JaucheCharly posted:There is another important aspect to consider, that would have been more weigthy to Himmler, namely that by late summer '41, they're trying to starve the unwanted population. So what you see is migration from ghetto to ghetto in search of food. You have lots of people on the move, although it's very dangerous. As a reminder: Judentum ist Partisanentum. From the point of the EG you've got exactly those people slipping through the nets that you consider as partisans. The process of liquidating ghettos speeds up as the nutritional situation gets worse, but they fail at concentrating and controlling the population in a way that they had envisioned. Also, the conditions the Jewish populations were being kept in in occupied Poland caused epidemics and disease that scared their handlers. The German government of occupied Poland consistently applied pressure to do something about the ghettos. There is also the consideration that, as the war looks less and less as if it is going to have an immediate and decisive German victory, acceleration of the program of genocide becomes a higher and higher priority. The first set-backs in Russia as the winter of 41 sets in really set some individuals in the mindset that they don't want to wait until the end of a long war - particularly as Nazis blamed Jews for losing WW1 (and some for causing WW2! - certainly blamed them for the USA entering) and because some even realise that if Germany were to lose, the opportunity to wipe out world jewry could be lost forever. As a result, Germany expended precious war materiel on the genocide even at the expense of the war effort. The holocaust consumed enormous industrial resources that large numbers of German officials would have preferred to spend on fighting Soviets, but they were all railroaded by the senior Nazi leadership and the SS. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 11:50 on Dec 12, 2014 |
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Dec 12, 2014 11:45
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In any event there was enormous pressure from the SS to get it done. These pressures formed positive feedback loops that fed more power and areas of responsibility into the hands of the SS - to many, it would have been a welcome relief, since the problem was offloaded onto another, powerful agency. But the keenness of the ideology still shines through when you see workers essential to the war effort being fed into the grinder, on trains meant for troops and supplies.
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Dec 12, 2014 14:58
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Ego-bot posted:Was it ever a goal of the Nazis to reacquire German colonies lost during the first world war? Greeks are 'culture carrying', as I recall, and as such are similar to Italians - except that Greeks are actually largely racially Slavic and a bit Turkish, and Slavs were further down the Nazi racial scale. Of course, even modern Greece today has a race myth that the country is racially Hellenic, but that simply is not the case and I believe was more or less known to be the case at that time. There was no great love for Orthodox Christianity either; while elements of the Nazi state were anti-traditional religion, very large numbers of senior Nazis and SS men were extremely observant and conservative Christians (a disproportionate number of SS men, as I recall, were Catholic). It was the ambition of elements within the Nazi state to acquire colonies. Large numbers of Nazis were admirers of the British Empire - Von Ribbentrop is one of the most famous of these. However, the empire in Europe is the chief priority. Some early wartime diplomatic overtures to Britain have the innuendo of a promise that Britain will be allowed to govern the outside world if Germany can govern Europe. I don't think there is a settled 'Nazi' attitude to that question though. A lot of people always had a lot of kooky plans for the future in Nazi Germany, it wasn't necessarily a predictor of what they actually did. And it wasn't a very unitary state.
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Dec 12, 2014 19:11
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site posted:I realize that everything surrounding the topic is so chaotic that counterfactuals don't mean much, but if the Nazis didn't dump so many resources into the Final Solution project would it have increased their chances of winning the war at all? It just tells you everything you need to know about the Nazi wartime state. Anti-semitism really was the organising principle. Nothing apart from Germany being a much bigger and more powerful country could have let the Germans win against the Allies + Sovs, although I believe the war could have been fought by the Germans a lot more successfully and caused even more damage to the world.
