Private Panic wrote,
With me it takes consideration of both sides via a debate, rather than a polemic.
Fair enough. For the sake of argument, I’ll divide my position into two component parts; to see which part (if either) is polemical.
1. Mass murder is morally wrong, and is a war crime.
2. The Allies’ food blockade was an act of mass murder.
I think that almost everyone would agree with 1. Not much controversy there. To see whether the Allied food blockade met the definition of mass murder, I looked up “mass murder” in dictionary.com. They didn’t have a definition, so I went to Wikipedia and found the following:
The concept of state-sponsored mass murder covers a range of potential killings. It is defined as the intentional and indiscriminate murder of a large number of people by government agents.
We can safely agree that the Allied food blockade killed a very large number of people; and often did so in an indiscriminate way. The personnel who enforced the blockade acted as agents of their respective Allied governments. They carried out the blockade because they were ordered to do so by their governments; not because they thought the idea up on their own.
For the blockade to count as mass murder, it’s not enough to establish that the people in question were merely killed. It needs to be shown they were actually murdered. Wikipedia provides the following definition of “murder.”
Murder is the killing of another person without justification or valid excuse, and it is especially the unlawful killing of another person with malice aforethought.
What justification or valid excuse did the Allies have for killing millions of Poles, or tens of millions of Slavs? There has been no shortage of pro-Allied posts in this thread. But none of those posts provided a credible explanation as to why it was acceptable for the Allies to deliberately, with malice aforethought, engage in such widespread, indiscriminate killing.
Well before WWII, laws of war had been established pertaining to artillery bombardment. For it to be legal to bombard a city with artillery, the following had to be true.
1. There had to be a military garrison inside the city.
2. Your own side must have an army at, or rapidly approaching, the city in question.
3. There must be a good faith effort to focus the bombardment on military targets within the city. However, it is understood that there will be collateral damage. Civilian deaths will not be regarded as murders, as long as a good faith effort was made.
In 1940, the French avoided the bombardment of Paris by declaring it an open city, and vacating the military presence there. The Germans did the same in 1944. In time of war, enemy combatants are legitimate military targets. Whereas, civilians are not legitimate targets. Almost no government in human history would have starved its own military personnel in order to feed the residents of the territories it occupied. The intended targets of the Allied food blockade were civilians, not enemy soldiers.
If the Allied food blockade meets the definition of mass murder, why are people letting the Allies off the hook for it? The only reason I can think of is that the war crime in question was committed by the Allies. We would not be getting that response from those people, had the crime in question been committed by the Axis.
Group A (food blockader)
Group B (target of food blockade)
Group C (outside group)
If Group A successfully deprives Group B of food, and members of Group B die as a result of hunger, then Group A is responsible for those deaths among Group B.
But if Group B steals food from Group C, knowing and guaranteeing that members of Group C will die in their place, then Group B is still responsible for murdering Group C. The fact that Group B is threatened with starvation doesn’t give them a free moral pass to starve others.
Quote from: Imperious Leader
What is surprising, however, is the starvation resulted directly from NAZI policies.
The widespread starvation in Europe during the years of WWII was not a result of Nazi policies; it was a result of the prevention of food imports from neutral nations by the British. The forcing of the Poles, Jews, Slavs, Soviets, etc. to burden this starvation is what was the result of Nazi policies. Any extra deaths throughout the war (a more significant number at the end since they didn’t have to feed as much conquered territory) are also at the fault of the Nazis.
It was. Nazi’s controlled the food and starved groups of people. That has already been established. In order for Germany to get out of the starving people business, they just needed to surrender and leave all the innocent people of Europe alone. Because the allies made a basic economic plan to deny the enemy imports of taco’s from Argentina, knowing fully well that about 90% of the world was at war with Hitler and really he had no trading partners left, if he wanted to continue the war of extermination, it’s entirely his own fault for putting Germany in that position. Not to mention that England was far more effected than Germany by the USW campaign 40-43.
The problem everyone has with Kurt is he invents a fake problem and raises it to the level of Genocide in order to make his ridiculous points sanguine. They will always be ridiculous to even try to explain that “Hitler had to kill the Jews and many other groups because Germans didn’t have food, and its Churchill’s fault”. This is the Coo Coo logic made by and to explain away behaviors that pale imagination.
Quote from: Imperious Leader
Sorry but you read all the coo coo literature
What makes it “cuckoo”? The fact that it highlights Allied shortcomings? Denying that the Allies had shortcomings is as wrong and ahistorical as denying that the Axis had shortcomings. If it acts like the Germans did nothing wrong? There’s plenty of literature that acts like the Allies did nothing wrong that you seem to have no qualms with, even though it’s also not truthful.
It is coo coo. Otherwise History would be quite different. The Jews would blame Churchill for Genocide. The blame is Hitlers alone. The level and quantity of crimes committed by the NAZI’s is ridiculously greater than anything the Allies did, and if you don’t understand this then you got problems, oh and we never landed on the moon either.
