Honour in Combat

[Kingfish]

...pick up post #300?

Aw, that is so nice of you Mike. I'm sure he will appreciate it.

[Maj Kong]

Originally posted by John Kettler:

Maj Kong,

How can the statements from primary eyewitnesses on both sides, including the sworn statement to the German Red Cross of one who was in the SS group machine gunned, coupled with contemporary photography, be deemed "questionable sources," praytell? Please see not only the lengthy illustrated main story here, but the related ones following it.

http://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/DachauLiberation/SoldiersKilled.html

Regards,

John Kettler

I did go through the scrapbook website in its entirety as well as another similar one at humanitas.org. In my opinion they purport to be memorials to the holocaust but instead are neo-nazi apologist websites that exalt in the work of the KZ. Andreas ref to the AHF has an extensive rebuttal to their claims. Again, no doubt that some German soldiers were shot...I would say recognize that something illegal happened as often happened on both sides and be done with it.

Why I believe the site's a sham:

- Emphasis most prisoners at Dachau were not Jews but mainly Communists, serious criminals, political criminals.

- Emphasis that gas chambers were never used.

-Emphasis that dead in train cars were caused by Allied strafing and that most dead in camp were from typhus not from execution.

- Emphasis that 45th Div was mainly composed of American Indians (I don't think that's true) singling out Lt Bushyhead as a full blooded Cherokee that accounts for the division's history of savagery from Sicily onward as the red man's delight in killing white men.

- Section on Dachau Malmedy massacre trial that purports all German prisoners were tortured/coerced into admitting guilt.

- The humanitas site is mainly a cut and paste of scrapbook as as example - someone asks the webmaster - I'm a great admirer of Hitler and am fascniated by his speeches, do you have any recordings? Reply: I abhor Hitler and everything he stood for, here's a link to his speeches. ; )

[Maj Kong]

dang

[Maj Kong]

double post

[Andreas]

I noticed similar things, and was also missing:

a) a critical examination of the discrepancy of Buechner's and the other claims

a list or table of all those killed, at least by massacre site at Dachau that allows me to follow how they arrived at the quite exact figure of 520 in the end, which seems to me to come a bit out of the blue

c) an explanation of how we arrive at the quite exact figure of 122 killed by noon?

d) how they know the picture with the shovel was taken before, and not after the beating of the SS man?

e) How the armed prisoner is ID'd as a 'communist'?

f) How between pages the guard to be beaten with a shovel is suddenly to be beaten to death, when on the first page it is explicitly said that it is unknown whether he survived.

I stop here - this is reasonably well-done revisionism, I have seen much cruder than this, but Maj. Kong is completely right, revision it is. Anyone taking that website at face value is willing to believe in lies.

I also noted the direct comparison to the Malmedy massacre, and all I thought was WTF does this have to do with anything?

All the best

Andreas

[Dandelion]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

6. I believe the number of "innocent" persons capable of being present in an official capacity at Dachau, when the Americans broke in, is so perishingly small so as to be insignificant. Yes I can imagine some poor guy coming off medical leave, seeing the concentration camp and hating it with every fiber of his body, placed on guard, and unable to desert before the Americans captured him.

Not adressing the guilt issue in this post, I think the men present in the camps might deserve some introducing.

As for the Waffen SS, more than 60 000 members of the Waffen SS - in the sense of frontline divisions - rotated through camp guard duty during the war. The number of recovering wounded also doing such service is unknown to me. At any rate - at any given time several thousands of them would have been serving.

So, we can assume members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände and Waffen SS were present at any liberated camp fro mwhich they had not had time to flee.

Who were these men?

As for the KZ Wach units, they were by 1945 reduced to contain about 33% Germans, mainly but not only NCOs and officers.

The original (well, from 1935 at least) guard units were recruited as such, thus men who were not only volunteers but actually volunteering for this specific duty. The war had however assured that almost all of them were sent to the frontline units, or to Einsatzkommandos. They were initially replaced by SS Reserve men (SS members aged 35-45), but this did not suffice.

Starting in 1942, involuntary transfers to KZ duty starts. It begins with reserve policemen, but continues with other reserves, including transfers of ordinary army reserve (largest transfer was 10 000 in a stroke in the summer of 1944 - but closely rivalling are the 7500 Luftwaffe reservists transferred the autumn of that year).

Still weak in manpower, the using of convalescing troops for guard duty was systematic, camps could calculate with a constant extra handful of such men. So the group of Germans to be found in 1945 will have been to a majority men who did not apply for the duty, and again as for the Germans, hardly anyone younger than 40.

But in spite of this and in spite of a constant presence of Waffen SS units to reinforce them, the manpower still was not enough. Hence the foreign nationals. Unlike the actual deathcamps, were German guards (privates) were intentionally excluded, the choice of foreign nationals in KZs was not a matter of policy but predicament.

By 1945 two thirds of the men were Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Slovak, Romanian - from all over Eastern Europe. Not all were considered foreigners even though foreign nationals, a great many (almost half the number) were so called Volksdeutsche. Those were normally drafted. The origins of all the other men was heterogenous. There was for example a large contingent of Romanians who were put on guard duty recovering from wounds suffered in the Stalingrad debacle, who were simply kept as guards to VE day. Resettled Volksdeutsche unable to speak German and thus not fit for military service could end up there. Some who were volunteers had not volunteered for guard duty, but for frontline duty in the SS.

But as Andreas said, the SS was one organisation and the postwar distinction of the various arms did not impress the contemporary commanders. If you joined the SS, you could end up anywhere in that organisation.

The also present Waffen SS and the composition of the units has been debated in many threads. Of the 901 000 members reached at peak in 1944, a third were Germans and a third were Volksdeutsche. The rest was not. Suffice it perhaps to say that there was no division in the roster of the Waffen SS that did not contain contingents of drafted men. Most had a majority of such men, like 5th, 9th, 10th, 17th etc. Some were based practically exclusively on drafted men, such as the 7th and 13th. A few saw comparably tiny contingents of draftees, such as the 1st and 12th.

So. There is actually a vey high probability of the guards at Dachau - reasonably grouped around the Standarte 1 - not being volunteers for that particular duty, or indeed is it very likely that very many of them had been there for very long before the enemy arrived.

I'm not saying it matters - well it doesn't, to me, since I'm against the shooting anyway. I'm not saying that makes anyone very much more or less guilty than anyone else.

Just illustrating further that we're not talking blood crazed indians slaughtering monsters. It was a bunch of guys, who shot another bunch of guys.

Cheerio

Dandelion

[John Kettler]

Maj Kong and Andreas,

Excellent points all around! Can either of you confirm or deny the accuracy of the eyewitness quotes, seeing as how they're the gravamen of the discussion? IOW, do you have the referenced materials to hand so that we may ascertain whether the quotes are themselves valid?

The 45th, a National Guard division which BTW formerly had a Native American swastika as its unit patch, later switched to the famous Thunderbird, another deeply Native American symbol, hailed from the American Southwest, per this site

http://www.45thdivision.com/

This site, which is very impressive and positively huge, confirms the Southwest origins. Also, there are extensive photos here, so some analysis, at least, can be made of the ethnic groupings in the unit.

http://www.45thdivision.org/home.htm

Wikipedia confirms the origin and provides graphics showing the unit's earlier shoulder patches.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_45th_Infantry_Division

Regards,

John Kettler

Regards,

John Kettler

[Maj Kong]

trip p

[ February 25, 2006, 06:55 PM: Message edited by: Maj Kong ]

[Maj Kong]

fyi, two of those are reenactor websites...and I would note that we all know by now the dangers of using Wikipedia for anything authoritative as anyone can type up anything they want and have a good chance of it remaining there. I would note that it appears a standard division history is cited and then has a sentence inserted describing the shootings in Sicily and Dachau. Then links are provided to the infamous "scrapbook" page and it's cross referenced with Dachau. hmmmm I'm not sure how you verify the validity of anything you read on the internet...can you? I think I might find it more believeable if it was linked to something in the National Archives, a .mil address, or Bundesarchiv or something like that...but really - can't anyone type - this is the sworn testimony of J. S. Ragman and he saw this?

As for the origins of the 45th, they're well known and it's one of history's ironies that it's prewar symbol was a swastika. Although they're symbol is American Indian and they were a conglomeration of National Guard units from the SW - I don't think any conclusions can be made that the entire division of some 15,000 men was composed of Indians.

IIRC, American Indians have a history of having the highest percentage of their race serving in the armed forces as a whole, but I think if the 45th had been truly a "Indian" division we'd hear about it all the time every Native American heritage month. If it was just about opportunities to kill white men, is that the explanation for the valiant exploits of the 442nd RCT? (which I don't believe anyone has accused of murdering prisoners)

[Maj Kong]

dang it again...

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Maj Kong:

- Section on Dachau Malmedy massacre trial that purports all German prisoners were tortured/coerced into admitting guilt.

This is probably an exaggeration with a germ of truth; wasn't McCarthy of the post war Communist witch hunt trials a US Army attorney at that time - and wasn't there a problem with the interrogations of some of the Malmedy guys?

[John Kettler]

Maj Kong,

The larger of the two 45th division sites is in fact both a reenactor site and a site for former members and unit members proper, as further attested by the affiliation with the Library of Congress Oral History program.

I didn't claim that the 45th was composed chiefly of Native Americans. Rather, I went looking for some data on the unit's origins and region from which the men came, found both, then suggested a resource which could be used to get some sense of the ethnic groups present in the division, in order to check someone else's claim. Nor do I claim that Wikipedia is the be all and end all of references; it not only confirmed, though, what I'd found elsewhere, but provided some information I did not have on the earlier unit patches and when they were in use.

Personally, I see the high participation of Native Americans in the U.S. military during the War as being the product of mutually reinforcing conditions: warrior tradition, patriotism despite centuries of genocide and abuse, the perceived justness of the cause (sanctioned by the tribal elders), proving their worth as men and warriors to themselves, their tribes, and to outsiders, persistent poverty on the reservations, a desire to get off the reservation and see the world, etc. Probably missed a few, but you get the idea.

Regards,

John Kettler

[ February 26, 2006, 02:13 PM: Message edited by: John Kettler ]

[Maj Kong]

Mr Kettler, GTG I just thought this focus on the Indian membership in the division to be a little odd and I kept noticing the point made in the other websites about "maybe it was because they were minorities and they were getting back at white men". So yes, it appears there were many Native Americans in the division, but I don't think hatred of white men had anything to do with how they performed in combat. I would also note - it appears many of the US Army photographs single out American Indians probably for propaganda purposes. I particularly noticed one which had named three soldiers from different tribes which may lead people to think they were a majority, however if you look at the formation standing behind them they're all Anglo. I see that done by Marine PAO all the time...minority people pulled out for photo ops because they make for good human interest stories and kind of reflect this broad "see Americans aren't just white theme." Semper Fi

[Maj Kong]

Mr Dorosh, I think you're probably right that the trials weren't the fairest but what annoys me about that website is he makes special pains to identify which lawyers were Jews etc. After exploring the entire website more fully, he has a very insidious way of being really interested in the Holocaust, but for all the wrong reasons - inserted in every discussion are disparaging comments about Jews and defensive comments about the Germans.

e.g. He visits the Anne Frank house and is pretty exhaustive in his description of the tour - but makes weird comments in the middle like - Anne Frank might not have died if their father had reported to the authorities because they would then have been sent to a "Star" camp instead of Bergen Belsen. WTF?

[John Kettler]

Troops,

This seems a reasonable place to report that the famous early WW I Christmas truce between the British and the Germans has been made into an Oscar-nominated (Best Foreign Film) movie called Joyeux Noel.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Andreas]

Nice movie too.

All the best

Andreas

[Sailor Malan]

I hate to add to this thread, so just let me say this:

Hitler - a man who thought he was morally justified in assessing an entire group or groups of people as fit only for death, regardless of the actions or status of individuals, and acting on it.

Dachau perps - people who think they are morally justified in assessing an entire group or groups of people as fit only for death, regardless of the actions or status of individuals, and acting on it.

The difference is only one of scale. Morally there is NO difference.

