Hitler's Health & How it Shaped World War Two

[JerseyJohn]

Piumarcobaleno

Yes, every side in every war always feels they're fighting for the right cause. Nobody would lay down his life thinking he was fighting for nothing.

I think you take WW II propaganda a bit too seriously. On the other hand, while Mussolini was not representing a murderous racist regime, try to imagine what world domination under the Nazis would have been like. It would have been hell even for the victorious population! Personally I don't think world domination was an immediate issue, but in the long term, after a nazi regime had been given time to consolodate it's gains -- decades, with Hitler dead but succeeded by new sociopaths like himself -- it might have been a reality.

In terms of the threads, in English the postings by yourself and Olivia did come off on the offensive side. As I said earlier, I don't believe you intended it that way, probably a second language problem, but please don't be offended if others read it with meanings neither of you intended to convey. These things happen. I'm often misunderstood myself while attempting to communicate in my primary language.

[jon_j_rambo]

Yes, every side in every war always feels they're fighting for the right cause. Nobody would lay down his life thinking he was fighting for nothing.

SirJersey This comment isn't always true from an individual's standpoint. I'm sure many Americans (drafted ones) sure didn't want to hit Omaha Beach or serve in Vietnam. But serving was better than a 5-year prison sentence.

[ September 20, 2003, 04:04 AM: Message edited by: jon_j_rambo ]

[kurt88]

Agree with Rambo here.

Even in WWII there were more than enough German youngsters in Russia who weren't too big a fans of Hitler.Ofcourse they weren't too found of the Russians either for obvious reasons sitting there amidst exploding shells.

Most enthousiasm for a war quickly vanishes once you're in the frontline I think.The hard part is to give some meaning too it all once you're waking up in the trenches.

[JerseyJohn]

General Rambo & Kurt

True, probably no war was every fought where the ranks were filled with fanatic true believers. Though that might have been the case in specific units, of course.

I'm not on absolute solid ground here, in my own mind, because I wasn't an actual combat soldier, my job was on a very active flight line, but on where we always functioned as though it were World War Three! That's the truth, S. A. C., even during Vietnam, had it's eye on the Soviets, not the Vietkong. There was only one enemy in our mind and he could strike any time he wanted while we always needed to be ready to retaliate even harder than the first strike that would be on the way. So, we always had bombers in the air and ready on the ground capable of destroying life on earth. I don't mean SAC in this sense, I mean Loring AFB & the 42nd Bomber Wing could destroy life on earth!

But getting back to our original point there was still the same common understanding all soldiers or sailors anywhere in any time work under. Your immediate actions are for the men you're serving with, not the service, not the country and not the cause; all of that is too abstract in terms of giving your life. You give your life for Bill and Joe and Harry, not for Aunt Sally or Mom or the Constitution. When you're in a militarty unit those other people better be pretty damn distant, otherwise you and the people counting on you are probably doomed.

On an individual basis, regarding Vietnam, I doubt many of the guys I served with believed in what we were doing. Many of us had, at first, but by 1970 the whole premise was becoming less credible by the day. Most damning was things even guys with one or two stripes were hearing from people who had been there and back. When decorated veterans by the thousand start saying a war isn't right then morale plumets, and that's what happened with us.

Fortunately, that was only a sideshow with us as Ivan was the guy squaring off against our H-bombs, not Ho Chi Minh.

I can't speak for the guys who were being shot at every day, but I'm fairly certain most of them will say that when it really got started, they were fighting for the guys next to them and not a cause.

Feeling your cause is the right one is mainly important during the early stages; going into boot camp, at the very least, every trooper should be a howling patriot.

There's an old novel and very good war movie, A Walk in the Sun which follows an infantry squad in Sept 1943 as moves off the Salerno beaches inland to take a farmhouse. Everything's been worked out ahead of time down to the last detail and all they need to do is walk inland and get the job done. Excpet the Leutenant stickes his head up on the way in and gets it blown off before reaching land. From there, the top sergeant develops battle fatigue half way to the objective etc. & etc..

What I like about this movie is this squad just moves along as a sort of living organism. Nobody is mouthing platitudes, it's all routine talk concerned with remaining alive and taking the farmhouse and still being there when the next batch of replacements arrive. One soldier walks along in silence, mostly, except for when they talk about reaching Rome or Paris and he ventures his opinion about they'll never see those places, instead they'll be fighting in the Battle of Tibet, which he says will be faught in 1953 -- a decade after the time they're in!

