Crimes Unspoken is the first historical account to expose the true extent of sexual violence in Germany at the end of the war, offering valuable new insight into a key period of 20th century history.
I don't think all of it is nazi propaganda either. It was helped a lot by anti communist propaganda from the US after the war, because they needed a strong ally in Western Germany to combat the threat of the Soviet Union.
And this is why a lot of the Germans that in a just World should hang, evaded the noose. Like Werner von Braun, countless Wehrmacht doctors, countless scientists, and lots of generals. Lots of people with very long sentences, got theirs shortened, and eventually released even before the shortened sentences.
Basically, the West needed Germany, and this is why we glossed over a lot of their crimes, and focused more on SS and the Holocaust, than their other crimes against humanity. We even bought into a lot of the common Nazi narrative before and during the war, to justify this.
And this brings me to the 20th of July plot:
It was a story we needed; German generals in opposition to Hitler, gave their lives in an attempt to overthrow the Nazi regime and end the suffering. It's what most of us think about the plotters, those were the good guys, and if they'd succeed, the world would be better off. I used to think that too, until recently.
So, let's look into the 9 central members of the bomb plot. The 8 that are certainly most highly regarded as the heroes Germany needed, but had too few of:
Hans Oster: This guy really belongs on a list of heroes. He did in fact oppose Nazi policy for a long time, and even warned the Netherlands of the upcoming invasion. Dismissed for helping jews avoiding arrest. Great German, human, and officer.
Carl Friedrich Goerdeler: Also belongs on the list of revered heroes. He opposed the slaughter of Soviet POWs.
Friedrich Olbricht: The brain behind the plot. Participated in invading Poland, but otherwise, a pretty decent fellow.
Werner von Haeften: Injured in Russia. Can't find anything proof he did atrocities. But his co-conspirator and uncle, Walther von Brauchits, supported the murder of Polish POWs and the ethnic cleansing of non-Germans in the Lebensraum. Doesn't mean von Haeften supported the same, and his brother was certainly one of the good guys, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, and consider him a good guy too.
Erwin von Witzleben: Didn't take part in the war in the East, and criticized the invasion of the Soviet Union. Took part in the battle of France. Seems like a reasonably good man.
Ludwig Beck: Against the more radical elements of the Nazi movement, but supportive of Hitler until 1938. Supported scrapping the Versailles treaty, and massive rearming of Germany.
That's six of them. I think they all deserve their place in history as people that stood up to the atrocities. They probably deserve whatever monuments they got. But let's check out the more problematic, and coincidentally more famous ones:
Claus von Stauffenberg: He planted the bomb, got portrayed by Tom Cruise, got executed after saying "long live sacred Germany". Probably the guy most people can name, and is considered a hero by most people today. He was not particularly enthusiastic of nazi ideology, apart from the militaristic aspects of nazism. Although he supported anti jewish sentiment early on, he changed somewhat after the Night of the Long Knives. He voiced opposition to the treatment of the jews during Barborossa. As most Prussian aristocrats, he fully supported the invasion, colonization, and ethnic cleansing of Poland. Actual quote from letter home from the invasion of Poland: "The population is an unbelievable rabble; there are a lot of Jews and a lot of cross-breeds." He was one of the few who started off as being in support of the Nazis, but then saw the treatment of people in the East, and gradually changed his mind. It took a long time, however, and he wouldn't have anything to do with people trying to recruit him for anti-Hitler resistance until the Sixth army surrendered at Stalingrad.
Erich Hoepner: When fighting in France, he issued orders that mistreatment of prisoners would result in court martial. SS troops from the division Totenkopf, who was assigned to the army corps he had command over, committed the Le Paradis massacre. He tried to get an investigation going, to court martial them for the atrocities, but it went nowhere. So far, so good.
But then we come to Operation Barbarossa. When Hitler laid out his plan for about 200 higher ranking Wehrmacht officers of the impending "ideological war of annihilation against the Soviet Union", he was in full support.
On the 4th of May, 1941, he issued this directive to the 4th Panzer group: "The war against Russia is an important chapter in the struggle for existence of the German nation. It is the old battle of Germanic against Slav peoples, of the defence of European culture against Muscovite-Asiatic inundation, and the repulse of Jewish-Bolshevism. The objective of this battle must be the destruction of present-day Russia and it must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron will to exterminate the enemy mercilessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the present Russian-Bolshevik system are to be spared."
