Welcome to City-Data.com Forum!
U.S. CitiesCity-Data Forum Index
Go Back   City-Data Forum > General Forums > History
 [Register]
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
View detailed profile (Advanced) or search
site with Google Custom Search

Search Forums  (Advanced)
Reply Start New Thread
 
Old 06-19-2016, 09:50 AM
 
5,544 posts, read 8,291,796 times
Reputation: 11141

Advertisements

I have been watching a TV program on my over the air antenna, 'Une Village'. It deals with Nazi occupation and aryanization of a small french town during WWII.

It is interesting to see how the villagers handle the situation and decisions they make to live with the occupation. Some resist, especially the communist partisans, some comply and do what they can to keep body and soul together, and some are totally complicent and participatory.

The Germans tell the mayor they want 28 Jews to ship out and the mayor (with great conscience bending) finds 28 Jews. If he can find Jews who have evacuated from elsewhere they are chosen first since they are not 'our' Jews.

But a telling comment from a guy as to why he was collaborating. He said "They won, the war is over." This was after Dunkirk so he had a point. How far do you go to save your family when your country has lost the fight and isn't there for your defense?

As to Magda I believe she was so much a believer in the cause that her decision was made before it even became a time to make a decision. I think it is hard to make those decisions on the spot and you really make them before the time comes. You have committed to a course of action.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message

 
Old 06-19-2016, 05:44 PM
 
Location: San Diego CA
8,435 posts, read 6,818,616 times
Reputation: 16818
The children would probably have been reasonably safe if they were captured by the front line troops who actually assaulted Berlin. They were actively fighting, exhausted and moving rapidly from the suburbs into the city center. They could have been passed on to the Soviet political agents who were part of every combat unit that fought in Berlin. Used for political purposes and then perhaps released to an orphanage or some other facility.


The real barbarity began when the fighting troops moved out and were followed by service troops who were loosely disciplined, drunk, with time of their hands and inspired by Soviet propaganda to take revenge on civilians. There were many cases of young women and even children being raped and murdered.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-19-2016, 06:28 PM
 
Location: Round Rock, Texas
12,922 posts, read 13,254,089 times
Reputation: 13933
Interesting topic for me personally, because my first "girlfriend" was the daughter of a Nazi SS Captain. Her parents were apparently divorced in the last year of the war while she was still an infant in Bamberg (Bavaria).
During the postwar Allied occupation, her mom married a US Army sergeant and moved to America. We became friends in St. Louis in the mid 1950s (I was 12). She was raised as an American and regarded her stepdad as her father. Last I heard she was living in El Paso, Texas.

Trudy was one of the lucky ones.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-20-2016, 01:36 PM
 
Location: Independent Republic of Ballard
8,065 posts, read 8,325,306 times
Reputation: 6223
The danger of propaganda is that you end up believing in your own lies.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-21-2016, 12:37 PM
 
Location: New Mexico
4,793 posts, read 2,783,911 times
Reputation: 4920
Default Not even Lex Talionis

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ummagumma View Post
...

Btw, while the Russian army did commit many rapes and other atrocities, this was done in revenge for the mass murder, industrial scale looting and rape that the Nazis had committed in the occupied Soviet territories where burning alive the total population of an entire village - old people and children included - because of suspected partisan ties was commonplace and the numbers of such villages were in hundreds.

...
Yah, except that when the Soviets invaded Manchuria near the end of the PTO, they also raped & pillaged & murdered (Chinese & Manchurian & Japanese civilians, as well as Japanese combatants), even though the there was nothing to avenge. The Soviets had suffered terribly (from Germany). This last seems to be just some more carnage - maybe the feeling was What's a little more violence after the ETO?
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-21-2016, 01:53 PM
 
Location: Type 0.73 Kardashev
11,110 posts, read 9,770,079 times
Reputation: 40161
Quote:
Originally Posted by southwest88 View Post
Yah, except that when the Soviets invaded Manchuria near the end of the PTO, they also raped & pillaged & murdered (Chinese & Manchurian & Japanese civilians, as well as Japanese combatants), even though the there was nothing to avenge. The Soviets had suffered terribly (from Germany). This last seems to be just some more carnage - maybe the feeling was What's a little more violence after the ETO?
Then there's the fact that the very notion of taking 'revenge' against some unrelated third-party - ie, some German woman who has no connection whatsoever with the German platoon that wiped out your village, except for being from the same ethnic group and/or of the same nationality as that platoon - is highly dubious. One can only take 'revenge' in such a manner if one believes in collective guilt, which is to say that any crimes committed by one's group convey guilt upon all group members.

