Posted on 08/30/2025 12:49:47 PM PDT by johnnygeneric
We were told America was a mongrel nation, weak, divided, controlled by Jews, incapable of military prowess. Every day I am here, I see the opposite. This is the most organized, unified, and powerful nation on earth. We were told fairy tales by criminals.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtu.be ...
Please elaborate. Were there no camps at all? Did Eisenhower not change the status of the German POWs to DEFs? Are the pictures AI?
Is it all just made up?
I don't think anyone is suggesting that this was an act of mass murder, only that the idea that German POWs were somehow treated like royalty by the Americans is part of the propaganda from WWII that never got taken out of our history books. (IOW, it's a fairy tale; the Americans of that time were quite capable of pretty vicious behavior.)
Just reading about Stalingrad is crazy.
Hitler deployed 75% of his armies on the Eastern Front. Near the end of the war, the Nazis fought so they could end up surrendering to Western Allies because of a better chance in survival.
They knew that they had no chance living under Soviet capvitiy.
Victor Belinko, the Russian pilot who defected to the US with a MiG 25 had the same experience. The book “MiG Pilot” tells the story. A very good and enlightening read.
Especially in 1941-42, before the Soviets were able to ramp up their production.
My Father-In-Law was in what was to be the Soviet Sector, so he sneaked out and found his way to the American Sector. He ended up in the USA and joined the US Army.
He then became a legal US citizen and found his bride when he was stationed in Japan. She also became a legal citizen and they are now buried in a national military cemetery.
It was from the movie, Battle of the Bulge.
I think you're right.
I was an enlisted troop on Titan II Missile Combat Crew when that book was first published and I immediately purchased my copy.
The most striking thing was the last chapter when, after he was finished being debriefed, he was given some credit cards, cash, and the free use of a small aircraft and told to travel the USA as he wished. He wrote that the USA was more like Socialism than the USSR or anywhere else. Our "poor" people were fat from eating whereas poor people in the rest of the world had bulging bellies due to starvation.
I was an anti-communist since grade school when I first started reading about WWII yet that one part of Belenko's book cemented my conservative views.
I saw much the same myself. After the Soviet Union fell apart my company arranged to bring over some Russian engineers so we could show them what we could do. On their first day they asked if we could take them out to buy of all things some peanut butter. Why peanut butter, I don't know. One our guys said he had to go to the bank at lunch and he would would take them. He dropped them off in front of the super market and came back for them a half hour later. They had no peanut butter and they were all in a state of shock. The went into that super market, saw the abundance and it just freaked them out. They could not process it. This was just a standard US supermarket. They could not comprehend it.
During the Apollo Soyuz mission, some of the cosmonauts came to Johnson Space Center for training. It blew their minds driving past new car dealers and seeing hundreds of cars available for purchase.
At the time there was a gun show at the Astrohall with about 3500 tables. There were rows of automatic weapons side by side with a shotgun shell though the trigger guard. Maybe 30-40 to a table. A family friend said they took the cosmonauts on a field trip there one Saturday. I would have loved to see the next communication with Moscow.
"Those are German prisoners," my Mother said.
As I looked out of the back window of the car, I made eye contact with one of them. His hair was bright blonde; the bright sun was shining on it.
I can see him now in my mind. I'll never forget the way he looked at me. It's hard to put into words, maybe impossible. It was a combination of weariness, uncertainty, surprise, suspicion, and envy. This article explains it I think.
A German woman lived with my family briefly during the war. I think her name was Theo. She made wonderful pies. She introduced me to meringue. I couldn't get enough of it. I horrified my Mother by asking her if she liked Hitler. Mother answered: "No. No. No. Lots of Germans don't like Hitler." The woman also assured me that she did not like Hitler, that that was why she was in America.
There is no way that we could ramp up to the quantities needed for a protracted war.
they’d be even more shocked to see that we’ve exported most of our industrial might to Communist China
“Soviet propaganda nonsense. Simply not true, you ought to know better.”
Definitely Soviet BS. To hear the Soviets tell it, we were secretly in league with the Nazis and wanted them to win. Glossing over the fact that it was the Soviets that helped the Nazis and may have actually wanted to join the Axis.
My Grandfather actually owned a coal mine before the depression but like so many lost his business early in the Depression. He had a little 20 acre farm that he and my Grandmother raised part of his 13 children on. The older ones were grown and gone. All through the Depression they always had food. They didn’t have much else just the farm and a ramshackle little house but they were clean and proud and good people.
Out of all the land in Pittsburgh County, Oklahoma the damned gooberment took 13 of his little 20 acres for a POW camp leaving him with not enough to live off of. They moved to town. Thankfully, one of his sons was able to take care of him and the remaining children having done well in spite of the Depression. Smarts and endless hard work paid off for him and he became a millionaire when that meant something. My Grandparents also sent three other sons to war. Gratefully, all of them came back. One was on a destroyer, one was an infantryman in Italy and the third was a submariner in the Pacific.
I am much less proud of our government than I am of my heritage.
I think it was the liner notes for the Avalon Hill game Panzer leader that pointed out that Russia faced 54% of Germany troops after D-Day, and 88% of Germany’s mechanized troops.
They also pointed out the significance of horses: “when properly [clothed] a Russian horse could survive down to -54 F, but the German horses began to die at -18F”.
Also remember that in Europe at that time, roads, rail lines, rail centers, bridges, airfields ...everything was smashed. Just getting supplies into camps was difficult.
At the same time, surplus of any kind was prioritized for citizens in newly liberated cities who received the most and best of anything going in the way of food, medicine, etc. That meant there was not much remaining for the Germans sitting in Allied camps.
The prisoners of the French had the worst treatment because they had been so brutal to France in the occupation. No Frenchman was going to show much compassion.... Germans in French camps were even put to work.
Whatever excuse/reason we provide here, my point is that the claim that German POWs were all treated well while under the care of the Americans is part of the propaganda of that time that was never scrubbed from our history books.
Erkelly's claim that the Americans "faithfully" observed the Geneva Convention is demonstrably false.
(IOW, we're human too. Even the "greatest generation", despite the hype, was made up of mere mortals.)
The federal government would issue training, production, and supply orders and contracts, but inadequate private financing constrained the necessary expansion. Lawsuits, political spats, and public finger pointing then snarled up the process even more.
Forrestal found the solution. An obscure New Deal agency was tasked with providing the financing for contracts and orders. Federal teams then went throughout the country signing contracts and productions orders with financing attached.
Factories long idled due to the Depression suddenly sprang to life, new ones were built, and workers were hired and trained. Sleepy hamlets would suddenly become the sites for air fields, bases, and training camps.
Flight schools that might provide basic training to fifteen pilots a year were suddenly tasked with graduating more than that every week, at an airfield that would be quickly built, with housing and services for hundreds of cadet pilots.
A country hungry for work responded eagerly. In effect, the wartime monetary and financial expansion and a new pro-business attitude in Washington created a torrent of wartime production and civilian prosperity. They took up the slack of workers and material resources idled by the Depression.
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