|
Gerlach, Christian (2000): Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrussland 1941 bis 1944, Hamburg, 2. Auflage, 2000 That book is quite monumental in scope and quality. 1232 pages.
|
#
?
May 17, 2014 09:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 18, 2024 07:20 |
|
JaucheCharly posted:Gerlach, Christian (2000): Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrussland 1941 bis 1944, Hamburg, 2. Auflage, 2000 Yeah, but it's in German, so that's, what, 200-300 words?
|
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2014 14:57
|
|
|
Centripetal Horse posted:Yeah, but it's in German, so that's, what, 200-300 words? Probably 100.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2014 15:13
|
|
|
Centripetal Horse posted:Yeah, but it's in German, so that's, what, 200-300 words? I don't understand what you mean. Good luck finding that in english. It's definitely worth it. Calculated Murders: German Economic Policies and the Politics of Annihilation in White Russia, 1941 to 1944 http://www.his-online.de/en/publish...ea922272e11ae7c
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2014 19:50
|
|
|
JaucheCharly posted:I don't understand what you mean. Report to the Reichserziehungsministerium immediately.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2014 20:25
|
|
|
JaucheCharly posted:I don't understand what you mean. It's a joke on German being more agglutinative than English, taken to hyperbolic extremes. More punny than funny, although it did make me chuckle.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2014 21:25
|
|
|
Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänskajüte. Are you happy now?
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2014 21:48
|
|
|
A few questions, most just generally about the era. I grew up in Poland, and was taught in history class that Poland was holding it's own during the first part of WW2. The battle of Wizna and the Romanian Bulwark were both provided as examples of how Poland could have held the country against the Nazis long enough for Britain/France to join in, or at worst, how they could have bled Germany dry due to it's horrible economy. The feeling I got from most people was that if the Soviets hadn't attacked eastern Poland, Germany wouldn't have been able to keep the war going long enough to conquer Poland, and WW2 would have ended right there. Even most of the Polish WW2 vets I talked to talked about how poorly trained the German army was. That while they had the numbers and equipment, it was largely young indoctrinated kids, as most of the German vets died during WW1. When I moved to the US, most people seemed to think the Polish army was so doomed it attempted to fight tank divisions with guys on horseback throwing grenades. Where is the truth in the matter? From reading the thread it does sound like Germany wasn't able to stabilize until after it looted Poland, and it's obvious the turning point was the Soviet advance. I'm not nationalistic enough to believe Poland could have beat Germany 1v1, but has any extrapolation been done on what would have happened if the Soviets never joined in? Would Germany have started to hit money troubles, or started running into a wall when it came to trained troops? Secondly, how do German kids nowadays feel about all this stuff? Growing up in Poland there was this sense of national pride in how we were the first to fight the Nazis, and how something like 3/4ths of the country kept fighting even after the occupation. In America it seems to mainly focus on D-Day, followed by the brave allied front, then victory. Both sides are the victors though. How do you get told your great grandparents knowingly helped in the extermination of thousands of people, and your grandparents were tortured, killed, and imprisoned in response to this? Also what do French kids get taught. In Poland we got told the French are cowards who loved becoming Vichy France, and how Charles de Gaulle was a pompous gloryseeker. I believe the way my history teacher phrased it was "They loved the taste of the German boot until the Americans arrived, then suddenly they couldn't take their mouth off that.", with the implication being the French just switched allegiance to save face rather then actually caring about what was going on in their country. While we got taught about how the Polish Government in exile did everything it could to save people in labor/concentration camps, we got told the French Resistance just "chased skirts and blew up trains" rather then anything important. I'm guessing the French get taught something else. Also I don't think Poland likes France much. Rookersh fucked around with this message at 00:05 on May 18, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 17, 2014 23:57
|
|
|
