Posted on 04/18/2017 10:50:44 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Oh bull,
The French, British, Poles, Swiss, Finns and Americans were the good guys, the Russians, Germans and Japs were the bad guys and the other nations somewhat in-between.
If fighting a war at the cost of many hundreds of thousands of your own young men is not enough, well screw the folks bitching. I for one am sick of people perpetually trying to make them and “their people” victims for all time at the expense of folks who actually did something to try and right the world, like actually fighting a war for the benefit of others.
Same thing with blacks bitching about the civil war and slavery. A lot of northern white folks died or lost years of their lives and the end result was freedom for blacks, yet if all they can do is find fault and now seek reparations 150 years later, screw them.
As for turning away the ship full of Jews in 1939, well it is sad, in retrospective. It is also sad that the Brits would not go along with the French in 1936 when Hitler moved back into the Rhineland, but hindsight is always 20/20. When Cuba and then the US refused that ship in early 1939 they were still in a depression that started in late 1937, folks forget the country was in a severe recession in 1939. Not the time you welcome refugees. Swiss did the same thing and the Brits were not allowing migration to Palestine for political stability reasons. The Poles would not take Jews thrown out of Germany and there were squatter camps in the no-man lands between the nations in 1938/39. Really sad, but British/Polish/American folks are not responsible for the evil that Hitler and the NAZIs did, nor do they bear any guilt or shame for not anticipating it.
As for the death camps, what could the allies have done? really, not some pipe dream but what really could have been accomplished? The camps were located outside of upper Silesia in Poland, and not within US bomber range with fighter escort. The upper Silesian industrial works were not bombed because of that, and they were as significant as the Ruhr. The one attempt to use soviet airbases as a stop (having bombers fly over Germany and land in Russia) was a flop, as the German tactical fighter bombers followed the US bombers to the soviet base and made a mess of the entire fleet of planes on the ground.
The best thing the allies could have done was to focus on defeating Germany before Japan...which they did.
If one wants to have a discussion on anti-Semitism, well that is a separate conversation. But any attempt to try a passive aggressive trick to make the good guys of WWII the bad guys in some way, well no thanks, I have heard enough of such B.S. from the leftist progressives to last my entire lifetime.
Not that I have a strong opinion on the matter.
“The pope and the “neutrals” in Switzerland and Sweden were actually complicit in their non-action when the information was made available to them.”
The Swiss and Swedes, yes. The pope actually was credited by Jewish historians like Pinchas Lapide with saving 860,000 Jews at one time or another. That number may be an exaggeration. But even liberal Jews - who despise Pius XII as a conservative Catholic - admit he saved 200,000 Jews: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/pope-pius-xii-saved-thousands-of-jews-1.300589
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/jewish_author_defends_pope_pius_xii_in_new_book/
Also, Pius XII was an active participant in plots to overthrow Hitler knowing full well that those plots, if successful, would mean Hitler’s execution: https://cruxnow.com/interviews/2016/06/17/pius-xii-active-conspirator-three-anti-hitler-plots/
That's not crap Gaffer.
I saw it first hand and deliberately glossed over some things I wanted to add because naive people like you might not be able to handle it, because you didn't live it and see it and hear it first hand.
What your parents or my parents though is irrelevant. -Tom
My dad was in the China Burma India Theater in the Army Air Corps ( joined at 19) working the ‘supply lines’.....riding the trains, etc
They all did their part
I believe the first mention of the Holocaust was in 1906.
If anything, the Russians were closer to the Camps, and they could have provided refuge for any fleeing Camp inhabitants. But the Russians were just as anti-semitic as the Germans.
Agreed.
Not everything known means you can stop it from occurring.
Are the allies to then be blamed for the jews that saw what was going on and decided to stay as things got worse and worse, too?
Like other liberals, they automatically jump to the worst possible conclusion about the people who fought to get them out of those camps alive. At great personal risk to themselves, no one seems to remember.
From "Schindler's List"
Russian officer: You have been liberated by the Soviet army!
Itzhak Stern: Have you been in Poland?
Russian officer: I just came from Poland.
Itzhak Stern: Are there any Jews left?
Michael Lemper: Where should we go?
Russian officer: Don't go east, that's for sure. They hate you there. I wouldn't go west either, if I were you.
At the time, the war hadn't started yet, and many of the ship's inhabitants were settle in the Netherlands, where they were "safe".
