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Oh yeah we call them "gothic" print & cursive vs. "latin" print & cursive here. Gothic cursive (actually we said "dansk skrift" = "danish script" at the time) was taught in school until 1875, gothic print gradually fell out of use from about 1860 on.
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# ? Oct 22, 2016 23:08 |
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# ? May 14, 2024 08:02 |
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WWI Fun: during the First World War, there's at least one documented case of a firefight between horse cavalry and a submarine. Apparently a British sub surfaced at the Dardanelles and exchanged small arms fire with an Ottoman cavalry unit. (Wiki)
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# ? Oct 23, 2016 09:30 |
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Probably common knowledge but thought this was cool Pre WW2/atomic bomb metal has value because the tiny radioactive air particles circulating the atmosphere weren't in the air during the metal manufacturing process. A lot of it is salvaged from ships https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel quote:This steel is used in devices that require the highest sensitivity for detecting radionuclides. A Geiger counter, for example Also this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E2SR6Z28kY Nostalgia4Dogges has a new favorite as of 01:53 on Oct 24, 2016 |
# ? Oct 24, 2016 01:42 |
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That's some pretty rad swords into plowshares poo poo.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 02:00 |
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Lamentably that also is where a decent amount of Roman-era lead artefacts go as well.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 02:38 |
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xthetenth posted:Lamentably that also is where a decent amount of Roman-era lead artefacts go as well. Low background lead is a little different than steel. Iron ore is fine. It’s the blast furnace that contaminates it with hot particles from the atmosphere. If you had a clean‐room blast furnace, that would work. It just happens to be cheaper to recycle pre‐1945 steel. Lead is contaminated by Pb‐210 straight out of the ground. This is because it’s found with elements of the uranium series (starting with U‐238), and they’re constantly producing Pb‐210. When the lead is refined, it’s made chemically pure. This halts the production of Pb‐210, but the Pb‐210 that already exists in the sample remains. If you need low‐background lead, you need lead refined no later than the eighteenth century so that that Pb‐210 has had suitably many half‐lives to decay.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 03:40 |
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:WWI Fun: during the First World War, there's at least one documented case of a firefight between horse cavalry and a submarine. Apparently a British sub surfaced at the Dardanelles and exchanged small arms fire with an Ottoman cavalry unit. (Wiki) Famously during WW2 when allied submarines would creep around the German coast or into German harbors, the Nazis would sometimes try and shoot at them with StuG's and other mobile guns/artillery. You know, just in case. Michael "The Black Baron" Wittman famously did this during his training as a tank commander and it impressed some of the German high command enough that it probably significantly advanced his career. But he was a crazy motherfucker in general, and his most famous moment came when he decided to charge a well fortified British position with his single Tiger I against several dozen British armor. The British were, not unsurprisingly, taken aback by this action and caught with their pants down. Between him and his support staff they ended up destroying a number (due to the Nazi propaganda machine, accounts vary but it was probably around a dozen) of allied tanks and support vehicles until their tank was hit by several shots from an anti-tank gun, after which they bailed out and then managed to hike back to the Axis command which was about six or seven miles away. He then got killed by a poor decision made by one of Germany's other well know Panzer aces, Kurt "Panzer" Meyer. Wittman was, by most accounts, not really a Nazi in the true blue sense, just a man who really wanted to blow poo poo up with tanks. He basically joined the Nazi party because he realized that the SS would give him access to big tanks faster. No doubt he was a racist and such (it was the 40's), but the dude had a calling and that calling was blowing poo poo up. Panzer Meyer on the other hand was a real poo poo of a person and it's really unfortunate that the Canadians willingly handed him over to the West German government (which was, spoilers, full of Nazi apologists, former SS and former Nazis). They commuted his sentence (which should have been death but was reduced already to life in prison) to 14 years (reduced again for good behavior), and a man who was directly responsible for several massacres of PoWs/Civilians and being a unabashed hardline Nazi and anti-semite, walked out of jail less than ten years after the end of WW2. He then pretty much immediately began to work with the Nazi apologist/Nazi lobbyist group HIAG, started denying the holocaust and pushing a holocaust denial agenda in politics and among politicians, organized a SS convention, and became rich when he published a book that is basically responsible for the modern tradition of portraying the SS as this noble, elite, super badass fighting force. So yeah, gently caress Kurt Meyer, that dude was an rear end in a top hat.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 03:47 |
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I don’t put a massive amount of weight on the distinction between “swore allegiance to the führer because he wanted to blow poo poo up” and “blew poo poo up because he swore allegiance to the führer”. We only got to prosecute the latter, but the other guys were bastards as well.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 04:24 |
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And then the 911 operator said "Mam, you need to get out. The wehraboo is coming from inside the thread!!"