Sorry but you read all the coo coo literature
The fact that someone who drank the Allied Kool Aid labels something “coo coo literature” does not make it so. Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction has been praised by The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The New York Sun, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, History Today, The Seattle Times, Sunday Telegraph (London). You’re going to find it extraordinarily difficult to persuade your audience that all those people are coo coos who don’t understand real history.
If you want to use the one book you have as bathroom literature, then go ahead and make it your bible and disregard everything else. That’s sound advice for people who are closed off from reality.
From your own link:
As 1940 drew to a close, the situation for many of Europe’s 525 million people was dire. With the food supply reduced by 15% by the blockade and another 15% by poor harvests, starvation and diseases such as influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhus and cholera were a threat.
Too bad Hitler started the war and created all those problems for England.
Their only mention at Nuremberg was “they were following orders”, which were to systematically
murder entire groups of people during the entire war and years before it.
From the Wikipedia article about the Nuremberg Trials:
Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Harlan Fiske Stone called the Nuremberg trials a fraud. “(Chief U.S. prosecutor) Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg,” he wrote. “I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”[71] . . .
Jackson, in a letter discussing the weaknesses of the trial, in October 1945 told U.S. President Harry S. Truman that the Allies themselves “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for.” . . .
That is an opinion, not fact. And he wasn’t referring to killing 10 million people in camps, because the Allies didn’t do that.
Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of “substituting power for principle” at Nuremberg. . . .
One of the charges, brought against Keitel, Jodl, and Ribbentrop included conspiracy to commit aggression against Poland in 1939. The Secret Protocols of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939, proposed the partition of Poland between the Germans and the Soviets (which was subsequently executed in September 1939); however, Soviet leaders were not tried for being part of the same conspiracy.[78] Instead, the Tribunal proclaimed the Secret Protocols of the Non-Aggression Pact to be a forgery. Moreover, Allied Powers Britain and Soviet Union were not tried for preparing and conducting the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran and the Winter War, respectively. . . .
In order to get lend lease going for USSR, they needed Iran because it was somewhat hostile to those efforts, for the greater good to win the war. They also attacked Vichy and occupied Iceland, and half a dozen other things….for victory. But what they didn’t do is exterminate people, that was reserved for Hitler.
The trials were conducted under their own rules of evidence. The Charter of the International Military Tribunal permitted the use of normally inadmissible “evidence”. Article 19 specified that “The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence.” [In other words, they were free to make stuff up.] . . .
Freda Utley, in her 1949 book The High Cost of Vengeance[83] charged the court with amongst other things double standards. She pointed to the Allied use of civilian forced labor, and deliberate starvation of civilians[84][85] in the occupied territories. She also noted that General Rudenko, the chief Soviet prosecutor, after the trials became commandant of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. . . .
Ask Freda which was worse: Genocide or food blockade.
The main Soviet judge, Iona Nikitchenko, presided over some of the most notorious of Joseph Stalin’s show trials during the Great Purges of 1936 to 1938, where he among other things sentenced Kamenev and Zinoviev.[88] According to the declassified Soviet archives, 681,692 people arrested for “counter-revolutionary and state crimes” were shot in 1937 and 1938 alone–an average of over 900 executions a day.[89]
The Soviet prosecutor, Roman Rudenko, later became commandant of NKVD special camp Nr. 7.[90] By the time the camp closed in the spring of 1950, at least 12,000 prisoners had died due to the catastrophic prison conditions, hunger and psychological or physical exhaustion.[91] . . .
nobody deny’s the soviets did some things, but it the NAZI’s were still worse … by far.
In an editorial at the time The Economist, a British weekly newspaper, criticised the hypocrisy of both Britain and France. “Among crimes against humanity stands the offence of the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations. Can the Americans who dropped the atom bomb and the British who destroyed the cities of western Germany plead ‘not guilty’ on this count? Crimes against humanity also include the mass expulsion of populations. Can the Anglo-Saxon leaders who at Potsdam condoned the expulsion of millions of Germans from their homes hold themselves completely innocent?”
Ok the weekly paper “the Economist” decides everything. Germany started the bombing of civilians and when the Allies do that just so much better because Germany had to attack the whole world you cry uncle because the problem Germany caused came home to roost.
After WWII, Britain operated a concentration camp/torture camp at Bad Nenndorf. Below is a quote from a Guardian article.
Oh brother. now you equate this with the millions murdered in Germany as if they are the same thing?
Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS . . .
Former prisoners told Hayward that they had been whipped as well as beaten. This, the detective said, seemed unbelievable, until “our inquiries of warders and guards produced most unexpected corroboration”. Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture and murder their wives and children were considered “perfectly proper”, on the grounds that such threats were never carried out.
Moreover, any prisoner thought to be uncooperative during interrogation was taken to a punishment cell where they would be stripped and repeatedly doused in water. This punishment could continue for weeks, even in sub-zero temperatures. . . .
One victim of the cold cell punishment was Buttlar, who swallowed the spoon handle to escape. An anti-Nazi, he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. “I never in all those two years had undergone such treatments,” he said.
