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Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Cessna posted:

I can think of maybe a handful of things that they made that were passably decent designs when evaluated strictly from an engineering perspective, but even these only brought more evil to the world. ... And when you name one "good" Nazi design the Allies came up with dozens of better designs to defeat it.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you in general, but

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrycan

Edit: ...And I'm too late again.

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Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010
I would also assume a big part of stug vs panzer effectiveness was also due to defensive rather than offensive use?

When you're no longer trying to exploit breakthroughs for a grand encirclement on your way to Moscow, you probably don need gun traverse as much.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010
I've read a few reports that Austro-Hungarian troops supposedly used exploding bullets in Serbia in WW1. A quick google turned up this diagram:

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010
The Byzantines did! :science:

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Lawman 0 posted:

Could the central powers done anything after the capitulation of Russia in ww1 to change the outcome of the war?

Thinking about this has led me to a question of my own: if the Central Powers had had enough foresight to consider the war unwinnable by that time, could they have used a magnanimous treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a diplomatic signal for better peace terms for themselves later on?

Though I think it would have taken several dozen gay black generals, diplomats and statesmen to even get to that point.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Comstar posted:

Youtube is now far surpassing made for TV documentaries.

It's already been a while since you made that post, and I have to fully agree. However, that is not because I think random youtubers produce quality content. It's because there's a ton of absolutely stellar lectures and discussions by professional historians freely available on Youtube. If you know who the leading names in whichever field or time period that interests you are, Youtube is a great way to get content that's far, far more in-depth than anything you will get even from the best made TV documentaries. You can get unadulterated Glantz, Browning, Tooze, Kotkin, etc., all just a search away.

Trin Tragula posted:

The problem here is, by the time Brest-Litovsk is being negotiated, you've got on the one hand Woodrow Wilson let out of his box and banging on about the Fourteen Points and self-determination; and on the other you have Georges Clemenceau, about whom it is deeply unfair to say he was the French Churchill, because if you're going to put it like that you should say Churchill is the English Clemenceau. Neither of them are even remotely interested in buying gay black Hindenburg and Ludendorff's KK-Brot and nail statues.

Even if you want to handwave some sensible Germans into power, you also have to handwave in a Joseph Caillaux premiership in France after the failure of the Nivelle offensive. Then, and only then, might you actually get somewhere with peace talks.

Case in point: A while ago, I wondered about the relation of the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles. Just now, I had my mind completely blown by a lecture by Adam Tooze that completely puts a new light on Brest-Litovsk for me. Maybe it won't be quite as revelatory for the rest of you, but I still very much want to share it, because it's absolutely fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDlRKl3XGoM

And yesterday, I watched a tremendously entertaining Q&A session between Slavoj Zizek and Stephen Kotkin about the first part of his Stalin trilogy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm7mb9eHg24

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Uncle Enzo posted:

Stalin: A Magnificent Journey
Stalin 2: Electric Gulag-oo
Stalin 3: Return Of Hitler

The Fellow Traveller of Lenin
The Two Powers
The Return of the Chairman

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Tomn posted:

Hey, can anybody recommend any WW2 memoirs from people serving on carrier aircraft maintenance crews? Also in general memoirs from the odd sides of war - was reading "Naples '44 - An intelligence officer in the Italian labyrinth" by Norman Lewis and it feels like there's a lot to look into in terms of daily life in an army outside of the front lines and command tents.

Maybe not quite what you're thinking of, but you could try Exploding Star by Fritz Molden. Molden was a member of the Austrian resistance, and went from being assigned to a penal battalion to working for Allied intelligence undercover, traveling between Italy, Austria and Switzerland. He became a major newspaper publisher after the war, and was married to Allan Dulles' daughter for a time.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Cyrano4747 posted:

What the gently caress McCarthy?

I'm not sure if this was linked in this thread or a previous one, but McCarthy wasn't the only American who's Hot for Peiper.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/us/joachim-peiper-nazi-photo-apology.html

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Cessna posted:

I'll also say that FOR IT'S TIME the movie Zulu was pretty decent. Every time a British character says something derogatory towards the Zulus they are told to shut up by their peers or superiors.