[Sergei]

Originally posted by John Kettler:

This seems a reasonable place to report that the famous early WW I Christmas truce between the British and the Germans has been made into an Oscar-nominated (Best Foreign Film) movie called Joyeux Noel.

I heard that it had to be shot in Romania because some old French officers still regard to that as an act of treason and so the French army did not cooperate or sumfink. Although I'd suspect that it was also a cost issue.

[John Kettler]

Here is a highly provocative and disturbing piece on

Eisenhower's policies regarding the procedures for handling German POWs, conveniently predesignated as and reclassified into (where have we heard of that concept?) Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEFs), a category with very few Geneva convention protections. The Eisenhower depicted here differs markedly from the avuncular warm and fuzzy model we're used to, and the accounts from both sides of the externalization of his policies makes for unappetizing reading.

http://www.rense.com/general46/germ.htm

Found it while looking for something else.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Andreas]

John

Did you read anything that was written about this nonsense in the previous posts?

Really, I can not even be bothered to deal with this kind of rubbish anymore. So Eisenhower was a Jew, bad at West-Point, did not eat his wheaties as a boy, and killed 1.7m German POWs. All without a single source, with claims that are obviously total nonsense, such as Ambrose supporting this, and all driven by some demented agenda.

And you fall for it. Again, and again, and again.

Originally posted by John D Salt:

Now, here are two techniques that I have observed are favourites with holocaust deniers on the web (and indeed elsewhere).

The first I shall call "argument by exhaustion". The unfortunate fact is that fools can make more assertions than wise men can check and correct. This is a fact that Nazi apologists rely on; eventually, people simply become too fatigued to refute their nonsense, and it becomes accepted by the mentally lazy as if it were the truth. A classic example is Herr Doktor Goebbels' assertion that it was the British who first invented the concentration camp in the Boer War; not true, but so widely repeated by now that it may as well be. Another example is George Hardy, a Jew-hater and holocaust-denier who used to (and for all I know still does) inhabit the soc.history.world-war-ii group. He would frequently produce some piece of abject tommyrot, such as, for example, the allegation that Winston Churchill deliberately starved half the population of the Netherlands in 1944. When challenged to produce his sources, he would bluster, whinge, dodge, and, eventually, once his hide had been nailed firmly to the wall, fall silent. A few weeks or months later, he would come out with precisely the same line, as if the refutation had never happened.

The second technique I shall call "the respectability fork". This seeks to draw real historians into debate on the absurd claims of the holocaust deniers. The real historian is caught in something of a cleft stick. Taking the time to refute their arguments item by item implicitly confers respectability on them (IIRC there is a discussion of this in "Telling lies about Hitler"), and, what's more, they then ignore the refutation and proceed to "argument by exhaustion". Refusing to enter into debate with them denies them the intellectual respectability they crave (and cannot obtain by other means), but leaves it open to them to claim that "our opponents cannot answer these points".

You may not be deliberately using "argument by exhaustion", but with the steady stream of slapdash and incorrect claims you have made, it would be hard to tell the difference between your postings and those from someone who was. You have specifically demanded that your interlocutors engage with the purported facts you have taken from pro-Nazi sources. You may not be deliberately using "the repectability fork", but it would be hard to tell the difference between your postings and those from someone who was.

Many of the accusations you have made I have seen made repeatedly by Nazi sympathisers, and many of the sources you quote with apparent approval are specifically Nazi sources.

I, of course, being full of the milk of human kindness, am always willing to apply O'Hanlon's razor in cases such as these. But you really cannot be surprised if people refuse to engage in debate with you when you demonstrate such a staggering lack of basic critical thinking in relation to material from a holocaust-denial site.

Having given you a pretty full explanation of why I think you are committing some pretty elementary errors, I do not propose to continue this debate any further. I agree entirely with Andreas, and if you cannot engage your critical faculties sufficiently to question the stuff promulgated by the VHO, I really have nothing further to say to you.

There are doubtless adequately-documented cases of war crimes by Allied forces, and there may indeed be considerable interest in discussing them, but I doubt that anything useful will ever come of golloping up the vapourings of Bartling, Lindbergh, David Duke, and senators Langer and McCarthy with wide-eyed credulity.

