Good point.
National Socialism vs. Communism.
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@strategic:
For all of the terrible qualities of hitler, the one thing you cannot say about him is that he was disloyal.
I’m not sure Hitler’s long-serving Party comrade Ernst Rohm would have agreed with that statement when Hitler had him executed in 1934. Rohm envisioned having the SA replace the Wehrmacht in the medium-to-long term, as part of the ongoing transformation of Germany being effected by the Nazis. Hitler, who had a different agenda, was secure enough in his position by 1934 that he no longer needed the SA (who had been instrumental in bringing him to power) – but he very much needed the regular Army’s support and manpower to start re-drawing the map of Europe. He therefore bought the Wehrmacht’s loyalty by getting rid of its potential competitors: in a very Stalin-like move, he ordered the arrest or execution of the SA leadership (including Rohm, personal loyalty to his old comrade be damned) and basically sidelined the SA organization because it had served its primary purpose (getting Hitler to power) and could thus easily be dispensed with.
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During the period in question (the early '30s), the German Army was limited to 100,000 men by the Versailles Treaty. On the other hand, the SA was a quasi-military organization which had at least 500,000 men. The regular army was certainly more combat-effective than the SA on a man for man basis, but the SA had much larger numbers. As such, the SA could have plunged Germany into civil war, had that been what it decided to do.
Roehm (the head of the SA) was becoming increasingly discontent with Hitler and his administration. Foehn had expected Hitler’s rise to power to be a time of redistribution, with money, positions, and so forth going to old party comrades. Hitler wanted positions allocated by merit, and did not want party hacks advanced to positions for which they were not qualified. Whenever he deviated from that philosophy, for example in the case of Goering, the result was typically bad for Germany.
Roehm was discontent, but was he on the verge of open rebellion and civil war? Hitler was convinced he was. It is quite possible that some of Roehm’s rivals and enemies within the Nazi party fed Hitler false or exaggerated data about Roehm’s future intentions. But that is only speculation. We may never know for certain whether Roehm did or did not plan open rebellion against Hitler. At the time, Hitler had to make a quick decision based on limited data. He chose to place avoidance of a bloody civil war above loyalty to a friend. If you want to find things for which to fault Hitler, there are worse things you could point to than that.
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Now if I was a Jew I would rather be killed in Germany. They used gas which is fast and clean. Stalin sent people to a slow and painful dead I cold Siberia
You got to be kidding? From the arguments presented, being a Jew in Germany is apparently better than being a German in Germany because all Germans were starved by Churchill and FDR and Jews just hanged around and played hide and go seek with the SS. And if you were a polish Jew, you could not blame Hitler for invading and exterminating, but again just blame Churchill and others for staving everyone. Hitler was forced into this war of extermination and we only have Churchill to blame and the Americans and Soviets. Adolf was basically a swell dude. How could we have been so mistaken?
Answer: To merely bring up examples and raise them to the level of where real evil was committed and totally ignore the basic facts. And if you repeat the lie as Herr Goebbels points out, you can claim the truth by repetition. Fantastic!!
Example: thread about the best German tank… well the greatest tank could be a Panzer V, but the greatest killer of innocents and the greatest crime was the Morgenthau Plan, which starved more people than Hitler could have possibly murdered, and BTW Hitler had to kill them because the cost of exporting people cost too much, so their deaths are not the Nazi’s fault… its anybody else’s.
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…whatever that truth may be. …
I do not want to restart the argument, but I do think a clarification is worthwhile.
The issue in Kurt and my debate was not one of truth, in the sense of disputed facts. We agreed that the Nazis pursued a policy of systematic and deliberate genocide using gas chambers, mobile death squads and so on. We agreed that the Allies were blockading food supplies which lead to starvation. These facts were accepted by both of us.
The issue was whether the Allied blockade transferred guilt for genocide from the Nazis to the Allies. I can understand that the Allied blockade might be regarded as justification for a food allocation that lead to death for those not favoured, although the furthest I could myself go is to regard it as extenuating rather than exculpatory. But to exonerate those who built and filled the gas chambers and pass that guilt to those who put in place the food blockade is beyond my understanding.
This difference does not depend on the facts, but on moral standpoint. Unfortunately, moral truth is even tougher to grasp than facts ……
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Private Panic wrote,
The issue in Kurt and my debate was not one of truth, in the sense of disputed facts.
