Interesting article about Wikipedia via the Nazis

[fintstone]

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.

[Rick Lee]

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.

[tabs]

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.

[Arizona_928]

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

[tabs]

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.

[nota]

Originally Posted by Arizona_928

So didn't the United States break international law at the time by funding munitions and personnel to Britain. Seize German merchant ships, imprisoned Germans, ect while maintaining neutrality....


United States and Britain refused peace with Germany to fund the munitions that brought the US out of the Great depression.
Peace in 1940 would have lead to the biggest scandal of fraud the United States have seen since well ever.... Yeah let's talk real history folks. Or erase it completely.

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

[nota]

''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

[tabs]

Gehlen.

[pwd72s]

test post..I think the board somehow frozen?

[svandamme]

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

[svandamme]

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.

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.

[sc_rufctr]

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.

[svandamme]

Hands off
but aware.

He left the dirty work to others to figure it out

[oldE]

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

[sc_rufctr]

svandamme:

Hands off
but aware.

He left the dirty work to others to figure it out

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.

[svandamme]

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.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by pwd72s

test post... I think the board somehow frozen

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

[sc_rufctr]

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.

[masraum]

Wow, the historians got bored.

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

[fintstone]

Originally Posted by Rick Lee

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.

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.