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Well I dunno invading poor defenceless Russia just sounds like something the perfidious Finns would have done.  Did Stalin actually want to annex Finland? I thought the point of the war was just because they wanted a slightly larger strip of territory between the border and Leningrad, and they had some kind of historical right to it or something, not that they wanted all Finns to start speaking Russian.
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Oct 1, 2017 23:17
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Disinterested posted: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. This goes a long way to explain the general lovely treatment of civilians in the occupied territories, but it doesn't approach the unique circumstances that Jews far behind the front lines experienced or the decision to liquidate the ghettos. For that you really need to look at the ideological feedback caused by the mass violence on the eastern front, the lack of other options for how to get rid of the Jews, and the other things I outlined above. A useful comparison is the experiences of occupation under the Imperial German military, both during WW1 and before. The Germans occupied huge swaths of Imperial Russia during WW1 and did some pretty lovely things there as an occupation force. A lot of the crappy things they did fall under the same operational rubric that you outlined above, but they never rose to the heights that you see in WW2. Liulevicius's War Land on the Eastern Front is the go-to on this subject, and he does a really good job of laying out some of the specific ways that the experience of being occupiers in that region in WW1 shaped the base assumptions of people at every level - from private to general - during the second war. At the same time you can see some echoes of WW2 in the treatment of the Herero during their rebellion in the years before WW1, but even at its most genocidal it never rises above what you could call genocide by malicious neglect - i.e. forcing people into the desert to die - along with massacres of a scale that can be found in just about any colonial action. There's a very specific linkage between the decision to invade the USSR and the plans for systematic genocide settled on at Wansee that's very important and extends beyond the operational exigencies that are such an unfortunate component of a great many late 19th and early 20th century wars.
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Oct 1, 2017 23:26
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Thanks for the recs all--those were the type of commentaries and histories I was looking for.
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Oct 1, 2017 23:26
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aphid_licker posted:All the other European states are mashed up right against each other The provisions relating to the Rhineland in the Treaty of Versailles, and the position of Belgium in between France and Germany is not that dissimilar.
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Oct 1, 2017 23:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:the Nazis were heavily conflating Judaism and Bolshevism I think that line made it click because I was also have trouble figuring out why invading the USSR makes you hate Jews, the USSR not exactly being super pro Judaism itself to say the least? Also explains the weird modern nazis claiming thar the USSR was secretly run by Jews, an idea so bizzare I'm at least glad to hear it isn't original. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Oct 1, 2017 |
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Oct 1, 2017 23:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:A useful comparison is the experiences of occupation under the Imperial German military, both during WW1 and before. The Germans occupied huge swaths of Imperial Russia during WW1 and did some pretty lovely things there as an occupation force. A lot of the crappy things they did fall under the same operational rubric that you outlined above, but they never rose to the heights that you see in WW2.
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Oct 1, 2017 23:37
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Oct 2, 2017 02:13
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Cyrano4747 posted:This goes a long way to explain the general lovely treatment of civilians in the occupied territories, but it doesn't approach the unique circumstances that Jews far behind the front lines experienced or the decision to liquidate the ghettos. For that you really need to look at the ideological feedback caused by the mass violence on the eastern front, the lack of other options for how to get rid of the Jews, and the other things I outlined above. That's true, and when it comes to the operational elements mentioned in my first para, I'm not really talking about Russian Jewry in particular and just atrocities in general. In the end, many dedicated Nazis saw the war against Jewry as the primary war; all other wars were subordinate or subheadings of that war. OwlFancier posted:I think that line made it click because I was also have trouble figuring out why invading the USSR makes you hate Jews, the USSR not exactly being super pro Judaism itself to say the least? Historically Jews had been simultaneously accused of being A) rootless luftmensch without any commitments to their native nations - fully cosmopolitan, aligned with decadence and finance capital, Freud, quantum physics, and communism (B) Highly committed to their roots, but only their Jewish roots, without regard for their nation. In that respect antisemitism has always been a paradoxical on a number of levels: the Jews are too communitarian, but not enough, they support both communism and capitalism, etc. Nazis even toyed with the idea in their rhetoric that communism was a species of genetic deficiency to be cleansed, akin to Judaism. In any event in the early parts of the war in the east people are killed for being Jews and Communists largely interchangably, and in Hitler's mind Jews are responsible both for the war in general, and for the United States' entry in to the war against them at the same time. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 02:35
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Are there good reads about Zhukov's victory against the Japanese army in 39?
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Oct 2, 2017 03:32
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Throatwarbler posted:Well I dunno invading poor defenceless Russia just sounds like something the perfidious Finns would have done. Finland didn't officially partake in the Russian civil war, but there were a couple of nationalist expeditions to aid Karelian insurgents. This was kind of a continuation of the Finnish civil war because the other side was made of Finnish Reds who had left the country after the defeat. There were also red border raids toward Finland. The treaty of Tarto ended them all. What we know is that Stalin intended to sovietize Finland. Whether this would have meant annexation like with Estonia etc. or remaining as a separate puppet state like our Mongolian brothers is unclear, but Independence would have been lost either way.