Let’s say that a spaceship has ten people on board, and exactly enough air for all ten people to arrive safely at their destination. A malicious man releases 30% of that spaceship’s air supply into outer space. At that point, the man has become guilty of the deaths of three people. We don’t yet know which three people the man just killed. In fact, there’s a strong likelihood that the responsibility for selecting the victims for the man’s crime will fall to the captain. The captain will be responsible for saying, “You seven get air, you three don’t.” The fact that the captain was forced into making that decision does not absolve the man who released the air from guilt. Nor does it transfer guilt onto the captain’s shoulders.
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In addition to these differences, much of the hostility can simply be attributed to Germany and USSR seeking to dominate overlapping territory.
An expansionist Germany (whether Nazi or Communist) was inevitably going to mistrust an expansionist Soviet Union.
To get the thread back on track. I guess you are spot on, Wheatbeer. Expansionist is the key word here. Nazism, Communism, Kingdom, Fascizm and so on are just names, and names don’t hurt anybody. Its when you steal your fellow mans land the problems start. Hitler and Stalin were basically thieves. Then we can debate who were the better or lesser thief and in that case Hitler win.
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Minor note: I should have written “and vice versa” at the end of that second sentence Narvik quoted (surprised no one complained about that earlier :lol:).
Returning to the original post, the ideological differences of these regimes tend to be overshadowed by the practical similarities of conducting total war as a dictatorship. That doesn’t mean the ideological differences are irrelevant.
Consider National Socialism as taking ethno-nationalism to its logical extreme. Socialism here is just a tool to harness and direct the collective/undivided strength of a nation as part of (in their minds) an inevitable Darwinian struggle between nations.
Communism does not cultivate the strength of any particular nation. Quite the contrary, it ultimately aims to dissolve nations. Socialism here isn’t just a tool to fight others. For a Communist believer, socialism simply paves the way for the ultimate idealized end, a classless/anarchist society.
(Before commenting, please note, I am using the word “nation” in the classical sense. Nation refers to an ethnic entity not a state entity.)
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Imperious Leader wrote,
Example: thread about the best German tank… well the greatest tank could be a
Panzer V, but the greatest killer of innocents and the greatest crime was the Morgenthau PlanI would never do something like that!
On another matter, Christopher Lee recently passed away. :( Lee was known for having played Saruman in the Lord of the Rings, Count Dooku in Star Wars, and other roles along those lines. He had a deep voice and a commanding, masculine, aristocratic presence. A typical theme for a Lee-played character was to initially side with the good guys. But then to commit a deep betrayal. His manner would give the betrayal a certain dignity. High evil, if you will, rather than petty evil.
One of the movies in which he starred involved the United States and Russia. There wasn’t a sufficiently evil power for the Christopher Lee-played character to betray himself to. So he went to work to create one. He and a few others began a plot to revive the old Soviet Union; with his supposed loyalty to the Russian government serving as a cloak under which to hide his betrayal and his plans to overthrow that government.
During Finland’s Winter War, Lee served as a pilot, and helped the brave Finns fight the evil Soviet invaders. He fought for anti-communism. Later, he joined the RAF; and proceeded to fight on the same side as communism. The anti-communists for whom he’d initially fought may have felt betrayed. They may also have felt that his deep voice and masculine, aristocratic bearing gave the betrayal a certain dignity.
Christopher Lee was not the only one guilty of betrayal during WWII. The French promised that if Germany invaded Poland, they would launch a general offensive against Germany within 15 days of mobilization. That promise was never kept–nor was it ever intended to be. Even worse, the British and the French initiated a food blockade against Germany–a food blockade which caused the deaths of millions of Poles. Not content with having thrown their Polish ally under the bus, the British and the French proceeded to use their food blockade to murder Poles by the millions!
Now where were we? Ah yes, Christopher Lee. All flippancy aside, he was a great actor, and he will be missed. May he rest in peace. :(
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Let’s say that a spaceship has ten people on board, and exactly enough air for all ten people to arrive safely at their destination. A malicious man releases 30% of that spaceship’s air supply into outer space. At that point, the man has become guilty of the deaths of three people. We don’t yet know which three people the man just killed. In fact, there’s a strong likelihood that the responsibility for selecting the victims for the man’s crime will fall to the captain. The captain will be responsible for saying, “You seven get air, you three don’t.” The fact that the captain was forced into making that decision does not absolve the man who released the air from guilt. Nor does it transfer guilt onto the captain’s shoulders.
