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Well, it's a bit simplistic, but in a basic sense it's pretty much what the nazis actually did. Areas they occupied, from Poland to France to Ukraine, were scraped clean of money, food, rare metals, guns, trucks, tanks and anything that could be remotely useful for the war effort. Parts of the population was either recruited as "volunteer workers" (in the west) or used as slave labour (in the east). Many were also recruited into the SS. Hell, towards the end of the war they even had an all-russian SS division. However, this takes time. It's not like you just roll into an area and get a bunch of resource points that you can immediately use - especially when both you and your enemy is conducting active warfare in the area in question. Sure, the Germans were looting anything that wasn't nailed down and shipping it back to the Reich, but a bunch of confiscated art and dismantled factory parts stuck on the road to Berlin won't help you win the battle of Kursk. Also, what? Chupe Raho Aurat posted:Assuming my goofy little thought was correct and the "liberated" Russians joined up could they have defeated the resources of the "Moscow" part of the SU? Or like a video game did the enemy get harder the closer you got to the boss?
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Feb 11, 2014 09:26
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Also, what eventually stopped the Germans (after they had obliterated the Red Army of 1941 several times over) wasn't that the Soviets had more and harder troops "in the center", it was a combination of several factors. The German's overextending their logistics, Zhukov's veterans arriving from Siberia, the relocated arms factories coming online and cranking out guns and tanks (which were superior to what the Germans had at the time), the Soviets raising a mindboggling amount of new units from scratch and - most importantly - Soviet commanders rediscovering their balls and starting to mount an effective (instead of suicidal) resistance. It is important to remember when discussing alt-history that the real-life Operation Barbarossa was really as close to the perfect scenario as the nazis would get. The Soviets had done basically everything in their power to sabotage themselves prior to the invasion, and basically every major decision they made in the opening weeks led to disaster. Had the Soviet leadership been just marginally less incompetent/unlucky, the Germans would have stalled much, much sooner.
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Feb 11, 2014 14:58
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Pornographic Memory posted:I guess to not make this a total derail, what, roughly, was Nazi policy on religions that were not Judaism? Did they favor any particular denominations? I know there was some non-Christian occult stuff espoused by some Nazis, but I'd imagine that even for Nazis it would be pretty fringe. As with with most other things in Nazi Germany, there was not a coherent policy with regards to religion. Fringe sects, such as Jehova's Witnesses, were persecuted for various reasons and many ended up in the camps. Hitler and many other high-ranking Nazis were critical of traditional Christianity, which they viewed as weak, passive and influenced by Jews. This led to the regime encouraging movements such as the German Christians or Positive Christianity, anti-semite and nationalist versions of Christianity that sought to remove Old Testament and other Jewish influence from the Christian faith. Neither of these ever gained much ground with ordinary Germans, though. The Catholic Church in Germany was persecuted with varying degrees of severity, though it was targeted at Catholic institutions rather than individual Catholics. This was mainly a part of the effort to remove any social and cultural institutions outside of the control of the party. A number of Nazi high-ups such as Rosenberg and Himmler were definitely dreaming of a neo-pagan Germany sometime in the future, but there was never any serious effort to "paganize" the population or to stamp out Christianity. The whole "Nazi Occultism" thing has definitely been overblown by media, and never amounted to much more than fringe movements. It is interesting to note that atheists were not allowed into the SS - an aspirant had to list himself as either Catholic, Protestant or "God-believer". I think the reason that the Nazis didn't try more seriously to reshape German religion was Hitler's ever-present fear of a repeat of the 1918 revolution. Many of the Nazi's more weird decisions - not switching over to a war economy, not recruiting women into either the armed forces or the factories etc - can be traced to this.
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Feb 12, 2014 09:02
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meat sweats posted:It should be remembered that prior to, really, 1979, the conception of the Holocaust (either of Jews or in general) as the ultimate crime of the Nazis was not widespread. What the leaders were put on trial for and what made the Nazis the byword for evil until VERY recent memory was their violation of international law on conquering & occupying territory. They started a war of aggression, and that is what was considered their crime until pretty much just before the current generation of freshly minted history professors was born. Being in Poland or France at all WAS the crime, regardless of how "honorably" anyone allegedly conducted themselves there.