Go read up on Dr. Mengle and what he did with twins.
If the British were willing to torture Nazi prisoners, and threaten those prisoners’ families, any confessions those prisoners made must be regarded as highly suspect. No more credible than the confessions made at Soviet show trials.
If the NAZI’s were willing to torture Jewish prisoners, and threaten those prisoners’ families, any confessions those prisoners made must be regarded as highly suspect. No more credible than the confessions made at Roland Friesler’s show trials.
Group A (food blockader)
Group B (target of food blockade)
Group C (outside group)If Group A successfully deprives Group B of food, and members of Group B die as a result of hunger, then Group A is responsible for those deaths among Group B.
But if Group B steals food from Group C, knowing and guaranteeing that members of Group C will die in their place, then Group B is still responsible for murdering Group C. The fact that Group B is threatened with starvation doesn’t give them a free moral pass to starve others.
Problem with the venn diagram is the Germans are more responsible for committing the same thing except more successfully. England needed everything delivered by ship, Hitler at least could steal from plundered nations, alot more coastlines for Fishing, alot more territory for farming, He still had trading partners like Sweden and USSR ( until he invaded them too). The actual problem is Hitler CONTROLLED THE FOOD DISTRIBUTION, and it was used to direct starvation of undesirables that they wanted DEAD. The Allies wanted Hitler to surrender and because Hitler starts wars and can’t finish them he can’t blame anybody else for his failures.
Let me try to fix that logical syllogism using the flat earth society logic:
Group A (Hitler starts invading country after country plundering them and exterminating anybody he hates)
Group B (Allies attempt to stop Hitler by attacking Germany and among other things start another Economic War with any means at their disposal)
Group C (Hitler has no trading partners left because he either declared war on them, liquidated them, or they declared war on Germany and are part of the Allies)
Group D ( Churchill is the devil and all the worlds problems traced to him, not the NAZI’s)
Group A successfully reduces the war economy of Group B’s food supply among other war making materials, and members of Group A- systematically use food as a means to exterminate the vast list of people they target to die as a result of hunger, then Group D is responsible for those deaths among Group B because they are supposed to do nothing to effect Hitler from global conquest. Hence the true evil was Winston, not Hitler–- its so obvious even the internet says so.
Wheatbeer wrote:
If Group A successfully deprives Group B of food, and members of Group B die as a result of hunger, then Group A is responsible for those deaths among Group B.
Agreed. Let’s say for the sake of argument that Group A creates enough starvation to cause 20 million deaths.
But if Group B steals food from Group C, knowing and guaranteeing that members of Group C will die in their place, then Group B is still responsible for murdering Group C.
There are at least three ways to look at this.
Once Group B steals from Group C, Group A is absolved of guilt. Under this scenario, Group A’s use of famine as a weapon was permissible, as long as Group B made sure that the resulting harm was borne by someone other than B. Group B is guilty of 20 million deaths, Group A is guilty of nothing.
Group A and Group B are both held equally responsible. In this scenario, Group A is held responsible for 20 million deaths because of what it did to B. Group B is also held responsible for 20 million deaths; on the theory that it has the right to starve its own people to death, but does not have the right to starve C. Under this scenario, both A and B are being held responsible for 20 million deaths each–40 million deaths total–even though only 20 million people have died.
Group A is held responsible. Its use of food as a weapon was intended to kill 20 million people; and 20 million people died. The fact that B transferred those deaths to C does not absolve A of its guilt, or make B either more guilty or less guilty than would have been the case, had it starved its own people instead. Under this theory, a government does not have the right to starve its own people, and does not have the right to starve some other group of people either. No additional guilt was created when the government of B transferred the starvation to C; because the starvation of either B or C is regarded as equally wrong.
During WWI, the Allies used food as a weapon against Germany. The resulting collapse of morale–and hence of the Kaiser’s government–was an important reason for its defeat. After Germany lost the war, the victorious Allies continued the food blockade on into 1919; in order to force Germany to sign the Versailles Treaty. (A treaty which, incidentally, bore no relationship at all to the lofty promises for a just peace Allied leaders had made before Germany had laid down its weapons.) The Versailles Treaty crippled Germany’s economy so badly that, by the time Hitler came to power, most Germans had experienced what Adam Tooze described as “periods of prolonged, insatiable hunger.”
During WWI, the German government thought much the same way you do. They could have chosen to feed their own people by starving the residents of their eastern territories: Polish people, and the residents of German-occupied west Russia. But they chose not to. Primarily due to that choice, the government collapsed. The people who’d been using food as a weapon–narcissistic Allied politicians–now had all the power. As a result, the German people continued to go hungry right up until Hitler came to power.
These were the life experiences which led Nazis and other Germans to become grimly determined to do whatever it took to feed the German people–up to and including the starvation of German-occupied Slavic territory. Another consideration was that a weak Germany–or a Germany whose government had collapsed; as the Kaiser’s did in 1918–would quickly fall prey to Soviet territorial expansion. Lenin and especially Stalin had absolutely abysmal track records when it came to mass murder. Most Western democratic politicians simply weren’t interested in stopping Soviet expansion, or in allowing Germany to stop Soviet expansion. That strongly suggests those politicians were every bit as cruel as the ones who’d starved Germany during WWI.