The captain must have not liked the three Jews that were on board then. Easy decision. I don’t think the captain felt guilty.
This is all just transference of blame or guilt. The stunning assumption here is that the Captain (… Hitler) has to choose people to die at all.
Besides, the analogy doesn’t quite fit. 10 people on a spaceship is different from 40 million in a country. The people in Germany (and their leaders) had more options than stay and die of starvation. And if some of those options were taken from them (escape, emigration), then whose fault is that?
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L. Hoffman wrote:
The stunning assumption here is that the Captain (… Hitler) has to choose people to die at all.
It’s not an assumption. It’s a basic statement of fact.
Let X = the number of calories needed to keep everyone in German-held territory alive
Let Y = the number of calories physically available in that territory.If X > Y, people will die. The larger the difference, the more people die.
The people in Germany (and their leaders) had more options than stay and die of starvation.
What options were those? No major Western democratic nation offered Germany any peace terms other than unconditional surrender. After Barbarossa, the unconditional surrender was required to be to all the Allies, including the Soviet Union.
There were some German generals interested in overthrowing Hitler and making peace with the Western democracies. They covertly contacted the American government. FDR responded by saying that he made no distinction between a Nazi and non-Nazi government, and that unconditional surrender was an absolute requirement either way. Upon hearing this, a number of the German generals abandoned their plans to assassinate Hitler.
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L. Hoffman wrote:
The stunning assumption here is that the Captain (… Hitler) has to choose people to die at all.
It’s not an assumption. It’s a basic statement of fact.
Let X = the number of calories needed to keep everyone in German-held territory alive
Let Y = the number of calories physically available in that territory.If X > Y, people will die. The larger the difference, the more people die.
The people in Germany (and their leaders) had more options than stay and die of starvation.
What options were those? No major Western democratic nation offered Germany any peace terms other than unconditional surrender. After Barbarossa, the unconditional surrender was required to be to all the Allies, including the Soviet Union.
There were some German generals interested in overthrowing Hitler and making peace with the Western democracies. They covertly contacted the American government. FDR responded by saying that he made no distinction between a Nazi and non-Nazi government, and that unconditional surrender was an absolute requirement either way. Upon hearing this, a number of the German generals abandoned their plans to assassinate Hitler.
Sorry Kurt but that is pure NONSENSE.
You are basically saying life is Math,but it is not!Every single Person on this Earth living, lived and will be living is giving the Option to choose.
With your Statement you are making life as we know it as an result of Math.
It is not working! -
aequitas et veritas wrote:
You are basically saying life is Math,but it is not!
I’m not saying that life is math. I’m saying that life is subject to certain mathematical and scientific principles. For example:
You choose what you eat, and how much you exercise. But the outcomes of those choices are a result of medical and scientific principles. Or to take another example: places of worship are designed to be physically resistant to high winds or other types of severe weather. It is very rare for a religious leader to design his place of worship in such a way that it ought to collapse according to the laws of physics, and then for him to pray for a miraculous exemption from those laws.
If religious leaders typically rely on the laws of physics (as opposed to miracles) to keep their places of worship standing, it’s reasonable for secular leaders to rely on the laws of physics in their efforts to feed the people within their borders. Unfortunately, those physical laws dictate the following:
If [calories available] < [calories needed to keep everyone alive], some people will die. I’m no happier about that logic than anyone else. Bear in mind that a number of my distant Polish relatives undoubtedly died as a result of that brutal math. But getting all emotional about this would not change the underlying physical principles. Emotions are not substitutes for food in people’s bellies. Food–rather than emotion–is what was needed, and what Germany did not have.
Wheetbeer wrote:
Consider National Socialism as taking ethno-nationalism to its logical extreme.
Agreed.
Communism . . . ultimately aims to dissolve nations.
Also agreed.
Narvik wrote,
Expansionist is the key word here. Nazism, Communism, Kingdom, Fascizm and so on are just names . . .
