Germans have been trying to shake off the Nazi stigma since June of 1945.
I haven't sanitized anything.
I don't need to Google Rheinwiesenlager. What I will say, is that they were all Nazis and if a few of them starved to death, then they earned it.
"War is horrible. The more horrible it is, the shorter it will be" --General William T. Sherman
I wouldn't segregate US behaviour to any of the other powers behaviour in the war.
The Germans committed mass genocide,The Japanese committed mass genocide,The Russians committed rapes as vengeance against Germans in Berlin.
War is evil, Occupation is evil, Imperialism is evil, it's what such policies create.
Nothing new there. Allied soldiers committed many war crimes during WW2 and were in many ways no better than the Axis powers. It was war after all.
There has been rumors for decades that certain American wealthy families that became wealthy after WW2, did so because a family member looted his way across Europe during WW2.
A classic movie on the subject is Kelly's Heros with Clint Eastwood and Telly Savalas.. not based on real events, but based on the reality of war.
This is the kind of relativistic lunacy that gives right wing fanatics ammunition with the public.
Yea the truth hurts.
But the fact is the allies executed German POWs during at random times during the whole war. There are many hush hush reports about mass executions during the D-Day landings.
Sure the allies did not starve their POWs or have concentration camps, but carpet bombing civilians with fire bombs and so on aint exactly nice either..
The execution of German POW's was rare and on an incidental rather than systematic basis,
the condition of German POW's was a direct result of the inability to simultaneously care for 2,000,000+ demobilized German soldiers and millions of European civilians,
and the strategic bombing campaign was both seen as a legitimate tactic for the time period and had utility in Allied efforts to accelerate the end of the war.
No one is denying that excesses, transgressions, and outright crimes were committed by the Allies during the war.
What is unacceptable is to make broad comparisons between the Dachau camp massacre or the bombing of Hamburg and Babi Yar and the Holocaust.
Which is precisely what you are doing if you claim the Allies were in many ways no better than the Axis.
In point of fact in every conceivable way and by nearly every metric the Western powers were infinitely better than their Axis counterparts.
As was the German execution of POWs... just saying. In fact the best known execution of POWs that the German's was accused off, was actually done by the Allies.
It was still mass murder of civilians. When 40k+ people die in one night of fire bombing of civilian areas, then you go from "tactics" to mass murder... there was no excuse for this .. non, especially when we come after the fact and try to act all holy and righteous because of the whole holocaust thing.
Err you are by trying to explain them away by saying that they were not as bad as the Germans.. yes they were. One executed POW is one too many. One civilian killed in retribution is one too many... especially if you are trying to be the good guy in a war.
The hell I am. I am pointing out that the Allies did many (not all, but many) of the things we accuse the Axis off. We accuse the Axis of mass executions of allied troops and civilians.. well the Allies did the same thing. We accuse the Axis of stealing cultural artifacts across Europe, and yet we know that the allies did exactly the same thing across Europe while they were "liberating" it.
Most maybe, but far from all. Quite a few tend to be a "draw", and that is especially when talking about looting and raping across Europe.
I completely disagree. Failing to partition the crimes of the Third Reich or Imperial Japan means that you dilute their significance. All crimes are not the same, this is an established precedent in the law and more importantly of history.
This is the problem when you jump into a debate between two other people and take a comment out of its original intended context.
The German execution of POW's was systematic and widespread, it involved the organized massacred of millions of Polish, Soviet, Italian, American, British, French, Norwegian, etc POW's.
That most of the victims were Slavs, Poles, and Italians does not diminish their atrocities.
Moreover it should be clear that when referring to the Allies and war crimes few include the Soviet Union which beyond Katyn was obviously a purveyor of atrocities.
There is a fantastic and fundamental difference between the bombardment of a city for the purposes of a war aim, even if that aim is the strategic reduction of the city, and carting those people off into the woods with the deliberate intent of killing every single last one of them. The Holocaust, the butchery in Russia, the annihilation of Polish, Czech, Greek, Hungarian communities, and so much more is incomparable to the Allied strategic bombing campaign.
You also have a peculiar inability to distinguish between the objectives of the Axis and the Allied powers.
The entire reason people give the US and the UK a lenient pass on the German strategic bombing campaign is because the Allies were battling to roll back totalitarian and genocidal fascism from the continent. Every day the regime existed was a crime against the millions suffering under their yolk.
You must be trolling. The shooting of a POW at Dachau by America troops, does not equate to the mountain of atrocities committed by the Third Reich.
No the Allies did not. This is factually untrue. The Allies (the Western Powers) did not engage in the mass execution of Nazi, Italian, or Japanese POW's.
The Allies did not engage in the mass looting of art and cultural artifacts.
