National Socialism vs. Communism.

It is clear that the Nazis committed terrible crimes against various European peoples. Also that they started the war by invading Poland. The fact that Germany hoped the UK & France would not fulfil their treaty obligations to Poland does not make the UK or France aggressors. Germany is the aggressor.

It is also clear that terrible crimes were committed by the Soviets. We do not need to deny this or argue whether the Nazis or Soviets were worse in order to retain the clarity that the Nazis were the immediate threat to the western democracies because of their geographical location and that they were the aggressors.

Nor do we need to deny that the UK and US were responsible for actions that many today label as war crimes - bombing of civilians, food blockades, etc. Although we should remember that total war for survival leads to difficult moral choices (did the atom bomb save more than it killed?) and that morality has moved on since 1945 in the comfort of the peace and security gained. Despite such actions, the Nazis remain the aggressors. The Nazis remain the greatest threat to the democracies. The Nazis committed utterly atrocious crimes.

We do not have to see things in black and white - allies only good / axis only bad - in order to retain clarity that WWII was a just war (if there can be such a thing) in which the allies (or two of them) did their best in the most challenging circumstances. But they did make mistakes. Accepting those mistakes allows us to focus more clearly on the blight on humanity we call the Nazis.

Instead we seem to be arguing about whether the allies were perfect.

Imperious Leader wrote:

Germany tops the list for depravity during WW2.

The above statement is false. However, people in Western nations have spent a lifetime immersed in anti-Nazi propaganda. We are taught the names of the victims of German atrocities. Told to read their diaries in school. Shown pictures of human skeletons in Nazi concentration camps.

Meanwhile, the victims of Soviet or Western democratic atrocities are mentioned only as statistics, or else not mentioned at all. In no case is there any effort to humanize the victims of Allied atrocities. This creates the false impression that the Nazis were somehow “more evil” than the communists. That impression is disproved by the fact that millions of Soviet citizens fled west into German territory to escape the horror of the Red Army.

The refugee columns fleeing the Soviet-occupied parts of Europe numbered millions of people. . . . At the end of World War II there were more than five million refugees from the Soviet Union in Western Europe.

In his book Lost Victories, general von Manstein correctly pointed out that the millions of Soviet citizens who fled westward to escape the Red Army were strong evidence that, whatever the sins of the Nazi government may have been, the Soviet Union was worse.

As IF you can even begin to formulate arguments that the western allies are to blame for any atrocities Germany committed in the war.

We’ve been over this ground before, and you are seemingly ignoring the points previously raised. The consequences of the Western democratic food blockade were so severe that in 1940, former U.S. president Herbert Hoover said that “If this war is long continued, there is but one implacable end… the greatest famine in history.”

You compared the Allied food blockade to the Germans’ attempt to use sub warfare to cut Britain off from food imports. However, that is a false comparison. After the fall of Poland, Hitler offered peace to Britain and France. After the fall of France, Hitler offered peace to Britain. In both cases, the offers amounted to, “Let’s stop shooting at each other and leave current borders intact.” Efforts to cut off Britain from its food imports appear to have been part of a larger, carrot-and-stick effort to reach a negotiated end to the war.

There are two possible motives for building a nuclear bomb:
1. As a deterrent, or to gain negotiating leverage. The intention under this scenario is for nuclear weapons to remain unused.
2. To use the nuclear weapon to kill people.

The same logic which applies to nuclear weapons also applies to food blockades. Germany’s attempted blockade of Britain’s food supply seems to have been actuated by the first motive. The Germans wanted the British to agree to negotiated peace; and creating a food shortage would have helped achieve that. Had Britain’s food situation become bad enough, its leaders would have been forced to the negotiating table. Or, the hungry British people would have voted those leaders out of office and replaced them with others more open to negotiated peace.

On the other hand, the Allied food blockade was never part of any larger strategy to achieve any sort of negotiated peace. Neither Britain nor the United States ever offered Germany any peace terms other than unconditional surrender. After Operation Barbarossa, that unconditional surrender was to be to all the Allies, including the Soviet Union. Given that the Allies had no interest in offering any peace terms Germany could accept, their only possible motive for imposing a food blockade was to use famine as a weapon with which to kill people.

Hitler had several options about how to respond to the famine conditions the Allies created. He could have chosen to starve Germans and other Aryans, while feeding Slavs and Jews. He also had the option of starving Slavs and Jews in order to feed Germans. A third option would have been to distribute the starvation evenly. Allied leaders had to decide which of these three options Hitler was most likely to select.

