German atrocities in WWII, systematic or just like everyone else?

[Patroklos]

For the Invasion of France there were 3 full SS divisions fielded, including Liebstandarte and what would become Das Riech. Do you maintain that those forces were raised and trained in a year? Not only that but became some of the best in the German military in a year?

1,000,000+ (http://www.feldgrau.com/stats.html people served in the Waffen SS, do you maintain that all of them or even a significant minority were camp gards???

Alot of people assume that because the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf (SSTK) used the deaths head emblem that it automatically makes them camp guards. That insignia was a common cap insignia service wide (Waffen-SS). Not that they were nice guys mind you, but hardly camp guards.

[Ben Kenobi]

so ben, i take it you havent read Fackenheim yet, have you?

LOTM:

Doubtful even if I did, that I would change my mind on the holocaust being unexceptional.

Now, can you figure out why this might be the case?

I'll give you a clue.

According to my beliefs, what would be the largest genocide ever to have occurred? It has not yet been mentioned in the thread.

[Hurricane]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
My point is that I don't think Americans would willingly follow orders to gas millions of people to death. Our culture has "programmed" us to automatically question and resist abuses of power like that.

I think this a very important point. It is the culture that allows or forbids such atrocities, not the individual people. All experiments have showed that people can become monsters with surprisingly little pressure (look at Milgram's electric shock experiments, for example).

EDIT: Here is a Link for those unfamiliar with the experiment.

[Patroklos]

Noah's Flood. God is a genocidal bastard.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by notyoueither
Tingkai, that is true. The Waffen SS did bad things, as did other soldiers. Maybe they did more, most likely they did. However, you are aware that Canadians had episodes of 'not taking prisoners', yes?

Yes, an old RCN vet told me how he was working on a landing craft during D-Day and saw some german prisoners being marched behind a sandbank. He ran up the beach hoping to get some souviners. The germans had all been killed.

The difference, however, is these crimes were not condoned within the Canadian Army and when these crimes occurred it was on the frontlines (where it could be explained, but not justified, as actions in the heat of battle).

The Germans shot prisoners in the rear areas. Russians soldiers in POW camps were tortured and murdered. The Germans killed these people in "cold blood".

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Unlike the ordinary Wehrmacht (which was infested by doubters), the Waffen SS consisted mainly of brainwashed volunteers.

This is important to note. The Germans were not naturally evil. They were brainwashed; some more than others. Years of Nazi proganda, that built on latent racist attitudes, created cold-blooded killing machines.

None of the Allied countries, including Russia, had years of hate propaganda, although after the German invasion, the Soviet government played up the German atrocities to the full and created the mob that raped its way through Germany,

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Saras
The guy wrote the book 1945-1946 while in American captivity.

No, the book was written some 50 years later. The author claims the book is based on notes from 45-46.

Originally posted by Saras
Everything he wrote was corroborated to the maximum possible extent by the publishers.

According to Amazon, The book's publisher claims the author's story was checked against American military records. Those records would not be able to verify whether the author committed atrocities behind the front line, or in Russia.

Besides, how do we know the publisher is telling the truth. And let's look at some of the other books this small publishing company has printed:

- The Good Soldier: From Austrian Social Democracy to Communist Captivity with a Soldier of Panzer-Grenadier Division “Grossdeutschland

- Five Years, Four Fronts: The War Years of Georg Grossjohann, by the late Major Georg Grossjohann, German Army (Retired).

- From Normandy to the Ruhr: With the 116th Panzer Division in World War II By Heinz Günther Guderian

- Seven Days in January: With the 6th SS-Mountain Division in Operation NORDWIND by the late Wolf T. Zoepf

Out of nine books published by this company, four are memoirs of German soldiers.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Sikander


Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden....

Unless you consider burning thousands of non-combatants alive to fall short of an attrocity.

It is a question of intent. The Allied bombing raid were done with the intent of crippling the German war industry.

The Germans murdering civilians and POW was with intent of genocide.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Patroklos
it should be noted tha the British colonial troops had the WORST record in killing POWS (to include Canadians).

Again, another wild claim without any substantiation.

I think you're lying through your teeth.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Patroklos
But I hardly see why I have to provide copious example contrary to what you say and you don't produce a thing. Honeslty, find me a competant WWII historian who states your view.

You have to provide the proof because you're the one claiming the Waffen SS were chivalrous, yet you have yet to provide any proof to back up your bullsh!t.

Meanwhile, I have provided numerous examples that they were not.

[Mr. Harley]

Just to set the record straight on bomber Harris and Dresden. Unlike the US boming campaign against the factories, the Brits realized they were going to be doing essentially area bombing and hoping to do generalized destruction to the infrastructure of the area, hopefully getting the factory.