I realize that starving someone else’s people in order to feed your own may well be a case of fighting cruelty with cruelty. I have very ambivalent feelings about that. But Germany had very few good options open to it. Unless I can come up with a “good” option–one clearly better than the option they chose–I’m not sure I have the right to condemn them for the basic concept of starving others to feed their own.
You won’t be surprised to hear that I agree with wheatbeer, which is why I marked his post up.
Dear KurtGodel,
You are repeating your self.
Like I said before, if you are not able to provide evidence of your claims then simply stop posting this nonsence!
You are sounding like someone who is trying to change history from his desk.
You arguments have no logic at all and I can not see that you are in anyway intellect.
Copy and paste has nothing to do with it.
If you are hundred procent convinced about what you say is the truth, then a intellect guy
would do everything possible to provide facts, lifetime witnesses, documents to prove his point.
You just come up with links of books we should read and take it as granit.
There is only one book in the world that is about the truth.
And belief it or not, even this books talks about the holocaust.
I suggest we go back to topic or we stop this topic.
Because I’m no fan of your theories and having relatives who survived camp and had relatives who served for Germany during this timeperiod makes me not even smile about your arguments that Germany was forced to pull up death camps.
If you say forcef to war, diffrent thing.
If we talk about overlord was also an inside job, diffrent thing.
But if you keep argumenting that germany was forced to kill jews, gays,gypsys,disabled, jehova witnesses, christians then I will report this topic to mod.
Im serious about it!
I have listening to long and debated to much with people who either denied the holocaust or blamed others for that it happened.
Nazi Germany did it, no way arround!!!
But if Group B steals food from Group C, knowing and guaranteeing that members of Group C will die in their place, then Group B is still responsible for murdering Group C. The fact that Group B is threatened with starvation doesn’t give them a free moral pass to starve others.
True, but the fact that Group B starved others instead of themselves doesn’t absolve Group A of causing the starvation in the first place.
@Imperious:
That is an opinion, not fact. And he wasn’t referring to killing 10 million people in camps, because the Allies didn’t do that.
OK people, first-hand witness accounts are now opinion.
Also since when is the Soviet Union not part of the Allies? They killed tens of millions of people in and out of camps.
@Imperious:
In order to get lend lease going for USSR, they needed Iran because it was somewhat hostile to those efforts, for the greater good to win the war. They also attacked Vichy and occupied Iceland, and half a dozen other things….for victory. But what they didn’t do is exterminate people, that was reserved for Hitler.
So the Allies are allowed to invade whomever they want and wage war however they want as long as they emerge victorious? Somehow I don’t think you would argue that the starvation of Soviet population to feed the German army was acceptable if Germany had won the war and gotten the Allies to surrender…
And the Allies didn’t exterminate people? Tell that to the Ukrainians the Soviet Union starved before the war, the Poles they indiscriminately killed during their invasion, the Bengalis who starved because the British thought their homeland citizens were more important…the list goes on.
@Imperious:
nobody denies the soviets did some things, but it the NAZIs were still worse … by far.
You have denied multiple times that the Soviets did “some things” when you say that the Allies never committed mass murder. The Soviets were part of the Allies.
I am curious what your metric for “badness” of crimes are, though. It can’t be numbers, because the Soviets killed more than Germany even if you attribute the food blockade deaths to Germany. If it’s the people they killed, what makes the Nazis’ victims more important to keep alive than the Soviets’?
@Imperious:
What makes it “cuckoo”?
It is coo coo. Otherwise History would be quite different.
Question dodging aside, this is terrible logic. It’s like saying anyone who votes for the loser in an election is “cuckoo” because their candidate lost.
@Imperious:
They will always be ridiculous to even try to explain that “Hitler had to kill the Jews and many other groups because Germans didn’t have food, and its Churchill’s fault”.
As far as I can tell, this is a straw man argument. Only Kurt can confirm/deny that this is/isn’t the argument he’s making, but if it’s not, any attempts to argue against this point of view are irrelevant, as no one is actually taking that side.
But if Group B steals food from Group C, knowing and guaranteeing that members of Group C will die in their place, then Group B is still responsible for murdering Group C. The fact that Group B is threatened with starvation doesn’t give them a free moral pass to starve others.
True, but the fact that Group B starved others instead of themselves doesn’t absolve Group A of causing the starvation in the first place.
I thought wheatbeer’s post made it clear that it did not absolve group A, in which case he, you and I are in vociferous agreement.
My mistake then, I read it as Group A only sharing guilt if Group B let their own people die.
Kurt,
None of your three scenarios matches my perspective.
- Once Group B steals from Group C, Group A is absolved of guilt. Under this scenario, Group A’s use of famine as a weapon was permissible, as long as Group B made sure that the resulting harm was borne by someone other than B. Group B is guilty of 20 million deaths, Group A is guilty of nothing.
