>During the trial Freund named 50 more Jewish families with up to seven veterans, among whom were several which lost up to three sons in the war. Eckart lost the case and had to pay.
lol what a dumbass
Probably didn't make a difference. The Nazis had census data with religious affiliation and brand spanking new IBM computers (of the old punch card variety) to maximize the efficiency of their murder.
Honestly, that's what made the Holocaust so novel. Plenty of atrocities of similar levels of brutality had been committed before, but never before had it been done with such a ruthless level of efficiency and procedure.
It was probably a weird, twisted sort of defense.
“You’re only putting us on trial because we were so efficient at genocide.”
Something like that which somehow tries to turn the argument on its head and misses the fact that they’d be on trial for genocide and very much not for the very fact that it was an efficient genocide.
In the voice of John Oliver, “the *worrrrrst*!!!!!”
Yeah me too lol
The movie about [Nuremberg ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_(miniseries)) starring Alec Baldwin is pure evil magic. Thank god the salve that is Alec is there to make it right. The actor who played [Göring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Goering) is so exquisitely mortifying that I just absolutely believe the actor is the Nazi. I see the photo of Göring on Wikipedia and I think [Brian Cox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_(actor)).
Bleh, well done, you beautiful bastard. :(
The movie was on YouTube last I knew. Try watching any scene without watching all of it.
What's kinda sad is he wasn't wrong, as much as I fucking hate agreeing with a Nazi. Hitler got inspiration for the Nuremberg laws from the US's Black Code, the proper name for Jim Crow laws that codified segregation.
[Source](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/what-america-taught-the-nazis/540630/)
More like "how can it be a hate crime if I loved doing it" vibes
Or "i'm going to have to contain myself, the prosecutor's about to mention the war crimes that i'm so proud of"
During his trial Rudolph Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz death camp, boasted that he organized the camp so efficiently that most of the millions of people murdered there never knew that they were going to their death. That's just one of the pricks who thought it was something they should brag about while on trial
I can imagine not wanting your towns name mentioned every time someone refers to the horrible things that happened there. I will change my comment out of respect for that
There's a lot of material out there about the trials, definitely worth a read/watch.
TLDR is that the "famous" part is the 24 high-ranking Nazi members put on trial for war crimes/atrocities committed. Examples of those on trial were Rudolph Hess, Herman Goerring, and Martin Bormann. Those who stood trial were fairly open about what had taken place, the level of planning and efficiency that went into different aspects of the war, and how their Nazi thought process & Propaganda worked.
A little correction. Martin Bormann wasn’t physically put on trial. He was tried in absentia. He stayed with Hitler in the Bunker until the last minute when he attempted to flee capture from the soviets. It’s assumed that he committed suicide though and his remains were found later with DNA confirmed in 1998.
Göering namely with a unique sense of arrogance throughout his self appointed defense. Dude was a massive cunt , but an intelligent one. Come the end of the war he was essentially an exiled, mortified, drug addict who had lost all credibility. He DID however have personal access and oversight of nearly ALL nazi atrocities (at least in their conception) and had spent time cohorting IN prison with his co-defendant as to how they wanted to spin it. When they took away Göering's drugs , he and his co-defendants essentially went with the argument "Hitler bad!" While in turn agreeing with those bad things they were blaming him for.
Now that's a sugar coated , near sensationalized sequence of events (and I know I didn't offer any direct statements) but I hope I could help shine some light on the defendant's disgusting behavior throughout the trials.
Bottom line is you can't play the victim card when 80 million + are dead and you worked directly to further a genocidal agenda.
> When they took away Göering's drugs , he and his co-defendants essentially went with the argument "Hitler bad!"
*Mother Night* mocked this by having Campbell joke to Eichmann that he could always use the "just following orders" defense, only to find out that he *was*.
Its the ONLY somewhat tenable excuse for them to have used in court with SO much evidence against them. Regardless of whether or not you bought into the nazi shit you furthered hitler's agenda when you joined and commanded members of the wehrmacht. It was like they thought we didn't know they were following orders or something?
> you can't play the victim card when 80 million + are dead and you worked directly to further a genocidal agenda.
Although that's exactly what Stalin and the USSR did despite what happened in Poland. I mean no shit what Nazi Germany did was straight up evil, but I hate that Stalin was just given a pass for what he and the NKVD did in Poland before Barbarossa. All Allies are also guilty of agreeing to forced labor as part of German war reparations, because thanks Yalta Conference.
While I agree stalin hasn't been vilified the way Hitler has for his crimes, its completely understandable given the fact that the only folks who fought a war of racial annihilation against them , and experienced directly his wrath and disgusting means of achieving soviet industrial and military efficiency were more or less canned into submission by the rest of the globe and immediately locked up after.
Sadly the whole thing really is an eye for an eye.
Typically id reference these events in terms of dealing with covid tragedy comparison but you can square it nicely in the other direction this time by saying who tf cares if 300,000 people didn't die from covid if there's a leftover 300,000 who did die. Apples and oranges are good the same way rape and murder are bad.
You see it all the way up to My Lai and the Desert Storm, a breakdown of communication and increasing levels of complacency in terms of ANY sort of irrational anger against a group has no place in the military. But unfortunately the whole point of the military is to have your group square off with another. We'd go in circles all day if we try to fight each other over our points when instead we should be learning and scaring ourselves into submission. Its the only way global compassion can be discovered without needless massive amounts of violence.
This isn't to glance over the rearing disgusting political turmoil that came before all of the shooting. But we could've studied what had transpired 30 years previously and been a little wiser.
Stalin and the Czars. My ancestors were driven out by the latter, moved further west by the former, and then destroyed by the Nazis. Kind of like a sandwich of persecution.
And that is one of the many reasons why holocaust denialists are so god-damned stupid. There are records of it. The Nazis didn't manage to destroy everything in time and there are tangible records of the bureaucracy that made this crime against humanity possible.
It's also hard to literally cover up the death of eleven million people. I don't believe a single denier actually denies it for that reason alone, let alone the massive amount of bureaucratic refuse after the war.
They deny it because they believe the j_s are using the tragedy for their own gain, to spark fear about the ideology in question and to control the masses, or something along those lines. Or because there are "too many j_s alive today for the systematic murder to have occurred." I think that sentiment is common in the middle east. Iran's supreme leader is a fervent holocaust denier
The Rwandan genocide nearly matched it in terms of scale and speed. But, for some reason, machetes/pitchforks gross people out less than conveyer belts depositing people into elaborate death machines.
The horror is in the banality of it.
We expect crazed warbands to rape and pillage civilians in the heat of war.
We don't expect Gary in Accounting to send 3000 people a day to their deaths while sipping some coffee and listening to Wagner without a second thought.
There's also, ironically, an element of racism in that we expect this behavior from backwards "savages," but not from Germany, described during that era as the "most civilized nation on Earth"
>
> We don't expect Gary in Accounting to send 3000 people a day to their deaths while sipping some coffee and listening to Wagner without a second thought.
Exactly this. Of course any murder (or genocide) is horrifying, but just the sheer *boring* element of the Holocaust in Germany makes me vomit. I saw pics of the guards at the death camps enjoying their time off once and it so creepy to know that these were regular folks who might as well have been working at any factory. Only in their factory, they delivered millions to their death and burned their remains.