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May 6, 2014 10:30
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Monocled Falcon posted:I was reading a book that goes one step further and advances the myth of the "clean Waffen SS". The book in question being "Watch on the Rhine", a pulp sci-fi by John Ringo and Tom Kratman. The book makes a lot of dumb claims that are hilariously easy to refute with five minutes of googling. (The Waffen SS were no worse than people such as... convicted war criminal Erich Von Manstein) But one I had more trouble with: that the German military lost 1 percent of new recruits in training accidents and that modern armies only have lower loss rates because they've been crippled by political correctness and liberals. Watch on the Rhine is an abysmally bad book. I bought it because hey, nazis in 1000-ton tanks fighting aliens! But it was so loving bad I threw it away after reading a few chapters. I mean, it opens with some EU politician watching footage of alien-wrought devastation in Washington DC, inner-monologuing to herself about how good it is to see America in ruins. Then Germany uses alien technology to rejuvinate the last surviving SS members, because of course the weak, liberal European people of today cannot fight the alien menace. Then the author spends far too many paragraphs describing the moral failings and devious character of the weak, liberal, homosexual pacifists who have the gall to be upset that Germany has brought back the SS. Oh, and most SS soldiers were honorable warriors fighting for their country, except one or two bad apples who were just in it for the rape.
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May 6, 2014 22:06
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spider bethlehem posted:For on-tracknes, I'd like to reiterate my question about sourcing that quote about Hitler's pitiful addiction to invading the Soviet Union and add on to this question about Wehrmacht/SS training cadre casualties, with the caveat that I have no idea what a reasonable comparison figure would be, so anyone who can speak to this on a statistical level would be very welcome. I can't help you with the quote, but it is pretty much in line with Hitler's stated opinions, as well as his actual actions. The nazis started the war for two nebulous reasons - Revenge on France for Versailles, and carving out a colonial empire out of Poland, the Soviet Union and other bits and pieces of Eastern Europe. On top of that you have the whole "communism is a Jewish plot (PS: so is capitalism)", viewing the slavs as subhuman, etc etc. Pair this with Hitler's tendency to break treaties at the drop of a hat if he felt like it, and well...
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May 7, 2014 07:20
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Hogge Wild posted:Didn't someone post in the MilHist thread that there aren't any evidence for this? There is no evidence that German soldiers were forced by their superiors to commit war crimes, no. The German Military Laws of the time stipulated that a soldier could and should disobey illegal orders. Of course, that doesn't mean poo poo in practice. When it comes to shooting your own men for disobedience/cowardice/whatever, I'm pretty sure that the Soviets had the Germans beat by a good margin. I think that in order to understand the Nazi state and the crimes it committed, you have to first realize that it is meaningless to try and divide people into good and bad. The important lesson of the Nazi period, and one that needs to be hammered home again and again, is that its crimes were planned and executed by perfectly ordinary people. Yes, the orders came from monsters like Hitler and Himmler, but they were interpreted and carried out by people who were convinced that they were just doing their job. That's the scary thing, and one people tend to overlook simply because the Nazis have attained near-mythical status in their evil. There is nothing that the Wehrmacht did that, given different circumstances, the US or British Army wouldn't also have done. There is nothing that the planners of Action Reinhard did that, given different circumstances, couldn't just as well have been done by some bureaucrat in Washington or London. All the really disgusting poo poo you outsource to locals (the guards inside the death camps were almost exclusively Ukrainians), which lets you maintain your emotional distance. Most of the accused during the various trials defended themselves claiming that they were only following orders, probably because that was how they rationalized their actions to themselves afterwards. They were just doing their job. Even someone like Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor, claimed that he was just following orders. If he refused, they would have shot him! Or his family! Or they would just have replaced him with someone who weren't as kind to the Jews as he was, so it was better he stayed! Or, or, or... People follow orders, even when they know that those orders are wrong, even when they know that there's no real repercussions to refusing. Not because they are evil, or stupid, but because following orders is easy.
