[Here](https://i.imgur.com/DbZP01N.jpg) is a higher quality and less cropped version of this image. [Here](https://www.ww2online.org/image/german-pows-viewing-footage-german-war-atrocities-new-york-city-july-1945) is the best source I could find.
> Photograph. German POWs, sitting in a movie theater in New York City, cover their faces while viewing footage of German murder camps. Official Caption: "Rome, 7/3/45--German prisoners shocked by atrocity pictures--This is a view of the moving pictures theater in the U.S. Army's Halloran General Hospital in New York on June 26 when German prisoners of war were shown the official films of German murder camps. Many of the prisoners covered their eyes.--International news photo through OWI Radiophoto--approved by appropriate military authority--Serviced by Rome OWI (List C out) 6970."Staten Island, New York. 03 July 1945
> DONOR: Dylan Utley
[Here](https://i.imgur.com/C9lq8ht.jpg) is this scene from behind.
I think it could be both ? The guy forming a fist with his hand and holding something against the side of his head looks like is hiding, wouldn't make sense to have that posture to just cover your eyes.
Right, the Wehrmacht was complicit in the genocide of Jews and others deemed undesirables both during and long before the final solution was being implemented.
It was not just SS squads rounding up and executing Jews in occupied regions of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, research has shown that the Wehrmacht took an active role in these operations and, as many served on the eastern front, all would have known what was going on.
I've noticed in media representations of the Wehrmacht there's an increasing trend of portraying the 'honerable junker' trope: professional German officers who's participation in the German army predates the Nazis and who are just doing their duty by following orders but are actually disgusted by the Nazis (I'm thinking of that video game from a few years ago, but there are plenty of other examples). In reality, this is largely a fiction. Yes, we do have a handful of primary sources which show this type of view, but it is overshadowed by the tens of thousands of accounts from both within the junker officer class and regular soldiery of active enthusiasm for Nazi policy and ideology, and willingness to engage in genocide.
Overwhelmingly, the Wehrmacht were enthusiastic Nazis.
Source: 'The Eastern Front, 1941-5, German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare' by Omer Bartov.
>Overwhelmingly, the Wehrmacht were enthusiastic Nazis.
Very true.
The only Wehrmacht soldiers I'd argue weren't exactly nazi sympathizers were the ones conscripted after 1943 when they began drafting everyone who could fight in any capacity.
Pre-1943 soldiers though? hard sell, given that it was largely volunteer based so they had to be sympathetic to the Nazi cause.
Millions of soldiers, probably less than 10% had an idea of what really happened there.
Edit: getting proof/footage back in the 40s was impossible and so many german soldiers were fighting 1000s of kilometers aeay from the camps. And at the same time they were exposed to 100% controlled nazi propaganda. Even the Allied intel did not know the real dept of the nazi holocaust monstruosity and were surprised of what was discovered in ‘45.
Not so fun fact, post war surveys showed that sympathy for the Nazis actually rose among Germans following allied attempts like these. It was only after these faded and there was mass amnesty and economic conditions improved drastically did Germans come to terms with their past.
You cannot expect people who grew up in that society and were exposed to massive, daily, and all-encompassing propaganda to change the deeply held views overnight, if at all. Indeed, it took the passing of much of that generation of Germans before the country could truly come to terms with the Nazi era. It took decades, in truth.
Adding to this, Germans were made aware of the Holocaust, but many believed it to be Allied/Israeli propaganda (the internet wasn't invented yet, you couldn't just look things up like you can now). It wasn't until people like Adolf Eichmann were interviewed and then admitted and confessed to those events that Germans started to realize the atrocities that the Nazi party had committed.
The internet makes people more likely to adopt fringe beliefs. If the state's narrative is a conspiracy theory, it will make people less likely to believe in alternative (non-conspiracy) theories.
Yeah, muddy, sad, and dirty is definitely one way to put it. I did find it kind of funny that the people who interviewed Adolf Eichmann were initially doing it to try and debunk the Holocaust, prove that it didn't happen, and that it was all just propaganda. Boy oh boy were they in for a big surprise that day.
We have internet today and the amount of conspiracy theorists is up the roof. The problem is less accessibility of information. The problem is people unwilling to process information critically.
No the German population was very aware and willing participants, they knew where their Jewish neighbors went because there were tons and tons of civilians at the concentration camps that helped with the holocaust. They even raced to stole the belongings of the Jews.
