Posted on 04/10/2011 1:39:15 PM PDT by kronos77
Regarding Germany and their Axis allies in the Baltics and Northern Europe, people were given several choices regarding enlistment ~ join, go hide somewhere, jump in the ocean. I know a fellow who actually swam out as far as he could go in the North Sea to escape induction in the Wehrmacht. He was picked up by the Brits who patrolled the area constantly looking for such folks (who had plenty of useful intelligence about German military positions and actions). He served in an "all Dutch" ALLIED BATTALION.
I've met other people who report that their fathers were induced to join the SS through the simple expedient of getting paid ~ whereas they'd served without pay in the regular army.
What I think you need to do is get your nose out of the neo-nazi fairy tales and turn to more authoritative sources ~ e.g. people who were members of Axis military units. It's not hard. The country is full of 'em.
I'd move fast though since they're all at least in their late 80s, with many now in their 90s.
*Hitler was evil; Stalin was worse. Ask the Poles, Ukrainians, and others that lived under him; *
Yeah. They were the lucky ones.
Hitler planned to depopulate everything West of the Urals.
And by “depopulate”, I mean murder.
So please continue with your thoughts.
No he wasn’t. People could actually *live* under Stalin if they kept their head down.
Ah, the physics of cantilevered hemispheres ... I remember them well.
The thing is, Hitler greatly admired Stalin and some suggest had the Nazis won, he would have kept Stalin on as the leader of a Puppet Regime beyond the Urals, because he figured he was ruthless enough to keep them in line.
Of course, Stalin would have probably refused.
From Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_Brest_Fortress
The fortress had no warning when the Axis invaded on 22 June 1941, and became the site of the first major fighting between Soviet forces and the Wehrmacht which surrounded the fortress. From the first minutes of the invasion, Brest and Brest Fortress were bombed and shelled by the German Wehrmacht. The initial bombardment took the unprepared fortress by surprise, inflicting heavy material and personnel casualties.[7] Fierce battles were fought at the border, in the town of Brest and in the fortress itself. The first German assault on the fortress took place half an hour after the bombardment started; the surprised Soviet defenders were unable to form a solid front and instead defended isolated strongpoints–the most important of which was the fortress itself. Some managed to escape the fortress; most were trapped inside by the encircling German forces. Despite their surprise, the subsequent attempt by the Germans to quickly take the fortress with infantry stalled, and the Germans started a lengthy siege.[6] Regarding the fights around Eastern Fort, that was taken only on June 30, 1941, the commander of the 45th Infantry Division General Fritz Schlieper wrote to the High Command in his detailed report:
“
“It was impossible to advance here with only infantry at our disposal because the highly-organised rifle and machine-gun fire from the deep gun emplacements and horse-shoe-shaped yard cut down anyone who approached. There was only one solution - to force the Soviets to capitulate through hunger and thirst. We were ready to use any means available to exhaust them... Our offers to give themselves up were unsuccessful...”[6]
”
Although the Soviet soldiers in the opening hours of the battle were stunned by the surprise attack of the heavily outnumbering enemy, being short of supplies and cut off from the outside world, they held out much longer than the Germans expected. . The Germans deployed various powerful guns, rocket mortars 15 cm Nebelwerfer 41, resorted to tear gas and flame throwers but could not break Soviet resistance. The civilians inside the fortress looked after the wounded, reloaded the machine-gun discs and belts with cartridges and even took up rifles to help defend the fortress. Children brought ammunition and food supplies from half destroyed supply depots, searched for and brought weapons and watched enemy movements.[6]
Schlieper wrote in his detailed report that:
“
“the 81st Combat Engineer Battalion was given the task of blowing up a building on the Central Island ... in order to put an end to the Russian flanking fire on the North Island. Explosives were lowered from the roof of the building towards the windows, then the fuses were lit. When they exploded, we could hear the Soviet soldiers screaming and groaning, but they continued to fight.”[6]
”
Chaplain Rudolf Gschöpf wrote:
“