Everyone is responsible for their own actions. If your numbers are correct, then Group A is guilty of 20 million counts of attempted murder.
- Group A and Group B are both held equally responsible. In this scenario, Group A is held responsible for 20 million deaths because of what it did to B. Group B is also held responsible for 20 million deaths; on the theory that it has the right to starve its own people to death, but does not have the right to starve C. Under this scenario, both A and B are being held responsible for 20 million deaths each–40 million deaths total–even though only 20 million people have died.
20 million cases of attempted murder on one side and 20 million cases of murder on the other side. There is no duplicate crime.
- Group A is held responsible. Its use of food as a weapon was intended to kill 20 million people; and 20 million people died. The fact that B transferred those deaths to C does not absolve A of its guilt, or make B either more guilty or less guilty than would have been the case, had it starved its own people instead. Under this theory, a government does not have the right to starve its own people, and does not have the right to starve some other group of people either. No additional guilt was created when the government of B transferred the starvation to C; because the starvation of either B or C is regarded as equally wrong.
Everyone is responsible for their own actions. Otherwise there is no such thing as responsibility at all because the cause of all things would stretch continually backwards through time.
Wheatbeer wrote,
If your numbers are correct, then Group A is guilty of 20 million counts of attempted murder.
You and I appear to be regarding this matter from somewhat different perspectives.
Let’s say that there are three ships crossing the ocean; each with 100 people on board. Ship A has enough food to feed 150 people; ships B and C have exactly enough food for 100 people each. The captain of ship A orders a nighttime raid on ship B. During the raid, some of Ship A’s sailors sneak on board Ship B, and throw overboard enough food to feed 30 people.
Ship A is very well-defended. Well-defended enough that the captain of Ship B cannot acquire any of the food he needs by raiding it. His two choices are to either allow 30 of his own people to starve; or to take the food he needs from Ship C. He chooses the latter option, on the theory that his first responsibility is to ensure the well-being of the men, women, and children who have given their loyalty to him.
As a result of Captain B’s decision, the people on Ship C begin to starve. At this point in the scenario, the Captain of A could choose to feed the people on board Ship C. But he chooses not to, even though he has more than enough food.
Under this scenario, Captain A has most of the power. If he chooses not to use food as a weapon, he leaves the door open to everyone on ships B and C surviving. But if he uses food as a weapon, he guarantees that some combination of the people from Ships B and C will die. If he continues using food as a weapon after it’s become clear that B is taking the food it needs from C, he is no longer attempting to murder B. He is actually murdering C. Every day that he refuses to provide famine relief to C–despite C’s starvation–constitutes a fresh decision on A’s part to murder C.
aequitas et veritas wrote:
Like I said before, if you are not able to provide evidence of your claims then simply stop posting this nonsence!
You choosing to ignore the evidence I’ve provided is not the same as me not having provided any. I’ve cited multiple sources: both online and in print. I’ve consistently cited mainstream sources, and have not once cited anyone sympathetic to the Nazis. If you don’t want to go out and buy a copy of The Wages of Destruction, fine. But at least read the Amazon book reviews before dismissing it.
Imperious Leader has also provided a number of links to this discussion. Several of those links provided support for the (correct) view that Germany had a grave food crisis during WWII. The most recent link he provided was to the Hunger Plan. From his link:
Germany itself was running low on food supplies, and the same problem faced the various territories occupied by Germany. The fundamental premise behind the Hunger Plan was that Germany was not self-sufficient in food supplies during the war, and to sustain the war it needed to obtain the food from conquered lands at any cost.
There is only one book in the world that is about the truth.
At the risk of going off-topic, 1 John 3:13 states, “Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you.” Just because a propaganda effort is widespread–just because it’s believed by a large portion of the world–does not make it correct. Just because the world hates some political, religious, or ideological minority; does not mean that minority deserves to be hated.
But if you keep argumenting that germany was forced to kill jews, gays,gypsys,disabled, jehova witnesses,
christians then I will report this topic to mod.
Part of having good character is to do the right thing even in the face of threats. (Such as the threat you made in the above text.) The permissibility of questioning the Allied propaganda effort has already been discussed by the list owner and a number of list moderators. They have not (so far as I’m aware) expressed the wish to revisit that discussion.
I have not argued that Germany was forced to kill Christians. The reason I haven’t made that argument is because Germany did not (so far as I’m aware) kill anyone for being a Christian. If someone was a Christian and also a member of the anti-Nazi political opposition, that person stood in danger of being killed. Non-Christian members of the anti-Nazi political opposition were about equally likely to be killed.
If the Nazis didn’t kill people merely for being Christian, why are they being accused of it? Lenin said to accuse your enemies of that which you yourself are guilty. From Wikipedia:
The total number of Christian victims of Soviet state atheist policies, has been estimated to range between 12-20 million.[6][7][8] . . .
