acquiring these territories full of Jews was in any way contingent or surprising either. Of course if you really do believe that Jews undermine and destroy a country from within, then forcing all the Jews in your country to go live in the country you plan to invade is a sensible enough plan.
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Apr 20, 2015 03:04
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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This also seems to imply that the German Jews somehow weren't real Germans. Why else would it be totally reasonable for them to just leave their homeland and move to an entirely different country where most people speak a totally different and barely related language to both German and Yiddish.
FreudianSlippers fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Apr 20, 2015 |
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Apr 20, 2015 04:09
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You also had the Fugu Plan, where the Japanese actually invited a small number of Jews to live in occupied China. The idea would be that they would gain the favor of the powerful Jewish industrialists controlling Europe, who would then invest in Japan.
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Apr 20, 2015 05:24
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There's still books in China getting around that promote getting rich the Jewish way (become bankers because chrisso's aren't allowed to?)
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Apr 20, 2015 06:00
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Similarly, I've read here on these forums that Protocols of the Elders of Zion is somewhat popular in Japan, but that people there admire rather than hate Jewish people for secretly ruling the world. True/false?
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Apr 20, 2015 06:39
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Similarly, I've read here on these forums that Protocols of the Elders of Zion is somewhat popular in Japan, but that people there admire rather than hate Jewish people for secretly ruling the world. True/false? I dunno about currently but the protocols were what 'inspired' the fugu plan mentioned above. Leaders of the Kwantung army read the protocols from Russian émigrés living in Manchuria and decided that attracting Jewish immigration to China would be an easy way to use the Jews super powers to get capital investment.
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Apr 20, 2015 06:59
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The end goal for the Nazis was always to rid Europe in general and Germany in particular of Jews, but how that was to be achieved was really fuzzy until the war started. There were all sorts of plans. Some were pretty coherent and realistic - like encouraging Jewish emigration through a combination of making life difficult for them in Germany and being liberal with exit visas - and some were hilariously out of touch with reality, like the plan to create a Jewish homeland in Madagascar. It would be easy to think that the Nazis tried "reasonable" methods for removing the Jews from Germany, and that they escalated to more brutal methods as the previous attempts failed. This is however incorrect. The 3rd Reich did not have a single, unified policy of how to remove the Jews until the Final Solution was proposed. From the Nazi point of view, the Holocaust emerged "naturally" from the conditions leading up to it. 1) We believe compassion is for the weak, and that violence is to be admired. 2) We want to get rid of the Jews (in Germany at least). 3) We have made laws barring Jews from most professions, and confiscating their property. 4) We have rounded up a lot of Jews and put them in camps. We also don't care much whether they live or die there. 5) We control almost all of Europe, and can dictate terms to our allied puppet regimes. 6) We are killing a whole poo poo-ton of civilians in the East, mostly Jews, through shooting, gassing and burning. This is inefficient and also bad for the morale of the executioners. 7) Why not move all the Jews in the territories we control into dedicated extermination camps? 8) We have a final solution to our Jewish Problem!
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Apr 20, 2015 08:57
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And it's not like you can't see all of this poo poo telegraphed in Mein Kampf in 1925-26:quote:Was there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate? On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light. quote:Certainly in days to come, the Jews will raise a tremendous cry throughout their newspapers, once the hand is laid on their favourite net. Once the move is made to put an end to this scandalous press and once this instrument which is public opinion is brought under state control and no longer left in the hands of aliens and enemies of the people. I am certain that this will be easier for us than it was for our fathers. The scream of the twelve-inch shrapnel is more penetrating than the hiss from a thousand Jewish newspaper vipers. Therefore let them go on with their hissing. quote:The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people. The Jew uses every possible means to undermine the racial foundations of a subjugated people. In his systematic efforts to ruin girls and women he strives to break down the last barriers of discrimination between him and other peoples. The Jews were responsible for bringing negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate. For as long as a people remain racially pure and are conscious of the treasure of their blood, they can never be overcome by the Jew. Never in this world can the Jew become master of any people except a bastardized people. quote:Since the inferior always outnumber the superior, the former would always increase more rapidly if they possessed the same capacities for survival and for the procreation of their kind; and the final consequence would be that the best in quality would be forced to recede into the background. Therefore a corrective measure in favour of the better quality must intervene. Nature supplies this by establishing rigorous conditions of life to which the weaker will have to submit and will thereby be numerically restricted; but even that portion which survives cannot indiscriminately multiply, for here a new and rigorous selection takes place, according to strength and health. quote:… the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew. And then the speech in 1939: quote:In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance only the Jewish race that received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! Say what you will about the final solution, but it should be clear that the organising principle of Nazism was National Socialism. Annihilation of international Jewry was set as a higher priority than the war effort. Seeing the holocaust as purely contingent is a mistake. How and when it happened was defined by events, but the will to dash Jews in to the wind came before Hitler ever even achieved power.