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Dec 13, 2014 15:53
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FreshlyShaven posted:I assume this is the right place to ask and I didn't see it covered elsewhere in the thread, so here goes: It's fairly well established now that most people at the time thought that Chamberlain was doing the right thing when he appeased Hitler. You only have to watch this to get an idea of what I'm talking about : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO725Hbzfls. The number of people who realised early enough to do something about Hitler what sort of monster Hitler was was relatively low. Churchill is the most famous example of this, and because Churchill did have some prescience (though he also had moments where he was quite pro-Hitler) and because Churchill set the tone so much about what people believed about the war, the contemporary enthusiasm for appeasement has been forgotten. Trotsky was, on Hitler, probably the most prescient of all - but naturally nobody in the establishment was reading him. In much the same way that France has a national myth that everyone was in the resistance, many English people have chosen to forget about themselves that they generally supported appeasement. Re: the second half of your question - without doubt Britain was not capable of waging war with Germany in 1938 and needed time to re-arm. I don't think Radar was the crucial thing here to be singled out, though it was important in the Battle of Britain. France was in a better spot in terms of materiel, but unfortunately was highly politically unstable and lacking in national morale. Appeasement is a rare example of a situation in which historians have regarded it as more helpful to play games with counter-factuals. In reality, they're not usually a very good idea, and they have the added problem of helping you to forget why that happened felt so necessary at the time. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 14:29
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In Germany you have a need to overcome the humiliation of the non-defeat defeat of Germany. On the other hand, there is an upsurge of nationalism in all major countries and in Europe, including fascist or other far right parties who advocate militarism as a form of rejuvenation of the national spirit and character, and/or as a restoration from the economic concerns of the great depression. At the same time, there is also war weariness and the spread of leftists as a response to the failure of old structures in the first world war. Certainly with Chamberlain, he is feeding in to a strong need in Britain to avoid war at almost any cost. But Britain was least afflicted by extremist views, right or left, of virtually any European country in the post-ww1 period.
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Dec 15, 2014 18:29
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:The ex-high command officers like Ludendorff lied through their teeth, basically. That's an over-simplification. Germany was militarily capable of fighting on in 1918 - it had simply collapsed domestically to the extent that the war was no longer possible. The unpopularity of the war had also led effectively to the end of the imperial government before the war ended and the rise of social democrats and socialists who were already planning for the republic to follow - with army officers doing the government in the meanwhile. The thing that has to be taken in to account is that Germany lost a war in which it won most of the battles and never lost substantial territory. Unfortunately for Germany, the widespread myth of the 'undefeated Germany' basically encouraged a lot of the roughness with Germany that followed in WW2, including the massive strategic bombing campaigns. Tao Jones posted:How many similarities are there between Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler? I keep hearing people comparing the two. To foolishly answer seriously, if you choose some very narrow and stupid band of comparison you can make them sound similar, since Hitler liked animal rights and restrictive gun laws. But you'd have to be totally blind to their ideologies or their broader policies to think the comparison was at all relevant. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 09:51 on Dec 16, 2014 |
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Dec 16, 2014 09:48
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Cingulate posted:They both wrote autobiographical books with some political oomph though, and had favourable opinions on vegetarianism. I kind of see the connection. Defeat was inevitable, but Germany probably could have kept it going for longer and forced the allies to keep at them for a bit longer - from a purely military perspective. National morale was basically zero though. Honestly the front collapse was worse for Germany from a supply point of view than it was purely in terms of military events. Germany had already been basically starved out by blockades, and there would have been a tremendous famine in Germany had Germany tried to fight on after losing the Balkan theatre. Germany's defeat was a national collapse and not a tremendous defeat. Germany surrendered at the point that calamity was about to unfold, not after it. As a result, although national morale was at 0, people did not suffer the tremendous trauma of total destruction and defeatr akin to the WW2 experience, where Hitler fought on long after Germany could no longer win. quote:The gun laws thing is actually really misleading. Hitler actually made it substantially easier for (non-Jewish) Germans to own guns, which is something that gets glossed over in the rush to paint American firearm legislation as stage zero of the imminent redneck holocaust. Don't you know the tyrants always go for the guns first? Yeah, basically the laws just let the government take guns away from 'undesireables'. My comment is only half serious. There is no real point in comparing Hitler and Obama. Another painful link often drawn by Americans is 'Hitler was a national socialist. Obama's a socialist too!' Neither of those statements is really accurate in any sense. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Dec 16, 2014 |
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Dec 16, 2014 13:46