I think WW II was like that for most of the combat troops; one endless battle with final victory being the ability to inhale and exhale when it was all over.

All the Veterans I've ever spoken to from the War in Europe agreed on a single point. That by 1945 the only troops still fighting for a cause were twelve and thirteen year olds in the Hitler Youth. One of my uncle's, a three year NCO combat veteran, nearly went insane after killing a group of them a week or so before Doenitz surrendered.

[ September 20, 2003, 05:10 AM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]

[Piumarcobaleno]

If someone can get offended because i say that throwing an A-bomb on top of hapless cities is not the best thing on earth, i can understand, i am often patriotic too, and i would get upset if Italy's deeds would have been put on the same level of Hitler's Reich.

But this is different from calling me fascist just because i say that every murder, even if done with the aim of ending a difficult and costly war, has something wrong in it, i amo NOT a nazi-fascist, i am NOT anti-semite, and i really can't stand being called that way because of my previous posts, which i believe could be found a little offensive to USA patriotic citizens.

And by the way, the fascist doctrine is for sure not against citizens kills, so that's a a wrong call anyway.

[JerseyJohn]

Piumarcobaleno

I don't think anyone called you a fascist, if you think it was me than you've got my apologies.

What was said was that some people found one of your statements to be offensive. So what? I've written hundreds of offensive posts, it's usually unintentional. Those who have read your numerous other postings know that, whatever you wrote, it doesn't reflect your true feelings.

The part about the A-bomb is a muddle. As you said, dead is dead, it doesn't matter much if a person is killed by a rock or an A-bomb, except possibly for the quickness of the method. It's unfortunate you compared it with the Holocaust. I've found that subject usually offends someone somewhere in some unanticipated way, so that topic is best left out of things.

We tend to lump fascism and nazism into the same category, which is wrong.

Mussolin's brand of fascism was the least offensive of all the dictators systems and he had many admirers in other countries. Up till the war itself Churchill regarded him fondly. Toward the end of the war, after Italy had been knocked out but while fighting was still in progress, Churchill, voted out of office, hurried to the area Mussolini had last been travelling in, supposedly to paint and relax, but the real reason was probably to find any old letters he might have written to IL Duce before the war.

Anyway, I don't think you're a fascist.

[ September 20, 2003, 08:05 AM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]

[Piumarcobaleno]

I was speaking of CC Baxter.

[xwormwood]

Originally posted by Piumarcobaleno:

But this is different from calling me fascist just because i say that every murder, even if done with the aim of ending a difficult and costly war, has something wrong in it,

What i still miss from people with your point of view is the alternative for killing people to avoid a costly war and further brutalities.

If something can be learned from WW2, isn't it the lecture that you better act soon (even if innocent casualties can't be avoided) instead of looking aside or apease?

Until spring 1940 every major offensive from france, england or maybe even italy would have had the result of Hitler's death. Maybe there would have some thousand innocent casualties, but their sacrifice would have left 50 millions alive.

---

The bombing of dresden was a war crime, thousands of refugees and pows died as well a few DAYS before the whole rotten 3rd Reich went down for ever.

The USSR's war against Poland and Finland in 1939 were war crimes as well.

The A-Bombs were in my opinion no war crimes, because as far as i know the japanese leaders were willing to fight until the bloody end, so the unlucky inhabitants of Nagasaki / Hiroshima would have died maybe in an allied stalingrad-like siege anyway. The japanese honor codex would have brought the world a lot more dead people than these deadly bombs which ended the war.

But i don't care about allied war crimes (this should the former allied countries do for their own sake), i feel sick enough when i see the crimes of my ancestors.

I agree with my father (born 1938) when he stated that he couldnT understand (after he learned about what germans had done in 1933 -1945) that the allied and the russians didn't kill every german because of all this guilt.

A lot of more germans should have been punished after the war, and the germans shouldn't have been allowed to judge their own people (many of the german judges were former nazi judges, so nearly everyone who wasn't executed after the war was free again in 1955) in these trials after nuremberg.

I recently have seen a TV-docu about the german war crimes in greece (Gebirgsjaeger), where italian pows where shot after italy changed once more in history the sides in a on-going war. The movie "Corellis mandoline" (not sure if i spelled it correctly) with N. Cage covers some part of the massacre.