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 04:39 |
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They really should've just put Abba Kovner and his Avengers in charge of denazification. I mean sure their definition of Nazi would've been "Is German, a Goy and not a member of some sort of resistance" which was like 99% of Germans but you can't get Nazis out of an omelette without a few million dead.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 05:11 |
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FreudianSlippers posted:They really should've just put Abba Kovner and his Avengers in charge of denazification. I mean sure their definition of Nazi would've been "Is German, a Goy and not a member of some sort of resistance" which was like 99% of Germans but you can't get Nazis out of an omelette without a few million dead. By the time it came to de-nazify things America was more concerned about Stalin. Better to have the Germans on your side, than causing trouble on a critical cold war front.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 05:20 |
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Cyrano4747 wrote a lot about this in the military history threads, but basically if you axed everyone who was in the NSDAP you would have no one left to run the country, so a lot of rather significant transgressions were looked over.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 05:25 |
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Platystemon posted:I don’t put a massive amount of weight on the distinction between “swore allegiance to the führer because he wanted to blow poo poo up” and “blew poo poo up because he swore allegiance to the führer”. No Wittman was not a good guy, but he also wasn't involved in any actual atrocities, he was just dedicated to killing people on the other side of the war. Compared to some of the other people, for example the previously mentioned Kurt "the SS committed no crimes, except the massacre at Oradour, and that was the action of a single man" Meyer he's pretty tame compared to a lot of other Nazis. One of the big issues with studying WWII is just how vilified all the Germans are. Yes, lots of them were terrible people, most of them were or supported anti-Semetism and racism (but then again, so did a lot of our allies), but we forget that a lot of people joined the Nazi party and the SS because they wanted to advance their careers in a fascist police state engulfed in propaganda and controlled by an agency who ruthlessly silenced dissenting opinion. There's a line between being a Nazi apologist, which a unsettling amount of historians are, and taking into account the attitudes of the time and the culture where people were coming from. We all like to imagine that if we were living in Nazi Germany we'd all be freedom fighters who smuggled Jews to safety and undermined Hitler's regime. But the amount of people who did that was extremely small, and in reality we're all mostly military service age adults who'd probably be in the Wehrmacht digging trenches in North Africa or machining thousands of bullets and guns in factories day in and day out. It's easy to cast an entire cast of people as the bad guys and forget they were real people who had real reasons for everything they did, and no one thinks they're the villain in their own story. These days we're all big on the supporting troops but not the military industrial complex thing, but we sometimes forget to apply that to the past in relevant ways. You don't hold a young German man fighting in the deserts of Africa against the British accountable for the crimes of his government any more than you should blame a random Marine in Afghanistan for people being tortured at Guantanamo bay. I think also, in many ways, we let down the families of a lot of dead soldiers in the post-WWII trials. After the true scope and horror of the Holocaust really because well known things like massacres of PoWs seemed to pale in signifgance and a lot of high ranking SS guys like Meyer who were responsible for doing things like ordering troops to massacre civilians or captured soldiers ended up getting off with ten year sentences. Also the fact that HIAG existed until the 90's is extremely unsettling. We basically let a bunch of Nazis off the hook and then they went and falsified the pseudo historical garbage that gave rise to modern apologists and Neo-Nazisim.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 08:04 |
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Don't forget that denazification only really occurred in Germany. Italy, Austria, and Japan basically got off the hook for what their constituent members did, Japan especially. Austria right now has a literal neo-nazi in a close re-run race for the presidency, and Japan has consistently decided to side-step their responsibility for the things that occurred in China and elsewhere under their oversight.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 08:40 |
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Ensign Expendable posted:Cyrano4747 wrote a lot about this in the military history threads, but basically if you axed everyone who was in the NSDAP you would have no one left to run the country, so a lot of rather significant transgressions were looked over. In a way, I suppose we saw a possibly result of full-scale denazification with G.W. Bush's de-Ba'athification of Iraq and the aftermath. It ain't pretty. A White Guy posted:Don't forget that denazification only really occurred in Germany. Italy, Austria, and Japan basically got off the hook for what their constituent members did, Japan especially. Austria right now has a literal neo-nazi in a close re-run race for the presidency, and Japan has consistently decided to side-step their responsibility for the things that occurred in China and elsewhere under their oversight. France as well (helped by the idea that De Gaulle's Free France were the "real France"). The Vichy authorities went above and beyond the Nazis' expectations to deport French Jews. Many of the high-ranking officials responsible for that went on to have long careers, since you need the civil service to actually run the country.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 08:54 |