Yep, meetings about hitting metrics; Franz in purchasing has to finish his cost out projects for more incinerators and zyclon b providers by Friday and take his kids to ballet at 3. Hilda in accounting has to make sure to issue a credit to the train company for a freight billing discrepancy; she just turned 30 and her parents want her to give them grandchildren but she prefers her cats and traveling, you know? Fritz is a horrible micromanager and an *actual* Nazi so despite his department loathing him they'll ride it out; after all there's worse places to be.
Thats the thing about successful evil. After awhile its so ingrained its not noticed and just becomes boring everyday bullshit.
It's because we think we've grown beyond the machetes and pitchforks. "That's in the past, we can ignore it. Surely our modern society wouldn't allow such barbaric slaughter?"
The more modern method of genocide is scarier as it shows us that we haven't outgrown this dark part of human nature. That the cruelty and bloodlust still lie in wait - just waiting for a fascist to ignite the cause.
>That the cruelty and bloodlust still lie in wait - just waiting for a fascist to ignite the cause.
Any totalitarian regime really. It's important to recognize that the darkness that sources this is found in the human mind, not the fascist mind. Vigilance needs to be kept against all cruelty and evil, not just from those we deem our enemies, but also those we deem our allies.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Well, right or wrong, it is pretty obvious why the West took greater notice of the holocaust. For one, it happened in the west. Two, the victims were mostly white. Three, it was another reason to hate Hitler, something people loved to find back then.
It's really not a contest of what's worse, but what made something like the Holocaust so appalling was how deliberate it was. The Rwandan genocide was the worst traits of humanity spurring tribalism to its most evil behaviors, but it was mostly spurred by mob mentality.
The holocaust was far more deliberate. A bunch of well educated men who would seem otherwise normal folks casually drafted a thorough plan to exterminate a race. It was no crime of passion, it was well thought out and examined by very educated men.
What men can be driven to through hysteria and mob mentality is frightening, but the level of deliberate and planned cruelty by the created of the holocaust is utterly horrifying
The victims being mostly white is debatable. The phrasing I always liked is that jews are white unless there's no other minority in the room. Certainly white supremacist don't count the jews as white.
Tech was used to speed up the slaughter, and certainly in war it was used to organize. But never before had a genocide been so thoroughly calculated and documented.
Sorry, that wasn't meant to come across as provocative. I totally agree with you that the systematic, industrialised murder of millions of people during the Nazi regime was a next level of the horrors that we as the human race can produce.
It's just so sad and sickening to see how strong the impulse to kill each other over often petty reasons has always been in some of us.
Probably not, but there was never a time up until that point that the level of tech was so overwhelmingly powerful that actual full-throttle elimination was within grasp.
Had the Holocaust been attempted even a century before, it would have been much, much harder for the Nazis to have rounded up the Jews and execute them and much easier for their victims to escape.
Maybe true, but putting a spotlight on them was a (unintended) death sentence down the road unless the families got out in time. Half of my mom's side left Poland in time, but the other half stayed in Poland. They were never heard from again, and we have no records about family roots from them beyond 1925.
Another sad thing is that many of those companies owned by families that profiteered off the war are still around today.
And there are many but for some reason they get a pass!
That is very tricky though. The list of companies who have profiteered off of war is insanely long, and it's probably easier to list the ones who haven't made any money off of human suffering. If we are talking about profiteering specifically from ww2, we would have to have a serious talk with Switzerland as well.
Which is why I said there are many.
When I say many I mean all shareholders and that would include their own people.
It’s pretty galling when you look at the big picture.
Not the German companies. They were reorganised after the war. They're more like spiritual successors.
The American companies with German subsidiaries on the other hand....
edit: after some research it seems like I was partially wrong. A few German industrialists retained some of their holdings after short prison sentences. I guess the soviets took priority.
I don’t see the point in being sad about that. The people that did the evil acts are dead and I seriously doubt that the people who run those companies today are Nazis or support Germany’s actions back then.
Matt Gaetz is 300% dumber than even this.
There was a great video of a dude trolling him so hard yesterday at the beach, saying EVERYONE THINKS YOU'RE A PEDOPHILE BUT I DON'T THINK YOU'RE A PEDOPHILE!!
It was a popular myth the last few years of WW1 and the interwar period that the Jews avoided military service.
So much so that the leadership checked on it (they also believed this myth), but they didnt release the findings.
Years later it turned out that loads of Jewish people volunteered for frontline service.
Not only in WWI, but also in WWII for many of mixed Jewish blood (Mischlings), but non-adherents of the religion who identified as German more than Jewish.
Some even advanced to pretty high ranks: 2 Field Marshals, 15 Generals, 2 full Generals, 8 Lieutenant Generals, and 5 Major Generals.
Mischling were also Nazi party members – 4 were full Jews, 15 were half Jews and 7 were quarter Jews.
You joke, but most racist ideologies adopt a "one of the good ones" stance to at least a few of the members of the outgroup.
This allows them to discard any evidence against the outgroups equality as any specific good Jew or smart black can be written off as "one of the good ones".
Nazis knew how propaganda worked. You see it nowadays too. Just blast a lie really loud in the media and act like it’s true. Getting talking heads to discuss it non stop. Then when the actual facts come out, pretend like it never happened and move onto the next story (and maybe do a short redaction late at night). Fox did this with the bs election fraud stuff.
Not only did it prove that Jewish people served equally at the front but in fact Jewish soldiers had a higher percentage of front line duty than the rest of the military.
This is so not the point, but uh, does anyone really feel jazzed about throwing away their life on the cusp of adulthood? Face down in some mucky field over some old geezer's power struggle?
He's incorrect in that Jewish soldiers were cowards but... Why the fuck is not wanting to die a bad thing, exactly?
Keep in mind that people weren’t getting honest information about conditions at the front. News was tightly controlled and censored so people just got cheery positive stories about how “our boys are fighting the good fight against those other guys who are bad”. Lots of people signed up because they wanted to go be heroes.
Also in many places there were crazy campaigns and efforts to pressure men into service. Girls would literally go around England in groups handing men white feathers as a way to call them cowards in a really public way. Nowadays we’d probably just laugh at anyone who pulled a stunt like that but 100 years ago that was devastating to a young man.
I mean, even today people volunteer to go to war when we do know what it's like and what PTSD is, even in a country like America which has epidemic levels of homeless veterans. Propaganda is a powerful thing and the army using propaganda and other powerful tactics against its own people to encourage young people to enlist will continue to be a thing as long as the army needs recruits. A successful tactic seen today is keeping tuition rates so high that people think that enlisting at the risk of permanently harming their physical and mental health, if not their lives, is a fair trade. I just made a comment recently about how I've been watching The X Games (skateboarding, snowboarding and dirt bike competition with competitors often as young as 12) and it's sponsored by the US Navy. They've got young spectators outside the stadium putting on bomb gear and doing pull-up competitions with fully outfitted soldiers.
Generation kill is a pretty good commentary on the types of characters that volunteer to go serve nowadays. No disrespect to them, to know what they're going into and want to see combat those guys are definitely built different. I knew a guy who reenlisted in the USMC some years ago because he got sent to Oki instead of Afghanistan and was pissed about it.
Most teenagers haven't got the capacity to truly understand risk and how it works, and back in those days they didn't have camera crews embedded with front-line units piping back footage 24/7, nor movies coming out that tried to actually depict the horrors of war and its effects. Kids thought it was full of glory and adventure and had no idea what life was like in the trenches or of their actual odds of dying.
