Prokhorovka anniversary!!!

[von Churov]

Originally posted by Sergei:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by von Churov:

He had guts. And he found something more valuable than his own life to fight for.

According to another version, he was simply misguided. I.e. stupid. </font>

[von Churov]

But you're right!

Infantrymen are generaly stupid...or shall we say low life.

All the smart ones go to signal troops, radio recon, radars, air force, calculation units of artilery, etc.

Scum good for nothing else but for eating dust goes to infantry.

I don't know about tank crews.

The commander is supposed to be smart, radio operator and gunner to some extent...but the driver and reloader may be at the IQ level of an average plant.

[Bigduke6]

Von Churov,

I stand corrected. If you are saluting the bravery of the S.S. troopers without considering them heroes, I don't have any issues with that. They certainly were brave although, as Sergei points out, bravery may be less praiseworthy if a nasty doctrine is behind it. Like I said, good for you for starting the thread.

That said, I think you are off base for comparing U.S. activities in Iraq to S.S. activities anywhere. I am no fan of the U.S. presence in Iraq, but what they are doing there is night and day different from what the S.S. did pretty much wherever they went.

Andreas,

Stop undermining my arguements with facts! What are you trying to do, make me feel like an Untermensch? :mad: :mad: :mad: :confused:

[von Churov]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

Von Churov,

I stand corrected. If you are saluting the bravery of the S.S. troopers without considering them heroes, I don't have any issues with that. They certainly were brave although, as Sergei points out, bravery may be less praiseworthy if a nasty doctrine is behind it. Like I said, good for you for starting the thread.

That said, I think you are off base for comparing U.S. activities in Iraq to S.S. activities anywhere. I am no fan of the U.S. presence in Iraq, but what they are doing there is night and day different from what the S.S. did pretty much wherever they went.

Andreas,

Stop undermining my arguements with facts! What are you trying to do, make me feel like an Untermensch? :mad: :mad: :mad: :confused:

I'm not comparing US in Iraq with SS deeds...I just pointed that there might be more than one side of a story depending on the point of view, and that things are not always black and white.

And that some people are overreacting, trying to do some witchunt around .

So, I just gave them something to think and to do witchunt about. To keep them busy.

No one should generalize the judgament!

I was just trying to be impartial and mentioned both sides equally.

The battle is not fought by itself, but by the soldiers who participated, and you cannot speak about the battle without mentioning them.

And what should I say: "To all the russians that died. **** the Germans!"

No.

That's where liberal in me comes up.

I just want to be impartial. They all fought for dictatorships. Two different ones. But so similar.

And the things that they fought for wrong cause should not neglect the fact that they died, and that we should remember their death.

There were all humans. And they were dying...

My compassion...regardless to ideology.

A corpse is not a corpse of a Nazi or a corpse of a Commie.

It's a something that used to be human, and it's a tragedy.

They were all fooled but...still, no matter how fooled you are it takes a lot of guts to rush down the battlefield into almost certain death.

I don't think that I could do so. No matter how indoctrinated I could be.

And that's what I admire.

After all, all I said is that the soldiers who fougt there were brave (and that's what nobody can deny) for having guts to die for something that they bellieved in, and for that I saluted them.

Another topic please! :cool:

[annihilate_this_week]

"Well, if every man who was in SS were potential thug, than it makes Germany nastiest nations of all, since they have the highest percentage of thugs within the population.

And that's just not true."

Don't underestimate what brainwashing can do to people. A lot of the German soldiers would not have been thugs and sadists in peace time without the Thrid reich. War turns people into demons.

Take the "Rape of Nanjing" for example, most Japanese veterans of this incident agree that they were brainwashed and were infected with bloodlust by propaganda and war itself, and these were just regualr infatrymen that did all of the raping and torturing there.

The same happened in Ukraine, and in Russia, good people are turned by war into monsters, I always thought it was a common fact.