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The talk about border disputes reminded me of a fact about my native language: the earliest written document in Italian is, in fact, a witness's testimony in a border dispute. Just one sentence (the rest of the document is, obviously, in Latin), but it's clearly Italian, still quite intelligible today. I checked out of curiosity, and the document was written in 960
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 13:08 |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placiti_Cassinesi That's cool as poo poo quote:Sao ke kelle terre, per kelle fini que ki contene, trenta anni le possette parte Sancti Benedicti. Capua, Marzo 960
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 13:13 |
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Y'all ever wondered what happened to all those German steel helmets after WW2? https://youtu.be/PLIQ7_I00mM?t=18
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 13:36 |
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A White Guy posted:Don't forget that denazification only really occurred in Germany. Italy, Austria, and Japan basically got off the hook for what their constituent members did, Japan especially. This part isn't really accurate. See if you can find a copy of Japan's American Interlude. Japan was under occupation, there were war crimes trials and sentences, and loads of people from military to civil servants were barred from any job they were really qualified for. Sounds broadly like what was done with Germany, aside from the Soviet partition thing.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 13:46 |
The basic issue with de-Nazification, as Cyrano described whenever he spoke about it, is that being a member of the Nazi party was a prerequisite to success in Germany during and before the war. The government intentionally arranged it so that it was very difficult to earn promotions, get particular jobs, etc. without being a registered member of the party. A ton of people who didn't really support the Nazis still ended up joining because it was expected of them and the pressure was squeezed in juuuust the right places. When the Allies decided to de-Nazify the place, their initial reaction was the obvious one: "Just kick out everyone who was part of the Nazi party and ban them from government, teaching, and everything else under the government's purview." And then they realized that they had nobody left if they did that, because Hitler's government had forced drat near everyone to join the party. It took a much more nuanced effort to figure out who was actually a Nazi and not just some random bus driver or elementary school teacher who joined the party to keep their job. Nostalgia4Dicks posted:Probably common knowledge but thought this was cool I've read that in the future, radiocarbon dating the modern era is going to be a little more difficult than usual because processing fossil fuels contain almost no carbon-14 and the pollution they create has actually reduced the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, while nuclear bomb detonations have greatly increased it. Future historians using radiocarbon dating will need to account for the proportion of carbon-14 in the atmosphere being hosed with by humans when they try to figure out how much the carbon-14 in a sample has deteriorated compared to the atmosphere at the time.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 13:47 |
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hogmartin posted:This part isn't really accurate. See if you can find a copy of Japan's American Interlude. Japan was under occupation, there were war crimes trials and sentences, and loads of people from military to civil servants were barred from any job they were really qualified for. Sounds broadly like what was done with Germany, aside from the Soviet partition thing. Almost nothing happened to Italy, though. We switched sides halfway, in both world wars, and we never had to pay for it. People don't even joke about it like they do about the French surrendering to Nazi Germany. We even got away with exiling our king and writing a new constitution that starts with "Italy is a republic founded on labor" and drawing a new coat of arms with a gearwheel (no ears of corn though! and the star was already there, we swear), and a powerful Soviet-friendly Communist party. We weren't even invaded once! although there were detailed plans for it, had the President dared appoint a Communist PM
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 14:52 |
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InediblePenguin posted:In the late 18th century all the London hipsters were looking down their noses at people and saying the word "quoz," and because all we have to go on about it is the equivalent of articles about memes in the New York Times Style Section, we no longer have any idea what the joke was Do you have any other examples of ancient proto-memes like this? I think they are absolutely fascinating. I don't remember the name of it, but the first pseudo-modern meme was footage spliced together of Nazi war marching set to some slapstick music. It's actually genuinely funny!