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Oct 2, 2017 04:06
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Part 4: Attack, have a sauna and attack some more 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 company settled on the almost-island west of Oinassalmi, east from Ilomantsi proper. Guards were set, patrols were conducted. The heavy snow and dense, swampy forests presented troubles even for the Finns and II platoon was unable to complete a night march and attack due to exhaustion. --- 13.12.1939 Approx. 7.30: II platoon returns to Meskenvaara, where it rests for 3 hours. Covering forces in the direction of Patrikka are called back. Approx. 10.30: Feverish and frostbitten men are inspected and taken to a doctor. Approx. 11.30: Left by cars to Muokonniemi, where reported to Group A's commander. Billeted in the house at Muokonniemi. Patrol Lehto reports that there is are hard-stamped footprints leading from the mouth of Karpanoja to the direction of Kekoniemi. They deduce that a larger detachment has marched in that direction. On the sides of this march route, there are among other things field telephone cable reels. Detachment commander sent the patrol leader to the commander of Group A to give his report. Patrol leader had marked his observations on a 1:100000 map. Approx 13.00 - 20.00: Patrolling in the area of Muokonniemi -- Kortelampi -- Karpanoja. Footprints were found, but no enemy. Spent night in Muokkoniemi house. I platoon Res.cpl. Kontturi's half-platoon still manning Petkelniemi Approx. 7.00: Res.2nd.lt Piitulainen's half-platoon ordered to take part in an attack over Oinassalmi. It was to act as the 3rd platoon of the 2nd company of the batallion of Cpt. Riitesuo, and was led by res.2nd.lt Piitulainen, with res.2nd.lt Ahonen acting as the company commander. Approx. 10.30: Platoon starts advancing towards the firefight, initially in the second line. During the advancing, it got into the first line. The platoon got tied into a firefight with a dug-in enemy some 300m away from the rest of the company. After being informed of this, the company commander sent as reinforcements 2 partial groups of light machine guns. Approx. 13.00: After a firefight lasting a couple of hours, an enemy firing position was taken. Enemy fire was fierce during the whole time. Of the reinforcing light machine gun men, two were killed and four wounded. An enemy machine gun fired from the left, the fire of which was avoided using a dead spot, was silenced by aimed volleys of fire from different directions. After an order to retreat was given, the enemy positions were abandoned. Killed and wounded were transported to their own platoons. Falling back over the Oinassalmi was a calm and casualty-free event. The half-platoon spent the night in the external building of Oinasvaara. 14.12.1939 Approx. 8.30: Detachment commander sent a patrol, led by res.cpl. T.Ikonen, to the trail found by cpl. Lehti. The patrol was to follow the trail. A sledge was taken to bring back the found telephone cable. Approx. 9.30: Res.2nd.lt Piitulainen joins the main body of the detachement with this platoon. The whole detachement was assembled in the house in Muokonniemi, from where the detachment was transported to Ilomantsi proper, where billets were found in Turjala. Approx 13.00 - 21.00: Organizational work, rest and sauna in Ilomantsi proper. 15.12.1939 Approx. 7.00 - 13.00: Skis handed out, organizational work and training in Ilomantsi proper. Doctor's examination. Order from HQ of Group A to immediately embark detachment in cars and to bring it to White Guard's house. Detachment commander to immediately report to Group A's commander. Approx. 13.20: Order of the commander of Group A: Russians beaten in the area of lakes Taivallampi and Kekoniemi, but they've broken through to the road via the isthmus between Taivallampi and Kortelampi. Your detachment will drive to Taivallampi and take positions on the isthmus. If the enemy has reached the road, attack it. Approx. 13.50: Detachment at Taivallampi, contact made with cpt. Kivikko. On arrival determined the battle to have ended. The Finnish dead and the enemy prisoners were being collected on the road. Cpt. Kivikko reports that no significant enemy forces remain in the area. By the order of Cpt. Kivikko, the detachment sets up to cover the battalion along the road on the western side of Kortelampi's southern reach. The task is to close with guard posts the isthmuses between the lakes Kortelampi, Taivallampi and Ravajärvi, and to patrol to Karpanoja, Kekoniemi and the southern end of Ravajärvi. Approx. 16.30: Tents set up along the road, on its souther side some 300m west of Kortelampi. Forward listening posts and patrols set. Approx. 23.00: Res.pfc Tuuppainen's patrol opened fire on the eastern side of Kortelampi against some lone and lost enemy stragglers. Nothing of note during the night. 16.12.1939 Approx. 9.00 - 12.00: Clearing the area around the isthmuses under command of res.lt. Julkunen. Large amounts of enemy dead, no sign of the enemy. Approx. 16.00: Group A's HQ orders res.2nd.lt Piitilaunen to be sent with this half-platoon to cover Patrikka. Transportation by car. Half-platoon billets in Patrikka in the house of M.Tahvanainen. Guards and patrols continue at Kortelampi. Nothing special. --- Next time: International Men of Mystery
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Oct 2, 2017 05:43
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Nenonen posted:Finland didn't officially partake in the Russian civil war, but there were a couple of nationalist expeditions to aid Karelian insurgents. This was kind of a continuation of the Finnish civil war because the other side was made of Finnish Reds who had left the country after the defeat. There were also red border raids toward Finland. The treaty of Tarto ended them all. It's worth noting that the Finnish White army was more than capable of intervening in Russia in 1918-1919. At the time, Mannerheim was plotting with Winston "Bad At Invasions" Churchill to make it reality, but internal politics and the new constitution of Finland prevented it from happening.
