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Foolish Poles should have rejected Papist lies and invited the Lion of the North to protect them instead.
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Oct 1, 2017 00:21
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Gnoman posted:No. The quality of Allied leadership barely had a chance to matter in any way before France capitulated, because the Germans had seized the strategic initiative through a combination of inventiveness, boldness, and sheer dumb luck. The main gambit that lead to the German victory was the swift conquest of the Low Countries, which neutralized fortifications that should have held the Germans out long enough for the French and British forces in-country to reach and destroy the invader. The main reason these forts were taken so easily was the use of airborne troops that attacked the forts from behind where the defenses were light. This strategy was audacious to the point of insanity - had the attack force been spotted, fighters could have been sent in despite the early hour, and any fighter opposition (even a couple of leftovers from the previous war) would have wreaked a massacre of epic proportions. The Nazis had a lot of luck going their way but it seems like the allies basically surrendered the initiative to Germany when they declared war and then didn't do anything for 8 months. The entire German army is in Poland and the allies just sit there and wait for them to move it all the way back and attack them. Didn't they have the means to attack? They also spread out all their armor and planes instead concentrating theme. Yeah hindsight is 20/20 but the Nazis didn't do that and the allies stopped doing it so it seems like everybody agrees it was dumb thing to do.
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Oct 1, 2017 01:10
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Making war is far more complicated then just taking all of your guys and throwing them at the other guy. The Allies were not ready for war. That's not a judgment on the militaries involved, but a result of isolationist movements and the Depression crippling military budgets. The logistics for an invasion of the Reich were not in place, there was still a lot of command and troop quality issues, and a host of other problems. Throwing the BEF and the French Army into Germany on 1 September 1939 would have been murder, nothing else. Instead, they counted on fortifications (which should have held) to slow an attacker down, and spread their forces out so that assembling a force to counter any serious assault would be easier. The ultimatum regarding Poland was in many ways a bluff, and Hitler called it.
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Oct 1, 2017 01:19
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Loezi posted:Part 2: Enemy contact Thanks for translating this, its nice to get a kind of in the ground perspective, especially with this first contact action.
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Oct 1, 2017 01:23
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Bates posted:The Nazis had a lot of luck going their way but it seems like the allies basically surrendered the initiative to Germany when they declared war and then didn't do anything for 8 months. The entire German army is in Poland and the allies just sit there and wait for them to move it all the way back and attack them. Didn't they have the means to attack? They also spread out all their armor and planes instead concentrating theme. Yeah hindsight is 20/20 but the Nazis didn't do that and the allies stopped doing it so it seems like everybody agrees it was dumb thing to do. Short answer? Not really. Both France and Britain had drawn down their militaries in a big way after WW1 due to being broke as gently caress. The whole thing with the Maginot line was supposed to be a cost saving measure so that France could be assured of protection on her eastern border without having to pay for a large military. This wasn't as dumb as it sounded, either. Belgium is great defensive terrain if you have to defend it from attacks on an east-west axis due to all the n/s flowing rivers there, and it has the added benefit of not being French farmland. The idea was to have a smaller, cheaper military and force the Germans through Belgium, where that smaller, cheaper army could effectively stop them. Everyone started rearming when the Germans did so with gusto, and doubly so after 1938, but that poo poo takes a while. In hindsight we realize just how weak the Germans were on their western frontier in 1939, but the western allies didn't exactly know that. What's more, the Germans had similar Maginot Line thoughts as the French did, and built a string of defenses opposite where the French did. Not quite as thick, but still sufficient to make holding the line there require far fewer men. What about the border with the Netherlands and Belgium? They were technically neutral countries until the Germans marched through in 1940. Violating Dutch and Belgian neutrality REALLY wouldn't have been a good look for Britain and France, especially as regards trying to win over the Americans for poo poo like lend-lease. Even if they had been willing to do that, you're still talking about a much smaller French and British army. The British and the French didn't even mobilize their reserves until Germany attacked Poland, and the French in particular were slow to get their army in the field. The Brits and French pouring across the Rhine in the middle of September was never going to happen. The best they could hope for was that the Poles could hold out into the spring, at which point they would hit Germany in the rear. Unfortunately the Poles did far worse than anyone expected, something that certainly wasn't helped by Stalin kicking in the rear door. By the time the British and French were in any shape to be considering an offensive the Polish campaign was well over and they had to think more about prepairing their own defenses for Germany's attack and what everyone though would be a re-play of the Western Front in WW2. That's the context of the Sitzkrieg - everyone knew an attack was going to happen, and everyone played footsie with side-theaters like Norway, but the Allies didn't want to violate the low countries neutrality and Germany wanted its ducks in a row before it created the world's largest traffic jam in the Ardennes.