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Apr 20, 2015 10:03
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Disinterested posted:Say what you will about the final solution, but it should be clear that the organising principle of Nazism was National Socialism. Annihilation of international Jewry was set as a higher priority than the war effort. Seeing the holocaust as purely contingent is a mistake. How and when it happened was defined by events, but the will to dash Jews in to the wind came before Hitler ever even achieved power. Given that the intentions were pretty much there for all to see long before the war even started, could anyone in post-war Germany really claim they had absolutely no idea what was going on? A lot of people, even government officials, claimed total ignorance, but to me that seems about as absurd as being surprised and shocked when US Republicans start handing out tax breaks. When the core tenet of your national government ideology revolves around getting rid of the "lesser races" by force if necessary, how can you realistically be completely unknowing when that same government carries out deportations and genocide on an industrial scale? Comrade Koba fucked around with this message at 10:23 on Apr 20, 2015 |
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Apr 20, 2015 10:19
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Comrade Koba posted:When the core tenet of your national government ideology revolves around getting rid of the "lesser races" by force if necessary, how can you realistically be completely unknowing when that same government carries out deportations and genocide on an industrial scale? You can know that something Very Bad is happening and still not know exactly how bad. The holocaust was totally unprecedented and I think you kind of had to see it to believe in the scale and horror of it. But the knowledge and complicity of the German people in the holocaust is a super complex topic and one someone else should speak to. But it should be noted that people have a tremendous capacity for wilful blindness and self-deception if it will help them get through the day. Edit: But to take a running jump at it - (a) nobody was ignorant about Hitler's feelings about the Jews and (b) there is no such thing as a perfect, hermetic seal of information, even in a totalitarian society. The Poles for sure knew about the death camps. A considerable number of Germans definitely in general often did know about mass killings of Jews - after all, millions of Germans served in the armed forces, which participated in the holocaust and brought information home. In cases, massacres of Jewish people took place in the city streets or in poorly hidden locations, particularly in the early days. What to do about it is a different question; moreover, a large number of committed Nazis were opposed to a holocaust but in favour of measures like compulsory sterilisation. Some people were intentionally kept in the dark or intimidated, even inside the German political machinery, in order to ensure complicity or silence. Don't forget that most of the holocaust took place outside Germany and thus gave ordinary people in Germany to try to lie to themselves or remain wilfully ignorant. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Apr 20, 2015 |
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Apr 20, 2015 10:42
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Comrade Koba posted:Given that the intentions were pretty much there for all to see long before the war even started, could anyone in post-war Germany really claim they had absolutely no idea what was going on? A lot of people, even government officials, claimed total ignorance, but to me that seems about as absurd as being surprised and shocked when US Republicans start handing out tax breaks. When the core tenet of your national government ideology revolves around getting rid of the "lesser races" by force if necessary, how can you realistically be completely unknowing when that same government carries out deportations and genocide on an industrial scale? Talk is talk and using industrial methods and the means of a modern western state to exterminate people is something else (without precedent before that, mind you). You can sift through antisemitic material of the fin de siécle in Vienna where Hitler was politically socialized and there are the same talkingpoints about getting rid of the jews, exactly the same. His language, social darwinism and imagery came from there, he invented nothing new. These views were a commonplace, and the general population shared them to a certain degree or was congruent (especially the deutschnationale branch of political thought that was very strongly present in the leadership of the Wehrmacht, or i.o.w. the old elites) and payed no attention that somebody might change talk into action. Antisemitic talk and stereotypes played a role of varying magnitude in political life since almost 100 years by then, and not just in Germany. What people knew is hard to estimate. Certain professional groups knew alot, e.g. railway men, soldiers too. There's alot to read in the fieldpost where soldiers openly recount or offered to recount when they returned home. Others made insinuations. It was forbidden to write such things, but people still did, and they talked when they came home. Just recently I read a letter of a soldier who had a stop in Auschwitz when he travelled home by train and saw people being unloaded. That guy knew what happened there. On the other hand, these places weren't open to visit, often in remote places (others not so much, like Dachau) and you'd know that something is happening there and that you'd be better off not to come too close to them. It's entirely possible that you'd never have heard about what's going on, or you weren't inquisitive enough to pay no attention to what people talk about. Loose talk could be dangerous, sometimes it's better not to hear or know anything. It was a touchy subject when these people were still alive. Today one views these things with emotional distance (or spatial and cultural distance) and fails to understand what it means to be entangled and part of this all, willingly or unwillingly. Memory does weird things as time passes. It does not simply recount the things that were, but the ones that conform to ones views. Repression can be very powerful, people might completely forget what they did in Russia when they were drafted as a young man, until something pulls the plug.
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Apr 20, 2015 11:37
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I should be clear - although I think Hitler's rhetoric, writing, and personal biography support the view that Hitler always had a malicious intent towards the Jews from the early days, I don't think they should be taken to support the view that Germans definitely should have seen the holocaust itself coming. But it does mean you don't have the right to be surprised about bad treatment of Jews, even if you can be surprised by the scale and horror of the holocaust. The other major problem, of course, is that people lie/give wrong information about this stuff, whether they realise it or not. It is very hard to be confident about whether interview sources of the holocaust - including victims - are accurate. You just have to look at the Demjanjuk trial to see how crazy the memory of the holocaust can be even some time after the events for everyone involved. To put it another way - go looking for an Austrian who was alive in the 40's and ask them how many of them fondly called Austria Ostmark. Apparently not a one, conveniently! Disinterested fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Apr 20, 2015 |
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Apr 20, 2015 11:48
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It's a long way from Mein Kampf (that only a few people read completely, and not found that it was utter bullshit) and the milestones that Sunshine outlined. I mean, do you take political banter at face value? Apparently not even enough jews did.
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Apr 20, 2015 12:21
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