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How much do you know about the post-war social impact of de-nazification? Specifically, how did the post-war generation of Germans deal with their skeletons in their parents closet? Earlier on you mentioned that the whole de-nazification system was pretty loose, did Germans self-govern themselves into dealing with their pasts? Don't worry if this is a little out of the realm, I understand that I'm asking about something to do with more than just the party.
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Apr 2, 2013 08:58
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WAMPA_STOMPA posted:I had a grandfather who was drafted by the Nazis. He was in the Hungarian Second Army. I never heard the story from him, as he died when I was young, but apparently he was at Stalingrad and the army basically melted around him. He decided to walk back to Budapest, which almost killed him and damaged his memory somehow. He said ~this country blows~ and peaced off to NYC with his wife and his mother-in-law to become a high-end florist. Can anyone tell me what kind of stuff might have happened to him and his army group at Stalingrad? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Uranus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Little_Saturn He was in an undersupplied and undertrained army that was at the spearpoint of an immense Soviet offensive. On the flanks of the German 6th army fighting in Stalingrad, there were the Romanian 4th and 3rd armies, the Italian 8th army, and finally your Grandpa's Hungarian 2nd. Here's a map with their general dispositions. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/German_Summer_Offensive%2C_24_July-18_November.PNG Basically, when the Soviets decide to finish the battle of Stalingrad, they ignored the 6th army that was entrenched in the city. Instead, they massed an enormous amount of supplies and men along the flanks of Stalingrad, and then unleashed this gigantic attack on the German-allied armies guarding the flank. The first stages of these attacks were directed at the Romanians, who get blown to pieces and pushed away from the city's flanks. They're annihilated. 300,000 men are encircled by the Soviets. At this point, your grandpa is still fine and his formation are still fine, as he's on the far edge of that operation. However, Uranus was planned in tandem with a further attack, Saturn, which was directed towards the axis armies still on the Don to the west of Stalingrad. Those were the Hungarians and the Italians. A month after the Red Army charged across the Volga, they do the same, but along the Don. There is no chance, neither the Hungarian nor Italian army possess the hardware to fight the Soviets, or the transport even escape. There are mass encirclements and total chaos, and both armies are obliterated. On the ground, this would have been terrifying as all hell. The Soviets open up their attack with a serious artillery barrage. As in, shells are saved up for weeks beforehand and an entire front's worth of artillery is carted around until the attack. This will go on for an hour, long enough that snow covered fields are blasted into muddy craters. Then the ground attack comes, and it's an entire division bearing down on the battered frontline. The attack is spearheaded by the Soviet armour, and nothing the Hungarians have will penetrate a T-34 or a KV-1. The Soviet infantry advance alongside them, armed with sub-machine guns, the whole mass is a deadly noisy avalanche of flesh and steel, shouting and shooting and rumbling as they approach. If you're a frontline soldier put up against this, you're hosed. I don't know what your grandpa did in the army, but it wasn't safe in the rear echelons either. This whole time there is Soviet artillery sighted towards the back lines, intended to catch retreating soldiers and also maim the cooks and mechanics. When the frontlines buckle, the Soviets don't stop either, so all those men and tanks are continuing to bear down through the entire army shooting as they go. So no matter where you were, there was death and chaos. Your grandpa was seriously a lucky one, over 80% of that army were taken as casualties during that one battle. I'd wager his memory problems might have been caused by some poo poo going down during the actual battle, and him only noticing during the way back. Yeah, so tl;dr it would have really sucked to be your grandpa back then, but I guess he was lucky to have gotten out of it alive at all. I'm sorry that he passed away before you could really talk to him about it. The story of the Eastern front is never a good one, but I think for the minor nations involved there, it was especially terrible. We don't get to hear much about their stories, and that's awful because the world really needs more stories about terrible wars. Edit: This question might have been better asked in the military history thread, unless you are specifically asking about atrocities? The Hungarians were quite complicit in their own deportations of the Jews and the Roma, but I don't know much about their actions on the front. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Apr 7, 2013 |
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Apr 7, 2013 08:48
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MN-Ghost posted:I have a question. Why did Hitler break the non-aggression pact with Russia and invade them before securing the western front by forcing Britain into surrender? I was taught that being forced to fight on two front between France and Russia was one of the biggest reason Germany lost WWI. So given that Hitler should have already learned this lesson, this always seemed to me to be a monumentally dumb move. The Battle of Britain was a defeat for Germany, but Britain was an impotent threat to the continent. There was nothing Hitler could have ordered that would force Britain to surrender, nor anything to accomplish for Germany from the Mediterranean. At the same time, Britain could be tied up with second-rate garrisons and recovering troops posted in Western Europe without any difficulty. Considering the scale of the Great Patriotic War, the piddling numbers of the Afrika Korps and the Atlantic wall were just a drop in the bucket.
