RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (Full Version)

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KenchiSulla -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/16/2011 5:47:21 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: cherryfunk


quote:

ORIGINAL: lastdingo

The Nazis did not want to eliminate nations, unless you call "Jewish" a nationality.

What was their plan for Poland? Were they going to bring it back at some point? How about Russia? Estonia? Latvia? Lithuania? Belorussia? Ukraine? The Czech nation? Serbia? Were any of these going to exist as political or national entities under Nazi rule?




Somehow I think Nazi reign was to chaotic to be able to answer that question...



lastdingo -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/16/2011 5:51:55 PM)

Cherryfunk; "nation" and "nation-state" ain't the same.



Theng -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/16/2011 6:39:45 PM)

The plan was to start German large scale farms there with the suitable locals as slave labor. The unworthy locals were to be exterminated. Germany would rule all the way to the Urals where they would build a fence and launch punitive raids to destroy all industry to keep the Slavs under control. The South Tyrolians would be resettled on the Crimea, etc. Unlike what a previous poster wrote, the plan (Generalplan Ost) was quite elaborate. Fortunately, the rest of the world kind of ruined the elaborate plans.

The sources for all of this are a a lot better in German than in English.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalsozialistische_Europapl%C3%A4ne

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost



cherryfunk -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/16/2011 6:44:55 PM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: lastdingo

Cherryfunk; "nation" and "nation-state" ain't the same.

You said the Nazis did not want to eliminate nations. Are you really disputing that they intended to eliminate Poland? Hitler was very clear on this point.

I think some reading up on Generalplan Ost is in order.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

Edit: Xian beat me to it.





Theng -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/16/2011 6:45:05 PM)

by the way, what not too many know is that as part of being awarded the Ritterkreuz, the awardee also received a "Rittergut" or Knight's Manor/Land which was the promise of a huge agricultural farm in the Eastern Territories after the Endsieg.



janh -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/17/2011 11:48:36 AM)

I think the two of you mean different things when speaking about "nations" -- people and states?  The Nazi plan was to turn some regions that sometime in history belonged to German, Prussian, or related territory, "back" into German provinces.  Such for parts of Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.  With that, they planned to exterminate "tier 1" people, i.e. the leading elite, and the well-educated or otherwise influential ones -- besides the Jews, Roma and Sinti etc.   In some regions, they planned to move large parts of the population eastward, especially in southern Poland, or any of the conquered Russian provinces, whereas in others a good fraction of people still had some link to German heritage. It is not that difficult to estimate that it was by no means possible to fill and run all these provinces just by "Germans", though Hitler might have dreamed that in his twisted mind.
In that sense, they didn't really plan to eliminate nations, but rather to re-incorporate these "provinces" into the German Reich, thus forming again a Greater German Reich ("Großdeutsches Reich")  -- quite similar to the Russians later incorporating Latvia etc. into theirs.



cherryfunk -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/17/2011 12:50:25 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: janh

I think the two of you mean different things when speaking about "nations" -- people and states?  The Nazi plan was to turn some regions that sometime in history belonged to German, Prussian, or related territory, "back" into German provinces. 

....

In that sense, they didn't really plan to eliminate nations, but rather to re-incorporate these "provinces" into the German Reich, thus forming again a Greater German Reich ("Großdeutsches Reich")  -- quite similar to the Russians later incorporating Latvia etc. into theirs.


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.




janh -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/17/2011 1:16:49 PM)

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.




Theng -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/17/2011 5:12:13 PM)

I am sorry, Ingermannland and Gotenland were never part of the German area of settlements or even for a day under some kind of "German" control in any which way you look at it. Not even the Teutonic Order got that far east.



cherryfunk -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/17/2011 10:28:11 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: janh
But that doesn't make Stalin's rule any better than Hitler.

