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RangerJoe -> RE: TF Cohesion (1/10/2021 8:05:34 PM)
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ORIGINAL: RhinoDad
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ORIGINAL: mind_messing
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It was more of a response to, there were a few good German generals. To there were many good and many bad on both sides. The English nor Americans were that clean. There was lots of dirt to spread around on all sides. History books and such often favor the winner and make the English and American sides smell like roses.
I was waiting for the statement of moral equivalence.
You're correct that the Western Allies were far from clean, compared to the Wehrmacht they looked like a sterile operating theatre. In the armies of the Western Allies, war crimes were not policy. Less so with the Wehrmacht.
You can argue historiography all you like, but you may find Lipstadt's writings of interest.
It is not in anyway a moral equivalence. Statements had been made to the effect that good German military leaders were rare and often ended up dead. I only pointed out that there were plenty of good Germans in military leadership. That it was not so rare that plenty of English in the early war did things that were against protocols of war. The people on one side are not monolithically good and the other not, there are many example of good individuals on both sides regardless of country policy.
It was as stated that there were good and bad on both sides, that often early on it was the English who pushed the boundaries. Also agreed and stated that often in war the side that is losing will tend to be the one that bends the rules that are then seen as fair/decent. That rules of conduct change when fighting starts.
Having actual knowledge of history, not the washed over telling of it, in no way equates with moral equivalence. Moral equivalence is a term, usually to deny that a moral comparison can be made between the sides in a conflict, or in the actions or tactics of two sides.
I clearly made moral distinctions between the two sides policy wise as well as individual behavior. That is the opposite of moral equivalence. Moral equivalence would have sounded something like, "Both sides were just the same". Never once came close to saying that the Germans as a whole behaved properly; nor that the English were the true bad guys.
Even though my sympathy is very much on the English side I do not whitewash some of their behavior, that at the time was not seen as proper behavior, made in desperation.
Also figured the examples given would be pretty common knowledge, something that would have been taught pre college age. Figured Battle of Britain and WW1 and WW2 British naval action would be well taught in school as it was quite controversial at the time and there has been plenty of time to make history lessons.
Again, this was a discussion of behavior on the western front and north African front. Bringing up behavior in a completely different war, eastern front, is irrelevant unless one is speaking of all fronts of WW2. Then Japanese, Russian, and east front Germans enter.
The Holocaust was a happening in the east outside of Germany proper. It has no relation to behavior of the western European combatants early war. Nor was it established at the time we are talking about. And until the near the end of the war the west was not fully aware of the atrocities. They were however, familiar with such things as the civilian bombings employed against Poland. The Holocaust is in no way relevant example I gave in WW1 and WW2 '39 to mid '40
The holocaust as happening in Germany proper.
Beside Dachau and other concentration camps in Germany:
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Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program. After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.
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Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Gypsies, were transported to the Polish ghettoes. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppenwould murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.
A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung (final solution) to “the Jewish question.” Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.
Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz, near Krakow. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.
Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young. The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz-Birkenau. From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone. Fed up with the deportations, disease and constant hunger, the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943 ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.
Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter. This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/the-holocaust
Also:
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/holocaust
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