The Allies did not engage in the mass slaughter of entire communities with the purpose of extinguishing entire peoples from the continent.
This is relativism gone wild and it is why liberalism has been so unfortunately but savagely maligned. This is lunacy.
No. No one thinks that except for Nazi sympathizers and simpletons. You spit on the graves of untold millions when you make that comparison. It is despicable.
Oh and yes you have been reported.
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Err and you base this on what exactly?
Now wait a minute...First you say they killed millions of Polish, Soviet, Italian, American, British, French and so on... and then you say most were Slavs, Poles and Italians? Serious lack of consistency there.
Fact is many of the mass executions of Poles was in fact the Russians, and many of the executions of the slavs was in fact the KGB shooting retreating troops.
Now I am not saying that the Germans did not execute POWs because they did that everywhere, but you forget how the allied POWs, especially the Russians were used. ... as slave labour. So mass executions was in direct conflict with how they were in reality used in many cases. But again that is not saying that there was no mass executions.
Point is, the Germans were bad and since we won the war, then we might as well push a few of our dirty deeds on them since people will believe that because the Germans were bad.
Oh I have never denied (nor commented) on which allies committed the mass killing of POWs..Fact is the Russians were bastards when it came to that, but the western Allies also did it and even trying to deny it is pathetic. The Russians had many death marches of German troops and out of the 200k German troops that surrendered at Stalingrad something like under 10k made it back to Germany after the war..
Why on earth are you deliberately trying to mix the fire bombing of cities and civilian together with the holocaust? Trying to play the "guilt" card or something? Every time I point out an allied war crime you throw the guilt card... yea but the Germans had death camps... so what? Does that some how excuse our war crimes? Does that excuse that we killed 40+k civilians in one night of firebombing a city with no military value in it?
LOL they had the exact same objective.. to win the war by any means possible.
err no. Most people including many in government did not know of the "genocidal" aspect of Nazi Germany until the last months of the war. Using that as an excuse for why we hated the Germans and went to war.. is pathetic.
Now the Allies were battling the Germans because they were threatening the dominance of the allies on the global scale... pure and simple. That it was packaged in as being democracy against fascism is often a smoke screen on the fact that quite a number of the policies of Nazi Germany actually came from the US and UK, and that there was great sympathy with Nazi Germany in the US and parts of the UK in the 1930s.
Who ever said that it was? I am saying that the shooting of a POW on the beaches of Normany or at Dachau is a war crime, just as if the Germans did it. The scale does not matter.
Depends on the definition of "mass". Shooting 10 POWs is that mass or do you need to go over 20? How about 3 or 4 at a time every 30 minutes across a battlefield for 8 hours or more? Is that mass?
And do you have any examples where thousands of POWs were executed by any side... other than the Russian example that was blamed on the Nazies?
Ever heard of the Chenogne massacre? And the aftermath of the Malmedy massacre by US troops?
Actually... you need to be careful here. The Russians did engage in organized mass looting of art and cultural artifacts from Germany during and after the war. On the Western front there was no official policy to do this, but there were many rumors of allied troops looting their way across Western Europe. Artifacts have turned up in the US decades after the war... artifacts that were originally taken by the Nazis and disappeared after the war.
The holocaust thing again... we get it, the Nazis were bad as they committed genocide.
The only lunacy here is your attempt to justify war crimes by saying the other side did far worse, hence our sides war crimes were some how justified and have to be accepted.
Feel free to explain if I took something out of context, it didn't look like it to me.
It was still mass murder of civilians. When 40k+ people die in one night of fire bombing of civilian areas, then you go from "tactics" to mass murder... there was no excuse for this .. non, especially when we come after the fact and try to act all holy and righteous because of the whole holocaust thing.
I wouldn't segregate US behaviour to any of the other powers behaviour in the war.
The Germans committed mass genocide,The Japanese committed mass genocide,The Russians committed rapes as vengeance against Germans in Berlin.
War is evil, Occupation is evil, Imperialism is evil, it's what such policies create. "color added
"War is evil."
Were this true, then capitulation to tyrants and genocide, slavery, and conquest would be virtues, would they not?
No.
War is evil and slavery and genocide is evil too.
Then, if a country is confronted with a tyrannical invasion by a genocidal power, is going to war with that power inherently evil?
"War is evil."
Were this true, then capitulation to tyrants and genocide, slavery, and conquest would be virtues, would they not?
War is evil.
The genocidal invader is evil.
So then, as I asked, is surrender to the genocidal invader virtuous?
I'd go further. War is part of the nature of Humanity, obviously. Were it not it would not occur in every major culture. Is man therefore inherently evil?
War is evil.
Yes humans collectively are evil. We are just animals and act as such.
My inferiors act like animals. I'd like to be allowed to have them spayed and neutered.
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