Obama's second term

[rainforests1]

Are you aware that the Nazis had an actual plan to starve Russian POWs because they wanted to reduce the population of Russia and free up resources, and that about 3 million Russian POWs starved to death in German POW camps? Are you aware of the conditions not only in German, Russian, Japanese and other Asian POW camps? You must not be, if you think American camps were "some of the worst."

There was a book I was reading that seemed to think the Russian POW's starving was mostly unintentional and the Germans obliged by the Geneva convention. They said the Red Cross' report said the same thing. This was from a German author who would hardly be considered a Nazi sympathizer. It's hard to say what's true or not.

 

[mlp]

You frequently seem to find it difficult to say what's true or not, all the while insinuating that the most out in left field conspiracy theories are the truth.

If you knew German, you could read for yourself: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsgefangene Of 5.7 million Russian soldiers in German POW camps, 3.3 million did not survive the war. The Geneva Convention was applied to the POWs of the western allies, but not to the Russians, which accounts for the fact that 57% of Russian POWs died in the custody of Germany, but only 3.5% of American, British, Canadian and other western ally POWs died in German custody. The Russian POWs were starved, exposed to the cold, and worked to death as slave labor. Half a million were sent directly to the death camps for immediate execution because they were suspected of being Jews or other undesirables. If you go to Germany, you can visit the cemetaries for yourself.

And Hitler's plans for reducing the Russian population are plenty well documented in his own words and those of his inner circle.

As a German, revisionist histories peddled by people furthering their own biases and bigotries makes me really, really sick. It's bad enough what was done to millions upon millions of people, without their memories continuing to be spat upon generations later.

Shame on you, Rainforests. What you are trying to do is despicable enough that I don't really have words for it.

 

[kibbleforlola]

What mlp said.

Also, I would like to point out that things like Japanese American camps first cropped up in my middleschool history classes. It's not that we aren't learning both sides; it's that we pay more attention to the loosing side (which in WWII also happened to be the bad guys - not that the U.S. was "good", but to sweep it under the rug and say "eh, we did bad things too" erases the horror that the Hitler War Machine released upon the world). It also speaks to the fact that kids just don't pay attention/forget quickly what they are taught. I really think that speaks more towards our educational system being undervalued and our culture not valuing knowledge in general; not some consperacy theory.

 

[rainforests1]

You frequently seem to find it difficult to say what's true or not, all the while insinuating that the most out in left field conspiracy theories are the truth.

If you knew German, you could read for yourself: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsgefangene Of 5.7 million Russian soldiers in German POW camps, 3.3 million did not survive the war. The Geneva Convention was applied to the POWs of the western allies, but not to the Russians, which accounts for the fact that 57% of Russian POWs died in the custody of Germany, but only 3.5% of American, British, Canadian and other western ally POWs died in German custody. The Russian POWs were starved, exposed to the cold, and worked to death as slave labor. Half a million were sent directly to the death camps for immediate execution because they were suspected of being Jews or other undesirables. If you go to Germany, you can visit the cemetaries for yourself.

And Hitler's plans for reducing the Russian population are plenty well documented in his own words and those of his inner circle.

As a German, revisionist histories peddled by people furthering their own biases and bigotries makes me really, really sick. It's bad enough what was done to millions upon millions of people, without their memories continuing to be spat upon generations later.

Shame on you, Rainforests. What you are trying to do is despicable enough that I don't really have words for it.

http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-War-E...sr=8-1&keywords=stalin's+war+of+extermination
This author seems to disagree. There are many historical events where I'm not sure what's true, and this is one of them.

 

[mlp]

Stalin was horrible and committed many atrocities. Hitler was horrible and committed many atrocities. Just because they were on opposite sides and one was horrible doesn't make the other one any less horrible.

And I continue to have nothing but disgust for apologists for either of them, or for those who would promote the revision of history to whitewash either of them, whether done because of stupidity, ignorance, or outright malice.

 

[das_nut]

I distinctly remember saying that the Russian winter was not the only one, in response to your earlier post. Maybe my mind is going, and I only imagined saying that? No, I just checked. I did say that. There were a number of major lessons from the Napoleonic wars, including these: a small to middling size country can only extend itself so far in its push to conquer before it overextends itself; Russia is a ****ing huge country in comparison to, say, France or Germany; there's a limited time frame between the spring thaw and the early autumn rains during which vast swaths of Russia are difficult to navigate because of the mud; winter in Russia sucks; Russia tends to be ruled by people who don't care how many of her people are killed in furtherance of the ruler'sdesires; all of the foregoing make Russia a place where it's super easy for a small to middling size country like, say, France or Germany to overextend itself. I came to these conclusions as a fourth grader reading Desiree and following up with some nonfiction history of the Napoleonic wars, and I was by no means a military genius at that age, nor am I one now.