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Oct 1, 2017 01:23
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Also important to bear in mind is how fatigued Britain and France were of war in the 1920s and 30s. WW1 was awful, and neither country was eager for another war.
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Oct 1, 2017 03:00
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Did international mail service continue during the world wars? In WW1/2, could you have successfully sent a letter from Berlin to London or Moscow? What about less extreme confrontations - are there some international regulations that allow mail service to continue?
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Oct 1, 2017 03:24
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Cyrano4747 posted:While we're on the subject of Polish Jews and the USSR, one of history's greatest ironies is the decision that a lot of people had to make in 1940 over whether they wanted to be on the German or the Soviet side of the border. A lot of it ended up boiling down to the political beliefs of various jewish communities (which could be VERY divided - look at the political alignments of the ZOB and ZZW during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising). The Soviets ended up deporting a fair share of Jews on their half of the border to Siberia in late 1940-early 1941, which got them out ahead of the German invasion in '41. This was commented on in the German half of Poland, and a lot of people there thought they made the right decision to stay with the Germans. Being forced into a ghetto sucked, but it was probably better than Siberia, right? I think this is really well put. Proposing counterfactual decisions informed with the benefit of hindsight is almost always a boring and pointless form of analysis. I mean think of someone asking a question like "Should the Titanic have steered out of the way of the iceberg just before it hit it?" Yeah duh. A better question to ask is "Why didn't the Titanic's pilot steer out of the way of the iceberg, and with the information available at the time, what could everyone have done differently in order to avoid a collision?" I'm sorry I know very little about the politics of Poland and the rest of Central Europe in this period. I know they were generally kinda authoritarian-y and pseudo-fascist-y but I'd really like to know how their governments planned on reacting to a large scale war between Great Powers.
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Oct 1, 2017 03:25
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Squalid posted:I think this is really well put. Proposing counterfactual decisions informed with the benefit of hindsight is almost always a boring and pointless form of analysis. I mean think of someone asking a question like "Should the Titanic have steered out of the way of the iceberg just before it hit it?" Yeah duh. A better question to ask is "Why didn't the Titanic's pilot steer out of the way of the iceberg, and with the information available at the time, what could everyone have done differently in order to avoid a collision?" Pilsudski was loving terrified of the Soviet Union. In a universe that didn't involve Nazi Lebensraum policies, there's a pretty fair chance he'd have joined the Axis. Obviously the logistical details of moving German troops to the Soviet front face similar issues as the helpful Soviet offer in our timeline, but to a slightly lesser degree. For one thing Pilsudski made his name improbably stopping the Red Army from retaking territory that Poland had
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Oct 1, 2017 03:57
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One thing to note that a Poland that invites the Soviets to march across is supposedly also a Poland that still has a rather large on paper standing army in which to watch them carefully. An agreement that starts at first with just transitioning through Poland on railroads to Czechoslovakia isn't guaranteed either in ending in Soviet occupation. If/When the war widens and Poland itself is drawn in then you probably either end up with Soviet forces integrated in or assigned their own section of the front.
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Oct 1, 2017 05:45
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I'm asking this here because there are some Marx scholars in the thread--is there a good volume of Marx that comes with commentary? Even a companion volume that could be read more or less in tandem would be helpful. I don't read a lot of philosophy so some guidance would be useful, but after many years of people (incorrectly) calling me a Communist I feel like I should read the original source. ETA: recs on industrial and worker history in the same time period would also be welcome, mostly because history reading is cool and good. occamsnailfile fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Oct 1, 2017 |
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Oct 1, 2017 07:16
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E P Thompson The making of the English working class is an absolute classic when it comes to the social / industrial history part of what you're asking.
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Oct 1, 2017 07:38
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Cythereal posted:Also important to bear in mind is how fatigued Britain and France were of war in the 1920s and 30s. WW1 was awful, and neither country was eager for another war. How come Britain and France were completely fatigued by WW1, but Germany was not? Germans had an equally horrible experience in WW1 and to top that they lost the war. I would have thought that there should have been a huge peace movement in Germany. Instead Germany went to totally another direction: "World War part 2 and four more years of war? Yeah baby, bring it on!" Did Germans have any peace movement in 20s and 30s or any ideas of peaceful co-operation instead of the rematch?