It's been a while since I watched it, and I may be misremembering some bits, but there was a part in the audio commentary, I believe, where they talked about that during the shooting of Zulu, the South African government was ramping up Apartheid and said they couldn't pay their African extras as much as they had originally agreed to with them. They made up the difference by giving them cattle instead.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

poisonpill posted:

Hey history guys, I've been told this thread is the place to ask about military history. I'd like some recommendations on the operational and strategic thinking and military / political footholds of the Cold War. I've read Command and Control, the Dead Hand, a bunch of stuff about Vietnam and the CIA. I'd like to know more about operations in Latin America, the balance of power, and especially how politics shaped and opened up following the collapse of the Soviet Union. If this is too broad of a question, I'll take just good stories and well-regarded general non-fiction. I'm just looking to shore up my knowledge in this area, not write a paper or anything.

This may not be exactly what you have in mind, but since you haven't had many takers so far: a good starting point for the early Cold War would be looking up George Kennan and the Long Telegram.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Polyakov posted:

They did not want to have to invade Japan and had absolutely no way of knowing what was going on in Japanese governmental circles. By any logic Japan should have surrendered a dozen battles earlier, same with Germany, these were not rational regimes. I think attempting to end the war by any means neccesary is absolutely the best alternative that the Allies had and the atomic bombing was a major component of that.

Just a minor point here, thanks to the bombing of the Japanese homeland, a lot of the landlines were out of commission and the Japanese had to communicate by radio - the encryption of which had already been broken, so the Americans weren't completely clueless as to what decisions the Japanese leadership was making.

One thing that I've not seen mentioned is that the Japanese had plans in place to murder everyone in their POW camps if the fighting got close to them.

And if they hadn't surrendered when they did, I believe the US was producing enough fissile material to produce about one new bomb per week, unless I'm misremembering.

Is there a good study about the radicalization of the Japanese military? They pretty much conducted themselves by international standards in the Russo-Japanese war and WW1, how did they go from there to bayonet drills on live bodies?

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Raenir Salazar posted:

Interestingly enough, my college friend wrote for his final an essay on this topic, and as it turns out still exists in my hard drive on the cloud!

If you're interested I could ask him for permission to either post it or dm it to you.

I could also try to reread it and summarize the key points.

:justpost:

A summary would be much appreciated, and probably not just by me.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

I don't know of any studies, but the short answer is that fascism and militarism is a hell of a drug combo.

Sure, and I don't know much about Japanese political developments before WW2, but they didn't have a single Mussolini or Hitler figure, so just saying 'fascism' doesn't provide a meaningful enough picture. I'm not sure if you can simply transpose European inter-war political ideologies and developments onto Japan and arrive at a conclusion that clarifies more than it obfuscates.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Fuschia tude posted:

Whoa, I'd never heard of this Hollywood-esque sequence of events. There must be a thousand weird one-off situations like this in every war, only a small fraction of which ever got recorded.

If that's news to you, you probably also haven't heard about the Battle of Castle Itter or Operation Cowboy.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Cyrano4747 posted:

German POW camps were divided both by service and by rank. Each service administered camps for their opposite numbers - Luftwaffe ran camps for downed aircrews, Wehrmacht ran camps for captured soldiers, and the Navy even had a single camp for captured foreign naval personnel. Within that you (generally) had separate camps for officers and enlisted men. This could be an entirely separate camp, or it could be an officers sub-section of a single camp.

The russians were treated brutally because they were considered sub-human. The Geneva convention never really applied on the Eastern Front.

This is from a few pages back, but here's a first-hand account from STALAG 3B that really hits home how Russian and U.S. prisoners were treated differently. It starts when an American news crew in Moscow in the 80s is approached by an old Russian.

https://youtu.be/oGwZ0pakhHE

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Oysters Autobio posted:

I'm trying to find some new reading about military history in angles that I haven't had more exposure to (being exposed at a younger age to military history being relegated to My Tank is War levels of "pew pew cool battles!!11"), but I'm having trouble articulating the exact style or focus.

I know this is veering maybe a bit out of the domain of history, but considering a lot of history is based off primary sources of war records and the like (written by officials themselves to describe the war, or memoirs later written by those seeking to justify their actions), are there any good historical works that take a more skeptical view of this historicity?