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May 8, 2014 08:04
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PittTheElder posted:Holy poo poo, really? Yup. The outside perimeter and the officers barracks were guarded by SS, but the inmates were guarded by Ukrainian "volunteers" (people recruited from POW camps and the like). Stangl himself, in his interviews with Gitta Sereny, goes on about how brutally the Ukrainians treated the Jews. When Sereny asks "But weren't you in charge of the camp? Couldn't you have stopped them?", Stangl goes "No no, I was just an administrator! That was out of my hands!". E: The way that the Nazis set up and ran the camps was pure genius, in the way it made sure that no single person was actually responsible. Stangl, for example, was recruited under the pretense that his expertise as a police detective was needed to clear up the distribution of "resources" (loot) from an army supply camp under construction. It wasn't until he arrived at Sobibor that he realized what he had signed up for, and then he kept telling himself that hey, the beatings and killings are being done by the Ukrainians and the SS, I'm just here to keep an eye on the loot and administrate construction. Same thing when he got put in charge of Treblinka. The camp was a complete nightmare. There were piles of bodies just strewn about the railway leading up to the gates. There was complete chaos. The guards were drinking themselves into a stupor daily to deal with what they were doing. Stangl was just there to shape things up. He made everything better, even for the Jews. He was just doing his job to the best of his abilities. He didn't kill anyone. A West German court later sentenced Stangl to life in prison for the murder of 900.000 people. Mr. Sunshine fucked around with this message at 09:35 on May 8, 2014 |
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May 8, 2014 09:19
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meat sweats posted:All members of the German state and military were guilty. Refusing to admit it = Nazi apologism. This is a ridiculous line of reasoning. Yes, it would have been wonderful if every German had the moral courage and insight to refuse to participate in the Nazi state, but holding every single member of the state and military morally responsible is just childish. E: You realize that you are setting up a moral standard which is impossible to live up to, right?
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May 8, 2014 15:51
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Is every employee of the US government morally responsible for the Iraq war? No, because that would be a ridiculous opinion to hold. Next time, think for five loving seconds before you poo poo up the thread.
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May 8, 2014 16:50
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brb gonna travel back in time and tell von Stauffenberg that he's morally responsible for WWII so maybe he should blow up himself instead of Hitler
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May 8, 2014 16:58
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meat sweats posted:...or just start bleeding from your crotch every time someone suggests that Nazis are bad? Are you saying that all women on their periods are Nazi apologists? drat man, that's pretty low, even for you.
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May 8, 2014 17:14
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:Members of my family have a victim mentality due to the Holocaust mythology they grew up with and due to family members that were part of it. I learned about it in school and at home too. I don't want that victim mentality and I see how insidious it is. And I don't have it. I see the roots of it though and that's what I am trying to convey. Sorry for any unnecessary offense. I take it that you are at least partially Jewish, given what you write here? Yes, Israel brings up the Holocaust all the time to deflect criticism. This does not mean that the Holocaust itself is an Israeli invention. The fact that the Nazis committed other crimes against other people does not mean that the Holocaust isn't their greatest crime. Let's look at the actual facts here. Antisemitism was one of, if not the core principle of National Socialism. In Mein Kampf, Hitler brings up the Jews again and again, describing them as destructive parasites that will, if left unchecked, bring about the end of all human civilization. He also details the idea that Germany must acquire living space by conquering land in the east and expel or eradicate the native populations (except for a fraction kept as slaves). Nazi propaganda, speeches and newspaper articles both from before and after the seizure of power use "the Jew" as a scapegoat for virtually all of Germany's ills. Public and private documents of individual Nazis that have been preserved speaks openly of the need to eliminate all Jews and Jewish influence from Germany. The Nazis started operating concentration camps almost immediately after seizing power. At first they housed mostly political opponents. However, the Nazis quickly started enacting laws aimed at Jews, stipulating what jobs they could hold, what they were allowed to study, who they were allowed to marry, what property they were allowed to own etc. This caused to Jews to be further and further marginalized within German society. At the outbreak of war, Jews were routinely having their property seized and sent to concentration camps. After the war started, the Nazis started "evacuating" the Jews east, to camps in Poland. We