Keep in mind, this is before the Commissar Order and the Barbarossa Decree. And he did it all on his own initiative.
After Barbarossa started, his previous reluctance to the SS and their methods stopped. The 4th Panzer group had a close knit relationship with Einsatzgruppe A, and cooperated in full when it came to the mass murders committed in areas controlled by him. Einsatzgruppe A didn't even have to do all of their atrocities themselves, as the 4th Panzer group did well enough on their own in massacring villages, rounding up jews, and killing off POWs, under Hoepner's orders and active encouragement.
Henning von Tresckow: Started off supporting nazism, because of his opposition to the Versailles treaty. Did not support the Kristallnacht. Spoke out against the murder of jews in the east on some occasions. The main brain behind the 20th July plot.
But, Heuaktion. Alfred Rosenberg, who would later be convicted during the Nuremberg trials, and hanged, initially proposed the Heuaktion in 1944. The plan was originally aimed towards kidnapping children aged 15 to 17, to work as slave labor for the German war industry. Tresckow signed the order to start kidnapping children aged 10 and upwards. He was chief of staff of the 2nd Army, and they carried out the kidnappings. The children that could be "germanized" were sent as forced labor on farms, while most of them were "racially inferior" and sent to factories, concentration camps, and extermination camps.
So, did the plotters really want to stop the war? Most of the resistance towards Hitler and the more radical elements of the nazis, seems to be related to the incompetence of the Nazis, rather than the evil committed by the nazis. They wanted peace with the western allies, but still saw it as a necessity to fight in the east, with brutal methods. Unconditional surrender was not part of their plan. They wanted to surrender to the Western Allies, before facing the Soviets. Some saw the brutality, and objected to it. But most of them saw the plot as an opportunity to turn the war around on the Soviets. Overall, the plotters were opposed to the extreme measures taken against the jews, but they're awfully quiet about the carnage on the Eastern Front. Not very much opposition to the Generalplan Ost and it's consequences. Most of them still believed in the Greater Germany, with the expulsion/eradication of Slavs from the eastern territories. As with the starvation of Soviet POWs.
BLUF - No, we are not influenced by Nazi Propaganda in any meaningful way.
I think to have any balance on this, you also need to look at the Allied treatment of conquered Japan, War Crimes Trials and Recovery. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal is almost unknown today while the Nuremburg Trials are well known. I think only about 6 Japanese military and civilian leaders were executed. The world went very light on Japan (except China*). If you look at both of the major WWII aggressors, Japan was far more inhumane, brutal, Evil if you will than the Nazi's. Yet the Japanese got of light.
I think there was a good deal of justice people felt needed to be handed out after the war, and the Nuremburg Trials came first, by the time they were over, most folks wanted to move on and get the War finally done.
IMO, the Soviets were far more brutal than the Western Allies on average and post war the Soviets probably led the charge of how brutal and awful the Western Allies were as a way of insulating themselves against criticism. I also think it's a little hard to sort out post war propagandas influence on our opinions because we went directly into the Cold War and that was rife with propaganda back and forth.
Lots of reasons I think the Japanese got off light:
They surrendered early, compared to the Germans. The Allies didn't need to set foot on the Japanese mainland, and they didn't need to take Tokyo. Germany, on the other hand, didn't surrender until a week after Hitler died, and Berlin had fallen.
Most of their war criminals died before they could be judged. On the islands where they had a chance to perform war crimes, they tended to die, rather than surrender.
The Chinese could take measures themselves to prosecute the Japanese, so the Americans wouldn't have to. Meanwhile, a lot of the really awful nazis, managed to flee to the west, which led a lot more of their war criminals into western hands and prosecution.
And I really wouldn't call the Japanese far more brutal and evil than the Nazis. They were awful, that's true, human experiments, cannibalism, their treatment of prisoners, and particularly their treatment of the Chinese.
But one of the events that actually got one of their leaders hanged, the Bataan death march, was pretty much par for the course when it came to Germany/Wehrmacht on the eastern front. Germany treated Western prisoners of war pretty well, compared to how the Japanese treated western prisoners of war, but they were certainly not any less brutal than Japan overall, considering most of Germany's war was in the east.
I was reading this thread earlier today and dozed off, day dreaming of a Greater Fatherland that conquered the Russian Wastes and populated the vast continent with blonde haired, blue eyed Aryan peoples. I dreamed of a vast change on the planet as what was once barren steppes became veritable Shires of green oasis.
