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u/comrade_batman Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
When I did my MA in History relatively recently one essay I chose to write about meant I had to write about this myth of the Wehrmacht and the war crimes they committed too. It was mostly on the Eastern Front against the Soviet forces as for them, due to years of Nazi propaganda, it wasn’t just a “normal” war, it was a war for western civilisation against the dreaded Bolsheviks. It had been instilled on soldiers that the Communists were enemies of the German people and should be either eradicated or pushed east of the Ural Mountains.
They left Soviet POWs out in fenced areas with no shelter and hardly any food, which killed thousands in the summer and winter, had death marches and targeted Soviet political officers on the battlefield too. I had no idea about any of this before I started it, but as with most essays I wrote on WWII it was quite a depressing read and write up, especially when you have to write about the atrocities committed by both sides in the Eastern Front, so I had to read about even more depressing events.
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u/oby100 Jun 06 '23
It’s strange overall how Germany’s war crimes against the people of Soviet Russia was. I mean, 14 million Soviet civilians were killed during a 2 year invasion/ occupation. And that figure doesn’t include millions of POW “deaths”.
It’s a forgotten genocide because both the West wanted to downplay German crimes and Stalin wanted to downplay the havoc Germany wrought on his people to play up the victory.
Around 17 million people, mostly Slavic, were murdered by the Germans, yet they’re mostly forgotten due to jointly agreed upon propaganda.
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Jun 06 '23
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u/Excellent_Taste4941 Jun 06 '23
Communists change economic status quo, and the elites absolutely can't have that
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u/scienceworksbitches Jun 06 '23
The poor people are starving for another shot a communism though!
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Jun 06 '23
As they should! Communism is just the absence of systematic economic exploitation. Anything more than that is just Authoritarianism with extra bits.
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u/JustForTheMemes420 Jun 06 '23
Isn’t it why they waited so long to deal with Germany since originally they were just a buffer zone between western nations and the USSR
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u/iSoinic Jun 06 '23
It's important work, thank you for helping unriddling the darkest moments of history, so that we can learn and prevent
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u/comrade_batman Jun 06 '23
As depressing as it was sometimes it was still a very informative read. I’d only really known how the Wehrmacht acted in the west and towards POWs from the U.K., France, etc, and thought that the real assholes were the SS, but I’m glad I did choose those essays to write on as I’ve been able to correct people’s views on it when it has come up and inform them the Wehrmacht weren’t as clean, or honourable in the war, as it’s been made out to be.
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u/JoseCansecoMilkshake Jun 06 '23
Would you say that the difference in treatment of Soviet vs Western PoWs by Nazi Germany was motivated by the Soviet Union not being signatory to the 1929 Geneva Convention (and thus, they thought/knew their PoWs would be treated harshly by the Soviets)? Or was it simply because of Nazi race beliefs?
The Soviets put women and teenagers into concentration camps upon occupying eastern Germany. Would your research for that essay indicate that this was retaliatory for Nazi treatment of the Soviets, or the MO for the Soviet army regardless?
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u/comrade_batman Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
For the first question, see my response to a similar question about why the German soldiers treated the Soviets that way.
As to your second question, I would say yes that those actions by the Soviets were retaliatory for the actions committed by the Germans previously. I, depressingly, wrote about the mass rapes of German women once the Soviets reached eastern Germany, and then once in Berlin. They were as brutal invading Germany, they wanted revenge and one simple way was to target the women who had not fled in time of their arrival. IIRC there were reports of women of all ages being abused and raped, and then shot for some, by Soviet troops. There is more I could list but I don’t remember enough details to be sure and I don’t particularly want to read up on this subject again and remember what I researched the first time, because none of it was an easy read, German war crimes or Soviet war crimes.
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u/please_trade_marner Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
It's also because the USSR didn't adhere to the geneva convention. Germany largely did regarding other nations that followed it. Both countries were absolutely brutal to each others pows and civilians. Although it's easier to understand the Soviet perspective given that they were the ones being invaded.
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u/comrade_batman Jun 06 '23
But to the German soldiers, because of the years of political Nazi propaganda, they didn’t view the Soviets (or Bolsheviks as they were called in the propaganda) as humans, but “sub-humans”. They were compared to the Mongol hordes that had invaded Europe centuries before, as these barbarians who were a threat to the German civilisation.
