Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Carthag Tuek
Oct 15, 2005

Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
slægt skal følge slægters gang



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.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

TapTheForwardAssist
Apr 9, 2007

Pretty Little Lyres
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)

Nostalgia4Dogges
Jun 18, 2004

Only emojis can express my pure, simple stupidity.

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

Nth Doctor
Sep 7, 2010

Darkrai used Dream Eater!
It's super effective!



That's some pretty rad swords into plowshares poo poo.

xthetenth
Dec 30, 2012

Mario wasn't sure if this Jeb guy was a good influence on Yoshi.

Lamentably that also is where a decent amount of Roman-era lead artefacts go as well.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS

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.

El Estrago Bonito
Dec 17, 2010

Scout Finch Bitch

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.

Platystemon
Feb 13, 2012

BREADS
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.

Nine of Eight
Apr 28, 2011


LICK IT OFF, AND PUT IT BACK IN
Dinosaur Gum
And then the 911 operator said "Mam, you need to get out. The wehraboo is coming from inside the thread!!"

FreudianSlippers
Apr 12, 2010

Shooting and Fucking
are the same thing!

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.

Rutibex
Sep 9, 2001

by Fluffdaddy

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.

Ensign Expendable
Nov 11, 2008

Lager beer is proof that god loves us
Pillbug
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.

El Estrago Bonito
Dec 17, 2010

Scout Finch Bitch

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”.

We only got to prosecute the latter, but the other guys were bastards as well.

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.

A Festivus Miracle
Dec 19, 2012

I have come to discourse on the profound inequities of the American political system.

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.

Kassad
Nov 12, 2005

It's about time.

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.

hackbunny
Jul 22, 2007

I haven't been on SA for years but the person who gave me my previous av as a joke felt guilty for doing so and decided to get me a non-shitty av
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 :eyepop:

Sulla Faex
May 14, 2010

No man ever did me so much good, or enemy so much harm, but I repaid him with ENDLESS SHITPOSTING
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
Sao cco kelle terre, per kelle fini que tebe monstrai, Pergoaldi foro, que ki contene, et trenta anni le possette. Sessa, Marzo 963
Kella terra, per kelle fini que bobe mostrai, sancte Marie è, et trenta anni la posset parte sancte Marie. Teano, Luglio 963
Sao cco kelle terre, per kelle fini que tebe mostrai, trenta anni le possette parte sancte Marie. Teano, Ottobre 963

PerilPastry
Oct 10, 2012
Y'all ever wondered what happened to all those German steel helmets after WW2?

https://youtu.be/PLIQ7_I00mM?t=18

hogmartin
Mar 27, 2007

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.

chitoryu12
Apr 24, 2014

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

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

A Geiger counter, for example

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.

hackbunny
Jul 22, 2007

I haven't been on SA for years but the person who gave me my previous av as a joke felt guilty for doing so and decided to get me a non-shitty av

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

Teriyaki Koinku
Nov 25, 2008

Bread! Bread! Bread!

Bread! BREAD! BREAD!

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. :allears:

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!

The North Tower
Aug 20, 2007

You should throw it in the ocean.

Teriyaki Koinku posted:

Do you have any other examples of ancient proto-memes like this? I think they are absolutely fascinating. :allears:

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!

Not exactly the same, but Chaplin as Hitler will never not be funny.

Carthag Tuek
Oct 15, 2005

Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
slægt skal følge slægters gang



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

Mycroft Holmes
Mar 26, 2010

by Azathoth

Snapchat A Titty posted:

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.

Youtube poop before youtube.

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?

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.

Rutibex
Sep 9, 2001

by Fluffdaddy

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.

Red Bones
Aug 9, 2012

"I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

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.

TapTheForwardAssist
Apr 9, 2007

Pretty Little Lyres

Teriyaki Koinku posted:

Do you have any other examples of ancient proto-memes like this? I think they are absolutely fascinating. :allears:

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!

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

hogmartin
Mar 27, 2007

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!"

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

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.

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.

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.

Ellie Crabcakes
Feb 1, 2008

Stop emailing my boyfriend Gay Crungus

#notallnazis

WickedHate
Aug 1, 2013

by Lowtax

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.

Alhazred
Feb 16, 2011




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

Chichevache
Feb 17, 2010

One of the funniest posters in GIP.

Just not intentionally.