We could have changed the earth together. Now we are doomed and our planet along with it unless something changes.
TheReal_ND wrote:I was reading this thread earlier today and dozed off, day dreaming of a Greater Fatherland that conquered the Russian Wastes and populated the vast continent with blonde haired, blue eyed Aryan peoples. I dreamed of a vast change on the planet as what was once barren steppes became veritable Shires of green oasis.
We could have changed the earth together. Now we are doomed and our planet along with it unless something changes.
I wouldn't glamorize the Nazis too much, if I were you. Remember, some of the first victims of the Nazis, were other Nazis.
TheReal_ND wrote:I was reading this thread earlier today and dozed off, day dreaming of a Greater Fatherland that conquered the Russian Wastes and populated the vast continent with blonde haired, blue eyed Aryan peoples. I dreamed of a vast change on the planet as what was once barren steppes became veritable Shires of green oasis.
We could have changed the earth together. Now we are doomed and our planet along with it unless something changes.
I wouldn't glamorize the Nazis too much, if I were you. Remember, some of the first victims of the Nazis, were other Nazis.
And people who didn't live in houses.
For legal reasons, we are not threatening to destroy U.S. government property with our glorious medieval siege engine. But if we wanted to, we could. But we won’t. But we could.
Officials at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum have described how they were subjected to a wave of “hate, fake news and manipulations” as a result of the controversy surrounding a contentious Holocaust speech law passed by Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party earlier this year.
The campaign of disinformation and abuse at the hands of Polish nationalists has raised concerns about pressure being exerted on official guides at the site in southern Poland, after the home of one foreign guide was attacked and supporters of a convicted antisemite filmed themselves repeatedly hectoring their guide during a visit to the camp in March.
Conceived in part as a means to prevent facilities established by Poland’s German occupiers from being described as “Polish death camps”, the legislation, which criminalises the false attribution to the Polish state or nation of complicity in the crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, prompted a furious reaction in Israel and elsewhere amid concerns it could be used to restrict open discussion of Poland’s wartime history.
This in turn provoked an angry backlash from nationalist and pro-government media in Poland, many of whom accused the museum – which administers the site, conducts historical research, and trains and licenses official guides – of deliberately downplaying the fate of the approximately 74,000 non-Jewish Polish prisoners who perished in the camp, by focusing exclusively on its Jewish victims.
For legal reasons, we are not threatening to destroy U.S. government property with our glorious medieval siege engine. But if we wanted to, we could. But we won’t. But we could.
For decades, Polish society avoided discussing the killing of Jews by civilians or denied that anti-Semitism motivated the slayings, blaming all atrocities on the Germans.
A turning point was the publication in 2000 of a book, "Neighbors," by Polish-American sociologist Jan Tomasz Gross, which explored the murder of Jews by their Polish neighbors in the village of Jedwabne. The book resulted in widespread soul-searching and official state apologies.
But since the conservative and nationalistic Law and Justice party consolidated power in 2015, it has sought to stamp out discussions and research on the topic. It demonized Gross and investigated whether he had slandered Poland by asserting that Poles killed more Jews than they killed Germans during the war.
Holocaust researchers have collected ample evidence of Polish villagers who murdered Jews fleeing the Nazis.
According to one scholar at Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, of the 160,000-250,000 Jews who escaped and sought help from fellow Poles, about 10 percent to 20 percent survived. The rest were rejected, informed upon or killed by rural Poles, according to the Tel Aviv University scholar, Havi Dreifuss.
At Auschwitz, however, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki stressed the Poles who helped Jews risking their own lives, noting that some 7,000 had been recognized by Yad Vashem but suggesting that the Polish sacrifices have not been acknowledged adequately.
"Jews, Poles, and all victims should be guardians of the memory of all who were murdered by German Nazis. Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a Polish name, and Arbeit Macht Frei is not a Polish phrase," Morawiecki said later on Twitter.
Yad Vashem issued a statement Saturday night opposing the Polish legislation and trying to put into historical context the "complex truth" regarding the Polish population's attitude toward its Jews.
"There is no doubt that the term 'Polish death camps' is a historical misrepresentation," the Yad Vashem memorial said. "However, restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people's direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion."
For legal reasons, we are not threatening to destroy U.S. government property with our glorious medieval siege engine. But if we wanted to, we could. But we won’t. But we could.
