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Shimrra Jamaane posted:The Nazis had quite a bit of trouble with the Catholic parts of Germany when things like crucifixes were forced to be removed from schools and such. There was actually mass protests that led to the Nazis giving in as strange as that sounds. This has less to do with specific Nazi policy re: religion and more to do with the ongoing multi-decade clusterfuck that was attempts to reform German education through the 20s-50s. The tl;dr on it is that church and state were intertwined in German public education in ways that are go far, far beyond what most other countries had to deal with. You have an extensive history of school inspectors being drawn from the clergy on one hand coupled with state-mandated and funded religious instruction in secular schools on the other hand and then the entirely special and hosed up sets of issues that accompany parochial schools kicking around just to keep things interesting. A lot of this goes back to the really fractured and confused "German" (if we can even talk about that at that point) religious identity that comes out of the Reformation and the battles that the state(s) had to fight to have the majority say in what we would now call educational policy during the period when bureaucratic, centralized governments were really taking off in Europe. Then you layer on the political and cultural problems that rose out of the mid-19th century Unification, and in particular the rebirth of all the religious tensions. The Kulturkampf created some truly mind-bending allies of political convenience when it came to educational policy. On top of all this throw a major late 19th/early 20th reform movement that was aimed at making public schools a mechanism for cultural and economic upward mobility rather than a means for reproducing traditional power structures. Even though most of that was pretty secular in nature it also got mired in the state/religious bullshit just because of the nature of the beast by that point and late Imperial / Weimar-era politics. Enter the Nazis. One of their major priorities from day 1 was to usurp traditional government structures with parallel Party structures. Part of that was trying to finally untangle all the religion/state BS that was going on in the schools in order to have a better handle on educational policy for their own purposes. That's where you get things like the pushback against the reform efforts in Bavaria/Hesse/Thuringia. Hilariously enough you get a lot of the same protests when the Allies try a lot of the same reforms for a lot of the same reasons. Hell, you still get the odd newspaper article about it today. Here's an article from ~20 years ago about the German high court ruling that a Bavarian law flat out requiring a crucifix in every classroom was unconstitutional. The last time I saw it crop up in German news in a big way was about 2008 or so, but I doubt it's a settled issue.
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Apr 15, 2014 19:58
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feedmegin posted:Britain in January 1936 has neither the Spitfire, nor the Hurricane, nor radar (in fact the RAF was still rocking biplanes), which would make the Battle of Britain interesting. I don't want to turn this into an airplane geek derail, but this isn't true. Even in the early days of aviation, when design took place with lightning speed compared to today, R&D and procurement didn't work like that. Neither airplane was in service in '36, abut both were around in one form or another. The hurricane was prototyped in 1935 and existed on paper and as government specifications back in '34. Hell, if you want to trace the linage of design and production elements that were lifted from other hawker designs (most notably the Fury) parts of it were around in the late 20s. As for the Spitfire, while it didn't prototype until March of '36 it was well under way as a coherant design project in 1934 and has roots in work Supermarine was doing even earlier than that, especially their sea plane work for the Snieder Cup. It's worth noting for comparison that the 109 prototyped in 1935 and was recognizable design in '34. These were things that were happening in parallel with each other as general R&D projects rather than in reaction to each other. As for RADAR, everyone was researching the hell out of it in the early 30s. Even in the late 20s it was clear that something could be done with it (although most were more concerned with naval or terrestrial than aerial applications) and basically every country worth mentioning was working on the problem. The first Chain Home stations were completed in 1936, but the first successful military trials were in 1935 and a lot of the breakthrough research for the Brits happened in 33 and 34. I forget what kind of timeline the German teams were operating on, but I'm pretty sure the US Naval research groups had even the British beat (although they were more concerned with it as a range finder for naval artillery). As for this: feedmegin posted:While this is true, there's a difference between the letter of the law and its execution (see also the American South at about the same time. In theory, killing black people == murder. In practice, there are souvenir photos of lynch mobs with their faces uncovered because they knew law enforcement wasn't going to do a drat thing to them). I'm sorry, but ArchangeI is correct. You really can't draw any useable parallels between the worst excesses of the Jim Crow south and what was or wasn't acceptable in mainstream German society in the 1930s. Setting aside whether your depiction of a lawless free-for-all where Southern blacks could be killed at will is accurate, German law still protected German citizens and there wasn't a terrible amount of public support for lawlessness of any kind. Let's take, as an example, the most infamous single night of anti-Jewish violence before the Holocaust got well under way, Kristallnacht. We remember it today as a shocking, terrible, cesura; a total interruption in the normal day to day life of German society that marked a distinct 'before and after' period for the treatment of Jews in Germany. A very significant part of why we remember it so today is because that's how it was seen at the time, both by the international community and within Germany itself. It was shocking in the extreme. That said, "only" 91 people were killed that night in all of Germany. This pales in comparison to even a minor liquidation action in any given occupied village 3 or 4 years later. It's also worth noting that, much to the concern of the more ideologically driven Nazis, German public opinion was almost unanimously against it. People were aghast. Goebbels et al had to make a full court propaganda press to turn it into anything but an unmitigated disaster, and November '38 stands as a low point in Nazi Party support before the war begins. It was condemned by drat near everyone outside the party who mattered and even most people inside the party who wasn't Goebbels or a known batshit crazy anti-Semite tried to play it off and move past it ASAP. Kristallnacht ended up not being a signal that you could murder a Jew in the street without repercussion, but a signal to the Nazi leadership that they lacked the public support needed to operate in the open. That's the whole reason they took advantage of wartime exigencies to solve not only the Jewish Question but all of their racial hygene-related concerns. This is the whole reason why they bothered going to such lengths to strip Jews of their citizenship and why they bothered deporting everyone first to ghettos then to camps rather than killing them in situ. They needed the extra-legal, quasi-colonial status of places like the General Government, Reichskommissariat Ostland, and Reichskommissariat Ukraine to give them the freedom not only to do what they wanted, but do it in a way that wouldn't be immediately under the public eye. Note that this isn't to say that people didn't know that bad poo poo was happening to the Jews. The notion that the individual, common German had no idea what was going on is equally false. The trick wasn't in hiding events from people, but in obscuring them just enough that your average citizen could quietly ignore them and maintain his individual belief that he was a good person who wasn't participating. That kind of trick becomes a lot harder when you're rubbing people's noses in it a la Kristallnacht. 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Apr 16, 2014 22:10
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Gen. Ripper posted:I have Irish ancestry. Would I have been wiped out of existence in a Nazi-victory world, or were Hitler/the Nazis cool with the Irish? Frankly 99% of the "would <insert group nowhere near nazi germany> have been wiped out in a Nazi victory" questions have zero basis in historical reality even ignoring the inherent hypothetical nature of them. The short answer is no, because contrary to how it was explained to the general public for the purposes of wartime support etc the Germans had no realistic plans for world domination. Their successful end-game wasn't landing troops in Virginia. gently caress, it's honestly pretty debatable if they even had an end-game in mind, but as best as we can piece together it was more or less to create a German great power situation in Central/Eastern Europe. Think more along the lines of the continental US after our 19th C. expansion or the USSR after it consolidated in the 20s-early 30s. They weren't gunning for the extermination of every non-Aryan on the planet as much as they were trying to secure what they perceived as the long-term racial health of their own nation and the space/resources to ensure that they stayed a dominant player on the world stage. Even taking the example of the Jews, they were all about expulsion and expropriation up until even the early 40s or so. This also helps put things like T4 and their anti Sinti/Roma campaigns into proper context. edit: just to be 110% clear because this is the internet - Nazis were horrid people and none of this is meant as any kind of justification or defense of their absurd beliefs and horrible philosophies. It's just that in its vileness it is still susceptible to the same kind of analysis and examination as any other belief system (whether well articulated and coherant or chaotic and self-contradictory), and they did have certain frameworks within which they were operating. It's also important to note that it can be really goddamned hard to pin down a single, coherant philosophy for any of this stuff. It's more of a collection of prejudices, pseudo-science, 19th C. romanticism, and other influences that forms a vague world view that even ardent National Socialists struggled to articulate and debated among themselves. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Apr 18, 2014 |
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Apr 18, 2014 17:10
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So much to comment on so little time. I'll just say that the Wehrmacht was balls deep in every atrocity type you care to name. Also post war justice and trials politics was a lot more complex than so far portrayed. Also the notion that Russian archives became accessible after 90 is a joke. There was a maybe five yer window where we got some things then it slammed shut. Circa Putin tha window got bricked over.