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I entirely agree. Some resistance might have been possible, but the resistance itself would have invited even worse outcomes, including mass desertions, further rebellions, mass starvation and revolutions. You mention the most salient fear of all by invoking Russia in 1917 - the fear of revolution. As soon as the Navy mutinied the game was basically up because that was a sure sign more rebellion was to follow. I just want to re-emphasise how the blockade of Germany slowly applied pressure for so long that helped build to this moment of fail cascade. There were a lot of reasons for the Germans to be pissed in their own minds. Unlike with WW2, looking back, they were genuinely close at moments to winning the gamble - and they did it with even fewer and more incompetent allies. They enjoyed military superiority over their competitors a lot of the time. France came perilously close to losing Paris or just giving up at various points. Britain, before it adopted convoys, was almost ruined by submarine warfare. In the end, superior resources and naval supremacy told in ways that it's easy to forget if you just close in on the final campaign. How did Germany reach this moment of collapse in the first place? Ed: and we've sort of distanced ourself from the really important thing, which is how people came to believe in the 'backstab' theory. A lot of it is to do with the psychological displacement necessary to cope with the trauma of losing. We can't imagine what Prussian-infused German society was like in 1900: for males, the emphasis on respect for the social order, martial values and service to the empire were incredibly powerful, and seemingly moving the country toward greatness. This idea also had tremendous depth because of the relatively progressive structure of German social security and high standard of public education. - I've always been a close student of Austrian history. The poo poo that went down with those poor fuckers in WW1 was truly horrifying, not least because it's such a pitiful way for such an influential country to disintegrate. It's hard to imagine that it wasn't that long ago that Austria was a truly influential and powerful European polity. Not as bad as it was for the Serbs though. I'd like to know how Serb historians think about the conflict. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Dec 16, 2014 |
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Dec 16, 2014 15:58
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The logistical challenges of an alliance with limitless resources and a vast navy supplying its soldiers is nothing compared to the logistical challenge of feeding tens of millions people with a a single frankfurter and a loaf of very dark bread, which is basically the German scenario. The allies would have had an easier time of it than the Germans - more men, more resources, can supply by sea as well as land.
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Dec 16, 2014 16:33
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The German army basically never got totally owned in quite the same way that some of the entente armies got owned, as well. Germany won most of the battles, held huge areas of territory, and then dramatically began to fold right at the end. But the point that needs to be emphasised is that the folding never fully played out. Why this isn't fully digested I already explained: quote:Ed: and we've sort of distanced ourself from the really important thing, which is how people came to believe in the 'backstab' theory. A lot of it is to do with the psychological displacement necessary to cope with the trauma of losing. We can't imagine what Prussian-infused German society was like in 1900: for males, the emphasis on respect for the social order, martial values and service to the empire were incredibly powerful, and seemingly moving the country toward greatness. This idea also had tremendous depth because of the relatively progressive structure of German social security and high standard of public education. For a lot of people it is easier to warp your perception of reality than it is to fundamentally alter the belief system that has been pounded into you since birth. Also, you can't think of this as a linear series of events that goes: 1. Lose War 2. Backstab Theory That is to forget about the twenties completely. What you actually have is: 1. War Starts and goes well 2. War Begins to drag on and go to poo poo 3. Soft (Social Democratic) Leftist parties begin to formulate plans for a democratic republican postwar Germany 4. Lose War 5. Leftists take over 6. Things are actually not bad in the mid twenties 7. Great Depression 8. Things go back to poo poo and everyone now starts to get more heavily involved in scapegoating, irridentism and irrational nationalism OR communism. Like sure, the seeds are there for this irrational belief in 1918, but the catalyst for them becoming a powerful political force is the devastation of the Great Depression.
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Dec 16, 2014 20:54
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Addendum: it only exacerbates the feeling that you were hard done by if you already don't feel like you lost that badly and then you get crushing terms against you in the peace.
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Dec 16, 2014 23:01
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Richard Evans' book Lying About Hitler is good if you like reading about crazy holocaust deniers et al.
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Jan 3, 2015 13:47
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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/the-system-books-kirsch A double book review about new history being written on the day-to-day operation of Nazi concentration camps. A pro, if depressing, click. quote:The failure of the factory, as Wachsmann describes it, was indicative of the incompetence of the S.S. and the inconsistency of its vision for the camps. To turn prisoners into effective laborers would have required giving them adequate food and rest, not to mention training and equipment. It would have meant treating them like employees rather than like enemies. But the ideological momentum of the camps made this inconceivable. Labor was seen as a punishment and a weapon, which meant that it had to be extorted under the worst possible circumstances. Prisoners were made to build the factory in the depths of winter, with no coats or gloves, and no tools. “Inmates carried piles of sand in their uniforms,” Wachsmann writes, while others “moved large mounds of earth on rickety wooden stretchers or shifted sacks of cement on their shoulders.” Four hundred and twenty-nine prisoners died and countless more were injured, yet in the end not a single brick was produced.
