National Socialism vs. Communism.

WraithZer0

Side story:

I was discussing this thread with a friend, in a bar, several days ago. My wife recently informed me that, while I was heavily engaged in this conversation, there was someone mean-mugging me pretty hard. Like they were intently listening and judging our conversation. My wife thought that maybe this person thought I was some sort of NAZI sympathizer. That made me laugh. Though, I could see where someone jumping into this kind of conversation would have strange regards to it. I had to explain both sides of the arguments and field their relevance accordingly, without prejudice. That way the story is better understood and may contain less bias.

I hope that this entertained you as much as it did me when she told me about it. Carry on. 8-)

KurtGodel7

Imperious Leader wrote:

The answer is the food shortage was not acute enough to warrant these actions.

And maybe Germany’s military situation was not acute enough to warrant commandeering merchant vessels laden with weapons. Either that, or you simply can’t commandeer very many enemy vessels when the enemy completely controls the surface of the water, and has radar, and has increasingly long-ranged aircraft, and has started using convoys.

The grain could have been raised in Ukraine, so this is bogus.

From pp. 477 - 480 of Wages of Destruction

As we have discussed, the ‘bread basket of the Ukraine’ played a key role in all the various military-economic assessments of the Barbarossa campaign prepared over the winter of 1940-41. For Hitler, it was the key priority, to be achieved prior to any military consideration, the importance of which was only reinforced by the alarming decline in German grain stocks. . . .

As Backe well understood, however, the Ukraine was not the limitless granary of imperialist cliche. The Ukraine, in fact, produced only a small net surplus of grain for export outside the Soviet Union. This was due, on the one hand, to the backwardness of Russian agronomy and on the other hand to the extraordinarily rapid growth in the Soviet urban population. Since 1928 Stalin had stamped an urban civilization of 30 million inhabitants out of the ground. The food for this vast new urban proletariat came from the Ukraine. To conventional economic analysis in Berlin this implied that even if the Ukraine was successfully conquered, Germany could expect little immediate benefit. It would, after all, take years before productivity could be substantially increased. Herman Backe, however, drew radically different conclusions. To enable the grain surplus of the Ukraine to be directed immediately towards German needs, it was necessary simply to cut the Soviet cities out of the food chain. After ten years of Stalinist urbanization, the urban population of the western Soviet Union was now to be starved to death.

That such a scheme should come from the pen of Herman Backe can come as no surprise. . . . What is perhaps more surprising is the alacrity with which Backe’s suggestion was taken up by the rest of the Ministerial bureaucracy in Berlin, above all by the chief economic expert of the Oberkommando Wehrmacht (OKW), General Thomas. At times, as we have seen, Thomas had toyed with opposition to Hitler’s war. But at heart, the General was a ruthless pragmatist. Germany’s future as a great power was Thomas’s only real concern. The raison d’etre of his office in the OKW was to prevent the kind of domestic crisis that had crippled the German war effort in World War I. Thomas was fully apprised of the precariousness of Germany’s food situation and saw no need to quibble with Backe’s calculations. . . .

According to General Thomas’s secretariat the meeting concluded as follows:

1.) The war can only be continued, if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war.
2.) If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that many millions of people will die of starvation.
3.) The most important issues are the recovery and removal of oil seeds, oil cake and only then the removal of grain.

The minute did not specify the number of millions that the Germans intended to starve. . . . Backe himself put the figure for the ‘surplus population’ of the Soviet Union at between 20 and 30 million, and over the coming months these numbers established themselves as a common reference point. . . .

Efforts to save the population from death by starvation by drawing on the surplus of the black earth regions can only be at the expense of the food supply to Europe. They diminish the staying power of Germany in the war and the resistance of Germany and Europe to the blockade. There must be absolute clarity about this . . . A claim by the [local] population on the German administration . . . is rejected right from the start.

One of the links you provided consisted of a book review. In that book review there was the claim that the Germans intended to starve 100 million people to death. That 100 million smelled like a made-up number. Germany’s government had concluded that there were 20 - 30 million people it would be unable to feed due to the Allied food blockade. While I’m highly dubious of that 100 million number, I nevertheless found a great deal of good content in your own link.

What is surprising, however, is the starvation that resulted from Allied policies.

India, which, as part of the British Empire, supplied “a large proportion of the soldiers who fought against the Japanese.” Yet, in Bengal, the “Allied powers made their own substantial contribution to wartime hunger, malnutrition and starvation” when 3 million Indians “died of a preventable man-made famine.” . . .

When Churchill declared the blockade in August of 1940*, he was “adamant that there was to be no question of food aid.” It might “relieve the Germans of the need to feed the people, and help their war effort.” Former American president Herbert Hoover was infuriated, and described Churchill as “a militarist of the extreme school who held that incidental starvation of women and children was justified.” . . .

The blockade of Germany in World War I contributed to the rise of Hitler. Writes Collingham: “The winter of 1918-1919 was the hungriest and most miserable for the German population. . . . Hitler (and many others who would later take up positions of power under the National Socialists) developed an acute awareness of the dangers of civilian hunger. . . . Indeed, Hitler developed an obsession with the need to secure the German food supply, especially at a time of war.” . . .

Chamberlain and Daladier initiated the food blockade of Germany back in September 1939. The author is either unaware of this fact, or is referencing a public affirmation of the blockade Churchill had made, long after it had been put into place.