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Oct 1, 2017 09:35
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Pyle posted:How come Britain and France were completely fatigued by WW1, but Germany was not? Germans had an equally horrible experience in WW1 and to top that they lost the war. I would have thought that there should have been a huge peace movement in Germany. Instead Germany went to totally another direction: "World War part 2 and four more years of war? Yeah baby, bring it on!" Did Germans have any peace movement in 20s and 30s or any ideas of peaceful co-operation instead of the rematch? France and the UK didn't have Hitler forcing them into it. German citizens for the most part were very apathetic about another war.
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Oct 1, 2017 10:13
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Chillyrabbit posted:Thanks for translating this, its nice to get a kind of in the ground perspective, especially with this first contact action. Thanks for the encouragement  It's good to keep in mind, that at this point the theater of operations is a battle of one (1) Finnish Detached Battalion (to which the company we are following is assigned to) against the complete Russian 155th Division. Against that backdrop, the idea of "Our first proper contact with the Russians will be us sitting along a river getting bombarded to hell for four hours" is pretty mind boggling. Considering all of these men would have been conscripts (even the White Guard were pretty much "conscripts with a hobby" as the civil war a few decades back was quite a different ordeal), it's amazing how many things didn't go more wrong. Especially without any proper anti-tank assets. Also, I absolutely love how even the extremely dry text manages to capture the confusion and -- dare I say, the dark humor -- of combat. "The order to withdraw will be given by telephone. <paragraph break> Russian artillery just cut the telephone line" and the whole part where orders to withdraw are being sent and rescinded all the time. The closest weather observations I'm finding are from the regional capital of Joensuu, which is 50 km direct west. The weather should be largely comparable. Joensuu reports 13 cm of snow at November 30th, which rises to 21 cm on 5th of December and again to 30 centimeters by December 25th. By January 15th, we've reached 51 cm of snow, deepening still until February 25th when there is 65 cm of snow. The forests are dense and swampy, and the extremely few roads that exist are dirt roads, likely with only room for vehicles to pass each other at points widened for that explicit purpose. All told, the mobility is really bad. There's 5 hours of daylight on December 15th, increasing to 7h 30min by start of February, making operations again more difficult. Temperatures are more difficult to gauge, but they would have ranged from around zero to -16 degrees Celsius during December, dipping to -20 in January. Extremes would have probably been around -30 or so. But these are pretty rough numbers since the data I have is from all over the Finland and I'm sort of extrapolating from weather stations that are all 100 km to 200 km away from our locale. By the way, many of the maps I've been posting allow you to check the area in Google Street View and have OK satellite imagery coverage. Especially in future updates I'll be mentioning "house at <so-and-so>" and if you check the satellite imagery, there is exactly one farm at that location. Many of the buildings and places we are discussing are still there. The theater of operations will also grow to encompass what is now the National Park of Petkeljärvi, where you can find restored battle structures from the time of Winter War.
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Oct 1, 2017 10:22
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About Loezi's stuff: I remember reading a paper about some folklore study about the battlefields of the region (and those further north). In some places, up until the late fifties or so, the woods were still filled with various debris and crap from the battles, including abandoned rifles, skeletons and burned out vehicles. There was at least one interviewer who told about kids playing with rusted guns and skulls.