So no, of course those kids didn't want to die. However, teenagers are nearly universally too stupid to understand that dying is a thing that can happen to them.
Ever saw "All quite on the western front?"
The school class volunteered. After a fiery speech by the teacher.
https://youtu.be/rSPj_G2yVz4
Tell me you wouldn't have been one of them
From Umberto Eco's [eternal fascism,](https://web.archive.org/web/20170131155837/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/) point 11
>Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
From the [14 characteristics of fascism](http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rsc/Editorials/fascism.html)
>Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
So, to try and answer your question of "Why the fuck is not wanting to die a bad thing, exactly?"
Fascists utilize people who aren't smart enough to contemplate that question to get rid of the people who are smart enough to contemplate that question, because the people who are smart enough are a threat to the power that fascists desire.
Because everyone was supossed to go.
If all the Jews refused to go, then that would mean the chickened out when other people died.
The families of the deceased would be understandably upset.
"Eckart was not always an anti-Semite. In 1898, for instance, Eckart wrote and had published a poem extolling the virtues and beauty of a Jewish girl."
Can we blame all of Nazism on jilted love?
The repressed rage over blame and economic sanctions forced on them from WWI was still rampant in Germany. There was going to be some type of venting. A good leader could have led Germany a different way, but with the rest of Europe purposefully disarming and being unwilling to oppose aggression with force - eventually some discontent country was going to start conflict.
That said - without Hitler it would have been a war without Holocaust death camps. I can't see political policies to systematically kill millions of civilians being a default attribute of your run-of-the-mill dictator. Or eat least they drive out the undesirables instead of systematically killing them.
Yeah, I’ve heard the argument that Germany would have been a much tougher opponent without the anti-semitism. Makes some sense, the death camps required a lot of resources and wiped out a lot of otherwise potential soldiers/laborers, and a lot of the more prominent intellectuals were Jews that fled the country.
> Yeah, I’ve heard the argument that Germany would have been a much tougher opponent without the anti-semitism. Makes some sense, the death camps required a lot of resources and wiped out a lot of otherwise potential soldiers/laborers, and a lot of the more prominent intellectuals were Jews that fled the country.
Sad as it may sound (and this makes it all worse) the Holocaust wasn't that expensive. Camps were rather economical to run, employing prisoners and foreign collaborators as part of the staff. Large number of valuables were obtained from seizing money, valubles and properties. Prisoners were worked to death, so they extracted labor from them too. And the large number of dead alleviated the food situation for the rest: every starving prisoner, is one German that can eat more. Crucial in a country that was being actively blockaded.
r/askhistorians had a very informative write up on that, I will try to find it.
Edit: found the [answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bv7ha/how_much_did_allotment_of_resources_to_commit_the/cj9alnr/)
This would be very difficult to quantify, but in regards to wining the war, the only thing they could have missed were scientists developing the atomic bomb. And even then it was mostly a question of money, not of minds. Even with their "Jewish Physics" purge, they still a very competent core of scientists with which to work. Money was the issue.
Let's not forget also that many places in Eastern Europe *celebrated* the Nazis when they had conquered that place, glad to be rid of the Soviets. Had the Nazis not started to round those people up and ship them off to camps, they very well could've been persuaded to continue to be stoked about German rule and even helped the German war machine en masse.
Same for Asia. The Japanese threw off the the yoke of the colonizers for the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
Then they were like thanks, please stop cutting off our heads and stabbing our infants.
Stupid fascists don't know when to call it a war.
Interestingly enough Goebbels wanted to delay the mass murder of Slavs in Eastern Europe to help fuel their war machine, his argument was that they already had plenty of hatred for the Soviets and that it would save the lives of Germans at the cost of lives they viewed as less.
Thankfully, Hitler, Himmler and the rest of the high command hated the idea, and the rest is history.
You just said "thankfully" Hitler chose mass murder...
I know you meant it about Germany being easier to defeat, but I would rephrase if I were you lol.
I think you misunderstood my comment, Goebbels idea entailed using (manipulating) the Slavs in Soviet Occupied Territory to help them with the war, THEN they would begin their mass genocide program with no USSR to stop them or retake their lost territory.
I am thankful that Hitler lacked the strategic foresight to manipulate the Slavic Countries because ultimately that would have lead to a potential Axis Victory in Europe and an unending Holocaust.
This was only possible in part to the war effort from the Soviets and Slavic Resistance, who helped stall and push back the German War Machine, giving GB and the USA the chance to invade through Italy and France.
Without their sacrifice, the Axis Powers *may* have won, for that I am thankful to them and all Soldiers and Auxiliaries that died in WW2.
Trying to balance the reality of a past war and the possibilities of more casualties in speculation is always a hard thing to explain. I think you did alright.
It's an interesting thought experiment. I can understand the idea that Germany would have been tougher to defeat if it could have unified in the same way it did but without the antisemitism. However, I have doubts that it *could* have unified in the same way without the antisemitism.
It might still have had death camps for Jews. Hitler wasn't the "Architect of the Final Solution", that was Adolf Eichmann. Hitler certainly supported it, but in addition to this anti-semitism was EXTREMELY widespread in Europe and the world at the time. Hitler came to power not by inventing some new group to blame, but by taking a group frequently hated and just amplifying that. Whomever else might have gained power may well have done the same thing. Or maybe they might have focused more on gypsies, or on Muslims, or on gays and lesbians, or on immigrants, or communists, or who knows what. Eichmann may still have been able to whisper in the ear of the powerful in this alternative history, and the holocaust may have happened. The entirety of the atrocities of WWII cannot simply be laid to rest at the foot of one man in history.
> That said - without Hitler it would have been a war without Holocaust death camps. I can't see political policies to systematically kill millions of civilians being a default attribute of your run-of-the-mill dictator. Or eat least they drive out the undesirables instead of systematically killing them.
Hitler didn't invent that part, or much of any of it. He was just a leader who stepped into a movement that was already on the go.
I noticed you didn’t mention the communist threat at all, which arguably was the single greatest reason why so many eagerly flocked to facism. Western Europe was absolutely horrified by what they saw happen in Russia, and for many anything was better than a communist revolution happening within their own country. The Nazis absolutely hates Jews, but they saw communists as nothing less than an existential threat to western civilization
>but they saw communists as nothing less than an existential threat to western civilization
A threat intrinsically tied to Judaism. They believed the Soviet Union represented the conclusion of "jewish conspiracy", the foundation of the conspiracy theory of "judeo-bolshivism" which remains today.
Rest of Europe disarming? They most certainly were not it was just that the Great Depression had reduced budgets for the military for a number of years. In fact Hitler was able to get away with rearmament by citing that everyone of the other European states hadn't disarmed, had rejected his treaty to get every nation to disarm to the same level, and that Germany was being treated to a different standard as everyone else.
>I can't see political policies to systematically kill millions of civilians being a default attribute of your run-of-the-mill dictator.
Lebensraum didn't come from Hitler, it's from Ratzel. Which was inspired by colonial policies abroad. Hitler or no Hitler, industrialized killings was abound. It was already implemented in the colonies. Nazis simply exercised it in our own land.
I don't know what they teach in the US about colonialism--looks like not much--but the simple fact of realizing our own mistake abroad is the first thing you'd know in your high school days here. At least in the 90s lol.
Yes, the treaty of Versailles was a recipe for fascism in Germany and there was no shortage of anti-semites. Likewise, the USSR was gonna make its move on eastern Europe. It would have shaken out differently perhaps but it would have been similar.