I agree that both the Nazis and the communists were expansionistic. The goal of Hitler’s foreign policy was to conquer all the Soviet Union west of the Urals. That would have protected Germany from the communist threat, obtained the Lebensraum Hitler wanted, and given Germany the same strength relative to Europe that the United States had relative to North America. As Hitler pointed out in Mein Kampf, no one had ever succeeded in imposing a Versailles Treaty on the United States. Nor did he want anyone to ever again succeed in doing so to Germany.
The goal of communism is world conquest. Communists were far more expansionistic than the Nazis or the Japanese.
I would also argue that Western democracies have sometimes been expansionistic. In the absence of Western expansionism, the English language would have been confined to England, and the French language to France. Instead of which, English is the dominant language in most of North America, India, and other places colonized by Britain. French is the dominant language in large parts of Africa, and in other places too.
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The goal of communism is world conquest.
I will assume that you mean: world conquest was a goal of Stalinist socialism and not “Communism”.
Marx’s manifesto never advocated conquest. He believed revolution was an inevitable and organic process. Marx never imagined that revolution would fail in Western Europe. The idea of an agrarian state like Russia becoming socialist and then imposing socialism upon others by conventional military force would have sounded like utter madness to Marx.
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I will assume that you mean: world conquest was a goal of Stalinist socialism and not “Communism”.
Marx’s manifesto never advocated conquest. He believed revolution was an inevitable and organic process. Marx never imagined that revolution would fail in Western Europe. The idea of an agrarian state like Russia becoming socialist and then imposing socialism upon others by conventional military force would have sounded like utter madness to Marx.
When I wrote that world conquest was the goal of communism, that’s exactly what I meant. Marx envisioned a world completely dominated by communism, with no other systems of government present. Engels in particular was very emphatic that violence was needed to achieve this goal.
It’s true that Marx seemed to envision the source of this violence as coming from people rebelling against their own governments, rather than communist governments violently conquering non-communist ones. At the time the Manifesto was written, the world had no communist governments.
But if a group of communist revolutionaries, people who see themselves as part of a movement committed to the violent removal of all non-communist governments everywhere, happen to seize control of some local government, what are they to do then? Are they supposed to just put aside their revolutionary fervor, and enjoy the utopia their local government will supposedly create? Or, having overthrown their own local bourgeoise with violence, maybe they’ll feel inclined to do the same to neighboring nations’ bourgeoise. Going after one’s neighbors can be either overt (military conquest) or covert (subversion and attempts to weaken the existing social order). Stalin was absolutely delighted to do both things to his neighbors, and was perfectly happy to use subversion against more distant nations as well.
Military conquest–especially on a world war type scale–carries more risks than subversion. Stalin’s more cautious successors tended to shy away from more than purely local military conquests, while continuing to fully embrace his emphasis on subversion. Every Soviet leader prior to Gorbachev embraced world conquest as the natural long term goal for the Soviet Union. A world controlled by one world government–a communist government–was the same goal Marx and Engles had. The fact the Soviets embraced additional means of achieving the violent removal of non-communist regimes is true, but does not alter the basic Marx/Engels declaration of war against all non-communist governments everywhere.
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@aequitas:
Every single Person on this Earth living, lived and will be living is giving the Option to choose.
Quite right aequitas.
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Sorry to revert progress buuuuuuut……
L. Hoffman wrote:
The stunning assumption here is that the Captain (… Hitler) has to choose people to die at all.
It’s not an assumption. It’s a basic statement of fact.
Let X = the number of calories needed to keep everyone in German-held territory alive
Let Y = the number of calories physically available in that territory.If X > Y, people will die. The larger the difference, the more people die.
Mathematically that makes sense. However, you are reducing a very complicated equation down to (2) variables and completely ignoring my point: why was it okay for Hitler/the Nazis to make that choice? Why did they have to make that choice?
Your statements would indicate that (Embargo) + (Too Many People) = (People must be killed so they don’t first starve).
If the number of people who would starve is the same as those that would be killed, then why not simply restrict their food such that they starve? Why systematically kill them? I am not supposing you have an answer for this, it is just rhetorical.
The underlying assumption here is that the logical and obvious choice for Hitler/the Nazis was to exterminate certain people so that ethnic Germans did not starve. Why is this logical and obvious? (I know it was to the Nazis, but why do you imply that it is rational, excusable or a choice that can be sympathized with?)
The people in Germany (and their leaders) had more options than stay and die of starvation.
What options were those? No major Western democratic nation offered Germany any peace terms other than unconditional surrender. After Barbarossa, the unconditional surrender was required to be to all the Allies, including the Soviet Union.