They knew that Jews were being killed but they couldn't bring themselves to believe that extermination was going on.
Even in our own time, people don't want to believe how murderous human beings can be.
Nice trick with trying to slime the Swedes and the Swiss.
Exactly what two small nations of around 3.9 million each could have done against Germans with its 78 million and 7 million extra eastern European Volk-deutsche? Gone to war? Both nations were holding their breath hoping to avoid being taken over in 1940 through mid 1943. I suppose they could have gone to war something in 1944, but at that point it did not matter, Germany was defeated and exactly why these small countries should be compelled to kill their young men for a predetermined cause escapes me.
When one is weak(both were)and unable to protect others you are not complicit when a local bully is beating someone up and you know about it.
Also there have been volumes written on the degree to which the nature of the camps was known and unknown. There is grounds for questions. The Nazis went to great extents to allow folks to have sufficient grounds to believe it was not so, that the Jews were being settled in the east, not killed. All sorts of fake things like mailed post cards and the like.
Certainly sometime in the summer to fall of 1944 it seems to truth was known in the west and likely in both Sweden and Switzerland, but by that time most of the killing was done.
And they pointed out that the Russians were sacrificing millions, while the Western allies "stood on the sidelines".
Well for one thing, millions of Russians died strictly out of Stalin's incompetence. Ultimately, the superior numbers of Russian soldiers were eat the Germans, "as a bunch of ants eat an elephant", as one German general put it. But with more competent leadership, there didn't need to be so many deaths on the Soviet side. Heck, they lost almost 100,000 in the Battle of Berlin, alone, when it was a foregone conclusion.
In fairness to the soviets I think the issue was the Germans were willing to surrender to the Brits/Americans and French, with the Russians it was a fight to the death. They had not given much quarter to the Russians and did not expect much in return. Also I think the Russians only lost 81,000 dead in the last battle of Berlin. The Russian army was pretty bad ass by that time.
As far as saying the US sat on its hands, when a young boy I recall a lot of families that had sons and husbands that fought in WWII (US side). I am not sure they would agree with that characterization, especially the gold star families. If you doubt that try that line out in a VFW.
Well going around raping German women certainly didn't help. Of course the Russians could have just let us have Berlin, and it would have been a cakewalk.....but NOOOOOOOO!
I don't believe going north or south would have been any better either.
At one time I believe Amsterdam Holland, was early on tolerant of Jews. - Tom
Possibly. But don’t forget a big part of the Final Solution was getting labor from the inmates to replace the manpower taken by the German military. Many of those who died were killed by a deliberate combination of starvation & overwork.
Agreed.
The dumbest thing the Russians did was rape and kill all of the inhabitants of Nemmesdorf in East Prussia in the fall of 1944. Then withdraw to let the Germans know what is coming. The effect was remarkable, the Germans actual stabilized the eastern front in the fall of 1944, when by any fair accounting they should have folded by December. I think the soviets lost something like 500,000 men clearing Pomerania and east Prussia because of it in early 1945. The Germans fought like wounded lions in the late winter/spring of 1945 in the east, while in the West they just started to surrender en mass from late February on.
Such a waste of lives, all over a little troll in the bunker.
Actually that feeds back into the original point of this thread: If the allies had stopped on their existing lines in November of 1945, Germany would have collapsed by the end of June of 1945, due to the economic collapse (what was left was not economically viable). If the soviets had stopped in February of 1945, after they got to the camps and the Upper Silesian industrial zone, Germany would have collapsed in late May of 1945 at the latest.
So a lot of allied lives were spent to liberate camps a month or two sooner then they would have fallen had the allies glass ball been perfect. For that reason alone the article referenced if full of B.S.
Most of the people killed by the nazis never made it to the camps.
So let me see, they should have abandoned hopes of winning the war, and focused instead on a relief effort to rescue seven million people at various internment camps in Europe?
Then what? Germany entrenches and we’ve spent so much of our efforts on the rescue and holding ground, that we’ve depleted our forces and supplies?
The idea to stop Germany and it’s allies from doing what they did is admirable, but was it truly feasible and the best place to focus our efforts, with the whole world at stake?
Hitler was working on the bomb and a delivery system. Should we have given him another eighteen months to three years to work on it?
We didn’t win the war easily. I’m not convinced an alternate plan would have ensured our victory.
I do not see our military leaders as people who didn’t really care if seven million (or whatever the actual figure was) people were killed or not.
13 million. Not all of them were Jews.
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