Arguing counterfactuals is generally a pretty pointless endeavor. That poo poo didn't happen, so it's pretty hard to say with any kind of authority what so ever what would have happened if it did. No soviet invasion from the east? Maybe the Germans never get east of Poznan, maybe they're on the east bank of the Vistula on the exact time schedule. Who knows? The German army in 1939 was pretty well trained for what it was - a rapidly expanded peacetime core of professionals with a lot of new blood that had to do a lot of learning, fast. It wasn't the unstoppable juggernaut that many people in the post-war era liked to describe it as, but to claim that the battering it took in WW1 affected its performance in WW2 is ludicrous. Separate generations fought those wars, and any veterans of WW1 were in leadership positions and very able to use the lessons of the past war to fight the next one. The Wehrmacht was no more hosed over by WW1 than the Polish Army was hosed over by the various wars it fought with the Russians in the 20s. The cavalry vs. tanks stuff is more or less bullshit, but the polish army was pretty woefully ill-equipped compared to the German army in a number of ways, and there were a lot of doctrinal differences between how they were handling tanks, airplanes, and artillery. The short version of that is that the Poles were still fighting like it was the 20s, with all the lessons of WW1 but none of the innovations of the interwar period while the Germans were doing some new things. It's not as simplistic as the "  The Germans invented Blitzkrieg and rode roughshod over Europe! " bit that you hear all too often, but it's the complicated kernel of truth that grew into the whole "unstoppable Blitzkrieg" bit.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 00:15
|
|
|
Didn't most of the Polish cavalry charges actually beat the infantry they were up against?JaucheCharly posted:Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänskajüte. Are you happy now? Isn't Donaudampfschiff where German speakers start rolling their eyes?
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 00:58
|
|
|
Seven Hundred Bee posted:the German military instituted measures to promote cooperation between units by holding dances and distirbuting propaganda about the 'racial strengths' of other, non-Aryan nationalities. Which were?
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 01:20
|
|
|
Rookersh posted:The battle of Wizna and the Romanian Bulwark were both provided as examples of how Poland could have held the country against the Nazis long enough for Britain/France to join in... No they didn't, because Britain and France weren't going to do anything; it seems abundantly clear (to me, a rather uneducated person on the topic) that their hope was to sit back and rearm as much as possible, while hoping the Germans would walk slowly towards them in the Low Countries a la the last war. And in a crazy counter-factual where Britain/France were going to act offensively, the correct time to do so would have been 1938. Now where's my weeping Czechoslovak flag emoticon... PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 01:46 on May 18, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 01:43
|
|
Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
|
PittTheElder posted:No they didn't, because Britain and France weren't going to do anything; it seems abundantly clear (to me, a rather uneducated person on the topic) that their hope was to sit back and rearm as much as possible, while hoping the Germans would walk slowly towards them in the Low Countries a la the last war. Oh yeah, it wasn't presented as a "Britain/France would have joined in!" just a "If those fuckers from the West did their job like we did, this wouldn't have been a problem. We could have totally held the Germans at bay anyways had it not been for the Soviets." Britain apparently redeemed itself by fighting back/letting the Polish government in exile set up shop there. France uh. Well, I posted the Polish opinion on France already. Rookersh fucked around with this message at 02:02 on May 18, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 01:49
|
|
|
Rookersh posted:Britain apparently redeemed itself by fighting back/letting the Polish government in exile set up shop there. France uh. Well, I posted the Polish opinion on France already. Though really, I don't think there is any circumstance where France would have attacked Germany on their soil. They learned their lesson about attacking for the sake of attacking no matter what the enemy numbers back during WWI, and it ended terribly for them there. I doubt any of the generals wanted a repeat of that fiasco, and from what I understand they embraced the defensive as the be-all-end-all. I'm probably wrong about that last part, I'm just extrapolating based on what I know about the French command in WWI compared to how timid they were in WWII.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 03:29
|
|
|
Frostwerks posted:Which were? I know I've read something about the specifics of the internal propaganda on the topic, but I can't remember where. The Wikipedia article on the "Master Race" concept gets at the fact that the Nazis distinguished beyond "Aryan" vs. "Jew" and had a sort of hierarchy of races.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 04:13
|
|
|
i clicked on this thread by accident and was about to ask what the gently caress hitler's done for porn within the last 15 years
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 04:33
|
|
|
