70th anniversary of Aushwitz liberation by the Red Army (assassin, crimes, Russian)
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no argument against that.
yet what Churchill achieved was bringing down a monster and introduced a bigger one, and happily handed him half of the world.
So, basically, in your alternative universe, Stalin was worse than Hitler because he was a Commie. I suppose all those "innocent" Germans also rationalized their support for Hitler the same way.
That's an attitude born of pure hatred. The Germans didn't do anything to deserve the indiscriminate rape and pillage by the Soviets. The real travesty is not a single Russian was charged with war crimes. There are hundreds of thousands of elderly rapists who will never pay for their crime.
When you support a war-mongering monster, you reap what you sow.
I'm always amazed at how supposedly little support Hitler had among "the German populace", but how he never ran out of henchmen to do his butchery or even soldiers to carry out his war plans until the very end of the war. The conspirators who tried to assassinate Hitler did so only because they thought Germany was going to be defeated, not because they disagreed with or were horrified by what he'd done to civilians in Poland, the USSR, or anywhere else in Europe.
I happen to subscribe to HBO and they have a really good documentary on the concentration camps called Night will Fall that they are showing tonight and it's also available on OnDemand.
In my old homestead community virtually everyone served in the war. In the fifties it was still fresh in everyones mind as virtually every family lost someone, as Canada entered so much earlier and saw so much action.
With these places it sure makes their personal sacrifice look worthwhile. Lest we forget.
Well that and the complete and utter devastation the Germans levelled upon the Russians wherever they set foot on Russian/Soviet territory. I don't condone what the Soviets did to the German civilians and it was often just as brutal as anything the Germans did, but I do understand why the Russians did it.
As a 25 year old American, I hadn't heard about this. Just read this and feel pretty ashamed of my country and the Allied forces in general. If I was Russian I'd feel a lot worse.
I cannot accept that all of these women aged 12-60 deserved to be raped and murdered. There is no excuse or justification for that. We hated the Germans for being so brutal and animalistic, then we go and pull the same exact crap. The concentration camps weren't even shut down after we discovered them, we just filled them up with Germans and did the same thing. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
That's an attitude born of pure hatred. The Germans didn't do anything to deserve the indiscriminate rape and pillage by the Soviets. The real travesty is not a single Russian was charged with war crimes. There are hundreds of thousands of elderly rapists who will never pay for their crime.
I do not condone what Russians soldiers did when they marched into Germany in 1945. The rape, pillage, and murders committed are difficult to even read about. On the contrary, I have the greatest sympathy for innocent German civilians who got this treatment from Russian soldiers.
Yet, to make a comment like this in isolation is to tell less than a "half-truth". I would call it a lie by omission.
Approximately, twenty-five million Russians died in World War II. That's an estimate. No one will ever know the exact total. Many died from starvation. Others were direct casualties of the unprovoked German invasion of 1941. Stalin may have been a butchering monster, but his people were not and certainly did not deserve what the Germans did to them.
Perhaps, two million Russians were carted off by the Germans to work as virtual slaves in German factories during World War II. Most of these people never made it back home.
Over a million Russians died in German POW camps. Most of the deaths were simply the result of not providing the most basic things that human beings need to live: food; shelter; and medical care.
The Soviet Union was decimated by what the Germans did. As they retreated, German soldiers deliberately carried out a "scorched-earth" policy destroying farms, industry, and anything of economic value to the Russians. The USSR took years trying to recover from this devastation.
There are truthful accounts of Russians being used by the Germans for medical experiments. One popular experiment was to force a prisoner into ice cold water to see how long it would take him to die of hypothermia.
Nowhere near this number of people were butchered by Russians. Germans were murdered and women were raped by the thousands. Yet, I submit that what the Russians did to the Germans pales when compared to what the Germans did to their own people.
Two wrongs will never make a right. However, after behaving the way they did in the USSR, it should come as scant surprise to the Germans that the soldiers of the Red Army were likely to behave any differently than they did.
what did "German citizens" do to deserve anything? They had no control over what their government did.
Yes, "liberated" by the red army. Stalin (with the help of Churchill) ended using Germans as slave labourers, and repatriated millions of Germans from homes they had for centuries, among whom millions died.
Nothing to celebrate.
I agree that there's nothing to celebrate. What is there to celebrate at the end of any war? Both sides suffer irreparable damage. But I think it's wrong to say German citizens "had no control over what their government did."
Hitler didn't forcibly take over the government of that country. He was ELECTED. He was very popular. He might have been reviled by many, but they were not the majority. After the war it seemed that every German claimed to have hated Hitler. They may have GROWN to hate him, but he and his minions were put in office by German citizens who loved his point of view and his plans for nation-building. You can't have your armies forcibly take over other countries and not stop and think, "Is this right?" You can't have entire segments of the population "disappeared" from their homes and their businesses and no one notices. Germans who "didn't know" about the extermination of Jews, Communists, homosexuals, Romanies, etc., were engaging in willful ignorance. That happens. It even happens here. Americans' ignorance of what their government is doing in the name of We the People is astounding.
Around half the Jews that died during the Holocaust came from this region.
You claimed that the Soviets sent the Polish Jews to the Germans. Do you have some evidence of that?
AFAIK, the Soviets under Stalin did NOT single out groups of people to be exterminated based on ethnicity or religion, but rather on their opposition to Stalinist policies. It seems likely to me that Polish Jews killed between Sept 1939 and June, 1941 would have more likely been killed because they were resisting the Soviet invaders than simply because they were Jews. That would have happened to non-Jewish Poles as well.
The Holocaust came to Soviet controlled Poland in June, 1941, BTW.
[quote=Linda_d;38255861]You claimed that the Soviets sent the Polish Jews to the Germans. Do you have some evidence of that?
AFAIK, the Soviets under Stalin did NOT single out groups of people to be exterminated based on ethnicity or religion, but rather on their opposition to Stalinist policies. It seems likely to me that Polish Jews killed between Sept 1939 and June, 1941 would have more likely been killed because they were resisting the Soviet invaders than simply because they were Jews. That would have happened to non-Jewish Poles as well.
The Holocaust came to Soviet controlled Poland in June, 1941, BTW.[/QUOTE]
Here you go. Look up each town in this link, where they were & where they are now. It's dated with a start date of Sept 1st, 1939.
If you look closely, you'll see my handle is the first city listed.
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