The Myth of the Eastern Front will give you good coverage regarding the about-face of the Soviets rapidly turning from allies into the next enemy in the early Cold War, and the accompanying "rehabilitation" of the Germans.

Other than that, the closest thing I'm aware of to what you're looking for may be The Bitter Road to Freedom by William Hitchcock, with covers how ambiguous and violent the interactions of the Allied militaries and the civilian populations of the liberated countries were, as the war was being fought around them. Being received with cheering, waving and flowers very much seems to have been an exception or outright post-war myth.

https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45875/hilton-hitchcock-bitter-road-freedom-new-history-liberation-europe

Maxwell's lecture is in the middle of this video, but the entirety is worth watching.

https://youtu.be/79KU997m9o4

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010
I read once that all the experts the U.S. had on French Indochina, who had worked with the resistance against the Japanese, got sacked during McCarthyism for their 'communist sympathies'. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

aphid_licker posted:

Intracranial bubble wrap for brains when

The Russians just use trepanation and a caulk gun.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010
I just found out why wikipedia has become a little better when it comes to WW2 military history in recent years. Turns out, this lady has been fighting the Nazis all by herself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:K.e.coffman

https://www.wired.com/story/one-womans-mission-to-rewrite-nazi-history-wikipedia/

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Biffmotron posted:

In terms of military assassinations, there's also Admiral Darlan in 1942. The surface level is that a French Resistance fighter shot him because Darlan was traitorous Vichy scum, but there's also a case to be made that his assassination was instigated by Allied intelligence because Darlan was an obstacle to the Allied cause, and a less reasonable case that his assassination was instigate by Allied intelligence because *gestures vaguely in the direction of the Rockefeller Foundation*.

Well, there also some speculation that the plane crash in Gibraltar that killed Polish government-in-exile premier and commander-in-chief General Sikorski was actually an assassination.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010
Silphium and mastic.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010
A little known Luftwaffe formation in the last weeks of the war were the combat gliders of Legion Geier, launched from cavernous concrete-reinforced hangars blasted into the rock high up in the Alps. Some say the real reason Patton's Third Army turned south instead of continuing on towards Berlin was too capture these planes and make sure the advanced German glider technology didn’t fall into Soviet hands. Accounts vary, but according to some, they had enough range to reach Berlin and take decisive part in the battle for the city, if their hangars hadn't been captured in a daring commando raid by the Free Dutch mountaineers.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Ferrosol posted:

Gibraltar would need Spanish co-operation and Cyprus would need Turkish co-operation so we're getting into real gay black Hitler territory here what do Turkey and Spain demand for their aid in closing the Mediterranean? Britain had plans in place to seize the Canaries in the event of a war with Spain so bases there could server much the same function as Gibraltar. But without Gibraltar is Torch launched? Is it aimed at Spain instead?

There were fairly advanced diplomatic negotiations about getting Spain to join the Axis in 1940, as well as seizing Gibraltar with Operation Felix. One of the reasons things fell through is that Franco wanted French Morocco for his help, as well as food and supplies. Hitler didn't trust Vichy France, but the anticipation was that if he started giving away chunks of their colonial empire, there'd be a surge of colonies joining the Free French and a destabilization of the Vichy regime, necessitating a complete occupation of continental France. Also, Hitler wanted permanent bases in Northwestern Africa and the Atlantic islands, for the coming war against America, (after he had subjugated Russia and Britain, naturally) which Franco wasn't prepared to grant.

Raenir Salazar posted:

On the other hand, he was an artist. There's a certain morbid curiosity about what sort of Chick Tract nonsense he'd have come up with.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Dance Officer posted:

You're forgetting that the German negotiator actively pushed Franco to stay out of the war.

I don't know how reliable John Waller's account of Canaris is, which the Wikipedia entry is sourced on, but I recently read Norman Goda's Tomorrow the World, which goes very in-depth on the subject.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

StrixNebulosa posted:

Is there a good overview book of WWII, comparable to the American Civil War's Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson? I've got the itch to recap that massive war, but I'd prefer an overview instead of a deep dive into any specific subject in the war.

I haven't read Battle Cry of Freedom, so I can't compare it, but Gerhard Weinberg's A World at Arms is a highly-regarded single volume history of WW2. I can't compare it to the other books that have been mentioned, but it focuses on diplomacy and long-term plans, as well as the cooperation between the Allies, and the lack thereof of the Axis. I found it very helpful in putting the events of WW2 in a global context.