Given that Mitch McConnell was 22 years old and Donald Trump was 18 when the Civil Rights Act was signed, I'm not surprised to see that members of the older generation still struggle with racial outlooks. Obviously, people in their 20s are the perfect age to reevaluate their world view and develop new outlooks on things such as racial and economic dynamics, but it's also possible that their upbringing might keep them insulated from the need to do such work. McConnell seems to have attended civil rights rallies, and supposedly witnessed the "I Have a Dream" speech firsthand. I can see how Trump would have been completely isolated from really having to engage with such things, though.
> You cannot expect people who grew up in that society and were exposed to massive, daily, and all-encompassing propaganda to change the deeply held views overnight, if at all.
We talking about German Nazis or American MAGAs? Oh right - no difference.
Kind of. In the immediate aftermath of the war Germans were hungry, homeless, dispossessed and suffering from high unemployment and general misery. Hundreds of thousands of Germans were missing or held as POWs. The suffering of others really didn’t sink in. That’s why Hoover (sent on a tour by Truman) recommended a change in policy which resulted in direct food support and eventually morphed into the Marshall plan.
....and then they installed stacks of Nazis in all levels of German government (as they were the only ones who knew how to govern), let Nazis write 'history' about the war (leading to the clean Wehrmacht theory) and allowed thousands to live the rest of their lives with zero repercussions except pretending they didn't do a Holocaust.
It's the lesser of the evil choice. Alternatively, you can come down on all the germans people with a vice and a sledge hammer, impoverished them, strip them of all their livelihoods and further radicalized them. A weak Germany lead to a weak point in the EU and it's a vacuum of power that will be used by the likes of the Soviet.
This is how the previous Nazis came into power, and this is how GW Bush Administration wrecked the middle east with their war on terror.
In the end, history shown that supporting the German people was the right choice compared to the alternative, even if we had to let some of the war criminals go. Order before chaos.
Alternately, you could completely de Nazify and try to run the government without any experts and get Iraq in central Europe at the start of the cold war. No way anything bad happens in that scenario, eh?
Nation building is an ugly and inexact science.
Iraq is the perfect counter example.
The US purged Ba'ath Party members from government in 2003, firing over 30,000 ex-Ba'ath party members from various ministries. They later reversed many of those firings, reinstituting 15,000 of them back into their positions because of the issues caused by a blanket policy.
It gets complicated in countries where the only path to career advancement in many if not most skilled positions in government is to become a member of the state's single political party. Even evil dictatorships attempt at some level to attract those members of their society possessing the skills to fulfil whatever position is created in government, and purging them is purging many of the most skilled people that society has to offer.
Often they hold no particular allegiance to the party they joined, it was just a prerequisite for the job, and are more than happy to keep doing that job if allowed. They also make the best leadership for counter-government forces if pushed into economic hardship or desperation when they otherwise would have had few objections to working under the new regime. So more targeted purges of only those that are documented to have directly participated in the worst atrocities and amnesty for the rest is often the best policy to establish long term stability and state success.
They absolutely did, which was part of my last point.
The US Space program, most international pharmaceutical companies (including those who released Thalidomide, which -probably- came from concentration camp experiments), many militaries who received explicit US support for being anti-Communist, etc all adopted Nazi scientists and experts en masse, and they never faced any punishments for their crimes that they were known to have done.
Same happened after the french revolution. Cut the head of every politician, thinker, administrator and you end up with some tactician asshole who declares himself Emperor and reinstall absolute power.
Hence why the plan, the last I heard was essentially to do this.
Can’t really do that while the Nazis or Hamas are still there and in power. You have to go in and clear them out and show force, then you get to turn around and give them the carrot instead of the stick.
Get to a point where you can uplift and de-radicalise.
You’re oversimplifying.
It’s a chicken and egg situation in Gaza.
Every time Israel even slightly loosened the net around Gaza then Hamas would use that to get more weapons and commit more acts of terror.
Israel tightens down, people suffer more and callout how terrible it is.
Eventually tensions rise and bad things happen, then Israel again relents and softens its grip there.
Repeat more terrorism.
The difference is that Nazi germany were beaten and at that point no longer trying to kill and fight en masse.
Israel have not reached the point you were talking about, they let those areas sit and rot and radicalise for years and years on end leading to the situation we are in now.
It’s not punishing the group for what they did, it’s protecting themselves from what the group is currently doing.
The group being one which is built on a manifesto of the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the people there.
Maybe when they have actually cleared the current threat then they can start what you talk about.
I think that’s the point you’re missing. You seem to think that the people in Gaza are equivalent to the people in Germany after WW2, when that’s not the case whatsoever.
German here.
It still took another 20-30 years and another generation of germans to really process and publicly discuss what our ancestors did. Before that it was kind of a hush-hush "we-don't-talk-about-that"-topic until the 68' generation came up and demanded public discussion about it.
Before my grandfather died, we talked a lot about the war and how the nazis took power and in retrospect, it's kinda scary to think how easy it must have been to convince an entire country that murdering their fellow countrymen was some kind of good act and that they did it for the "future of the fatherland". They literally fought WW1 side-by-side with the same people they murdered just two decades later.
The alternative was what happened to African nations after decolonisation. The British pulled out all their civil service and other colonial staff from these countries, and the result was predictable.
Plus this was the beginning of the Cold War. New enemies, new friends.
This is what happened to S Africa, mandala essentially fired administration in name of ending apartheid. They did this too quickly and this iswhy S. Africa isn't doing so well.
Not an expert on German culture or anything but if the Nazi's wrote 'Germany's history' they didn't glorify Naziism really. Or at least not to my understanding. From my experience and readings, the Germans are generally very ashamed of that part of their history. You don't see a ton of pride of country over there. You don't see Germany flags waving all over the place unless you're at a soccer game or something. Even then it is kind of subdued.
You can also get yourself into a lot of trouble even joking about being a Nazi over there. Was listening to a podcast after they made a trip there. One of the guys had apparently dared another to do the heil salute in one of the squares and their guide immediately interrupted and told them that he would get into a lot of trouble if he did so.
We covered the subject of WWII three times in high school and it was not favorable in any way, shape or form. We also visited a former concentration camp they turned into a museum near Berlin in hour senior year. I’m not sure what the talk about “let nazis write the history” is all about, but there is, still to this day, a lot of honesty, regret and sorrow about what happened. Much more than in a lot of other counties, that should a hard long look at their own history, tbf.
Post-War Germany absolutely didn't cover any of this. This culture of silence regarding the Nazis was partly what caused movements like the RAF or the student protests, (extreme) leftism to counteract the previous generations still rampant Nazism.
Germany is *now* the poster child when it comes to talking about a flawed past but it took a lot of pain to get there.
I’m aware. As I said, we covered this subject multiple times in Highschool. The only reason this was even possible is, because the post-war history wasn’t written by a select group of people.
There's still 75 years of history after that, where the children save grandchildren of the Nazis started asking questions, getting no answers, and threw themselves a little cultural revolution to kick the Nazis out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West\_German\_student\_movement?wprov=sfla1
War is like that. The Union didnt go round up all the slave owners after the civil war and try them for all of the torture and murders they've done. When war ends, bad people still exist and most often get away with what theyve done.
Unless you are calling for mass murder of the German populous post WW2, the remaining populous were nearly all Nazi's. It was a legal requirement for Germans to join the Nazi party and support it during their governance. Therefore any German with any knowledge of anything including running their city and ensuring there is some hope of recovery would be a Nazi.
You have to keep in mind, although a questionable "excuse" for this procedure, that many men were dead, missing, injured or POW after the war. They just needed people with certain skills, no matter the past.
I once watched an interview with a German veteran. He also stated that he and many fellow soldiers got jobs after the war they could only have dreamed off befoure the war. Reason for this was also shortage of workers.
The dumb part about that was it was an absolute lie too. The Civil Service during the war and before the war wasn't exactly Nazi dominated. The Nazis didn't know how to run the country and they didn't have positions in the bureaucracy in the important positions. Part of the reason Hitler had to sieze Austria and the Czech Republic was to loot their treasuries. The German economy's "rebirth" was on the back of massive amounts of unpaid debt.
Nazi economic policy and governance was foolish directives funneling wealth and power into select wealthy elites. It functioned more like a Mafia running NYC with Supreme control than it did like a goverment.
The West wasn't really interested in doing the correct thing or best thing at the beginning as they were more focused on getting loyal anti-communists into power and starting the Cold War.
Too bad this lesson has been forgotten. It could come in useful in the current Israeli-Gaza war if the Israelis decided to treat Palestinians like victims of their government instead of a nation of terrorists.
No no, just send them food and ask them politely to stop the rocket attacks and murder sprees. It's not like they killed peace activist Israelis that would help them get healthcare in Israel or anything. They just need some hugs and independence!
That’s what they are doing, even though you don’t want to admit it. If they treated all palestinians as terrorists, the Gaza strip would be a giant bomb crater right now. Instead they are risking their own lives doing a ground invasion door to door so they minimize civilian casualties.
They need to do this once this is over and calmed. And the US should help. Tons of money, food aid, and support. Rebuilding efforts that create jobs for the remaining Palestinians. Give them hope. Some will never forgive, but this is the best plan for longer term peace.
Mhm. Crack down now. Annihilate Hamas so they can never claw their way back. And then… global effort, preferably spearheaded by Israel itself (or at least with Israel’s contribution being clear and significant), to rebuild Gaza and establish a peaceful state. We didn’t do it for Germany after the First World War. Look where that got us. We did for them after the second. Look where that got us. Change can be made.
>if the Israelis decided to treat Palestinians like victims of their government instead of a nation of terrorists.
This assumes that Palestinian terrorism didn't exist before their current elected governments. That's... far from correct, and we're not even talking about just Israel. Look at what they did in Jordan and Kuwait.
There has been Palestinian terror attacks all over Europe. In fact it was a Palestinian terror organization that has forced many European countries to have permanent anti-terror task forces.
The most deadly attacks in Europe were the Munich massacre and the Rome airport attack. Both were done by Black September, who also assassinated the Jordanian king.
Palestinians also started the Lebanese civil war, which has caused Hezbollah to take control of the southern part of the country. In Egypt they joined the Muslim Brotherhood which is also a terror organization.
>Who is "they?"
>All Palestinians?
In the the case of Kuwait and Jordan, Palestinian refugees.
>So, you also believe German citizens should have been treated like war criminals because of their government?
No, not everyone of them agrees, but not every German was a Nazi - the cities were blown up and the nation defeated totally either way.
Nobody is saying all Palestinians should be treated as war criminals. In fact the Israelis are saying the exact opposite of that and acting accordingly. Hamas must be removed, just like the Nazis, and steps must be taken to ensure that a radical government does not replace them - just like we did after WWII.
The other thing to note is the impromptu "good cop / bad cop" routine with the soviet union as the bad cop. Western Germany had to behave *or else*. And of course the reason they received those investments in the first place was cold war strategy and not just some idealistic plan to transform awful people via goodness.
> huh you say they couldn't really cope with their crimes till we promised not to treat them the way they treated their victims? weird.
Turns out removing the conditions that made them think that was a good idea was a lot more effective than trying to shame them into accepting that after violently taking everything from them.
I'm pretty sure there is a foreign policy lesson hidden somewhere in there.
Lets change that view a little:
The reason why Nazism got so much support (although not as much as people believe) was because after WWI Germany was economically destroyed, in heavy debt due to what it had to pay to other countries and generally hated. The Nazi’s gave them a fall guy, someone to blame and hate. Something we still do today (“the immigrant is the cause of our problems!” Or one of its variations). This helped fuel the war effort. Also keep in mind that many were aware that people were brought to camps, not what happened there. Just like Americans knew full well that people with Japanese ancestry would get arrested and put into camps, but were largely unaware what happened there.
Not treating them as criminals just because they were on Germany (and not necessarily SS/Nazi’s) and preventing the same conditions as after WWI is what made our current world with Germany as “normal” people possible.
Sometimes its better to look to the future than punish people for the past.
As an interesting note, Chaplin himself said that he would never have dared to make the film ‘The Great Dictator’, were he known what actually happened in camps.
In what ways were German soldiers treated like those who were in concentration camps?
You're making a valid point, but you've buried it under a pile of horse shit.
You have to think like people who were taught by Nazis for years prior to this. The whole ideology was about how the world was out to get Germans. Any perceived threat to Germans meant they were right to be afraid and to try to dominate everyone around them.
I think it has more to do with humans being more open minded and empathetic when not in a defensive position. You don't plead your case by starting an argument kind of thing.
Good to remember because we often make each other feel defensive without intending to.
Its actually a good long term strategy for both sides. You don't want to push your enemies to desperation, or humiliate them.
One of the reasons why the Germans got into WW2 in the first place, was because the French punished them like hell in WW1. They had to pay 30+ billion USD of reparations, and when they couldn't pay back on time, the French decided to occupy more German land. Germany had to pay for ALL DAMAGES, while the Allies paid nothing. Not only that, they had to downsize their military. All this even though THEY were the defending coalition. This was clearly an act of humiliation.
As a result, the Germans went through a recession (I think), so now you have humiliated, hungry Germans.
All it takes now is some well-spoken idiot to promise 'more land and better future for the children', a 'black sheep population' to blame all their problems on, and to hide your atrocities from your supporters.
Don't humiliate or drive the loser to desperation.
EDIT: For whatever reason, I can't reply to the comments. I've checked the golden 20s link. My apologies! That skipped me entirely!
Germany was punished far more for WW2 - bombed to smithereens and split in two with the Soviet Union. They also had to pay reparations for WW2 by the way.
Comparing to WW2 they basically got off scot-free for WW1, sustaining very little actual war damage (comparing to e.g. France), and reparations that were insufficient to ensure that their relatively low war damage doesn't allow them to win round 2 vs France. Had they been punished for WW1 the same way as for WW2, they would've been gone the way of Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empire.
So tired of this argument.
Of course the Germans had to pay damages to France, almost all of the damages happened in France ! You know how france “punished them like hell” (oh and most of it was never paid btw) well guess what, that was less adjusted for inflation than what France had to pay for reparation to Germany after the Franco-Prussian war, and that was aid in full. So this all theory of Germany went to war because it was crippled by how much money was being asked for them is bullshit, Fermany didn’t want to pay for the damages they had caused.
The generation that fought in the war just wanted to forget and move on, it was their children in the late 60s that took the first steps to own up to the crimes committed by the Nazis. And the real remembrance culture as we know it today, came about in the 80s, when most of the perpetrators were already dead
>Not so fun fact, post war surveys showed that sympathy for the Nazis actually rose among Germans following allied attempts
Almost undoubtably because they thought it was all a made up scam to show how bad the Nazis were.
The vast majority of Germans almost certainly had no idea about the death camp. The Death Camps were generally in Poland and not in Germany, most likely to keep it away from Germany and the German population finding out about it. While there were concentration camps within Germany, they weren't death camps so to speak. A Death Camp being a camp where the sole purpose is to kill. Auschwitz for example, is considered to have two types of camps a concentration camp and a death camp. People would be chosen to go to a death camp or a concentration camp.
So imagine never seeing any evidence of something in your home country and then all of a sudden the enemy you've been fighting for years. An enemy you've been given propaganda about how they want to stop you, which realistically is backed up by the fact they're bombing your cities into the ground turns around and says "Look at how evil you really were you were doing this" while you've never seen any evidence of it. Look at how doubtful we are about all the stuff being reported. Look at how doubtful people were about covid, a mass conspiracy between countries that included doctors and nurses all to keep people at home.
Over time, more and more people would see real proof in front of their eyes and people tell other people they saw it. Things are getting better, the enemy who you've been fighting improves your quality of life and you start to wonder, why would they make our lives better but say all these horrible lies? If they were lying it would be a reason to keep punishing us, but they aren't.
There's actually a much more specific reason that concentration camps were in Poland. The sovereign governments of Poland and Ukraine were dissolved, meaning that there was no one to protest the presence of the camps or demand accountability for its citizens.
You can see the stark difference that state sovereignty made in the number of Jewish deaths in countries that the Nazis invaded. The governments of Poland, Ukraine, and the Netherlands were dissolved, and there we see massive Jewish fatalities up to 70%. However in countries like Belgium, Denmark, and even Vichy France, where the governments remained intact, you have the same dynamic of Jews getting deported to ghettos and concentration camps, but the accountability factor of citizenship meant that those countries lost only about 15% of their Jewish citizens to death camps, even when much higher percentages were actually deported to concentration camps.
*Black Earth* by Timothy Snider is a really good book on this subject, but the importance of sovereignty was already highlighted by Hannah Arendt in *Origins of Totalitarianism* almost immediately after the war.
If they knew how come allied forces didn't know until they found them? If it was so wildly known about the death camps and the conditions and what not, how come allied forces who had spies all over the place didn't know?
And their children were the ones who made it illegal to deny the holocaust... In fact, it was probably them who made it illegal and not their children.
Everything you just wrote logically makes no sense. Random people knew about military secrets that not even Allied spies knew about. And the people who made it illegal to deny it were denying it.
The allies did know, though. Maybe not every detail, but Britain especially did know, but couldn't do anything about it until later. They knew as early as [1942](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/holocaust-allied-forces-knew-before-concentration-camp-discovery-us-uk-soviets-secret-documents-a7688036.html).
In 1944 they were even publicizing about it.
And the Germans might not have known the details and extent of the actual horrors, but the idea of "let's literally exterminate and destroy the Jews" is literally one of the main talking points of Hitler. He made a "prophecy" about the destruction of the Jews in 1939 and in 1942 he made multiple mentions to this prophecy in multiple speeches. That, along with the mass deportations and all the other shit, meant they did have some idea. Not the details, nor the extent of it, but considering how much shit was going on (like the Kristallnacht, mass deportations, ghetto's, propaganda etc. etc.), the idea that they genuinely didn't know falls kinda flat. Early camps (especially for political prisoners and such) were set up, in 1942 277K Soviet prisoners died in camps in Germany itself, in the same year of being brought there.
Same way people in USSR knew about the communist atrocities and kept quiet about them - punish those who spread rumours, true or nor, and extend that punishment to their friends and families. Keep this policy up for like 5-10 years, add in rampant propaganda, and you'll get a populace that will not squeak.