Yes, actually, it does. Stalin allowed nations and cultures to continue to exist under his hegemony that Hitler sought to permanently eradicate from the face of the earth. Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of suspected political enemies into the work camps, Hitler sent millions of the 'racially inferior' into the gas chambers. The Soviet system sought to reshape human politics via indoctrination, the Nazi system to reshape humanity itself via genocide. Both were horrific systems, but one far more so than the other.






janh -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/17/2011 11:59:26 PM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: cherryfunk
But that doesn't make Stalin's rule any better than Hitler.
Yes, actually, it does. Stalin allowed nations and cultures to continue to exist under his hegemony that Hitler sought to permanently eradicate from the face of the earth. Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of suspected political enemies into the work camps, Hitler sent millions of the 'racially inferior' into the gas chambers. The Soviet system sought to reshape human politics via indoctrination, the Nazi system to reshape humanity itself via genocide. Both were horrific systems, but one far more so than the other.


Looking at the pure numbers of crimes and murders committed by both, they were both comparably cruel people. And both had very absurd ideas. So in my opinion, neither one of them was any better than the other. As I said before, I am quite happy that the Western Allies occupied large parts of Germany before the Soviets made it. And luckily for the future development of Germany and ultimately the European Union, the Western Allies prevailed with their rebuilding and democratization efforts. Though highly speculative, I don't want to think of the way Europe might look today if the iron curtain had run a couple 100 miles further west.



Steelers708 -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/18/2011 1:57:46 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: cherryfunk


quote:

ORIGINAL: janh

I think the two of you mean different things when speaking about "nations" -- people and states?  The Nazi plan was to turn some regions that sometime in history belonged to German, Prussian, or related territory, "back" into German provinces. 

....

In that sense, they didn't really plan to eliminate nations, but rather to re-incorporate these "provinces" into the German Reich, thus forming again a Greater German Reich ("Großdeutsches Reich")  -- quite similar to the Russians later incorporating Latvia etc. into theirs.


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?



It may only have been for a very brief period but I would suggest looking up the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that ended Russian involvement in WWI. It may not have covered all of the above areas, but did include a very large part of them.



Cavalry Corp -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/20/2011 5:16:24 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: janh

quote:

ORIGINAL: cherryfunk
But that doesn't make Stalin's rule any better than Hitler.
Yes, actually, it does. Stalin allowed nations and cultures to continue to exist under his hegemony that Hitler sought to permanently eradicate from the face of the earth. Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of suspected political enemies into the work camps, Hitler sent millions of the 'racially inferior' into the gas chambers. The Soviet system sought to reshape human politics via indoctrination, the Nazi system to reshape humanity itself via genocide. Both were horrific systems, but one far more so than the other.


Looking at the pure numbers of crimes and murders committed by both, they were both comparably cruel people. And both had very absurd ideas. So in my opinion, neither one of them was any better than the other. As I said before, I am quite happy that the Western Allies occupied large parts of Germany before the Soviets made it. And luckily for the future development of Germany and ultimately the European Union, the Western Allies prevailed with their rebuilding and democratization efforts. Though highly speculative, I don't want to think of the way Europe might look today if the iron curtain had run a couple 100 miles further west.



- correct.



Cavalry Corp -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/20/2011 5:32:59 PM)

Except I would wish the EU was what is was, as a collection of central states who could no longer afford war but instead prosper with each other.
I would now vote to leave the expanded EU. Its day is done for the UK.

Cav,




rotfront1918 -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/21/2011 11:04:19 PM)

Always disgusted to see how many fascists and crypto-fascists play this game, and easily fall for (neo-)nazi ideology and fairy tales. Let's hope they all are plainly ignorant and harmless...



cherryfunk -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/22/2011 1:17:31 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Steelers708


quote:

ORIGINAL: cherryfunk


quote:

ORIGINAL: janh

I think the two of you mean different things when speaking about "nations" -- people and states?  The Nazi plan was to turn some regions that sometime in history belonged to German, Prussian, or related territory, "back" into German provinces. 

....