[LongLeftFlank]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Sorry, I have no respect for those who fought and died for what they believed in. Those who believed in any of it are beneath compassion. Those on the other hand who died fighting to keep their friends alive etc, without believing a word of any of it, have all my sympathy.

I'm not actually sure that the second motive is any nobler than the first. Ideals and faith can inspire us to great as well as terrible acts. On the other hand, the dark side of not letting your buddies down is "we were just following orders".

To quote SLA Marshall and many others, the only motive strong enough to keep a soldier in the line risking his life under fire is comradeship. So when your commander tells your unit to go shoot those Jews, or Bosniaks, or kulaks or infidels or (insert category of human being to be exterminated here), just how easy is it to say no?

And it isn't even a matter of "if I don't, I'll be next to them in the ditch". Consider this from Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners": a polizei company from Hamburg -- not SS, not even MPs, just ordinary middle-aged cops -- was deployed in 1943 to Poland to murder Jewish peasant families by shooting them in the woods (very nasty work, up close, blood-spattered and personal). The commander, an avuncular type, felt awful about the job (not that he wouldn't do it of course), and even told his men that anyone who didn't "feel up to it" could be exempt. Only one man took him up on it. And this man confessed later that he felt very guilty about refusing to help out his buddies in the difficult job.

Weird, eh? But strangely familiar....

Yeah, the SS cadre drew in a lot of the narcissistic ideologues who got Nazism started in the first place. They're easy to identify as culprits, easy to blame, easy to hate. Their thought process:

1. "I have enough education to be insecure and resentful about what life has given me, so I joined this really great group, and to prove that I/we are the master race (or the beloved of Allah or whatever), we will slaughter our designated enemies like the cattle they are..."

But I doubt this was the mental picture of your typical SS man, even Freiwillige. I've run across enough ideological types in government and business to know that they're mostly lousy at functioning in RL. The SS was, whatever else it was, a highly effective fighting force.

I suspect that its bulge bracket -- increasing as the war went on -- tended to be big working class jocks who liked extra pay and the chance to belong to a top drawer outfit. Shooting untermenschen wasn't mentioned in the job description, and really wasn't a motivator. Kurt Hausser. That kind. Not an extremist.

However, does that create a better outcome when he gets put on Sonderkommando duty? Nope.

2. The aggressive type: "Some boys in the Rollbahn got their throats cut by partisans last week in this sector. This'll teach them to think twice about messing with us."

3. The pragmatist: "Stupid bastards, why didn't they run away when we came up the road? Well, if they're that dumb, that's their problem, not mine. Sorry, nothing personal."

4. The weary veteran: "I'm tired and fed up and cold: let's just get it over with and go back to camp".

OK, we all know the believers got the ball rolling. Hang 'em high. But a lot more Jews, commissars, et al, got killed by more or less mentally normal guys in categories 2 - 4.

So who deserves our respect or contempt 60 years later? And faced with the same situation, would we all be that one guy out of 150 in the Polizei unit?

[Michael Dorosh]

Bear in mind Goldhagen's work is heavily criticized and there is a "better" work out there on the same Police Battalion, using the same sources...

[Bigduke6]

LongLeftFlank,

Great post, thanks.

[Sirocco]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

LongLeftFlank,

Great post, thanks.

I would second that. A great post that nails the simplified good and evil notion.

[LongLeftFlank]

Yeah, I didn't buy Goldhagen's core thesis either. He seems to resort to nasty stereotypes about Germans ("eliminationist" tendencies, etc.) that have some disturbing echoes of Nazi pseudo-anthropology.

Upon rereading my earlier post, I realize I'm also being simplistic in characterizing the SS as some kind of Third Reich affirmative action program taking in ex-butchers' apprentices with street smarts to do Einsatzgruppe duty one day and fight Third Kharkov the next with minimal thought or reflection.

There were a whole bunch of clean cut university boys in there from the comfortable classes who could recite Goethe, play Brahms and calculate gunnery tables in their heads. Kurt Waldheims. People who should have known better.