“We only gradually managed to take one defensive position after another as a result of stubborn fighting. The garrison of the so-called “Officers’ House” on the Central Island only ceased to exist with the building itself ... The resistance continued until the walls of the building were destroyed and razed to the ground by more powerful explosions”.[6][8]
”
On 24 June, with Germans having taken parts of the fortress, the remaining Soviet troops were able to link up and coordinate their actions under the command of Major Ivan Zubachov; his second in command was political commissar Yefim Fomin.[1] On 26 June the Soviet forces tried to break out from the siege but were unsuccessful and sustained heavy casualties. On 27 June, after a week of assault, the Germans began to use 540 millimeter artillery which fired 1.25 tonne shells and two 600-millimeter guns Karl-Gerät which fired concrete-piercing shells weighing over 2 tonnes. Shells from the 600-millimeter guns formed craters 30 meters wide and inflicted gruesome injuries on the defenders, including ruptured lungs of defenders hidden deep within the fortress from the concussive force of the explosions.[9] On 29 June-30 June Germans launched a major assault, which penetrated deep into the fortress and resulted in the capture of both Zubachov and Fomin. Zubachov was sent to a concentration camp in line with the Nazi policy of extermination of Soviet prisoners of war and would die there; Yefim Fomin was executed on spot for being a commissar and a Jew.[10]
German soldiers in the Citadel in June 1941
R.Gschöpf wrote:
“
“Late on the 30th of June the division received the order to abandon Brest. Early on the 1st of July we paid tribute to the perished in the Division cemetery that was laid out on the eve…The main units of the Division abandoned Brest on the 2nd of July 1941.[8]
”
The 45th divisional after-action report of June 30, 1941 related:
“
“The division took 7000 prisoners, including 100 officers. German losses were 482 killed, including 32 officers, and over 1000 wounded”.
”
The magnitude of these losses can be judged by the fact that the total German losses on the Eastern front up to 30 June 1941 amounted to 8886 killed. The citadel of Brest therefore accounted for over 5 percent of all fatal casualties.[11]
After nine days of fierce fighting the Germans had captured most of the fortress. It meant that the strategic objective was accomplished with a considerable delay and losses. The German High Command demanded General Fritz Schlieper present a detailed report regarding combats by Brest 22–30 June 1941. It was made on July 8, 1941.[12] A copy was found in the archive of the 45th Infantry Division, that was captured by the Red Army by Livny, Russia in March 1942.[12]
To be fair, the date June 30, 1941 as the end of the battle for the Brest Fortress is not quite correct. Even after the fortress was declared as captured, and with the front lines hundreds of kilometers eastward, surviving cells of resistance were not put down by the Germans for several more months. Fighting still continued in isolated pockets, primarily underground in the old dungeons, in the Citadel and the Kobrin Fortification. From late June until the very end of July rifle fire and short bursts of machine-gun fire continued to ring out from basements and half-destroyed dungeons with small groups and individual soldiers inside. The actual front had by then already moved about 300 miles (480 km) east.[4] During the last days, the remaining defenders made inscriptions on the walls. They said:
“
“We’ll die but we’ll not leave the fortress”. “I’m dying but I won’t surrender. Farewell, Motherland. 20.VII.41.”[6]
”
Major Pyotr Gavrilov, one of the best known defenders of Brest (later decorated for it as Hero of the Soviet Union) was captured only on 23 July.[10][13][14] There were reports that isolated defenders were weeded out by Germans as late as in August when Hitler and Mussolini visited the fortress with heavy security to protect them from remaining defenders. It is claimed that a stone Hitler picked up from the remains of a bridge was found in his office at the 3rd Reich’s headquarters after the war[9][14] To eliminate last pockets of resistance German High Command had given orders that the fortress cellars be flooded with water from the Bug River.[14]
It’s understandable to an extent as to why Churchill was in the wilderness in the mid-30s with regards to Hitler.
I think there was a sizable segment of the British population who figured at least Hitler would serve as a buffer against Bolshevism, which at that time was the bigger fear of most. Even in Mein Kampf, Hitler stated a desire to forge an alliance with Britain. The difficulty however was in that he wanted no such alliance with France, and this required driving a wedge between France and Britain. To Chamberlain’s credit, he would not allow this to happen.
“Of course the story has been romanticized and turned into a legend.”
