Posted on 02/01/2015 2:57:53 AM PST by Paid_Russian_Troll
Over 9,000 people died in the Baltic Sea on January 30, 1945, in an attempt to evade the Red Army. The Wilhelm Gustloff was the largest shipwreck in history, but little is known about the catastrophe seven decades on.
At around 9 p.m. on January 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler was speaking to the German people. In the packed dining hall of the luxury liner "Wilhelm Gustloff," as in most of the rest of the country, a radio was broadcasting Hitler's address, but the thousands of refugees from Pomerania and East and West Prussia who had struggled onto the ship weren't listening to the Führer now.
They wanted one thing - to be rescued. Only very few, 1,252 to be precise, made it off the steamer alive, of the well over 10,000 - mostly women and children, but also navy sailors. The ship had been hit by three Soviet torpedoes within an hour; the temperature outside was minus 18 degrees Celsius.
The solace offered by the Wilhelm Gustloff was enormous for the passengers who boarded the ship at Gotenhafen. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians had wanted to embark on ship in the port near Gdansk, in what is today Poland. The Red Army was on their heels and their thoughts were of Nemmersdorf. It was the first village in German territory reached by the Soviets and there were already rumors circulating of the draconic revenge on the part of the Soviets for German war crimes. Only the navy could rescue them now.
(Excerpt) Read more at dw.de ...
I am all for treating POWs and other with as much respect and decency as possible because after the war these are people we may very well have to live with and animosity is no way to live. That said, I would never risk losing the war, or risk not doing what it takes to win one, just to be thought of a decent or civil. War is not decent. I want my enemies to fear me. War is about killing people and breaking things and neither of those things are of a civil world. I am not the first to say that war should be so unpleasant that belligerents will think twice before waging war.
I tend towards the St Thomas Aquinas goal. I avoid the Sherman's March to the Sea indiscriminate approach to warfare.
Since Thomas on, we strive to act morally in war. Not always succeeded, but we try. The others don't even try and make it a matter of unending national policy.
Having flown a jet a “Nuke” switch in it, its does make you think about such things. Would I have dropped? Of course, because we used a counter-force targeting strategy and not a counter-value approach. I am sure you know what that means.
Of course, you have the right to endorse slaughtering innocents wherever you find them, such as a family on a farm far away from a city or military installation, mow them down, kill them all.
I have the right to disagree morally .
IMHO, you are wrong.
Interesting name you have there, BTW. . . .
If "we" refers to you and me, I don't believe we have.
If "we" refers to the current administration, the response is "What you mean, 'we', al-Kemosabe?"
Nukes are the slaughtering of innocents. There is nothing legally rational about their use. They are simply an instrument of war; a threat that hopes to deter war. War is irrational.
P.s. My point was the US has a policy of ending the world as we know it where billions may die. That is every bit as legally irrational as this killing of 9,000 ship passengers. It only makes sense in the context of war.
Wow; looks great! Thanks
Paybacks are a bitch.
Goebbels asked “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?”
Germans said “Ja!’
Well, they got it!
If you ever saw the movie “Come and See” you will know why I have no sympathy.
City of Ruins - Warsaw 1945
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aGiurRbQ
Well it does seem to me the one thing the Allies managed to do is to forever quench the Germans’ thirst for war.
In 1942, my father, then a teen in Orlando, visited beaches on the Florida coast to the east and was shocked to find them littered with debris, oil, and tar from sunken ships.
Neither was the Soviet Union
That’s unimaginable today; we learn about those wars as though they are oceans away.
Then again, just a couple of miles from me are two sites destroyed by pro-German saboteurs during WWI - the Canadian Railway Car Co. in Lyndhurst NJ and Black Tom Island in Jersey City. Nothing remains of either site but memorial plaques.
My parents were originally from your area then. My mother grew up in Brooklyn, and my father grew up in Moonachie, New Jersey, close to Teterboro airport. Memory of the Black Tom explosion helped to prompt the internment of Japanese and other enemy aliens during WW II.
Moonachie in particular isn’t far from the site (which like Moonachie, also borders on the Meadowlands).
Because of those acts, a small rail bridge in my town had a small troop of soldiers guarding it. The little stationhouse, unused but still standing when I was younger (1970s), is now gone but the foundation is still visible.
The US had a real dilemna in WWI; there were a lot of German-Americans (and Americans themselves) who didn’t want the US to fight in that war. In fact, one of the towns near Moonachie is “Carlstadt”, a recognition of the number of Germans in the area.
In both WW I and II, US internal security benefited from a wave of patriotic sentiment that bolstered the loyalties of German Americans. In addition, before WW II, the Roosevelt Administration had cracked down hard on the Bund and shut down various German spy rings before the war.
Even at that, the Germans had some notable early espionage successes in stealing plans for the Norden bomb sight and for the main US submarine torpedo. Like the British, the Germans were unimpressed by the Norden, and they detected and corrected the defects in the US torpedo firing mechanism that bedeviled US submariners during the first half of the war in the Pacific.
I am glad you like it, too. So much were told about them and I thought it ‘s a shame that FR don’t have one.
I couldn’t imagine the security issues involved as we went to war with countries that had fed our “melting pot”; of course, it helped that back then there was no political correctness. If somebody’s last name indicated they MIGHT be a security threat, they were simply kept away from sensitive material (without fear of a lawsuit).
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