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Oct 1, 2017 10:31
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Kemper Boyd posted:There was at least one interviewer who told about kids playing with rusted guns But enough about FDF conscripts
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Oct 1, 2017 10:40
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Nenonen posted:But enough about FDF conscripts  --- Part 3: New positions This is a translation of the war diary of the Finnish 2nd Detached Sissi Company from 10.11.1939 to 26.4.1940, as it fought in the Winter War. Last time, the battalion was assaulted in Möhkö by Russian forces. It's one Finnish detached battalion against the whole Russian 155th Division, but I'm not sure they know it. At least the diary is quiet about it. After a few days of battle, the battalion fell back to a defensible position along the river at Oinassalmi. --- 10.12.1939 Approx. 1.30: I platoon under the command of 2nd.lt Piitulainen mans a forward base on the eastern side of the Oinassalmi bridge. II platoon rests along campfires on the western side of the water. Approx. 10.30: I platoon relieved from the forward based. Relieved by men from the fifth battalion of the Field-Reinforcement Brigade (Loezi: orig. "V/KT-Pr", essentially Commander-in-Chief's reserve). Approx. 11.00: Detachment assembles in the forest on the western side of the house at Muokonniemi, where it rests by camp fires. Approx 18.00: Order from Battalion Adjutant: I platoon, under the command of the detachment commander, will be immediately transported by cars to Ilomantsi proper, where res.lt. Julkunen must report to cpt. Lampola. Platoon's mission will be to cover the southerly direction. Approx. 18.30: II platoon arrives in Ilomantsi proper and res.lt. Julkunen reports to cpt. Lempola in the HQ of Group A (Loezi: orig. "Os. A", short for "Osasto A", an ad-hoc area command created to organize the defence in the theater. As far as I can tell, it now encompasses a total of two battalions, one of which is ours.). The detachment was tasked with occupying the Meskenvaara village. They were to set a NGO-guard in the Elinvaara house and patrol along the road all the way to Patrikka Approx. 21.00: Guards set as ordered. Approx. 23.00: Report from Group A's HQ: Friendly troops coming from the direction of Korpiselkä, not to be mistaken for enemy. Res.2nd.lt. Neuvonen visited Meskenvaara on the the account of an artillery column arriving. 11.12.1939 Approx. 8.30 - 13.00: Nothing to report from Patrikka. Preparing positions in Meskenvaara. Approx. 14.00: Order from HQ of Group A: Group J, leaving a light covering force in Elivaara, will cover the corssroads of the roads Möhkö and Karali towards the north, preventing the enemy from breaking form the direction of Viitaranta to the crossroads. Patrol up to Hiisjärvi. Reports quickly to Grp.A HQ. Approx. 15.00: Patrol Lehti left to reconnoitre in the direction of Karalin crossroads - Hiisjärvi, with the objective of reaching the western shore of Hiisjärvi. Särkkätie must be under put on special watch. (Loezi: I'm failing to find these places on modern maps, again). Approx 15.30: Positions on the edge of a swamp to the north of the crossroads have been manned. Watch set up towards Särkkätie. Approx. 19.00: Patrol Lehti returned. No enemy. Manning removed. Patrol towards Patrikka set back up. I platoon has been resting in tents in the area of of Muokonniemi the whole day. Approx. 18.00: Transportation by trucks to Ilomantsi proper, where billets for the night in the White Guard's house. 12.12.1939 During the morning, patrolling towards Patrikka and Läävästönpohja. Positions fortified in Meskenvaara. Approx. 18.00: Detachment given the order to assemble in Moukonniemi. By the order of Grp.A's commander, a patrol was sent towards Karpanoja, where something suspicious. Patrol consisted of Cpl. Lehti and three other men. Res.lt. Julkunen was given the order to take II platoon to a crossroad in the area of Taivallampi, where there is a crossroads between the road and a path leading north. Afterwards, he was to return to Moukonniemi for additional instructions. Order of the commander of Group A: Patrols report that the enemy has crossed lake nuorajärvi at Karpankangas isthmus and Jänissaari island. They are camped in the area of Jaakkimanpuro, on the western shore of the lake, some 1200m SW of Jänissaari. In addition to own II platoon, take platoon of res.2nd.lt Manner from Muokonniemi house, orient to Jaakkimanpuro and destroy the enemy. (Loezi: route by roads). Approx 20.30: Res.lt. Julkunen collected the platoon of 2nd.lt Manner to Muokannimi with the intention of leaving towards Taivallammi. During the assembly and as the march went on, it was found out that the men were so exhausted that that they were unable to complete the long march trough rough terrain and a night battle. The platoon was thus allowed to rest. Res.lt. Julkunen was given Border Guard Sgt. Laine's (Loezi: orig. "vääpeli", modern NATO OR-6, US. equiv. Staff Sgt.) platoon from 1./11th Det.B., which was on skis. The combined force of two platoons advanced in the direction of Taivallampi - Eronen's cabin - Shore of lake Pohjanlampi - Kekoniemi. No enemy was encountered. In the area of Kekoniemi it was determined that the II platoon was unable to keep up without skis in the swampy land and deep snow. Therefore the detachment commander gave B.G.Sgt Laine the order to hurry ahead towards the objective of Jaakkimanpuro. II platoon returned back, when it was determined it had no possibility of reaching the objective before daylight, thus losing the element of surprise. B.G.Sgt. Laine did not find the enemy at Jaakkimanpuro. I platoon commander res.2nd.lt Piitulainen received during the morning an order at the White Guard house to transport his platoon to Muokonniemi, where it was to report to Cpt. Riitesuo. There, four men originally from the area were ordered to act as guides for the Grp.A HQ. Approx. 8.30 - 11.30: I Platoon providing security for own artillery and securing Oinasvaara. Approx. 12.00: The first half-platoon of I platoon, under the command of res.cpl. Kontturi, occupied Petkelniemi. Approx. 12.30: The second half-platoon of I platoon, under command of res.2nd.lt Piitulainen, sent to reconnoitre the area of Kääntämäsalmi strait. Nothing special. Res.2nd.lt Piitulainen's half-platoon billeted for the night in the external building of the Oinasvaara house. Cpl. Kontturi's half-platoon occupied Petkelniemi. --- Next time: Attack, have a sauna and attack some more Loezi fucked around with this message at 11:27 on Oct 1, 2017 |
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Oct 1, 2017 10:59
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feedmegin posted:Germany either loses a war or backs down in 1938 and Hitler is overthrown by the Army which stops the Holocaust cold hth.