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Apr 3, 2015 14:11
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He's basically pushing the same anti-Semitic line that is pushed by a lot of European far right parties today.
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Apr 19, 2015 10:59
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A lot of the Jews who resettled wound up in Poland and France and got gassed anyway so it wasn't like Hitler was cutting the ones who left any breaks. Hitler had conquest in mind from the early days, so it's not like acquiring these territories full of Jews was in any way contingent or surprising either.
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Apr 19, 2015 20:26
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And it's not like you can't see all of this poo poo telegraphed in Mein Kampf in 1925-26:quote:Was there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate? On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light. quote:Certainly in days to come, the Jews will raise a tremendous cry throughout their newspapers, once the hand is laid on their favourite net. Once the move is made to put an end to this scandalous press and once this instrument which is public opinion is brought under state control and no longer left in the hands of aliens and enemies of the people. I am certain that this will be easier for us than it was for our fathers. The scream of the twelve-inch shrapnel is more penetrating than the hiss from a thousand Jewish newspaper vipers. Therefore let them go on with their hissing. quote:The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people. The Jew uses every possible means to undermine the racial foundations of a subjugated people. In his systematic efforts to ruin girls and women he strives to break down the last barriers of discrimination between him and other peoples. The Jews were responsible for bringing negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate. For as long as a people remain racially pure and are conscious of the treasure of their blood, they can never be overcome by the Jew. Never in this world can the Jew become master of any people except a bastardized people. quote:Since the inferior always outnumber the superior, the former would always increase more rapidly if they possessed the same capacities for survival and for the procreation of their kind; and the final consequence would be that the best in quality would be forced to recede into the background. Therefore a corrective measure in favour of the better quality must intervene. Nature supplies this by establishing rigorous conditions of life to which the weaker will have to submit and will thereby be numerically restricted; but even that portion which survives cannot indiscriminately multiply, for here a new and rigorous selection takes place, according to strength and health. quote:… the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew. And then the speech in 1939: quote:In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance only the Jewish race that received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! Say what you will about the final solution, but it should be clear that the organising principle of Nazism was National Socialism. Annihilation of international Jewry was set as a higher priority than the war effort. Seeing the holocaust as purely contingent is a mistake. How and when it happened was defined by events, but the will to dash Jews in to the wind came before Hitler ever even achieved power.
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Apr 20, 2015 10:03
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Comrade Koba posted:When the core tenet of your national government ideology revolves around getting rid of the "lesser races" by force if necessary, how can you realistically be completely unknowing when that same government carries out deportations and genocide on an industrial scale? You can know that something Very Bad is happening and still not know exactly how bad. The holocaust was totally unprecedented and I think you kind of had to see it to believe in the scale and horror of it. But the knowledge and complicity of the German people in the holocaust is a super complex topic and one someone else should speak to. But it should be noted that people have a tremendous capacity for wilful blindness and self-deception if it will help them get through the day. Edit: But to take a running jump at it - (a) nobody was ignorant about Hitler's feelings about the Jews and (b) there is no such thing as a perfect, hermetic seal of information, even in a totalitarian society. The Poles for sure knew about the death camps. A considerable number of Germans definitely in general often did know about mass killings of Jews - after all, millions of Germans served in the armed forces, which participated in the holocaust and brought information home. In cases, massacres of Jewish people took place in the city streets or in poorly hidden locations, particularly in the early days. What to do about it is a different question; moreover, a large number of committed Nazis were opposed to a holocaust but in favour of measures like compulsory sterilisation. Some people were intentionally kept in the dark or intimidated, even inside the German political machinery, in order to ensure complicity or silence. Don't forget that most of the holocaust took place outside Germany and thus gave ordinary people in Germany to try to lie to themselves or remain wilfully ignorant. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Apr 20, 2015 |
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Apr 20, 2015 10:42
