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Extremely. quote:Later in the war, Mills-Roberts took part in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp's liberation. When Luftwaffe field marshal Erhard Milch was captured and surrendered his command baton to Mills-Roberts, the latter vented his anger about the atrocities he had seen at Bergen-Belsen, marching Milch around the camp and demanding to know his thoughts on the terrible sights witnessed. Milch's reply (who spoke English) was along the lines of "these people are not human beings in the same way as you and I!" This infuriated Mills-Roberts, who took Milch's field marshal's baton from under Milch's arm, and then proceeded to brutally strike it over Milch's head until it broke and then repeatedly beat Milch with a champagne bottle. Mills-Roberts went to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery the following day to apologise for losing his temper with a senior German officer and Montgomery put his hands over his head in mock protection jokingly saying "I hear you've got a thing about Field Marshals", and nothing more was said. This incident left Milch with several contusions and a fractured skull. Another British soldier: quote:Millions of words have been written about these horror camps, many of them by inmates of those unbelievable places. I've tried, without success, to describe it from my own point of view, but the words won't come. To me Belsen was the ultimate blasphemy. Tony Bennett died recently, and as he was part of the unit that helped liberate Dachau, people were remembering his own descriptions of what it was like. quote:Bennett wrote in his autobiography, titled The Good Life, of the moment: “I’ll never forget the desperate faces and empty stares of the prisoners as they wandered aimlessly around the campgrounds. “Once we took possession of the camp, we immediately got food and water to the survivors, but they had been brutalised for so long that at first they couldn’t believe that we were there to help them and not to kill them. To our horror we discovered that all of the women and children had been killed long before our arrival and that just the day before, half the remaining survivors had been shot…The whole thing was beyond comprehension.” Edward R. Murrow was present for the liberation of Buchenwald quote:I asked to see one of the barracks. It happened to be occupied by Czechoslovaks. When I entered, men crowded around, tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses. There were 1,200 men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description. Buchenwald was also where Patton made 1000 residents of the nearby town of Weimar walk the entire perimeter of the camp to see with their own eyes what was going on just a few miles from their homes. zoux fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Jul 31, 2023 |
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Jul 31, 2023 21:46
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two fish posted:How appalled were Allied soldiers when they liberated the camps? I wouldn't expect that they knew just how bad it really was until they actually saw it with their own eyes, and that must have been extremely traumatic. Appalled enough that not all the guards survived. So sad
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Jul 31, 2023 21:47
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two fish posted:How appalled were Allied soldiers when they liberated the camps? I wouldn't expect that they knew just how bad it really was until they actually saw it with their own eyes, and that must have been extremely traumatic. quote:Ohrdruf was the first Nazi camp to be liberated by US forces. On April 12, a week after the camp’s liberation, Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Omar Bradley toured the site, led by a prisoner familiar with the camp. Numerous corpses were found scattered around the camp grounds, lying where they were killed prior to the camp’s evacuation. A burned out pyre was discovered with the charred remains of prisoners, proof of the SS’s hurried evacuation and attempt to cover their crimes. Evidence of torture was present, and prisoners demonstrated for the generals various torture methods used by the guards. In a shed, a pile of roughly 30 emaciated bodies were discovered, sprinkled with lime in an attempt to cover the smell. Patton, a man privy to the violent scenes of war, refused to enter this shed as the sights and smells in the camp had previously caused him to vomit against the side of a building. German citizens from the nearby town of Ohrdruf were forced to view the camp and bury the dead, a practice that was later repeated in other camp liberations. quote:Following the tour, the mayor of Ohrdruf and his wife were discovered to have hung themselves in their home.
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Jul 31, 2023 21:49
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Nenonen posted:While I'm not in disagreement, if you take the claim as it is written and only limited to movies then he's not talking about movies made during the war but in the following decades. And in the 1950's there was already the Korean War, McCarthyism, nuclear race, etc. Germans were no longer enemies but allies being bullied by Stalin and Wernher von Braun was helping America conquer space (and nuke Moscow). Yeah, while I'd certainly expect 50s/60s movies to depict Nazis as bad, I would expect a degree of "clean Wehrmacht" false nuance than you probably wouldn't see today. I haven't actually seen many 50s/60s movies with a WWII setting, though, so I'm not sure.
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Jul 31, 2023 21:51
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two fish posted:How appalled were Allied soldiers when they liberated the camps? I wouldn't expect that they knew just how bad it really was until they actually saw it with their own eyes, and that must have been extremely traumatic. The American units that liberated Dachau reacted by summarily executing many of the remaining German SS guards.
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Jul 31, 2023 22:01
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Nenonen posted:But the claim is a monolith of stupidity and seems to be based on this person never having read a single book like Anne Frank diaries or anything else written by witnesses. I checked his Twitter history. He knows, he's just a Nazi sympathizer and apologist.
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Jul 31, 2023 22:10
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mllaneza posted:I checked his Twitter history. He knows, he's just a Nazi sympathizer and apologist. I mean, yeah, he's on Twitter.
