[nickcarraway]

Ping

[dfwgator]

It is a week in which Germany’s history has seemed inescapable. Yesterday, the German president Joachim Gauck became his country’s first head of state to visit Oradour-sur-Glane, the perfectly preserved French village where, in June 1944, 642 men, women and children were massacred by a Waffen-SS company.

I can still hear Sir Laurence Olivier's narration:

"Down this road, on a summer day in 1944. . . The soldiers came. Nobody lives here now. They stayed only a few hours. When they had gone, the community which had lived for a thousand years. . . was dead. This is Oradour-sur-Glane, in France. The day the soldiers came, the people were gathered together. The men were taken to garages and barns, the women and children were led down this road . . . and they were driven. . . into this church. Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot. Then. . . they were killed too. A few weeks later, many of those who had done the killing were themselves dead, in battle. They never rebuilt Oradour. Its ruins are a memorial. Its martyrdom stands for thousands upon thousands of other martyrdoms in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, in China, in a World at War..."

[Trapped Behind Enemy Lines]

I honestly don’t get the point of going after ageing camp guards well into their 90s. War crimes were originally meant for policymakers and higher ups, not low level soldiers and guards.

The Soviets and Chicoms slaughtered millions more people than Hitler did in their gulags, how come no concerted efforts are made to go after their ageing camp guards and personnel?

[dfwgator]

Funny how Austria always seems to get a pass. Some of the most fanatical and evil Nazis were Austrians.

[Sherman Logan]

the collective memory of Germans as perpetrators started to become weaker, a collective memory in which Germans are victims starts to become stronger.” The Allied bombings of German cities became the focal point of this sense of victimhood. The aerial bombardment was graphically recounted by historian Jörg Friedrich in his 2002 book Der Brand – The Fire – in which he argued that civilian deaths were not collateral damage but the object of the exercise. The memory of Dresden, devastated by a firestorm, is honoured by neo-Nazis in deliberate counterpoint to the memory of Auschwitz.

False dichotomy. As if victims cannot also be perpetrators and perpetrators can't also be victims.

In actual fact, most humans are both in their lives, sinned against and sinners.

The notion that they can't be both is part of the idiotic glorification of victimhood. Victims having replaced heroes in our collective mythology. As if victim is not a role we all play to varying degrees, but a designation for specific people, or more accurately certain groups of people. Same being true for perpetrators/oppressors.

BTW, recent research indicates the actual death tolls at both Auschwitz and Dresden were significantly lower than the conventional wisdom.

[Jack Hammer]

If only the Moslem countries were as assiduous in pursuing their war criminals...

[colorado tanker]

At least Germany has made a good effort to admit what happened and bring criminals to justice. The country that concerns me is Japan, where so far as I can tell there is still widespread denial about the crimes they perpetrated.