Andreas

You have played 49th Recce how many times?!?!?!?!?! I am impressed. Just don't tell your wife/significant other that I designed it. In answer to your question, I never heard of anyone being able to take the hill either, and I did not the one time I played it. All the best Andreas

Or we could forego the whole punishment idea (that's soooo BlackJack) and I invite you for diner to corrupt you. Ask Mattias if it is worth it. All the best Andreas

Speak for yourself. All the best Andreas [ February 17, 2006, 01:29 AM: Message edited by: Andreas ]

No, all I can tell you is that it was not insignificant, since it co-incided with the expansion of the W-SS and the heavy losses of the late war that needed to be replaced. But if you are really interested, you can ask the question on the AHF. For the purpose of this discussion, I thought it would be clear that one would be one too many, if he ended up in the group at Dachau. All the best Andreas

Does not compute. All the best Andreas Ps. Check behind your sofa.

In German it is called 'Radler'(if you are living south of the Weisswurstäquator) or 'Alsterwasser', if you are living north of it. But if you live in the Rhineland, they will serve you beer mixed with Fanta (I kid you not) if you ask for Radler. We should have left that part of the country to the French, if you ask me. All the best Andreas

I don't know why this is not getting through. I would like to know why, after having been told numerous times, you still come back with the 'willingly joined'? Is the concept of conscription alien to you? Maybe you need to look it up in a dictionary? So for the umpteenth time. You are totally, utterly, flat-out wrong about all Waffen-SS members being volunteers. And you know it, and still you make this false claim. Why? It may not appear like that to you, but if you want to be the Devil's Advocate, complete misrepresentation of reality does not really help your argument. All the best Andreas

Is that because you oppose the death penalty in all instances, or that you do not feel that being in the SS as a volunteer is wrong enough to merit death? </font>

A) No it does not. It may deserve punishment, but not the death penalty. You have no proof that they were volunteers. As I have pointed out, they can very well have been conscripts, and it is in fact quite likely that some/many/most of them were. You ignoring this point does not make it go away. All the best Andreas

I draw the line at SS troops captured in a death camp. Those are the facts of this situation, and it is pointless to dwell on hypotheticals as there are so many variables at play. That is why it is a waste of time to try to come up with some sort of utilitarian calculus to determine at which point it is OK to stop letting the guilty go free and convict an innocent man. I am not trying to argue that the executions comported with military law, and I am agnostic on whether they had a negative effect on discipline etc. All I am saying is that they were not evil or unjust per se, and were certainly not an "atrocity" or in any way comparable to, for example, the Malmedy massacre. Were any of those executed not actually members of the SS? If so, I will rethink my position. The point is that here we have an extraordinary situation where the potential for error is extremely low -- Allied agents in disguise? disguised escaping prisoners? -- please. As a result, there is little, if any, chance for a genuine miscarriage of justice. </font>

Dachau is not comparable to the liberation of many other camps, because there the guards left before the liberators arrived, probably because they suspected that they would get the BigDuke/BlackJack version of justice. In other cases the camps were dissolved, and the inmates taken on death marches around the countryside, where again the guards (once they had had enough of shooting/clubbing to death those inmates who could not keep up and were not immediately dead when they could no longer go on) departed. Also, with all this righteous indignation here, one should not forget that at least a number of the victims of the shooting at Dachau were not actually the concentration camp guards. Dachau All the best Andreas

You brought up your securities clearance. I just pointed out it is a red herring. It still amazes me that with all these great qualifications, you can not (or at the very least do not bother to) get your facts right when a simple Google search would suffice, as evidenced in this thread. Regards Andreas

I don't actually know much about it, since post-war history is not very interesting to me. My guess is that the prime reason was that Germany had lost the war and was in no position to argue? Obviously I am not in favour of my government signing away such basic rights, but I think it is a simple question of playing with matches and getting burned. All the best Andreas

So all these people studied your ability to correctly read and remember historical texts? Amazing, I never knew that US police departments required that. But they must be crap at checking, looking at the amount of things you already got wrong in this discussion. I am judging you on a very simple basis. You are willing to take lies and distortions at face value, regardless of who utters them, as long as they fit your pre-conceived notions and ideas. All your errors go into the same direction - that of making the allies look worse than they were. I think there is a method, since by now it can no longer be accident. That other people are willing to trust you with money has no bearing on this. Regards Andreas

painfbat Seidler is a now retired professor for modern history at the Bundeswehr university in Munich. I presume 'Freiheit der Lehre' applies to the university as it does to others. Whether the views he proclaims are seen as unpalatable by some like me and the reviewer in the FAZ should not have any bearing on his employment. He can not be fired for them, unless they are clearly breaking a law. I highly doubt Goering was prosecuted for Rotterdam, since he killed himself at Nuernberg, and he was not prosecuted for it there. I linked his judgment, and it says exactly zero about any bombing campaigns. He got done for (like the others) participating in planning and executing an Angriffskrieg. Kesselring was a witness at the trial of the major war criminals, and his testimony can be found here: linky The Avalon Project at Yale has all the texts of teh Hague and Geneva Conventions online. linky. Let me know which para you think outlaws the bombardment of cities that are defended and contain military installations. Happy digging. You may want to consider this part of Kesselring's statement - but take into consideration that it was given after the war, and the whole direction of his statement seems to me to aim at bringing some distance between the GAF and the RAF strategy of bombing: All the best Andreas