Hamburg changed all that. A mult-day raid using both British night-and American day-boming, they ended up with a fortunate, and also horrific, happenstance. The Brits torched the city, and then US high-explosive (HE) took out the fire crews. This is oversimplified, but hey I'm trying to keep my posts short. It resulted in a firestorm, essentially a tornado of fire that incinerated everything, and turned underground bomb shelters into slow cookers and/or oxygen free chambers, they aren't too sure which killed first and it may have varied.

Well, they had discovered how to destroy a city, serendipitously. The British head of the unified bomber command, Air Chief Marshall Harris, decided to attack Dresden to break the back of the German civilian morale. Dresden had been a tourist town, and a lot of refugees had gone there because it had absolutely nothing of military value.

First off, that was in total violation of the Geneva accords. Secondly, it failed, please note my sig. In fact it strengthened the resolve of the German people. Kurt Vonnegut was an American POW who got to help clean up after Dresden, one of the most monstrous civilian-only attacks of the war. It was a war crime, targeting ALMOST ONLY civilians, women and children, with malice of forethought. Vonnegut's description is horrifying.

Niven and Pournelle got it right in "Inferno" a novel why an aetheist sci-fi writer dies and goes to Dante's hell. Harris is in the eigth circle. The difference between that and Hamburg, and the US firebombing of Japanese cities, is that Hamburg had industrial targets, and Japan had deliberately spread out it's production through civil areas so it couldn't be targeted. Thus you have to take out the city to get the scattering of small workshops. Dresden was a terror raid, pure and simple, DOCUMENTED AS SUCH BY BOMBER COMMAND ITSELF, and done deliberately with a brutal, industrial efficiency. They carefully dropped street busters, large 1000-2000 pound bombs with delayed fuses, to kill the fire crews who responded. It doesn't make the Brits, or US, as bad as the Nazis. But we do have our war criminals, it's just that we won.

[Tingkai]

I wouldn't question that Dresden was a terror raid, but the allied air crew were led to believe that they were taking out German military industry. It should also be noted that the Commonwealth bomber crews hated Harris. They called him Butcher Harris because he sent them into the meat grinder.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Patroklos
For the Invasion of France there were 3 full SS divisions fielded, including Liebstandarte and what would become Das Riech. Do you maintain that those forces were raised and trained in a year? Not only that but became some of the best in the German military in a year?

1,000,000+ (http://www.feldgrau.com/stats.html people served in the Waffen SS, do you maintain that all of them or even a significant minority were camp gards???

Alot of people assume that because the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf (SSTK) used the deaths head emblem that it automatically makes them camp guards. That insignia was a common cap insignia service wide (Waffen-SS). Not that they were nice guys mind you, but hardly camp guards.

At times of the invasion of France, the Leibstandarte and the predecessor of Das Reich weren't divisions yet, but merely motorized regiments. They were made divisions by adding other units later, when they already were in Russia. And they didn't consist exclusively of camp guards.

[Saras]

Originally posted by Tingkai

No, the book was written some 50 years later. The author claims the book is based on notes from 45-46.

Splitting hairs.

According to Amazon, The book's publisher claims the author's story was checked against American military records. Those records would not be able to verify whether the author committed atrocities behind the front line, or in Russia.

Besides, how do we know the publisher is telling the truth. And let's look at some of the other books this small publishing company has printed:

- The Good Soldier: From Austrian Social Democracy to Communist Captivity with a Soldier of Panzer-Grenadier Division “Grossdeutschland

- Five Years, Four Fronts: The War Years of Georg Grossjohann, by the late Major Georg Grossjohann, German Army (Retired).

- From Normandy to the Ruhr: With the 116th Panzer Division in World War II By Heinz Günther Guderian

- Seven Days in January: With the 6th SS-Mountain Division in Operation NORDWIND by the late Wolf T. Zoepf

Out of nine books published by this company, four are memoirs of German soldiers.

Demagogue.

[East Street Trader]

The firestorm raid on Dresden was exceptional only its scale and the fact that the military significance of Dresden as a target was not very small, it was nil.

It is not exceptional as regards intent.

No one beieved that the bombing of cities did any significant damage to ecomomic or military capacity. It was done with the intent you describe - to undermine the enemy by inflicting horrifying casualties and damage in their backyards.

The morality of which was debated hotly. A debate which Harris won.

I deplore the raid on Dresden and the bombing of cities generally.

The complete absurdity of war is represented most clearly for me by the fact that my father watched the London docks burn, set on fire by one set of strangers, and he promptly signed up to go and drop bombs on cities occupied by another set of strangers.

I believe it to be the case that as many died in the Dresden raid as in Hiroshima or in Nagasaki.

But the simple fact is that if closely matched nations are at war and an effective weapon is available to one of them it will get used.

Dresden does not remotely compare to the Holocaust.