Germany and Japan did some really bad things in the 30s and 40s...as did we. Much like with our own civil war, the winner has essentially rewritten history pretty one-sided...and as if the things done in the 1850s...and the 1940s should/can be fairly evaluated under the lens of current morality, largely formed by television/ignorant teachers/authors who put their own political spin on everything.

Forgive me for this, but I have always wondered what law constitutes "crimes against humanity." Was it a treaty that Germany signed or in any way recognized or felt bound by? A German WWII vet buddy of mine once said they should have just shot every one of those in the Nazi leadership. No trials needed. No explanation, just shoot them all. And I have to agree. None of them were breaking any law they were bound by as German citizens. Sure, if Poland or Russia or Czechoslovakia wanted them for criminal acts committed on their sovereign soil, fine. But to invent "crimes against humanity" after the fact sounds like victor's justice to me. And I'd be fine with that if they just called it that.

Hitlers word was the law. It was legal.if he said it was legal. Hitler didnt give one wit if it was legal or not.

I gave the source about Heydrich.

Yet we have the famine and purges of the east. We have invaded middle eastern countries for less....

Some people like to think legality means anything as if that is going to deter a regime from going to the dark side of humanity. Legality is a construct for those who think they care..it is a convient salve.

lots of hidden history about hess and his flight

but we could NOT reject peace in a war we were not yet in, in 1940
that was all on Churchill as it was not our war then
now later yes there was an official policy after dec 1941 attacks of no deals
no separate peace but then italy did swap sides in 43

''Forgive me for this, but I have always wondered what law constitutes "crimes against humanity." Was it a treaty that Germany signed or in any way recognized or felt bound by? A German WWII vet buddy of mine once said they should have just shot every one of those in the Nazi leadership. No trials needed. No explanation, just shoot them all. And I have to agree. None of them were breaking any law they were bound by as German citizens. Sure, if Poland or Russia or Czechoslovakia wanted them for criminal acts committed on their sovereign soil, fine. But to invent "crimes against humanity" after the fact sounds like victor's justice to me. And I'd be fine with that if they just called it that. ''

Geneva conventions post ww1 and before had some rules to follow

problem was some signed us brits germans and others russia japan did not

some knew things the west needed to know about the reds post war or like von brawn
how stuff worked

Gehlen.

test post..I think the board somehow frozen?

Regardless. Had the Us not gotten involved. It wouldnt have been good for the world or the US.
The us wouldny have become the superpower it became and europe would have been either a fascist or communist superstate that, once consolidated would have been near impossible to overthrow again and with grave ambition for gaining more control over the rest of the world.. Which would sooner or later have been a problem for the US, and at that point the problem would have been directly affecting US interests. Combine that with the Japs at the other side, it was a gangrene that could not be left in place.


Not taking care of that at the earliest , would have meant it would not have been solvable with the relatively low casualties or long term costs the US suffered in the European ww2 theatre..

So either way it worked out a treat for the USA

That's not how legal vs illegal works.
Especially not since German culture has a tendency for strict adherence to laws and procedures.

So for those orders to be legal, they would have had to been backed up by German law and written orders.

But no such orders or laws existed, So it was very UN german and those things happend in a definately grey area of their own normal way of doing things.

I'm not debating that Hitler did not OK or order it.
The point is weather or not anybody who got that order, could have properly asked for confirmation of those orders and if then , where did those orders come from.

You'de think that is the basic premise for orders to be legal.
And yet, none of that has been found.

One can argue the orders were burned at the end as incriminating evidence.
And yes a lot of papers did get burned during the fall of berlin.

However Hitler was dead, and they would all go on trial over those crimes.
It would have served them pretty good to produce written orders pointing to the dead guy..

And burning things in Berlin, would not have taken care of all the orders being sent around to the lower ranks..

Top down orders have never been found or even claimed to exist by the defendants.
The practical side was simply organized in the middle.