Rookersh posted:Secondly, how do German kids nowadays feel about all this stuff? Growing up in Poland there was this sense of national pride in how we were the first to fight the Nazis, and how something like 3/4ths of the country kept fighting even after the occupation. In America it seems to mainly focus on D-Day, followed by the brave allied front, then victory. Both sides are the victors though. How do you get told your great grandparents knowingly helped in the extermination of thousands of people, and your grandparents were tortured, killed, and imprisoned in response to this? I can't speak for the 14-18 year olds, who probably care very little about Nazis and the Third Reich on account of being teenagers. In general, the time is seen as probably the most important 12 years in German history, to the point where German historians, at times, have to argue against writing the rest of German history as "the time before Hitler" and "The time after Hitler". But I can tell you about how you feel about the fact that your own Grandparents fought in that war. It is very strange, because the thing to remember is that the vast majority of Wehrmacht soldiers weren't psychopaths. It would be easy to accept that Uncle Karl always tortured cats when he was young and then joined the SS and headed an Einsatzgruppe in Ukraine during WWII, being eventually executed for war crimes. But how do you reconcile Opa Heinz, the guy who read bedtime stories to you, who build a model railway with you, who always left the room 20 minutes before Santa showed up on Christmas with a man who executed civilians on the Eastern Front? You don't. I always believed that my grandparents didn't know about the Holocaust. They were good people, they wouldn't have stood idly by while humans - some of them their neighbors - were murdered in gas chambers if they had known. Then one day I realized how many people it took to organize the Holocaust. This wasn't something you could run with a few hundred psychopaths. You needed people in every town's record office who compiled the lists of Jews and where they lived. You needed people who trucked them to the railway stations. You needed engineers to run the trains and people who would throw the switches to steer the trains to the camps. Then you needed people who build the camps and who organize the forced labor jobs in the factories (if they aren't killed outright). You have people who work alongside the forced laborers. All these people have families and friends who they talk to, and who have friends of their own. That day I realized that my grandparents had to have known. And they still did nothing. I'm hardly the only one who thought that, though. The clean Wehrmacht myth was so readily believed because the alternative was to acknowledge that a large part of Germans were at least complicit in war crimes. If someone told you that your son, your brother (who died), your husband (who also died) and your son-in-law all were war criminals most people would vehemently disagree. After all, only crazy manics could do such a thing, right? Your son came home and married his girlfriend and then they started having a family. He didn't do anything wrong in the war. That idea only died in the 1990ies, and it was an ugly death. There has been an ongoing debate whether VE-day was a day of defeat or a day of liberation for the Germans, with good arguments on both sides. I don't think WWII will ever be just another war for Germany, at least not unless we somehow get involved into an even worse one (and after that, there probably won't be a Germany left).
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 08:42
|
|
|
Rookersh posted:A few questions, most just generally about the era. If you quoted your teachers correctly and once more read it out aloud, I think most of it is an answer by itself in terms of validity (+1 for the BDSM talk). There is enough basic material available on wikipedia, and while we attack the myth of the invincible juggernaut that Germany is often depicted as, it was a major power (and Poland was not), that did what it did. The French, if you want to use this general statement, are no cowards or military inept cheese-eaters as WWI illustrates, and also "Napoleon" or whatever point you want to pick of the French military history of the last ~2500 years. On paper it had an impressive army and the Maginot Line looked as impressive. So, ask yourself what the function of painting the French as cowards is? Why is it needed in this narrative? Wehrmacht basic training was 8-12 weeks, depending on the branch. The simple infantryman might have been green in terms of combat experience in the beginning of the war (surprise!), but the quality of training was excellent and professional and ncos and almost everyone of note in the officer corps were men that served in WWI and learned their lessons. Turning training and theory into something aplicable is another story. Drafting very young men is something that happens as the war turns bad. France and England weren't coming to help Poland, because their planning and doctrine called for trench warfare (we could also go into detail as of why "attack" was politically impossible after the fact that France on so many levels had taken so much damage in WW1. And probably blantant racism). So you see where this is going. The Polish army planned that they were going to bail them out, most likely because that was the only hope to do at least *something*. So, it would be meaningful to find out if or how the allies tried to coordinate their doctrines before the war, or if they gave any thought to aiding Poland at all, beyond mere words. If you look at what German propaganda says about Poles, you had every reason to resist. It's a weird thing here in Europe, but prejudice travels east. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 10:21 on May 18, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 10:00