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Jul 31, 2023 22:24
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I mean, yeah, he's on Twitter. Dumb. Like there isn't an entire political spectrum of idiots on Ecks.com
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Jul 31, 2023 22:30
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I feel like in theory anti-nazi sentiment was probably stronger than pro-nazi sentiment in the US, although the various pro-nazi incidents seem to stand out a lot more. Like here's this incident in 1936 where a Nazi ship rolled into Portland and they had a little celebration of friendship and all that. Gross. https://www.ohs.org/blog/the-first-time-nazis-marched-in-portland.cfm I'm more confident in saying that after the war proper started in Europe, public opinion in America was probably more strongly anti-nazi germany rather than pro. The US federal government was assisting the UK. Marvel debuted Captain America to great success with a first issue of punching Hitler in the face on the cover. But the only particular thing I know of before the war proper had started was the Bremen Incident, in 1935, when anti-nazi activists got onto a German oceanliner docked in New York, and there was a big fight between sailors, activists, and police, which culminated into the activists successfully cutting down the Nazi flag and sending it into the harbor. https://albavolunteer.org/2018/02/who-the-hell-worked-out-a-plan-like-that-new-light-on-the-1935-bremen-riot/  I've seen the incident cited as the reason why Hitler officially changed the flag of Germany, because it was argued that Germany was not harmed because the Nazi flag was just a party symbol, not a national symbol. The mayor of New York refused to issue an apology for the incident. Incidentally, there was an anti-nazi demonstration planned for Portland in 1936, but police successfully found and stopped the organizers before they could raise any trouble. As a bonus, have an anti-Nazi and anti-William Randolph Hearst cartoon from 1936. 
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Aug 1, 2023 01:05
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SlothfulCobra posted:I feel like in theory anti-nazi sentiment was probably stronger than pro-nazi sentiment in the US, although the various pro-nazi incidents seem to stand out a lot more. …although it’s clear in 193x a solid chunk of voters in the US were solidly in agreement with a racial hierarchy.
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Aug 1, 2023 01:51
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That isn't mutually exclusive, though. You can easily back your own racist government against a foreign people, even if said people are even more racist than you.
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Aug 1, 2023 10:08
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 found in the randomwaffle thread what does it say?
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Aug 1, 2023 13:51
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Probably something about technicals
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Aug 1, 2023 14:41
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The first light of dawn shines upon the training ground.
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Aug 1, 2023 14:50
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ChubbyChecker posted:what does it say? "Safety first - always remove bayonet before doing a ride-by shooting!"
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Aug 1, 2023 15:26
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How did the Soviets react when they liberated the camps, did they also execute the guards?
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Aug 1, 2023 16:10
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two fish posted:How did the Soviets react when they liberated the camps, did they also execute the guards? The Nazis ditched Auschwitz with most of the prisoners who could still walk, I think, so they avoided that one.
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Aug 1, 2023 16:12
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Nessus posted:The Nazis ditched Auschwitz with most of the prisoners who could still walk, I think, so they avoided that one. There was some weird dynamic where Germans didn't like to fall in the hands of the Soviets but felt that it was safe to surrender to the western allies. I have never, ever understood why though, probably the food in POW camps 
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Aug 1, 2023 21:47
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The western allies definitely treated POWs better. Also there was the popular delusion that at some point the allies were gonna turn on the soviets and then the nazis could join up.
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Aug 1, 2023 21:49
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ilmucche posted:Probably something about technicals Nenonen posted:"Safety first - always remove bayonet before doing a ride-by shooting!" Fangz posted:The first light of dawn shines upon the training ground. 
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Aug 1, 2023 21:53
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Nenonen posted:There was some weird dynamic where Germans didn't like to fall in the hands of the Soviets but felt that it was safe to surrender to the western allies. I have never, ever understood why though, probably the food in POW camps
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Aug 1, 2023 22:02
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Did the Germans on the ground have much insight into the relative resilience of the economies of their respective enemies? I could definitely see "even if the Russians wanted to treat us fairly as POWs, they're on the brink of starvation and will absolutely not feed us when there's citizens going hungry, but the Americans have gobs of food", assuming they had that much information to work with.
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Aug 1, 2023 22:04
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I gotta imagine they probably thought America was huge and rich.
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Aug 1, 2023 22:26
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Nenonen posted:There was some weird dynamic where Germans didn't like to fall in the hands of the Soviets but felt that it was safe to surrender to the western allies. I have never, ever understood why though, probably the food in POW camps The answer is Nazi ideology. They believed that they were in an existential crisis where the loser would be wiped out.
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Aug 1, 2023 22:33
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Nenonen posted:There was some weird dynamic where Germans didn't like to fall in the hands of the Soviets but felt that it was safe to surrender to the western allies. I have never, ever understood why though, probably the food in POW camps In addition, by that time there had also been several years of Germans being captured by the Soviet Union and Western countries. The expectation of being treated very differently depending on who you surrendered to was based on experience. Roughly a third of German POWs captured by the Soviet Union did not survive. Only roughly 1% of German POWs captured by the Western allies died. My grandfather was released after only roughly three weeks of being a POW with the Americans. DTurtle fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Aug 1, 2023 |
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Aug 1, 2023 22:35
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Did the Allies have formal plans for how the trial and execution of Hitler would have gone, assuming he was captured? Would it have been just like Nuremberg, or would there have been more ceremony to it?
