~ Robert, Robert, Robert - at least learn something of language and history before going off on a quasi-pedantic rant.
The Nazis didn't start the war. That was done by the Treaty of Versailles. Read a little of what Woody Wilson was saying at the time the treaty was "negotiated". The rest of Europe and Washington were not displeased with the Nazi rise to power. It stabilized Germany and created a natural buffer against Stalin and the Soviets. There was a reason that Hitler was named "Man of the Year" in 1938 by Time Magazine.
Your totals on the camps are woefully lacking. The actual total is closer to 18 million. Of them, only about 6 million were Jews and only half of those died in the death camps. (Do learn to distinguish between the death camps and the concentration camps, by the way.) Jasenovac had the highest body count of the death camps after only Auschwitz II (Birkenau) and Belzek. Jasenovac was not established to kill Jews and the Jews comprise a small minority of those who did die there. The camp totals don't take into account the millions of Russians, Serbs, Slavs, Poles and Ukraines who were simply killed rather than marched off to processing centers. The world didn't care what was going on with the Jews at the time (and the documentation is irrefutable that the world knew). Any number of pronouncements and actions from the capitals of Europe and Washington prove this beyond the shadow of a doubt. The saddest part of the "Holocaust" is that most of the victims are forgotten. The Nazis were not about killing Jews to the exclusion of the rest of their targets and they did a much more complete job on the Serbs and Romas. The millions of Slavs who were scheduled for extinction were saved by Joe Stalin the Red Army. The US wasn't particularly concerned about the Nazis. With full knowledge of what was going on, the US congress decided to continue the draft by a single vote a few months before Pearl Harbor. Of course, Operation 14f13 had not been implemented at that time so the Final Solution was not an issue.
Hitler was anti-Jewish. That was a product of his education, his upbringing and over 1000 years of dogma from the Vatican and the ruling classes of Europe dating from before the Roman Empire. When you speak of anti-Semitic Arabs though, you kind of lose all credibility. (You pretty much lost any credibility when you couldn't even spell the word.) The Jews constitute a minority of the Semites in the world today. They are far outnumbered by their Arab cousins. (Point of fact: we know the present day "Palestinians" have no historical claim to "Palestine" as a traditional homeland because they, in fact, are Semites while the Palestinians who disappeared into Babylon before Persia took control of the region were not. Historic 'Palestinians' where extinct before Rome was founded.)
As for the nukes, I guess it's a good thing the German scientists who built the bomb decided to do it here, isn't it? But for Hitler's Jewish policy, they may have stayed home and built it there. As to the necessity, justification, legality and morality of dropping them, I'll let Dwight Eisenhower, Chester Nimitz, Douglas MacArthur, Robert Oppenheimer and Curtis Le May, among others who were more privy to the facts and circumstances than me (and than Harry Truman) speak for me, but I tend to agree with Le May that, if Japan won, he and Harry Truman would have been on the block for war crimes, and I surely can't argue with Chet, Ike and Mac, the commanders in the field, as to the total pointlessness and lack of military purpose of the attacks. The Japanese surrender was a foregone conclusion and the invasion of Japan would not have been necessary. If there was military purpose to the bombings, at least one of them would have been dropped on a militarily significant target and if saving US troop lives was an issue, one would think Japanese troop concentrations somewhere within 500 miles of the intended invasion route would have been somewhat close to ground zero. At least one of the next eleven planned drops would have been aimed at something of military significance, wouldn't you think? They weren't. The way Stalin and the Soviets were plowing through Manchuria signaled to Truman that Papa Joe and Mao needed an object lesson. Pity a couple generations of Japanese babies born with all manner of birth defects since the war that provided the lesson along with the quarter million or so Japanese civilians and 2 to 3 thousand American civilians and POWs who were incinerated. Mengele (if you are going to suggest that someone look something up, it would expedite the research if you could spell the name correctly) worked on live but condemned subjects. Truman went after the unborn.