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May 6, 2014 02:50
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Mr. Sunshine posted:What are you basing this on? Crimes Against Humanity were one of the indictment points of the Nuremberg Trials (as well as subsequent trials) and this included all of the really nasty stuff like slave labour and the death camps. There were separate trials for people like Eichmann, Höss and Stangl, almost solely for their participation in the Holocaust, and Simon Wiesenthal and his likes conducted a very public hunt for perpetrators of the Holocaust. There were even trials conducted for the participants in the T4 program, the euthanasia program that can be viewed as a precursor to the actual Action Reinhard extermination program. The Nazi concentration and extermination camps were a big loving deal when they were disclosed to the public eye towards the end of the war, and the one things that helped elevate the Nazis from Bad Guys to Lovecraftian Otherwordly Evil. I don't know where you get this idea that they were only seen as bad because they occupied other nations. He's overplaying it a bit but in the broadest sense he's correct. "Crimes against humanity" was a catch all for all of the hosed non military poo poo the nazies did mostly because no one had a real conceptual or legal framework for genocide and how it was special. Early on the Jews were lumped in with everyone else who suffered without donning a uniform: french civilians tortured or killed during anti partisan sweeps, civilian deaths from the bombings of Rotterdam, Coventry, et al, POWs who were massacred after surrender, civilian deaths in the U Boat campaigns, etc. Rather than recognize the Jews as a unique and super hosed type of persecution post war groups latched onto their experiences to claim a greater share of the anti fascist martyrdom narrative that was becoming increasingly politically useful. The French made the camps all about the members of the resistance who perished there, while the communists lumped everyone who died in Europe between 33 and 45 in as "victims of fascism". In the west this only really started to change with the Eichmann trial in the 60s and some heavy pushing on both historiographical and political fronts by the Israelis. The reporting surrounding Nuremberg concentrated on the war crimes. It wasn't that individuals didn't know about the anti semetic nature of hitlers Germany; were talking about what the public discourse was In the US major cultural awareness of the Holocaust in a way that we would recognize it today really comes about with the 1978 broadcast of the TV miniseries Holocaust. That and the eichmann trials are the two huge moments that, in the eyes of the Western public at least, transforms the suffering of the Jews into a distinct and separate thing from all the other nasty poo poo the NSDAP did. Interestingly enough Eastern Europe never made this turn under the Soviets and you can still find monuments in e Berlin etc that date from the late 80s and are dedicated to "the victims of fascism" as a generic group. In the E German historiography the camps were much more concentrated on as where political prisoners, especially KPD and SPD, were detained and killed. The latest controversies in holocaust memorialization have to do with how we recognize non Jewish sufferers. The Jews were singled out and killed for reasons radically different than your average political prisoner, but many argue that the persecution of other groups falls under the same conceptual space of "racial hygiene" as a motivation Also whoever is reading Ringo holy poo poo save your sanity now. I did a lets read of some of his poo poo for TFR a few years back and boy does it get bad. Edit might come by later to expand and clarify on this subject when not on a phone so if you have questions shoot.
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May 6, 2014 16:44
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Ensign Expendable posted:Really? Which archives? TsAMO is open, RGASPI, RGVIA, at the very least. Some of them are slowly but surely starting online repositories, even. I'm mostly going off what colleagues who have researched in them have said. Lots of reports of huge sealed off sections and complaints about how what's available is the same stuff that was accessible to foreign researchers by the 80s. From what they've told me there was a period early on under Yeltsin when you could rest relatively unfettered access to most things short of the craziest secret, executive, personal, NKVD/KGB etc archives but that it quickly constricted. I probably should have made it clearer that this was second hand info, but phone posting. That said it's coming from colleagues who are/were actively researching in Russian archives so I at least believe them. A lot of them are going to Ukrainian and Belorussian archives when looking into questions that challenge the current consensus in the Russian literature. Again, not my field so I'm not intensely familiar with it, but I socialize frequently with people who deal with it daily so i hear a lot about the difficulties and how that situation has changed in the last few decades.
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May 6, 2014 20:31
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spider bethlehem posted:An infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters will eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare, we are told. What we are not told is that even monkeys refuse to produce the works of John Ringo. Holy poo poo I'm stealing this, it is pure distilled genius.
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May 7, 2014 03:46
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spider bethlehem posted:I'd be interested in a Let's Read of something like that. I've toyed with the idea of doing a "fascism in modern escapist fiction" thread, ranging from things like Ringo and Clancy to the more innocuous obsession with royalty and security theater in modern dramas, but it seems like kind of a high concept thread to hope for. If you want a lets read if awful patriot fiction there is a great one going on in TFR right now. It's the thread with "bracken" in the title. Pretty sure there are links in that thread to the other two huge TFR patriot fiction lets reads from past years, including one covering Ringo's Ghost Johnny Ringo is not a nice man and his word-pictures hurt my think-meat 
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May 7, 2014 14:19
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I think it's fair to say that there is zero evidence for recorded instances of men getting killed for refusing to participate in atrocities, but tons of evidence for people either getting reassigned or just actively not participating - going off to smoke behind the trucks while the shooing is happening or whatever. Now, this itself isn't definitive proof one way or the other. I don't have the figures at my fingertips but the Wehrmacht executed a ton of its own people - on the order of tens of thousands - for desertion, cowardice in the face of the enemy, theft, etc. - during WW2. Far more than any other country in the ETO. Could a few of them have been "cowards" who refused to participate in killing actions? Maybe. Additionally we have the the eastern front was loving huge and involved millions of people killing millions more. I wouldn't at all be surprised if somewhere, out there, in the vastness of the Eastern Front 1941-1945 some stressed as gently caress NCO got fed up with Gefrieter PantsWetter not having the stomach for clearing ghettos the 5th week in a row and put a bullet into him. Instances like that could probably get filed under "oh look, a partisan got Hans, how awful" pretty easily as well. Still, the best scholarship that has been done so far can't find any evidence of it in the records. Now pause for a moment and think about what that means. Unlike just about every other government in the 20th century, we have (relatively) full access to the surviving archival records and, despite the chaos and destruction of the latter part of the war, a gently caress ton of those records did survive. Unlike just about every other country you care to name there is no single caretaker government for the Nazi archives; they're scattered between holdings in the US, Germany, Britain, Russia, and I'm sure a few more. The archives are also, again for the most part, wide open. I'm sure there are a few really juicy files here and there that someone decided to bury in the most special Top Secret folio in Moscow or DC, but for the most part the highest level correspondence and dirtiest, darkest secrets of Hitler's Regime are splayed out for all to see. We also have a six decades of prosecution of members of that military for war crimes by a huge number of judiciaries. Off the top of my head the American, W. and E. German, Soviet, Israeli and Soviet governments all, at various times between 1960 and now, had special taskforces directed at rooting out war criminals and bringing them to justice. I'm sure there were more. Why is this important? Two reasons: 1) it has kept scholars, researchers, and jurists active in those very open archives looking for - and finding - assholes who have hitherto slipped through the cracks. 2) the trials have led directly to the re-interviewing of tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of people regarding what, exactly, went on in Eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945. Not all of these are of equal value, of course. A lot of the Soviet and E. German interviews are rather tainted by some questionable interrogation tactics. But even so, it's another giant mountain of evidence. A lot of the more resent research that's been done in the last couple of years has focused on these trials and trying to see what new information we can glean from the interviews that resulted from them. Within all of that evidence we have plenty of examples of people trying to shirk "unpleasant" duties and plenty of examples of officers offering men ways out. We have tons of examples of people participating out of what might be considered a sense of duty or a feeling that they were doing something extremely unpleasant specifically because they had been ordered to. We even have examples of people really getting into it and letting their inner sadist out. What we don't have is a wide spread pattern of reprisal executions for failure to engage in atrocities. Again, and I know I'm repeating myself here, this isn't proof that it never occurred anywhere, but it is a really strong sign that it probably wasn't prominent enough to be part of the recognizable pattern that comprises the day to day experience of the Holocaust for the perpetrators.
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May 8, 2014 19:32
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:Um he volunteered to be a Bavarian soldier in WW1 and was wounded in battle and was promoted to the rank of Corporal, that's not a regular job requiring manual labor enough for you? Promoted "up to" corporal isn't exactly a distinction for someone with four years wartime service. His ww1 service wasn't a joke by any means, but it also wasn't exemplary. Read Kershaw on him if you want details he does a good job with that.
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May 9, 2014 15:49
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Skeleton Jelly posted:The point is that character assassination and over analysis of all aspects and periods in his life is utterly pointless, his actual crimes are enough to condemn him and his poo poo forever. Attempts to poo poo on all aspects of Hitler's personal life are just attempts to kind of detach Hitler from the average Joe, something that's done to Nazis all the time and is actually super dangerous in a way. It may be true that it doesn't do anyone any favors to try and mythologize the man into some kind of lovecraftian entity personifying all hate and malice in the universe, but it is equally silly to act like he wasn't a total shithead just as a person. Go read Mein Kampf. He's pretty open about having a deep seated antipathy for the Jews and goes on and on about how much he hates them. Same deal if you read Hitler's Table Talk or any of the other sources we have from people who had to deal with him routinely. You can't just whitewash him as a "simple nationalist" or anything like that. That has been the tack taken by Hitler apologists for decades, from the very first ones who argued that he was a good man with lovely advisers. Trying to paint him as a "simple nationalist" reduces him to the level of a Ho Chi Minh or even a Cecil Rhodes, which he's not. He's a totalitarian dictator who oversaw one of the most successful genocides of the modern era. That's a really loving small club right there. Nationalists? They're a dime a dozen. You can argue intentionalism vs. functionalism until you are blue in the face, but at the end of the day you probably don't end up with a continent-wide genocide without SOMEONE up top having a major hate-on for the people who are getting wiped out. Malevolent hand on the steering wheel or simply a loud mouth for people to aspire towards pleasing, either way it sets the tone for what follows. edit: before someone breaks out "Teddy Roosevelt was a racist too" and ethical relativism based on historical context, Hitler stood out as an anti-semite even in fin de siecle Vienna. When you stand out for that in Karl Lueger's city you're going a bit above and beyond. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:34 on May 9, 2014 |
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May 9, 2014 17:28
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:Yes, that, and it's also the way in which historians and others ignore the real ways in which Hitler had power and sway over the populace, which is what led to so many horrible situations. Who? Who is doing this? Point me to works by respectable historians who are ignoring the ways that Hitler gained and maintained power in favor of falling back on a cartoonishly evil strawman based on wartime propaganda or needlessly slanderous depictions by victorious enemies. There is a gigantic body of literature on Nazi politics dating from the late 40s on to today that has been dedicated to dissecting how power worked in that state and what role Hitler played in it.
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May 9, 2014 17:40
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:
No. Not even in the slightest. You are conflating the past with history. Historians do not strive to find some perfect truth, we interpret a more or less fragmentary record to construct arguments that explain past events and (sometimes) their relationship to the world we inhabit today. In some cases we can speak with extreme confidence because of a preponderance of evidence, in others less so, but at the end of the day it is an interpretive discipline. If you want capital T Truth go talk to a mathematician or a priest. Phone posting so I hope this link works: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/htd_history/historians/historians_hats_01.shtml Read that. It is a good article by the bbc that does a serviceable job of explaining what history is and the different roles that academic historians play. Edit: also Wikipedia is deeply flawed in many regards but most of the basic history poo poo is OK-ish for first pass research or informing oneself about the broad strokes of a topic. I have a love hate relationship with it but blanket condemning it is a lazy way to attempt to gain credibility for your own beliefs Edit x2: edited some needless snarky poo poo Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 04:49 on May 10, 2014 |
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May 10, 2014 04:24
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Kemper Boyd posted:
any idea about what time period you're moing to?
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May 10, 2014 15:10
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Here is a cartoon that I've always felt neatly encapsulated the Hitler/Mussolini relationship. It's a scan of a leaflet that I believe was air dropped around '42 or '43.  for  by the wayhttp://imgur.com/jqKtK9d.jpg Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 20:26 on May 13, 2014 |
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May 13, 2014 20:24
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Veritek83 posted:My understanding is that at least for a significant portion of the war, SS units were more likely to get better equipment than their Wehrmacht counterparts and were generally regarded as more trustworthy/reliable by the Nazi leadership. Which makes some sense, given the differences in composition. That said, results varied widely, especially the longer the war went on. For a very very few politically connected units this is true. For the most part, though, the SS was equipped far worse than the Heer, a problem which was actually much worse at the outbreak of the war. The short version is that there was a giant pissing contest between the regular army and the SS over supply rights, and the SS lost pretty bad. The Army had all the good contracts with the various arms industries and hoovered up all the product they could produce. Just to use one concrete example that I'm a bit familiar with: the SS had a devil of a time getting K98k rifles for their infantry units and had to make due with all sorts of grey market upgrades of WW1 surplus, foreign mauser action rifles, and the odd shipment of K98ks made out of parts other factories had rejected for quality reasons. Eventually (I don't have my notes handy but I'm pretty sure it was '43) they managed to get some solid contracts with Steyr, who remained until the end of the war the only plant that would make them K98ks. The K98k was the basic small arm of the German military, so you can well imagine this was kind of a big loving deal. midnightclimax posted:Is it possible - given you have a name - to find out what soldier was part of which regiment, and how they moved around? Do documents like this still exist, and are they available to the public? Possible? Sure. Ultimate success is never assured due to damage sustained by the records during the whole process of losing the war, but they're out there. There was a really bad fire at the Potsdam archives in 1945 that took out a lot of the military's records for people below command rank. Things get immensely easier if you have an idea of where that soldier was at a particular time and place or, even better, if you have his Soldbuch, which was a combination pocket record of transfers/equipment issued/etc. and personal ID for German soldiers. Off the top of my head the archive you would want to visit would be the Bundesarchiv Military Department Archives in Freiburg. It's a bit off the beaten path, but it's also in what is probably the nicest part of Germany, especially during the summer. Here's a link to an english language website they run - https://www.bundesarchiv.de/bundesarchiv/organisation/abteilung_ma/index.html.en . At the very least those are the guys you want to email to start your search. Based on what, if anything, you find in Freiburg there are other archives you might try, including the old NSDAP Party archives which I'm pretty sure are held at one of the main branches up in Berlin or Potsdam.
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May 15, 2014 18:43
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:All the other SS divisions were made up of foreign volunteers or Volksdeutsche, and did little besides murder civilians while doing some perfunctory military duties. This isn't true. I'm mostly familiar with the Latvian SS (15th and 19th Waffen-SS divisions) but they were engaged in fairly heavy fighting from their inception in '43 through the end of the war. I'm sure other examples can be found, as I doubt the Latvians were the only foreign SS units used as front line soldiers. How heavily implicated they were in the Holocaust is a huge ball of wax that gets really loving political because of the Latvian diaspora in the US in particular and the rather hosed up history of the Baltics in general. Using the specific example of the Latvian Legion, most of the actual Holocaust-related killing was done in that part of Europe by the time they were raised in '43. That said, they certainly had war criminals in their ranks from the Arajs Kommando and given the very nature of the war on the Eastern Front it's basically certain that they did things to local civilians and surrendered enemy combatants which would be considered war crimes.
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May 15, 2014 19:31
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gradenko_2000 posted:
Not really. One of the most important things to realize about the entire Nazi system is that it wasn't anything like as monolithic or well organized as most people seem to imagine it was. It wasn't this incredible pyramid of power radiating out from Hitler; you had all manner of lesser assholes carving out their own petty political fiefdoms at just about every level imaginable. At the extremely local end you've got the Gauleiters acting like mini-Führers in their tiny administrative districts, while at the top end you've got both Göring and Himmler trying to build up their own independent militaries alongside the Heer. The Heer, aka what most people mean when they say "The German Army," was supported by all of the normal acquisition practices and procedures that you would expect of any modern military in a modern nation. One office would issue a set of general requirements for a new piece of equipment they wanted, another would arrange for prototypes to be made by competing firms, another would evaluate it, and so on. The difficulty arrises when you had paramilitary units being raised by political organizations. Simply put, they don't have this apparatus and when their representatives went calling to the various arms manufacturers it wasn't all that clear if they even had legal authority to take possession of small arms, much less poo poo like artillery and tanks. The relationship between the SA, the SS, and the Heer is long and tortured but the tl;dr of it is that the Heer hated the existence of these "private armies" and wasn't eager to give them any weapons at all. This is a huge reason why the SS was so big on trying to manufacture stuff at concentration camps - it was an industrial base that they could control and which they could divert to their own needs. Basically just imagine if the Republican or Democratic Party created its own paramilitary forces parallel to the US Army, USAF, etc and then tried to buy a bunch of Abrams tanks for units that would be under their direct control, and you'll have the broad strokes of why the Waffen-SS was such a problem for the rest of the military.
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May 15, 2014 20:07
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The "your particular section of the army needs to be cushy with the arms manufacturers if you want to get guns" is a gently caress-up of the Nazi regime's particular brand of capitalism, isn't it?
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Arguing counterfactuals is generally a pretty pointless endeavor. That poo poo didn't happen, so it's pretty hard to say with any kind of authority what so ever what would have happened if it did. No soviet invasion from the east? Maybe the Germans never get east of Poznan, maybe they're on the east bank of the Vistula on the exact time schedule. Who knows? The German army in 1939 was pretty well trained for what it was - a rapidly expanded peacetime core of professionals with a lot of new blood that had to do a lot of learning, fast. It wasn't the unstoppable juggernaut that many people in the post-war era liked to describe it as, but to claim that the battering it took in WW1 affected its performance in WW2 is ludicrous. Separate generations fought those wars, and any veterans of WW1 were in leadership positions and very able to use the lessons of the past war to fight the next one. The Wehrmacht was no more hosed over by WW1 than the Polish Army was hosed over by the various wars it fought with the Russians in the 20s. The cavalry vs. tanks stuff is more or less bullshit, but the polish army was pretty woefully ill-equipped compared to the German army in a number of ways, and there were a lot of doctrinal differences between how they were handling tanks, airplanes, and artillery. The short version of that is that the Poles were still fighting like it was the 20s, with all the lessons of WW1 but none of the innovations of the interwar period while the Germans were doing some new things. It's not as simplistic as the "  The Germans invented Blitzkrieg and rode roughshod over Europe! " bit that you hear all too often, but it's the complicated kernel of truth that grew into the whole "unstoppable Blitzkrieg" bit.
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May 18, 2014 00:15
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I've never found any indication that normal, civil police were any more or less effective than any compeer able nation of the period
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May 18, 2014 22:14
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mcustic posted:586 BCE when the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple? Eh, that's kind of just an ancient empire doing what ancient empires do and taking a giant poo poo on a conquered enemy. There isn't any specific religious or ethnic animosity there - they did that poo poo to basically everyone. Same deal for the Romans kicking them out later on - that was more due to the fact that there was a history of uprisings in that region, and it was more or less how they treated everyone who bucked the empire. For the Jews specifically you probably need to get into the Christian era at least and figure out what the earliest incidents of religious persecution are. I know the English Edict of Expulsion was 1290, but I would be surprised if there aren't earlier examples. You could certainly argue that there's indirect evidence of some kind of prejudice or wide-spread dislike of them at least as early as the 5th Century, since that's when you have St. Augustine writing that they should be tolerated; if there weren't people running around making life difficult for them it's doubtful he would have felt the need to specifically argue for their toleration. edit: note that this is all based on religious anti-Semitism, however. Racial anti-Semitism as practiced by the Nazis is a different beast all together. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 21:59 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 21:56
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Thinking about it more, I'd probably argue for the roots of racial anti-Semitism being in pre-Expulsion Spain. That's where you have the first (I think - not a medieval or early modern scholar) articulation of an inherent "jewishness" that couldn't be gotten rid of simply by converting. The Spanish made a distinction between regular Christians and 'conversos' and there was a lot of angst about conversos continuing to practice Judaism behind closed doors. Critically the converso stigma, as I recall, was also something that was an inheritable trait - if your parents were conversos you were still suspect, even if you were born and baptized Catholic. Personally I'd argue that this is still a bit early for true racial anti-semitism, though, because most of the real fear behind it has a religious nature to it - the core objection was a theological one, rather than the fact that they simply existed. The stuff that most directly influenced Nazism would probably be 19th century 'scientific' racism. Where and when, exactly, that begins I'm not sure, but it was certainly alive and kicking by the middle of that century. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 22:21 on May 21, 2014 |
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May 21, 2014 22:19
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In all fairness you were kind of hard hosed if you got flanked in any ww2 AFV
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May 24, 2014 20:51
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Kuiperdolin posted:That is one of the reasons, yes. If you're seriously going to argue that post-WW2 German continued to pose an existential threat to world peace that could only be solved by partition, you're going to need to back that up.
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May 28, 2014 00:43
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It's a pitty the original audio is so heavily drowned out by the voice-over.
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Jun 6, 2014 19:10
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One of the things to keep in mind when it comes to resistance against Nazi Germany is that European resistance, period, was very disproportionately participated in by communists (I'm using the term 'communists' here as shorthand for the far political left, usually highly influenced by Marxist Socialism and very frequently actually self-identifying as a national "Communist" party - I don't want to get bogged down addressing internal disputes in the splintered pre-45 European left or the tensions between some national communist movements and the Comintern). Whether you're talking about France, Poland, Germany, Yugoslavia, etc. among the people who organized first, organized the most effectively, and actually got out there and did things pre-1944 communists are way, way better represented than they were as a voting percentage of the population as a whole. For Germany in particular this has a number of direct consequences for resistance: 1) as noted already a lot of communists are already in the camps by the mid 30s. The KPD being declared illegal did a lot to drive a lot of people either out of the country, into seclusion, or got them quickly arrested on political grounds. 2) the camps themselves became hotbeds for "resistance" although this is highly contingent on how you define the term. If you limit it to the most physical forms than you disqualify almost all resistance attempts by the KPD, and indeed all German resistance period. Political prisoners weren't exactly sneaking out of Dachau at night to blow up trains a la Hogan's Heroes. What you see instead, especially post-42 as the eventual fate of the Third Reich becomes ever more apparent to everybody, are secret planning committees among the political prisoners for post-war rebuilding and restructuring of both society and the government. Dachau in particular had a very organized resistance cell of SPD and KPD members, many of whom walked straight out of the camp and into prominent positions in the occupation governments after the war. 3) after the war there was a huge reshuffling of the population in Germany. Part of this was as a result of the refugee crisis that central Europe was plunged into as ethnic Germans were resettled from territories that they lost in the post-war settlement, part of it was as a result of the internal wartime refugee problem created by the bombings of major population centers and the general chaos of the final military advances into the Reich, and part of it was a result of the new political landscape caused by occupation. As part of this you had a certain degree of political self-sorting during the mid-late 40s, with people who felt very strongly anti-communist tending to move away from the Soviet Occupation Zone and people who felt very strongly pro-communist tending to move into it. 4) Fast forward a bit and you're into the Cold War with the twin-state solution to the question of German nationhood. For all sorts of reasons, ranging from the obvious Cold War political tensions to the eventual discrediting of Stalin among the Western European left, communism in general became pretty marginalized west of the Elbe. Meanwhile the political situation in the DDR solidified into a true one party state behind the SED. In the pre-wall era both of these factors contributed to a ratcheting up of the political self-sorting that was started in the late 40s. The net result of all of this is that what German resistance took place was conducted by people who, if they survived, tended to be living in East Germany by the mid-50s, where they were celebrated and frequently prioritized for good government jobs based on their wartime conduct. Hell, the entire nation was founded on the principle of anti-fascist resistance under the banner of Marxist Socialism. Meanwhile their actions and those of others like them were increasingly minimized and ignored by a post-war western political order that was attempting to build its own wartime narrative that emphasized a different set of national heroes. There was some level of German anti-Nazi activity, but Cold War politics led to a lot of it being ignored in the west and what academic research was done on it in the east tends to be problematic for various reasons (this isn't to say that the entirety of the E. German scholarly apparatus was suspect, but that it has to be approached significantly differently than most of the contemporary W. German historiography). There is a lot of work that remains to be done integrating this research into our current understandings of both life in the Third Reich as well as in the immediate post-War era. This is all very stream of conscious and poorly organized, but I’m hoping it helps a bit. While German resistance was certainly muted compared to, say, Poland, France, or Yugoslavia it certainly existed beyond The White Rose and it really did have some pretty profound impacts on the post-war order. Edit: this is also completely ignoring the contributions of various Germans in exile during the war, both in the West and in the USSR. There was a lot of activity on that front, both in the forms of groups organized from among POWs by the various allied militaries and other groups and individuals, operating both in conjunction with the Allies and on their own. While most of it wasn’t explicitly military in nature and did little to win the actual war, a lot of it involved post-war planning. This in particular was of an importance that is difficult to under-state precisely because of how utterly lacking Allied wartime planning for the post-war order was. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go sob and rock myself gently in the corner while I flash back to sections of my dissertation. edit x2: ZombieLenin posted:PS I'm a Political Science PhD candidate (Political Theorist) so my interest is kind of academic. In lieu of (or in addition to) any answers to my questions, I'd love you forever if you pointed me towards some good sources doing work on the bureaucracy, institutions, and civil servants in the Nazi state. Can you read German? Also how detailed are we talking? To really understand the way a lot of this works you really need to get into the weeds with the way professionalization and the bureaucracy/civil institutions worked - both politically and socially - prior to the Nazi takeover. I don't want to overload you with a massive list of niche books if you're looking for a specific thing or more of an overview. This is smack dab in my wheelhouse, as most of my work is on a lot of those structures in the immediate post-war era. If you'd like to talk a bit off site either PM me or email me at my username at gmail and I'll hit you back at my real address. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 14, 2014 22:00
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CBJSprague24 posted:I'll add questions as I read the thread, but to start: Anti-Semeticism in Nazi Germany wasn't nearly as clean cut as most people imagine it was. It was very important to the Nazis that everything they were doing be done legally, at least in so far as German law was concerned. This is why they went to all the trouble that they did to systematically strip Jews of their rights as citizens during the 30s. The problem is that like all legal processes clever people find loopholes and political realities make other groups hard to directly target. Jewish veterans of WW1 are a good example of this. There were a bunch of laws that made it much more difficult to exclude them from jobs and politics, and as a result a number of them remained active in public life until relatively late in the game. In the end, as power was consolidated more and more, most of them lost their jobs, citizenship, etc the same as everyone else (and suffered their ultimate fate) but they lasted a lot longer. Then there's also the question of how you legally define a Jew. Legally sorting the population by race was a big part of the Nazi project in the mid 30s, and a lot of what you could and could not do was contingent on being able to prove your racial background. It's important to note that the Nazis never adopted a "one drop" rule for mixed-race backgrounds. If I remember correctly 1/4 was where things could get ugly professionally for someone (it could preclude promotion to top positions etc) and it could gently caress up some marriage prospects, but it wouldn't get you included in the worst of the racially discriminatory legislation. That said, there were exceptions that could be made if the person was important enough for whatever reason. I know there were a few senior military officers, politically connected persons, people with necessary scientific or industrial skills, etc. who had some problematic aspects of their family backgrounds wiped clean with what amounted to special certificates granting them full Aryan status. That said, all of the people who got that treatment were fairly important and/or connected in some way and they weren't what you or I would consider "Jewish." They didn't self-identify as Jewish, they certainly didn't practice Judaism as a religion, and it was a distant enough part of their family history that it could be glossed over with a bureaucratic exemption. You didn't see any Einsteins or Freuds allowed to stay on just because they needed or wanted their expertise. quote:This is something I've always wondered about. How many proud Nazis and followers of Hitler suffered a major kick in the balls after hearing he'd killed himself and left them to sort out the hell that would be immediate post-war Germany? Cults of personality tend to die with the personality they're built up around. The only real instances where this isn't true is where they survive long enough to become political dynasties, a la North Korea. That said, a lot of the true believers thought of the war as a great tragedy that befell Germany, Hitler included, and blamed other people around him for having basically hosed things up. Basically the notion of a great prophet let down by the frailties and weaknesses of his followers. I don't have it in front of me right now, but somewhere I've got a copy of a report on a questionnaire that was administered to middle school aged children in Hesse in 1946 or so, and a majority of them expressed views along those lines; Hitler was a great man betrayed by corrupt lieutenants who were responsible for getting Germany into the war etc. In the immediate post-war period most people who weren't already anti-Nazi to begin with were just trying to pick up the pieces of their lives and find some way to make it through to next week. A lot of reconciliation and moral reckoning with the Nazi era was put off until the 50s-60s.
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Jul 20, 2014 20:36
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Filippo Corridoni posted:So my question: did german workers ever go on strike, legit? What about the mineworkers in the Ruhr? During the Nazi period? Ehhhhhhhh. . . nothing major that I'm aware of. The German Labor Front had things locked down pretty tight and they were pretty aggressive with regards to tackling unemployment via state projects, mandatory service in work brigades, and the final out of just labeling any long-term unemployed "work shy" and throwing them in the camps as political prisoners. Actively organizing any other labor group would be a good way to get yourself labeled a communist and prosecuted accordingly. That said, I'm equally sure that there was the usual back and forth of informal give-and-take that happens even in the most regulated systems. Individual factories or shifts organizing work slowdowns and stoppages, local management making small scale concessions to get things moving again, etc. But nothing company wide and certainly nothing industry or region-wide.
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Jul 20, 2014 23:21
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gradenko_2000 posted:What was the German civilian economy like, particularly in the late war? Did they get hit by hyperinflation? Did Germany have a war bonds drive similar to the US and UK? The Nazis put a huge emphasis on keeping the civilian economy stable for as long as possible. A huge part of their over-all strategy was to keep life good enough for a majority of Germans that there was never any real incentive for most people to get politically active against them. This is why, for example, that they never really got their economy on a war footing the same way that you see with Britain, the US, or certainly the Soviets. Most of this was due to the disastrous German experience with home front rationing in WW1. Even things like hyperinflation take a bit of time to develop. For the German home front the bottom fell out really goddamned fast, in the span of a couple of months in late 1944/early 1945. As long as you weren't in a major urban industrial center and dealing with frequent bombing things stayed pretty normal for most of the war, and then all of a sudden everything went to complete poo poo, with a over-night transition to occupation rationing and a black market economy. As far as bank policy goes, the Nazis never held a public bond drive. A lot of their liquid assets were generated by confiscating and re-selling assets owned by Jews, and later by forcing the banks of countries that they occupied to buy state bonds at favorable rates.
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Jul 21, 2014 16:46
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Deep Thought posted:Can you say more about these organised camp resistance cells? When you say 'many' of them walked out of the camps it surprises me a bit, as it seems the case to me that a resistance cell would necessarily have more attrition than the general camp population, few of whom can be said to have left the camps. I'm not an expert on them specifically, so I really can't say much about them beyond the fact that they existed. However, you have to remember a couple of things: 1) these are the camps for political prisoners. Places like Dachau and Buchenwald were loving awful and lots of people died, but ultimately they were holding facilities for prisoners and not extermination or work camps. Some of them had work camps that were attached to them or were part of larger camp complexes that included other types of camps. As a result you didn't have anything like the attrition rate that you see at places like Auschwitz or (god help you) the Operation Reinhard camps. It wasn't all that uncommon for people to spend 3-5 years as political prisoners in these camps, and you see some unlucky people who were there longer. 2) the concentration camp system is a key component of the Holocaust, but it predated the Holocaust and was used for many things besides simply killing Jews. 3) a lot of how you evaluate the work that they did is highly contingent on how you define "resistance." In the specific example of Buchenwald I'm very familiar with a small group of ex-KPD inmates who organized what they hoped would some day be the foundations of a communist government for the state of Thuringen, mostly because one of the men who I study was part of that group and went on to become the Turingian Minister of Education for the first few years of the Soviet occupation. These were all highly educated men and really most of what they were doing was kinda theoretical bullshitting and generally just trying to keep their minds occupied. As it turned out when the war ended they were among the first Germans in the region with a solid grasp on how they wanted to organize the reconstruction of German civil society, and were put to work in doing so by the Soviets. For the men themselves it was probably more of the sort of fantasy that people engage in to stay sane in those kinds of ugly circumstances, but some people also categorize that as a form of resistance. 4) I probably should have used a less ambiguous term than 'many.' They were fairly over-represented in immediate post-war German civil administration, mostly due to the impeccable political credentials that having spent the war in one of the camps gave you during the period of active denazification, but this isn't to say that they were exactly common within the population as a whole. I don't have my notes in front of me, but as I recall the group of men at Buchenwald was a dozen or two guys.
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Jul 22, 2014 02:15
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Just saw the obit and figured I'd make note of it here, since this is about as close as we come to a German history-specific thread. Wehler died earlier this month. Say what you will about some of his theories and assertions, he was important as all hell and knew how to write.
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Jul 24, 2014 22:45
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Rocksicles posted:Dunno if there are any WW1 buffs in here but my friend made a video about the start of the war and the subsequent destruction of the french forces... It's his first video. I knew nothing about it and i found it interesting. You might want to try re-posting this in the military history thread. I don't know if your friend is looking for any kind of feedback but I'll make a couple of basic observations: 1) the history is a bit shaky in places. The descriptions of the politics leading up to the war are fairly problematic. I'd suggest he read "Germany's Aims in the First World War" or "The Guns of August" to get a better grip on that. 2) the slide presentation format really doesn't work with text that long. If you want to do the Ken Burns-style sequential flipping of photos you really need a narrator. It's also important that the photos tell a story as you go through them, one that the narrator describes. As it is it's just a collection of photos that are thematically related to a text block set against almost entirely unrelated period music. It's not a bad first effort, and I'd highly encourage him to keep on working with it.
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Jul 25, 2014 13:51
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I might be able to do an effort post on this later (might not - work's a bitch for the next few weeks) but there is a ton more to Hitler's policy in the east than that. Look into his planned resettlement campaign; the Nazis were very self-consciously resettling Germans on the conquered territories and tying them into local German minorities where possible. This wasn't just an issue of dropping handfuls of Germans in the middle of nowhere, they were also shipping out teachers, doctors, etc. and had plans for what amounted to small kit-built cities with full educational and cultural amenities in the more fully gutted out parts of the Ukraine. Look into, in particular, the resettlement campaigns in Poland and in the Baltic states to get a general feel for what they were looking at. A lot of what they actually accomplished took place in 1939-40 before the Ukraine was on the table, but the Polish areas were generally understood to be a dry run of what they would do further east.