know this, because the Nazi regime was pretty open about that, and we still have the train schedules and cargo manifests for it. Prior to the war, the Nazis had ran a "trial" euthanasia program called T4, where they executed handicapped, mentally ill and other "antisocial" people, sometimes using gas. It was clandestine, but its existence eventually leaked out and caused quite a stir among the German public at the time. It was also know internationally, as letters from Catholic scholars to the pope concerning the T4 program has been preserved. T4 was shut down after less than a year, but many of those involved eventually got involved in Aktion Reinhard. We know this from testimonies of the men themselves, of their colleagues or superiors, or of their surviving victims. The Nazis were rounding up Jews in all countries they occupied, and pressured their allies to do the same. Some, like the French and the Baltics, cooperated with gusto. Others, like the Italians or the Finns, were more restrained or outright uncooperative. German forces were rounding up and executing Jews in Eastern Europe on an ad-hoc basis from the moment Operation Barbarossa started. It helped that the Nazi regime was equating Judaism and Bolshevism. The Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz, Dachau and Theresienstadt are more well known, but Aktion Reinhard, the actual extermination program, only involved three camps - Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, all specially constructed for the extermination and torn down once it was concluded. The camps operated between spring 1942 and autumn 1943. Most "inmates" were executed within 48 hours of arriving to the camps. A few were kept as workers. We know of these camps from contemporary German documents, from testimonies of administrators, guards and surviving victims, and from excavation of the camp sites. It is estimated that between 700.000 and 1.500.000 people died at Treblinka alone. These figures have never been challenged by anyone involved. Reinhard Heidrich estimated at the Wansee conference that there were about 11 million Jews in Europe. It was at Wansee that Aktion Reinhard was formalized. The minutes of that meeting survived the war, and it is from here that we have the term "the Final Solution". The American Jewish Yearbook estimated in 1933 the Jewish population of Europe to 9,5 million. In 1950, the same estimation was 3,5 million. Jews were specifically targeted by the Nazi regime from its very inception. No other group of Nazi victims, apart from maybe communists, was so openly and constantly vilified. Jews were murdered by the Nazis trough ad-hoc executions in the east, through sickness, starvation, exhaustion and random violence in the labour camps, and through gassing in the extermination camps. In conclusion: We have a regime which is extremely antisemitic, and very open with its desire to rid the world of Jews. Between 1933 and 1939, the Jews in Germany are marginalized, deprived of legal rights, and eventually rounded up in concentration camps. When the war starts, they are shipped east. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence, kept by the Nazi regime itself, that they initiated a program aimed at ridding Europe of Jews. Guards, administrators and surviving victims are all largely in agreement on how the concentration and extermination camps operated, and that a truly mind-boggling amount of people died. Between 1933 and 1950, at least 6 million European Jews simply go missing. Tell me, what do you think happened? Mr. Sunshine fucked around with this message at 16:10 on May 10, 2014 |
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May 10, 2014 16:08
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Hell, let's have a talk about why Nazism is uniquely evil. Nazism is often compared to Stalinism. On the surface they share many similarities - their brutality, oppression, aims of totalitarian control over all aspects of society, an all-powerful secret police and a "formalized lawlessness" were the representatives of the state apparatus could act with impunity until they caught the ire of someone higher up. They also, fascinatingly, shared many aesthetic similarities in architecture, propaganda, art etc (There's a fascinating discussion to be had here about how totalitarianism shapes art and culture, but that's for later). However, their intellectual backgrounds are wildly different. Socialism ultimately comes out of the same enlightenment thinking that gave rise to liberal democracy, and its values and goals are fundamentally the same. The value of individual liberty and dignity, a society controlled by and for the people, and the ability of each individual to express themselves freely and without fear. Granted, none of this existed under Stalin, but it was part of the regime's "cultural baggage", and values it continued to profess and (claimed to) aspire to. "The First Workers' State" had centuries of socialist thought behind it. The opposite is true of Nazism. Fascism considered itself "the movement of the 20th century", a revolutionary movement that would do away with the contradictions of liberal democracy and socialism, a third way between capitalism and communism. Its goals were almost entirely reactionary. It wanted to roll back democracy and the ideas of individual worth and liberty (the most striking example is, I think, Vichy France, that quite literally aimed to undo the revolution of 1789). "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state" as Mussolini said. Individuals were to subordinate themselves to an all-encompassing nation-state, personified in