Posted on 10/13/2015 10:43:27 AM PDT by Perseverando
During World War II, 30,000 Jewish partisans fought in Eastern Europe, in their own combat units. In Western Europe, where anti-semitism among the conquered gentile population was less severe, Jews were able to participate as individuals in the national resistance, rather than having to fight in separate units. For example, in France, Jews amounted to less than one percent of French population, but comprised about 15 to 20 percent of the French Resistance. One of the most successful battles of the Jewish resistance was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Nearly every Jew who participated was eventually killed — but they were going to be killed anyway. By choosing to stand and fight, the Warsaw Jews diverted a significant amount of Nazis resources from battlefields elsewhere, thus hastening the Nazi defeat.
The following is based on my forthcoming book “The Morality of Self-Defense and Military Action: The Judeo-Christian Tradition,” which will be published in 2016 by Praeger.
Before the war, about 10 percent of Poland’s population was Jewish. In the Middle Ages, Poland had been a welcoming, tolerant and free nation, and many Jews emigrated there. But when Poland regained its independence in 1919, thanks to the Versailles Treaty, the nation degenerated into military dictatorship, and much of the population was antisemitic.
The Nazis took most of Poland in September 1939, but according to the terms of the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Soviet Union was allowed to take the eastern third of the nation. After the June 1941 German invasion of the U.S.S.R., all of Poland fell under German control.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
"Uprising" is probably the least accurate film made on the subject. The Nazis lost 17 men KIA. There are some scenes in that film in which the Germans sustain double that number of casualties in a handful of minutes. "Uprising" would have you believe it was a bloody fight for the Germans, rather than a methodical massacre of the ghetto inhabitants.
Already read it, after Vin Suprynowicz drew my attention to it.
It also occupies a chapter or two in Unintended Consequences.
Lots of folks confuse the 1943 Ghetto uprising with the much larger Warsaw uprising about 18 months later. You are correct as to the battle being discussed. Not a major drain on the Nazi resources at that time, and no real impact on the war.
The threat of the resistance was disproportionate to it’s effectiveness. At the end of WW2 it was estimated that the French resistance had killed about 2000 German soldiers, while sustaining tens of thousands of casualties. But killing all those Maquis required the commitment of large numbers of troops on the part of Germany, troops that were urgently needed elsewhere.
I still remember the uproar that Pauline Kael caused by giving Shoah a bad review! She really knew how to get attention.
Every Panzer division they kept tied up gave my father’s buddies an advantage. He was in the Army Infantry - N. Africa, Italy & Germany and was prepared to “charge Hell with a bucket of water” by the time he got out of basic training. - These Nazi fiends were killing people right and left and piling up the bodies several feet high for a distance of one eighth of a mile at just one of the camps. The Nazis NEEDED killing; and my dad was just one of the MEN who had the guts to do it! - He was raised tough as nails and taught to shoot as soon as he was old enough to aim a gun.
The fact that the Jewish uprising happened at all is a good deed in a naughty world. Always better to go down fighting but that takes enormous courage and self-sacrifice.
bmp
Bfl
I don't think Carson's saying gun control "caused" the Holocaust, exactly, more like "enabled" it, and I don't think you can argue against that. I doubt that Hitler woke up one day and realized "Hey, ve haf gun kontrol, letz haf a Holocaust!"
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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I never said or implied that the ghetto inhabitants died for nothing, but the brutal reality is that they were terribly massacred because they had essentially no weapons in the face of a numerically inferior, but exponentially better-equipped enemy. There is a far greater lesson in knowing and taking to heart what actually happened than in rewriting history. I'm sorry if your unchecked emotions cause you to do the latter.
People keep saying that the ghetto uprising lasted longer than the conquest of France, as if it were a worse fight -- my point with the casualties is that it was a different situation all together. The French got rolled, but they were at least able to fight. The ghetto defenders were hardly able to fight at all because most of them had nothing to fight WITH. All that most of them could do was hide in cellars and hope that they could come up behind a soldier and hit him with a rock.
"the bulk of the FIGHTERS in the Frehcn Resistance, albeit many were communist, WERE JEWISH"
If you weren't in the middle of a hissy-fit over imagined antisemitism on my part, you'd see that that proves my point.
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