To be fair to Germany, when viewed from GDP, the USSR and Nazi Germany were more or less evenly matched. Population is part of the reason why Russia lost - Russia had 190 million to Großdeutschland's 90 million. (Yep, had to look that one up.)

Still, the USSR was literally decimated by the war. And Germany did come very, very close to capturing the capital of the USSR during WWII. Would that have been enough to give the PR advantage to Germany? Who knows?

All of those factors combined to make the Eastern Front the most brutal of WWII, and, if I remember correctly, with the highest toll of military and civilian deaths in history.

Yep. The Soviets didn't recognize the Geneva convention. So the Germans didn't recognize the Geneva convention in regards to the Soviets. Both sides were utterly brutal towards each other, and uncle Joe was brutal even to his own troops.

Kind of goes back to my points about Russia being a big ****ing country and the overextension of the small to middling size would-be conqueror, doesn't it?

Then again, WWI disproves that.

It's interesting that you choose to ignore the role of the Bolshevik revolution, which was occurring at the same time as WWI, or perhaps you're unaware of the Bolshevik revolution, and the Bolsheviks' desire to withdraw from WWI, which they ultimately did unilaterally (and that unilateral withdrawal is what caused the loss of considerable territory).

I thought I had a pretty obvious inference to the Bolsheviks when I stated that Russia ceased to exist as a country. I suspect that Hitler would have been aware of the role of the Bolshevik revolution in connection with the cessation of WWI Eastern Front hostilities, though. The political unrest in Russia owed a great deal to the military failures of Tsarist Russia and the resulting poor moral.

And if he was looking to what happened in WWI as an incentive for again invading Russia, he really should have kept in mind that the fighting on the Eastern Front resulted in Germany's inability to maintain the Western Front, and Germany's resounding and humiliating defeat.

Yep. But if Hitler wasn't crazy, he wouldn't have been Hitler. After the German advanced stalled, he would have been far better off pulling back and shortening his front line. But he didn't.

See, you're thinking like an American who is pretty blissfully unaware of things like road conditions in other countries. Trust me, Germans have not been an insular people, and would have been perfectly aware of how little certain things (like road building) had progressed in Russia. For Germans, Russia is not the other side of the world, as it seems to be for many Americans.

I dunno. Americans tend not to realize how desolate parts of their own country are. It's one thing to know that Russia is a large country, it's another thing to know exactly what that means.

 

[das_nut]

Nope. The American camps were considered some of the worst in the entire war.

Wait, what? Soviet POWs had less than a coin toss's chance of surviving the war. At the height of Soviet POW deaths, the death rate was 1 out of a hundred per day.

The worse allied POW camps in the west were the Rhineland camps, which existed for a few months after the war. They had a death rate, on the high end, of about 1 out of a hundred over their entire timespan.

By the way, a quick google search for "Other Losses" turns up academic claims of serious flaws in that work.

 

[FortyTwo]

http://www.amazon.com/Battlefield-Earth-L-Ron-Hubbard/dp/1592120075/
Yay! I can do it too!

 

[mlp]

Then again, WWI disproves that.

Only if you ignore the fact that Germany lost WWI.

 

[das_nut]

Only if you ignore the fact that Germany lost WWI.

That doesn't negate the fact that Germany won against Russia.

On the other hand, one could argue that as long as the US was in the war, Germany was doomed. Germany, if lucky, could defeat the USSR. But geography would make a defeat of the US impossible. Even if a successful Sea Lion lead to the UK's removal as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the US, there's always southern Europe and north Africa as weak points. (And quite frankly, a successful Sea Lion is arguably unrealistic.)

Hitler's big mistake was declaring war against the US. He should have let the US/Nazi aggression stay in the realm of an undeclared war and hope that Japan would tire the US out.

 

[das_nut]

http://www.amazon.com/Battlefield-Earth-L-Ron-Hubbard/dp/1592120075/
Yay! I can do it too!

More relevant to the thread? http://www.amazon.com/The-High-Castle-Philip-Dick/dp/0679740678

 

[rainforests1]

By the way, a quick google search for "Other Losses" turns up academic claims of serious flaws in that work.

It goes completely against what Americans want to believe. Of course people will try refuting it. It's far from the only book that mentions around 1 million German POW's being murdered by the Allies.

Even wikipedia acknowledges several historians consider the book accurate. Of course those who claim it's false get much, much greater attention in the article than those who claim it's accurate. Typical dishonesty associated with wikipedia.

 

[mlp]

That doesn't negate the fact that Germany won against Russia.

On the other hand, one could argue that as long as the US was in the war, Germany was doomed. Germany, if lucky, could defeat the USSR. But geography would make a defeat of the US impossible. Even if a successful Sea Lion lead to the UK's removal as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the US, there's always southern Europe and north Africa as weak points. (And quite frankly, a successful Sea Lion is arguably unrealistic.)