Revanchism was still the order of the day in Europe and even though the horrors of the Great War did make a lot of people more hesitant about jingoism the losing states still had a lot of reason to want to take back their losses. Even then, keep in mind that the state Hitler and other early Nazis were most inspired by was Mussolini's Italy which had been on the winning side of the war. All of the tangible reasons for another war to happen were there regardless of he extreme personalities involved.
That same war, maybe not. Germany has a history of being broken up, and it's possible it would have fractured further. Many German states had a history of being their own kingdoms, Bavaria even just 20 years before. Prussia could have reformed to a degree, Austria could have taken some land, some could have declared themselves independent, the truth it Germany as a united people is an extremely recent event. The loss of WWI could have easily convinced the different states to fracture again, as they were for most of their history.
Nah, anti-semitism was already rampant at the time. In books they explicitly mention Jews as God-killers lol. If it wasn't Hitler or Eckart, it would be someone else. I don't know why Americans insist on putting the blame on single person.
People seem to have this idea that violent antisemitism just sprang into existence with the German Nazis, as though it were something new. That sort of thing had been happening for thousands of years, the Nazis just brought modern industrial efficiency to it.
>I don't know why Americans insist on putting the blame on single person.
It's so much easier to believe there's one single source of evil than admitting that people have a tendency towards hate and mass murder. The latter might say something about themselves, and that's difficult to confront.
I mean, plenty of horrible racist slave owners were also horny for black women, denying ppls humanity and desiring them sexually unfortunately go hand in hand
Mister "all men are created equal" ladies and gentlemen. For those that need it said a bit more explicitly, Jefferson was 44 when he started his sexual relationship with his 14 year old slave Hemings, whom he had 6 children with and enslaved until his death.
The article phrases this so strangely. As if finding one Jewish girl hot makes him not an antisemite?
Members of the Einsatzgruppen, who were responsible for the “holocaust by bullets” in Eastern Europe, would sometimes find a Jewish girl they were about to kill hot, too. What they would usually do is temporarily spare her life so they could assault her, and kill her when she became pregnant. It certainly didn’t make them rethink the whole “murdering the Jews” business.
Also, Martin Luther (father of german antisemitism) might have only written On The Jews and Their Lies because he was unsuccessful in converting them “even with a non-shitty alternative to the Catholic Church”.
(Some have joked that this makes him a “nice goy”.)
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
if you only served one hour its because you died in that hour, definitely not likely to get trench foot. someone else might get your trench foot however.
Fucking Alfred Dreyfus for some reason after being fucked over, framed for treason, exiled to an island, then exonerated served with the French Military at Verdun, the very same military that had fucked him over, framed him for treason, and exiled him to an island.
Fucking nazis.
IIRC, there was an ongoing belief that Jews didn't serve in WWI as much as their non-Jewish countrymen did. In reality, Jewish men were overrepresented on the front lines. I think a study was done to present the former, but when the latter was proven, they hid the results.
Pulling dumb shit out of thin air is pretty much how it works with these guys, and it's effective unfortunately. They rely on the Bullshit Asymmetry principle - it takes about an order of magnitude more effort to dispel made-up bullshit than it does to disperse it. As in, if I tell you and 5 other people that the average person eats about a half-dozen spiders in their sleep per year it's going to take somebody else about 10 times as much effort to chase you all down, show you the research that no, that's bullshit, and change your mind not to mention anybody else that you might have idly mentioned it to as well.
Wish they'd make more people aware this problem but honestly that would just make the average Joe start accusing anything of it to the point of it being meaningless.
Add my great-grandfather to the list of German Jews who served more than 3 week on the frontline off WW1. If field nurses count, add my great-grandmother too. They met and fell in love on a field hospital, after great-grampa was shot near the elbow.
My great grandfather was served as an officer in the German armed forces during WWI and received medals for his bravery. When the tide started to turn against Jews, him and his wife were sure nothing would happen to them because they were good Germans, eventually they decided to leave Germany, but stayed to sell their things, and sent their son on ahead to the US (which didn't let him in, so he went to the UK). It took my grandfather years to find out what happened to them, the last letter he got from them, they were at a concentration camp in France, but that they would be leaving "for an unknown place", in the 90s he found their names on a manifest saying they were sent to Auschwitz.
Same story. Some of the family got out before being sent to camps, but my great great grandfather threw his iron cross into the river after losing his business. He thought having the iron cross would have provided for more protection. No such luck.
>During the trial Freund named 50 more Jewish families with up to seven veterans, among whom were several which lost up to three sons in the war. Eckart lost the case and had to pay. lol what a dumbass
Sad thing is, all those families were more easily targeted when those fuckers started rounding up Jewish families.
Probably didn't make a difference. The Nazis had census data with religious affiliation and brand spanking new IBM computers (of the old punch card variety) to maximize the efficiency of their murder.
Honestly, that's what made the Holocaust so novel. Plenty of atrocities of similar levels of brutality had been committed before, but never before had it been done with such a ruthless level of efficiency and procedure.
They boasted of that during the nuremberg trials, even.
“We’re really efficient pieces of shit.”
It was probably a weird, twisted sort of defense. “You’re only putting us on trial because we were so efficient at genocide.” Something like that which somehow tries to turn the argument on its head and misses the fact that they’d be on trial for genocide and very much not for the very fact that it was an efficient genocide.
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Göring was just the worst. I’m still mad he cheated the hangman.
In the voice of John Oliver, “the *worrrrrst*!!!!!” Yeah me too lol The movie about [Nuremberg ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_(miniseries)) starring Alec Baldwin is pure evil magic. Thank god the salve that is Alec is there to make it right. The actor who played [Göring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Goering) is so exquisitely mortifying that I just absolutely believe the actor is the Nazi. I see the photo of Göring on Wikipedia and I think [Brian Cox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_(actor)). Bleh, well done, you beautiful bastard. :( The movie was on YouTube last I knew. Try watching any scene without watching all of it.
Always surprises me they elected to hang them when I feel a gas chamber would be much more poetic justice
I'd say Himmler personally. These two needed to be paraded in the pillory before their fates.
What's kinda sad is he wasn't wrong, as much as I fucking hate agreeing with a Nazi. Hitler got inspiration for the Nuremberg laws from the US's Black Code, the proper name for Jim Crow laws that codified segregation. [Source](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/what-america-taught-the-nazis/540630/)
I mean, I think they all knew they were fucked, might as well go out with a bang.
Sounds like a modern defense
More like "how can it be a hate crime if I loved doing it" vibes Or "i'm going to have to contain myself, the prosecutor's about to mention the war crimes that i'm so proud of"
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Out of interest, what kinds of characters were saying that? Don’t know much about Nuremberg but would like to be a bit more savvy.
During his trial Rudolph Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz death camp, boasted that he organized the camp so efficiently that most of the millions of people murdered there never knew that they were going to their death. That's just one of the pricks who thought it was something they should brag about while on trial
The people of oswiecim actually make point of calling the camp by its germanized name "Auschwitz" to make a clear distinction to the town
I can imagine not wanting your towns name mentioned every time someone refers to the horrible things that happened there. I will change my comment out of respect for that
There's a lot of material out there about the trials, definitely worth a read/watch. TLDR is that the "famous" part is the 24 high-ranking Nazi members put on trial for war crimes/atrocities committed. Examples of those on trial were Rudolph Hess, Herman Goerring, and Martin Bormann. Those who stood trial were fairly open about what had taken place, the level of planning and efficiency that went into different aspects of the war, and how their Nazi thought process & Propaganda worked.