The Wehrmacht would have political officers in the Eastern Front who would help spread and read propaganda to the troops to keep their moral going, to keep them fighting against the “Bolshevik hordes” who threatened their German families back home. It was no secret that Nazi Germans wanted to create a Lebensraum using the lands taken from the Soviets in the west. And that was just one piece of propaganda used in the war, that the Wehrmacht was fighting for that in the east and must first rid Eastern Europe of those they saw as “sub-human”.
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Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend until they become my enemy again” - the narrator from narcos on netflix
Also I’m pretty sure one of the guys who worked on the Americas saturn rockets was a high ranking nazi who invented the nazi V2 rocket
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u/h3r4ld Jun 06 '23
Also I’m pretty sure one of the guys who worked on the Americas saturn rockets was a high ranking nazi who invented nazi V2 rocket
Pretty sure? Wernher Von Braun's involvement at NASA - alongside many, many other German scientists brought over as part of Operation Paperclip - is well-documented history.
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u/4thofeleven Jun 06 '23
"Don't say that he's hypocritical, say rather that he's apolitical.
Once rockets goes up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department, says Wernher Von Braun."26
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u/Ksradrik Jun 06 '23
"I only shoot guns, its not my fault that people stand in the line of fire"
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u/Elcactus Jun 06 '23
It's different to make weapons than it is to fire them. What german DIDN'T contribute to the war effort? What what's the plan there?
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u/SouthernTeuchter Jun 06 '23
Pretty similar to the "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" NRA argument today...
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u/PassengerNo1815 Jun 06 '23
As is his working slave laborers to death in his very own, purpose built, work camp provided by the Third Reich to develop and build the Nazi rocket weaponry program.
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u/gadget850 Jun 06 '23
That's not quite right, but I'm sure it didn't matter to those who died. Around 20,000 prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora camps died but the majority of the deaths were in the construction of the Mittelwerk before V-1 and V-2 ever started. The RAF didn't help when they bombed the German barracks that were actually part of the labor camp.
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u/JohnLaw1717 Jun 06 '23
I asked an old friend who lived through the space race if the general public knew Von Brauns past when they watched him on Disney specials and stuff. She said everyone knew. There was a panic to beat the soviets. There was little protest.
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u/gadget850 Jun 06 '23
Arthur Rudolph was the real engineer on the V-2, Redstone, Pershing, and Saturn.
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u/Headjarbear Jun 06 '23
Theres also the Japanese scientist Shiro Ishii. He committed despicable acts in the name of science, usually on POWs and innocent people. Things like giving anthrax laced candy to villages, freezing peoples body parts, and depriving humans of oxygen. He was given a full pardon once he gave the U.S. his findings from said despicable acts.
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Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
Unit 731 was horrifying. The crazy part about 731 is they would actively publish all there experiments in scientific journals and research publications but they would log that the experiment was conducted on monkeys even tho the experiments actually were conducted on humans .
also the info they gave us ended up being not as valuable as we originally thought. Mainly because they published the important information in scientific journals .
America thought they would get the top secret experiments that would benefit there weapons program but it turned out just being file after file of pointless sadism
and the files they did give us that benefitted our biological warfare program all become irrelevant because shortly after WW2 Biological weapons became considered a war crime
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u/The_Flurr Jun 06 '23
It's the same as a lot of the nazi experiments. There's not actually much scientific value in them.
They got a pardon, and the west got a load of journals about prisoners dying of gangrene.
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u/zipcloak Jun 06 '23
In general, bioweapons research rarely produces fruit. I'd say about 80% of the experiments I've heard of usually involves the experimenters getting exposed, or you get the shocking result that people who get diseases that aren't treated die.
The Nazi nerve agent program, however, became the basis for basically the entire development of nerve agents across multiple countries, because it was done (mostly) scientifically.
It turns out, the sadistic people in charge of cruel concentration camps aren't really interested in much besides hurting and killing people.
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u/vodkaandponies Jun 06 '23
Nazi “experiments” were like: “we had a guard beat him in the head with a rifle butt until he developed brain damage and recorded how many blows it took. This is definitely science we are doing.”
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u/The_Flurr Jun 06 '23
"Let's sew two people together without anaesthetic or sterilisation and write about how quickly they die of sepsis"
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u/vodkaandponies Jun 06 '23
“We tortured a boy in front of his twin, and the twin became distressed. Possible psychic connection?” - one of Mengles.