There's an interesting panel discussion about Myths of World War 2 on youtube, if you want to get an impression of Weinberg himself.

https://youtu.be/79KU997m9o4

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Solaris 2.0 posted:

Hitler was reportedly upset when Singapore fell because it meant suddenly it was under the occupation of inferior non-whites.

Do you have a quote for that? I find Weinberg's account and analysis very compelling.

A World at Arms posted:

From time to time, the Japanese would point out to the Germans that Japan would be ready to move in 1946, the year when the last United States forces were scheduled to leave the Philippines, to which the Germans responded by pointing out that by that time the war in Europe would be over and the American fleet doubled. Perhaps more important was the German assurance that if Japan could move against Singapore only if she struck the United States at the same time, then she could count on Germany to join her.

This was a point von Ribbentrop had already made in 1939. A detailed examination of the issue by the German naval attaché in Tokyo seemed to show that this would be a good bargain for Germany; Japan as an open ally would more than offset the disadvantages of converting the United States from a tacit to an open enemy of Germany. Here is a key point which most analysts of the situation have overlooked and which has led them to puzzle endlessly and needlessly over Germany’s declaration of war on the United States in December 1941. Hitler had long intended to fight the United States. He had tried to begin air and naval preparations for this in the late 1930s. These had been aborted by the outbreak of war in 1939, but on each occasion thereafter, when it looked as if the campaign immediately at hand was over, he had returned to the big blue-water navy program. It was always his belief that Germany needed a big navy to tackle the United States that made him want to postpone war and avoid incidents with the United States; when the right time came he was confident that he would find a good excuse–he always had with other countries.

But if the Japanese, who had hung back so long, took the plunge, then the naval deficit would automatically disappear. He had thought of removing that discrepancy by a German sneak under-water attack on the United States navy in port. Told by his navy that this was impossible, there was the obvious alternative of Japan providing a navy for his side of the war; that the Japanese would do from above the water what he had hoped to do from underneath was not known to him beforehand, but that made no difference. The key point was that Japan’s joining openly on the Axis side would provide a big navy right away, not after years of building, and hence remove the main objection to going to war with the United States now rather than later. It was therefore entirely in accord with his perception of the issues that he promised Matsuoka on April 4 that if Japan believed that the only way for her to do what the Germans thought they should do, namely attack the British, was also to go to war at the same time with the United States, they could move in the knowledge that Germany would immediately join them. This policy was fully understood in German headquarters and would be voiced repeatedly thereafter.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Argas posted:

If you know a lot, the Chinese language is a BS construct for the sake of a single national identity. There's many languages in China and abroad, and while its written forms share a lot, both verbal and written forms are all sorts of mutually intelligible/unintelligible depending on which ones you're talking about.

I think I get it now. China is the Yugoslavia of Asia.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Camrath posted:

On the topic of psychological and other casualties amongst the German ww2 forces, I seem to recall reading somewhere (possibly here?) that there were plans in place to exterminate a large proportion of wounded or psychologically crippled Wehrmacht veterans if Germany managed to win WW2- can anyone expand on this, or is it something I misread? I’ve not been able to find any info from googling around.

I've been trying to dip up a bit more on this, because I also recalled hearing this. In my case, I think I read about it in a review of Gerhard Weinberg's Visions of Victory

quote:

Although inside Germany the killing of the handicapped was decentralized after August 1941, the process continued until the German surrender of 1945, and those involved attempted to maintain it afterwards until physically halted by the occupation authorities. By that time, among the tens of thousands murdered were numerous German World War I veterans, and a start had been made on German World War II veterans as well. Germany's defeat saved not only innumerable old people, handicapped individuals, and persons in mental institutions inside and outside the prewar Third Reich but also tens of thousands of Germany's own seriously wounded veterans from death at the hands of their own government.

That's a pretty bold claim. I don't know what the sources for this are.