the avatar of the Leader. Dictatorship and oppression of the individual are professed, intrinsic values to fascism, in contrast to the "temporary measures" of Stalinist communism. Fascism is also almost completely void of philosophical thought, guided almost exclusively by conservatism, national romanticism and a disdain for modern society. When the fascists seized power in Italy, they did not have a single ideological work to lean on. "Mein Kampf" remains the only major philosophical foundation of Nazism, and it is an incoherent mess mainly spent railing against Jews and the French, and proclaimed "outdated" by Hitler by 1933. Fascism is openly anti-intellectual, hailing instinct and intuition as the most noble foundations of human actions. To this pre-enlightenment thinking, Nazism added an extreme racism and a glorifying of medieval brutality. The goal of the Nazis was to create a new Europe, where the master race rule through violence and brutality, unfettered by morality or law, and the inferior races are either exterminated or kept as illiterate slaves. We find in the speeches and writing of people like Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels an almost fetishistic love of brutality and a aggressive disdain for the weakness of liberalism, modernity and "Jewish Christianity". They wanted to turn society back a thousand years or more, and create an industrialized feudal empire running on slave labour, where the elite ruled through gut feeling and violence. And that is why calling Hitler "just a nationalist", or claiming that the "racist angle" is overblown, is extremely myopic.
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May 10, 2014 17:15
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meat sweats posted:You should keep reading to the end of the thread for a surprise!
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May 11, 2014 10:54
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Karl is fourteen years old, and a member of the Hitler Jugend. He is wearing a swastika armband and a hand-me-down helmet several sizes to big, covering behind a sandbag barricade some few hundred meters from the ruins of the Reichstag building in Berlin. In his hands is a panzerfaust, a stick with an anti-tank grenade at the end, constructed in a factory rapidly running out of everything including gunpowder. A soviet IS tank comes rumbling down the street, straight for his position. With tears running down his face, he raises his weapon, and pulls the trigger. It clicks. As Karl is crushed underneath the tank that never even noticed him, meat sweats watches with arms crossed over his Che Guevara t-shirt. "Guess you shouldn't have started World War Two, kid", he smirks. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 11, 2014 21:14
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Frau Müller has worked at the post office for almost 40 years now. The trams have stopped running, so the last few weeks she has been walking to work. Life is difficult. There's a shortage of of even basic foodstuffs, and there's air raids almost every day. But frau Müller goes to work, like she did during the last war, like she did under the Kaiser and under the Weimar republic. As she nears the post office, the wail of the air raid sirens fill the air. 15000 feet above her, a stressed and tired crewman on a Lancaster bomber misidentifies his target, and releases his payload early. Frau Müller never even makes it across the street. In his mother's basement, meat sweats makes another mark on the wall. One more cog in the Nazi machine dead. He sighs with satisfaction.
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May 11, 2014 22:15
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Other than trolling meat sweats, what is the point of these? No, that's pretty much it, since his claim that every employee of the German state and armed forces is by definition a Nazi criminal is so dumb that the only coherent response is mockery. But if I'm making GBS threads up the thread I'll drop it.
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May 12, 2014 07:01
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I've been reading a biography of Reinhard Heydrich, and it really hammers home how absolutely dysfunctional the nazi system was. When Heydrich got put in charge of the Sicherheitsdienst (secret police) a few years prior to the nazi seizure of power, it was one of several similar organizations within the Nazi party itself. After 1933, the SS started taking over police organizations in Bavaria (at the time, every German state and even many individual cities had their own criminal and political police organizations), sometimes by political assignments, sometimes by literal armed takeover of individual police stations. This eventually brought them into conflict with Göring, who was setting up a parallel system in Prussia. At the time, Himmler, Heydrich and the SS actually looked like they were going to lose that fight - Göring had popular support even among non-nazis, he was close to Hitler, he had the powerful SA on his side, and Prussia was the largest and most powerful of the German states. The organization that would eventually become the Gestapo was set up by Göring in Prussia as the Geheime staatspolizeiamt (shortened Gestapa), and was a rival to Heydrich's SD. However, the SA eventually proved too unruly. They had their own agendas, and Göring proved unable to control them. In a backroom deal, Himmler got control of the Prussian police and the Gestapo, and in return the SS would help cull the SA. This quickly led to the Night of the Long Knives.