In 1936, “The large numbers of Jews entering Palestine [from Germany] led to the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine.” In 1939, Britain closed Palestine to additional Jewish immigration. (Except for a token 10,000 Jewish immigrants per year.) After the passage of the White Paper of 1939, Hitler no longer had the option of continuing to export Germany’s Jewish population. The Allied food blockade forced Germany to reduce its population through starvation or emigration. The White Paper of 1939 took the emigration option off the table. Population reduction would occur, and it would occur through either starvation or other forms of killing.

I read literally thousands of pages of mainstream history books (written from the Allied perspective) before I came across any mention of the Allied food blockade or the resultant famine conditions in Germany. Data such as that was deliberately swept under the rug in order to present a simplistic, deliberately deceptive “good versus evil” dichotomy. In the past, I’d thought that the Allies had had an abstract interest in telling the truth. I’ve since learned that such is not the case. Reading an Allied account of Nazi Germany is like listening to Rush Limbaugh describe Democrats, or like listening to Al Franken describe conservatives. At their worst, Allied descriptions of Nazi Germany are far more one-sided and deceptive than anything Limbaugh or Franken would say.

The fact that a number of half truths and lies have been told about the Nazis does not make them perfect, or anywhere close to perfect. My intention in this discussion is to strip away the lies and half truths the Allies have told, and to see the Nazis, the communists, and the Western democracies in as unbiased a light as possible. That unbiased light reveals serious flaws in all three sides. But it does not reveal moral equivalence. The Soviet Union was by far the most brutal and evil participant in WWII.

Who reasons like this? Nobody, that’s who.
I’m super confused where you’re drawing these conclusions from. I said nothing that they are equal guilt, just that I think they both have guilt.
It’s like one person robs a store and another murders a person. I’m saying don’t skip apprehending the thief just because the other guy committed murder, not that they should get the same sentence!

This is Godels reasonings, He says Soviets, and Allies effectively all “Bad” for the purpose of pulling them down to a level equal to Germany, so making Germany “not look so bad”. WE are talking about Godel.

1. Pronoun game. Please elaborate (quote preferably) what I said you said that you didn’t.
2. You did just say again that you think USW is an acceptable outcome (== a basic measure of civilized people at war). Mass murder is not, but I never said it was (or that you said it was). I’m not trying the impossible task of justifying mass extermination. I’m saying the Allies weren’t as spectacularly clean as they are sometimes depicted, just because they had the very just goal of wiping out Hitler’s evil.  The arguments you pretend I make hold air.

Again these are Godel’s points. The Allies for him are on an equal footing in terms of guilt with Germany….to him. That thinking is evil. In reality-compared to the Nazi’s, the Allies fought the war as well as could be expected. Also, pointing out grammar mistakes is another fallacy of argument.

The so called food blockade as a general blockade of anything reaching Germany, that didn’t come from the Baltic. You can call it an economic blockade. In time of war you think any belligerent that had the capability to blockade wouldn’t?. In war that is a basic strategy. You don’t want the enemy to receive any benefit from trading to neutral factions. In the Pacific, we sunk a whole lot of Japanese transports that were “feeding” the Japanese was economy, Germany nearly starved UK with USW. so your being ridiculous with this reasoning.

@KurtGodel7:

Neither Britain nor the United States ever offered Germany any peace terms other than unconditional surrender.

Diplomacy is a two way street. Did Germany ever offer to return to their 1938 Munich Agreement borders?

Imperious leader wrote,

The Allies for him are on an equal footing in terms of guilt with Germany….to him.

That is not my point at all.

During the prewar years, Germany was responsible for several hundred direct killings, and several thousand indirect killings. Also during the prewar years, Stalin was responsible for tens of millions of mass murders. Recall that neither nation was subjected to a food blockade during this time, and that the Soviet Union was a food exporter for every year of the period in question.

There is no moral equivalence between German and Soviet behavior during the prewar period. For every victim of German prewar murder, there were 1,000 victims of Soviet prewar murder.

That thinking is evil.

Bear in mind that all of us have been immersed in Allied propaganda ever since we were little. On the surface, it’s tempting to believe the Allied leaders’ claims that they were interested in preventing murder, brutality, and so forth. Standing up for innocent people. However, those surface claims are belied by the fact that they took no interest whatever in stopping Soviet mass murder. In the early postwar period, the governments of Britain and the United States aided and abetted Soviet mass murder.

Tolstoy described the scene of Americans returning to the internment camp after having delivered a shipment of people to the Soviets. “The Americans returned to Plattling visibly shamefaced. Before their departure from the rendezvous in the forest, many had seen rows of bodies already hanging from the branches of nearby trees.”

The bodies in question were of the aforementioned refugees–Soviet citizens–who had fled westward to escape the horror of the advancing Red Army. These refugees had escaped into Western democratic custody, and were later handed over to the Soviets.