The allied powers struggling in the cold war offered the comanding and responsible german general a position in the Bundeswehr AND accepted HIS demand for a (sorry for my bad english) statement, that the Wehrmacht fought a clean and honorable war. This statement was used to end war trials in germany and to set german war criminals free in the mid-50s.

---

Did someone know a webside where i can find the english translation of Berlusconis last statement (something like "Mussolini wasn't that bad after all")?

[JerseyJohn]

xwormwood

You hit upon a lot of great topics here -- BTW, sorry I can't help you with that website.

Guilt is a difficult thing to judge when it's on such a massive scale. For one thing, The Russians, Americans and English all wanted certain Germans for their own uses, so there were a lot of whitewashings even as the war was coming to a close.

The Soviets originally wanted to execute everyone with an SS tatoo, which would have ran to many tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands as during 1945 the SS was simply drafting able bodied men who looked sort of Aryan and throwing them into their divisions. Of course they still had the cadre of blond blue eyed fanatics, but Himmler was also competing with Goering to see who'd have the largest private army in case the Allies gave Germany a negotiated peace. All the upper lever nazis knew by then that Hitler would die fairly soon from poor health and were anticipating a shootout at the top.

The United States covered up scores of Japanese War crimes for postwar reasons and did the same in Germany when the Cold War began and Washington suddenly realized that Harry Truman had dismantled the U. S. Inteligence Services after the war, making German Eastern Front veterans a valuable commodity. As it turned out many of them secretly sold out to their supposed Blood Enemies.

[Kuniworth]

This topic is related to SC how?

I am the one and only,

Oh yeah!

Call me, call me by my name or call me by my number,

You put me through it,

I'll still be doing it the way I do it,

And yet, you try to make me forget,

Who I really am, don't tell me, I know best,

I'm not the same as all the rest,

I am the one and only,

Nobody I'd rather be,

I am the one and only,

You can't take that away from me

I've been a player in the crowd scene,

A flicker on the big screen,

My soul embraces, one more in a million faces,

High hopes and aspirations, ideas above my station

maybe but all this time I've tried to walk with dignity and pride

I can't wear this uniform without some compromises,

Because you'll find out that we come,

In different shapes and sizes,

No one can be myself like I can,

For this job I'm the best man,

And while this may be true, you are the one and only you!

[Piumarcobaleno]

Xwormwood,

what's wrong with my statement? When i say that every murder is still a murder, i'm speaking on a ethical\philosophical level, not counting how many deaths have there been, or how many could have been (or simply have been) avoided with an action instead of another.

In my opinion it would have been far better if war never broke out, but since that happened, what's wrong in being sad because of men's murdering nature?

It's a thing that makes me sad, this animal side of human mind, "i'll kill you if i fear you'll kill me" and so on. Is it that strange to put things on the philosophical\ideological level, that everyone misjudges my posts?

And just a question: you refer to Italy as to a nation that has changed many times the side during a war; when this happened, outside WW2? Italy as a nation was founded in 1850 ca., and since that year she hasn't fought many wars, and by now i can't remember any of them during which she changed side willingly.

And during WW2, well, sure, she changed side, but has she many choices? German troops weren't there to defend Italian soil, but to guard their own interests (Italian-German alliance had never been on a equal level since the outbreak of the war), so Italy was already invaded by German troops, when an allied army was ready to attack Italy, too, were there many choices different from a surrender? I take italian switch-side as a treaty request from allied powers, more than a self-wanted treacherous act. No nation in modern warfare has ever fought to final defeat, sometimes you HAVE to surrender.

[xwormwood]

Piumarcobaleno

I didn't wanted to say that "killing is bad" isn't true, but in a fallen world it is sometimes nescessary to take the sword, even the bible tells from wars ordered by god in the old testament.

The point is: what can be done to stop a Hitler-like person if he has some power to hurt/kill his neighbors? Talk? Proven the wrong answer. Killing is BAD BAD BAD, but what else is left when someone tries to kill and is ignoring this message? This is why we need a police and an army.

And better both act BEFORE something REAL bad has happened.

I agree with you that our human nature is wicked, and yes, it is a shame. But this only brings me to think one step further, demanding an active police and army to protect me from the worst human beings.

Italy left in WW1 their alliance with Germany-linked nations as well (because the entente powers promised more teritorial gains than imperial Germany / Austria-Hungary).