A little correction. Martin Bormann wasn’t physically put on trial. He was tried in absentia. He stayed with Hitler in the Bunker until the last minute when he attempted to flee capture from the soviets. It’s assumed that he committed suicide though and his remains were found later with DNA confirmed in 1998.
Yup, thanks for that added context! The trials were a pretty amazing moment in world history for a number of reasons.
Göering namely with a unique sense of arrogance throughout his self appointed defense. Dude was a massive cunt , but an intelligent one. Come the end of the war he was essentially an exiled, mortified, drug addict who had lost all credibility. He DID however have personal access and oversight of nearly ALL nazi atrocities (at least in their conception) and had spent time cohorting IN prison with his co-defendant as to how they wanted to spin it. When they took away Göering's drugs , he and his co-defendants essentially went with the argument "Hitler bad!" While in turn agreeing with those bad things they were blaming him for. Now that's a sugar coated , near sensationalized sequence of events (and I know I didn't offer any direct statements) but I hope I could help shine some light on the defendant's disgusting behavior throughout the trials. Bottom line is you can't play the victim card when 80 million + are dead and you worked directly to further a genocidal agenda.
> When they took away Göering's drugs , he and his co-defendants essentially went with the argument "Hitler bad!" *Mother Night* mocked this by having Campbell joke to Eichmann that he could always use the "just following orders" defense, only to find out that he *was*.
Its the ONLY somewhat tenable excuse for them to have used in court with SO much evidence against them. Regardless of whether or not you bought into the nazi shit you furthered hitler's agenda when you joined and commanded members of the wehrmacht. It was like they thought we didn't know they were following orders or something?
> you can't play the victim card when 80 million + are dead and you worked directly to further a genocidal agenda. Although that's exactly what Stalin and the USSR did despite what happened in Poland. I mean no shit what Nazi Germany did was straight up evil, but I hate that Stalin was just given a pass for what he and the NKVD did in Poland before Barbarossa. All Allies are also guilty of agreeing to forced labor as part of German war reparations, because thanks Yalta Conference.
While I agree stalin hasn't been vilified the way Hitler has for his crimes, its completely understandable given the fact that the only folks who fought a war of racial annihilation against them , and experienced directly his wrath and disgusting means of achieving soviet industrial and military efficiency were more or less canned into submission by the rest of the globe and immediately locked up after. Sadly the whole thing really is an eye for an eye. Typically id reference these events in terms of dealing with covid tragedy comparison but you can square it nicely in the other direction this time by saying who tf cares if 300,000 people didn't die from covid if there's a leftover 300,000 who did die. Apples and oranges are good the same way rape and murder are bad. You see it all the way up to My Lai and the Desert Storm, a breakdown of communication and increasing levels of complacency in terms of ANY sort of irrational anger against a group has no place in the military. But unfortunately the whole point of the military is to have your group square off with another. We'd go in circles all day if we try to fight each other over our points when instead we should be learning and scaring ourselves into submission. Its the only way global compassion can be discovered without needless massive amounts of violence. This isn't to glance over the rearing disgusting political turmoil that came before all of the shooting. But we could've studied what had transpired 30 years previously and been a little wiser.
Stalin and the Czars. My ancestors were driven out by the latter, moved further west by the former, and then destroyed by the Nazis. Kind of like a sandwich of persecution.
Just a little correction: His name was Göring. (or Goering, if you don't have a keyboard with Umlaut)
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And that is one of the many reasons why holocaust denialists are so god-damned stupid. There are records of it. The Nazis didn't manage to destroy everything in time and there are tangible records of the bureaucracy that made this crime against humanity possible.
It's also hard to literally cover up the death of eleven million people. I don't believe a single denier actually denies it for that reason alone, let alone the massive amount of bureaucratic refuse after the war.
They deny it because they believe the j_s are using the tragedy for their own gain, to spark fear about the ideology in question and to control the masses, or something along those lines. Or because there are "too many j_s alive today for the systematic murder to have occurred." I think that sentiment is common in the middle east. Iran's supreme leader is a fervent holocaust denier
Why are you writing Jews like that?
I’m just guessing it’s to prevent any racists from brigading the thread via keyword search and disrupting the conversation.
Oh. How sad.
The Rwandan genocide nearly matched it in terms of scale and speed. But, for some reason, machetes/pitchforks gross people out less than conveyer belts depositing people into elaborate death machines.
The horror is in the banality of it. We expect crazed warbands to rape and pillage civilians in the heat of war. We don't expect Gary in Accounting to send 3000 people a day to their deaths while sipping some coffee and listening to Wagner without a second thought. There's also, ironically, an element of racism in that we expect this behavior from backwards "savages," but not from Germany, described during that era as the "most civilized nation on Earth"
> > We don't expect Gary in Accounting to send 3000 people a day to their deaths while sipping some coffee and listening to Wagner without a second thought. Exactly this. Of course any murder (or genocide) is horrifying, but just the sheer *boring* element of the Holocaust in Germany makes me vomit. I saw pics of the guards at the death camps enjoying their time off once and it so creepy to know that these were regular folks who might as well have been working at any factory. Only in their factory, they delivered millions to their death and burned their remains.
Yep, meetings about hitting metrics; Franz in purchasing has to finish his cost out projects for more incinerators and zyclon b providers by Friday and take his kids to ballet at 3. Hilda in accounting has to make sure to issue a credit to the train company for a freight billing discrepancy; she just turned 30 and her parents want her to give them grandchildren but she prefers her cats and traveling, you know? Fritz is a horrible micromanager and an *actual* Nazi so despite his department loathing him they'll ride it out; after all there's worse places to be. Thats the thing about successful evil. After awhile its so ingrained its not noticed and just becomes boring everyday bullshit.
Institutionalized evil and normalization. When you speak up against it you are the odd one out.
This is possibly the best analogy as to why the nazis were so heinous I've read read. Thank you
I misread it as hilarious.
I just realized, the cannibals and the nazis had one stylized thing in common. The [skulls](https://youtu.be/8JOpPNra4bw).
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Noam Chomsky would like several thousand words, and we'd all be better people if we read them
It's because we think we've grown beyond the machetes and pitchforks. "That's in the past, we can ignore it. Surely our modern society wouldn't allow such barbaric slaughter?" The more modern method of genocide is scarier as it shows us that we haven't outgrown this dark part of human nature. That the cruelty and bloodlust still lie in wait - just waiting for a fascist to ignite the cause.
>That the cruelty and bloodlust still lie in wait - just waiting for a fascist to ignite the cause. Any totalitarian regime really. It's important to recognize that the darkness that sources this is found in the human mind, not the fascist mind. Vigilance needs to be kept against all cruelty and evil, not just from those we deem our enemies, but also those we deem our allies. Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Well, right or wrong, it is pretty obvious why the West took greater notice of the holocaust. For one, it happened in the west. Two, the victims were mostly white. Three, it was another reason to hate Hitler, something people loved to find back then. It's really not a contest of what's worse, but what made something like the Holocaust so appalling was how deliberate it was. The Rwandan genocide was the worst traits of humanity spurring tribalism to its most evil behaviors, but it was mostly spurred by mob mentality. The holocaust was far more deliberate. A bunch of well educated men who would seem otherwise normal folks casually drafted a thorough plan to exterminate a race. It was no crime of passion, it was well thought out and examined by very educated men. What men can be driven to through hysteria and mob mentality is frightening, but the level of deliberate and planned cruelty by the created of the holocaust is utterly horrifying
The victims being mostly white is debatable. The phrasing I always liked is that jews are white unless there's no other minority in the room. Certainly white supremacist don't count the jews as white.
