janh
Posts: 1216
Joined: 6/12/2007 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: cherryfunk This is simply incorrect, unless you can tell us when Germany ruled all of Poland, the Baltic states, the Ukraine, Belorussia and European Russia itself. When was that exactly? And the comparison to the Russia incorporation of the Baltic states is again entirely false. Russia turned the Baltics into 'Soviet Socialist Republics' within the Soviet Union -- they had puppet governments and were under military occupation, but their national identities were not liquidated. They still had their borders, spoke their own language, and had some sense of national identity within the Soviet system, including limited local rule by their own governments. Now compare to Poland under Nazi rule -- a third of the Polish state was absorbed outright into Germany, the rest was put under a murderous occupation based on the precept that Poles were subhuman ('undermensch') and Polish culture was to be eliminated and its people turned into slave labor for a German ruling class. There was no Polish puppet government -- capable local leaders were murdered, and the administration was taken over entirely by Germans and predicated on what could be taken from Poland to help Germany. Deathcamps were created in which one-quarter of Poland's population was liquidated, with ominous hints that the killing wasn't going to stop with the Jews and intelligentsia. And the very notion of a Polish state was eliminated -- Hitler forbade anyone referring to the area as 'Poland', and made it very clear that nothing resembling a Polish state would ever reappear under German hegemony. No way in hell are those two policies equivalent. Therefore the narrowing statement: "Such for parts of Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc." Of course I did not mean the Ukraine, Baltic states etc. Let me see what I recall from my history classes: Böhmen, Mähren, Pommern, Schlesien, Ostpreussen etc. Actually the Wiki article gives a nice overview over the Kaiserreich around the turn of the century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Empire But even before the situation in central Europe was quite fluid, and ownership changed quite frequently. Otherwise, the point is yours -- the comparison to the 'Soviet Socialist Republics' was a bad one. In that sense the Soviets behaved a lot more civilized than the Nazis, though also there Stalin did do local cleansing, as he did in Eastern Poland before. Definitely Poland should not have reappeared as a nation of own identity during Nazi rule; the country largely could be divided into former Prussian provinces, so there would have been nothing left to call Poland. But that doesn't make Stalin's rule any better than Hitler.
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