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?

Fat Samurai
Feb 16, 2011

To go quickly is foolish. To go slowly is prudent. Not to go; that is wisdom.

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.

Mycroft Holmes
Mar 26, 2010

by Azathoth

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.

System Metternich
Feb 28, 2010

But what did he mean by that?

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.

To keep it short: in the first few months the SA opened up a number of "wild" camps, but most of the prisoners there got released after a while, often publicly as a show of how merciful the new regime was. The second stage of camps was administered by the SS; many of them close to towns and villages so people knew what was going on - but those weren't the extermination camps of later years (yet), mind you! In the first few years some camps even had open house days where visitors could come and look at the camps (which had been thouroughly sanitised of anything untoward by then, of course). Stuff like the aryanisation or the 1938 pogroms couldn't possibly be kept hidden and weren't supposed to be either. There was much talk about large ghettos in the east, or Madagascar or whatever, so people could profit from that while simultaneously not feel too bad about it - Jews were dangerous enemies of state and race, after all, and it was only proper that the Führer would resettle them all somewhere far east where they couldn't do any harm. In later years, the camps within Germany as well were closed to the public, and the SS tried to suppress any information about the many deaths occurring in there.

The third stage of camps, when the industrial-scale extermination of millions began, was kept mostly secret from the German population as well. It is no coincidence that all of those camps were built far to the east of where Germans lived. Himmler said as much in 1943 to high-ranking NSDAP officers: "The sentence 'The Jews have to be exterminated' with its few words is easily said, gentlemen. But for those who actually carry it out it is the hardest ad most difficult thing possible. [...] Now you know what is going on, and you keep it to yourself. Maybe it will be possible in much later times to tell the German people more about it. For now it is better, I think, to say that we have done that for our people, have shouldered the responsibility (for a deed, not just an idea) and will take that secret into our graves." It was quite effective, not only concerning the Germans but also their victims as well. The overwhelming majority had no idea what was going to happen to them, there are photos of Hungarian jews sitting peacefully in front of a gas chamber in Auschwitz, completely unaware of what the building's actual purpose was.

On the other hand there were many people who knew, or at least had the possibility to know. Most Wehrmacht soldiers knew all too well about the mass executions (often even the gassings) taking place there and passed that information on the their friends and families back home, even though that was strictly forbidden. Franz Josef Strauß, later the prime minister of Bavaria, was a soldier back then and wrote in his autobiography that he personally witnessed several mass shootings. There are some extant diaries from people staying home where it shows quite clearly that there were plenty of rumours circulating about the SS and Wehrmacht murdering civilians and enemy POWs en masse. A leading official of the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office) even wrote "liquidation of Jews in Belgrad" as the reason for a business trip into his deduction documents! Sometimes there were even newspaper articles hinting at what was going on, or Hitler doing so in his speeches.

The information flow became so great from 1942 on that the regime cracked down hard on anyone speaking about it. From 1943 on even the antisemitic propaganda was dialled back, because many people started to react negatively against it. When the regime painted the massacre of Katyn as prrof of Soviet barbarism, many Germans openly called it hypocritical as their own government did much worse things in the east. There is the example of a German engineer who despised the regime and tried to gather as much information about the eastern front as he could by listening to the stories of soldiers, cross-referencing German and foreign radio, trying to read between the lines in the papers and so on. Without even having to leave his hometown for it, he correctly deduced what was happening.

To sum it up: Many people could have known about what was happening, even though the regime tried to conceal it. Most either ignored it or chose not to believe it. Especially during the later stages of the war knowledge about the holocaust became more and more widespread, and many people expressed their disgust at it - without ever actually doing something against it, though. Many chose to go into denial and remain passive, and when they later told the allies that they "didn't know about it", they may truly have believed that. Contemporary historians think that not a majority, but still a sizeable part of the German population knew about the holocaust. But they remained passive. Out of fear of the regime? Because the war had made them jaded? Because they didn't want to hear about what their sons, husbands, brothers, fathers were doing at the front? Who knows.

edit: Oh hey, I chose to not believe that this is the maps thread!


CoolCab
Apr 17, 2005

glem
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.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

twoday
May 4, 2005



C-SPAM Times best-selling author
So this article was recently published about the obscure historical fun fact which I have become obsessed with. Great artwork too!



:getin:

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply