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I've never done any actual study on WWII but the topic fascinates me. Here are a few questions I have. It seems like there was a large number of Nazis -- both high-level officials and lower grunts -- who either committed or at least seriously contemplated suicide at the end of the war. Is this true, or is the number / percentage no higher than any other empire's collapse? And if it is true, why? Pragmatism, despondency, panic? Magda Goebbels murdering her children just chills me. I've also heard that the Nazi higher-ups were hoping the Allies would accept generous surrender terms so that the Nazis and Allies might work together to fend off the Soviet threat, but the Allies wanted nothing to do with the Nazis. I had assumed that was moral outrage over the concentration camps, but that doesn't really fit if the Allied forces already knew about the Holocaust. So why were they so repulsed? Gumby posted:Speer is a slippery character and probably the first rule of WW2 scholarship is "don't trust anything Speer says" What's your take on him? Do you think he was covering his rear end, so to speak, in case Germany lost? I know he played the "nice Nazi" card to save his own neck at Nuremberg, but I don't know that he would have seen that coming that far in advance. So was he angling for something else entirely? Lastly: have you seen the movie Downfall (Der Untergang) and if so, what did you think?
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Apr 2, 2013 08:23
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Omi-Polari posted:David Irving isn't the only anti-Semite to get banned recently. Ho ho. I did a thing there. Late reply, but for anyone interested in a thorough take on David Irving, you can read the entire transcript of the Irving v Lipstadt trial here, hosted by Emory University (where Deborah Lipstadt is employed). For those who don't know the story, author Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book called Denying the Holocaust in which she mentioned David Irving as a leading historian who was also a Holocaust denier. He sued her (as well as Penguin Books) for libel, and he did it in the UK, since they have much stricter libel laws than the US. Penguin's lawyers paid for experts to go over Irving's works with a fine-tooth comb. The verdict indicated pretty strongly that even Irving's earliest works had falsifications and factual stretches, and that he couldn't be trusted as a historian at all. Richard J Evans was one of the expert witnesses, and wrote a book about his experiences, entitled Lying about Hitler. Both the transcripts and Evans' book are highly recommended, though I realize plenty of people aren't interested in slogging through hundreds of pages of court reports.
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Nov 8, 2013 09:14
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