Erich Hartmann was the highest scoring ace in history. Like the refugees, he had also managed to surrender to a Western democracy (the United States). Like millions of other German servicemen, he was handed over to the Soviet Union. He describes the aftermath of the Soviet victory in the following words:

The Russians then separated the women and girls from the men, and the most horrible things happened. . . . We saw this; the Americans saw this, and we could do nothing to stop it. Men who fought like lions cried like babies at the sight of complete strangers being raped repeatedly. A couple of girls managed to run to a truck and the Americans pulled them in, but the Russians, most were drunk pointed their guns at the allies and fired a few shots. Then the truck drivers decided to drive away quickly. Some women were shot after the rapes. Others were not so lucky. I remember a twelve year old girl . . . being raped by several soldiers. She died from these acts soon afterward. Then more Russians came, and it began all over again and lasted through the night. During the night, entire families committed suicide with men killing their wives and daughters, then themselves.

While a Soviet general put a stop to that particular batch of atrocities, others in the Soviet hierarchy–including Stalin himself–were far more open to the idea of allowing rape and murder. As the war in Europe drew to a close, the invading Red Army temporarily lost its discipline as a fighting force. It became a band of drunken thugs, focused rather on raping, looting, vandalizing, and murdering than on fighting. Hartmann goes on to describe the experience of captured German servicemen sent to the Soviet Union in the postwar period.

Finally we arrived near Kirov and disembarked in a swamp. This was our home for a while. Of the 1,500 POWs who were dropped at this place about 200 lived through the first winter. This I know from some who survived. They were not fed, just worked to death.

Hartmann was spared a long stay at the Kirov gulag due to his celebrity status. No lower level Soviet official wanted to take the responsibility of killing the highest scoring ace in history. Instead, the Soviets attempted to recruit him–turn him into a spy for communist East Germany against democratic West Germany. In order to get Hartmann to agree to this, they tortured him, and threatened to find and kill his wife. Nevertheless, Hartmann refused to “fold to the Soviet will.” He was eventually returned to West Germany in the mid 1950s, as a result of a trade agreement between West Germany and the U.S.S.R.

That is not my point at all.

Then why do you keep making statements that support that view? You do nothing to ignore statements about German crimes, then recent what the Western Allies did/ Soviets did and downplay what the GERMANS DID.

You never tell us what the Germans did wrong because you can’t raise them an an equal footing of total evil committed when you know Germany was at a far lower place for committing evil.

It’s ok if your revisionist, but at least admit it. It happens to be a point of view that few support in light of the facts.

@Imperious:

That is not my point at all.

Then why do you keep making statements that support that view? You do nothing to ignore statements about German crimes, then recent what the Western Allies did/ Soviets did and downplay what the GERMANS DID.

It’s ok if your revisionist, but at least admit it. It happens to be a point of view that few support in light of the facts.

Imperious Leader wrote:

Then why do you keep making statements that support that view?

I don’t. There was no moral equivalence between the Nazis and the Soviets. The Soviets were morally inferior to the Nazis, and by a wide margin. The statements I make are in support of that thesis, and in opposition to any kind of moral equivalence thesis.

You do nothing to ignore statements about German crimes, then recent what the Western
Allies did/ Soviets did and downplay what the GERMANS DID.

The Germans were guilty of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of murders during the prewar period. The Soviets were guilty of tens of millions of mass murders during that same time. The reason I place such importance on that dichotomy is that there were no extenuating circumstances. No brutal military necessities to consider, no food blockades forcing the extermination or starvation of some group of people. Anything that occurred in the prewar period was straight up mass murder, period.

By the same token, there were no extenuating circumstances for the crimes the Allies committed in the postwar era. Any act of mass murder they committed during that period–such as the Morgenthau Plan–was every bit as unjustified as anything which occurred in the prewar period. However, because no major Axis government survived into the postwar period, one cannot compare postwar murders the way I’ve compared prewar murders above. I will simply state that the Allies murdered millions (or possibly tens of millions) of innocent people during the postwar era, and leave it at that.

It’s ok if your revisionist, but at least admit it.

“Revisionism,” at least in a WWII-specific context, is often taken to mean denial of the Holocaust, and an effort to downplay the immense suffering Jews endured during WWII. Such revisionism is often seen as intellectually dishonest. The video footage of skeletal concentration camp inmates offers concrete proof that the Jews endured immense hardship under Nazi rule.

The Holocaust happened, and millions of Jews died as a result. But rather than putting 100% of the blame for that on the Nazis, I tend to point out that the Allied food blockade made it impossible for the Nazis to feed everyone within their borders. The Allied leaders knew that their food blockade would cause immense suffering among civilians. They couldn’t necessarily be 100% sure that such suffering would be born so disproportionately by the Jews. But they knew that their food blockade would kill someone. That’s what famine does. That’s what their artificially created famine was intended to do. If the Allied leaders were willing to admit that they were murderous thugs willing to stoop to any measure at all to win a war, that would be one thing. But the fact they’ve presented themselves as saints is nauseatingly sanctimonious and hypocritical.