Leaving the 3rd Reich in WW2 was the best decision italy could made, fighting against the 3rd Reich looked a bit like "we have no weapons and are guilty but we want to sit at the victors table to get some loot as well", even though it was of course honorable (same for France: i still don't understand why the french got their own part of Berlin and West-Germany after the war).

---

JerseyJohn

"the SS was simply drafting able bodied men who looked sort of Aryan and throwing them into their divisions".

My grandfather became member (drafted) of the Waffen-SS this way in 1944 (not sure about the correct date). Before this he served in a 8,8 Flak unit.

As far as i know these real blond-blue-eyed-nazi-fanatic SS divisions of 1939 were nearly completly wasted in their first battles, because these men attacked against ALL odds fanaticly for their beloved Fuehrer ("leader, instruct, we follow you").

[ September 20, 2003, 09:21 PM: Message edited by: xwormwood ]

[JerseyJohn]

xwormwood

Thanks for verifying the later SS drafting practices, a lot of Americans don't believe me when it's mentioned in conversations. I think you're right about the origianl racial and party fanatics being, for the most part, killed off early in the war. They had an incredibly high casualty rate up to the Battle of Kursk. By late 1943 the SS at first lowered and gradually dropped all pretense of being perfect Nordics; by the Nazi definition.

There were still a handful of units maintaining the original code, but by 1944 it was really the German Army with a different uniform and structure.

As the concentration camps were overrun and most of the camp SS vanished into the countryside their place was often filled by Waffen SS units who, mistaken for the sadistic killers who had fled, were sometimes killed after surrendering.

[ September 21, 2003, 12:42 AM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]

[JerseyJohn]

"This topic is related to SC how?"

-- Kuniworth

Possibly because SC is a strategic level game about the Second World War in Europe and according to some historians Adolf Hitler was somehow involved in those events. Ergo, ipso facto, e puribus unum, the state of his mental and physical health seems relavent to us.

Regarding your poem, we are all greatly relieved and overjoyed to find that you are the best at being Kuniworth, and even more relieved that you are the one and only allowed to compete for the honor.

[ September 21, 2003, 02:17 AM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]

[xwormwood]

One and only = Chesney Hawkes Top 20 Hit in 1991 (one-hit-wonder)

Kuniworth likes obviously male Euro-Pop-singers ...

Mmmh, wasn't there a rumor about Kuniworth being, what was this specific word, happy? No. Funny? No.

Ga - ga - ga

y can't remember, sorry

[Piumarcobaleno]

Well, i 1st world war italy had a defensive pact with the central powers, and considering that they started the war, she has not left an alliance, she simply wasn't forced by the pact to help nor germany nor austria in case of a war declared by them; Italy did not get any loot at all with peace treaties after WW2, instead she lost what she gained in WW1 (Istria\Fiume).

I believe UK\USA HQs were more happy to fight a war of liberation in italy, for propaganda's sake, so i believe italian switch-side was a bit obliged..

[CC Baxter]

Piumarcobaleno

I didn't call you a fascist. I didn't call you an anti-semite. Those comments were aimed at Oliva.

I lumped you two together but I suppose your argument was not racist nor fascistic. It was just disturbing in that it seemed to equate Hitler and Nazi Germany as being no different from any other (democratic or not) regime.

[xwormwood]

Wasn't Triest & Süd (South) Tirol (sorry, i don't know the correct italian name for this region) part of italys gains after WW1?

[ September 21, 2003, 11:41 AM: Message edited by: xwormwood ]

[Piumarcobaleno]

Sure, Italy kept Sud Tirolo (the italian name for the region) and Trieste after WW2, and these were gains from WW1, but lost Istria and Fiume to Yugoslavia (these WW1 gains, too), and obviously the african colonies (1908 and 1936 gains); Istria was filled with italian dwellers, that were pretty much slaughered by the Yugoslavian regime (and thrown, sometimes alive, in 'foibe', aka the particular cracks in the earth tipical of that region).

On his part, Italy had to cope with Sud Tirol's originary people, that had no desire to live under the italian banner, and brought up a war of terrorism for several decades. In the end, the only nation that got a real land expansion as WW2 peace treaties had been URRS (which, by the way, i almost find as a result from many of my SC games, where half europe is painted in red).

At least Italy wasn't divided between the two parts of the allied faction, as germany ended up to, also mainly because it wasn't worth the effort

CC Baxter

Ok, tnx for the explanation, no grudge!

[ September 21, 2003, 08:59 PM: Message edited by: Piumarcobaleno ]