Was WW2 Inevitable ?, " the question of 1,000,000 points"

Helmut Von Moltke, there is no need to be so aggressive in your posts. It hardly improves the discussion or help you make a point.

Saudades,

Are you implying in the above quote that, had there been no Hitler, the Soviet Union would not have tried to bring communism into Europe through war?


Cheers!

That article is like something David Irving would write but actually not as good or sensible as David Irving, that's why I was thinking it might be a bit revisionist.

Me saying that the 'Germans brought it on themselves' IS NOT equivalent to saying that the Jews brought the holocaust onto themselves.

Did the Jewish soldiers (where was the Jewish 'army' before Israel?) invade Germany, steal German art, destroy German cities, exploit the Germans as slave labourers in the way that the Nazis did in all the countries that they invaded? Many Germans stood to reap massive benefits from this exploitation if they won the war, and many Germans participated in destroying the countries they invaded, and exploiting the people there.

It could be possible to argue that Hitler was fighting a defensive war against Communism, if it were not for the fact that both he and the Nazi leadership openly and frequently admitted that it was as much a war of conquest as anything. And why attack Poland, France, UK, all anti Communist regimes, if all you are doing is forestalling a Communist threat?

Given that the Germans and the Romanians alone (with a few other small allied contingents) came so close to defeating the Red Army in 1941, and the Finns had already fought it to a standstill, imagine if Russia had attacked any country; without the German threat almost every European country would have happily contributed troops to fight the Russians, and they would have probably been quickly and catastrophically defeated.

Instead, the Germans led the Russians into Eastern Europe.


If those articles really took account of German war crimes, the writer could give up writing in that way, because he would be faced with massive crimes on one side, massive crimes on the other, and write about the dangers of crazy totalitarian dictatorships generally, instead of just about the evils of Russia.

If there were two evil dictatorships at war in WW2 it was still a positive result one was wiped out, leaving the rest of the world to then deal with the one that was left.

What were the Western Allies supposed to do, fight USSR and Nazi Germany simultaneously?

Saudades,

Are you implying in the above quote that, had there been no Hitler, the Soviet Union would not have tried to bring communism into Europe through war?


Cheers!

They might have tried, but they would have been defeated easily, I think that is what is important.

As far as I know the Germans came close to winning in 1941, and that was when they were trying to fight Britain, occupy Europe, help the Italians in North Africa etc. If instead of that, the French and British, and Italians etc., had been free to send troops to attack the Russians, in the case that the Russians had tried to attack another European country, the Russians would have had little chance.

France and Britain were apparently eager to send an expeditionary force to Finland in 1940 anyway.

Several instigating posts were deleted.

sorry for the aggresive tone.

saudadesdefrancesinhas, so are you seriously suggesting that the war crimes inflicted upon the Germans were justified? Most Germans did not know of the holocaust. Most Germans and German soldiers did not commit crimes. Not many Germans were the goosstepping party members. So, how can you say that an act done to a civilian is revenge for an act done by an Einsatzgruppe man? Isn't it more sense to punish the Einsatzgruppe man instead? Rememebr the phrase "Innoncent until proven guilty".

K

No.

Most of the things done in WW2 were not justified when thinking in this way.

Lots of ordinary Germans were like the ordinary civilians in all the countries in WW2, they all had massive crimes committed against them, because sadly that is what can easily happen in wars.

The acts committed against civilians were not conscious revenge, but when two countries are fighting each other it is probable that does sides will end up engaging in such acts, especially in past eras when people were not so concerned about things like human rights.

Becoming massively indignant about the suffering of ordinary Germans seems strange, if you are only indignant about the suffering or ordinary Germans, and not ordinary Russians, Ukranians, British, French people etc.

When discussing the suffering of ordinary Germans the comparaison is not really related to the Einsatz Gruppen and things like that, but suffering caused by military operations. The Allies made the German people suffer more than necessary at different times, but the Germans did this equally.

If I see you finding those orders of the German commanders ordering their troops directly to burn Russian people's houses and starve the inhabitants to death, or testimony of say a Hungarian officer who had to intervene to stop German troops killing all of his labour battalion because they were Jews and Ruthenes I would believe you were interested in studying war crimes more generally.

But it just seemed all you were interested in was allied crimes against the Germans, presented in such a way as to make the Germans seem innocent victims of unprovoked aggression, as if there was no context to it all.

saudadesdefrancesinhas, you bring up relevant points about both sides disregarding the rules of war.

But your accusations of me ignoring the crimes of the Germans is fake. I have much sympathy for victims of National Socialism as much as I have sympathy for a victim of Dresden. But about crimes of Germans: why should I bring them up and mention them, when they are already well know, an being whipped up by people who make money out of them? Actually the constant obsession over German war crimes and the holocaust is much more of a threat to memories of victims of National socialism than any denier ever was. Have you ever seen the stories of people pretending to be holocaust victims to get money? And it of course cannot be said that the millions of Euros coming out of Germany to Israel is about the holocaust any longer. All this just fuels up anti-semitism in certain parts of the world. Most people know of German war crimes but know nothing about Soviet or Allied war crimes. So why shouldn't I bring it up?

K

It is probably a good thing to bring these things up, when no one knows about them.

Reading some Romanian books I have that were printed pre-1989 feels really wierd and unpleasant, because the view of what happened presented in them is so distorted.

I don't know what the situation is like in the country you live in, but in the UK there has always been discussion of allied war crimes, and also of the evils of Stalin and the USSR. We were taught about British colonial atrocities at school, and there are, in my local public library at least two different books, one recent one about Dresden, and one about allied bombing offensives generally. This is only a medium sized library; in University libraries you can find a lot more. There was discussion here about whether bomber Harris was a war criminal and so on.

Nowadays, more and more people here tend to mention Hitler and Stalin together, as since the end of the USSR more books are being printed about the Soviet regimes crimes, and it is becoming more well known.

Some of those articles you were posting, however, seemed to me extremely partial, in that they ommitted vital facts and context to make it seem like Germans were suddenly just victims of unprovoked Soviet or allied aggression. That kind of the thing is as bad as the communist propaganda, if you know even a little about what had led to those things.

I think this quote (by Helmuth) sums up the jist of the thread fairly well. Some people (especially those who have lived under communism) are tired of hearing of Axis-committed war crimes or atrocities, while at the same time there is relative silence on the subject of similar acts committed by Soviets and even the Western Allies.