I did not mean that Germany’s leaders should have opted for Unconditional Surrender. What I was saying is that the leaders of Germany had more options than simply to exterminate all the Jews and whomever else deemed unfit. And the persecuted people had more options than to simply stay in Germany.
Nazi leaders could have relocated all the undesirables/foreigners to non-German (i.e. Ukraine, USSR, Greece, Hungary, Africa, France, etc…) territories. They could have placed them on barges and set them adrift in the Mediterranean. If truly deprived of their food and facing persecution in Germany, I am sure many Jews (et al) would have (and did) voluntarily emigrate if given the chance or free passage to do so. (Many did, but many more were not given that opportunity.)
My point is simply that Nazi Germany need not have expended such an effort to kill all those involved in the Holocaust. Impending Starvation does not logically lead to Kill A Portion of Your Own Populous. There were other, non-genocidal ways of removing undesirable people. If the Nazis were at all capable of separate coexistence or had any compunction over atrocities, they could have made different choices. To insinuate that Hitler/the Nazis had no choice but to kill people is blatantly false.
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L. Hoffman wrote:
If the number of people who would starve is the same as those that would be killed, then
why not simply restrict their food such that they starve?I’d like to thank you for taking the time to write a good post, and to express your points of disagreement in detail. I come here for good discussion, including discussion with those whose perspectives differ from mine. :)
In answer to your question–in some cases the Nazis tried to do exactly what you described. The Hunger Plan was intended to starve captured Soviet cities, in order to free up food for use elsewhere. However, the successful implementation of the Hunger Plan would have required the Nazis to physically blockade the captured Soviet cities in question. For that, the Nazis lacked the required manpower. As a result of that lack, food continued to flow from captured Soviet farms to captured Soviet cities. Also adding to the Hunger Plan’s failure was local Nazi officials’ grasp of the negative political consequences of starving the local Soviet population to death at a time when Germany and the Soviet Union were at war.
The failure of the Hunger Plan did not mean less overall starvation. It meant that different people starved than those the Nazis had wanted to starve. In particular, millions of Soviet POWs, conscripted to work in German weapons factories, died of hunger as a direct result of Germany’s failure to starve people living in captured Soviet cities.
If truly deprived of their food and facing persecution in Germany, I am sure many
Jews (et al) would have (and did) voluntarily emigrate if given the chance or free passage to do so.Below is a description of The White Paper of 1939
The White Paper of 1939 was a policy paper issued by the British government under Neville Chamberlain. . . . a limit of 75,000 Jewish immigrants was set for the five-year period 1940-1944 (consisting of a regular yearly quota of 10,000 and a flexible supplementary quota of 25,000); after 1944 the further immigration of Jews to Palestine would depend on permission of the Arab majority (section II); and restrictions were placed on the rights of Jews to buy land from Arabs (section III).
The White Paper was published as Cmd 6019. It was approved by the House of Commons on 23 May 1939 by 268 votes to 179.[1] . . .
Following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, a growing number of European Jews were prepared to spend the money necessary to enter Palestine. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped the 500,000 German Jews of their citizenship. Jewish migration was impeded by Nazi restrictions on the transfer of finances abroad (departing Jews had to abandon their property), but the Jewish Agency was able to negotiate an agreement allowing Jews resident in Germany to buy German goods for export to Palestine thus circumventing the restrictions.
The large numbers of Jews entering Palestine . . . led to the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine. . . .
In the wake of World War II, the British believed that Jewish support was guaranteed or unimportant. However they feared that the Arab world might turn against them. This geopolitical consideration was, in Raul Hilberg’s word, “decisive”[6] to British policies.
The White Paper of 1939 restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine to 10,000 Jews per year–a purely token number when weighed against the millions of Jews who perished in the Holocaust. I know what you’re thinking–that Hitler didn’t have to export his Jewish population to Palestine in particular. He could have chosen any nation outside the Allied food blockade. During the early 1940s the Nazi government tried something along those lines. They loaded a ship up with Jews, and had the ship sail to many nations around the world. Each and every nation–including the United States–at which the ship arrived turned away the Jews. Eventually, the ship returned to Germany, still filled with Jews! Granted, this was something of a publicity stunt, in that the Nazis knew in advance that no nation was willing to take in large numbers of Jews. Prior to the passage of the White Paper of 1939, Palestine had been the only viable destination for Jewish refugees. One of the reasons Israel was created in the first place was so that there would never again be a situation in which some random White Paper would prevent Jewish refugees from having any place to go.