Digging further, after Aktion T4 was officially discontinued, euthanasia killings continued in a more decentralised fashion. There als owere successor programs like Aktion 13f14, centered on killing (non-Jewish) KZ inmates who became too weak to work, and Aktion Brandt, which continued the killing and expanded from mental institutions to old people's homes and regular hospitals. According to the German wikipedia article, there was increasing pressure to clear out space for 'productive members of society', since the Allied bombing campaign had destroyed so much housing and urban institutions by that time. There are accounts that some WW1 veterans were also included, such as Karl Rueff, a 58 year old former officer who suffered from epilepsy after a head injury in the war.

Michael S. Bryant, The Good Death posted:

In the aftermath of the Hamburg incendiary bombings in late July 1943, for example, Hamburg women deranged by the trauma of the firestorm were transported to Hadamar, where, it is believed, they were all murdered.

There apparently also was a secret mission of T4 staff to Minsk in the winter of 41/42. There don't seem to be any written records, but Henry Friedlander and Michael Burleigh have speculated that this was to euthanize wounded German soldiers. I haven't read the respective books, (The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution and Death and Deliverance: 'Euthanasia' in Germany, c.1900 to 1945) but it seems that any speculation that this represents a comprehensive plan for killing all invalid veterans after the war is pretty far-fetched.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Oberndorf posted:

For a long period prior to the war, a great deal of Nazi discussion revolves around where best to deport the Jewish population of Germany. Madagascar was a leading candidate for awhile.


One thing to keep in mind is that a 'resettlement' to Madagascar would have been more akin to the 'resettlement' of the Armenians in WW1. The German weren't exactly intending to provide the Jews with the necessary supplies and equipment to set up model kibbutzim in a new Jewish island homeland, it would have turned out as a tropical open-air concentration camp, with all the attendant starvation and diseases.

quote:

So instead, the Nazis had, among other meetings, the Wannsee conference to decide what to actually do with the Jews, since the race war was now on and the enemy needed to be addressed. Hence, they elected to annihilate the Jewish population.

Wannsee was in early '42, the Holocaust by bullets was already included into the planning of Barbarossa. (Women and children were included in the summer of '41). Wannsee was mostly about coordinating all relevant German government agencies under Heydrich, for the upcoming extermination of the ghettoized Jews of Western and Central Europe.

quote:

TL;DR: getting rid of the German Jews was originally thought of as forced expulsion/exile, and only when the war began was it conceived as genocide.

That's pretty much the functionalist view. The arguments between the intentionalist and functionalist schools of Holocaust research are pretty expansive, and I'm not really up to date on what the most recent thoughts on either side are. I do think it's safe to say that even if there weren't any concrete plans, the extermination of the Jews was something on Hitler's (and lots of other high-ranking Nazis') long term wishlist. Since the war against Russia wasn't over as quickly as expected, they used it as both cover and justification to start the extermination of all the Jews within their reach right away instead of some time after having won WW2.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Cyrano4747 posted:

Which is all to say that if you’re looking at the civil service the real bigwig alte Kämpfer Nazis age out in the early 60 or even late 50s. But then you’ve got another tranche of dudes who were hard core into that poo poo because they were 20 year guys in the late 30s who are the ones promoted behind the old guard and they stick around a few decades later, like you indicated

I've been wanting to ask you this, because I think it's in your wheelhouse, or at least adjacent to it: a lot of the hard-core Nazis where of the generation just too young to have served in WW1, and I've always wondered if there's a relation between their attitude and the war propaganda and censorship they grew up under in their formative years during WW1, especially relating to school.

I would assume a lot of them had the sentiment, "if only the war would have lasted long enough for me to fight in it, we (I) totally could have won this! drat these dolchstossing jews and socialists!"

Are there any studies on the subject? Generation of the Unbound, maybe?

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

feedmegin posted:

This is where a LOT of the SA rank and file came from, too, just sub WW1 of course.

Edit: this isn't, like, a monograph I've read or anything, it comes up in several places in Richard Evans' series though especially re: student support for Nazism. You have a whole generation who missed WW1 and feel that as a result they haven't proved themselves.

It's also an interesting point raised by Götz Aly, thanks to the Weimar Republic's education policy, there were a lot more people of that generation able to go to university as the first ones in their families, and they had to compete with Jewish students who generally came from family traditions that had emphasized learning and studying, and tended to have an easier time. That's been a general pattern throughout Europe since the emancipation of Jews in the 19th century, and was a major reason why antisemitism was readily adopted in student circles.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Ensign Expendable posted:

Forgot to post last week, so have a few:

Do you know anything about the Germans using uranium as a substitute for tungsten in anti-tank munitions?