|
|
|
Rookersh posted:Also what do French kids get taught. In Poland we got told the French are cowards who loved becoming Vichy France, and how Charles de Gaulle was a pompous gloryseeker. I believe the way my history teacher phrased it was "They loved the taste of the German boot until the Americans arrived, then suddenly they couldn't take their mouth off that.", with the implication being the French just switched allegiance to save face rather then actually caring about what was going on in their country. While we got taught about how the Polish Government in exile did everything it could to save people in labor/concentration camps, we got told the French Resistance just "chased skirts and blew up trains" rather then anything important. So I'm a French 28 year-old. WW2 came up four times in the syllabus I had. Caveat that this is what I remember and while I did pay attention, well. I may not remember with 100% accuracy. What I learned in elementary school I can't really remember but it was very barebones and I did not really get it. It focused on Italy of all things, or maybe it's just what struck me more. Second times was when I was 10-11. I remember absolutely nothing of the lessons themselves but there was a field visit to a Holocaust museum. Very graphic pictures, very emotional presentation. I felt physically sick on the way back. With hindsight I do think it was inappropriate for a boy my age. I did not seem to affect the others much (whether it actually did and they were better at hiding it than me I will never know) but I got actually mocked and it thoroughly convinced they were a bunch of sociopaths. Third time was when I was 14-15. That I remember well. The issue of French guilt was mostly about the pre-war period, basically France/England should have attacked Germany over the Rhineland/the Anschluss/Munich but instead they sat back and voted themselves paid vacations and 40-hour work week while the Germans beefed up their war industry. The war itself was mostly about military operations. This time the focus was the Fall of France and the North African theater. It was the standard nazi propaganda with svatiskas painted over, as in ruthless German efficiency, comically inept Russians, comically inept Italians, wunderwaffen and BLITZKRIEG BLITZKRIEG BLITZKRIEG BLITZKRIEG (this is the real money shot : Charles de Gaulle had actually invented Blitzkrieg but Hitler copied it on him. Yeah.)(double money shot : two weeks before it was WW1 and all about the myth of the breakthrough was absurd and wasted lives useless. Complete cognitive disconnect) Speaking of Charlie, he's presented as a positive figure but beleaguered and opposed by more mediocre men. The story is less "and then he came and saved us all with a flaming sword" and more "if only he'd been in charge he would have come and saved us all with a flaming sword." There was something about war in the Pacific too. Holocaust comes up, but mostly as one German exaction among many. The last time was when I was 16-17. Focus was on totalitarianism so there Vichy came up a lot. The key notion was that the average Frenchman had no choice, with nods toward the "sword and shield" concept. Totalitarianism fostered a paranoid atmosphere that made any organized resistance impossible except within established structures, and that's were the commies come in. De Gaulle completely sidelined by the commies this time, except in the context of his power struggle with Giraud. There is no real solution of continuity between democracy and totalitarianism so people go along until it is too late. The holocaust is given a lot of time. Its purpose was to destroy the Jewish and Slavic race, as a race, from the get-go. Forced labour was merely a "bonus". Eugenics T4 program had been a prototype. As I see it the big absent was war in Asia. When I focus I half-remember half-imagine a few mentions of China and Japan, but there was definitely nothing about Burma, nothing about the Dutch East Indies and nothing about French Indochina. The Indochina war was seen as completely disconnected from WW2. Another thing was that French were unique in collaborating as a government and not as individuals. We heard nothing of Quisling, Hungary, Finland and such. So that's for what I was taught. The issue of what French people actually think I'll maybe get back later if it interests people. quote:I'm guessing the French get taught something else. Also I don't think Poland likes France much. You're possibly not going to like that part. The French view of Poles is that they were terrible antisemites and collaborated with Germans to a greater extent than other people. They do get white-washed out of their participation in Munich though.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 11:30