CORRECTION: Romanticized, SANITIZED, and turned into a legend.
The Russians were occupiers in Brest at that time, and the Brest East Fortress was a center of NKVD Border troops committing atrocities against the Poles, and even other Soviet Units, as Stalin’s enforcers.
A pretty significant percentage of people in the Baltic were ethnic Germans and spoke German as their 1st language. In 1941 as the Nazis were on a roll, it probably did not take a hard sell to sign them up in the German army.
The same trick was clumsily tried against Finland and all the Soviets ended up with was the Skolt homeland.
Now, regarding the Skolt, I see Swedes, Danes, Dutch, Scots, Norwegians, Poles, Estonians, Litnuanians, Latvians, and Germans ON OTHER LAND ONCE CLAIMED BY THE SKOLT, and there's no sign any of them have an intention of leaving.
So?
If you want me to buy into the division and occupation of the Skolt homeland, then you have to buy into the idea that there's a battle here between Russian soldiers and German soldiers, and it was gruesome ~ most likely way beyond our understanding of what gruesome means.
It's ENTERTAINMENT as well as an examination of human perseverence in the face of adversity. To a degree it's on the order of looking into David facing off against Goliath ~ which is a totally different sort of story than the Philistines facing off against the Hebrew nation.
Someday we'll get a better story than the one about the Skolt narrowly escaping from the Indo-European cannibal tribe plodding around in the snow. There might even be such a story with meaning ~ I'm thinking here of the time the Swedes transported nearly the whole nation to America and abandoned them in the wilderness. Now that's meaning ~
The Germans imagined their ancestors to have arisen in the Baltic region ~ more likely they originated along the Danube though, but even earlier in the Western European "Ice Age Refugia" which is located just SW of the Pyrenees.
The Medieval use of German throughout the region was quickly squashed by the Swedish breakout in the late 1500s and early 1600s. They did kill a whopping huge load of Germans ~ so many in fact that virtually the entire male population had to be replaced with immigrants from other European countries at the conclusion of the 30 years war. That one item, in fact, resulted in a total ethnic replacement of the German population in the various German speaking states.
It would be like jacking up your car and driving a new one under it then driving around in that one.
I saw that one. Great.
Historically Western Europe wanted the buffer between themselves and Russia; the whole dynamic changed when the buffer started acting like a nation, and a modern industrialized one at that. The creation of Germany, a few years after the Austro-Prussian war (in which Prussia assumed leadership of the German states in Austria’s place), created an environment in which France, Britain, and Russia had to deal with a new power in Europe. One hundred years after bringing Germany to its knees in the First World War, Germany is now the head of the European Union.
The wedge between France & Britain was never more obvious than the French lack of enthusiam (to put it mildly) for a second war. The first Allied troops landing in N. Africa couldn’t be British, and even Americans that landed were gunned down by French troops determined to preserve their neutrality.
“What I think you need to do is get your nose out of the neo-nazi fairy tales and turn to more authoritative sources”
That’s very intelligent. You’ll believe what you want to believe; “authoritative” must mean they agree with your worldview.
The Ukrainians in the 1940s remembered Stalin’s murders of the 1930s; there would have been goodwill towards Martians if they showed up. These were people who knew Stalin, and preferred anything else. Until German reprisals drove them away, they were better off (unless you belonged to any group, including Jews, that were being murdered west of there).
Stalin had no use for them except as laborers as well.
Try to find a ‘Torpedo bombers’. Another nice Russian WWII movie on youtube.
The “Two-Ton Bomb” scene was pretty intense.
I am well aware of Soviet atrocities against Poles...I tried however not to let that knowledge detract from the film, these were men who were defending their country, and their families, these were men, who like the Germans, did not choose their leaders, but whose only choice to survive was to serve those leaders, and follow orders. And I don’t mean by that the “I was only following orders” as a defense. The members of the NKVD and the SS, who carried out the terrible crimes committed by both regimes, volunteered to be part of those acts. I am referring more to the common soldier of the Red Army who was fighting for the “Rodina”, and not for Stalin and the Communist Party.
wow you are right. just watched it. incredible
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