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Sep 10, 2014 16:24
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gradenko_2000 posted:I read in a book about the drive on Moscow that the Germans had planned to do the same to that city: instead of taking it by force, the Wehrmacht was supposed to surround it, establish a cordon around it, starve it out and shoot anyone that tried to flee. That was why they had Panzertruppen swing around as far north as Kalinin and as far south as Tula. *shrug* How did they manage to encircle the Kiev and Minks pockets, to name just two of the larger ones? Leningrad failed for a number of reasons, the primary one being that they never quite cut it off. The bodies of water were godsends for the Russians, as the Germans could never secure them and they allowed a trickle of supplies in throughout the siege, whether by boat or over the ice in the winter. If anything a mass encirclement of Moscow would have been far more effective as Moscow didn't have the luxury of being near water. It's also a little problematic to blame Germans for not applying the failures of Leningrad to the drive on Moscow, since the two were happening roughly in tandem.
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Sep 10, 2014 19:08
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Mr. Sunshine posted:They weren't going to run a 20th century society - or rather, the nazi definition of "20th century society" was so far removed from what we have as to be virtually alien. The native slavs were to live in pre-industrial villages, without schools, hospitals or electricity. What machines they needed for agricultural work would be supplied by the Germans. Each village or region would be encouraged to develop its own religion, language and culture, to keep them fractured and isolated from each other. The German overlords would live in fortified, supermodern cities connected by highways and railroads. Each year, a select few peasants would be allowed to visit these cities, so that they could marvel at all the wonders, and bring back tales to their fellows about the superiority of the German race. Where are you getting this from? It's difficult, at best, to speak with authority on what the Germans ultimate plan was for the conquered areas of eastern europe. The evidence we have is fragmentary, and mostly consists of some real bullshitty speculation between nazi hire-ups and the writings of a few pre-war nutterbutter right-wing "philosophers" who were writing during the 20s and 30s. Yes, this includes Adolph Hitler. You can't take every last sentence of Mein Kampf as an iron clad statement of national policy - it needs to be looked at in its proper context as a book on political and personal philosophy written long before he came anywhere near office. What we do have is the "Germanization" campaigns that they began in Poland, especially those territories that were annexed directly to the Reich or included as Reich Protectorates - the Warthegau in particular. That is the only place where we have concrete examples of the (and thankfully only the) VERY early states of a Germanization campaign. What would have occurred in the Ukraine etc. further east is far more questionable, although it is reasonable to assume that it would have been a refinement of what went on in Poland. The basic pattern was this: 1) figure out what ethnicities, if any, in the target area could be "regermanized" - there was the general idea that you had some good german stock in these areas that had ben overtaken by its slavic surroundings and which could be re-absorbed if exposed to enough German culture. Those that were targeted in this way would go through what modern scholars term a cultural genocide - kill off all of the native intelligentsia, local religious leaders, etc. and forcibly educate their children in German schools, away from their parents if necessary. The thought was that within a few generations they'd be German again. The process has a lot of similarities and parallels to what went on in the early 20th century on American Indian reservations via the public schools operated there. 2) expel everyone else. In the case of the Warthegau this meant shipping them east to the Generalgouvernement Poland. This was a progressive process and they started off with the Jewish populations, since they were the least desirable - there was a lot of debate over how slavic vs. germanic the average Pole was that far west. Regardless, ultimately the Poles who were deemed unassimilable would be shipped further east, with tentative plans for them getting dumped in western siberia along with the more slavic Ukranians, Latvians, Lithuanians, etc. Note that these policies were, in their earliest forms, put together and enacted before they started the wide-spread systematic killing of the Jews. Initially "relocating Jews to the East" wasn't just a euphemism, it was a policy. Hence filling up the Krakow, Lublin, Warsaw, etc. ghettos to bursting in 1939-1941. 3) re-settle the area with displaced ethnic Germans taken out of surrounding countries (mostly the baltic states - remember, this is a pre-41 policy so there was a HUGE push to get as many Baltic Germans out of what von Ribbentrop had agreed to make a Soviet sphere of influence) as well as volunteers from the Reich. These people were to set up whole new towns and villages which would in turn be used to Germanize the surrounding countryside over time. There was a big push in particular to get people who were considered "cultural carriers" out to these areas - I've personally worked with the documents pertaining to their recruitment drives for teachers to resettle in these areas. They absolutely intended to create a modern society out east, and not just a couple of pockets of German god-kings living in a sea of slavs. A lot of their settlement policy was patterned after US American Indian policy, or at least what a lot of the Nazi leadership imagined that policy to be. Of course there are major differences between the N. American western planes in the 19th century and Poland in the early 20th that necessitated some really radical departures, but the basic idea was consistent: concentrate the existing, unwanted population into a few pockets which can be eliminated over time or later moved again to even more fringe areas, settle with your own people, and let nature take its course over a couple centuries. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Sep 11, 2014 |
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Sep 11, 2014 16:48
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Baron Porkface posted:Why did the Generalplan Ost crew have such a grudge against the Latagalians? I wouldn't say they had a specific grudge against them, they were just local non-Germanic peoples living in an area that they wanted to eventually colonize. That isn't to say that they thought well of them, I just don't think that they thought of them specifically any more or less than the hardest-charging Manifest Destiny proponents in the US thought about any particular tribe of Planes Indian. It's worth noting, for example, that during the actual war they were more than happy to make use of local Latvian, Estonian, and Lithuanian auxiliaries, both in non-combat and combat roles. The behavior of the Red Army during the Baigais Gads pretty much guaranteed that they'd have people willing to lend hand, to use the Latvian example. If that seems a bit contradictory, it is. None of this poo poo is internally consistent from year to year which is what makes getting into the specifics of what plans were for the post-war east pretty akin to reading tea leaves. At the very best you can talk about how plans and dialogues changed over the course of the war. What they would have actually done in, say, the late 40s following a hypothetical German victory is anyone's guess.