|
|
|
That about great polish collaboration is hogwash. That about raging antisemitism not.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 12:21
|
|
|
Kuiperdolin posted:Another thing was that French were unique in collaborating as a government and not as individuals. We heard nothing of Quisling, Hungary, Finland and such. That's not the best comparison. Quisling was not part of the legitimate government before the war, he was merely the head of the German-appointed puppet government from early 1942. The elected government went into exile in Britain and never collaborated with the occupiers. As for Hungary and Finland, unlike France they hadn't been invaded and militarily defeated by Germany, so they did not "collaborate" as such. Instead they acted as Germany's allies until their defeat by the Soviet Union. Kopijeger fucked around with this message at 12:34 on May 18, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 12:29
|
|
|
JaucheCharly posted:That about great polish collaboration is hogwash. That about raging antisemitism not. It really seems the best method to control two other groups is to lower one below the other, the slightly-higher one will do most of the heavy lifting in suppressing the other.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 13:24
|
|
|
It's always worse than that. http://www.amazon.com/Fear-Anti-Sem...n+thomasz+gross
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 13:54
|
|
|
Kuiperdolin posted:So that's for what I was taught. The issue of what French people actually think I'll maybe get back later if it interests people. I'd actually be fascinated to hear more about the average French persons thoughts on WW2. It's something that's never really shown in any sort of history books I can find, and it's not exactly a question you can bring up while wandering around France. And yeah, as I said, I'm no nationalist. I can 100% recognize the Poles were going to get beaten, were raging antisemites, and had their own share of problems. I wasn't posting from a position of personal belief, rather what Poland as a whole thinks about the war/it's contribution to the war, as it's not really something you see in history books in the USA. It's always amused me the lengths Polish schools go to teach kids about how we did everything we could to save the Jews, then you get to college and they just admit most of the camp raids were attempts to save Slavs, and everyone was super anti-semantic. I just like hearing the stories from other groups in Europe over more American stories of heroism. Talking to Italian WW2 vets, or Austrian WW2 vets is ultimately much more interesting as the perspective they have on their governments/what happened is so drastically different then that of the American view. ArchangeI posted:I can't speak for the 14-18 year olds, who probably care very little about Nazis and the Third Reich on account of being teenagers. In general, the time is seen as probably the most important 12 years in German history, to the point where German historians, at times, have to argue against writing the rest of German history as "the time before Hitler" and "The time after Hitler". This is super fascinating ( and depressing ), but I can understand it entirely. I don't judge anybody, especially the Germans who stayed at home for wanting to believe their surviving family had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Especially considering the years following the wars end were not exactly a good time for self reflection and cultural growth. It's much easier to believe your family was the good ones who stayed home and didn't know, then it is to think such things about those you respect/love. Thank you for posting it. I imagine that realization was hard, and posting about it probably wasn't easy either.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 15:07
|
|
|
Rookersh posted:And yeah, as I said, I'm no nationalist. I can 100% recognize the Poles were going to get beaten, were raging antisemites, and had their own share of problems. I wasn't posting from a position of personal belief, rather what Poland as a whole thinks about the war/it's contribution to the war, as it's not really something you see in history books in the USA. It's always amused me the lengths Polish schools go to teach kids about how we did everything we could to save the Jews, then you get to college and they just admit most of the camp raids were attempts to save Slavs, and everyone was super anti-semantic. Something I am curious about is how contemporary Polish society views the Polish Forces in the USSR. Are they considered traitors in the same vein as the Waffen-SS volunteers from occupied territories, unfortunate people who were forced by circumstances to fight for Stalin, or something else?