Imperious Leader

What is surprising, however, is the starvation that resulted from Allied policies.

What is surprising, however, is the starvation resulted directly from NAZI policies.

The deliberate extermination by starvation of targeted groups became a defining feature of the National Socialist food system.

[Herbert Backe] argued that the Wehrmacht could be fed by diverting Ukrainian grain from Soviet cities. This would solve the problem of feeding a vast army while conveniently eliminating the Soviet urban population, who would starve to death.

Altogether the regime�s agrarian vision for the east generated plans to murder up to 100 million people.

During the Second World War the National Socialists would argue that the need to secure a minimum food ration of 2,300 calories per day for ordinary Germans justified the extermination of 30 million urban Soviets, over 1 million Soviet prisoners of war, and at least as many Polish Jews.

The majority of the 100,000 Jews who died in the Warsaw ghetto succumbed to starvation.

A proportion of the 200,000 mentally ill victims of Germanys euthanasia programme and 2.35 million Soviet prisoners of war were all given so little food that they were slowly but systematically starved to death.

Although the National Socialists were at their most ruthless in exporting hunger to the Soviet Union and Poland, the plunder of foodstuffs from other occupied countries resulted in a famine which killed 500,000 in Greece, increased death and infant mortality rates and spread malnutrition, particularly among children, in Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium and Holland. During the Hunger Winter of 1944-45, 22,000 Dutch succumbed to starvation when the Germans cut off supplies to those parts of Holland which the Allies had failed to liberate.

The relentless extraction of food from China in order to feed the Japanese homeland caused chronic hunger and malnutrition among the Chinese population.

Despite the fact that so much has been written about the siege of Leningrad, it is less well known that the Germans regarded the death by starvation of its inhabitants as only one element in a far larger plan to eliminate as many Soviet consumers or, rather, “useless eaters” as possible.

Funny how the Germans near the end of the war didn’t use the bogus “allied food blockage” garbage as an excuse for all the murdered people. They weren’t stupid enough to get laughed out to the ropes directly for even mentioning it. Rather they tried to cover up their crimes and accelerate the murders. 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.

Kurt you need to be ashamed of yourself for believing in your nonsense. It was almost like arguing with flat earth society people… a big waste. Sorry but you read all the coo coo literature and started hating Churchill. I’m quite sure you don’t have a university degree in History, and all that self taught reading led you to the wrong conclusions. Sorry man.

Imperious Leader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany_(1939–45)

ColonelCarter

@Imperious:

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.

@Imperious:

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.

Private-Panic

@ColonelCarter:

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.

Colonel Carter - I agree with you and said the same thing ad nauseam in my posts earlier in this thread. Ultimately I failed to persuade Kurt to accept this balance of responsibility. It will be interesting to see whether you can achieve that with IL.

Accepting that balance of responsibility is not the same thing as ascribing equal moral guilt. Both can be responsible while the actions of one party may be worthy of greater approbation. Clearly the Nazis’ genocidal policies were evil. I myself am as yet undecided wrt the allies’ blockade, which merits debate. Until there is agreement (amongst those that contribute most) as to the responsibility of both the allies and the Nazis it seems that no such debate can happen.

Good luck.

Narvik

@Imperious:

Sorry but you read all the coo coo literature

KurtGodel7

Imperious Leader wrote,

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany_(1939–45)

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.

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.” . . .

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. . . .

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. . . .

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] . . .

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?”

After WWII, Britain operated a concentration camp/torture camp at Bad Nenndorf. Below is a quote from a Guardian article.

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.

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.

KurtGodel7

Private Panic wrote,

Clearly the Nazis’ genocidal policies were evil. I myself am as yet undecided wrt the allies’ blockade, which merits debate.

The Allies’ food blockade does not merit debate. It merits condemnation. It was among the most serious crimes committed in the entire history of humanity. The fairness or unfairness of the Nazis’ distribution of famine-related deaths is a separate subject. The bottom line is that unless the Nazis surrendered to all the Allies–including the most murderous regime in human history–tens of millions of innocent people were going to starve to death as a result of the Allied food blockade. I don’t see how it’s possible for the Allies to on the one hand stir up moral outrage about the ghastly appearance of human skeletons in the Nazi concentration camps; and on the other to use food as a weapon with which to kill 20 - 30 million innocent people. Allied politicians oozed hypocrisy, but that’s hypocritical even for them!

Private-Panic

That’s one side of an argument Kurt. I am not going to be persuaded by your strength of feeling, no matter how sincere. With me it takes consideration of both sides via a debate, rather than a polemic.

I don’t want to waste your time with another post in response, so let me be helpfully clear - at this point I am sure in my own mind that having such a debate on these boards will not work. Certain things would need to change, such as the thread being dominated by those who are open-minded about the question.

Sorry!

KurtGodel7

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.

wheatbeer

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.

Imperious Leader

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.

Imperious Leader

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany_(1939–45)

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.

Imperious Leader

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.

Imperious Leader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan

KurtGodel7

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.

Private-Panic

You won’t be surprised to hear that I agree with wheatbeer, which is why I marked his post up.

aequitas-et-veritas

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!!!

ColonelCarter

@Wheatbeer:

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:

@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.

@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.

National Socialism vs. Communism.

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