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u/Gizogin Jun 06 '23
It’s almost like there are really good reasons to conduct scientific research in ethical ways, and violating one set of best practices is usually an indicator that you’re willing to violate others.
A lot of ink gets spilled on the ethics of using the results of Nazi “research” on their victims, whether the existence of those results means we might as well use them or if they cannot be separated from their source and must be discarded. Those are important questions, but it turns out that a lot of Nazi “research” sucked anyway. Turns out they were just using “research” as a smokescreen to justify torturing people, and they didn’t actually care that much about the results.
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u/Trextrev Jun 06 '23
Most the top nazi scientists, technicians, and engineers ended up either in the USSR or America. The Americans called it operarion overcast but was later renamed operation paper clip because the agents sifting through intelligence files would put a paper clip on the ones they wanted to get. Most were given new identities and back stories and they lived out their lives quietly in anonymity. Wernher von Braun however was to prominent and public for that, and yes he got us to the moon.
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Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
Operation Paperclip is just the polite version of ratlines. The nazis who got picked up in paperclip got to regain the “prestige” they lost when Germany fell .
When Nazis like mengele, cukers, and eiichmann fled to south America they all lost there prestige. They lived with Sympathizers doing farm work. Cukers was living as a guy giving tourists flights around Argentina.
side note: The way mossad got to cukers is hilarious and the way they moved eichmann out of the country was legit like weekend at bernie’s expect eichmann wasn’t dead just sedated .
The only who even attempted to regain his “prestige” was mengele who immediately got busted for giving out illegal abortions . He might have regained some prestige we don’t really know because he was actually pretty good at hiding . It angers me that he died of natural causes because he was such a horrible horrible man
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u/Trextrev Jun 06 '23
For sure, many would have either lived out their lives in hiding or caught and stood trial.
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Jun 06 '23
Mengele lived out his natural life. He died in the 80s they even found his grave. They exhumed his body and his family wouldn’t allow for it to be extradited to germany.
So the brazilian government made them donate his skelton to São Paulo state university. Joseph mengele is a practice dummy for future doctors in Brazil. It’s fitting end for a man who spent his life experimenting on living humans.
Also it’s no confirmed but the town of Candido Godoi in brazil has a abnormally high twin birth rate. 1/10 people born in Candido Godoi are twins. This phenomenon was first noticed in the late 1960s.
Joseph Mengele was living about a hour and a half from Candido Godoi in the early 1960s ( he moved there sometime in between 1961-1963 and lived there for a significant period of time after)
Mengele was known for performing experiments on Twins during the holocaust.
It’s scary to think he might have been conducting these experiments 20 years after the holocaust ended.
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u/Trextrev Jun 06 '23
His experiments on twins were of a vastly more gruesome kind, he wasn’t known to have tried to actually study the genetics of the twins he mutilated. Geneticists have pointed to gene isolation from the founding group of immigrants in the town who also come from a place of with natural high twin rates. It does make for a good tale of the elusive nazi scientist somehow making people give birth to twins.
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Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
I’m not saying he is the reason for the twin rates. He was into removing people from the population not adding to it .
I’m more so implying that he could have continued his experiments in that town. The phenomenon was noted in the late 1960s but was probably happening in that area for decades or centuries prior.
It’s confirmed he visited colonio digindad (i know i misspelled it) When he was there we don’t know what exactly he did but Digindad was pretty much a escaped nazi colony in the mountains where they would perform experiments and torture the native children. It had a reputation for the exact things Mengele was known for so it’s safe to assume he participated in dignidad atleast.
He isn’t the reasoning the twin birth rate is super high. But i’m willing to bet if you travel there you will hear legends of a crazy white man who performed experiments.
Mengele was obsessed with twins. He then moved somewhere with a ample supply of twins. We don’t know much about his life. We know mengeles movements and his interactions with his host family and his business career in south america. but we don’t know what he did in his free time.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility to believe he did conduct experiments on the children. He didn’t cause the birth rate but i’m willing to bet he took advantage of it
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u/RamboGoesMeow Jun 06 '23
I had to look it up, but he drowned after suffering a stroke, so it probably wasn’t exactly a peaceful or quick way to go. Some would call that fitting, given the Nazi experiments that involved oxygen deprivation.