Some actions against Orthodox priests and believers along with execution included torture, being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals.[24][25][26][27] Many Orthodox (along with peoples of other faiths) were also subjected to psychological punishment or torture and mind control experimentation in order to force them give up their religious convictions (see Punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union).[25][26][28] During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled.[1] . . .
Protestant Christians in the USSR . . . in the period after the Second world war were compulsively sent to mental hospitals, or endured trials and imprisonment (often for refusal to enter military service). Some were even compulsively deprived of parental rights.[29] . . .
None of the documented acts of brutalities against members of the clergy by the Reds involved anyone who actually took up arms with the Whites, and only a few of them were cases of clergy who gave vocal support.[39] . . . The slicing up of unarmed prisoners, scalping and torturing believers, shooting priests’ wives and children, and many other such acts recorded in the documented acts of brutality by the Reds against the Orthodox church during the civil war have nothing to do with acting in ‘self-defense’.[39] . . .
When [in the 1920s] church leaders demanded freedom of religion under the constitution, the Communists responded with terror. They murdered the metropolitan of Kiev and executed twenty-eight bishops and 6,775 priests. Despite mass demonstrations in support of the church, repression cowed most ecclesiastical leaders into submission.[45] . . .
The Orthodox church suffered terribly in the 1930s, and many of its members were killed or sent to labor camps. Between 1927 and 1940, the number of Orthodox churches in the Russian Republic fell from 29,584 to fewer than 500. . . .
After 1929 and through the 1930s, the closing of churches, mass arrests of the clergy and religiously active laity, and persecution of people for attending church reached unprecedented proportions.[2][63] The LMG employed terror tactics against believers in order to further the campaign. . . .
During the purges of 1937 and 1938, church documents record that 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of these, over 100,000 were shot.[72]
While these events were happening, FDR was courting a warm diplomatic relationship with Joseph Stalin; and convincing the American people to regard him as a benign “Uncle Joe.” Over in Europe, Chamberlain and Daladier had chosen to guarantee Poland against a German invasion, but not against a Soviet invasion. France signed a defensive alliance with the U.S.S.R. in 1935. Corrupt Western politicians’ pro-Soviet foreign policies are an important reason why I regard them as narcissists, lacking compassion, mercy, or a moral compass.
Funny thing is Kurt goes on about Allied blockade, when the reality is Germans used the reduced food supply to SYSTEMATICALLY EXTERMINATE HITLERS ENEMIES. The allies just spread the food around and rationed it so few died if any. That excuse can never be overcome by any of that flat earth society logic he uses.
And i wonder why he doesn’t mention the Great War Allied blockade which did actually starve Germans. Hes got the wrong war!! LOL
Quote from: Imperious Leader
That is an opinion, not fact. And he wasn’t referring to killing 10 million people in camps, because the Allies didn’t do that.
OK people, first-hand witness accounts are now opinion.
Also since when is the Soviet Union not part of the Allies? They killed tens of millions of people in and out of camps.
The Soviets were obviously guilty of doing things, but after all they were subject to a war of extermination and some in their armed forces sought retribution when they entered Germany. But we are talking about how a sane person could rank Genocide as an excuse for a system that directs the food supply to kill millions, when it could be rationed like everybody besides Germany did.
Quote from: Imperious Leader
In order to get lend lease going for USSR, they needed Iran because it was somewhat hostile to those efforts, for the greater good to win the war. They also attacked Vichy and occupied Iceland, and half a dozen other things….for victory. But what they didn’t do is exterminate people, that was reserved for Hitler.
So the Allies are allowed to invade whomever they want and wage war however they want as long as they emerge victorious? Somehow I don’t think you would argue that the starvation of Soviet population to feed the German army was acceptable if Germany had won the war and gotten the Allies to surrender…
And the Allies didn’t exterminate people? Tell that to the Ukrainians the Soviet Union starved before the war, the Poles they indiscriminately killed during their invasion, the Bengalis who starved because the British thought their homeland citizens were more important…the list goes on.
They are allowed to invade to save the world from enslavement, yes The Soviets did kill some Poles, but not to the extent or anywhere near Hitler. The actual list goes on for what the NAZI’s did BTW.
Quote from: Imperious Leader
nobody denies the soviets did some things, but it the NAZIs were still worse … by far.
You have denied multiple times that the Soviets did “some things” when you say that the Allies never committed mass murder. The Soviets were part of the Allies.
I am curious what your metric for “badness” of crimes are, though. It can’t be numbers, because the Soviets killed more than Germany even if you attribute the food blockade deaths to Germany. If it’s the people they killed, what makes the Nazis’ victims more important to keep alive than the Soviets’?
Read up on what the NAZI’s did and stop making excuses…All sides did some things, but Germany was the problem starter and committed the worst crimes.
Quote from: Imperious Leader
Quote from: ColonelCarter
What makes it “cuckoo”?
It is coo coo. Otherwise History would be quite different.
Question dodging aside, this is terrible logic. It’s like saying anyone who votes for the loser in an election is “cuckoo” because their candidate lost.
It’s coo coo because in face of obviously established facts, some people refuse to acknowledge who was fighting and for what reasons. For keeping Europe free or enslaving it.