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Aug 1, 2023 22:42
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German attitudes to surrender were solidified before the war with the Soviets even started. The sixth army sat in the ruins of Stalingrad, starving and typhus-ridden, for months before giving up. A big chunk of those POW deaths were just from the sixth army electing to freeze to death rather than surrender
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Aug 1, 2023 23:02
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two fish posted:Did the Allies have formal plans for how the trial and execution of Hitler would have gone, assuming he was captured? Would it have been just like Nuremberg, or would there have been more ceremony to it? The formal plans for Nuremberg weren't even fully settled by the time the war ended. There was a huge debate between the main Allied powers - the Soviets favored a big flashy show trial with predetermined verdicts, the US pushed for a scrupulously fair trial to Prove We're Better Than They Are (and hopefully help prevent a recurrence later), while the British position boiled down to "let's just shoot them all, toss them in a ditch, and pretend we never saw them". The question's kind of moot, because it is very unlikely that a captured Hitler would make it any farther than the nearest lamppost or stout tree.
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Aug 1, 2023 23:50
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Just imagine a law drama, "Defending Hitler" where some Perry-Mason-meets-David-Irwing type tries to make the case that ol' Adi knew nothing (and ends up hanged by Russians himself).
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Aug 2, 2023 03:57
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This may be stupid as hell, but are there any instances of opposing forces shooting volleys into enemy forces on a scheduled basis to help their friends out? By this I mean like ‘hey we’re shooting go coordinates xyz tomorrow so be at abc instead and we both get medals for being so close to the action’ types of situations. I’ve worked in a kitchen before and have had someone from the neighboring business do a food trade [you get our “leftover pizza” we get “your leftover xyz”] so I’m thinking it might be an ad-hoc thing like that, where we both really don’t care about the greater cause of war and just want to grill type of situation. I apologize for being a dumbass with my ridiculous question, but I don’t want to ask this on a Reddit-type forum and get some Nazi-apologia. The North Tower fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Aug 2, 2023 |
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Aug 2, 2023 07:33
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Barthas mentions a sort of agreement in one sector that at 2:20am every night both sides would abandon their listening posts and a bunch of the front line. 2:30-6:30 they would set off mines, then everyone would come back after 6:30.
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Aug 2, 2023 08:50
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That sort of thing was enough of a concern in WWI that Allied commanders especially would move their troops around along the line constantly, to avoid units getting too chummy with the enemy.
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Aug 2, 2023 09:18
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MikeCrotch posted:That sort of thing was enough of a concern in WWI that Allied commanders especially would move their troops around along the line constantly, to avoid units getting too chummy with the enemy. Some great "Is this war stupid and pointless? No, it's the people in the trenches who are out of touch" energy.
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Aug 2, 2023 10:29
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Gnoman posted:The question's kind of moot, because it is very unlikely that a captured Hitler would make it any farther than the nearest lamppost or stout tree. Hitler himself assumed he'd be paraded in a cage through Moscow, Roman-triumph style.
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Aug 2, 2023 10:46
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The North Tower posted:This may be stupid as hell, but are there any instances of opposing forces shooting volleys into enemy forces on a scheduled basis to help their friends out? By this I mean like ‘hey we’re shooting go coordinates xyz tomorrow so be at abc instead and we both get medals for being so close to the action’ types of situations. This was commonplace by the tail end of the kinmen island artillery battle. The two sides had shot at each other for something like 30 years. By the end they were just doing it for show, and communicated times and targets ahead of time.
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Aug 2, 2023 10:50
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ChubbyChecker posted:
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Aug 2, 2023 11:35
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Why doesn't that one guy get an SMG? Did they take it away because he kept taking his eyepro off?
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Aug 2, 2023 13:23
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The Lone Badger posted:Why doesn't that one guy get an SMG? Did they take it away because he kept taking his eyepro off? They're the one herding them together
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Aug 2, 2023 14:27
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The North Tower posted:This may be stupid as hell, but are there any instances of opposing forces shooting volleys into enemy forces on a scheduled basis to help their friends out? By this I mean like ‘hey we’re shooting go coordinates xyz tomorrow so be at abc instead and we both get medals for being so close to the action’ types of situations. This isn't a dumbass question at all. It happens surprisingly often. There's an entire book on this sort of thing in WWI, Trench Warfare 1914-1918 by Tony Ashworth. In VERY brief terms, units that were across from each other for extended periods of time in the trenches often developed unofficial/unsanctioned truces with each other. Higher commands didn't like this, so they came up with ways to break the truces; as mentioned, they'd rotate units around, or they'd do things like bringing in trench mortars or ordering trench raids to anger the enemy, thus keeping the hostility up.
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Aug 2, 2023 15:08
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Specifically the Christmas truce of 1914 really put the shits up a lot of the commanders on both sides and measures were taken to prevent stuff like that happening again, though there were still quiet sectors where it happened, especially at the south of the Western Front.
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Aug 2, 2023 15:14
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