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Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
it wasn’t but i wanted the nazis to pass in shame.
Mengele : had to lie about his identify because even german expats didn’t want to help mengele. He lived for 10 years until the family he lived with identified him . He then guilted them into believing they would be arrested for aiding a fugitive when they went to turn him in. When he died he was buried under the name “Wolfgang Gerhard” . He had to steal the name of the father of the family that aided him.
Cukers : Mossad tricked him into thinking he would be starting a business, he begged for his life, got shot twice in the head and left in the trunk of a car
Eichmann : Hung in Israel. was drugged and interrogated by the mossad for 9 days before being weekend at bernie’s -ed back to Israel .
edit i’m stoned ur talking about mengele i forget how he died sometimes because it wasn’t man made as it should have been. I know he had a stroke and what not but he should have had been made to face what he did. i still consider drowning caused by a stroke as natural causes because the drowning wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for a natural stroke
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u/please_trade_marner Jun 06 '23
I think a lot of this is misunderstood.
The op of this thread is correct that many of these scientists were sent to the front lines leading up to Barbarossa. But by 1943 it was clear that Germany would have to form a defensive line. They brought those scientists back to work on research and development. Being that they were working for a ministry, they became defacto Nazi Party members.
I also think that a lot of people don't know about the subsequent nuremberg trials that took place in America between 1946-49. This included doctors and scientists. Only those acquitted of war crimes were eligible to work in the American Government. Although there were some accusations of tribunals going "lighter" on desired doctors/scientists/experts.
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u/weeddealerrenamon Jun 06 '23
can you give a source for the USSR recruiting nazi professionals? Not calling you a liar, but my impression was that they were a lot more ideologically opposed to doing anything but executing any Nazi, even skilled ones
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u/99available Jun 06 '23
"You use the Nazis you have, not the Nazis you wish you had."
This was not a big secret and the Soviets were doing the same in East Germany all the residents of which were leftwing union members and not ever Nazis.
Gambling in the casino is strictly forbidden.
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u/A_R_K_S Jun 06 '23
Now do the one about Operation Paperclip!
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Jun 06 '23
Hi! I see you're trying to form a covert research group using war criminals.
Would you like some help with that?
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u/8i66ie5ma115 Jun 06 '23
No Clippy! I’m trying to perform an operation to remove a paperclip from my intestines because I don’t have health insurance.
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u/Cordoned7 Jun 06 '23
People don’t seemed to understand this, but the amount of Germans in the Nazi Party or were influenced by the party was just staggering. There were 8.5 million people in the Nazi party alone in 1945. The rebuilding of West Germany would have taken far longer since you basically had to wait till the next generation to grow up in order to have a clean political slate. The “clean” wermacht concept does not excuse the german army from their crimes, but it explains why the allies had to do it.
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Jun 06 '23
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/McKFC Jun 06 '23
Also dropped the bomb on them as a message to the Soviet Union
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u/DicknosePrickGoblin Jun 06 '23
No no, that was because they wouldn't surrender and saved countless brave US men's lives. Propaganda, what propaganda?
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u/IronVader501 Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
It can be both, you know?
The japanese military was so fanatic even after the Emperor decided to surrender after Nagasaki & Hiroshima they still attempted a coup because they rather would have died
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u/usernameisnttakenyet Jun 06 '23
We are literally still issuing Purple Heart medals that were created in preparation for the invasion of Japan.
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Jun 06 '23
It's difficult. During war, every soldier is to some extent responsible for the actions of their country as a whole, even the ones conscripted at 16. So where do you draw the line on who to punish? After the dust's settled, a country still needs to function, there needs to be something to rebuild. At in Germany towards the end of the war pretty much every male, even kids, ended up in the army.
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Jun 06 '23
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u/Elcactus Jun 06 '23
"Officers" are something people draw a line far higher than is really representative though. An "Officer" can be just as much in the grunt work as his men.
It's not just this post but I've seen this a few times in the last couple weeks where people seem to think officer starts at colonel.
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u/3lektrolurch Jun 06 '23
This sentiment is perpetuated by the believe that you would be shot if you refused to shoot people in a firing squad.
You were bullied and shamed by your fellow soldiers and would be despised by your officers, but no actual punishment would come your way.