In that sense, they didn't really plan to eliminate nations, but rather to re-incorporate these "provinces" into the German Reich, thus forming again a Greater German Reich ("Großdeutsches Reich")  -- quite similar to the Russians later incorporating Latvia etc. into theirs.


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?



It may only have been for a very brief period but I would suggest looking up the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that ended Russian involvement in WWI. It may not have covered all of the above areas, but did include a very large part of them.

So the fact that Ukraine and Belorussia were occupied for six months in 1918 means Germany had a right to re-occupy the area, loot it, massacre its people by the millions, crush its culture to extinction, colonize it, and rule it forever after? Is that what you're arguing?

I don't get the apologism for Nazism among wargamers -- we above all people should know what that regime represented, and what its intentions were after the 'endsieg'. No one is saying Stalinism was a good thing, but the fact that it defeated Nazism is a very good thing.





Steelers708 -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/22/2011 2:52:24 AM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: cherryfunk

So the fact that Ukraine and Belorussia were occupied for six months in 1918 means Germany had a right to re-occupy the area, loot it, massacre its people by the millions, crush its culture to extinction, colonize it, and rule it forever after? Is that what you're arguing?

I don't get the apologism for Nazism among wargamers -- we above all people should know what that regime represented, and what its intentions were after the 'endsieg'. No one is saying Stalinism was a good thing, but the fact that it defeated Nazism is a very good thing.


You appear to be one of those people that always reads more into a sentence than is actually in it and it's funny how some people think that stating a historical fact turns you into a Nazi sympathiser.

My orginal answer was merely pointing out that there was a time in Germanys past where they had effectively occupied/controlled those areas, so with that, please point out to me where exactly in that sentence I was advocating Germanys inalianable right to occuppy that land in perpetuity?







vinnie71 -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/22/2011 10:27:59 AM)

Keep in mind that the Nazi claims stretched back to ancient times, funny as it seems. They even sent archeological teams on digs in the Ukraine to prove (through falsified records) that the Ostrogoths were there once upon a time...

Something else - Hitler's land grab was no different from the Kaiser's in WWI. Baltic States and the Ukraine were clearly to go to Germany by the provisions of Brest Litovsk, and in a way, Hitler's mentality, was forged on the short-lived expansion of Germany after the Russian collapse of 1917. Of course, here I'm talking in terms of the ground covered.

Aryanism also included other populations in its calculations - Nordic countries and the Netherlands were considered kindred spirits. So were the inhabitants of the Baltic States. Not to mention the Germans found all over Eastern Europe and the Balkans due to the medieval diaspora. At one point they even included the Greeks in the list (the Dorians were supposed to be proto-germans etc etc - a lot of ****)! So in essence there was no limit to their ambitions.

Yet despite all this, they also thought of themselves as the protectors of Islam - making friends with Albanians, Egyptians, Iraqis etc.

All the above points to one simple fact - Nazi ideology was muddled and waxed and waned with their successes. All those plans for the east were just wishful thinking and cooked up in the death troes of the war (1944 onwards). I would say that even Hitler was not even that a loony to come up with such absurdities - these were all the results of what today we call think tanks with no connection with reality whatsoever (funnily enough many think tanks nowadays have the same results - ie a lot of idiotic speculation without any basis except statistics - but that's another story and one that is unfolding around us - vide the EU). I mean let's face it - grab the Ukraine and the Russians were somehow expected to withdraw behind the Urals and not challenge German possesion of their formal lands? That's sheer fantasy! Problem is that the whole eastern strategy was not well thought out in the first place, let alone achievable. The whole system was rotten conceptually, ideologically and in practical terms.