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Oct 1, 2017 13:19
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Loezi posted:Also, I absolutely love how even the extremely dry text manages to capture the confusion and -- dare I say, the dark humor -- of combat. "The order to withdraw will be given by telephone. <paragraph break> Russian artillery just cut the telephone line"
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Oct 1, 2017 13:21
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HEY GAIL posted:OR without the war in the east the nazis never radicalize one another into the final solution in the first place. Or the Nazis land on the Moon first and discover it's made of barbecue spare ribs, and the Nazi version of Harry Caray asks Goering if he would eat said moon made of ribs. Of course he would. In one sitting.
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Oct 1, 2017 13:28
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Or the Nazis land on the Moon first and discover it's made of barbecue spare ribs, and the Nazi version of Harry Caray asks Goering if he would eat said moon made of ribs.
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Oct 1, 2017 13:34
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occamsnailfile posted:I'm asking this here because there are some Marx scholars in the thread--is there a good volume of Marx that comes with commentary? Even a companion volume that could be read more or less in tandem would be helpful. I don't read a lot of philosophy so some guidance would be useful, but after many years of people (incorrectly) calling me a Communist I feel like I should read the original source. The current premier English-speaking scholar is Gareth Stedman Jones who recently released a biography - Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. I never read any of the texts with commentary; I did read a lot of what he wrote in this format, however https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Political-Writings-Cambridge-History/dp/052134994X with extensive footnotes. You can, however, ask about what you find difficult. And DnD had a (very mixed) Explain Marxism To Me thread in which I made some fairly long posts. A typical history of the industrial revolution as a textbook would be https://www.amazon.com/Progress-Poverty-Economic-History-1700-1850/dp/0198222815
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Oct 1, 2017 13:59
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MANime in the sheets posted:France and the UK didn't have Hitler forcing them into it. German citizens for the most part were very apathetic about another war. The Germans also had a major social movement in the form of Nazism that was really, REALLY big on patriotism and doing your duty to the state. The average citizen was pretty uneasy about the prospect about another world war, but by 1938 you're in a place where the state apparatus of control and terror is firmly in place, complete with the true believers in the population who will rat you out if you try anything along the lines of an overt peace movement. The issue of what "fatigued by WW1" means also has to be better understood. It's not an issue of putting warm bodies on the front line, it was mostly the financial repercussions of WW1 spending on interwar military spending. Part of the reason why the Brits and the French took it in the rear end so bad on that front was that they were expecting the Germans to pay for their WW1 spending, but the combination of Germany's hyperinflation crisis, the failure of the Dawes and Young Plans, and the Great Depression really put a stop to that. Hell, the collapse of those payment systems and the consequent exposure of American banks to bad debt was no small part of what kicked the depression of (although there were systematic problems in the American agricultural economy in particular that were longer term explanations for why it was so long lived and so bad). It also really, really didn't help that the first thing the Nazis did when they got into power was repudiate their wartime debts. That was a big part of what let them rebuild their military in the interwar years. HEY GAIL posted:OR without the war in the east the nazis never radicalize one another into the final solution in the first place. Can't emphasize this enough. There are some really fundamental differences between what German policy is towards the Jews before Barbarossa and after.
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Oct 1, 2017 16:00
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There's also more than one way for you to emotionally configure the trauma of WW1, and one of them, as it turns out, is 'our sacrifices were thrown away in vain by a stab in the back'.