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Oct 2, 2017 06:43
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feedmegin posted: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. The Baltics and Ukraine were part of the USSR up until the start of the 90s, does that make Putin's actions in Crimea at al ok?
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Oct 2, 2017 09:44
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JcDent posted:The Baltics and Ukraine were part of the USSR up until the start of the 90s, does that make Putin's actions in Crimea at al ok? Did I say anything about OK? It's not. It's also a different situation than Putin sending tanks through the Fulda Gap.
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Oct 2, 2017 09:48
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feedmegin posted:Did I say anything about OK? Im not sure it is to the people who live there. It just is to those of us that live on the western edge of Europe because the Fulda Gap is 700 miles further west.
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Oct 2, 2017 11:12
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Soviet foreign policies in the thirties are interesting, because it does a complete 180 when Molotov gets to the scene. Before that, the Soviets were putting some significant effort into getting peaceable guarantees from neighboring states that the wouldn't cooperate with someone (i.e. Germany) wanting to invade the Soviet Union. By all accounts, they were completely honest about it too. Also, Stalin's post-WW2 regrets about opposing a union between Finland and Sweden are funny, since it turned out that the Finnish politicos were just that incompetent and irresponsible as was suspected.
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Oct 2, 2017 11:14
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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? Germany was also fatigued. It was a significant factor in Germany's warmaking ability that Hitler very specifically shied away from putting the economy on a total war footing - rationing and minimal consumer goods and all that, because he was selling an image of recovery to the German people and was trying to avoid re-creating the kind of privations people had to endure during WW1 and the Depression.
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Oct 2, 2017 13:00
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The German armed forces & labor pool also had manpower issues caused directly by a lack of children being born during WWI and those that were born dying or otherwise suffering long term development problems from malnourishment.
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Oct 2, 2017 13:50
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The Germans end up looking a lot less smart once you realize that they started a world war in 1939, ran out of manpower by 1941 but kept fighting for four more years.
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Oct 2, 2017 13:52
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Going from 1939/09/01 (start of hostilities in Poland) to 1945/05/08 (V-E day) is 2077 days Going from 1939/09/01 to 1940/06/22 (armistice at Compiegne) is 296 days. That's just 14% of the war, and not even a full year. Going from 1939/09/01 to 1941/06/22 (start of Barbarossa) only gets us to 661 days, or 31% of the war. The final surrender at Stalingrad on 1943/02/02 was day #1251, or at 60% through the war. The Third Reich peaked relatively quickly, and died a really long death.
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Oct 2, 2017 14:02
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MikeCrotch posted:The German armed forces & labor pool also had manpower issues caused directly by a lack of children being born during WWI and those that were born dying or otherwise suffering long term development problems from malnourishment. 
HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 14:10
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Why don't we view starvation blockades in the same moral light as indiscriminate bombing or ethnic cleansing?
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Oct 2, 2017 14:20
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bewbies posted:Why don't we view starvation blockades in the same moral light as indiscriminate bombing or ethnic cleansing? Because by that logic capitalism is genocide.
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Oct 2, 2017 14:26
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bewbies posted:Why don't we view starvation blockades in the same moral light as indiscriminate bombing or ethnic cleansing? Because in indiscriminate bombing and ethnic cleansing you are actively killing civilians, in a starvation blockade you are passively killing civillians.
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Oct 2, 2017 14:30
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To be fair here, much of that furrow isn't starvation, it's soldiers being away and therefore not being home to have babies with their wives, or families otherwise thinking it's not exactly a great time to have a kid. https://www.populationpyramid.net/france/1950/ France has a similar dip.
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Oct 2, 2017 14:44
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bewbies posted:Why don't we view starvation blockades in the same moral light as indiscriminate bombing or ethnic cleansing? Because it's convenient. We also don't view indiscriminate bombing as particularly objectionable if it's us doing it. History's written by the victors and all that.