Having said that, I think that in the end Hitler administered the slow poison which eventually killed off the Soviet Union. By actually making Stalin's worst nightmare come true - an invasion from the west - he forced Stalin and his successors to devote a lot of attention towards defence rather than development. Frankly, a superpower that produced 2000 tanks a year but could not produce enough tractors and trucks to increase its agricultural output, is not exactly a sane superpower. Remember that the first communist leaders feared not America per se, but Europe, which was a more immediate concern for them (especially since the bulk of Europeans showed their aversion to communism very early on). That mentality still permeated their thinking till the 1960's and they shifted little of their attention from Europe. They never shook off the fright they got in WWII and ended up trapped in their fears. Essentially, the effect of the sacrifices of millions who fought under the black banners or allied nations, paid off in the 1980's with the internal collapse of the Soviet Union.



cherryfunk -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/24/2011 3:50:51 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: Steelers708


quote:

ORIGINAL: cherryfunk

So the fact that Ukraine and Belorussia were occupied for six months in 1918 means Germany had a right to re-occupy the area, loot it, massacre its people by the millions, crush its culture to extinction, colonize it, and rule it forever after? Is that what you're arguing?

I don't get the apologism for Nazism among wargamers -- we above all people should know what that regime represented, and what its intentions were after the 'endsieg'. No one is saying Stalinism was a good thing, but the fact that it defeated Nazism is a very good thing.


You appear to be one of those people that always reads more into a sentence than is actually in it and it's funny how some people think that stating a historical fact turns you into a Nazi sympathiser.

My orginal answer was merely pointing out that there was a time in Germanys past where they had effectively occupied/controlled those areas, so with that, please point out to me where exactly in that sentence I was advocating Germanys inalianable right to occuppy that land in perpetuity?

I apologize, I was out of line to imply that. However, German occupation in 1918 went only as far east as the Ukraine, and even then they installed a puppet government and at least paid lip service to Ukrainian independence. The Nazis, however, sought to conquer as far as the Urals and intended to colonize the area and liquidate any nationalist tendencies among the locale populations. Even the Baltic states, who would have happily joined the German cause and been staunch allies, were treated like so much plunder. So I'm not sure how you bringing up the treaty of Brest-Litovsk has any bearing on my point, really. The Kaiser and the Fuhrer had very different outlooks on German expansion.





cherryfunk -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/24/2011 3:53:36 PM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Steelers708

You appear to be one of those people that always reads more into a sentence than is actually in it and it's funny how some people think that stating a historical fact turns you into a Nazi sympathiser.

My orginal answer was merely pointing out that there was a time in Germanys past where they had effectively occupied/controlled those areas, so with that, please point out to me where exactly in that sentence I was advocating Germanys inalianable right to occuppy that land in perpetuity?

I apologize, I was out of line to imply that. However, German occupation in 1918 went only as far east as the Ukraine, and even then they installed a puppet government and at least paid lip service to Ukrainian independence. The Nazis, however, sought to conquer as far as the Urals and intended to colonize the area and liquidate any nationalist tendencies among the locale populations. Even the Baltic states, who would have happily joined the German cause and been staunch allies, were treated like so much plunder. So I'm not sure how you bringing up the treaty of Brest-Litovsk has any bearing on my point, really. The Kaiser and the Fuhrer had very different outlooks on German expansion.

quote:

Something else - Hitler's land grab was no different from the Kaiser's in WWI.

Not really. Read up on Imperial Germany's occupation policies vs. those of the Third Reich -- one relied on local leaders and created national (if puppet) governments, the other murdered local leaders and sought to wipe said nations from the face of the earth.




Gilmer -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/26/2011 2:39:01 AM)

If you're a Pole and your family is dying, does it really matter to you if the hand killing you is fascist or communist? You and your family are still dead. There's a reason the Polish fought for their freedom throughout the 70s and 80s.



cherryfunk -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/28/2011 1:42:19 AM)

It's a simple historical fact: Poland existed under Russian hegemony, it did not under German.  The two occupations are not equivalent.  Full stop.




wodin -> RE: Hitler's Generals & Admirals...... (9/28/2011 8:06:50 AM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: pwieland

I find it rather odd that people focus on the millions killed by Hitler but don't mention the tens of millions killed by Stalin. History, it seems, loves the winner.

Personally, I find both tyrants repugnant, as is war. I enjoy wargaming however - weird huh?



Well said.



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