Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Wehrmacht War Crimes - An Overview" video.
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The main problem was not what Germany did at the frontline, but rather what it did behind it. Killing civilians at the frontline sometimes happens, but rounding up millions of people and have them standing next to a ditch and have them shot is another doctrine.
At the frontline did the German army behave well. But behind the front did Germany create crimes of epic proportions. Most of the blame goes to the SS, SD, and Gestapo of course. They deserve 97% of all the blame for what happened. And without them would the German army, the reichbahn, and the German chemical industry never had became helpers of genocide either.
The genocide was unique in that sense that it s co-ordinated effort of all departments of the state-machinery of a modern government. The industry provided expertise in cremation ovens, poison gas, gas tight rooms, computers for data storage, and gas vans. The reichbahn provided railway transports. The intelligence agency tracked down people.
The military provided land mines, barbed wire, machine guns and much else. Doctors gave lethal injections and selected which people who would die and which were strong enough for slave labor.
Everything was systematic. Murder methods were systematically improved.
The cost of killing a person were kept at a minimum. And a tiny guard force of only a hundred men could easily kill half a million people. Only 2 people managed to flee and survive from Belzec while a quarter of a million died. And at Chelmno did also only 2 people survive out of half a million. Victims were systematically mislead by being given soap, and seeing shower room signs, and seeing sprinkles in the roof. Thousands of people could be killed in just an hour.
And the guards did not have to look their victims in their face as they died.
And all information about their crimes was supposed to be hidden, bodies were burned to ashes to hide their crimes.
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World war 2 was an industrial war done on scale never seen before in history. The mobilization never seen in another war. But the organized murder of civilians also took forms of extreme efficiency and industrial scale.
The entire state machinery was brought into this... the railroads, technicians to build ovens, gas chambers, gas vans and ventilation, and electric fences, the secret police tracked up people, the military provided machine guns for the guard towers and land mines outside the camps.
And the efficiency was brutal. Gas did cost nearly nothing to produce. The camps did not need much personnel.
Millions of people died in just a year. Evidence was hidden by burning the bodies to ashes, and then using the ashes to grow trees. The killers did not have to see their victims, since the dirty work of taking care of dead bodies was done by slaves. And nearly no one successfully able to flee from those horrible places. The chance of survival was literary less than one in 250.000 in one of those. And even less if you were a child, elderly, a mother or disabled and unfit to work - because then you were killed right away. And almost all among those few who were lucky to flee were men who were working outside in the forest as a slave and cutting trees. Otherwise was there nearly no chance at all of surviving, except an armed uprising.
To me the lesson of all this is how powerless the individual is against an evil government.
If the Germans were able to do this with such a brutal efficiency in 1942, then imagine what a modern government would be able to do today...
Back then it was almost impossible to flee from a factory of death. You had to worry about guards with machine guns, electric fences, barbed wire, land mines,
And even if you manage to get out of the camp, then you would have to flee out in the woods starved and with a striped pyjamas and no food or cover against the cold. And meanwhile would trucks with guards and barking dogs come out and looking after you. And people would feel sympaties with you and give you food and a blanket if you were lucky. But they would be too afraid to hide you, because then their entire family could be killed if your enemy would found out.
And today I imagine that chance of surviving a genocide is not 1 in 250.000.... but rather it is 0%.
Today governments can track fleeing prisoners with drones flying around or satellites. Heat seeking sensors can see the heat of a human body hiding in a forest. Microphones, surveillance cameras and sensors can easily track people down. With RFID tags can you track down the movement of cattle on a radar. With coal cameras can you see through walls if someone is hiding on the other side.
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Truth has been sacrificed for the sake of simplicity and in the cause of healing some wounds. In war movies are there often stereotypical caracters like the good German (Thomas Kretschmann, von Stauffenberg etc) and the bad German (ie Hauptmann Haller).
Not all Germans were bad was the message, and clean Wehrmacht myth and the myth of the South only wanting "a little more freedom and the fight had nothing to with slavery"... are maybe a bit of an attempts to heal the wounds and hatred between USA and Germany, and the North and the South.
But reality was however more complicated. The Wehrmacht was mostly clean, but there was also elements who committed crimes against humanity. And even if the SS, the police and gestapo deserve 95% of all the blame for the genocide, would I still say that it is bad enough if only 3% could be blamed on the German army for their cooperation and assistance with bullets and trucks to kill people. Looking the other way and say nothing when millions of innocents die is incredibly weak by an organization that managed to conquer Europe.
I do however not think that the German army otherwise did much I can complain about. A few war crimes happened like in any other army, captured American paratroops in Italy got tied to trees and then got a bucket of gasoline on them and being set on fire, but as one paratrooper said did the Americans do equally horrible things in the fighting there. Overall was the war in North Africa seen as civilized and both sides even had secret radio contact to help each other to save men who had been lost in the middle of the desert. And soldiers who had raped a woman in France got severely punished.
When it comes to the South and the lost cause is this story incredibly silly. The South was the bad guys, and the purpose of the war was the preservation of slavery... and all other factors for the war were of little importance by comparison. CSA also committed treason so there is really no need to romanticize the South.
If I would present the South in a good light I would not do so by lying, but rather by saying that abolitionist activist caused dangerous riots in the south - which was both an undemocratic method of doing things, and a thing very provocative towards the south... and it radicalized the issue of slavery and made it difficult to compromise a stepwise solution towards abolition. The war was a tragedy that could have been avoided, and it did end up costing more lives than any other more in US history.
The war was unnecessary and it created bad blood between the North and the South for decades to come... indeed some even see conflicts between GOP and the democrats to follow this line of conflict. The protectionist policies that made imports of British machinery more expensive for southern farmers were also an unfair provocation to the south. Northern cities benefited by southerners being forced to buy their overpriced products and helping them to industrialize, but the South did not get any compensation for this.
And the burning of cities in the South did put salt into the wounds in the relation between north and south.
"Nazi iconography is banned in Germany, many hate groups over there have taken to using the Confederate battle flag in its stead."
The best thing would be to forcing them to wear ugly Picasso painting logos instead of good looking symbols :P
Jokes aside.. I do think that hate groups will use whatever that is available to them. So banning the nazi flag is pointless. The neo-nazis in Germany then only use the old black-white-red Bismarck tricolour with an iron cross
instead - which have in turn made a historical German non-nazi symbol associated with far right extremism.
Which I do think is idiotic.
To a foreigner it is a bit strange that the stars and bars are still used as much as it is in state flags, given its historical use in the racist oppressive Confederate states.
But on the other hand could you see this flag being used also here in Europe by groups with no ties to KKK... such as rockabilly fans, motorcycle drivers and people who drives American cars fromt the 1950s and 1960s. So it have become a strange cultural icon.
"Winners do not always write history- only those dedicated to writing history write history."
True. So if one person repeat a lie. Then will I repeat the truth over and over and over again until it sticks.
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