Speer writes a few lines about that in Inside the Third Reich. They had captured about 1200 tons of Belgian uranium ore, but I have no idea how much metallic uranium you can extract from that.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010
Depleted uranium is your leftover after you extract the U235. But if all you want is to use your uranium stockpile as a substitute for tungsten in AP rounds, because you know the war will be over before your eggheads have figured out isotope separation, you don't need to deplete it first.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010
A while back, I read Molotov's Note on German Atrocities, which is a near endless list of heinous poo poo the Germans did in the Soviet Union, and then did a double take when I realized it was written in January '42 and only covered the start of the war.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Randarkman posted:

Did Hitler give a single poo poo about Germany's former colonies? IIRC he was dismisse towards the notion of giving any priority to getting them back.

e: Also basically envisioning that Italy could have British and French possessions in Africa.

German plans for Africa, ca. July 1940:

Gerhard Weinberg posted:

If Italy was to occupy Northeast Africa, Germany herself would acquire a vast colonial empire in Central Africa. That empire was to include the former German colonies of Togo and Cameroons in West Africa as well as German East Africa, now to be joined into a huge contiguous Central African domain stretching from the South Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and rounded out by the inclusion of the British colony of Nigeria, the French colonies of Dahomey and French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo, Uganda, the southern half of Kenya, and perhaps the northern portion of the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. Former German Southwest Africa (now Namibia) might either be reclaimed from the Union of South Africa in exchange for the British protectorates of Bechuanaland (Botswana), Swaziland and Basutoland (Lesotho), or, alternatively, it might be left to the Union in connection with the partitioning of the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa. In either case, Germany expected to enjoy good relations with a South African state ruled in this vision by the extreme nationalist elements among those Afrikaaners who had opposed the Union’s entrance into the war in 1939 and who were and remained devoted admirers of both National Socialist ideology and its German practitioners.

Once De Gaule and the Free French started gaining support in Africa, the Nazi became pretty hands off regarding demands of Vichy French colonies, worrying that they would defect to De Gaule if push came to shove.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Tomn posted:

MUNDUS COGITAT

Mundus stupet :colbert:

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Alchenar posted:

That looks like a film poster? Specifically the text under WA looks like where you put film review blurb.

Nope. Genuine (or replica) Waffen-SS recruitment poster. You must be 17 years of age to join.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Cyrano4747 posted:

Are you talking about the POW camps? Because I wouldn’t lump them in with the concentration camps.

If we're talking about Soviet POWs, I absolutely would.

Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Siivola posted:

Okay, actually, it is kind of interesting to ponder what would happen without Churchill at the helm in 1940. Would the British government sue for peace after Dunkirk? Would Roosevelt agree to send massive amounts of aid to the UK if asked by someone other than his best bud? Would there be an Anglo-Soviet agreement? Would there be Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union?

Yet in the end, the straight white Hitler would still probably declare war on the States and ruin everything.

Lord Halifax was in support of a peace agreement with Germany, and there was some brokering whether Chamberlain, and therefore the Conservative Party, would support Churchill over Halifax in May 1940. That's the closest Britain came to quitting.

With the UK out of the picture, Barbarossa might have happened on a different timetable, but that, I assume, would only have helped the Red Army to prepare better. Stalin's hope in '41 was to delay the start of the war for a year.

Hitler had fairly concrete plans for a naval buildup, and the seizing of ports and airbases in French West Africa, in preparation for an inevitable war with America for world domination, but his first priority was control of Europe (and seizing vast colonies in Africa from France and Britain.) The war with America didn't necessarily have to happen in his lifetime, he imagined that might be left to his successor.

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Hannibal Rex
Feb 13, 2010

Tomn posted:

As it happens, Ex Urbe has a fantastic post about the influence of Beccaria on European ideas about torture and I can do no better than to link her here.. It’s a bit of a long read but well worth it, diving deep into the Enlightenment thinking of the time and how Becarria used it to argue against torture.

That's a great read, but I also wanted to mention Friedrich Spee who pubished the Cautio Criminalis in 1631 during the German witch hunts and in the middle of the 30 Years War.

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