Those orders were informal, not backed up by any true orders, law or policy from the top, They got Idiology from the top, not orders... And yes they followed the ideology, that much is true.. But by US standards, none of those orders were legal because they haven't been found, not in orders.
Those who did it got assigned to a unit, and within that unit, they took care of things. They did not have a paper, with orders on what or how they ought to do it.
The CO's of those units.. they gave the orders, and they gave em based on their idea on how to suit the ideology proclaimed by Hitler.

It's actually quite similar how things happened at My Lai.
The grunts never got legal orders do commit those crimes and it was guys in the middle management, like Medina and others who decided they would take care of that village the way they did.

They did it because of doctrine that came from above, by Westmooreland, the Body count, the attrition nonsense.. And the GI's were ordered by their field commanders and went along with it.
Much muuuuch smaller scale, but again, those orders weren't on paper, and none were legal either.


To be legal there has to be law to back it up (eg laws making extermination approved) and a paper trail.

Stijn but this may be worth a read.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/uk-documentary-claims-hitler-was-very-hands-off-in-implementing-final-solution/

LONDON — Adolf Hitler did not wish to confront the reality of the Final Solution, a documentary on British television claimed on Monday night.

The program alleged the Nazi dictator never visited an extermination camp and pulled down the blinds of his Fuhrer train when a train carrying Jews to their deaths stopped on an adjacent platform.

It also stated that the origins of the Holocaust lay in remarks made by Hitler at a private dinner and noted the lack of a “paper trail” linking him directly to its instigation.

“When it came to the extermination of Jews, Hitler was very hands off,” presenter Dr. Tracy Borman stated in the documentary, entitled “Private Lives,” which aired on Britain’s Yesterday channel.

But doubt was immediately cast on the implication of some of the program’s claims by one of Britain’s leading experts on Nazi Germany, Prof. Sir Richard Evans.

In the show, Borman, the chief curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, examined Hitler’s private life, attempting to show how it related to his public actions. Historic Royal Palaces is a charity which looks after some of the UK’s most famous public buildings, including the Tower of London and Kensington Palace.

“While atrocities were being carried out in his name, he never visited an extermination camp,” Borman said in the program. “When a train carrying Jews to the camps stopped on an adjacent platform to his Fuhrer train, he pulled down the blinds… Hitler never wanted to be confronted with the brutal reality of what was going on. He just wanted to know that it was being done.”

However, Evans, former Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge and the author of a number of books on the Third Reich, urged caution about some of these claims.

“It is true that Hitler did not visit any extermination camps, but he was sent, and read, the regular reports of the SS task forces who shot hundreds of thousands of Jews in pits behind the Eastern Front during the war,” he noted.

“The incident recorded by [Albert] Speer in which Hitler had the blinds on his train windows pulled down was prompted by a trainload of German war wounded,” Evans said. “Jews were transported for the most part in cattle trucks and would not have been visible from outside.”

Evans was the principal expert witness against Holocaust denier David Irving in Irving’s unsuccessful 2000 libel suit against American historian Deborah Lipstadt. That case would be dramatized in the 2016 Hollywood movie “Denial,” starring Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt.

The Yesterday channel documentary highlighted the lack of documents linking Hitler to the decision to order the Final Solution.

“When it comes to the instigation of the Holocaust, there is no paper trail leading directly to Hitler himself,” Borman said. “Quite typically, these horrifying plans seems to have grown out of one of the Fuhrer’s private chats at the dinner table.”

Hitler is said to have told SS head Heinrich Himmler and Hans Lammer, Chief of the Reich Chancellery, over a dinner that he had been “extraordinarily merciful to the Jews,” but he was coming to see that “the only solution was extermination.”

A transcript of the conversation, historian Nigel Jones told the program, was “the only actual written link that we have that Hitler ordered the policy of the Holocaust.”

Holocaust scholar Evans said, however, “There are many documents attesting to Hitler’s knowledge of the extermination of the Jews, including the diaries of his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.”