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 16:00 |
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Teriyaki Koinku posted:Do you have any other examples of ancient proto-memes like this? I think they are absolutely fascinating. Not exactly the same, but Chaplin as Hitler will never not be funny.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 16:25 |
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The Lambeth Walk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjbYl3LgTHA E: There's probably some stuff that can be called "proto-memery" in dadaism and surrealism. See also Roy Lichtenstein's appropriations of comic books from the 1960s. Carthag Tuek has a new favorite as of 17:01 on Oct 24, 2016 |
# ? Oct 24, 2016 16:54 |
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Snapchat A Titty posted:The Lambeth Walk Youtube poop before youtube.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 18:06 |
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hackbunny posted:Almost nothing happened to Italy, though. We switched sides halfway, in both world wars, and we never had to pay for it. People don't even joke about it like they do about the French surrendering to Nazi Germany. We even got away with exiling our king and writing a new constitution that starts with "Italy is a republic founded on labor" and drawing a new coat of arms with a gearwheel (no ears of corn though! and the star was already there, we swear), and a powerful Soviet-friendly Communist party. We weren't even invaded once! although there were detailed plans for it, had the President dared appoint a Communist PM Italy seems like it has a habit of changing sides in pretty much every war, ever. Going right back to the Romans the Italian city states were conniving backstabbers who sided with whoever gave them the better deal, and the Italian Wars and the 30 Years War were pretty much caused by Italians being double-crossers to everybody.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 20:14 |
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Arcsquad12 posted:Italy seems like it has a habit of changing sides in pretty much every war, ever. Going right back to the Romans the Italian city states were conniving backstabbers who sided with whoever gave them the better deal, and the Italian Wars and the 30 Years War were pretty much caused by Italians being double-crossers to everybody. Rome was founded the day Romulus betrayed and killed his brother Remus, and hes been doing it ever since.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 21:20 |
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hogmartin posted:This part isn't really accurate. See if you can find a copy of Japan's American Interlude. Japan was under occupation, there were war crimes trials and sentences, and loads of people from military to civil servants were barred from any job they were really qualified for. Sounds broadly like what was done with Germany, aside from the Soviet partition thing. I can vouch for Japan's American Interlude being a really good book, unlike most English-language stuff on Japan it was written by a Japanese man who was a journalist during the occupation and went on to become a lecturer at universities in the US, so the English version (I'm not sure if there's a Japanese one) is all his own writing, rather than being a translation. It's very comprehensive in going through the different aspects of Japanese civil society and the country and how the Americans changed different things, and he also puts in some really nice humanising anecdotes that he (presumably) picked up during his work as a journalist. At one point someone jokes that they don't have an opinion on the new Japanese constitution because it hasn't been translated into Japanese yet.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 21:27 |
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Teriyaki Koinku posted:Do you have any other examples of ancient proto-memes like this? I think they are absolutely fascinating. The 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds has a whole chapter called " Popular Follies of Great Cities". It's basically just a short summary of all the contemporary stupid fads and catch-phrases the author was familiar with in London: quote:The next phrase was a most preposterous one. Who invented it, how it arose, or where it was first heard, are alike unknown. Nothing about it is certain, but that for months it was the slang par excellence of the Londoners, and afforded them a vast gratification. "There he goes with his eye out!" or “There she goes with her eye out!” as the sex of the party alluded to might be, was in the mouth of everybody who knew the town. The sober part of the community were as much puzzled by this unaccountable saying as the vulgar were delighted with it. The wise thought it very foolish, but the many thought it very funny, and the idle amused themselves by chalking it upon walls, or scribbling it upon monuments. But, “all that's bright must fade,” even in slang. The people grew tired of their hobby, and “There he goes with his eye out!” was heard no more in its accustomed haunts. http://www.econlib.org/library/Mackay/macEx13.html
