Posted on 11/15/2004 2:15:17 AM PST by LouAvul
The Soviet Union.
I read a little about these camps a few years ago. TX and AZ had their share of these camps as well as GA.
SS soldiers and party members were segregated from other prisoners- their life was not so swell here at times. The general population were often conscripts, and by the time they were showing up in large numbers, toward the end of the war, they were in rough shape.
Some of the more imaginitive ones plotted elaborate escape schemes on the boat ride over. But after a week on trains going west, many just gave up. Few had any idea how enormous the United States is.
The military put them to work in agriculture and such, but were allowed all sorts of diversions. Orchestras, theater, and if memory serves even a radio station at one TX camp. Many prisoners remarked that they had never eaten so well in their lives outside of major holidays, and not at all in recent years.
One of my German professors had been captured and sent to one of these camps. He told me once that there were many shocks and surprises in the trip from battlefield to CONUS. But what really stuck in his mind was the train...they had so much space inside, he couldn't believe he and his comrades could each take up 2-3 seats if they wanted to. But he didn't, because he didn't want to put his feet on the seat opposite his own and get it dirty.
S'funny the stuff that sticks in your mind.
Well in some respects one could say ... FRANCE. Yes France.
The Treaty of Versailles, pretty much authored by France, bankrupted Germany after WWI which created the ensuing anarchy and caused the power vacuum that led to the rise of the NSDAP (nazi party). And France received the greatest benefits from the treaty over all other allied countries.
Then consider the fact that Germany didn't even start WWI but was 'punished' the most and you have one po'd country.
"Dulce et decorum, pro patria mori est".
I have always thought it a mistake to confuse the honorable service of soldiers with the regimes they are often forced to serve.
Brave and honorable men exist in all countries, however unworthy the leaders or causes they may serve.
I imagine it takes the same guts to drop onto a Belgian frontier fortress in 1940 or crash land a glider under fire onto Maleme airfield on Crete in 1941 as it did to jump into the Kanev bridgehead or seize the bridges at Arnhem, Eindhoven and the third Dutch city, the name of which I've forgotten, just to use three examples from WWII, of German, Soviet and American, English and Free Polish airborne ops.
Many American "heroes" were anti-Jew. Henry Ford, of Ford Motors fame, was so anti-jew that he published a newspaper dedicated to jew hating. Charles Linburg, who flew the "Spirit of 76" also hated the Jews.
No, they didn't put them in concentration camps, but there was a lot of hatred here. That is why FDR was so slow to get directly involved in the war...he wasn't anti-jew, but a large portion of the country was.
The Luftwaffe also trains in the US. They have F-4 Phantoms and Tornado fighter bombers based in the US. Hundreds of troops are in support.
Some men had no alternative honorable choice but to fulfill their obligation as a citizen to answer the call of a draft then, as a soldier drafted into service, their military duties.
It happened much the same way in the South during the WONA.
" These men may have fought "bravely" and so what? They may deserve a grudging respect for being good fighters but they earned no "honor" and do not deserve any at this late date "
It's easy to tar these mostly footsoldiers with the evil policies of an evil regime. But of course, it is simply wrong to deny Germans the opportunity to honor their war dead.
That you would deny them this speaks volumes, and by the way, your way is and has been repudiated by history many times.
The neuremberg trials were about finding and punishing war criminals, which it did reasonably effectively.
Apparently, you would have every German punished as a war criminal for all eternity. It was your thinking that precipitated the reparations disaster in the wake of world war I that spawned Hitler.
I'm sure you, like many folks here, also think that honoring Confederate soldiers is tantamount to treason in the modern age, which is equally wrong and misguided.
It's not about hate, it's about a fundamental pillar of Western Civilization, for better or for worse, that allows for the clash of different national interests yet the integration of the defeated into a productive, hopefully more peaceful post-war world.......
You're correct in more ways than you may know.
In the post the WWI anarchy in Germany the Communists almost came to power. It was the Nazis or the Commies and the Nazis won. All those old film clips on the History Channel of the SA beating up 'citizens', well those were Communists, not your average Wolfgang Von Citizen.
Can you imagine the scenario if Stalin's agents were successful? All of Europe would have been Communist in the 1930's and would have been one big gulag. And all those nice French Resistance fighters - they were communists too. And the Spanish Revolution, same thing - communists. That entire American Lincoln Brigade that fought in Spain were communists also.
(I HATE communists)
The only Europeans worth rooting for in WWII weren't even Europeans - they were British.
...
Good point. Even President Wilson was against the Versailles Treaty, knowing it would sow the seeds of another war. But that's the French for you, look at any disaster in World History and the French's fingerprints will be all over it. Not to condone Hitler or anything, but France does deserve much of the blame for creating the atmosphere that made WWII possible.
"Charles Linburg, who flew the "Spirit of 76" also hated the Jews."
I bet I can guess the school grades you got in both English and History...
Yeah, that's about it :-)
Well except for the Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians too - but FDR screwed that pooch by 'giving' them to Stalin.
FDR is still detested for that by many from those countries. My FIL from Lithuania was one.
They(by and large)fought for The Fatherland!
Eh?
Is this a joke?
Disgraceful.
The Poles saved Europe from Communism in 1920 with the "Miracle of the Vistula." Had the Soviets won that battle, they pretty much would have had free reign on the rest of Europe. Poland never surrendered to the Nazis, their pilots were critical to the Battle of Britain, they fought in North Africa, on D-Day, and at Monte Cassino. And what was their reward? To get sold out to Stalin at Yalta, and forced to endure 40+ years of Soviet domination. At least the "losers" got the Marshall Plan, Poland got zilch, zero, nada!
And remember that after the invasion of Poland (which was a "staged" incident) Britain and France declared war on Germany. Not the other way around....
There were only small border skirmishes for a while until Germany invaded France BUT in the German mindset THEY declared war on them.
If you can try to read some papers from the actual time period and read what they actually wrote in the dailys back then. Highly interesting and you get a great perspective about what the average person/newspaper guys knew back then.
One of my favorites is the day the first atomic bomb was dropped. Headline was something like "Atomic Bomb dropped: Size of a Pea harnesses power of 1,000,000 regular bombs" and then they speculated about it.
Remember, only through history books and the information from all sides do we know "The rest of the story"... The average person had NO way of doing so...
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