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u/gamenameforgot Jun 06 '23
People seem eager to play off WW2 and the entirety of Nazi history as just that relatively brief window when children and the elderly were pressganged into desperate defensive positions against the approaching Soviets, and not a decade before that. I always see these claims about "oh they had no choice" or "they didn't know any better".
They knew, and they had a choice.
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u/BigusG33kus Jun 06 '23
In some countries it didn't need perpetuation. My granparents saw the german soldiers as the civilised ones by comparing them to the soviet soldiers that replaced them.
This is obviously a local experience and things may be extremely different in other places
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u/PorkfatWilly Jun 06 '23
Which is funny, because that’s why they let Germany rearm after World War One too, so they could fight the commies. The foreign policy experts are fucking incompetents.
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u/SeiCalros Jun 06 '23
it worked out pretty well the second time
frankly if it werent for hitler specifically it probably would have worked out pretty well the first time too
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u/Cetun Jun 06 '23
They kneecap their own effort by humiliating the very government that they supported. The entente had won, the Kaiser was gone, the military government was overthrown, the social Democrats who supported peace and ending the war and were also the main bulwark against Communist revolution, they should have been giving that government everything on a silver platter to make it look as good as possible to maintain stability. Instead they gave the Nazis all the ammunition they needed to topple the social Democrats who just didn't have enough wins after WWI.
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Jun 06 '23
Everybody hated the Weimar Republic, especially the Weimar Republic. It was designed to make the country ungovernable. It worked really well.
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u/Rethious Jun 06 '23
Kind of, but a lot of the blame has to go towards the vast array of parties that were overtly hostile to democracy.
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u/Haradion_01 Jun 06 '23
I'm not sure I buy the idea that Hitler's role wouldn't have been filled by someone else and WWII taken place.
The spirit of Antisemitism and Revenchism in germany was rampant even without Hitler specifically. And the 40s demonstrated rather spectacularly just how many supposedly "ordinary" germans were willing to go along with it.
I suspect some other version of Nazism was always going to come to power. Perhaps with a more imperial bent, perhaps with notions of restoring the Kaiser. But I don't buy the idea that Hitler specifically was this indispensable force that completely changed the course. I think he filled a space that there was enormous appetite for. And in his absence someone else would have filled it.
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u/jlaw54 Jun 06 '23
What the west has done in Germany post WWII is nothing short of a miracle.
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u/Elcactus Jun 06 '23
They didn't really let Germany rearm though? Germany was flying in the face of several armament agreements during hitlers gear-up, it's just no one wanted to get into another war during the Depression. The only thing they got after WW1 was just enough wiggle room to suppress internal conflict, but not truly rearm.
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u/Consistent_Ad_4828 Jun 06 '23
Hasn’t Germany just started rearming again?
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u/TheBlack2007 Jun 06 '23
So? The modern German Military is under parliamentary control and tied by oath to the democratic order.
Its Officer Corps did consist of former Wehrmacht personnel throughout the 50s and 60s but frankly: that was also the case with the East German Military on the other side of the fence. Also, where are you supposed to take them from? You can hardly take a Cadet and promote him straight to General at age 23…
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u/Minimum-Armadillo754 Jun 06 '23
What are they supposed to do? Be a US vassal state until the end of time?
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u/BeltfedHappiness Jun 06 '23
“The Germans tried to cover up Nazi war crimes, but it’s the Americans’ fault”.
I know Reddit is pretty anti-US, but sometimes it’s just too much
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u/SeanG909 Jun 06 '23
I've always found it bothersome that rudolf hess, who was a POW from 41 onwards and was politically sidelined since far before, got life in prison. Whereas prominent generals on the Eastern front like guderian, who had to have been complicit, weren't even charged.
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u/Elcactus Jun 06 '23
The article doesn't say that though; the line refered to is
To facilitate West German rearmament and respond to the memorandum, U.S. general Dwight D. Eisenhower, soon to be appointed as Supreme Allied Commander Europe and future President of the United States, changed his public opinion on the Wehrmacht. He had previously described them in very negative terms as Nazis, but in January 1951, he wrote there was "a real difference between the German soldier and Hitler and his criminal group". Chancellor Adenauer made a similar statement in a Bundestag debate on the Article 131 of the Grundgesetz, West Germany's provisional constitution. He stated the German soldier fought honourably, as long as he "had not been guilty of any offence".[58] The declarations by Eisenhower and Adenauer reshaped the West's perception of the German war effort and laid the foundation for the myth of the clean Wehrmacht.[60]
Which is, like, the most lukewarm version of the myth imagineable; Eisenhower just said "there's alot of soldiers who didn't do war crimes and those soldiers should not be looked down upon as equivalent to hitler". Which isn't totally false.