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I should be clear - although I think Hitler's rhetoric, writing, and personal biography support the view that Hitler always had a malicious intent towards the Jews from the early days, I don't think they should be taken to support the view that Germans definitely should have seen the holocaust itself coming. But it does mean you don't have the right to be surprised about bad treatment of Jews, even if you can be surprised by the scale and horror of the holocaust. The other major problem, of course, is that people lie/give wrong information about this stuff, whether they realise it or not. It is very hard to be confident about whether interview sources of the holocaust - including victims - are accurate. You just have to look at the Demjanjuk trial to see how crazy the memory of the holocaust can be even some time after the events for everyone involved. To put it another way - go looking for an Austrian who was alive in the 40's and ask them how many of them fondly called Austria Ostmark. Apparently not a one, conveniently! Disinterested fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Apr 20, 2015 |
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Apr 20, 2015 11:48
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JaucheCharly posted:It's a long way from Mein Kampf (that only a few people read completely, and not found that it was utter bullshit) and the milestones that Sunshine outlined. I mean, do you take political banter at face value? Apparently not even enough jews did. I think I just made the distinction you seem to be inviting me to make. Although I think the point about Mein Kampf is that it wasn't actually just 'banter' - not that everyone was to know that! In any event, my point is simply that nobody has the right to claim that the brutal persecution of the Jews came out of the head of Zeus. The surprise was just how bad it was. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 12:34 on Apr 20, 2015 |
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Apr 20, 2015 12:32
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JaucheCharly posted:I don't think that this is just a conversation between us two here. What I said wasn't covered in the longer post, but what Koba asked. You post that the whole thing was plain to see and the only question was how bad, and I add that it wasn't a step from 0 to 100 as his post suggests. Ya true enough.
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Apr 20, 2015 12:49
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Cyrano4747 posted:The one thing I would add to all of what he said is to emphasize that you have to recognize how much easier it is to spot ill portents through the 20/20 hindsight of knowing where all this bad poo poo leads. Even the Jewish community and its leaders thought that this was just another moment in history where things would get temporarily really lovely, maybe for as long as a few decades, and then return to the status quo. Pre-Holocaust European Jews were a population that had survived hundreds of eras of persecution, eviction, ghettoization, pogroms, etc. since the middle ages. The historical lesson that many had learned was that in the face of someone like Hitler or Karl Leuger (who most people figured Hitler was a carbon copy of) you were best served by hunkering down, keeping within the community, supporting each other as best you can, and just generally weathering the storm. Victor Klemperer reported that occasionally Germans would approach him and say things like 'don't let the bastards get you down, I'm sure it will be over soon, the fools can't last much longer' etc.
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Apr 20, 2015 15:50
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Kanine posted:So apparently the United States would actually ship German POWs over the Atlantic all the way to the United States to camps in the mainland US? Why didn't they just keep the German prisoners in camps in Europe once they'd been captured and not go to all that trouble? The great American tradition of shipping free labour across the Atlantic?
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Apr 21, 2015 10:21
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GlyphGryph posted:I was... I was mostly talking about the actual bombing proposals that were made, which were centered around bombing the tracks leading to the camp rather than the gas chambers themselves. Bombing railways is an exercise in futility, they are replaced overnight. It's only useful as a tactic for the immediate short term benefit of interrupting communications as part of an offensive.
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Apr 22, 2015 09:49
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At best Nazi generals seem more or less to have tried to skirt around the worst of the holocaust like Guderian, but if you look at what Rundstedt and Reichenau were doing, there can be no illusions.
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Apr 27, 2015 22:55
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Although the substance abuse of Hitler and Goering did contribute to their problems as human beings.
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May 4, 2015 14:30
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Hitler had ulcers, was severely stressed and also tried to maintain an impossible schedule. He was demented and running on fumes and drugs in the end.
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May 4, 2015 14:54
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Ensign Expendable posted:I am sure that Ferdinand Porsche's works were influenced by a large amount of some manner of substance or substances. I think in the context of the war effort the fact that Porsche was continuing to draw breath was a substance abuse problem for the Reich.