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 15:17
|
|
|
Kopijeger posted:That's not the best comparison. Quisling was not part of the legitimate government before the war, he was merely the head of the German-appointed puppet government from early 1942. The elected government went into exile in Britain and never collaborated with the occupiers. As for Hungary and Finland, unlike France they hadn't been invaded and militarily defeated by Germany, so they did not "collaborate" as such. Instead they acted as Germany's allies until their defeat by the Soviet Union. Quisling was Minister of Defence between 1931 and 1933, actually.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 16:08
|
|
|
meatbag posted:Quisling was Minister of Defence between 1931 and 1933, actually. Had forgotten about that, admittedly, but the point was that he did not have a position in the government at the time of the invasion.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 16:18
|
|
|
Kopijeger posted:That's not the best comparison. Quisling was not part of the legitimate government before the war, he was merely the head of the German-appointed puppet government from early 1942. The elected government went into exile in Britain and never collaborated with the occupiers. As for Hungary and Finland, unlike France they hadn't been invaded and militarily defeated by Germany, so they did not "collaborate" as such. Instead they acted as Germany's allies until their defeat by the Soviet Union. Yes, I was thinking and typing at the same time, which seemed to have been over-ambitious. My point is, for us schoolboys the Axis was Germany, Italy, Japan and Vichy France. Every other place, to the extent we thought about it at all, was supposed to be some kind of dystopian military directly under German control. Rookersh posted:I'd actually be fascinated to hear more about the average French persons thoughts on WW2. It's something that's never really shown in any sort of history books I can find, and it's not exactly a question you can bring up while wandering around France. I'll make an effortpost about that later, then, but not tonight. Busy.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 17:30
|
|
|
Rookersh posted:Thank you for posting it. I imagine that realization was hard, and posting about it probably wasn't easy either. It was mostly a "Here but for the grace of God" moment. I was 18 at the time, and my letter summoning me to the medical examination for my conscription had just arrived. I wondered what I would have done if I had been born perhaps 60 years earlier, in time to turn 18 sometime in the late 30ies. What do you do in that situation, to optimize your chances of survival without getting the blood of innocents on your hands? You'll be drafted. Not showing up means prison, and execution during the war. Your parents won't spring for emigration to the US (and besides, why would you do that? things are going so well in Germany!) If you get drafted, you'll probably end up in the infantry, and that means you either fight in the East (very probably), giving you the options of death, crippling injury or several years in a Siberian labor camp as well as the added bonus of probably becoming a war criminal in some fashion (participating in a war of aggression being ignored for the sake of the argument), or fight in the West, where you fight on the side that is increasingly outnumbered and technologically behind. But at least you'll probably be treated well if you get captured. Or maybe you volunteer? Of course, the biggest volunteer organization is the Waffen SS, so that means you'll be shuffled from hotspot to hotspot (with increased likeliness of injury or death), are even more likely to become a war criminal and have the added bonus of probably not being taken prisoner. The navy gives you the choice between a handful of surface ships, which end up being hunted down mercilessly by vastly superior forces, or the U-boats, which have something like a 70% death rate for personal. The Luftwaffe might be your best bet, provided that you somehow manage to not get shot down and killed (good luck with that). of course, if you end up ground crew, you'll end up being drafted as infantry later in the war, with the added benefit of practically no training for the role. It's a lovely situation all around, and I am glad I wasn't in it. But it also makes you wonder if you'd have the courage to resist the regime (that is a death sentence, by the way). I for my part have come to the conclusion that I probably wouldn't. Which makes it hard to be outraged at the people who didn't either.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 17:45
|
|
|
My former employer was a soldier in WWII (American) He gave me some photos to scan including these. He took the set off a dead German soldier, who was evidently named George.   There was also a picture of a girl. No way of knowing if she was a girlfriend, wife, sister or just a friend. I have no idea what unit he was in or where he was stationed. There are more photos here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/45997483@N06/ One of them is a photo of him next to a memorial stone to Anton Gunther (1876-1937) a (nationalistic(?)) poet I'm guessing, based on the translated Wikipedia page.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 20:20
|
|
|
Emmigration isn't so easy. It's not like today, where you're free to travel. If you're unlucky, the only countries that will take you are Denmark or Holland, so welcome back to the Wehrmacht a year or two later. Luftwaffe ground crew is probably the best place to be. There's no way to dodge the draft. You're going, if you like it or not.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 21:28
|
|
|
You could always become an engineer and invent dumb poo poo no one needs, as long as you can justify its value somehow.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 21:43
|
|
|
Question: Say you were a member of the OrPo or Kripo under Nazi Germany; How much would you have spent with "Normal crimes" (murder, rape,arson,etc) versus political crimes (hiding Jews, anti-regime agitation, the White Rose)?
