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!