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May 20, 2014 08:08
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No, it's titled simply "Reinhard Heydrich" and written by the norwegian author Knut Kristofersen. As an aside, when people talk about the Holocaust, what is it commonly understood to mean? The entire process of Nazi ethnic cleansing, starting basically with the Nuremberg laws, or the outright extermination campaign (including executions, death camps and "work 'til you die" labour camps)?
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May 20, 2014 08:39
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The mythologizing of the capabilities of nazi germany comes from several sources. Nazi propaganda that seeped into the public unconsciousness in the west, media focusing on the spectacular (and overblowing the mundane), surviving german commanders' views of themselves and the war etc. This mythologizing serves several purposes. If you depict your enemy as an unstoppable juggernaut with superior technology, with soldiers that are disciplined bordering on brainwashed being led by fanatics, your own struggle looks more impressive. It also becomes easier to explain your own failings. The allies fighting against a superior enemy for several years, until finally through great efforts they manage to turn the war around, makes for a better story. Also, when the Cold War started getting into swing at the end of WWII, the idea of the Soviet throwing hordes of illiterate peasants armed with sticks and clad in rags against the technological marvels of the germanic race, was something that was readily accepted in the west. It played into existing prejudices and beliefs. If you admit that Blitzkrieg wasn't this super-strategy that couldn't be countered, you have to admit that the allied setbacks at the start of the war were due to strategical and political failings. You understand why no-one in a leading position would be interested in doing this. Sure, Scandinavia, Poland and the Benelux probably didn't stand a chance to start with (too small, too underdeveloped) but the Fall of France and the opening year of Barbarossa was all due to the political and military leadership doing all the wrong things in the buildup to the war. Russia managed to turn things around because they could trade land and lives for time, and eventually adapted. France couldn't. The myth of nazi super-science feeds into the same self-comforting delusions. Sure, they managed some spectacular things like rockets and jet planes, but only late in the war and it never amounted to much. The legendary nazi supertank, the Tiger:  It was based on an outdated design from the mid 1930s. It was all right angles and straight lines, overcomplicated and too expensive for what it actually did, and the Germans never had more than a few handfuls. Yes, it was big. Yes, it had a huge gun. But contrast with something like the soviet IS tank:  Look at that. One of these two is the design-philosophical ancestor of all modern tanks, and it isn't the box on wheels. Towards the end of the war, Soviet battlefield technology and their strategical thinking were far superior to what the Nazis had. But acknowledging that wouldn't allow western (and nazi!) leaders to paint the soviets as barbarians callously throwing their starving and ill-equipped population into the meat grinder, so we're stuck with the "oriental hordes" image.
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May 23, 2014 12:13
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JaucheCharly posted:Guess who also shaped that image? Shortly before the war ended it is obvious who the new enemy no.1 will be for the US. So, who has substantial experience with that new enemy? German generalship. These guys tell intelligence what expect from the SU, how they operate, how the "character" of soviet soldiers is supposed to be, all that stuff that you would expect from a good NS-General. Exactly. A lot of former Wehrmacht commanders were seen by the west (by which I mean largely the US and UK) as experts on fighting the soviets. Of course these commanders would claim that their technologically and intellectually superior forces were simply overrun by the numerically superior Soviet hordes, and that they would have prevailed had it not been for Hitler's meddling. This was lapped up by both the western public and leaders, as it played into pre-existing prejudices about the underdeveloped and primitive Russian.