After the outbreak of war in September 1939, the head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine David Ben-Gurion declared: ‘We will fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and fight the war as if there is no White Paper.’[21] . . .
After the war, the determination of Holocaust survivors to reach Palestine led to large scale illegal Jewish migration to Palestine. . . . Illegal immigrants detained by the British Government were interned in camps on Cyprus. The immigrants had no citizenship and could not be returned to any country.
There were other, non-genocidal ways of removing undesirable people.
Suppose, for example, that the Nazis had said, “we cannot feed all the people in the lands we’ve conquered. To solve the problem, we will force most of the populace in conquered Soviet lands eastward–to the portion of the Soviet Union not yet conquered by Germany.” Doing something like that would not necessarily have saved those people from starvation. Bear in mind that the Soviet Union had its own severe food problems, caused by the fact that Stalin diverted a large portion of his workforce away from agriculture and to military manufacturing. Such a measure might have lessened the death toll caused by the Allied food blockade; but not necessarily by very much. Moreover, such an action would have represented a very significant military sacrifice on Germany’s part. The tens of millions of people Hitler would have sent east would undoubtedly have been put to work in Soviet weapons factories, or conscripted for the Red Army. Given that Germany was badly outnumbered and greatly outproduced, in a war in which its very existence was on the line, to require that kind of military sacrifice was asking an awful lot. It’s also worth pointing out that there was not a single major instance during WWII in which the Allies sacrificed military advantage for humanitarian concerns. If the side with all the advantages wasn’t willing to make military sacrifices to save innocent lives, why should the nation in (by far) the weaker position have been expected to do so?
That being the case, I will grant that in Germany during WWII, military considerations were considered much more important than humanitarian concerns. Actions were justified or rejected based on whether they helped or harmed the war effort. Was there a certain level of brutality in their determination to do everything possible to win the war? Yes–but the same could also be said about the Allied war effort. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden come to mind. The brutality of the measures the Nazis were willing to employ in their efforts to win the war must be weighed against the brutality they were attempting to avoid: the brutality of an Allied victory.
Following the Winter Offensive of 1945, mass rape by Soviet males occurred in all major cities taken by the Red Army. Women were gang raped by as many as several dozen soldiers during the liberation [sic] of Poland. In some cases victims who did not hide in the basements all day were raped up to 15 times.[64][90] According to Antony Beevor, following the Red Army’s capture of Berlin in 1945, Soviet troops raped German women and girls as young as eight years old.[91]
Soviet postwar brutality was not limited to rape only. In the celebratory atmosphere of the Allied victory, it was considered acceptable to rape or murder anyone associated with opposing the Allied war effort. Millions of people were murdered in the aftermath of the Allied victory.
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My point is simply that Nazi Germany need not have expended such an effort to kill all those involved in the Holocaust. Impending Starvation does not logically lead to Kill A Portion of Your Own Populous. There were other, non-genocidal ways of removing undesirable people. If the Nazis were at all capable of separate coexistence or had any compunction over atrocities, they could have made different choices. To insinuate that Hitler/the Nazis had no choice but to kill people is blatantly false.
I agree. All the arguments against this merely throw blame at other parties, either for different crimes, or for creating the conditions that contributed to the Nazi’s policy of deliberate and systematic genocide. Whether or not those arguments are true, and all too often they are, is irrelevant. Hopefully, we do not live in a world where self-interest and logic have replaced justice, legality and morality, imperfect though our pursuit of those concepts is. The Nazi’s are guilty of genocide.
There is a debate we might have about the allies’ failings, but that debate is stymied by the use of those failings to forgive the Nazi’s their crimes.
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Private Panic wrote,
Hopefully, we do not live in a world where self-interest and logic have replaced justice, legality and morality.
I hope the same, which is why some of the arguments advanced in this thread concern me. For example, the argument has been made that a food blockade is an acceptable tactic, because it’s analogous to besieging a castle in the Middle Ages. The underlying assumption seems to be that if an action was considered permissible during the Middle Ages, it should have been considered permissible during WWII.