By that logic, a gay person from Orlando can get 'revenge' for the Pulse massacre by killing a Muslim from Long Island (where Omar Mateen was born) - which, of course, tortures the very definition of 'logic' to death.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-21-2016, 02:22 PM
 
1,535 posts, read 1,383,524 times
Reputation: 2099
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ummagumma View Post
The only Slavic group that the Nazis were more or less willing to incorporate in their future plans were the Czechs, although the question of their "Aryan" origin was left open.
Nazi attitudes twoards slavic peoples, like the attitude towards everyone else was pretty jumbled and changed as the war progressed.

For example, in the short lived Nazi empire, Slovaks were seen as somewhat allies and the Germans held the fighting ability of Croat units in high esteem.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-21-2016, 05:56 PM
 
Location: interior Alaska
6,895 posts, read 5,829,033 times
Reputation: 23410
I think we have well established that Goebbels was not motivated by the desire to protect her children from Soviet troops, so the premise of the OP's question can be dismissed as flawed. However, even if it wasn't, I still do not see that Goebbels' actions would be excusable or decent.

I am no apologist for the Soviet actions in the territories they occupied, far from it. I believe the high end estimate for how many German women and girls were attacked by Soviet troops is around 2 million. This is horrific, an obvious war crime, and the cause of incomprehensible suffering. But - as it relates to the OP's question - one must also consider the overall population figures of Germany at the time. As a post-war German, you were much more likely not to be raped or murdered by Soviets, than to be raped or murdered by Soviets. The attacks were not carried out in the systematic way that, say, the Nazis rounded up Jews and other minorities for extermination. They were haphazard. While yes, this very haphazardness may contribute to the climate of terror, one was not guaranteed victimization. Surely murdering children to avoid the chance of suffering is not a sympathetic act. It would perhaps be one thing if the reavers were on the doorstep, pounding to come in, but they were not. Goebbels had time and options to take other protective steps.

Bottom line is, Goebbels' children had possibilities, and she took those possibilities away. They were killed by sick Nazi ideology as surely as the other victims of the Third Reich were.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-21-2016, 10:27 PM
 
Location: Southeast Michigan
2,851 posts, read 2,289,174 times
Reputation: 4546
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cryptic View Post
Nazi attitudes twoards slavic peoples, like the attitude towards everyone else was pretty jumbled and changed as the war progressed.

For example, in the short lived Nazi empire, Slovaks were seen as somewhat allies and the Germans held the fighting ability of Croat units in high esteem.
And yet in their propaganda they portrayed Croats as part of the "subhuman" peoples. Not sure about Slovaks.

The somewhat "special treatment" of Czechs (relative to other Slavic peoples), I believe, was due to the fact that Bohemia and Moravia had been integrated with the German speaking world since the High Middle Ages, had about 1/3rd of population who identified as ethnic Germans, and a whole lot of people with at least some German blood in them, so there was really no telling who was more of a Slav vs more of a German. Hermann Goering was even allowed to marry a Czech actress by Hitler himself.

Anyway, I am going off on a tangent here... apologies.
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
 
Old 06-22-2016, 09:20 AM
 
1,535 posts, read 1,383,524 times
Reputation: 2099
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ummagumma View Post
And yet in their propaganda they portrayed Croats as part of the "subhuman" peoples. Not sure about Slovaks.
Slovaks were technically "sub humans" as well, but that concept was not really applied to them as they were a German ally of sorts. Likewise, Croats were also technically "sub humans", but as with Slovaks, their status as a German ally and the fighting ability of Croat eastern front volunteers kept the concept from being applied.

Other Slavic subgroups that the Nazis never applied the "sub human" idealogy towards were Russian and Ukrainian Cossacks, Silesian Poles and to a degree Kashubian Poles (said to have Germanic cultural influences).
Reply With Quote Quick reply to this message
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.

Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.


Reply
Please update this thread with any new information or opinions. This open thread is still read by thousands of people, so we encourage all additional points of view.

Quick Reply
Message:

Over $104,000 in prizes was already given out to active posters on our forum and additional giveaways are planned!

Go Back   City-Data Forum > General Forums > History

All times are GMT -6. The time now is 12:20 AM.

© 2005-2024, Advameg, Inc. · Please obey Forum Rules · Terms of Use and Privacy Policy · Bug Bounty

City-Data.com - Contact Us - Archive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 - Top