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May 23, 2014 16:20
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As always with the Nazis, that's a loving clusterfuck. Certain areas were annexed into Germany proper, such as the Sudetenland, western Poland etc. These were turned into "Gau" and administered chiefly by the Nazi party apparatus. Occupied territories such as northern France and the Benelux countries were under military administration. In the east things turn weird. The remnants of Poland and parts of Ukraine called the General Government was in theory the personal fiefdom of the governor, Hans Frank, but in practice it was run by the SS and other organizations subordinate to Himmler. Other occupied areas of the Soviet Union was nominally under military administration, but the SS had pretty much free reign behind the actual front lines. There were a few new institutions set up in order to build infrastructure in the occupied territories, to administrate colonization by ethnic Germans etc. I'm not quite sure whether it is meaningful to talk about these as state institutions, however. There was quite an overlap between the party and state, and areas of responsibility were rarely formalized - the state, the party and the military were often operating in parallel and at cross purposes. Also, by the time the war rolls around, Himmler had put the entire law enforcement under his control, from street cops up to the secret (political) police, and these were active throughout Germany and the occupied territories, further confusing jurisdictions etc. ZombieLenin posted:Finally, of course it was leading here, I want to know about the German memory of the war. Specifically, that those outside of a small cadre (including the SS) had no idea mass extermination a were taking place. People knew. Like you said, the logistics required were way to big. Ordinary people knew that Jews were being rounded up, deported and put in camps. Rumours of mass killings were trickling back into Germany with returning soldiers. Did most Germans know about the Holocaust, as in the industrialized extermination of an entire people? No. Did they know that the Nazis wanted to kill a whole lot of Jews, that a whole lot of Jews were being deported east and that they weren't coming back? Yes.
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Jun 12, 2014 10:39
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Woolie Wool posted:How much of the monumental architecture planned for Hitler's redone Berlin was even feasible? Woolie Wool posted:You can't run a 20th century society like this. You're just going to get a bunch of useless, ill-educated people who contribute nothing of value because their way of life is 500 years obsolete. How would they compete with mechanized agriculture?
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Sep 11, 2014 08:49
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Cyrano4747 posted:Where are you getting this from? Yes, you are right. That's an interpretation based mostly on the personal ramblings of Hitler, Himmler and a few other nutjobs.
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Sep 12, 2014 07:56
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No, it never really caught on. Yeah, Himmler and a few others were dreaming of a glorious neo-pagan Germania, and there was an attempt to create a pro-nazi "positive Christianity" that shed most of the old testament, jewish influences, but it never went anywhere. Hitler and the higher-ups were really sensitive to anything that might upset ordinary Germans, and went out of their way to not rock the socio-cultural boat too much. It's hard to overstate just how pragmatic and opportunistic Hitler & Co were once they got a whiff of power - hence the purging of the party radicals in the Night of the Long Knives etc.
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Dec 8, 2014 09:56
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If we compare the Nazi and the Stalinist purges, they are very different beasts. The Night of the Long Knives was an opportunistic, but very focused, event. It played out quickly, and Hitler and his closest associates used it to rid themselves of obvious, outspoken rivals as well as the core of what could turn into an uncomfortable "second revolution". It neutered the radicals of the party, placating the army and Hitler's conservative allies. The Great Purge, as Cyrano points out, lasted for six years. Its targets were, well, everyone. It ramped up slowly, and I'd argue that its roots can be traced back to Lenin forbidding the formation of intra-party blocks in the 20s. In the end it reached pathological levels, culminating in the bizarre Moscow show trials were old, loyal Bolsheviks who had led the revolution confessed to being bourgeoisie saboteurs, counterrevolutionaries and fascist agents. I'd argue that there was no aim or logic to the Great Purge, just a hysterical lashing out that targeted anyone who happened to be in the way. I don't think we've seen anything similar since the days of Ivan the Terrible. In comparison, the Night of the Long Knives was an office spat.
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Dec 8, 2014 18:41
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There's the old rumor that Göring once said, regarding a close subordinate that turned out to have insufficiently pure blood, "I decide who is a Jew". Now, this never happened, but in interviews/interrogations at Nürnberg, Göring himself acknowledged it, basically going "I never said it, but I could have". The nazi racial ideas and the laws they enacted were never adhered to 100%, and many higher-ups didn't give a gently caress as long as they looked good in the führer's book.
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Dec 10, 2014 08:33
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I think that's one of the things that really set Nazi killings apart from other genocides. There's been attempts to exterminate entire peoples for as long as there's been people, but most if it has been pretty straight forward - "We hate these fuckers, and we sort of like seeing them suffer and die" kinda deals. The Nazis actually sat down and figured out how to turn exterminating people into a 9-5 job. E: not to say that there weren't a lot of outright hate-fueled killings going on as well, but the extermination camps was something morbidly different.