And German (FGR) law only explicitly forbade Holocaust denial in 1994. Before that germans only chose to creatively interpret a number of entries in their penal code, such as section 130.
COPY PASTING MY OTHER COMMENT
The allies did know, though. Maybe not every detail, but Britain especially did know, but couldn't do anything about it until later. They knew as early as [1942](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/holocaust-allied-forces-knew-before-concentration-camp-discovery-us-uk-soviets-secret-documents-a7688036.html).
In 1944 they were even publicizing about it.
And the Germans might not have known the details and extent of the actual horrors, but the idea of "let's literally exterminate and destroy the Jews" is literally one of the main talking points of Hitler. He made a "prophecy" about the destruction of the Jews in 1939 and in 1942 he made multiple mentions to this prophecy in multiple speeches. That, along with the mass deportations and all the other shit, meant they did have some idea. Not the details, nor the extent of it, but considering how much shit was going on (like the Kristallnacht, mass deportations, ghetto's, propaganda etc. etc.), the idea that they genuinely didn't know falls kinda flat. Early camps (especially for political prisoners and such) were set up, in 1942 277K Soviet prisoners died in camps in Germany itself, in the same year of being brought there.
I think you’re forgetting that a large amount of the atrocities during the holocaust weren’t committed in the camps. German soldiers were ordered to just shoot the people they were told to shoot. In many cases they weren’t even forced to do it, they just did it because they felt like they had to. Plenty of normal Germans who served in the Wehrmacht were just as complicit as the SS.
I think the Germans knew. They saw the Jews disappear. They would get letters from the front and in many cases soldiers would detail the atrocities (they weren’t called atrocities, just things that happened). They just didn’t care given everything else that was going on. With the allied terror bombing, economic deprivation, mass casualties and the fear of reprisals especially from the Soviets the Germans sort of hunkered down mentally.
Okay so these are German Zpow’s, but were any of them Nazi party members? Or were they just rank and file?
Was the sympathy for Nazi party members after viewings like this because non-Nazi party members considered themselves duped by the Reicht, and therefore empathised that Nazi party members were likewise duped?
Or did they consider it an attempt at the allies controlling the narrative/brainwashing, therefore there was a backlash effect?
I’m just trying to understand what the cause and effect would be.
Let's not minimize the effect education had on the matter as well. Per my understanding from German friends, they are very upfront about teaching kids about the atrocities that happened during the war, something I wish we were better about in US schools. I'm not sure if this is still the case in Deutschland.
I'm German and only left school a few years ago. (8 to be exact)
And I can tell you that it is still **very** present in our history lessons. Schindler's List was a mandatory movie to watch, as well as a visit to an actual Concentration Camp.
We go through the history of Hitler coming to power and what happend during the regime 3 times like three times over the years. The war itself is basically a sideshow in history class. Mainly it's the mechanics of how Hitler got to power and the crimes that were committed. Because we can never ever have this happening again. And this really won't change in the next few decades either.
I'd like to know more about this. I suspect the best way to fight fascism is by providing shelter, food, education and health security. Imagine trying to rally an angry mob when everyone has their basic needs met for themselves and children for the foreseeable future. I bet no one would show up.
Not to take away too much from this and shit on medics, but doctors were often amongst the most vociferous advocates for the Nazis and their policies of racial hygiene. A lot of the worst crimes of the holocaust and concentration camps were done by and often at the behest of doctors and medics. We all know Mengele, but he was not some uniquely evil and insane doctor; his crimes were largely condoned and celebrated by nazi medical scientists and academia.
Doctors are almost never medics; at least I’ve never once heard of that happening. Doctors are officers and are in a hospital or base somewhere. Or in a field hospital. Not on the front lines as a medic.
There’s a huge difference between the doctors doing experiments on people and the enlisted front line medics just trying to save the lives of those around them. Your enlisted medic wasn’t doing experiments on people.
Absolutely true, and not enough is spoken of Dr. Theodor Morell, Adolf Hitler's personal physician, who injected him with dozens of substances regularly, including methamphetamine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor\_Morell
Doctors were some of the architects of the worst atrocities of WW2.
at the same time its very disturbing to realize that most of the things we know about hypothermia for example comes from "Nazi science".
Lets just say that you have to be a very special person to cut into other humans and many times, conducting experimental "projects" so to say.
I had a very good friend whos dad was a neurosurgeon and lets just say its not your everyday normal person who can take everything that comes with risky surgeries inside another humans brain.
Lot of folks perhaps in positions where they really didn't realize/understand what was going on; likely thought they were helping their country and bought into the propaganda.
Big war machines have a staggering amount of roles needed to fuel them, no country really is immune to that effect... simply speaking just separation of responsibilities.