Goebbels confided in his diaries that Hitler was “pitiless” when it came to the “Jewish Question.” Hitler believed that “The Jews must get out of Europe, if need be through [the] use of the most brutal means,” the minister wrote on one occasion. On another, he argued that “the Fuhrer is the unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution.”

The one ‘noble Jew’

The program noted that Hitler had, in fact, shown mercy to only one Jew, Eduard Bloch. A Linz-based doctor, Bloch treated Hitler’s mother, Klara, when she was dying of breast cancer. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Hitler awarded him special protection and he was allowed to emigrate to the United States in 1940.

Hitler called Bloch “the noble Jew,” according to the documentary, and said, “If all Jews were like him, there would be no Jewish question.”

“Hitler’s very private act of mercy towards Dr. Bloch was not to be repeated,” Borman said.

The program also claimed that, as a child, Hitler was beaten by his father, Alois.

“His father had been a brutal, tyrannical man who tyrannized his entire family and beat Adolf [on a] fairly regular basis,” Jones stated.

However, Evans argued: “The claim that [Hitler] had an abusive childhood is based on speculation; there is no evidence to suggest that his father was more violent than other fathers of the time.”

The documentary painted a picture of Hitler as a lazy and arrogant student, who was embittered by his rejection by the prestigious Vienna Academy of Arts. It suggested that as a resentful vagrant living on the streets of Vienna he sold paintings, postcards and drawings, frequently through Jewish middlemen.

Decades later, Hitler’s desire to rebuild German cities according to his own neo-classical architectural tastes were a “key driver of the concentration camp networks, the persecution of Jews and peoples of occupied territory and even of the course of war itself,” Borman said in the program.

According to historian Jones, “Camps like Mauthausen in Austria and Flossenburg in Germany were built next to quarries where the stonework that would go into the building projects was actually dug out.”

“We can draw a connection between Hitler’s own love of architecture and his desire to build these grandiose constructions with the work that went on in concentration camps,” said Jones.

Hands off
but aware.

He left the dirty work to others to figure it out

Given what is known about the camps, programs and reprisals, it is easy to understand why the lady drew attention to the pictures of clean cut men in elegant uniforms. It is harder to picture a corroded soul.
If the Axis had won, Lemay and Harris probably would have been tried for war crimes.
As mentioned above, history is written by the victors.
It has been a half century since I have read Mein Kamf, but the repeated message was the nation was being held back by "them". The language used (in the English language translation) was demeaning and dehumanizing. In fact it was very similar to what can be heard about political and ideological rivals today.
I find that very disturbing. You do not have to search long to find people who profess to be loyal to a cause or to an individual and express their willingness to do violence to their opponents. Have we not learned a thing in the last nine decades?

Best
Les

Yes but were the extermination camps his idea? I think they were or at the very least he approved them.
- Imagine trying to justify and then live with a decision like that.

Hitler and his henchmen, evil bastards all of them.

No they weren't his idea

He just wanted to have no Jews.
How, was not his problem

He never told anybody "hey, build camps, lock em up, then gas em"
There's zero proof of that, not even a trace that he came up with any of that.

He had his 1st tier of henchmen, Heydrich, Himmler, Goebbels.

And hed talked Ideology, he told them what the goal was : Europe without Jews.

And then took that ball and ran with it.
They figured out "how" to get to the goal.
They sorted out the practical problem, most obviously in the Wansee conference, where Heydrich basically set out the big lines, got buy in for logistics (gather up and transport) and then on that basis they delegated "work".
How to do the killing bullets, gas, whatever was then again sorted out lower ranks in the camps, when the Jews showed up and the volumes became to big.


It's similar to how Blitzkrieg was such a success
They allowed enough freedom of thought at the lower ranks to improvise.

John Boyd even took that in his "Patterns of Conflict”
That leaders should communicate where you are going, but leave the initiative "how" to get there, to those who actually do it. No Micro Managing.

And that's exactly how they did it.. Hitler explained his Ideology, what the goal was : Europe without Jews.

