Ask me/us About Nazi Germany

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Ask me/us About Nazi Germany

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

Slavvy posted:

I am absolutely convinced that the nazi party, and particularly hitler, would not have been possible in a world with internet forums and facebook as a sort of safety valve.

Might be. I think that Hitler would have totally been a E/N poster and a Pet Islander. And I've been thinking about others also. If ancient philosphers had had internet, they would probably have just wasted their time on procrastination instead doing anything productive. Napoleon would just have played Total War and Paradox games. Renaissance masters would just have photoshopped art before internet.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2013 11:21

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 08:43

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

meat sweats posted:

Do you think tagging 'I'm not going to contribute to the perpetuation of the "clean Wehrmacht" myth' on the front of regurgitating the very definition of the clean Wehrmacht myth makes it OK?

I wish these threads were better policed to keep the military fetishists out. It's not that you guys are Nazi apologists per se, it's just that you've bought into this general notion of ideologically and morally neutral armed forces that you think you can admire "just" for their honorable fighting of a war, as if wars just happen divorced from context. The war was fought for the Nazi domination of Eurasia. Whether any individual soldier personally killed a Jew (or any of the other victimized groups) doesn't matter -- the entirety of his life from 1939 to 1945 was devoted to one and only one goal, which was establishing the conditions by which the Jews, Slavs, etc. could be killed.

There is a problem when people who have the superior knowledge of tank repair manuals and no moral sense get to take over the discussion of the Nazi period, and the problem is it leads to attitudes like "the 'actual armed forces' are morally blameless because soldiers just follow orders."

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. The distinction of the "regular army" from the SS is not only garbage in terms of what it's trying to imply about Holocaust guilt, it's also, ultimately, an attempt to distract attention from the fact that the entire German military apparatus was guilty of war crimes, first and most notably starting the deadliest war in human history in the first place, whether they were involved in the genocide or not.

You should ease on the social justice warrioring. Do you think that German military apparatus had only volunteers in it? Some random draftee didn't start any wars or build concentration camps.

# ¿ May 8, 2014 02:51

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

Gough Suppressant posted:

Opposing the romanticization of the Wehrmacht: Social Justice Warrioring.

There's a difference between opposing the romanticization of the Wehrmacht, and saying every draftee was devoting the entirety of his life from 1939 to 1945 to one and only one goal, which was establishing the conditions by which the Jews, Slavs, etc. could be killed.

# ¿ May 8, 2014 03:38

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

Wehrmacht did massive amount of war crimes. But did every member in Wehrmacht do warcrimes?

Raskolnikov38 posted:

Well no, most soldiers in the Wehrmacht didn't think they were fighting for that despite the fact that they were fighting for that by virtue of being in the armed forces of Nazi Germany.

E: or to put it another way, no not every German soldier in WW2 was literally Hitler. But they were fighting for Hitler and his vision and that's pretty bad.

Edit: Ok, answered. What happened to draftees that didn't want to serve in armed forces, farms or factories? I know that no one was shot for not killing civilians or prisoners, they just found some other soldiers to do it. But what happened to people that didn't want to help in lesser ways? I haven't read anything about it.

Hogge Wild fucked around with this message at 04:01 on May 8, 2014

# ¿ May 8, 2014 03:48

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

Ensign Expendable posted:

I'm pretty sure some people did get shot for not shooting civilians.

Didn't someone post in the MilHist thread that there aren't any evidence for this?

# ¿ May 8, 2014 04:08

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

Enigma89 posted:

Are you familiar with anything regarding copper/nickel production in wartime Germany. I was midway through a book that was covering this subject but left it on a plane and for the life of me I cannot remember the book title. The book talked about how the German war situation was hopeless on an economic/industrial aspect from the get-go.

I do know that this was a big reason why the Luftwaffe had such big issues with the their jet engines having such a short lifespan.

Sorry if this question is too specific about about the military.

Also, were the British at all considering terms if Hitler did not stop advancing into Dunkirk?

Thanks

There's a Military History thread, where people might know the answers: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3585027.

# ¿ May 8, 2014 09:41

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

Seven Hundred Bee posted:

A really great book on the last days of Nazi Germany is Ian Kershaw's "The End." He's one of the first scholars to explore what is probably a pretty key question: why did Nazi Germany fight to the bitter end, something that's surprisingly unique in modern warfare? And how was the state able to function (and function at a high level) when its borders had fallen and much of its territory was under control of the Allies?

One of my favorite examples of Nazi... compartmentalization (I guess you could call it) comes from the Berlin University system. In the last weeks of the war - when Germany was surrounded, the Russians were encircling Berlin and the Americans and British had defeated the Germans in the west - university administrators were meeting to award assistantships to foreign students and inviting them to attend campus. As if the university was going to have Fall classes, business as usual.

Sounds like an interesting book, I'll have to add it to my reading list.

# ¿ May 8, 2014 13:54

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

Seek help for yourself meat sweats.

# ¿ May 8, 2014 19:44

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

What did Nazi Germany usually do to conscientious objectors who refused mandatory conscription? How many were executed?

# ¿ May 8, 2014 19:46

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

He would have been the star of E/N.

# ¿ May 9, 2014 12:23

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

Mr. Sunshine posted:

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)

# ¿ May 11, 2014 21:38

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

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?

From what I've gathered in this thread, the invasion of the Soviet Union closed the book on the Nazis and the US joining in was the nail in the coffin, so was it really that big of a deal that all that German manpower, time, and material was going towards the genocide?

Nazis probably lost when UK declared war. And they lost for certain when they invaded USSR.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2014 22:14

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

Ensign Expendable posted:

There is a Russian study on ammunition storage I need to find, but the jist of it is that even 30 year old shells don't work quite as well as they should, and the downright antique North Korean ammunition is probably at way under the projected maximum range. That is if the batteries will even fire.

Do they have just normal field artillery stuff, or do they also have heavier, stationary pieces with longer range?

# ¿ May 15, 2015 18:43

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

Fish of hemp posted:

Maybe I have some really wrong ideas, but did nazi officials really rise ranks incredibly quickly? I mean whenever I've read about nazi officers their career seems to be "well I decided to join the party for poo poo and giggles in M�nich 1934 and by 1936 I was an SS-colonel commanding some 1000 men". Was this normal or have I just read biographies of really good military men?

Think of it like a Feudal Kingdom. If the King sees you doing something that proves your loyalty, you'll get a bigger fief and a new title, even if you're incompetent in every other way.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2015 22:45

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

edit: disregard, i cant read

# ¿ Jun 25, 2015 17:56

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 08:43

Hogge Wild: Aug 21, 2012; by FactsAreUseless; Pillbug

Kazak_Hstan posted:

Welp that was 500 some pages of misplaced I'd prefer my bogus nazi history to involve wonder weapons, the occult, and ancient pagan rituals.

Wages of Destruction is legit, right?

Also, I once read a book by Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, titled White Shark. It is about a half man half shark hybrid with razor sharp metal teeth that was engineered by the nazis at the end of the war. It wakes up in a crate at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the late eighties and swims to the New England shore, where it walks onto land (it has legs), and starts killing people. Someone eventually shoots it. Also there is a teenage love subplot that just gets left hanging. Do they gently caress?! I'd like to know. It's basically Jaws, except if the shark could walk on land and was also a nazi.

Can any of the scholars in this thread confirm and / or deny that the Nazis had or attempted to have such a weapon, also if they had lots of them could it have affected the outcome of the war?

Boss Hitler had a weaponized shark, Megabite, but it was created after he had won the war:

# ¿ Jun 29, 2015 06:38

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Ask me/us About Nazi Germany