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 21:52 |
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Red Bones posted:At one point someone jokes that they don't have an opinion on the new Japanese constitution because it hasn't been translated into Japanese yet. The other part I liked was his explanation of the emperor. In Kawai's explanation, the emperor is divine, yeah, but only a bit more so than everyone else. More like a pope or something than a living incarnation of a deity. There was one who was pretty well insane, and people still bowed because well, the emperor may not be all there, but he's the sacred figurehead of the nation. Kawai makes a good comparison to the American flag - Americans saluted it and wouldn't let it touch the ground, revered it, cried over it, &c. because it was a tangible visible national symbol. He has a bit where after a while the Americans magnanimously allow the Japanese to fly the Hinomaru over civic buildings like the American flag flies over American civic buildings, and the Japanese were all "we've, uh, never done that, because it's just a flag and who cares but... OK! We'll get right to it!"
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 22:12 |
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El Estrago Bonito posted:No Wittman was not a good guy, but he also wasn't involved in any actual atrocities, he was just dedicated to killing people on the other side of the war. Compared to some of the other people, for example the previously mentioned Kurt "the SS committed no crimes, except the massacre at Oradour, and that was the action of a single man" Meyer he's pretty tame compared to a lot of other Nazis. One of the big issues with studying WWII is just how vilified all the Germans are. Yes, lots of them were terrible people, most of them were or supported anti-Semetism and racism (but then again, so did a lot of our allies), but we forget that a lot of people joined the Nazi party and the SS because they wanted to advance their careers in a fascist police state engulfed in propaganda and controlled by an agency who ruthlessly silenced dissenting opinion. There's a line between being a Nazi apologist, which a unsettling amount of historians are, and taking into account the attitudes of the time and the culture where people were coming from. We all like to imagine that if we were living in Nazi Germany we'd all be freedom fighters who smuggled Jews to safety and undermined Hitler's regime. But the amount of people who did that was extremely small, and in reality we're all mostly military service age adults who'd probably be in the Wehrmacht digging trenches in North Africa or machining thousands of bullets and guns in factories day in and day out. It's easy to cast an entire cast of people as the bad guys and forget they were real people who had real reasons for everything they did, and no one thinks they're the villain in their own story. These days we're all big on the supporting troops but not the military industrial complex thing, but we sometimes forget to apply that to the past in relevant ways. You don't hold a young German man fighting in the deserts of Africa against the British accountable for the crimes of his government any more than you should blame a random Marine in Afghanistan for people being tortured at Guantanamo bay. It's also worth noting that even some high-ranking literal Nazis didn't agree with Hitler's little "murder literally all of the Jews" project. There was a major plot to kill Hitler and end the nastier parts of Nazism; Rommel in particular probably participated in it and also refused to turn over captured Jewish enemy soldiers. He treated them like any other POW, which made Hitler pretty unhappy. To some serving their nation was the more important thing; this was true of Rommel as well. He was a loyal old German military dude who would do what was right for his nation, though that was up to and including refusing some direct orders. The common folks also didn't necessarily even know about the Holocaust. In a lot of areas the undesirables were just loaded on trains with the message being "we're moving them." Pretty much "hey we just conquered Poland so we're keeping Germany for the Germans. Everybody else has to go over to Poland." Your bog standard infantryman may not have even known the Holocaust was happening. He probably also had a head full of propaganda and family of some sort. WWI and the economic nastiness Germany endured after it were still pretty fresh memories; it's perfectly reasonable to assume that the average