As long as we’re on the subject of the Middle Ages, below is a description of the torture tactics used by the Normans to extract treasure from the conquered Anglo-Saxons.
They hanged them by the thumbs, or by the head, and hung fires on their feet; they put knotted strings about their heads, and writhed them so that it went to the brain … Some they put in a chest that was short, and narrow, and shallow, and put sharp stones therein, and pressed the man therein, so that they broke all his limbs … I neither can nor may tell all the wounds or all the tortures which they inflicted on wretched men in this land.
Below is another description of a medieval torture tactic.
A barrel is fitted over the entire body, with the head sticking out from a hole in the top. The person is kept locked in the barrel, forcing him to kneel in his own filth, and in some cases suffer extremes of hot or cold. . . .
The defenceless individual’s faeces accumulated within the container, attracting ever more insects, which would eat and breed within his or her exposed and often gangrenous flesh.
Feeding the victim would often be allowed each day in some cases to prolong the torture, so that dehydration or starvation did not provide him or her with the release of death. . . .
Death, when it eventually occurred, was probably due to a combination of dehydration, starvation and septic shock.
The Middle Ages should not be used as a barometer for whether the Allied food blockade was acceptable!
I’m not an expert on medieval history. But my impression is that whoever imposed brutality took responsibility for their actions. Their attitude was, “Yes, we did this, and it was necessary because . . .” I could be wrong, but I don’t think they attempted to blame their own brutality on their victims. For example, if some random king besieged an enemy castle, I don’t think he’d blame the resulting starvation on the enemy’s refusal to surrender. If he ordered his soldiers to lob dead bodies over the castle walls in an effort to spread disease, I don’t think he’d turn around and say, “The defenders of the castle are cruel, inhuman monsters for having driven me to this!” But when the Allies imposed their food blockade–a blockade designed and intended to starve millions or tens of millions–why do so many blame the consequences of that food blockade on the Nazis? I just don’t understand the thinking behind that assignment of blame, any more than I understand a recent court decision to needlessly ruin an innocent teenager’s life.
If you can show me where the Nazis had enough food with which to feed innocent people, but chose not to, then fine. Blame those deaths on the Nazis. If you can show me where they imposed deaths that were crueler than starvation (Allied food blockade) would have been, then blame that cruelty on the Nazis too. If you can show me cases in which they reduced their own food supply, for reasons other than military necessity, those deaths should be blamed on them too. My goal is not to defend the Nazis in cases where they were legitimately guilty. But I don’t want to see them blamed for the Allies’ choice to impose a food blockade, or the Allies’ refusal to offer Germany any way out of that blockade other than unconditional surrender. The Allies knew their food blockade would kill millions of Poles. In choosing to go forward with that food blockade anyway, they demonstrated the same spirit of cynicism and betrayal toward Poland which had motivated them during the Polish-Soviet War (1919-'21), and which motivated Daladier’s government to tell a pack of lies to Poland during the months leading up to WWII.
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My attempts to keep out of this thread fail because I feel strongly on the subject.
… when the Allies imposed their food blockade–a blockade designed and intended to starve millions or tens of millions–why do so many blame the consequences of that food blockade on the Nazis?
Starvation can be blamed on the blockade. Genocide cannot. See below.
If you can show me where the Nazis had enough food with which to feed innocent people, but chose not to, then fine. Blame those deaths on the Nazis. If you can show me where they imposed deaths that were crueler than starvation (Allied food blockade) would have been, then blame that cruelty on the Nazis too. If you can show me cases in which they reduced their own food supply, for reasons other than military necessity, those deaths should be blamed on them too. My goal is not to defend the Nazis in cases where they were legitimately guilty. But I don’t want to see them blamed for the Allies’ choice to impose a food blockade, or the Allies’ refusal to offer Germany any way out of that blockade other than unconditional surrender. The Allies knew their food blockade would kill millions of Poles. In choosing to go forward with that food blockade anyway, they demonstrated the same spirit of cynicism and betrayal toward Poland which had motivated them during the Polish-Soviet War (1919-'21), and which motivated Daladier’s government to tell a pack of lies to Poland during the months leading up to WWII.
By this reasoning a government unable to feed its people has the right / duty to murder part of its population in order to feed the rest. It can select which part to murder based on whatever mantra of hatred and bigotry it prefers. No guilt is attached.
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