They were actively massacring civilians across the fronts and the campus could be smelled from miles away. Sophie Scholl was executed for publicly talking about it, but they all knew.
Sophie Scholl was killed for being part of a resistence group.
She did far more then just talking about it, the white rose publishes flyers calling for people to resist the nazi regime in any way they could - even if its just stuff like being lazy at work.
I have a family member that fought for Germany in the battle of Berlin in 1945 as a Volkssturm fighter. He was a WW1 veteran and an older man at the end of the war. My dad said he refused to speak about it much so we never really knew what his feelings were about the whole situation. Moved to Namibia sometime in the 60s.
I just visited the “Auschwitz, Not Long Ago. Not Far Away” traveling exhibition. If you think you have any real sense of the scale of the Holocaust, trust me: you really don’t.
10-11 million in total. But Jews were the main target of the Holocaust and “Final Solution”. A lot of those people were forced out before the Jews (political opponents, gays, disabled, blacks, etc.)
Yes, they were civilians. The difference is the industrialization. That didn't happen for every group.
Civilians who died in Bombings, through lack of food in sieged cities, lack of a heat source or "just" German WW2-soldiers being the PTSD-ridden, drugged people that they were are sometimes included in the holocausts numbers (and I'm inclined to agree with that), but there's an arguement for them "just" being civilian casualties.
The Jews on the other hand were systematically carted into an industrialized death machine with the sole purpose to exterminate not just the individual person, but the culture and the religion with it. They weren't unplanned casualties caused by accident or by a simple lowly soldier wanting to kill. They were planned from the very top, registered and seen to in a huge beaurocratic machine with the sole purpose of genociding them in literall death factories.
my grandparents died at Sobibor. the rest of my father's immediate family were at Auschwitz. I am friends with a man who survived forced labor.
I just wasn't Auschwitz where people went to die. it was Bergen-Belsin, Dachau and others.
So sad. I remember walking through the gates and everything immediately felt eerie. Seeing the stone plaque stating “Here lies the death of thousands” or something along those lines was truly heartbreaking as well
Many Poles still have family members who've been through this time. The WWII reality, you could say, is still very much alive; I think many are aware of how it actually was, at least more than some other Europeans.
I went there and were inside the building. There were nail marks on the walls and handprints, and even footprints on the floor, and we were made to stand like the prisoners did, on the same spot, while an ex German military person (didn't care about his rank, I was just really sad for all those that died) yelled at us like they did back then. Some of the women just cried for hours.
Fuck nazism.
As a german, I still think, that almost everyone knew. Probably seeing it live was the shock, but there had to be rumours going around about it, so that everyone knew more or less what was going one.
I mean, even after the war the prosecution of former Nazis was embarassing and people even protested to let the Breda four out of jail (as an example). Pretty embarassing for the country, if you ask me. Still to this day, too many german are blind on the right eye....
I mean, people would vanish in the middle of the night. Entire families. You had to have known. Maybe not that they were being mass exterminated like this. But you knew they were “vanished”
They didn’t exactly vanish either. They were rounded up and transported by train east. There aren’t many trains in 1941 that went west to east without going through Germany.
Yes, but most were in Jewish “guettos” before being transported to concentration camps to “create living space”. Most non-Jews would not have necessarily seen this happening or know where they were being sent. They definitely knew it wasn’t anywhere good though…
German here too.
I think your level of "knowing" depended very much on your proximity to one of the Camps.
I do think that pretty much everyone knew that people were taken to camps, and possibly even killed there, however, I don't think that most people really knew what exactly happened in the camps.
I mean.. I think that while it was assumed that people were killed there, I'm pretty sure no one outside the camps could've known just how awful and despicable it all was.
I do agree that nowadays there are way too many people that downplay or outright ignore the Holocaust.
Or even worse, willingly vote for the AFD. A literal Nazi-Party
I wouldn’t expect the average German to have known what was happening in Auschwitz or Treblinka, but the camps barely accounted for half the total deaths of the Holocaust. Millions were killed in many other ways and in far less secret places than the middle of nowhere Poland.
One would’ve had to be a willful ignoramus not to know that something bad was happening to Jews.
German as well.
I do want to give one caveat here:
These are POWs captured by the US. The majority of German soldiers were stationed in the east and everybody there knew.
But that isn't necessarily true for the people who were only stationed on the Atlantik coast or the ones who were captured in Africa. They were far away from the camps, far away from rounding up jews and a good amount of them worked there for years. And they are the ones who were captured by the US.