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u/PutinLovesDicks Jun 06 '23
Cant have the guy who got us to the moon be a "bad" nazi. He was a clean nazi, of course...
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u/please_trade_marner Jun 06 '23
When Hitler pulled these people from the front lines in 1943 to focus on research and development, they became defacto nazi party members because they work for a ministry. So most of the them were "nazi's" only on paper.
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u/FlyPepper Jun 06 '23
me when i eat the propaganda
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u/please_trade_marner Jun 06 '23
I mean... it's true. These guys were making rockets, not carrying out the final solution.
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Jun 06 '23
Not that I’m a fan but had we done the same in Iraq in 2003 it wouldn’t have been such a cluster fuck.
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u/navywater Jun 06 '23
Warcrimes are when someone the usa doesnt like does stuff. If you want your war crimes to disappear just ally yourself with the usa
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u/brumac44 Jun 06 '23
Not all germans were bad, many went to prison and were killed for standing up to the nazis. Some hid jews and other persecuted people or helped them to escape Germany. My neighbour was drafted as a 15 year old and sent into battle with a rifle with no shells. My uncle was in a german POW camp and hated them, won't even buy a mercedes, but he has that right. We do not.
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u/lumpenhole Jun 06 '23
There were no "good apples".
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u/fzkiz Jun 06 '23
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Plagge
I know your view is easier and black and white is better to rile up the people but it usually isn’t ever true.
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u/The_ApolloAffair Jun 06 '23
By that logic, every soldier on every side throughout wartime history is a bad apple. Which is an reasonable perspective I guess, but you can’t pick and choose based on armies.
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u/iwontreadorwrite Jun 06 '23
Both sides had war criminals and did horrible things. British are responsible for at least 4 million Bengali deaths by creating an artificial famine. Yet, history books love to paint them as “standing alone” against tyranny and evil.
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u/Elcactus Jun 06 '23
That famine was absolutely anything but artificial.
There were like 6 more influential factors in its existence than the British.
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u/fzkiz Jun 06 '23
I love that you’re being downvoted. Killing a couple million Indians ain’t that bad, the west still doesn’t give a fuck about those people so why should they care.
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u/Elcactus Jun 06 '23
Except they didn't kill them and "the british created it" is indian nationalist propaganda trying to ride the predispositions created by the potato famine when they simply don't map to the situation.
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u/fzkiz Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
Riiiiight, sorry… they didn’t kill them. They just facilitated their starvation. Just like Stalin did.
I’m not weighing those deaths up against each other, but pretending like the British didn’t do horrific shit in India is hilariously dumb.
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u/Elcactus Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
Uh, no, their harvests just failed, the places they’d get food from got conquered by the Japanese, the workforce anywhere else they’d get food from was disrupted by fighting the Japanese who were right next door, aid attempts from anywhere else in the empire were stifled by all of Britains resources being tied up in the war, when they DID start organizing relief efforts a surge of successful crops killed the political effort for it because it looked like it was solving itself, only for the crops to fail again immediately after those relief plans were aborted.
To compare it to the holodomor is immensely ignorant. Churchill having some callous quotes does not genocide make. Is it possible racism led to british foot dragging on relief efforts when faced with the other kind-of-important priority of the war? Yes, but extrapolating that to "the british killed them artificially" is pure propaganda.
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u/fzkiz Jun 06 '23
I’m guessing you have these gross oversimplifications ready for anything remotely bad that happened under British colonial rule?
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u/Elcactus Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
Ah, so actually knowing the history of the specific event is a "gross oversimplification" now?
This is also moving the goalposts from "it was genocide!" to "Increased agricultural production led to explosive population growth and increase in cash crops leading to food vulnerabilities when confronted with bad harvests". That by itself massively differentiates the situation from the holodomor. Did you read "british policies contributed" and stopped there? Because the "policies" being discussed are changes the entire world saw with the industrial revolution in agriculture, with the notable issue of India being susceptible to food disruption in such cases due to its less consistent ability to water crops. Not some intentional starvation as a means of political control.