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Oct 1, 2017 16:11
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Cyrano4747 posted:Can't emphasize this enough. There are some really fundamental differences between what German policy is towards the Jews before Barbarossa and after. What about Barbarossa actually caused this?
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Oct 1, 2017 16:53
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spectralent posted:What about Barbarossa actually caused this?
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Oct 1, 2017 17:23
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Tekopo posted:At a guess, too many people to manage. Alot of that. Wages of Destruction goes into it a bit as well. I remember reading an article that laid out the numbers of calories available vs. what the conquered population required and yeah... yeah  gently caress nazis
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Oct 1, 2017 18:34
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david_a posted:Did international mail service continue during the world wars? In WW1/2, could you have successfully sent a letter from Berlin to London or Moscow? What about less extreme confrontations - are there some international regulations that allow mail service to continue? For the Americans, V-mail was the mail service used between soldiers at the front and the homeland. The mail was censored, copied to film (preventing things like invisible ink or microdots from being used to send secret information on the letter), and reprinted onto paper at its destination. For regular postal and telephone/telegraph service, pretty much no. Even if the local mail service was working (Stalingrad didn't exactly have mailmen for a bit...), fears of espionage alone would shut down mail service between warring nations. This page has some history on the British telephone and postal system. The first direct Anglo-German underwater cable wasn't laid until the war's end in 1945, and it mentions that continental and transatlantic phone services from Britain were closed and then reopened at an unspecified date in 1945 and 1946. This page has info on the mail. You can see some examples of things like a letter sent from England to Denmark that was returned due to the postal service being suspended.
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Oct 1, 2017 19:29
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occamsnailfile posted:I'm asking this here because there are some Marx scholars in the thread--is there a good volume of Marx that comes with commentary? Even a companion volume that could be read more or less in tandem would be helpful. I don't read a lot of philosophy so some guidance would be useful, but after many years of people (incorrectly) calling me a Communist I feel like I should read the original source. Assuming you're interested in reading Capital first and foremost, David Harvey's A Companion to Marx's Capital volumes 1 and 2 sounds like what you are looking for. The "let's read Capital" thread in c-spam may also be of interest to you. For Marx's other works, Tucker's The Marx-Engels Reader is the standard anthology, but it doesn't contain much commentary beyond introductory notes.
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Oct 1, 2017 19:54
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I take issue with someone saying that USSR was "shellshocked" into building up buffer states. Yeah, not, it gobbled up Baltic states and Poland without any shellshock. They were perfectly happy to invade Finland, too. Didn't need any shellshock to put all the intelectuals and land owners on cattle trains to Siberia, either. Now, while I can't really fault the revolution for wanting to expand, Stalin's USSR isn't the vector for it.
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Oct 1, 2017 20:28
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JcDent posted:I take issue with someone saying that USSR was "shellshocked" into building up buffer states. Yeah, not, it gobbled up Baltic states and Poland without any shellshock. They were perfectly happy to invade Finland, too. The USSR's policy regarding buffer states was basically the same as the Czars, for what it's worth. Plus, Western intervention in the Revolution sort of indicated that the Soviet suspicion and desire for buffers was a good strategic idea. I agree that they weren't shellshocked, but recent history indicated that building up buffer states was a good idea.