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Dec 10, 2014 21:31
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Yeah, Eco's attributes for ur-fascism are pretty broad, and with a bit of ill will you can get almost any movement to fit many of them. It's useful as a guide to what gives rise to fascism and fascist sentiment, but it's a pretty crude tool for judging whether a movement is fascist.
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Apr 10, 2015 10:16
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The end goal for the Nazis was always to rid Europe in general and Germany in particular of Jews, but how that was to be achieved was really fuzzy until the war started. There were all sorts of plans. Some were pretty coherent and realistic - like encouraging Jewish emigration through a combination of making life difficult for them in Germany and being liberal with exit visas - and some were hilariously out of touch with reality, like the plan to create a Jewish homeland in Madagascar. It would be easy to think that the Nazis tried "reasonable" methods for removing the Jews from Germany, and that they escalated to more brutal methods as the previous attempts failed. This is however incorrect. The 3rd Reich did not have a single, unified policy of how to remove the Jews until the Final Solution was proposed. From the Nazi point of view, the Holocaust emerged "naturally" from the conditions leading up to it. 1) We believe compassion is for the weak, and that violence is to be admired. 2) We want to get rid of the Jews (in Germany at least). 3) We have made laws barring Jews from most professions, and confiscating their property. 4) We have rounded up a lot of Jews and put them in camps. We also don't care much whether they live or die there. 5) We control almost all of Europe, and can dictate terms to our allied puppet regimes. 6) We are killing a whole poo poo-ton of civilians in the East, mostly Jews, through shooting, gassing and burning. This is inefficient and also bad for the morale of the executioners. 7) Why not move all the Jews in the territories we control into dedicated extermination camps? 8) We have a final solution to our Jewish Problem!
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Apr 20, 2015 08:57
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I have a book written in the mid-30s analyzing the ideological foundations of nazism and fascism (the chapter on fascism is basically a thin pamphlet where the author goes "I don't know what the hell these guys are even on about, and evidently neither do they."), and the author says that, given their violent rhetoric, it is surprising that the nazis aren't treating the jews worse. A lot of smart people assumed that people like Hitler, Goebbels, Rosenberg etc were just spouting extremist bullshit to impress the masses.
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Apr 21, 2015 09:13
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I think the main question is, what would bombing the camps have accomplished? Stop the killing of innocent civilians? Are you supposed to precision-target the gas chambers or the guard barracks? Then what? You have a bombed-out camp in the middle of nazi-occupied Poland, filled with weak, starving Jews, many of them dead and wounded from your very bombing. Are they supposed to walk out into the country side and just live happily ever after?
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Apr 21, 2015 22:47
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The clean Wehrmacht myth is the idea that the common soldiers of the German army were ordinary men fighting for their country, and that the Sonderaktionen, Holocaust etc were all carried out by the SS and the party organs. Even if we were to ignore the insane brutality on the eastern front (and the willing cooperation of the army needed to carry out the Holocaust, and the starvation, torture and murder of prisoners, and, and, and...), we run into the same snag faced by the US Lost Causers - what country exactly were these men fighting and dying for? Well, for the Wehrmacht 39-45, that would be Nazi Germany. Like, you are invading other countries on the orders of actual loving nazis. You don't get to go "I only served my country" when your flag is the loving swastika and your head of state is Adolf loving Hitler.
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Apr 27, 2015 19:14
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Germany's allies varied in the extent and severity of their anti-Semitism. It was for example much safer to be a Jew in the Italian-occupied areas of France than it was in "independent" Vichy France. I am however not aware of any actions by the Italian army specifically to protect the Jews.
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May 7, 2015 07:08
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Ghetto Prince posted:This has probably been covered somewhere upthread, but would handing over Danzig have done anything to improve Poland's situation / at least buy some time? They would have maybe bought themselves a few months, if not weeks. Hitler was dead-set on a war and was actually quite pissed at the Munich agreement that gave him Czechoslovakia, as he saw it as the British and French robbing him of his glorious war.
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May 18, 2015 11:57
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