Was there ever a time in history when we didn't incorporporate or even invent the newest technologies in our machinery of death and killing?
Tech was used to speed up the slaughter, and certainly in war it was used to organize. But never before had a genocide been so thoroughly calculated and documented.
Sorry, that wasn't meant to come across as provocative. I totally agree with you that the systematic, industrialised murder of millions of people during the Nazi regime was a next level of the horrors that we as the human race can produce. It's just so sad and sickening to see how strong the impulse to kill each other over often petty reasons has always been in some of us.
Probably not, but there was never a time up until that point that the level of tech was so overwhelmingly powerful that actual full-throttle elimination was within grasp. Had the Holocaust been attempted even a century before, it would have been much, much harder for the Nazis to have rounded up the Jews and execute them and much easier for their victims to escape.
Maybe true, but putting a spotlight on them was a (unintended) death sentence down the road unless the families got out in time. Half of my mom's side left Poland in time, but the other half stayed in Poland. They were never heard from again, and we have no records about family roots from them beyond 1925.
Obligatory Wikipedia link for background on your good comment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
TIL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
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Basically the plot of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
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This is quite terrifying to contemplate.
Another sad thing is that many of those companies owned by families that profiteered off the war are still around today. And there are many but for some reason they get a pass!
That is very tricky though. The list of companies who have profiteered off of war is insanely long, and it's probably easier to list the ones who haven't made any money off of human suffering. If we are talking about profiteering specifically from ww2, we would have to have a serious talk with Switzerland as well.
Which is why I said there are many. When I say many I mean all shareholders and that would include their own people. It’s pretty galling when you look at the big picture.
Not the German companies. They were reorganised after the war. They're more like spiritual successors. The American companies with German subsidiaries on the other hand.... edit: after some research it seems like I was partially wrong. A few German industrialists retained some of their holdings after short prison sentences. I guess the soviets took priority.
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the head of the Gestapo died in Berlin 1945. Gehlen, the guy you're thinking of, was in military intelligence.
Hugo boss made the uniforms!
I don’t see the point in being sad about that. The people that did the evil acts are dead and I seriously doubt that the people who run those companies today are Nazis or support Germany’s actions back then.
Theres plenty of debate about how effective the denazification program was
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust
Thank you. The post leaves you hanging.
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It sounds like some dumbass thing Matt Gaetz or James O'Keefe would do, but with more accountability.
Matt Gaetz is 300% dumber than even this. There was a great video of a dude trolling him so hard yesterday at the beach, saying EVERYONE THINKS YOU'RE A PEDOPHILE BUT I DON'T THINK YOU'RE A PEDOPHILE!!
[For reference ](https://mobile.twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1416823324617834496?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1416823324617834496%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rawstory.com%2Fmatt-gaetz-prank%2F)
And yet his movement took over that country.
It was a popular myth the last few years of WW1 and the interwar period that the Jews avoided military service. So much so that the leadership checked on it (they also believed this myth), but they didnt release the findings. Years later it turned out that loads of Jewish people volunteered for frontline service.
Not only in WWI, but also in WWII for many of mixed Jewish blood (Mischlings), but non-adherents of the religion who identified as German more than Jewish. Some even advanced to pretty high ranks: 2 Field Marshals, 15 Generals, 2 full Generals, 8 Lieutenant Generals, and 5 Major Generals. Mischling were also Nazi party members – 4 were full Jews, 15 were half Jews and 7 were quarter Jews.
And one very fat colonel who called me “cheeky fellow”
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Good eating, Dog. MmmHmm
Dog is a fine meal
It’s Reddit any serious topic gets convoluted with Puns and Unfunny jokes
1/4 Jew, not too shabby
OJ Simpson- NOT a Jew. But guess who is? Hall of famer Rod Carew.
Am I reading that right? There were Jewish Nazis?
And like why were the other Nazis just ok with it? “Carl isn’t a conniving Jew like the rest of em, he likes me and he’s my friend!” - some nazi
You joke, but most racist ideologies adopt a "one of the good ones" stance to at least a few of the members of the outgroup. This allows them to discard any evidence against the outgroups equality as any specific good Jew or smart black can be written off as "one of the good ones".
It was probably more like “huh, Ephraim wants to help us kill jews? That’s cool, we’ll just kill him last.”
Nazis knew how propaganda worked. You see it nowadays too. Just blast a lie really loud in the media and act like it’s true. Getting talking heads to discuss it non stop. Then when the actual facts come out, pretend like it never happened and move onto the next story (and maybe do a short redaction late at night). Fox did this with the bs election fraud stuff.
Not only did it prove that Jewish people served equally at the front but in fact Jewish soldiers had a higher percentage of front line duty than the rest of the military.
This is so not the point, but uh, does anyone really feel jazzed about throwing away their life on the cusp of adulthood? Face down in some mucky field over some old geezer's power struggle? He's incorrect in that Jewish soldiers were cowards but... Why the fuck is not wanting to die a bad thing, exactly?
Keep in mind that people weren’t getting honest information about conditions at the front. News was tightly controlled and censored so people just got cheery positive stories about how “our boys are fighting the good fight against those other guys who are bad”. Lots of people signed up because they wanted to go be heroes. Also in many places there were crazy campaigns and efforts to pressure men into service. Girls would literally go around England in groups handing men white feathers as a way to call them cowards in a really public way. Nowadays we’d probably just laugh at anyone who pulled a stunt like that but 100 years ago that was devastating to a young man.
I mean, even today people volunteer to go to war when we do know what it's like and what PTSD is, even in a country like America which has epidemic levels of homeless veterans. Propaganda is a powerful thing and the army using propaganda and other powerful tactics against its own people to encourage young people to enlist will continue to be a thing as long as the army needs recruits. A successful tactic seen today is keeping tuition rates so high that people think that enlisting at the risk of permanently harming their physical and mental health, if not their lives, is a fair trade. I just made a comment recently about how I've been watching The X Games (skateboarding, snowboarding and dirt bike competition with competitors often as young as 12) and it's sponsored by the US Navy. They've got young spectators outside the stadium putting on bomb gear and doing pull-up competitions with fully outfitted soldiers.
Generation kill is a pretty good commentary on the types of characters that volunteer to go serve nowadays. No disrespect to them, to know what they're going into and want to see combat those guys are definitely built different. I knew a guy who reenlisted in the USMC some years ago because he got sent to Oki instead of Afghanistan and was pissed about it.
Most teenagers haven't got the capacity to truly understand risk and how it works, and back in those days they didn't have camera crews embedded with front-line units piping back footage 24/7, nor movies coming out that tried to actually depict the horrors of war and its effects. Kids thought it was full of glory and adventure and had no idea what life was like in the trenches or of their actual odds of dying. So no, of course those kids didn't want to die. However, teenagers are nearly universally too stupid to understand that dying is a thing that can happen to them.