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Sep 12, 2014 00:55
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I think it's important to remember that the Nazis had no consistent, overarching plots for Eastern Europe other than mass murder. There were plans thrown about and very nebulous decrees like, "depopulate" or "Germanize" an area but nothing more than that until the Holocaust. As I've said before, this isn't really true. There was a very well directed resettlement campaign aimed at both the areas of Poland that were annexed directly into Greater Germany and the areas that were set aside for colonization (with an eye toward eventual annexation - it was very much done on the federal territory -> state model that produced the internal organization of the western US), and there were preliminary plans articulated and drawn up with regard to the Baltics and western Ukraine. The areas in the east nearest the front (Baltics, Ukraine) never got much beyond the discussion phase, but Poland experienced quite a bit more. The war very happily ended before we ever got a full view of what they would have done with the further reaches of the East had they been more successful, but they themselves were very self conscious about Poland being the testbed for the practices they would use out there later and documented the gently caress out of it. If you want to read more about the specifics of what went on in the annexed areas of Poland and in the General Government, I recommend "RKFDV: German Resettlement and Repopulation Policy 1939-1945: A history of the Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom" by Robert L. Koehl. It's an older book and probably long since out of print, but any decent university library should be able to get a copy via Interlibrary Loan at the very least. quote:You have to stop and ask yourself, "What the gently caress does that even mean or entail?" Most the Nazi leaders in those areas had the same question on their minds and didn't want to ask more questions than they had to because that weakness would leave them open to political attacks. They also probably knew that the people above them didn't know either and were just reciting Nazi jargon. Again, there was a central organizing body, the RKFDV. As for specific plans and policies, they were well published. Certain aspects were made more open to the public than others (the execution of local intelligentsia, religious leaders, political leaders, and other cultural carriers was kept on the D/L for example), but they published books about this poo poo. Here is a nice sampling of a few that I have on hand as .pdfs, although there are a lot more.  Loosely: "Signpost in the new Danzig/West-Prussian homeland" - it's a general guidebook for ethnic Germans resettling to those areas. How to behave re: the locals, available local support in getting settled, etc.  "Germans! The East Calls You! The economic development opportunities in the integrated eastern territories of the German Reich." Basically a book length advertisement looking for qualified professionals to come fill all the various spots that need to be filled in your average scratch-built village.  "The struggle for life in the German/Polish border territories" Basically what it sounds like. How to deal with living on the frontier of the German Reich.  "National Socialist Foreign-Peoples Policy: The German man and the foreign peoples" Again, how to comport yourself re: the locals. This wasn't just the vague mumblings of a few beer hall buzzards in the 20s or post-dinner tabletalk wank sessions between general staff members in the early 40s. This was real policy that was written down, enacted, and which had centralized offices to carry it through on the ground. Now, when you mention all the Gaulleiters having different priorities you're flirting with Kershaw's "Working towards the Führer" hypothesis. I generally agree with Kershaw here, but what you have to remember is that it's not an iron clad either/or approach. There were some issues that Hitler was wonderfully vague on, leaving people to decide on their own policies in a kind of "What would Hitler do?" fashion. Then there were others where they had a clearly articulated state policy and clear steps were taken to achieve it. The Holocaust is the most famous example of the former; resettlement and the systematic destruction of a Polish national identity is a solid example of the latter. quote:If they didn't achieve results, they would probably lose their jobs or worse. I strongly disagree with the "or worse" part of that, and what it implies. Say what you will about the Nazis (insert Big Lebowski joke here) but they weren't Stalinist Russia. Purges (well, physical purges - more on professional purges in a moment) within their own ranks wasn't their style. Someone who indicated that they weren't on board with the current plan didn't face the possibility of the camps or execution, what they really faced was marginalization. Most of my own work has had to do with German educational administrators and there were a ton of those guys who got frozen out during the Nazi years. A comment of "staatspolitisch nicht zuverlässig" ("~Politically unreliable") one one's file was the professional kiss of death. There would be no more promotions, and quite possibly some ugly transfers or positions generally below what a person of your experience and education should expect were in your future. Now, this shouldn't be confused with people who were identified as actively anti-Nazi. The thing is that those people didn't last through to the mid 30s. THe vast majority of them were fired from governmental positions in 1933. If they were lucky they got the hint and spent the next 12 years very quietly trying to get by doing whatever menial jobs they could or they emigrated before 1939. If they persisted in their political activities (as a lot of KPD members did) or were a major enough political figure in '33 they'd probably find themselves in a camp by '38. The key is, though, that that is a totally different process than how they dealt with normal people who simply balked at the uglier demands made by the Reich.
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Sep 12, 2014 15:24
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I need to run and take care of a bunch of stuff so I don't have time for a real effort post on the Gau issue. The super tl;dr version is that all of these bodies are operating in parallel. Yes, Gau leadership can vary quite a bit with regards to how it implements this policy or that policy, but in a lot of areas it also has to contend with a bunch of other competing (and sometimes conflicting) authorities that have specific portfolios. Resettlement policy is one of those areas where there's a specific office that's trying to coordinate this poo poo on a broader scale. RocknRollaAyatollah posted:
The night of the long knives was a one-off event during the period when the party was consolidating its power within Germany. Basically it sorted out the SA/SS rivalry once and for all and was also convenient cover for what amounted to a miniature coup against certain conservative elements of the German political class that the Nazis thought weren't on board with the program. While they were at it they got rid of a few politically embarrassing remnants of the oldest iterations of the Party. It wasn't a way of punishing or purging individuals who somehow failed in their jobs a la Stalinism. It was the end stage of a very specific battle for power between Röhm and Heydrich/Himmler and a general political house cleaning to ensure that they had firm footing in the new government. The key is that it wasn't a punishment for refusing to do a duty or being a fuckup in some way, it was a specific strike against specific individuals for pre-existing political ideologies or convictions. This isn't your local Gauleiter getting two in the ear for failing to meet a quota, this is offing an old rival because you don't want him attempting a coup a few years down the road.
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Sep 12, 2014 16:43
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Kemper Boyd posted:One thing that remains a mystery about Hess is how some Nazis today worship him. I don't get it. He was trying to make peace with ~~fellow Aryan brothers~~. If he had been successful you don't get England as a permanent threat from 41-44, no easy invasion route, no western front, and ideally get a victorious Germany in the east. That's delusional, but whatever we aren't exactly talking about Rhodes Scholars here. That, plus if you're the sort of guy who lives in the shittier parts of mid/north England, votes BNP, and strokes himself to sleep thinking about beating up on the local Pakistani shopkeeper it lets you construct a "might have been" alternate history narrative where Hess is successful and all the right-thinking British conservatives team up with Hitler to fight the real threat. brozozo posted:What was the relationship between the Nazi party and the Wehrmacht like? Were members of the Wehrmacht expected to join the party? Short answer: no. The Wehrmacht and the party were two very distinct entities. Hell, that's the root of the whole Wehrmacht/SS competition for resources and field authority. The Wehrmacht was just the German military, full stop, and as such could trace its history back to 1871, and back further if you buy the Imperial Prussian Military => Unified German Military line of thinking. Hell, early on there were actually regulations, hold overs from at least the Weimar Period and I think even the Kaiserreich, that maintained that people in the military couldn't be members of any political party. Under the Nazis they obviously ignored the hell out of that and eventually got rid of it, but it was a thing. The other thing to remember is that actual party membership wasn't as super-common as people assume. They topped out around 8 million in 1945, out of a pre-war population of ~80 million. Now, this doesn't mean that people didn't believe in or support the Nazi political movement, they just didn't bother to join up and do all the extra party poo poo. How many staunch Republicans or Democrats do you know who are actually active in the party (volunteer to work for it, act as local party delegates, etc) rather than just ticking the appropriate box once every four years? It's a poor comparison because political party membership works very differently in the US than in most parliamentary systems of that era, but it gets the point across. On the other hand, once you get past Gefreiter Joseph Blasen and into people looking at the military as a career then things start to get a lot more political. I don't know numbers for how many officers etc were party members, but it wasn't freakishly uncommon or anything. All that said, don't think that this is a back door back into the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth. There might have been a lot of regular guys just trying to get by who got drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943 or whatever and coudln't give two shits about politics, but there are also a lot of accounts of totally normal dudes without party affiliation etc. engaging in some loving awful atrocities against civilian populations, POWs, and other non-combatants.
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Sep 13, 2014 15:58
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Kemper Boyd posted:I was thinking more along the lines of the current "intellectual" Nazis, you know, guys who dress fairly normal and listen to neofolk. Either way, nazi dipshits who idealize Hess tend to do so because he was trying to make peace with England, who they slot in as "fellow Aryans we should have been allied with rather than fighting." edit: well, I won't say 110% of the time because I don't specialize in neoNazi fuckwits and do my best to ignore them. There could easily be the odd group making a novel argument. If you have some specific subset of mouth breathers who are saying something different about Hess in mind, just come out with it.
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Sep 13, 2014 17:59
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