However, it should make you feel better to know that the firebombing of Tokyo killed far more people (mostly civilians) than did either Fat Man or Little Boy and beyond Dresden, Germany had its share of firebombings, destroyed cities and dead civilians. At least in Germany, the bombings killed far fewer American civilians and POWs than were slaughtered by Enola Gay and Bokscar at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviets did their part for you, too. Don't be sad. Stalin did for you what Patton couldn't. If you need a bigger lift, more German civilians died in the war than did German troops. If you take the Soviets and Poland out of the mix, more Germans, over half of whom were civilians, died in the war than did the rest of Europe combined. This should really make your day: Germans deaths outnumbered Japanese by about 4 to1, even with the nukes.
Finally, if you are going to condemn a nation and a people for its barbarism and savagery, take a good look at the USA. Heydrich and Himmler did. The modern world's first concentration camps were established in 1838 at Ross's Landing (Chattanooga, Tennessee), Fort Payne, Alabama, and Fort Cass (Charleston, Tennessee). Martin Van Buren called them "emigration depots". The Cherokee didn't really care what they were called - dead is dead by any name. The term "concentration camp" wasn't coined until the British came up with it during the Boer Wars some 60 years later. Heydrich and Himmler were pretty impressed with the activities of the US Bureau of Indian Affairs as well. The didn't particularly like the tactics of Billy Sherman and Nellie 'Bearcoat' Miles because that would cost too many bullets and allow the foe to make a pretense of fighting back, but they did learn the lessons of feeding the starving captives rotted, tainted meat and giving them smallpox infested blankets. Zyklon B was much more merciful. Fact: they got more than a few of their ideas from Uncle Sam and the Indians. They said that, not me.
To youyo: You are, of course, correct insofar as your accusations of France and Britain are concerned. However, the victor writes the history and it is so much easier to point fingers at others than to look at oneself. Since you fail to mention the US in your list of folks who have committed atrocities, and since the US is the first modern nation to have engaged in a prolonged campaign of genocide over a period spanning generations, you can see how well the propaganda works. (We'll leave the American slavery experiment out of the discussion for now, but you really should compare American slavery to that of other nations so you can appreciate how truly egregious it was.) Maybe that's why 98?f the American population bought into Georgie the Younger's rap 6 years ago that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were moral, legal and justified. This in spite of all the treaties and agreements the US has signed which preclude a preemptive war and in spite of the condemnation of the world before the troops went in and in spite of the fact that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan posed any threat to US security or interests, and in spite of the fact that the folks against whom the invasions were aimed had been US allies just a decade or so before. (The fact that history screamed out that neither war could be won and that the stated goals were not only out of reach but a sick joke simply makes that support all the more frightening - but gives a wonderful object lesson on how a man like Hitler can rise to power.) However, to be consistent with your logic that Hitler gave France and Britain what they deserved, I presume that you agree that 9/11 was a justified attack on a deserving target? After all, bin Ladin is but another spurned US ally, just like Saddam. US support of butchers like Shah Pahlavi, Saddam, Marcos, Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu , to name but a few, does not ingratiate Uncle Sam around the world.
Aside to cychuck1213: Germany, in terms of loss of life, was third, not second, hardest hit by the war, after the USSR and China. Poland trailed Germany by less than a quarter million. (proportionately speaking, Poland was hit harder.) If you count Soviet troops (10 million) as one group and Soviet civilians (15 million) as another, that pushes China to #3 and Germany to #4. The US, by comparison, lost fewer than 350 thousand. And Robert, before you go off an another rant that the Wehrmacht forces deserved it, US troops were just following orders in Nam and at My Lai and Panama and Granada, and Afghanistan and Iraq and Gitmo, too. The troops don't make policy. They follow orders or commit treason. Anyways, Stalin, after joining the Nazis in the invasion of Poland, was preparing his own invasion of Germany, so the European war would have happened with or without Hitler or Fall Weiss and Barbarossa.
Answered By: bcptm - 8/2/2007 |