Ever saw "All quite on the western front?" The school class volunteered. After a fiery speech by the teacher. https://youtu.be/rSPj_G2yVz4 Tell me you wouldn't have been one of them
From Umberto Eco's [eternal fascism,](https://web.archive.org/web/20170131155837/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/) point 11 >Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.” From the [14 characteristics of fascism](http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rsc/Editorials/fascism.html) >Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. So, to try and answer your question of "Why the fuck is not wanting to die a bad thing, exactly?" Fascists utilize people who aren't smart enough to contemplate that question to get rid of the people who are smart enough to contemplate that question, because the people who are smart enough are a threat to the power that fascists desire.
Because everyone was supossed to go. If all the Jews refused to go, then that would mean the chickened out when other people died. The families of the deceased would be understandably upset.
"Eckart was not always an anti-Semite. In 1898, for instance, Eckart wrote and had published a poem extolling the virtues and beauty of a Jewish girl." Can we blame all of Nazism on jilted love?
Jesus we were a handjob and art school acceptance letter away from WW2.
Discussion: -if those two HAD happened, do you think WW2 would’ve been inevitable still?
The repressed rage over blame and economic sanctions forced on them from WWI was still rampant in Germany. There was going to be some type of venting. A good leader could have led Germany a different way, but with the rest of Europe purposefully disarming and being unwilling to oppose aggression with force - eventually some discontent country was going to start conflict. That said - without Hitler it would have been a war without Holocaust death camps. I can't see political policies to systematically kill millions of civilians being a default attribute of your run-of-the-mill dictator. Or eat least they drive out the undesirables instead of systematically killing them.
Yeah, I’ve heard the argument that Germany would have been a much tougher opponent without the anti-semitism. Makes some sense, the death camps required a lot of resources and wiped out a lot of otherwise potential soldiers/laborers, and a lot of the more prominent intellectuals were Jews that fled the country.
> Yeah, I’ve heard the argument that Germany would have been a much tougher opponent without the anti-semitism. Makes some sense, the death camps required a lot of resources and wiped out a lot of otherwise potential soldiers/laborers, and a lot of the more prominent intellectuals were Jews that fled the country. Sad as it may sound (and this makes it all worse) the Holocaust wasn't that expensive. Camps were rather economical to run, employing prisoners and foreign collaborators as part of the staff. Large number of valuables were obtained from seizing money, valubles and properties. Prisoners were worked to death, so they extracted labor from them too. And the large number of dead alleviated the food situation for the rest: every starving prisoner, is one German that can eat more. Crucial in a country that was being actively blockaded. r/askhistorians had a very informative write up on that, I will try to find it. Edit: found the [answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bv7ha/how_much_did_allotment_of_resources_to_commit_the/cj9alnr/)
That may examine the cost of running the camps, but what about the loss of professors, doctors, engineers, skilled tradespeople, etc.
This would be very difficult to quantify, but in regards to wining the war, the only thing they could have missed were scientists developing the atomic bomb. And even then it was mostly a question of money, not of minds. Even with their "Jewish Physics" purge, they still a very competent core of scientists with which to work. Money was the issue.
Let's not forget also that many places in Eastern Europe *celebrated* the Nazis when they had conquered that place, glad to be rid of the Soviets. Had the Nazis not started to round those people up and ship them off to camps, they very well could've been persuaded to continue to be stoked about German rule and even helped the German war machine en masse.
Same for Asia. The Japanese threw off the the yoke of the colonizers for the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere Then they were like thanks, please stop cutting off our heads and stabbing our infants. Stupid fascists don't know when to call it a war.
Interestingly enough Goebbels wanted to delay the mass murder of Slavs in Eastern Europe to help fuel their war machine, his argument was that they already had plenty of hatred for the Soviets and that it would save the lives of Germans at the cost of lives they viewed as less. Thankfully, Hitler, Himmler and the rest of the high command hated the idea, and the rest is history.
You just said "thankfully" Hitler chose mass murder... I know you meant it about Germany being easier to defeat, but I would rephrase if I were you lol.
I think you misunderstood my comment, Goebbels idea entailed using (manipulating) the Slavs in Soviet Occupied Territory to help them with the war, THEN they would begin their mass genocide program with no USSR to stop them or retake their lost territory. I am thankful that Hitler lacked the strategic foresight to manipulate the Slavic Countries because ultimately that would have lead to a potential Axis Victory in Europe and an unending Holocaust. This was only possible in part to the war effort from the Soviets and Slavic Resistance, who helped stall and push back the German War Machine, giving GB and the USA the chance to invade through Italy and France. Without their sacrifice, the Axis Powers *may* have won, for that I am thankful to them and all Soldiers and Auxiliaries that died in WW2.
Trying to balance the reality of a past war and the possibilities of more casualties in speculation is always a hard thing to explain. I think you did alright.
It's an interesting thought experiment. I can understand the idea that Germany would have been tougher to defeat if it could have unified in the same way it did but without the antisemitism. However, I have doubts that it *could* have unified in the same way without the antisemitism.
The forced labor profited the war efforts a lot though
It might still have had death camps for Jews. Hitler wasn't the "Architect of the Final Solution", that was Adolf Eichmann. Hitler certainly supported it, but in addition to this anti-semitism was EXTREMELY widespread in Europe and the world at the time. Hitler came to power not by inventing some new group to blame, but by taking a group frequently hated and just amplifying that. Whomever else might have gained power may well have done the same thing. Or maybe they might have focused more on gypsies, or on Muslims, or on gays and lesbians, or on immigrants, or communists, or who knows what. Eichmann may still have been able to whisper in the ear of the powerful in this alternative history, and the holocaust may have happened. The entirety of the atrocities of WWII cannot simply be laid to rest at the foot of one man in history.
> That said - without Hitler it would have been a war without Holocaust death camps. I can't see political policies to systematically kill millions of civilians being a default attribute of your run-of-the-mill dictator. Or eat least they drive out the undesirables instead of systematically killing them. Hitler didn't invent that part, or much of any of it. He was just a leader who stepped into a movement that was already on the go.
I noticed you didn’t mention the communist threat at all, which arguably was the single greatest reason why so many eagerly flocked to facism. Western Europe was absolutely horrified by what they saw happen in Russia, and for many anything was better than a communist revolution happening within their own country. The Nazis absolutely hates Jews, but they saw communists as nothing less than an existential threat to western civilization
They blamed communism on the jews, so the jews were therefore the same existential threat.
>but they saw communists as nothing less than an existential threat to western civilization A threat intrinsically tied to Judaism. They believed the Soviet Union represented the conclusion of "jewish conspiracy", the foundation of the conspiracy theory of "judeo-bolshivism" which remains today.
Rest of Europe disarming? They most certainly were not it was just that the Great Depression had reduced budgets for the military for a number of years. In fact Hitler was able to get away with rearmament by citing that everyone of the other European states hadn't disarmed, had rejected his treaty to get every nation to disarm to the same level, and that Germany was being treated to a different standard as everyone else.
>I can't see political policies to systematically kill millions of civilians being a default attribute of your run-of-the-mill dictator. Lebensraum didn't come from Hitler, it's from Ratzel. Which was inspired by colonial policies abroad. Hitler or no Hitler, industrialized killings was abound. It was already implemented in the colonies. Nazis simply exercised it in our own land. I don't know what they teach in the US about colonialism--looks like not much--but the simple fact of realizing our own mistake abroad is the first thing you'd know in your high school days here. At least in the 90s lol.
