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Germany invades Poland beginning its blitzkrieg to the English Channel...
Well, technically, there was about an 8 month pause between the invasion and fall of Poland and the attack by Germany into France and the low countries.
But yes, it's a noteworthy date. Also of note (to me at least) is when Russia invaded eastern Poland a couple weeks later.
Today I was in Zwickau, a small industrial city in the state of Saxony in eastern Germany. It is a little over 1 hour by fast regional train from Leipzig, where I have been living since May.
While I was on the train, someone left a copy of today's local newspaper called the Freie Presse (Free Press) on the seat next to me. The headline news had the same stuff you might have read in a US newspaper, and some domestic news and politics from Germany. Then I turned to the local news section, and there were some black and white photos from Sept 12, 1944, 75 years ago today. It showed a photo of a nearby city of Plauen that had been bombed by a USAAF squadron, and the caption read "WW2 arrived in Plauen 75 years ago". There was also a photo of one of the air crews that participated in the bombing, and their B17.
It was an interesting and finely detailed article to read, and the conclusion of the article was that the city was amazingly lucky to have been hit by just one large bombing raid, at a cost of less than 200 civilian lives. It was nowhere near the scale of what happened not far to the east in Chemnitz or Dresden, where the cities were leveled. It was reassuring to see that the article did not try to sugar coat history or categorize the bombing as an unjustified attack.
Germany invades Poland beginning its blitzkrieg to the English Channel...
The invasion of Poland and the western invasions in 1940 were really two different events.
Hitler did not expect the United Kingdom and France to declare war over Poland and had to improvise his plans after they did so. While he had always considered France an implacable enemy of Germany, he still hadn't abandoned his long-held belief that the UK and Germany were natural allies. Hitler never understood the British at all. It wasn't until October that the plans to move the the Channel really began to take shape (and would change considerably until launched the following year).
Give credit for Germany for the self-realization that they were the bad guys in WWII. They don't argue that fact.
Japan on the other hand...
The articles I have read here on the 80th anniversary of the invasion of Poland have also been in the same tone. The general tone highlights the disaster it ultimately became not only for the countries that were invaded, but also for Germany. The generations since then have had to deal with the dark history of that era, and try to understand why it happened.
There is a proposal to build a monument in Berlin to the Polish victims of WW2, but many comments stated that a monument is almost too trivial for what happened, that is is not worthy enough. It gave me a flash back memory to the 1970s. I was in the US Army, stationed at Wildflecken in then West Germany near the border with East Germany. It is a remote rural area, a former military base of the German Army in WW2. On the edge of the military post, there was a small, secluded cemetery with hundreds of graves of displaced persons from Poland, mostly children, who were brought there as a place of refuge in the aftermath of WW2. Many became sick or were in bad health and did not survive. Poland paid a huge price and the victims are scattered far from their original homes, almost forgotten. I think it would be a fitting memorial to document and preserve all of the locations that are actual cemeteries or burial sites for those victims instead of building an artificial new monument.
Give credit for Germany for the self-realization that they were the bad guys in WWII. They don't argue that fact.
Japan on the other hand...
What about Japan? Article Nine of their post war constitution, an article that the Japanese people insisted be added, reads:
Quote:
Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.
That wasn't imposed upon them by General MacArthur, they came up with it themselves.
Every nation has it's cultural traditions and attitudes, and Japan interpreted WW II using, unsurprisingly, their own. They believed that their big mistake was hubris, that they were the most splendid people in the world when they were isolated, and that they erred by turning their backs on their special status by trying to imitate the western global colony empires.
It wasn't as satisfying an explanation to the west as would have been "We were wrong to be so aggressive and cause so much death and suffering", but it at least was an acknowledgement of the need to renounce what they had done.
Then they spent the '50's making and remaking atomic created Monster Stomps On Tokyo flicks as part of their atonement mentality. Japan being punished for their hubris over and over.
It isn't any different from how the US explains away what they did to the Indians. Sure, we killed them, drove them off their lands and confined them to small reservations where their traditional nomadic lifestyles would be impossible, but we were also spreading the benefits of Christianity and Democracy across this great land and establishing a beacon of hope for the rest of the world.
Oh I see now. Godzilla as a atonement figure for the Pacific War. That’s an interesting take on post war Japan.
Last edited by msgsing; 09-14-2019 at 10:43 AM..
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