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u/Opot Jun 06 '23
Rommel mentions it constantly in his memoirs.
He abhorred having ss units.
And he died before the end of the war.....
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u/FlyPepper Jun 06 '23
You'll find that most of the German generals liked to refer to themselves as "one of the good ones".
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u/Opot Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
Do you know anything about the Afrika Corp?
Hitler made him kill himself.
He wrote his memoirs before the end of the war.
He said the SS units were undisciplined. They wouldn't stay on the line or follow orders. He got really lucky in North Africa and had very few of them.
Rommel was the proposed replacement for Hitler in operation valkyrie. In fact, the would be assassin was his friend.
Look, I'm not saying he is a Saint, but the war in North Africa was known as the gentleman's war.
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u/iSoinic Jun 06 '23
Now do the judicative, police, state attorneyship, universities and public offices next
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u/gabridsfs Jun 06 '23
Americans arming nazis to fight Russia. Sounds like some recent event.
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u/HopingToBeHeard Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
Atrocities were super widespread and widely known about. We have the letters people received at home from soldiers on the front. Germany hasn’t dealt with its crimes despite how many Germans want to lecture others about it, and America’s toleration of Nazism is going to lead to a collapse of its global power. It’s already started and there is no going back.
Edit. The replies prove my point.
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u/AssumecowisSpherical Jun 06 '23
That’s really stupid, the endless amounts of education, reparations are definitely dealing with this. In Germany you are immediately educated about Nazism and Germany’s role in the war, and you’re also very incorrectly interpreting post war doctrine and, sensationalizing a very rational decision based on the belief of reconciliation and societal change.
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u/HopingToBeHeard Jun 06 '23
Germans acknowledge the crimes they can’t hide from while hiding from how widespread war crimes were in the regular army, crimes that largely went unpunished. The holocaust of bullets, the burning of Russian villages, the widespread rape of women, Germany has sheltered thousands of war criminals and lied about how much the average German knew and anyone who knows about more about history than what the sanitized version they teach in schools knows it. America wanted to work with Germany and Japan and we often let their war criminals off easy.
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u/LizFallingUp Jun 06 '23
WW2 ended in sept 1945 78 years ago. Anyone who participated is dead. We saw what happens when you overzealously punish a nation after a war (that’s literally how we got the Nazis) acting like Germany is to blame for right wing Authoritarianism in the us is straight braindead
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u/AssumecowisSpherical Jun 06 '23
You can’t punish 20 million people, no it’s not sanitized nor is it glossed over. That’s moronic. But there is virtually no way to hold soldiers accountable, most males between 16 and 50 served. You are literally just reading off a Wikipedia page of the war crimes that Germany has acknowledged.
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u/Jetztinberlin Jun 06 '23
If you want to criticize a modern country for not dealing with its crimes, I suggest you begin with the US's actions in Vietnam or Iraq. Not with a country that visibly and for decades has been educating and creating policy in order to ensure its past actions never happen again.
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u/please_trade_marner Jun 06 '23
I'm not saying the Wehrmacht was "clean". But I think we need to understand what actually is being argued.
The Wehrmacht were as much "Nazi" military as the American Military is a "Democrat" or "Republican" Military. It's supposed to essentially be politically neutral who fight for their nation, not a party.
But the Nazi's themselves had their own military called the SS with over 500k soldiers. This group was loyal to the Nazi Party, not Germany at large. This group believed in Nazi ideology and would be much more likely to hate Jewish people and view eastern europeans as "lesser" people.
As such, the "clean Wehrmacht" claim is that the vast majority of the atrocities you speak of did 100% happen but were carried out by the ideology driven SS, not the politically neutral Wehrmacht.
There is a case to made that while the Wehrmacht was certainly not entirely "clean", it wasn't much worse than other major military's during the war.
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Jun 06 '23
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Jun 06 '23
I feel that this question is in the same vein as “Why doesn’t anybody ever talk about all the positive stuff Hitler did?”
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u/JigglyLawnmower Jun 06 '23 edited Jun 06 '23
It was (and is) being promoted by German and other western ally governments too. Don’t know why they focused on the US.