[dfwgator]

I was discussing this with my wife and one reason the Germans were so eager to start war again in 38 was because they did not experience fighting on their own territory -- the French and Belgians did and were reluctant to see this happen again. The Germans didn't and got that "stab-in-the-back" myth. Just imagine if the Entente had fought into Germany and showed the people what hell is like? there would have been no shitler, no holocaust, no pojramos.

The Allies certainly weren't going to make that mistake the second time around.

[Cronos]

True. And the lessons we learn from this are clear to me — it’s classic Sun-Tzu, when an enemy is down, vanquish him utterly, totally. At the end of WWII, Germany had nothing, no state organizations, nothing. Utter wasteland.

[Cronos]

The Germany of WWII is DEAD.

On FR there are quite a few Germanophobes who'll call out nutzi slogans when talking about the euro crises. But I do not share their sentiments. The Germans of today are not the Germans of the 30s and 40s.

After WWII, Stalin solved the German liebesraum problem once and for all -- nearly every person identifying as a German in Central and Eastern Europe outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland were transported to Germany. Even if they had lived for half a millenia, a millenia there, they were shipped to this strange land of 'germania'.

he also "solved" the Polish Kresy problem by kicking Poles out of what were Polish lands (western Ukraine and Belarus -- ok, let's be precise, this was joint Polish/Ruthenian lands, with the people being ethnically and racially the same, just the ones who climbed up in society identified as Poles and the folky, rural folks identified as Ruthenian)

Stalin also "solved" the Polish-German border problem by chopping off what was eastern Germany and giving it to Poland -- places like Breslau, Stettin which were nearly 90% German now became Wrocław and Szczecin -- and created the border on the Oder-Neisse.

WWII ended the middle-ages idea that people of different ethnicities could live together and it created the mono-ethnic states in central Europe.

The Germanic peoples lost the most in this, but arguably they gambled the most.

Now they work hard and in many ways allow others to walk over them.

But the Germans of today while always remembering their ancestors past, are not responsible for it. young Germans are taught from class 1 what atrocities their ancestors committed. They know.