What was going through their heads, I wonder, when they were told to burn families alive in their houses to save bullets? Did they have nightmares? Look forward to their own deaths in battle as a just atonement?

I don't personally believe in "brainwashing" as alluded to by an earlier poster vis a vis Nanking. It's just another form of moral evasion. I believe we stay human 100% of the time, no matter what we're doing.

It seems that our natural human need to belong gives us all -- no nationality, class or other human grouping is exempt -- all the tools we need to be induced into awful acts. Heidelberg education or not.

[von Churov]

Originally posted by LongLeftFlank:

It seems that our natural human need to belong gives us all -- no nationality, class or other human grouping is exempt -- all the tools we need to be induced into awful acts. Heidelberg education or not.

I pretty much agree with this.

I've passed through the ex-Yugoslavia civil war fall appart and have seen how ordinary man turns to a killer and vice versa. So, I realised that there is no difference in between them...they are the same,("...the Ring and the Dark Lord...") Two faces of the same coin.

Of course we shouldn't whitewash...but we shouldnt moralize too much eather.

It could have happened to us. We're not better than average SS trooper. We were just lucky to be born in better time and place.

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by LongLeftFlank:

Yeah, I didn't buy Goldhagen's core thesis either. He seems to resort to nasty stereotypes about Germans ("eliminationist" tendencies, etc.) that have some disturbing echoes of Nazi pseudo-anthropology.

Upon rereading my earlier post, I realize I'm also being simplistic in characterizing the SS as some kind of Third Reich affirmative action program taking in ex-butchers' apprentices with street smarts to do Einsatzgruppe duty one day and fight Third Kharkov the next with minimal thought or reflection.

There were a whole bunch of clean cut university boys in there from the comfortable classes who could recite Goethe, play Brahms and calculate gunnery tables in their heads. Kurt Waldheims. People who should have known better.

What was going through their heads, I wonder, when they were told to burn families alive in their houses to save bullets? Did they have nightmares? Look forward to their own deaths in battle as a just atonement?

I don't personally believe in "brainwashing" as alluded to by an earlier poster vis a vis Nanking. It's just another form of moral evasion. I believe we stay human 100% of the time, no matter what we're doing.

It seems that our natural human need to belong gives us all -- no nationality, class or other human grouping is exempt -- all the tools we need to be induced into awful acts. Heidelberg education or not.

I think it was very easy for the Waldheims to rationalize what they were doing. And Germany DID have some unique cultural tendencies. Look at the rates of suicide in 1945. Or earlier. Suicide was a cultural institution almost as rampant as among the Japanese. They shot their own officers for losing battles. What if the British had done that on 1 July 1916? They were very different from "us" in so many ways it is impossible to catalogue. (How many British, American or Russian generals committed suicide during the war? Would be an interesting study.)

I did this article a couple years ago with relation to Omer Bartov's work - Bartov argues about the "barbarization" of the German soldier - not convincingly, to me, but lots of grains of truth. The Germans did have a morbid death culture - so if it is ok to kill yourself, or kill your own people for desertion or just losing a battle (best example I can think of is Remagen), how hard would it be to condition people to the idea that killing a racial group you've identified as sub-human was ok?

http://members.shaw.ca/grossdeutschland/crime.htm

[painfbat]

What surprises me again and again is that somebody says something pritty innocent(or doesn't know his English to well, like I do)and starts a discussion or gets involved in a discussion and then some big mouth comes along, starts screaming about Nazi propaganda, SS heroes or whatever.

And that always reminds me of an old German picture of a man with a sign:

"Ersten gebot, Maul halten."

[Gpig]

And that means . . . ?

"Keep your mouth shut?"

[K.A. Miles]

I tried translating the phrase using one of those free translation services, and here is the result:

"First commanded, hold mouth."

Hmmmm.... Maybe not.