It didn't matter to him "how" , as I said earlier, if they could have just shipped em all off to Africa with a pampflet" we don't want you in Europe, good luck abroad", and had it down quicker that way.. Hitler would have been fine with that.

But they could not do that, because it was a 2 front war.
They were over-extended in more ways then one.
So they worked those who could
experimented on those who were interesting
And disposed of the rest

None of that was based on a big premeditated plan, ordered from the top


You have to read the books by Reese to imagein how they justified it. How the populace was brought in on that idea..
How they made the people hate the Jews.


Now think of it. That storming of Congress in the US
Did anybody "order" it? Nope.
But it happened, right? And those who did it.. They thought they were doing somethign rightuous

Similar thing.

Yes, the forum is broken again.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/off-topic-discussions/1106690-forum-broken-again.html#post11518472

On good looking Nazis via Wikipedia: Maybe they're the easiest to find and best photos available?

The Nazis also had a thing for Fencing scars. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dueling_scar

Years ago there was an "artist" that produced an exhibition using classic pictures of Hollywood stars in Nazi uniforms. He didn't take any of the photos but just assembled them into a collection. How many movies have been made about WW2 and the well dressed Nazis and German soldiers?

Just a few off the top of my head...
Ralph Fiennes - Schindler's list.
Clint Eastwood - Were Eagles Dare.
Steve McQueen - The Great Escape.

Gregory Peck & David Niven - The Guns of Navarone.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1636944707.jpg

Wow, the historians got bored.

this went slightly off topic, but I like the direction that it went. Interesting reading.

I imagine a lot if Germans/Nazis did nothing any worse than some of our leaders...so shooting them all was not warranted IMHO. We would have had to do the same with the Japanese and the

There were no such laws (crimes against humanity). At the time, most countries recognized wars to acquire territory/wealth or grievances as entirely legal/correct (our own civil war). Specific people should always be tried for specific crimes. Anything that reaches the level of a "crime against humanity" should indeed be a crime in the country where committed.

The occupation of each country and the way the citizenry was treated was different. My father was an Aryan in occupied Denmark. His whole family was treated with deference by the SS. Never once did the regular Waffen occupy Denmark, it was all SS.
The level of genetic disdain the SS had for the regular Waffen was beyond the racism of today.

If you don't have blue eyes, you really can't begin to understand how much you were hated.

I think mass murder is against the laws of most countries, don't you?

Not only do the winners get to write the history, they get to apply the laws they feel are warrented.

Best
Les

Not sure what you mean with regular Waffen, there is no such thing as the regular Waffen.

Waffen SS was SS. full stop.
You had the Algemeine SS(Civil paramilitary, not a combat organisation) and the Waffen SS
2 different organisations but any one in Waffen SS would typically also have a (usually different) rank in the Algemeine SS, at least so until they had foregin Waffen SS units later in the war.
Algemeine SS took care of internal(political) enemies, commies, Jews, Gypsies, and organized and ran concentration camps.
Waffen SS did the fighting against external enemies (rooskies, and after D Day , the Western Allies)

Algemeine SS was Germans only
Waffen SS also included people from occupied territories later on in the war (Belgians , French, Dutch, Danes, Fins, Italians, .,. )

If you mean the regular army, then that would be "the Heer"

You are right though in the fact that they treated different countries different.
Western Europe, and Scandinavia were considered similar races, Hitler even looked up to Britain as an example of what he wanted in the world.
Belgium for instance, the Flemish were thought to be Germanic and they actively courted Flemish Nationalists (anti establishement, anti Monarchy, anty French speaking.) to join their cause, even before the war even had begon.
A lot of those became collaborators
POW's were treate well and , Post Invasion within 6 months POW's were released back home, My grandfather was one of those.
The Germans tried to return to normal life in occopied western countries, offering work to those willing to work (and only when that failed did they resort to forced labor, also my grandfather).

Poles, and Russians were considered subhuman.. POW's were thrown in camps to die of starvation and there was no release.
Civilians in Poland were mistreated and opressed, looting and pillaging was the norm, local populace only lived to serve the occupiers and German people were transplated to occupied countries if there weren't any Germanic minorities already there. "lebensraum".