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May 5, 2015 12:42
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moths posted:Something I've always wondered about is why weird occult paranormal stuff is so persistently attached to Nazis in pop culture. This is actually a really messy subject. A lot of Nazis were very strongly observant Christians - a very great proportion of the SS, for example, were strongly Roman Catholic. That was certainly the religious background of a strong part of the Nazi movement (though many were also Lutherans). And, indeed, the Nazis did rely on Church support in their early years. On the other hand, many saw the Church as corrupt, flimsy, and not rooted in the traditions of the race. And when you consider that Nazism is principally a racial ideology (as opposed to say, nationalist) that's really your way of gripping on to how Nazis come to be fascinated in a sort of false version of Nordic culture - they are looking for a pure, 'Aryan' religion and folk custom before the influences of civilization. So the endgame of Nazism in some way did involve the re-awakening of Germanic folk customs and religion. But I think you have to grip very firmly on the idea that there was no fully coherent Nazi ideology or take on religion - pagan or otherwise.
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May 5, 2015 15:02
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Obdicut posted:Do you have any source and figures for this? It's a pretty startling claim, given both the anticlericalism of the SS and the specific hostility of the sicherheitsdienst towards Catholicism. Why would have expected wiki to deliver so hard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_Nazi_Germany#Catholic_adaptation_to_Nazism These article is pretty comprehensive. I can't dig out the stat at the moment but I believe Catholics were over-represented in the higher echelons of the Nazi party including the SS, although to advance further and deeper you had to begin to renounce elements of your faith. On the other hand, the average voter for the Nazi party was more likely to be protestant. I think I over-state my case somewhat by claiming these people were observant (they were often strongly religious, from a Catholic cultural background, but were also anti-clerical). I don't think that many of the SS actually ever bought the paganism, at least that's the impression I always got from interview footage of SS members.
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May 5, 2015 15:27
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Obdicut posted:First, I don't accept Wiki as a source for any contentious claims, second, I'm asking particularly about your claim of high representation in the SS> I'm not using the Wiki as a source for a contentious claim, merely saying it's a fairly comprehensive article on the whole subject. quote:You appear to be combine wildly different time frames, talking about the SS and 'voters' at the same time. The SS was also not a 'higher echelon of the Nazi party'. Instead of operating off of your remembrances, could you find an actual text backing up anything you're saying? What time period are you even talking about, the original SS? The Waffen SS included--with the later enforced SS battalions? I don't have the text available. I'm searching now, I'll get back to you. quote:What paganism are you talking about? The SS was specifically monotheistic. Paganism=/=polytheism, even though the two often go together. I'm not sure what things like the Thule Society are if not 'neopaganism' of some description.
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May 5, 2015 15:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:Did you actually read the links you posted? They speak pretty directly to the anticlericism of the nazis. Also I think you are confusing the political relationship between the nazi state and the papacy with an actual affinity for Catholicism on the part of the nazis. Yes, I know, and I didn't anywhere make a claim that the Nazis weren't anti-clerical. I just made a lovely post.
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May 5, 2015 15:45
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Obdicut posted:Why are you talking about the Thule society? It was dissolved in 1925. Obviously the SS weren't signing up for it. Where do you get the idea that paganism was being promulgated in any serious way? In the context of the Thule society I am not talking about the SS. But that and elements of Hitler's occultism strongly leaned on pagan motifs and rituals. I definitely made a bad post, and I need to keep digging to see if I can find where I produced this idea from.
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May 5, 2015 15:57
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Reviews of six recent books on the concentration camps by Richard Evans http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jul/09/concentration-camps-anatomy-hell/
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Jun 23, 2015 20:19
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Mass mobilisation and war also generates enormous officer demand.
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Jun 24, 2015 23:29
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Last Buffalo posted:Isn't that the root of the functionalist argument for the holocaust? Basically, a system which promoted based on enthusiastic action and fanaticism towards the stated goals of a new, pure world encouraged all the lower officers to commit the mass scale of murders that occurred. The goals were vague enough, and the culture cruel enough, that the violence was born out of people mostly looking to please their bosses and get promoted. You're basically describing 'moving toward the fuhrer', though I'm not sure it's quite right to call it functionalist. Kershaw touches on it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00546wh
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Jun 25, 2015 19:12
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Maybe the most mad thing about him is he kept it secret for so long
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Jul 1, 2015 20:04
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