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 21:50
|
|
|
I'd like to know how effective the police was in the Reich.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 22:00
|
|
|
I've never found any indication that normal, civil police were any more or less effective than any compeer able nation of the period
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 22:14
|
|
|
JaucheCharly posted:Emmigration isn't so easy. It's not like today, where you're free to travel. If you're unlucky, the only countries that will take you are Denmark or Holland, so welcome back to the Wehrmacht a year or two later. That reminded me of a pretty depressing local story I recently heard. It was a small family of farmers (mother, father and one son), and the son got past the initial waves of the draft because they contributed to actually keeping the soldiers fed. But as things got more desperate he too was eventually called up for his examination. His father suggested that he should pretend that he was mentally handicapped to get past it, and it actually worked. However, that meant that under the eugenics program he was immediately scheduled for forcible sterilisation (reputedly through castration, though I'm not certain if that was a commonly used method). He couldn't exactly retract his story because that'd likely have lead to a death sentence, so he had to go through with it. It was so traumatising to him that he killed himself with poison some time later. His father hanged himself after that, blaming himself since he'd given him that advice in the first place. The mother, too, killed herself shortly afterwards, leaving their farm entirely abandoned. 
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 22:33
|
|
|
Perestroika posted:That reminded me of a pretty depressing local story I recently heard. It was a small family of farmers (mother, father and one son), and the son got past the initial waves of the draft because they contributed to actually keeping the soldiers fed. But as things got more desperate he too was eventually called up for his examination. His father suggested that he should pretend that he was mentally handicapped to get past it, and it actually worked. However, that meant that under the eugenics program he was immediately scheduled for forcible sterilisation (reputedly through castration, though I'm not certain if that was a commonly used method). He couldn't exactly retract his story because that'd likely have lead to a death sentence, so he had to go through with it. It was so traumatising to him that he killed himself with poison some time later. His father hanged himself after that, blaming himself since he'd given him that advice in the first place. The mother, too, killed herself shortly afterwards, leaving their farm entirely abandoned. I bet if you opened with this joke at an open mic, you'd have a killer set.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2014 22:57
|
|
|
Rookersh posted:A few questions, most just generally about the era. This is really interesting. My maternal grandparents were Polish and deeply affected by WW2. My grandfather was born in 1915 in a small village northeast of Bialystok, in what was then the Russian Empire. The village, of which I don't know the name, was west of the 1947 Curzon line. My grandfather was a tailor by trade and could speak Polish, Russian, Belarusian and Yiddish, and knew some Ukrainian as well. My grandmother's family was from Lviv when it was part of Poland, and quite well off. My grandmother was actually born in Brooklyn, but that part of her family returned to Poland during the Great Depression- not the greatest move. Both of them suffered a great deal. My grandfather's village was invaded first by the Soviets. He was arrested by the NKVD for "agitation" because he was Polish and literate. He was put on a train east, and escaped by kicking through a rotten board and walking out while the guards were sleeping while the train was stopped for coal. The Nazis invaded a year and a half later. They arrested him, this time on accusations of partisan activity. While they were rounding up others that were accused, he ran, and they shot him, leaving him for dead. He got shot in the neck, and miraculously, the pistol bullet didn't manage to sever anything. He picked it out and stitched up his own wound with a shaving mirror and his sewing needles :metal:. He survived, and at one point repaired Wehrmacht officers' uniforms. He said, before he died (I was only 14 when he died, so there was a lot he didn't want to tell a young boy), that this was the worst part of his experiences during the war. He said that although it wasn't an act of overt collaboration, it felt like it. He was actively maintaining a symbol of oppression. On the other hand, if he didn't, he would have been shot for refusing. In his own words, "I had already used up all of my chances". My grandmother was shipped west, and was a forced labourer in Germany. She never saw any of her family again- they must have all been massacred by the Nazis, Soviets or some combination of both. She was forced to make munitions, and recalls the brutality of the factory supervisors, and the constant fear. There were constant air raids in the later years, and recalled the time a bomb hit a building in the factory complex, killing almost