I’d like to expand on a point I made in my previous post.

A long time ago, Europeans (primarily Dutch) had established colonies in South Africa. They’d been there for generations, and thought of South Africa as their home.

Unfortunately for them, gold was discovered. Britain immediately took an interest in these Boer (Dutch) colonies. After the Boers refused Britain’s demands to allow in large numbers of British immigrants, Britain chose to annex the colonies outright. In an effort to dehumanize the intended victims of their aggression, the British began referring to the Boers as “white savages.”

The Boer War occurred around the turn of the century. The first phase was a conventional war between the British and the Boers. The British won that first phase quickly and decisively. The war then entered its second phase, which consisted of guerrilla war against the British invaders. The British responded to the Boers’ guerrilla tactics by rounding up large numbers of Boer civilians and placing them in concentration camps. Click here to see a picture of Lizzie Borden, an inmate of Britain’s concentration camps.

The British government later admitted to interring nearly 100,000 inmates in its concentration camps, of whom 28,000 died of starvation and related causes. Of those, 24,000 victims were children under 16–representing half of the Boers’ child population.

The Boer War was a notable event in the life of a young journalist named Winston Churchill. It’s how Churchill first came to the attention of the British public.

According to an entry from the Diary of Anne Frank, dated 1941, the British government had already begun accusing the Nazis of exterminating the Jews. According to another source, Britain’s accusations began even earlier than the diary entry had indicated–in 1940. According to some other sources I’ve seen, the Holocaust did not begin until 1942. Assuming those sources are accurate, why did Britain’s Holocaust propaganda effort begin two full years before the Holocaust itself began?

During WWII, the American government rounded up recent German and Italian immigrants, as well as Americans of Japanese descent, and placed them in concentration camps. American political leaders felt the loyalty of those groups was far from reassured. Hitler felt the same way about Germany’s Jewish population, and placed the German Jews in concentration camps as well.

Due to its actions in the Boer War, the British government had institutional experience with concentration camps. They knew that once a government begins placing people in concentration camps, those people are far more vulnerable to famine conditions than is the general population. For one thing, people in concentration camps will typically be lowest on the government’s priority list. Also, people in concentration camps can have access only to food the government physically controls. (As opposed to food grown by peasants which hadn’t been physically seized by the German government.)

I am about to present a scenario as a possibility. What I’m about to describe is not a certainty–but neither is it anything I’ve (thus far) been able to rule out.
1. The British government correctly predicted that the Germans would not agree to Britain’s (nonexistent) peace proposals.
2. The British government realized the war would go on for years.
3. They also knew that the longer the war lasted, the more severe the effects of their food blockade would become.
4. They correctly predicted that Germany’s Jewish population would be among the most prominent victims of the famine the blockade had created.
5. Realizing this, they chose not to open Palestine or any other colony to Jewish immigration. Nor did they allow food through their blockade. Nor, in early 1941, did they allow Herbert Hoover to send food to starving Belgian children.
6. Instead of doing anything to alleviate the starvation their blockade was causing, their instinct was to turn the situation to maximum political advantage. The Holocaust became the centerpiece of the anti-Nazi propaganda effort.

Imagine that Jack sets Bill’s house on fire. Bill saves his biological children from the flames, but is unable to save his adopted children. “You are a murderer,” Jack says to Bill. “You killed your adopted children.” Jack doesn’t say anything about the fire. He hopes people forget there was a fire. If anyone questions Jack’s logic, he responds with, “Bill owned the house. It was his responsibility to keep those children safe. If he couldn’t even do that, he should never have acquired the house in the first place. The responsibility for those children’s deaths is his, and his alone. Anyone who says different is a revisionist and a liar.”

I’d like to expand on a point I made in my previous post

Kurt,

I would like you to continue expanding on your points. :)  This is interesting stuff!

Then why do you keep making statements that support that view?

I don’t. There was no moral equivalence between the Nazis and the Soviets. The Soviets were morally inferior to the Nazis, and by a wide margin. The statements I make are in support of that thesis, and in opposition to any kind of moral equivalence thesis.

You do nothing to ignore statements about German crimes, then recent what the Western
Allies did/ Soviets did and downplay what the GERMANS DID.

The Germans were guilty of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of murders during the prewar period. The Soviets were guilty of tens of millions of mass murders during that same time. The reason I place such importance on that dichotomy is that there were no extenuating circumstances. No brutal military necessities to consider, no food blockades forcing the extermination or starvation of some group of people. Anything that occurred in the prewar period was straight up mass murder, period.