I did reply to your post asking about the books. No they were not - here is the judgment regarding Göring linky. Kesselring was never put on trial for Rotterdam as far as I can tell (e.g. here linky) but he was sentenced for being involved in retaliation measures including shooting partisans. And yes, none of these attacks was an infringement of the laws of war as they then existed. All of the targets were of military value (including Dresden), they had not been declared open cities, and they were defended (including Dresden). The GC covering treatment of civilians dates from 1949. It would have been difficult to observe it in 1940. All the best Andreas

It's called selective quoting, and it is a distortion of the true argument of Jones. And anyone who does not have the book has to trust that your post is an accurate reflection of the content of it. Sorry, that does not wash. Well, it does, but only if we accept that you are not above bending the truth in the pursuit of your argument, deliberately leaving out critical information, providing it only when called on, and some posts on try to distort all this by claiming you had said it all in the first place. All this while getting outraged when you perceive others to do the same to you. That's called hypocrisy where I am from. Regards Andreas

Your comment was a deliberate distortion of the truth, and all your backpeddling now is not going to change it. You did not specify a time, just said UK OR showed 5 mile hit area. No qualification in your post. You did not mention any future improvements to UK technique in your post either. What you do in posts following that one has no bearing on the content of the first post, and I can very easily take you to task for it and do so. Especially since you only correct yourself once challenged by Trap One. Until then, you are happy to let deliberate distortion of the historical record stand despite your knowledge that things were not as bad as you paint them. That's called distorting and furious backpeddling where I am from. BTW have you 'gone back' and checked on whether area bombing was a violation of the laws of war? Enlighten us with your findings. Regards Andreas

There are Marines in Iraq? All the best Andreas

And this statement is somehow not 'lying with statistics'? Pot, Kettle, Black. Glasshouse, stones. When the British bombers were putting their bombs 5 miles off target, the USAAF had not even started their campaign of daylight bombing. Regards Andreas

Something on Seidler here Linky Note the problems that exist with the list, i.e. lack of sources and context. If Seidler's work is a proper documentation of the work of the Wehrmacht War Crimes bureau (the unit investigating alleged war crimes committed against the Wehrmacht, as opposed to alleged war crimes committed by it), it maybe worth getting. It is however likely that you have to engage your critical faculty very hard to ensure that you get the most of it: Will Berthold is not a serious historian. He is one of the Vielschreiber. Not worth getting in my view, simply because of the author. I have read some of his other books, and they are a waste of perfectly good pulp. All the best Andreas

Given Tagwyn's sig line, I have to wonder what the possible outcome of that might have been... </font>

Now, the 670,000 missing German soldiers. Last returnees were in 1955/56, total of 22,000 to West and East Germany. So that leaves 650,000 missing. Well, I guess since the paperwork for all those battles in the east is just impeccable, and we know exactly where every last Landser fell, is buried, and have a name for every body that was found, that only leaves the conclusion that they were all shot personally by Dwight, with the assistance of Leclerc, who handed him the ammunition. Or maybe not. A quick look at the Volksbund website (www.volksbund.de - available only in German, further proof of the conspiracy to hide things), there are hundreds of thousands of German soldiers where there is little clarity what happened to them, today. Moldavia - 200,000 to 400,000 German dead expected. Ukraine - can trace 1.88 million to the territory, but could be as high as 2.2m. Russia - not in the database yet. Byelorussia - estimated losses 250,000. Latvia - suspect 100,000. Poland - estimated 400,000. Of course, many of these are not missing, but would have been properly booked into the German loss system. But by no means all of them, and with the ranges seen here, 650,000 easily fit into the uncertainty range. For the battle of Berlin no reliable German casualty estimate exists. At Halbe and Seelow they are still finding bodies today. But hey, let's ignore this, and follow a fantasy trail pointing to Dwight's hate for the Germans, because we all know it just makes more sense to do so. Regards Andreas

For those interested in what really happened at Dachau: As posted by Rob -WSSOB here: Linky Hundreds? Err, no. Wounded from a hospital? Err, no. John also fails to realise that the SS-T division and the KZ Guards belonged to the same organisation, and that SS-T regularly exchanged personnel with the KZ Guards. So you could be a wounded soldier just returning from the East and a professional KZ Guard at the same time. Regards Andreas

An advanced dressing station and some medical transport are emphatically not a field hospital. Wounded lying in slit trenches are not patients in a field hospital. Accusations of enemy soldiers being drunk during a charge are made by: - Germans against Russians - Germans against Kiwis - Russians against Germans To a degree that I rather think it is rubbish and a general attempt to denigrate the enemy. I am not sure what adrenalin rush in these situations looks like and hopefully will never find out, but I would not be surprised if it appeared similar to being drunk. All the best Andreas