everyone in side. She also recalled with pride her part in industrial sabotage. She claimed that a fellow forced labourer had taught others how to make shells that would explode in the breech of the gun when they were fired, which they would try to slip through every so often, and that it was very satisfying knowing that if even a few of these shells made it to the front, some Nazi bastard was getting blown up because of their handiwork. They met in a displaced persons camp, and emigrated to Canada in 1948 aboard the S.S. Marine Falcon. Naturally, as a child, I thought my grandparents came to Canada on the Millennium Falcon Among the Polish community here, some of the things you mentioned hold true. Polish emigrants and their descendants view Poland as having been sold out by the British and French. First, by not invading Germany when they invaded Poland, and then by handing Poland to Stalin on a silver platter at Yalta. Considering that there is a monument to the Katyn massacre 300m from the house where my grandparents lived, Soviet atrocities have definitely not been forgotten. There is also a huge sense of pride in the Polish fighting spirit. The perception is sure, Poland was hopelessly outnumbered and outclassed, but we fought bravely against absolutely hopeless odds. The (doctored) footage of Polish cavalry charging German tanks? drat right we did- it's all we had, but Poles die fighting, not lying down, and if we're going to die, then we're going to take some of those Nazi bastards with us! This is shared with how Canadians see their accomplishments during WW2- we were a small country, overshadowed by Britain and especially the USA, but when there was a hard job that needed to be done and you needed some stone-cold badassery, then you called up the Canadians to do it. Our history textbooks has a section on the Dieppe raid that was three times the length of the section on the entire Pacific theatre: "Oh yeah- the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor for no reason, then the Americans beat them back to Japan and dropped a couple A bombs on them. The Japanese weren't very nice to the Chinese or Filipinos either". The Einsatzgruppen massacres and war in the East got a couple sentences. As for anti-Semitism, it has been glossed over and whitewashed. This is not to diminish the absolutely heroic actions of many Poles who faced death for aiding Jews and did so anyway, but the perception here is that anti-Semitism was entirely the Nazis' fault. Others tread into dangerous territory, and say that Jews can't claim that they're the only victims of the Holocaust, and the 3-5 million ethnic Poles that died during the war have been forgotten. The following are usually the excuses given: "I/we/my relatives never did anything- in fact, we/someone we knew helped a Jew/Jewish family" "The Nazis instigated massacres, and just blamed it on the local population to justify their actions" "No matter where you go, there's a few bad apples" "They sold out the Jews just to save their own skins, if they didn't they would have been executed too" "A lot of the blackmailers were Jews themselves, so you can't just blame the Polish population for everything." It is worth noting though that the Government-in-Exile did state that crimes against Jews were equal to crimes committed against Catholic Poles. The Armia Krajowa actually held trials for blackmailers and collaborators who turned Jews over to the Nazis, and in many cases handed down death sentences in trials that were surprisingly sophisticated given the circumstances.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2014 11:44
|
|
|
I've been reading a biography of Reinhard Heydrich, and it really hammers home how absolutely dysfunctional the nazi system was. When Heydrich got put in charge of the Sicherheitsdienst (secret police) a few years prior to the nazi seizure of power, it was one of several similar organizations within the Nazi party itself. After 1933, the SS started taking over police organizations in Bavaria (at the time, every German state and even many individual cities had their own criminal and political police organizations), sometimes by political assignments, sometimes by literal armed takeover of individual police stations. This eventually brought them into conflict with Göring, who was setting up a parallel system in Prussia. At the time, Himmler, Heydrich and the SS actually looked like they were going to lose that fight - Göring had popular support even among non-nazis, he was close to Hitler, he had the powerful SA on his side, and Prussia was the largest and most powerful of the German states. The organization that would eventually become the Gestapo was set up by Göring in Prussia as the Geheime staatspolizeiamt (shortened Gestapa), and was a rival to Heydrich's SD. However, the SA eventually proved too unruly. They had their own agendas, and Göring proved unable to control them. In a backroom deal, Himmler got control of the Prussian police and the Gestapo, and in return the SS would help cull the SA. This quickly led to the Night of the Long Knives.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2014 08:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 18, 2024 07:20 |
|
|
Is it Hitler's Hangman by any chance?
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2014 08:15
|
|