By the same token, there were no extenuating circumstances for the crimes the Allies committed in the postwar era. Any act of mass murder they committed during that period–such as the Morgenthau Plan–was every bit as unjustified as anything which occurred in the prewar period. However, because no major Axis government survived into the postwar period, one cannot compare postwar murders the way I’ve compared prewar murders above. I will simply state that the Allies murdered millions (or possibly tens of millions) of innocent people during the postwar era, and leave it at that.

And you keep doing it. The first thing you did was ignore the comment or rebuttal about how the Western Allies really did nothing, which is true and focus on Soviet Atrocities. Then you make a general blanket statement about German crimes and go back just what the Soviets did.

I will simply state that the Allies murdered millions (or possibly tens of millions) of innocent people during the postwar era, and leave it at that.

Ok and you just make blanket claims now. Where is proof that the Western Allies killed tens of millions of people? You were better off just ignoring German crimes and blaming the Allies for a rudimentary economic blockade of the axis, which the axis attempted to do with USW. Somehow that blockade ranks equal in your mind to all the crimes of Germany? OMG what a reach

Imperious Leader wrote,

Where is proof that the Western Allies killed tens of millions of people?

During the war, there was widespread hunger and starvation in German-occupied Europe. While there were a number of reasons for the food shortage, the primary cause was the Allied food blockade.

Also during the war, Britain and the U.S. engaged in extermination bombing raids targeted against German cities. As Chuck Yeager pointed out in his autobiography, some American pilots were told to fly around the German countryside and “shoot anything that moves.” This represented exactly the same mentality the Allies demonstrated in Dresden, Hamburg, and other German cities, except that their targets were more spread out.

At this point in the discussion, there will be those who try to explain away Allied war crimes or (worse) to shift the blame for those crimes to Germany. As someone who’s partly of Polish descent, and whose grandfather served in the Polish military during WWII, the latter attitude greatly irks me. Millions of Poles–my relatives–starved to death as a direct, foreseeable result of the Allied food blockade. And yet people act like the Allies did nothing wrong–like those millions of Polish lives–and the even greater number of non-Polish lives–lost didn’t matter.

As for the idea that the Allied blockade was somehow “economic”–it’s true that the Allies blocked oil, metal, and other supplies that a blockade should block. But they also blocked food. Not only did they block food to Germany directly. They also prevented neutral European nations bordering Germany from importing more food than necessary to compensate for their own food deficits. The intention was to prevent those neutral nations from acquiring any sort of food surplus which could be sold to Germany. The sole intention of the Allied food blockade was to use hunger as a weapon with which to kill large numbers of innocent people.

Throughout human history, government typically feed their own citizens first, before feeding the residents of occupied territories. In choosing to prioritize the feeding of Germans over the feeding of Poles, the German government did not do anything criminal, or out of the ordinary. The “out of the ordinary” thing was the Western democratic willingness to take a brutal, medieval tactic–starving an enemy castle into submission–and to apply that tactic to an entire continent. The Polish were among the foremost victims of that blockade, thereby demonstrating the emptiness of the Allies’ claims that they wanted to “help” Poland. The starvation of millions of Poles was completely avoidable, and almost certainly would have been avoided had the Allies not imposed their murderous, sadistic food blockade.

You’d think that with so many deaths on their hands during the war, the Western democracies’ blood lust would have been sated. But no. There was plenty of more Western democratic killing after the war was over. Exhibit A was the Morgenthau Plan, a plan intended to starve large numbers of Germans to death after the war. In this it largely succeeded. The degree of its success has not been widely studied due to the political sensitivity of the issue. However, one historian estimated that the resultant death toll was 6 million. His estimate may or may not be accurate; and it would be nice if the issue could be more widely studied in an environment free from politically-based arm twisting.

Another instance of Western democratic postwar murder was Operation Keelhaul. There are some who excuse the mass murder of millions of Germans during the Morgenthau Plan (JCS 1067), on the theory that “the Germans had it coming.” Such excuses cannot be used to explain away Operation Keelhaul, because the victims of Keelhaul were not Germans. They were refugees from the Soviet Union. Britain and the U.S. agreed to transfer Soviet refugees–all 5 million of them–into Soviet custody, regardless of consent. Not all the refugees were necessarily killed immediately upon being received by Soviet authorities. Many were transferred to gulags, and it’s possible that some small minority of those made it out alive.

A third Western democratic war crime was the transfer of large numbers of captured German servicemen to Soviet custody after the war was over. I have already described the Soviets’ willingness to murder those servicemen in a previous post, so there is no need for me to go into that here.