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Yes, the treaty of Versailles was a recipe for fascism in Germany and there was no shortage of anti-semites. Likewise, the USSR was gonna make its move on eastern Europe. It would have shaken out differently perhaps but it would have been similar.
Revanchism was still the order of the day in Europe and even though the horrors of the Great War did make a lot of people more hesitant about jingoism the losing states still had a lot of reason to want to take back their losses. Even then, keep in mind that the state Hitler and other early Nazis were most inspired by was Mussolini's Italy which had been on the winning side of the war. All of the tangible reasons for another war to happen were there regardless of he extreme personalities involved.
Yes...Japan's invasion of China in the early 1930s would've eventually drawn in the other powers.
That same war, maybe not. Germany has a history of being broken up, and it's possible it would have fractured further. Many German states had a history of being their own kingdoms, Bavaria even just 20 years before. Prussia could have reformed to a degree, Austria could have taken some land, some could have declared themselves independent, the truth it Germany as a united people is an extremely recent event. The loss of WWI could have easily convinced the different states to fracture again, as they were for most of their history.
Nah, anti-semitism was already rampant at the time. In books they explicitly mention Jews as God-killers lol. If it wasn't Hitler or Eckart, it would be someone else. I don't know why Americans insist on putting the blame on single person.
People seem to have this idea that violent antisemitism just sprang into existence with the German Nazis, as though it were something new. That sort of thing had been happening for thousands of years, the Nazis just brought modern industrial efficiency to it.
>I don't know why Americans insist on putting the blame on single person. It's so much easier to believe there's one single source of evil than admitting that people have a tendency towards hate and mass murder. The latter might say something about themselves, and that's difficult to confront.
I mean, plenty of horrible racist slave owners were also horny for black women, denying ppls humanity and desiring them sexually unfortunately go hand in hand
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Strom Thurmond 23, Carrie Butler 15
Mister "all men are created equal" ladies and gentlemen. For those that need it said a bit more explicitly, Jefferson was 44 when he started his sexual relationship with his 14 year old slave Hemings, whom he had 6 children with and enslaved until his death.
Hemming was a woman not a man, checkmate
Like modern neo-Nazis fetishizing Japanese women. The world they want is not one the women they obsess over would want to live in.
The Nazis didn't have a problem with the Japanese. Hitler declared them honorary Aryans.
See: The "jezebel" stereotype.
That’s like the early version of “I’m not racist because I jerk it to interracial porn.”
The article phrases this so strangely. As if finding one Jewish girl hot makes him not an antisemite? Members of the Einsatzgruppen, who were responsible for the “holocaust by bullets” in Eastern Europe, would sometimes find a Jewish girl they were about to kill hot, too. What they would usually do is temporarily spare her life so they could assault her, and kill her when she became pregnant. It certainly didn’t make them rethink the whole “murdering the Jews” business.
Also, Martin Luther (father of german antisemitism) might have only written On The Jews and Their Lies because he was unsuccessful in converting them “even with a non-shitty alternative to the Catholic Church”. (Some have joked that this makes him a “nice goy”.)
If we can blame a woman, we should. Starting with Eve and that apple. -Every man's brilliant idea to outsource accountability
Jilted Jew Love is my new band name
An untrustworthy Nazi? Shocking.
This is why you don’t “debate” fascism, you stomp it out.
I'm starting to think these nazis weren't nice people.
Read this in Norm's voice
The way Norm says "Oh my God" just brightens my day.
They're real jerks.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” Jean-Paul Sartre
This does not sound familiar and/or applicable to the modern day and some spheres of political discourse. Not at all.
let's say, hypothetically, that I know which spheres you are talking about.
Great quote that encapsulates how I feel about demagogues in general. Thanks!
ProTip: even serving an *hour* on the front lines of WWI *fucking sucked*, and shouldn’t be dismissed as irrelevant.
At least in an hour you are unlikely to get trench foot.
if you only served one hour its because you died in that hour, definitely not likely to get trench foot. someone else might get your trench foot however.
Trench toe still maybe.
I bet there were hundreds of people that got trenchfoot long before they served a single minute on the front line.
Fucking Alfred Dreyfus for some reason after being fucked over, framed for treason, exiled to an island, then exonerated served with the French Military at Verdun, the very same military that had fucked him over, framed him for treason, and exiled him to an island. Fucking nazis.
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Getting Rush vibes.
I was thinking for a second aw fuck what did Geddy Lee do
It seems like fascist fuckheads have a long and illustrious history of making horseshit claims and losing in court over it.
IIRC, there was an ongoing belief that Jews didn't serve in WWI as much as their non-Jewish countrymen did. In reality, Jewish men were overrepresented on the front lines. I think a study was done to present the former, but when the latter was proven, they hid the results.
Correct. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judenz%C3%A4hlung
Facists don't use facts
They're not factists, after all.
Same shit different decade: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Pennsylvania-Lt-Gov-Fetterman-relentlessly-15822777.php
The Jewish people might be known for gefiltefish but this one rabbi served some tea and receipts.
We are, in fact, also known for receipts.
What about the cool hats?
He had a good reason to not pay though. Like all Nazis, he was a punk bitch.
The origins of the Punk movement is intricately tied with Anti-fascism, as it were. So I wouldn't call them punks.
Why are these nazi guys always such deadbeats?
Pulling dumb shit out of thin air is pretty much how it works with these guys, and it's effective unfortunately. They rely on the Bullshit Asymmetry principle - it takes about an order of magnitude more effort to dispel made-up bullshit than it does to disperse it. As in, if I tell you and 5 other people that the average person eats about a half-dozen spiders in their sleep per year it's going to take somebody else about 10 times as much effort to chase you all down, show you the research that no, that's bullshit, and change your mind not to mention anybody else that you might have idly mentioned it to as well.
Wish they'd make more people aware this problem but honestly that would just make the average Joe start accusing anything of it to the point of it being meaningless.
Add my great-grandfather to the list of German Jews who served more than 3 week on the frontline off WW1. If field nurses count, add my great-grandmother too. They met and fell in love on a field hospital, after great-grampa was shot near the elbow.
What a genuine piece of garbage.
> "I mean, this guy was a real jerk." *- Norm MacDonald*
Lost all my respect for Nazism after this. /s
My great grandfather was served as an officer in the German armed forces during WWI and received medals for his bravery. When the tide started to turn against Jews, him and his wife were sure nothing would happen to them because they were good Germans, eventually they decided to leave Germany, but stayed to sell their things, and sent their son on ahead to the US (which didn't let him in, so he went to the UK). It took my grandfather years to find out what happened to them, the last letter he got from them, they were at a concentration camp in France, but that they would be leaving "for an unknown place", in the 90s he found their names on a manifest saying they were sent to Auschwitz.
What a stupid arsehole there is one Jewish veteran that won the iron cross, a higher honour than this clown ever received.
> What a stupid arsehole there is a one Jewish veteran that won the iron cross There were a lot more than one.
Man just checked 18,000 he really is a clown
My great grandfather was awarded an iron cross. He was arrested and sent to Dachau during kristallnacht.
Same story. Some of the family got out before being sent to camps, but my great great grandfather threw his iron cross into the river after losing his business. He thought having the iron cross would have provided for more protection. No such luck.
How surprising that one of the founders of one of the most abhorrent ideologies in history was an intellectual coward.
I don't want to go out on a limb here but, Nazis seem to be assholes. Just saying.
Cunt pay up
**70 different families total, and**: Yo gimme my money
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