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Oct 2, 2017 14:56
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bewbies posted:Why don't we view starvation blockades in the same moral light as indiscriminate bombing or ethnic cleansing? We don't even look at all indiscriminate bombing the same way (Guernica and Coventry vs the Anglo-American bomber offensive vs Germany), nor do we look at all ethnic cleansing the same way.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:05
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bewbies posted:Why don't we view starvation blockades in the same moral light as indiscriminate bombing or ethnic cleansing? I think it's because we're more concerned with being able to consider our hands clean than with the effects.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:22
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OwlFancier posted:Because it's convenient. We also don't view indiscriminate bombing as particularly objectionable if it's us doing it. History's written by the victors and all that. History is not written by the victors. Note also that a key point in the 'stab in the back' myth is also the denial that the starvation blockade even happened.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:27
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I think a large part of it is also how difficult it is to place numbers on deaths from starvation blockades as opposed to bombings and ethnic cleansing.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:28
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Seriously, it bugs me when people say 'history is written by the victors'. The reality is "History is written by the people who write histories, and read by people who read histories". A point both banal sounding and also hugely important, if you consider how small and peculiar the pool of the former group is at most points in time, and what the motivations of the latter group are.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:37
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bewbies posted:Why don't we view starvation blockades in the same moral light as indiscriminate bombing or ethnic cleansing? The British Empire has had really good PR throughout its history and perhaps most notably, after it stopped existing. It baffles me how little the UK has had to come to grips with its colonial past and it's a travesty that the atrocities committed under the auspices of British imperialism are practically never mentioned, in history lessons or elsewhere in this country.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:42
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gradenko_2000 posted:We don't even look at all indiscriminate bombing the same way (Guernica and Coventry vs the Anglo-American bomber offensive vs Germany), nor do we look at all ethnic cleansing the same way. Case in point: No one giving a poo poo about the ongoing cleansing of the Rohingya, because everyone assumed that if Aung Sang Kyui had been released and was running things, bad poo poo couldn't happen.
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Oct 2, 2017 16:00
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[quote="“Fangz”" post="“476976054”"] Seriously, it bugs me when people say ‘history is written by the victors’. The reality is “History is written by the people who write histories, and read by people who read histories”. A point both banal sounding and also hugely important, if you consider how small and peculiar the pool of the former group is at most points in time, and what the motivations of the latter group are. [/quote] Control of the narrative is a real thing though - look at Versailles writing history that Germany was solely responsible for the war (still parroted today), or Japan, or even UNESCO setting up an institute for education in Hamburg, ensuring that West German education had a heavy focus on personal and collective responsibility. History isn't written by the victors, but the victors tend to have bigger audiences and their ideas propagate more effectively. lenoon fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 16:10
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MikeCrotch posted:The German armed forces & labor pool also had manpower issues caused directly by a lack of children being born during WWI and those that were born dying or otherwise suffering long term development problems from malnourishment. Wasn't there also the issue that Germany was relatively hesitant to use women in their war effort like the Allies did? What with them being all about the "traditional" family and encouraging women to stay at home and have as many children as possible? How big of an impact did that make, relatively speaking?
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Oct 2, 2017 16:17
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On the other hand, the victor does tend to dominate history but it's very frequently not the events in question that decide who has access to write history. The Lost Cause myth and the Cold War politicization of WWII both spring to mind.
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Oct 2, 2017 16:18
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lenoon posted:Control of the narrative is a real thing though - look at Versailles writing history that Germany was solely responsible for the war (still parroted today), quote:or Japan, quote:or even UNESCO setting up an institute for education in Hamburg, ensuring that West German education had a heavy focus on personal and collective responsibility. History isn't written by the victors, but the victors tend to have bigger audiences and their ideas propagate more effectively. The point is that the writing of history is a deliberate process. It's not a function of historical inevitability. The losers wrote a lot of histories. Roman history has plenty of defeats in it, and Rome wrote essentially all of the history on them. Fangz fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Oct 2, 2017 |
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Oct 2, 2017 16:20
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I do not remember learning that germany was "solely" responsible when I learned WW1 in (british) high school. in fact, I'd say I came out excessively convinced of the idea that it was all a series of blunders where everyone shared responsibility equally
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Oct 2, 2017 16:27
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Perestroika posted:Wasn't there also the issue that Germany was relatively hesitant to use women in their war effort like the Allies did? What with them being all about the "traditional" family and encouraging women to stay at home and have as many children as possible?
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Oct 2, 2017 16:38
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Fangz posted:Seriously, it bugs me when people say 'history is written by the victors'. "History is highly subjective and the popular conception of it is dependent enormously on the governmentally approved syllabus in public schooling and media messaging in the modern era" doesn't have a good ring to it though.
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Oct 2, 2017 16:41
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