I have yet to encounter anything which would remotely suggest that the leader of any major Western democracy was worth the bullet it would have taken to shoot him. Not Daladier, with his lies to Poland about a French general offensive within 10 days of mobilization. Not Chamberlain, with his decision to go along with French lies–and to start a world war–in order to punish Germany for having made him look bad at Munich. Not Churchill, with his warmongering, extermination bombing, and sheer enthusiasm for an unjust war which had never, ever been intended to help Poland. Nor FDR, with his unbridled narcissism, and his chilling eagerness to do whatever it took to make friends with Joseph Stalin. Up to and including becoming a direct, willing, eager participant in acts of postwar Soviet mass murder. Nor Truman, who with his complete absence of any sort of moral compass was perfectly willing to pick up where FDR had left off. These were some very, very evil people.

During the war, there was widespread hunger and starvation in German-occupied Europe. While there were a number of reasons for the food shortage, the primary cause was the Allied food blockade.

The War? You mean the one Hitler started? Yea blame the Allies for blockading the Baltic from a war of extermination started by Germany where she just plunders countries and kills off the population. Yea point out the Allies and what they did. Your reasoning again is ridiculous, but keep expanding it for whatever value you can.

Also during the war, Britain and the U.S. engaged in extermination bombing raids targeted against German cities. As Chuck Yeager pointed out in his autobiography, some American pilots were told to fly around the German countryside and “shoot anything that moves.” This represented exactly the same mentality the Allies demonstrated in Dresden, Hamburg, and other German cities, except that their targets were more spread out.

Germany didn’t bomb England? Germany didn’t bomb Poland? Germany didn’t bomb France? Germany didn’t bomb Rotterdam? Germany didn’t bomb Russia? Germany didn’t bomb Yugoslavia? Germany didn’t bomb Greece?  Germany didn’t bomb Malta? Germany didn’t bomb Crete? Germany didn’t bomb Norway?

As for the idea that the Allied blockade was somehow “economic”–it’s true that the Allies blocked oil, metal, and other supplies that a blockade should block. But they also blocked food. Not only did they block food to Germany directly. They also prevented neutral European nations bordering Germany from importing more food than necessary to compensate for their own food deficits. The intention was to prevent those neutral nations from acquiring any sort of food surplus which could be sold to Germany. The sole intention of the Allied food blockade was to use hunger as a weapon with which to kill large numbers of innocent people.

You’d think that with so many deaths on their hands during the war, the Western democracies’ blood lust would have been sated. But no. There was plenty of more Western democratic killing after the war was over. Exhibit A was the Morgenthau Plan, a plan intended to starve large numbers of Germans to death after the war. In this it largely succeeded. The degree of its success has not been widely studied due to the political sensitivity of the issue. However, one historian estimated that the resultant death toll was 6 million. His estimate may or may not be accurate; and it would be nice if the issue could be more widely studied in an environment free from politically-based arm twisting.

Throughout human history, government typically feed their own citizens first, before feeding the residents of occupied territories. In choosing to prioritize the feeding of Germans over the feeding of Poles, the German government did not do anything criminal, or out of the ordinary. The “out of the ordinary” thing was the Western democratic willingness to take a brutal, medieval tactic–starving an enemy castle into submission–and to apply that tactic to an entire continent. The Polish were among the foremost victims of that blockade, thereby demonstrating the emptiness of the Allies’ claims that they wanted to “help” Poland. The starvation of millions of Poles was completely avoidable, and almost certainly would have been avoided had the Allies not imposed their murderous, sadistic food blockade.

But in Germany’s she just plundered France and all her other conquests of foodstuffs and people who could be forced to work in her Labor camps, or just get killed. then you say :

With  “the German government did not do anything criminal, or out of the ordinary” you made another ridiculous statement. The Poles where forced into labor camps, Killed, and or forced into Ghettos. The Western Allies didn’t put anybody in forced labor, or kill them. The poles were doing just fine before Germany plundered Poland and starved them and whom latter raised keyboard commandos to argue the most ludicrous points of reasoning imaginable. If Germany was so concerned about Poland, she would have left her alone. So don’t freaking blame the outcome of what happens to Germany after she started the war. Next you will argue that the war was forced on Germany, just like Hitler did.

The starvation of millions of Poles was completely avoidable, and almost certainly would have been avoided had the Allies not imposed their murderous, sadistic food blockade.

To reason like this is really sad. you ignore the fact that Germany invaded Poland and Poland did nothing to deserve that, then blame the Allies again? Dude your either a Nazi or the next best thing?

The rest of your point is just more faulty reasoning. Volumes of words don’t make points or the truth. I’m done with you.

Imperious Leader wrote:

you ignore the fact that Germany invaded Poland and Poland did nothing to deserve that, then blame the Allies again?

