70 years after the Dresden raids

[MarkD]

The Japanese need to seriously stop lying to themselves about atrocities their troops did during the war and acting like none of it was their fault.

They won't, because they don't view the things they did as having been done to actual humans. For them it would be like putting American Marines stationed in the Pacific on trial for going fishing or killing land crabs. At worst they're having a little harmless fun and keeping themselves busy, at best they're eliminating pests.

In The World at War series there was a former Japanese soldier who talked about visiting the "pleasure houses", basically whorehouses filled with Chinese and Korean women who were little more than slaves. He thought the women should have some sympathy for him because he might have to go out and die. I hope he died of the drizzling crud.

[Vonz90]

I think some of that disparity may be because the NAZI atrocities were being kept secret. TMK, not much of the regular German army knew of them.

Well, Germans in general adopted an "I know nothink!" stance on everything by the end of the war, and it's not hard to see why. The Nazis gave the average Germans just enough sand to bury their heads under. They knew something was up, but it could be safely ignored as someone else's problem. So we'll probably never know really how widespread knowledge was in the Heer or the citizenry.

Come to think of it... anyone heard anything more about the CIA torture scandal since December?

I've had lots of discussions about this with my Grandmother when she was alive.

What you need to understand about her is she was 100% opposite of the Nazis. They were anti-aristocrat, she was nobility. They were antisemitic, she was a semitophile if anything (and this goes to before the war, when she first moved to Germany from Latvia to go to school, she stayed with a well to do Jewish family who were friends with her family, they actually made it out of Germany before the war and she still kept in touch with them in US after she made it here after the war). Etc - so she did not exactly have anything to apologize or hide in terms of her own past.

She said that at one point she lived in the vicinity of one of the camps (for a few months) where they were keeping Jews but she did not realize it until much after the war when she saw it on list of such places. She said everyone knew there was a secret military camp at the location, and there were trains going there and whatnot, but there were such camps all over the place so she never thought to much about it and it was not too different from the outside from other camps which were for various other purposes (and you were not exactly encouraged to ask details about military camps.)

She also said that she was sure that there were some people in a position to know who either turned a blind eye or kept their mouth shut about it either out of fear or something else (maybe agreement?). She thought that her husband (my Grandfather) probably knew because he was always talking (or saying in letters as he had been drafted and was at the front) things about "moving away from 'those people' after the war" and saying that he wanted to leave the country after the war. Of course, he was killed so it is possible he meant something else because she was never able to discuss details.

Another thing she mentioned was that when my Grandfather was on leave one time, they stayed at a resort on the Baltic that had been put aside for officers and their family to stay during leave periods. She said that there was a sub-group of SS officers who were ostracized by everyone else there (including other SS officers) and that her husband forbid her to talk to them in any way. She said that she did not understand at the time, but it was her though later that they were probably death camp guys, but again she had no way of knowing for sure. This would suggest that at least in that group of officers, they knew something unsavory was going on.

So, my point is, when Germans were saying "I know nothing" after the war, it was probably true in a lot of cases. In a lot of others it is probably BS, but it depends on who is saying it and what/where they did. It was not advertised so to speak.

[Yogimus]

Going with "Bullshit across the board". Everyone in the conquered territories knew that if you wanted a family to "disappear", all you had to do was claim they were jewish, and a special little squad would make them go away in due course. No one thought the jews were being taken to happy farms.

[PawPaw]

Going with "Bullshit across the board". Everyone in the conquered territories knew that if you wanted a family to "disappear", all you had to do was claim they were jewish, and a special little squad would make them go away in due course. No one thought the jews were being taken to happy farms.

There is that.

[Vonz90]

Going with "Bullshit across the board". Everyone in the conquered territories knew that if you wanted a family to "disappear", all you had to do was claim they were jewish, and a special little squad would make them go away in due course. No one thought the jews were being taken to happy farms.

I didn't say she didn't know they were rounding up people (Jews plus various and sundry others). That was common knowledge from even before the war. Several members of my family helped some Jewish friends get out of the country (by helping them transfer their money out, which emigrating Jews were not allowed to do) before the war so again she was both familiar with it and decidedly not in favor it. The point is that the Nazis were not advertising that they were setting up death camps.

To look at it another way, we were rounding up Japanese and a lot of Germans and Italians - it did not therefore follow that we were killing them. The one does not necessarily imply the other.

Again, my Grandmother had no particular reason to fudge this since it was more than obvious to anyone looking at her history that she was never pro-nazi. Heck, at one point towards the end of the war, she was almost shot by the nazis herself. The point is that some did and some did not. I don't claim to know the proportions of each.

[BDK]

Concentration camps were a matter of routine during warfare in that era. Some of the Mennonites, etc in the US were kept in slave labor camps until 1947.

[JAE]

I've read somethings, I think Shindler's list may have touched on it too, that suggest even the some of the prisoners in the slave labor camps adjacent to the death camps refused to believe/acknowledge what was going on. Maybe it's evil and madness so great that a rational mind cannot accept its existance? Different for outside observers who can judge it objectively with admitting that it could happen anywhere else?

[JAG2955]

Concentration camps were a matter of routine during warfare in that era. Some of the Mennonites, etc in the US were kept in slave labor camps until 1947.

I'd love to hear more about that, but I would like to emphasis the difference between a concentration camp, a death camp, and a labor camp. Concentration camps are a anti-insurrection tactic, where the population is concentrated and freedom of movement is restricted. In some cases, they actually saved lives, like in the Philippine Insurrection, where sanitation was forced on the populace resulting in a reduction of disease. I suppose that you could argue our tactic of walling off Fallujah was a concentration camp.

[BDK]

The plain PA Dutch border of being anarchists. (They were initially referred to as Anarchist Anabaptists.)

Lincoln tried to execute them into military service, FDR enslaved them in labor camps, and made their communities pay for their upkeep. They were not concentration camps - thy were forced to engage in "labor vital to the nation", without pay or board.

They were released in 1947.

That they were farmers, mostly, and should have been exempted from the draft for that purpose, was immaterial, except if the local draft boards arranged exemptions on that basis.