Quote from: Imperious Leader
They will always be ridiculous to even try to explain that “Hitler had to kill the Jews and many other groups because Germans didn’t have food, and its Churchill’s fault”.
As far as I can tell, this is a straw man argument. Only Kurt can confirm/deny that this is/isn’t the argument he’s making, but if it’s not, any attempts to argue against this point of view are irrelevant, as no one is actually taking that side.
As far as i can tell this is Kurt’s argument and the fact that his invented “food blockade” which is really an economic war and that Hitler manipulated that into his Hunger Plan for exterminating entire groups of people and hunting them down. He redirected the supply of food to put millions into camps to be gassed/cremated. That act had NOTHING TO DO WITH FOOD. That nonsense he runs on about " i got food and only Germans will use it" is total BS. He used the perceived lack of food to persecute his enemies. To even argue that the Allies are remotely equal to the evil acts committed by the Nazi’s is completely faulty reasoning.
He chooses the latter option, on the theory that his first responsibility is to ensure the well-being of the men, women, and children who have given their loyalty to him.
Even if you need to make innocent outsiders suffer in your place? Good luck with that theory if it turns out that God exists or if you end up in court.
You choosing to ignore the evidence I’ve provided is not the same as me not having provided any. I’ve cited multiple sources: both online and in print. I’ve consistently cited mainstream sources, and have not once cited anyone sympathetic to the Nazis. If you don’t want to go out and buy a copy of The Wages of Destruction, fine. But at least read the Amazon book reviews before dismissing it.
You don’t have any sources, you just regurgitate one book and ignore the other millions that say otherwise. How bout discussion for the Hunger Plan? It totally trashes your argument because it shows that Germany directed it to have an excuse for killing Jews, Slavs, Gays, gypsies, deformed, and countless others. The lack of food of 15% ( to use a figure brought up earlier) could be easily distributed. Additionally, Hitler could have just stopped the war realizing Herman would starve and save his people. Who in their right mind knowing his people are starving just continues the war and attacks new countries like the Soviets who were providing grain shipments to the Reich? Secondly, Germany attacks so many countries that any viable trading partners are either : Invaded, plundered, or at war with the Axis.
He is left with the Swiss, Sweden, Turkey to feed 525 million? yea sure. And don’t tell me Argentina can save the day, they can’t.
If they are at war with him, where is any food coming from?
It’s so ridiculous to make so many excuses when its so basic.
[�]The policy of annihilation by hunger approved by Hitler was directed against two population groups: on the one hand against the people in the “forest zone” of central and northern Russia and Belorussia, on the other against the urban population of the Soviet Union in general. It is true that this plan, which in June 1941 was even checked and in principle approved by the Macroeconomic Department of the German Reichsbank, contained some basic flaws overlooked by its authors. For instance the surplus and deficit regions in the Soviet Union were by no means clearly separated, and especially Ukraine was not the most important surplus region, for it promised only relatively little “surpluses” even if the population�s food consumption was forcibly reduced. Thus the Macroeconomic Department of IG Farben had to conclude on 26 November 1941 that, “under the assumption of normal nourishment”, the territories conquered so far were “all together deficit regions in regard to bread grain”, which theoretically would have required supplies from the Volga-Urals region. The main flaw, however, was that no one seems to have thought how the starvation was to occur in an area which at least partially contained German troops.
Nevertheless the intention of letting millions of people in the occupied Soviet territories starve or otherwise perish became the guideline for many decision-makers. In this respect the ominous number of 30 million, by which [State Secretary at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture] Backe considered that the population would have to be reduced, played a part. The fact that many corresponding statements were made by acting figurers from the areas of Belorussia and “Central Russia” is no coincidence, but likely to be related to the fact that these regions were part of the “forest zone”.
Thus the Reichsf�hrer-SS and Head of the German Police, Heinrich Himmler, “at the beginning of 1941, before the start of the campaign against Russia, held [a speech] on the Wewelsburg, in which he stated that the purpose of the Russian campaign was the decimation of the Slav population by thirty million”, as the former Head of SS and Police von dem Bach-Zelewski testified in 1946 at Nuremberg. Written orders for this annihilation of Slavs had not existed. At the speech twelve Gruppenf�hrer (higher SS officers) were said to have been present. In fact the mentioned conference of the SS-Gruppenf�hrer on the Wewelsburg with Himmler took place only between 12 and 15 June. According to a later deposition of the Head of the Personal Staff Reichsf�hrer-SS, Karl Wolff, what Himmler had said on the Wewelsburg was that the death of these millions of people was not the goal, but would be the consequence of the war against the USSR. To this Bach-Zelewski, at the criminal trial against Wolff, added that Himmler had back then predicted that military actions and crises of food supply would lead to this high number of victims. Himmler�s announcement, however, came very late and was very vague, just like the food planners� project left many things open. Coincidence or not, two days before the meeting on the Wewelsburg Himmler had talked with Backe about the agriculture of the Soviet regions to be occupied.