Once the war started, there was no way Poland was going to avoid hostile foreign occupation. An Axis victory would have meant a German-occupied Poland. An Allied victory would have meant a Soviet-occupied Poland. WWII was never about Polish freedom–it was about who its hostile foreign occupiers would be.

Knowing that Poland would be subject to hostile foreign occupation regardless of who won or lost the war, the question then becomes: what (if anything) could the Western democracies do to influence conditions in occupied Poland? In 1939, Britain and France imposed a food blockade on Germany. In doing so, they made the starvation of millions of Poles an absolute certainty. They could have chosen to allow food through their naval blockade, in which case widespread starvation would most likely not have happened in Poland.

You seem to think that the German invasion of Poland excuses the Allied food blockade. It does not. Life for Poland was going to be bad enough already, without the Allies adding mass starvation to Poland’s other problems.

Also–to be blunt–Germany was not the only country to have invaded Poland. The Soviet Union also invaded Poland in 1939–the second time in as many decades that it did so. The Western democracies showed no more interest in stopping the second Soviet invasion of Poland than they had in stopping the first.

You will recall that many Poles escaped to Britain, where they continued fighting against the Axis. After WWII ended, a pro-Soviet British Labour government denied those Poles the chance to participate in the victory parade. Perhaps that’s fitting. A Soviet-occupied postwar Poland was hardly a legitimate reason for Polish celebration.

If Germany was so concerned about Poland, she would have left her alone.

No one was concerned about what happened to Poland. The Soviets were not concerned: they were evil invaders and hostile foreign occupiers. From 1939 - 1941, the population of the eastern half of Poland was literally decimated. One Pole out of every ten was either shot outright, sent to a gulag, or otherwise deported. Recall that the Soviets had no food shortage, making these killings entirely capricious.

Germany was not concerned at all about Poland. They were consistently upfront about the fact that their foreign policy was based on what they considered best for Germany.

The Western democracies had no, zero, zilch interest in helping Poland whatsoever. What makes their contempt for the Poles different from German or Soviet contempt is that the Western democracies awarded themselves credit for standing up for Poland. Their entire justification for going to war was based on the idea that they wanted to “help” Poland stand up to the German bully. Instead of doing that, Daladier deliberately lied to Poland about French military intentions in order to get Poland to pursue an anti-German foreign policy in the first place. Having deliberately misled his “ally,” and having placed it in a completely false position, Daladier–together with Chamberlain–proceeded to impose a food blockade on Germany starting in the very first month of the war. A food blockade which would ultimately kill millions of Poles.

You seem to think that I should be blaming Germany for the Western democracies’ crimes against Poland. Why would I do that? Hitler wasn’t the one who chose to impose a food blockade against Germany. Hitler wasn’t the one who chose to lie to Poland about whether France would launch a general offensive. Hitler wasn’t the one who felt that a Soviet-occupied postwar Poland would be perfectly acceptable. Yes, Hitler was guilty of his own crimes against Poland. But a discussion of Hitler’s anti-Polish crimes does not (as you seem to think) justify the absolutely despicable way in which the Western democracies treated Poland.

@Imperious:

With  “the German government did not do anything criminal, or out of the ordinary” you made another ridiculous statement.

Please don’t quote selectively to advance your argument/reduce your opponent’s. The statement was:
@KurtGodel7:

In choosing to prioritize the feeding of Germans over the feeding of Poles, the German government did not do anything criminal, or out of the ordinary.

This does not say that the Germans did nothing wrong in their other actions against the Poles, Jews, and other Eastern European people (as your quote implies). It says that feeding your own people first is a normal response in wartime.
Had India somehow been a part of the British Isles, I highly doubt that the British would have tried to feed everyone equally while under Germany’s USW. And I highly doubt you would blame the British for the Indians’ starvation.

@ColonelCarter:

Had India somehow been a part of the British Isles, I highly doubt that the British would have tried to feed everyone equally while under Germany’s USW. And I highly doubt you would blame the British for the Indians’ starvation.

Actually there was a famine in India in 1943 with between 1m and 3m deaths. Snippet from Wikipedia:

Any imports would have had to come from Australia, North America or South America. Some supplies from Australia entered the region.[63] The main constraint was shipping. The Battle of the Atlantic was at its peak from mid-1942 to mid-1943, with submarine wolf packs sinking so many ships that the Allies were on the verge of defeat, so shipping could not be spared for India.[64]

By August 1943 Churchill refused to release shipping to send food to India.[65][66][67] Initially during the famine he was more concerned with the civilians of Nazi occupied Greece (who were also suffering from a famine) compared with the Bengalis,[68] noting that the “starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks”.