All the best,

John.

[John Kettler]

Andreas,

I don't claim to have analyzed it, merely to have read it and found it provocative. I clearly indicated that the information was controversial

and contrary to the standard model. I do feel, though, that it is germane to this thread and that it provides some interesting angles on a very hot topic. Do I wish it had been properly sourced?

Absolutely! Also, this was a target of opportunity which popped up when I was trying vainly to find the report to Eisenhower on comparative German and U.S. weapon performance.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Andreas]

It is just plain wrong, and lieing to boot. Why it is so has been outlined in this very thread, and in other threads e.g. on the AHF linked to here.

It is a piece of rubbish full of lies written by someone with an agenda that is certainly anti-Eisenhower, and probably anti-semitic as well, who can not make his points using facts so instead resorts to lies and distortion. That's the only thing I find disturbing about it.

All the best

Andreas

[John Kettler]

Andreas,

There's no source listed for the primary article, but there are several U.S. soldiers listed by name and, I believe, unit in it. That should theoretically make them checkable. Whether it's actually workable is another matter entirely.

I agree that the follow-up posts are decidedly non PC in both tone and orientation. The information provided in them about Eisenhower was wholly new to me, and I really don't know what to make of it, seeing as how I'm not even remotely up to speed on even the accepted Ike, own no biographies of him or autobiographies by him. Elsewhere I posted a link to www.paperlessarchives.com This has a wealth of Eisenhower material on a single CD for $10 U.S., a CD which may have something useful for this discussion. Personally, though, for that same outlay I'd rather have a slew of declassified WW2 FMs, TMs, or Operational Reports from the same source.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Krautman]

I think this Eisenhower article is just as credible as its language style is scientific. The German POWs indeed did have a hard time in some allied camps, especially in those in the Rheinland were the Ruhr pocket POWs were sent to.

But the numbers of those who died which the article on Eisenhower gives are grossly exaggerated. It might be hard to determine, because due to the mass surrender there was no complete registration, but they tried to find out the numbers afterwards. Official German historiography (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung) gives a maximum of 20.000 who died in those camps. Obviously the allies had not anticipated such huge numbers of prisoners. They also had to provide food, clothing and shelter for the civilian populace and the millions of refugees. Pictures e.g. of the Ruhr area in 1945 show that literally everything was destroyed; it is hard to imagine anyone could survive a winter in this desert of rubble. Transportation and medical care was very hard to setup again. The Allies had to reestablish administration and to provide even the most basic means of survival for a whole nation; no wonder they could not establish prison camps with shelters and good food on the spot like those e.g. in the USA and Britain.

Like John Kettler I think the fact that the Allies were also responsible for war crimes should not be denied, and I disagree with Andreas' opinion that the deliberate bombing of civilians, aiming to kill as many as possible, is not a war crime (Robert McNamara's retrospective in "The Fog of War" comes to mind). Depends on what you consider a crime, maybe the end justifies the means.

But as many posters pointed out, allied war crimes are often used by the extreme political right to stir up anti-American emotions, e.g. the Dresden memorial day. This article is a nice example.

[ March 12, 2006, 11:43 AM: Message edited by: Krautman ]

[Andreas]

Krautman

I was not making a moral judgement, strictly a judicial one. If you want to disagree with me on that, you are free to provide the judicial documentation showing that mass bombing was a warcrime in 1939-45, at your leisure. It should not be difficult, Yale University has the texts of all the relevant agreements online. Please note that MacNamara's views on the Vietnam war are highly irrelevant to the judicial question, since the legal situation had changed by then. They can only be relevant when we look at it from a moral perspective (see below).

As for the moral side, I have my own views, and they are more differentiated, and not completely firmed up, so I won't get into them here.

John

Somebody who manages to write stuff like this: "Eisenhower, in his personal letters, did not merely hate the Nazi Regime, and the few who imposed its will down from the top, but that HE HATED THE GERMAN PEOPLE AS A RACE. It was his personal intent to destroy as many of them as he could, and one way was to wipe out as many prisoners of war as possible." is certainly capable of inventing fictitious vets. I see no reason to trust anything written on that webpage.

All the best

Andreas