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May 2, 2013 19:02
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Devour posted:Because Hitler really would've won those two fronts if the U.S. didn't get involved in both theatres of WW2 after Japan attacked pearl harbor. At the time Hitler launched Barbarossa, Britain was literally a sitting duck that could barely do anything. Yes, the Germans had the problems with the winters on the eastern front, but they still would've crushed the Soviet Union if the U.S. wasn't invading from the west & the south. Are you writing a paper for socials class?
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May 4, 2013 08:22
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Devour posted:No it's not a joke. Without the U.S. in the Europeon theatre, it was basically Britain & the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany and its allies. Again, Britain did not have the resources nor the manpower to invade Nazi-occupied france/the Atlantic wall without the support of the U.S. militarily or economically. Meanwhile, Nazi Germany has already conquered Europe & North Africa, effectively taking control of the resources/raw minerals in these occupied territories. American military was not integral to winning WWII. However, it was integral to establishment of an anti-communist bloc in Western Europe. By 1942, the war had been won at Stalingrad. The American contribution to the war at that point was the occupation of French North Africa. The invasion of France took place long after the war was decided. During Overlord, the Soviets were destroying entire armies in Bagration. That was the point when the Western Front became a relevant article for the German military. Before then, the German investment in fighting the Western Allies amounted to second-rate garrisons and a small contingent of regulars. They were not guarding themselves against the Americans either, since there was a whole year and a half between the fall of France and Pearl. In the future, please elaborate any arguments you have instead of trying to pass yourself off as knowledgable.
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May 5, 2013 02:05
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I'm not even getting into the specifics of how badly trained/equipped the Red Army was, or how stupid Stalin was with his generals.
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One problem I've always had with the "Hitler conquers Moscow" scenarios is how Moscow is just assumed captured because the Germans have more tanks around. Wouldn't it be extremely difficult and time consuming to capture a huge city like that? Stalingrad was never fully occupied over 6 months of fighting, and it was a smaller city. Is there any reason to consider Moscow to be an "easier" city to fight in?
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Feb 9, 2014 04:44
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:What were the resources of the SU like on the Barbarossa front (for want of a term) You should try not to think of real life things in video game terms. For one, the Nazis are not rearming any Soviet soldiers and sending them back to fight their own country, because that's a clusterfuck. Who is going to lead them? Who is going to supply them? What weapons are they even going to use? How will the Germans manage them at all? There's a million problems here. I don't understand your section metaphor. I think you may be thinking in RTS terms where resources just spill out of land and immediately enter a national stockpile, but that isn't how logistics work.
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Feb 11, 2014 08:21
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:For the love of god, I was using over simplistic terms to try and explain something I didn't understand.. In a thread called "ask me about Nazi Germany" I'm not trying to belittle you, it's legitimately difficult to answer your question because you're using self-admitted over-simplistic terms to describe complicated scenarios. It's almost unrecognizable as real life. The biggest problem you have is assuming that captured Soviets are going to fight for Germany to a man, or even a reasonable proportion. Stalin and communism was not so hated that these men would give up the relative safety of captivity (Before being starved as sub-humans) for a chance to die for Hitler. Not that the Germans even wanted them! I blew through a few reasons why not, but I'll say again that trying to run a foreign military is a clusterfuck. The Soviets aren't going to speak German, and they aren't trained to act within the German army. Forgetting the hideous supply situation of the Pre-Barbarossa Red Army, they have Soviet made weapons and ammunition that the Germans don't have stocks from. Trying to supply them with captured ammunition would be a waste of resources that would be better spent on actually useful formations. The Red Army was so ineffective in Summer 1941 I can't even imagine it operating under German command with personnel from a thousand surrendered units. The other problem is that you are pitting areas against other areas, which doesn't apply to the real world. Assuming that your Soviet traitors are even useful, why would a unit made in the Ukraine help in the fight against Moscow? Front-line forces do not combine as they take territory into an ultra-dense sphere to conquer Moscow, they actually spread out cover the new area that they occupy. If a final fight occured where the Nazis literally surrounded Moscow and had 50% of the Soviet army on their side, and the Soviets had stuffed 3 million soldiers in Moscow proper, they would all get bombed to poo poo because it's really easy to kill dense armies without taking your own casualties.