Which brings us back to the Allies not being perfect, faced as they were with such challenging decisions, Churchill’s failings being embarrassingly evident in this example. But that does not stop Churchill being a great leader, nor suggest any (im)moral equivalence with the Nazis’ policy of genocide.

Private Panic wrote,

Actually there was a famine in India in 1943 with between 1m and 3m deaths.

A good contribution to the discussion.

When Churchill was told about the famine, he made a flippant remark about Gandhi not yet having starved to death. There was something about Gandhi which really got under Churchill’s skin. He also seemed irritated by the fact that Gandhi hadn’t starved to death, despite Indian food shortages and Gandhi’s own self-imposed fasts.

But that does not stop Churchill being a great leader, nor suggest any (im)moral equivalence with the Nazis’ policy of genocide.

Winston Churchill fought an unnecessary, unjust war which resulted in Soviet hegemony over the vast bulk of Europe. Including Poland–the nation the Allies supposedly went to war to save.

Was Churchill guilty of genocide? Yes, absolutely. But the millions of victims of famine in India should not be counted among his genocidal victims, any more than the millions of Slavs who starved to death in Nazi-occupied Europe were victims of Nazi genocide.

@KurtGodel7:

Was Churchill guilty of genocide? Yes, absolutely. But the millions of victims of famine in India should not be counted among his genocidal victims, any more than the millions of Slavs who starved to death in Nazi-occupied Europe were victims of Nazi genocide.

Of course you know that I disagree with that utterly KG. Churchill did not set out to exterminate any race, religion or nationality. The Nazis did. Genocide. Definition:

“the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group”

@KurtGodel7:

Winston Churchill fought an unnecessary, unjust war which resulted in Soviet hegemony over the vast bulk of Europe. Including Poland–the nation the Allies supposedly went to war to save.

The outcomes of the war did include Soviet hegemony over eastern Europe including Poland. Looking at outcomes as a whole rather than only in part we should remember that these also included democratic free peoples across western Europe.

As I have said before in this thread, a war against an aggressor, which represented a strategic threat to the beleaguered democracies and which pursued a policy of genocide and other heinous crimes is a just war.

Recognising that the UK & US were not perfect and that the Soviets were awful does not change that fact.

I understand your desire, KG, to highlight the Allies’ shortcomings. The victors write the history and the truth must come out. But you take a worthwhile cause and then undermine your argument by drawing conclusions every bit as one-sided as those who presented us with the Allies perfect / Nazis evil picture in the first place.

Private Panic wrote,

Churchill did not set out to exterminate any race, religion or nationality.

Whether or not that’s what he set out to do, that’s exactly what he did. The millions of people who died of hunger-related deaths in German-occupied territory were his responsibility, and the responsibility of the other Allied leaders who participated in the food blockade. Churchill was also a participant in other genocidal acts, such as extermination bombing raids, the treatment of German POWs after the war, the early stages of Operation Keelhaul, and (to an extent) the Morgenthau Plan. To his credit, Churchill was never enthusiastic about the Morgenthau Plan, and had to have his arm twisted at the Quebec Conference to participate in it.

Looking at outcomes as a whole rather than only in part we should remember that these also included democratic free peoples across western Europe.

If the Western democratic goal for entering WWII was to save Poland from foreign tyranny, the war was a failure. If the goal was to preserve democracy in France, the war was unnecessary. Hitler never wanted war with France or the west. If the goal was to forcibly impose democracy on Germany, they were 50% successful, in that they conquered the western 50% of Germany. But if that last point was their objective, then (from the Western democratic perspective), WWII was a war of aggression and imperialism, not a war of liberation.

But you take a worthwhile cause and then undermine your argument by drawing conclusions
every bit as one-sided as those who presented us with the Allies perfect / Nazis evil picture in the first place.

Probably everyone reading this thread has spent a lifetime steeped in history written from the Allied perspective. My posts are going to seem one-sided–at least to people who have spent decades immersed in that perspective.

When I was younger, I read a complaint about Allied hypocrisy. The Allies had loudly complained about German bombing attacks against civilian targets in England, while remaining silent about their own, far more massive attacks against civilian targets in Germany. At the time, I thought that complaint was nonsensical. Of course they’re different, I thought to myself, the German raids against England were clearly a war crime. The Allied raids against Germany clearly weren’t.

That was an example of how I thought after having been steeped in a pro-Allied perspective. At the time, I didn’t realize how one-sided I was. I honestly believed I was being neutral! I’ve since had to deprogram myself–almost like the deprogramming one has to do to escape the brainwashing efforts of cults. That effort took years. But I believe that effort is now successful, and that my brain is Allied propaganda-free.

On the surface, rejecting Axis propaganda should be easier, because we are exposed to so little of it. However, once Allied propaganda is rejected, it’s very important to not use Axis propaganda to fill the resulting void.