Hitler's big mistake was declaring war against the US. He should have let the US/Nazi aggression stay in the realm of an undeclared war and hope that Japan would tire the US out.

My point was that one of the big lessons to be taken from the Napoleonic wars is that of a small to middling nation overextending itself in its efforts at conquest. The outcome of both WWI and WWII are relevant to that lesson.

I'm done. You're arguing just because you can't help yourself.

 

[das_nut]

It goes completely against what Americans want to believe. Of course people will try refuting it. It's far from the only book that mentions around 1 million German POW's being murdered by the Allies.

Allies are different from the US/UK.

1 million POW deaths seem to be in the ballpark for the Russians. If you're arguing that the Americans/British killed another 1 million POWs, then you're talking of a total POW death rate of 2 million, which does not seem to have historical verification.

The "Other Losses" book seems to count POW prison population losses due to prisoner transfers and releases as deaths. That is wrong, since the prisoners ended up surviving.

It appears that the author of "Other Losses" assumes documents that refer to POWs in US custody being transfered and released as a sign of a huge conspiracy to cover up a million prisoner deaths.

I think this Amazon review puts it best:

Have you heard of the holocaust of the jews? The Armenians? The rape of Nanking? Yugoslavia? Rwanda? The gulags? Of course you have. The world might not have *done* much to stop them, but no matter how hard the perpetrators tried to hide them, the truth came out, usually within a few years at the most.

Now Bacque claim that over a million Germans were not only killed by the Americans and French in POW camps in 1945-6, mostly by deliberate starvation, but that *nobody*, and I mean nobody, said anything about it for the last *sixty years*. Not the victim's fellow POWs; not their families; not the German government; not the US and French soldiers allegedly involved in a genocide to rival the holocaust; literally nobody.

This is extremely unlikely. But, that aside, what is his evidence? The most important is allied sources numbering about 1,000,000 German POWs as "other losses" in POW camps' statistics. But, as an Aug. 1945 allied report makes clear, 700,000 of those were Volkstrum ("People's Army") members released without bothering with a formal discharge! (Other reports show the rest of these were also, almost entirely, "losses" to a camp's population not due to death, but due to administrative reasons, eg. transfers to other places, etc.)

Bacque's book is an example to how an historian can be so lost in his own thesis (which he "knows" is true) as to ignore all contrary evidence, to say nothing of common sense. ​

My point was that one of the big lessons to be taken from the Napoleonic wars is that of a small to middling nation overextending itself in its efforts at conquest. The outcome of both WWI and WWII are relevant to that lesson.

True, a small nation has problems with conquering, yet at the same time, from a GDP standpoint, Germany was anything but small. European wars have succeeded in the past, resulting in gains by some of the nations involved.

 

[FortyTwo]

More relevant to the thread? http://www.amazon.com/The-High-Castle-Philip-Dick/dp/0679740678

'Tis the patron book of Scientology. It was a conspiracy joke but I guess it fell flat.

 

[das_nut]

'Tis the patron book of Scientology. It was a conspiracy joke but I guess it fell flat.

Wouldn't that be Dianetics? Battlefield was written back when Hubbard was still open about being a SF author.

 

[rainforests1]

Now Bacque claim that over a million Germans were not only killed by the Americans and French in POW camps in 1945-6, mostly by deliberate starvation, but that *nobody*, and I mean nobody, said anything about it for the last *sixty years*. Not the victim's fellow POWs; not their families; not the German government; not the US and French soldiers allegedly involved in a genocide to rival the holocaust; literally nobody.

​

​

​

How do they possibly know this? This has to be one of the dumbest comments ever made.

While we're on this subject, why did the Allies never attempt to get rid of Hitler? Of course terror bombing civilian cities was perfectly acceptable. The only logical reason I can think of is the Allies wanted the war to happen and did everything to ensure it did. The "good guys".

 

[led.boots]

There were certainly attempts on hitler's life. http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/assassination_attempts.html

 

[rainforests1]

There were certainly attempts on hitler's life. http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/assassination_attempts.html

I understand that, but the Allied governments weren't involved. Odd thing is the best chance was around the time Munich happened. The opposition was ready in case the conflict with the Czechs didn't go well. Germany was very weak in 1938 so I think that had a chance of happening. If England had not gotten involved the war could have been avoided. Many people benefit from war so that could explain why they'd want it.

 

[das_nut]

How do they possibly know this? This has to be one of the dumbest comments ever made.

Er, you think about 70 different Katyns would be hard to cover up for 60 years.

While we're on this subject, why did the Allies never attempt to get rid of Hitler? Of course terror bombing civilian cities was perfectly acceptable. The only logical reason I can think of is the Allies wanted the war to happen and did everything to ensure it did. The "good guys".

There were plans to assassinate Hitler. But the main argument against it (other than difficulty) was that anyone who replaced Hitler had a good chance of being a far more competent military commander (even if their competency was only shutting up and letting the military planners run things).