German could have just hated the rest of the world. Other times it was a matter of survival. This wasn't a time where moving far away was cheap and easy. If the Nazis handed you a gun or a wrench and said "hey you're helping" well...what the hell could you do? I mean your kids gotta eat, right? Desertion was probably a terrible idea and God help you if you deserted to somewhere that the Nazis conquered later. Aside from that some didn't like the mass deportation/murder of people Hitler didn't like but were loyal enough to Germany that they just grit their teeth and did what they had to. Then you get into people saying "well X person was a member of the Hitler Youth!" Well...you, uh...didn't get a choice on that one. That also pre-dated the Holocaust. It doesn't justify Nazi apologists at all of course but this idea that Nazi Germany was some gigantic monolith of hate where everybody agreed is kind of absurd. I imagine a lot of Germans, after the war was over, just kind of went "holy poo poo I'm glad that's over and I survived it." It's just much, much easier to paint The Other Guys as a unilaterally evil group. It also makes it easier to not feel bad about firebombing entire cities. Thank you, propaganda.
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# ? Oct 24, 2016 23:25 |
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#notallnazis
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# ? Oct 25, 2016 03:01 |
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Then you get into people saying "well X person was a member of the Hitler Youth!" Well...you, uh...didn't get a choice on that one. That also pre-dated the Holocaust. Just ask Hans Massaquoi.
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# ? Oct 25, 2016 04:37 |
ToxicSlurpee posted:The common folks also didn't necessarily even know about the Holocaust.. They probably did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Kellner#The_war_years
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# ? Oct 25, 2016 05:05 |
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Alhazred posted:They probably did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Kellner#The_war_years Are you saying that the wiki link has examples demonstrating that the common folks knew about the Holocaust, or are you arguing that Friedrich Kellner is supposed to be an example of a common German citizen at the time?
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# ? Oct 25, 2016 05:31 |
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Rutibex posted:Rome was founded the day Romulus betrayed and killed his brother Remus, and hes been doing it ever since. Hey, Romulus did jump over Rome's walls like a barbarian. The kidnapping and raping of the Sabine women at a party is a little more difficult to justify.
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# ? Oct 25, 2016 07:50 |
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Rutibex posted:Rome was founded the day Romulus betrayed and killed his brother Remus, and hes been doing it ever since. I thought it was when the Romulans killed Surak and fled Vulcan.
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# ? Oct 25, 2016 09:42 |
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Chichevache posted:Are you saying that the wiki link has examples demonstrating that the common folks knew about the Holocaust, or are you arguing that Friedrich Kellner is supposed to be an example of a common German citizen at the time? I once did an effort post about this in the D&D maps thread, let me crosspost it real quick: System Metternich posted:The German Wikipedia has a fairly in-depth article about how much the average German knew about what was going on.
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# ? Oct 25, 2016 10:33 |
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It's also worth noting that the attempted coup wasn't so much "wow! Hitler's doing the holocaust better stop him to save all the undesirables" for a bunch of reasons (including the timelines not matching up at all), it was because he was losing the war...badly. When the nazis were winning the same generals were, to various degrees of enthusiasm, willing participants in the holocaust. Likewise, Rommel not obeying the order to execute Jewish POWs was less an ideological kindness then a purely practical one: teaching the enemy you do not obey the various conventions on POW treatment is a really loving dumb and dangerous idea.
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# ? Oct 25, 2016 11:06 |
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# ? May 14, 2024 08:02 |
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So this article was recently published about the obscure historical fun fact which I have become obsessed with. Great artwork too!
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# ? Oct 25, 2016 17:32 |