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Oct 1, 2017 20:48
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Tekopo posted:At a guess, too many people to manage. It's a whole host of things. The starvation plan was part of it, as has already been alluded to. Then you have the Kommissarbefehl, which basically said that any commissars who were found should be summarily executed, as well as any common soldiers who were actively pushing bolshivism in the ranks. This is especially nasty because the Nazis were heavily conflating Judaism and Bolshevism in their propaganda, to the point where the general assumption was that commissars were Jews pushing their sinister agenda. This leads to a whole lot of awful poo poo beyond the already awful summary execution of prisoners. In particular it paints all Jews as implicit in Stalin's regime and blurs the gently caress out of the line between combatant and non-combatant. This is where you start to see a lot of early round ups of all military aged jewish men under the assumption that they are at the very least politically active bolsheviks, if not stay behind commissars with orders to foment rebellion in the rear. It's this war against "Judeo-Bolshevism" that you have to understand the Einsatzgruppen in. They start out as a special political action branch that secured government buildings and important papers in the wake of the 1938 Anschluss, and eventually morphed into killing squads during the invasion of Poland. It should be noted, however, that they were still vaguely political killing squads. The idea was to wipe out Polish leadership and any carriers of Polish national identity - so politicians, military officers, but also intelligentsia, teachers, etc. - both as a way to secure the country and also as a precursor to Germanizing it. This is pretty awful, but it wasn't just a German thing. You see similar focused attempts to wipe out regional national identities all through the early 20th century. Stalin forcibly moving groups around to disperse them is a great example, as is Stalin's murder of the exact same people the Germans were knocking off on their half of Poland after 1939. Once you have the idea expressed that you are in a struggle for national survival against a Judeo-Bolshevik USSR, then those groups turn naturally to wiping out Jews wherever they can find them. Katyn Forest and Babi Yar are two very different kinds of events, but they are two points on the same line of reasoning. As if all of this isn't awful and hosed enough, it also does two really bad things for the Jews of Western Europe: It cuts off any real chance of getting them out of German territory through non-genocidal means, and provide a huge territory out of the view of your average German to dispose of them in. Fist the issue of getting rid of Jews non-genocidally. The thing you really have to understand about Nazi racial theory is that it was really focused on the idea of "foreign entities" inside the body of the German Volk damaging and poisoning it.* It's a super biological way of looking at the world, so the infection metaphor works well. All through the 30s, you see attempt after attempt to get German Jews to just get the gently caress out. There were massive campaigns of harassment orchestrated to make leaving Germany seem very, VERY attractive, and a fair number did try to emigrate. Unfortunately (from a certain point of view) there were three things holding them back. First and foremost, they thought of themselves as Germans. Leaving your homeland is no easy thing under the best of circumstances. Second, the Germans wanted to rob them of all their wealth. They passed laws that required any Jews who wanted to leave to turn over the vast majority of their property and any savings as a condition of getting an exit visa. This discouraged a lot of people from leaving, especially those with businesses. Look up Freud's move from Austria to England if you want a good idea of what that could entail. The last was the issue of immigration quotas on the part of other countries. Simply put, no one wanted hundreds of thousands of German Jews who were penniless refugees settling in their country. A couple of high profile intellectuals and artists got special dispensation (e.g. Freud) but if you were just some random dude your chances were not nearly as good. This leads to some really perverse poo poo, like when 12.000 Jews were forcibly deported by the Germans into Poland and the Polish border guards refused them entry. A whole refugee camp sprang up in the no-mans land between the posts and conditions were loving dire. One of the families stuck in that was the Grynszpans, which is what prompted Herschel Grynszpan, a teenaged student living in Paris, to murder Ernst vom Rath, the German ambassador to France, which in turn was the immediate pretext for Kristallnacht. As late as 1939 there were active attempts to simply deport them all. One of the more famous is the so-called Madagascar Plan, which basically amounted to negotiating with France to settle them all in Madagascar. You also see some really odd bedfellows in Zionist movements working with Nazi officials to funnel Jews into Palestine. Of course none of these had any real kind of support or direction from senior levels of Reich leadership, but that's kind of the point - there was no firm policy beyond "get rid of the Jews" and the fact that we see all of these odd attempts to get them out points to there not being a settled policy of extermination. Barbarossa makes it abundantly clear that they are not getting rid of the Jews by pushing them over the border. As late as early 1941 you could talk about scenarios where the Germans force the British to the peace table and then the Jewish question is settled in post-war circumstances. Worse, a lot of the Jews that they had successfully deported to Poland, France, and the Netherlands all of a sudden became subjects of the Reich again. The vast swath of non-German territory that they conquered in the East offered some great possibilities for getting rid of them, however. This is where we get the ghettos. "Resettlement to the east" wasn't just a cruel euphemism for sending people off to be murdered in 1939/40. It's a really ugly step and one that in hind sight prepares the ground work for extermination, but from the narrow perspective of Nazi racial ideology and the priority of ridding the Reich of Jews deporting them all to occupied Poland makes a fair amount of sense and doesn't by itself imply mass murder. Of course by this point events are spinning wildly out of control. The ghettos in Poland are only