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Feb 11, 2014 17:59
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:I wasn't saying genocide is the logical consequence of the militaristic nation-state, I am saying the desire for conquest and control is. This is because nations constantly feel like they are being encroached on by their enemies, they are aware that power is constantly slipping away from them. I think where some people might go wrong is assuming the Nazis were trying to create an empire based on a foundation of unshakeable strength, but what the feeling that goes into military aggression is generally "we have to do it to them before they do it to us". A nation has to create additional slippery ground for themselves so that they have maneuvering room. It's based out of fear. You've lost everybody. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum#World_War_II Here is an informative page in which "Greater Germany" is discussed. It's a little sickening and confusing to see somebody try to whitewash Nazi Germany in order to feed their post-colonial guilt complex. Here's why Napoleon isn't accused of genocide: he never advocated it. And he never created an entire state apparatus to shuttle innocent people into death camps. Genocide was Hitler's goal, as well as creating Lebensraum. The two went hand-in-hand in retarded matrimony, because the concepts behind Nazi Germany were a singularity of hatred and idiocy that escape all rational thought. Do you somehow think the Holocaust was just some collateral damage over the course of WWII? 10 million people weren't just hustled around in trains and -oh no!- they fell into a pit filled with Zyklon B gas meant for the ostfront! This train was meant for Stalingrad! Why's it in Auschwitz? Pseudo-intellectual word vomit doesn't make your views poignant or true. I'm glad your expertise on geopolitics and political science enable you to claim that "It wasn't about the Jews, it was about Greater Germany". quote:We make too much of this racist angle. And the ones who make the racist angle the most well known are plenty racist themselves (Jews/Israelis). "Who are the real racists here?  "Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 23:49 on May 9, 2014 |
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May 9, 2014 23:46
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Von Humboldt posted:Could you elaborate on the Chosen People remark? And you're just saying that the numbers for the Holocaust are maybe a little off, due to poor records, and that does not mitigate the tragedy or number of people murdered, right? He's opening the ducts of his own metaphorical gas chamber
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May 10, 2014 01:14
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MrBling posted:Was there any ever chance of Spain entering WW2 after Germany helped Franco win his civil war? Surely the Allies must have been a bit wary of it happening, even if Germany seemingly mostly helped out Franco to take focus away from themselves and what they were doing. Hitler and Franco had a lot of personal animosity between them, and neither shared much of the same ambitions on the geopolitical scale. Franco was politically isolated before the Spanish civil war, and basically stumbled onto a leadership role after two of his Nationalist leaders died in accidents. He was very much placated with his hold on Spain, and the Blue Division was really just a way of acknowledging the German support he received during the Civil War, and a continuation of his "duty" to fight socialists. The Civil War was still in recent memory, and the Spanish economy was barely afloat through trade with both Allied and Axis. The forces behind the War lacked any sort of expansionist or revanchist element and the Nationalists were mainly traditionalists who were galvanised by "household" issues rather than outside politics. There wasn't much reason for Franco to accede to Hitler's demands. Had Franco joined the war, Gibraltar would probably have been captured quickly enough, but Spain's 5000km coastline now needs to be defended. The Spanish army and air force is not up to snuff, and the Germans need to invest themselves in at least the entire Northern coastline. The Navy is nonexistent, and Germany can't even help there. The Catalan/Basque/Galician Republican elements are still simmering. It's too complicated and alt-histy to really discuss, but it's an iffy scenario, and sees no gain for the Spanish. Franco sensibly refused Hitler, was called a Jew, never touched the War, and lived on for 3 decades. And nobody did a thing.
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May 10, 2014 20:06
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Kopijeger posted:That statement makes little sense unless all the Heer formations were of uniform quality, which I doubt they were. Which SS units were on par with which Heer counterparts? A few SS divisions were lavished upon by Hitler, and received all sorts of military hardware at the expense of the regular army. They were also organized as Panzer divisions, which obviously gave them more firepower than an average infantry division. These were the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 5th SS divisions. They were criticized for being wasteful with their equipment and suicidally defiant, refusing to retreat and taking unnecessary casualties. They are all heavily linked with numerous atrocities and started out as volunteer organizations. The 9th and 10th were drawn from late-war conscripts with personnel from the early divisions. German writer Gunther Grass was an AA gunner in the 10th. They aren't as connected to war crimes, although they might not be documented. They also spent less time fighting on Soviet soil, which might have had something to do with it. The 12th was made up mostly of underage Hitler Youth, and they were obliterated by their own fanaticism shortly after D-Day. 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.
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May 15, 2014 17:50
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OctaviusBeaver posted:This is absurd. Germany had a population of ~80 million people in 1939. The US currently has a population of ~320 million with a GDP of ~$16 trillion. Your number would put the average German in 1939 as being more productive than the average American in 2014, even though the average German in 1939 was already less productive than the average American in 1939. Germany has a GDP of less than $4 trillion today. There is no way this number could be even close to correct. I don't have any evidence for the particular 6 trillion dollar figure, but you're confused on what GDP is. GDP does not measure production, it measures the market value of products. It's not unreasonable to think that the average German in 1939 is producing goods worth more than a modern American. The depression is still being felt, the rest of the world is barely industrialized, and Germany is on the tail end of unsustainable rearmament.
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May 28, 2014 23:59
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I don't have any evidence for the particular 6 trillion dollar figure, but you're confused on what GDP is. OctaviusBeaver posted:You are arguing that the Germany of 1939 had a GDP almost twice that of Germany in 2014. Think about that for a second. The estimate was wrong. Your reasoning was also wrong.
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May 30, 2014 01:39
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It is neither scandalous nor noteworthy for a Hitler apologist to be a crazy person who spends a lot of time and effort glorifying Hitler.
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Jan 3, 2015 13:43
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Patrick Spens posted:Serious question. How was the highest survival rate not Britan? Or did you mean on the continent? Under Axis control? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Jewish There's a list. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 00:33 on May 8, 2015 |
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May 8, 2015 00:26
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