All by themselves Bach-Zelewski�s utterances might be explained as a mere attempt to exonerate himself, as he was invoking a higher order. They are supported, however, by a deposition that the former Head of SS and Police for the Eastern Territories, Friedrich Jeckeln, made shortly before in January 1946 at Riga:
“Herf [Eberhard Herf, commander of the Order Police Minsk from about January to March 1942 and August 1943 to January 1944, Head of the Staff of the Anti-partisan Units Reichsf�hrer SS (Bach-Zelewski) for one month in July/August 1943] told me that von dem Bach-Zelewski had told him that he (von dem Bach) had been given by Himmler the order to destroy 20 million Soviet citizens on the territory of Belorussia and other regions east of Belorussia, immediately upon the heels of the advancing German Army.”In this respect it must be taken into account that Bach-Zelewski�s territorial area of action was to be “Central Russia” with head-office in Moscow. He himself even wrote once that it was to lie principally to the east of Moscow up to the Urals. A great part of the so-called forest zone would thus have fallen under his jurisdiction, which could explain why he was given the task to destroy so large a part of those 30 million people, a fact that he “forgot” at Nuremberg. The inferno foreseen for Central Russia was to be so terrible that even Erich Koch, one of the most brutal NS politicians, rejected the place of Reich Commissar in Moscow with the justification that this was “a wholly negative activity”.
In his memoirs the former counterespionage officer of Army Group Center, Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, wrote about a visit by the head of the Advance Detachment Moscow of Einsatzgruppe B, Professor Franz Six, who shortly after the moving of the staff quarters to Borissow, i.e. presumably in July 1941, told him about the plan:
"He reported that Hitler had the intention to push the eastern border of the Reich up to the line Baku-Stalingrad-Moscow. To the east of this line there would be created a fire strip in the area of which all life was to be wiped out. It was intended to decimate the about thirty million Russians living in this area by hunger through the removal or all food from this gigantic area. All taking part in this action would be forbidden under punishment of death to even give a piece of bread to a Russian. The big cities from Leningrad to Moscow were to be leveled to the ground; Head of SS von dem Bach-Zelewski would be responsible for the execution of these measures.[…]A slightly different version of the same event is given by Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt. According hereto “a special envoy of Rosenberg�s Eastern Ministry, in the company of a high-ranking party officials, visited the Army Group at Borissow.” As recalled by the Supreme Commander of Army Group Center, General Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, they had spoken with Bock at the meal about the colonization of Russia until possibly east of Moscow. A quintessence in this respect had been the following: “Forty million Russians too many! They must perish!” This meant starving to death. Asked about this by him, Strik, Rosenberg had answered that these were “fantasies” of the SS and some others without significance. Von Bock is supposed to have refused to believe what he heard. Yet the General Field Marshal had met Himmler already on 5 June 1941 and been informed by him that the “goal of the campaign in the East was the splitting of Russia into small single states and the extension of the German sphere of interest far beyond the Urals.” On 6 July he noted the following: “The region is a hunger region. Its products will hardly be sufficient […], so that I don�t know how one is to solve the problem of feeding the population.” Thus von Bock was by no means that much a stranger to these thoughts. When Himmler visited him on 24 October in Smolensk, he at least according to Bach-Zelewski�s testimony thanked him for the murder of the Jews, this “dirty work” which he thus would not have to do himself.
Back to Six. The considerations exposed by him are obviously based on the Backe Plan and also show notable coincidence with Jeckeln�s deposition. In what concerns the execution his vision remained nave and unclear, like in the “Guidelines of Economic Policy”. Fortunately the project could not be put into practice that easily.
The Hunger Plan also appeared on other occasions. For G�ring it was a favorite subject. In November 1941 he told the Italian foreign minister Count Ciano that within a year 20 to 30 million people would starve to death in Russia. Maybe this was a good thing, for certain peoples needed to be reduced. Hitler spoke of a “population catastrophe” of the “Muscovites” and declared that due to lack or destruction of food “millions would have to die”. According to Goebbels, the German leadership declared “publicly that Russia has nothing to expect from us and that we will let it starve to death.” The General Plenipotentiary for Labor Employment, Fritz Sauckel, stated on 4 August 1942, during a visit in the occupied Soviet territories, that when he had been there in the autumn of 1941 “all German authorities had persisted in the conviction that in the following, i.e. in the past winter, at least ten to twenty million of these people would simply starve to death.” At least some occupation authorities on site thus stuck to the guidelines as they were repeatedly stated similar to this: “We cannot feed the whole land. The intelligence has been killed, the commissars are gone. Huge areas will be left to themselves (starve to death).” Also the Eastern Minister Rosenberg repeatedly stated that the starvation death of millions was “a harsh necessity that stands outside any sentiment.” Hans Tesmer, head of the Department War Administration at the Commander of the rear area of Army Group Center (1941-1942) and of Army Group Center (1942-1944), disapprovingly remembered the following: “Slogans came up that in Russia several million might well starve to death, that the Russians were to be kept dumb and other similar views of this sort.”[…]