established in late 1940, and within half a year you have the war in Russia. That brings with it the firm certainty that Germany is at war with a Judeo-Bolshevik menace, attempts to wipe that out in the wartime conditions of the advancing front line, and before too long the Jews behind the lines in the ghettos are seen as a risk as well. Eventually it all comes full circle into the question of how to get Jews out of the metaphorical body of the German Volk, and the killing becomes a goal in and of itself, not just an expeditious way to persecute the war. It's (of course) more complex than that, but that's how you get from killing squads roaming from village to village behind the front lines to setting up no bullshit killing camps. By that point the fact that you have all this occupied territory is a major boon. The worst of the killing centers - the ones that you couldn't even pretend were labor camps - were stuck out in the middle of nowhere on the far eastern edge of the Polish territory that the Germans had - most of them are right on the modern day eastern frontier of Poland. Keeping the worst of the consequences of what was going on out of the immediate sight of the German population was a pretty necessary precaution. We can talk about how much bullshit it was that the Germans professed innocence when Dachau, Ravensbruck, Buchenwald, etc were literally in their backyards, but true death camps like Sobibor and Belzec make the German ones look really tame in comparison. This is, of course, just a broad sketch of the issue. There are whole books written about exactly this that do a much better job than I can in a few hundred words of internet posting. It's also stream of conscious as gently caress and uneditied, so if anything isn't clear hopefully I can explain better. *wrapping your head around this aspect of Nazi racial theory also helps explain why so many other groups got caught up in Nazi persecutions. Jews were a huge group that were singled out for special treatment, but that rubric of "foreign elements weakening the body of the Volk" also applies to Gypsies, homosexuals, cultural deviants, people with hereditary mental and physical disabilities, etc. The T4 program singling out the disabled is a big part of really grasping what the gently caress they were trying to do. Even something as awful as eugenics has its own interior logic, and that logic drives a lot of what happens over the next half decade.
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Oct 1, 2017 21:12
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i'[m makin memes
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Oct 1, 2017 21:27
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The USSR's policy regarding buffer states was basically the same as the Czars, for what it's worth. Plus, Western intervention in the Revolution sort of indicated that the Soviet suspicion and desire for buffers was a good strategic idea. I agree that they weren't shellshocked, but recent history indicated that building up buffer states was a good idea. All the other European states are mashed up right against each other I mean obviously that has not gone great for them 100% of the time but
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Oct 1, 2017 21:44
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that was certainly not always the case and you can make a case that really pre-Revolutionary French borders were the result of Bourbon attempts to create a buffer between themselves and the HRE if there's an opportunity to take territory to create a buffer between your borders and a powerful opponent you do it
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Oct 1, 2017 21:48
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JcDent posted:I take issue with someone saying that USSR was "shellshocked" into building up buffer states. Yeah, not, it gobbled up Baltic states and Poland without any shellshock. They were perfectly happy to invade Finland, too. I do note that literally all of these were part of the Russian Empire in 1917, ie 20 years ago, like the 90s for us. Arguably thats a different situation than the postwar Eastern Bloc. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Oct 1, 2017 |
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Oct 1, 2017 21:53
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Also the Poles (and the Finns too?) invaded Russia during the revolution.
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Oct 1, 2017 22:03
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I think there's other operational reasons for atrocities in general. For one thing, there's no winter quarters in Russia for the army, so they turf out whole villages in to the cold with no food to die. When they don't do that, they sometimes use the roofs of houses for fodder, with similar results. Moreover, the general pattern of the reich in the war is that the deepening of the war also facilitates greater power and influence for the SS, particularly when the SS can operate with complete authority and impunity in the rear areas of vast landmasses in the east, as well as reach the ear of an increasingly physically and mentally degrading Hitler (who had also hated Jews and communists from the start). And, quote:This is especially nasty because the Nazis were heavily conflating Judaism and Bolshevism in their propaganda And also being a partisan, as a triple-headed snake. This is the root cause of the mass execution in Russia in 41; orders issued to root out partisans who are jews who are bolsheviks who are partisans who are jews who are bolsheviks. Plus Hitler openly blamed the entire war as well as the preceding one on the Jews.
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Oct 1, 2017 22:46
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Throatwarbler posted:Also the Poles (and the Finns too?) invaded Russia during the revolution. The Finns were granted independence by Lenin roughly contemporaneously with Brest-Litovsk. After that point Finland mostly went through a (relatively) small but brutal civil war. The Whites did not intervene in the Russian civil war after the conclusion of the Finnish Civil War for a variety of reasons, but the most important one probably being that the state was weak and divided and Finland was in no position to militarily intervene in anything. Nor were there any particular unifying national war aims at the time (such as the ones that led to participation in the Continuation war).
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Oct 1, 2017 23:11
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