Important thing to know, the German military was not fed with food parcels from the home country.. The German military went abroad, invaded and was expected to source food where they were.
Stark contrast with the US military that had massive food logistics and fed it's military better (calory wise) with deliveries sent from the US, then the locals could feed their own probably even in peace time.

No. It was thought at the time that other nations had no right to try leaders of other countries for things that happened within their own borders...any more than Canada could try Biden for murder because we have a death penalty in some states.

Similarly, what if Mexico thought it proper to try Obama and his goon squad cabinet for all the people he slaughtered in Afghanistan...or Biden for the family that he just killed there?

The crimes against humanity" nonsense was created after the fact. The only Germans that could be tried after the war were those that broke laws in other countries...by those countries...unless Germany chose to try them.

Funny how we let the Japanese off the hook for their genocide. Most tallies have it at way more than the Germans. Their rape of China and Southeast Asia in general seems to be forgotten.

That's all very true but I'm sure there are complex reasons surrounding that decision.

We had them by the short and curlies. I can only assume that we saw them and their country as a very convenient way to keep an eye on that part of the world. And on top of that, we wanted all of the documentation that they had from their "medical experiments."

I suspect that we had less compassion for their victims at the time as most Americans did not identify with them as we did the Europeans...and most Europeans, even less so.

6665 Germans convicted
4403 Japanese convicted


Considering that the Conflict in Europe was of a much bigger scale then that in the Pacific (beligering parties, military casualties, not surface area of the conflict)
China was big, but it wasn't as densily populated in those days , not compared to Europe.

Considering the size of the organized German Atrocities vs those of the Japanese empire that was more a case of culture and mentality rather then organized, industrial holocaust.


I'de say the Japs atrocities were harder to convct, because they were more individualistic, less paper trail, or infrastructure and victims were much harder to testify to anything..
If anything they were mostly for crimes against westerners, in POW camps and the biggest massacres of nankin were simply difficult to find suspects and witnesses for.

A lot of the medical experiments in unit 731 were wiped under the table in trade for the data produced by those medical experiments.. McArthur did that. I'm sure when the CDC was founded in 1946, they accumulated a wealth of data provided by the Japanese, Obviously none of that is listed publicly on their website.

Also apart from Western POW's , there's a completely different mentality in Asia towards civil rights and what constitutes suffering.. sure the Japs were ruthless as conquoring invaders. But I doubt other Asian cultures and nations have been any less ruthless. Just look at DPRK, or Mao's famines..or North Vietnam, Cambodia etc etc etc.

And a big part of it was just because they were ruthless and hard on themselves as well.. a Jap Soldier that went in the army, training was pretty much based on getting beat with a bamboo stick by peers.. And so when they were in for a while, they started beating new recrutes with sticks as well... and anybody else..

Again, read Laurence Rees, Horrors in the east to get an idea how they got to that mindset.

Yes, from a normal point of view, the Japanese mistreated themselves, it all rolled downhill.

It's a big part of how they were conditioned and indoctrinated, and each one just passed it on to the next.. It desensitize em for brutality. Once they got to China, the NCO's would organize bayonet practice with pow's or just about anybody they could round up.

Anybody who refused it, well, he got beatings till he finally did it.

Same with rape, it was considered a requirement to join in, obviously the NCO's went first, but then the next, not participating, well that's like refusing an order.

Japanese culture was and still is weird, Life always was cheaper over there. For the Nobel (Samurai) the honor was more important then own life, and anybody not Samurair was pretty much their servant.. criminals.. well, tough luck , we have a sword to test.. stand still bud.

it's very difficult to simply look at it with western eyes.
Brutalities yes, but blaim those brutalities to an individual who basically never knew better, Who was brought up in that culture and trained with brutal methods??

considering their closed nature as a society, and the state of their cultur and technologically, they had to leap forward into the 20th century
And that closed culture + modern technology.. It triggered an ambition to equal the likes of Britain in terms of colonies and expansion. IF everybody else can go abroad and claim other folks countries, why can't we?
How they did it, was just the way they were used to do things.. They hadn't gotten through the enlightenment phase of the western countries (which clearly didn't enlighten the western rulers enough)

Exactly. If practice XYZ is considered completely normal in a particular culture, but another culture thinks it's barbaric or immoral, you can't expect folks from the first culture to know or understand the view of the second culture.

I haven't read that. I have read about half a dozen books on the attrocities in the far east during WWII.

One of the books that I read was probably similar to the book that you reference, but written by a Japanese man.

https://smile.amazon.com/Hidden-Horrors-Japanese-Crimes-Voices/dp/1538102692/

at the same time, if they are less culpable for those crimes due to ignorance as a culture and upbringing.

Shouldn't those raised in the west be held to higher standards and then shouldn't the west be trying their own according to those standards.

Don't want to point fingers, but objectively speaking , People raised in the priviledged west post WW2, with all the schooling..

once they got indoctrinated into the military (and taught about rules of war, and what constitutes misbehavior) In plenty of documented cases i would rather not name because I don't want to point fingers and be flamed for being anti something when i'm not.

The Military has succeeded in training folks to kill on command, to participate abroad against people who are living in a 2nd or 3rd world country, (not privi to that upbringing and education).
And those wars are then rationalized based on some one sided perspective.. with terms like war of attrition to make the enemy loose his will to fight.

And then those soldiers who get sent to do those dirty jobs.. When things go horribly wrong, and attrocities happen.. they don't have the argument of "I was brought up in a culture that doesn't know any better"

All they can say is, well we were put in this country for a dirty job, and when we got dirty, we should have known better?

or
We were put in this country for a dirty job by people far far away telling us how to do this dirty job, and anything that happens, they are part to blame?

slippery slopes and things tend to get covered up real soon. Nobody wants to be to truthful when that happens.. Not those who did it, not those whe command em, not those who sent em, and not those who are politically responsible for em, and definately not those who voted the politicians in that spot.

Nobody wants to hear the truth, and I guess for a big part that was no different post WW2.
Except off course the actual victims.

added to my list now
canibalisme is also mentioned in Rees's book
he has a whole series. including nazi crimes, and some about allies

he doesn't discuss strategy or battles
he discusses how people came to do the things they did, and how they rationalized em.

I think he also worked on a documentary with same name, for the BBC , but haven't seen it yet.

It's important lecture to anybody who already read all the battles and strategy books

I'm now going through a 5 books on the SOE, and OSS..
and tabs SS book arrived this morning.

It's been several years, but IIRC the cannibalism entered into the equation when the Japanese military effectively abandoned their own people (whether unable to support them or stretched too thin or whatever) and as they starved, they started to eat whatever they could dig their teeth into. I don't remember the details.

A lot of what I read centered around the Phillippines (Bataan Peninsula, Corregidor, and Leyte), but some of the books (several that were memoires) also included the "hell ships," and forced labor in Japan.

We have not, and it has been more than 90 years

I've learned in recent years that this is still true

https://www.quotemaster.org/images/a...c259ab247e.jpg


I'll add my own statements to that :
Because people in groups are stupid,
the bigger the group, the worse it gets
the worse it gets, the more gullible they are

And the internet has HUGE groups that self reinforced innate stupidity and brings all group members down to their lowest common denominator.


It's very visible, for instance in localised town groups for historical memories..
We have those around here on facebook "You are from Ypres if..."
"You are from Brussels if"

Starts off nice and they recollect memories. But they all invariably slip down the slippery slope till you got a few dullarts with dull followers bullying those with critical thought on grounds of "hey if you don't like it here you can F off, stop asking annoying questions"
Self policing does not work and more sensible , clever people don't have the time or patientce to moderate such groups so they all end up moderated by either people who don't care, or bully themselves..

This can't be overstated and it's only getting worse!