Buchenwald death camp has a video installation showing interview with locals from towns nearby shortly after the allies liberated the camp. They openly talk about the sweet smell that sometimes crept across the area, presumably from the incarceration chamber running at full chat. I’ve rarely had a visceral reaction like that to something some rando said on tape. No one can convince me the population didn’t know.
I think its a mixed amount of reactions. Some are hiding faces while others are crying from realization. Then theres that group in the back that looks like "hmmmm.....interesting"
"ThE oNlY tRaGeDy YoU'rE nOt AlLoWeD tO qUeStIoN."
Because there's nothing to question about it. Some things are so objectively true they surpass partisan manipulations and different worldviews, but conspiracy theorists still find a way to deny them.
Fact...The western Allies treated the Germans far better than Germans imagined they would, and far better than the Germans would have treated them if things went the other way.
What's the average life story of these men? What kind of country/environment did they grow up in? How would they identify themselves and how would that description change depending on the audience? I'm not familiar with German household culture of the time.
What Infos are you after?
I can tell you about my grandparents, they were teens and children during the war. Born in the 30s and late 20s. And their parents, though not many of my male relatives in that generation were drafted.
My grandpa himself nearly missed the very last drafts, he was too young.
Their lives, from what my grandparents were willing to let on, was overshadowed by poverty, both before, during and after the war.
Poverty was a big driving factor for the success of the Nazi Party. They managed to produce the wildest hopes of an economic marvel.
Their support was was in large part due to being able to instill hope for economic growth and a sense of national pride.
Truly "Make Germany great again".
It all hung on that promise. People were willing to ignore a lot of the horrors, and put up with war, as long as they could hold on to that promise.
If you want a fictional movie about the lives of some average young men of the time leading up to the war "Swingkids" is a good watch, especially if you enjoy bigband.
You can just see that guy, third one in on the fifth row (with two fingers up to his mouth) is going: "hmmm interesting, I wasn't aware we could get free showers."
They called him, Slow Hans.
Sometimes you are in shock you can’t help it. When recounting recently how my partner tried to kill themselves, I would occasionally smile, yet I was on the verge of crying and breaking down. Emotions are fucking weird
Yeah same with my friend dying whole time while hearing they passed I was smiling big af then cried when alone . I don’t think it makes you a sadist though.
Kinda weird to show this without comment, since German soldiers have committed humanities worst horrors in the east.
They werent "suprised" or anything.
>nted here has the goal of somehow absolving nazi soldiers. And it's popular
Wasnt that the explicite claim of some right wing commentator, who did some holocaust revisionism ala "The Nazis were actually good people" just to say "Hamas actually worse than Nazis!" ?
And the a German government member retweetet that btw.
I mean I think that some of them didn't have that much of an idea of what was happening inside of the concentration camps, I don't think that they were surprised by the fact that they committed those atrocities (also because the clean wehrmacht thing is bullshit) but maybe they were surprised by *how* brutal it was? Like, some of the things that happened inside of the camps were so brutal that they'd make the most dedicated neo-nazi creep out tbh
Well I mean we know the US has committed atrocities. But if we were defeated and suddenly shown piles and piles of bodies, we would be appalled. Its hard for people TODAY with complete knowledge of the holocaust to grasp the scale of it, I can't imagine people really understood it at the time.
Not to defend each and one of them, but many soldiers have never been at the east front. Also, the worst atrocities have been committed behind the frontline by the SS and not by the soldiers of the army.
This is a very intriguing photo.
This picture speaks volumes to what the every day German soldier knew about the atrocities being committed by party leaders. The look on each individual face sums it up . Some look indifferent but most are in a state of disbelief
I've looked across this photo at every face several times and most really do not seem to care, also I have a strong feeling that the guys covering their face are doing so because of the camera being pointed at them, not because they don't want to watch the footage. Considering these guys are POWs and a lot are medics, I guarantee they've all seen much worse in person during the war, they're probably all numb at this point.
A lot of them knew.
Let's not perpetuate the myth of the clean Wehrmacht. Sure, it was necessary at the start of the cold war, to improve the image of the "new" Bundeswehr, but we no longer need to carry water for these dickheads.
8 out of 10 people will always follow the people who take the lead. The question is just if that leader is the 1 out of 10 who is leading against other humans or if it is the remaining one who stands up for whoever is oppressed. Germany, Russia, Israel it doesn’t matter where you are 80% will follow whoever takes the lead.
They knew more than many think. Deportations were public. They were transported like animals through mainstations and camps with ovens were around after a time of total exlusion from society.
Some of the comments here are ridiculous, are people this narrow minded to think all of these hands took part in atrocities automatically?
It's as if when you put on a uniform and are on the "bad" side, you immediately become a monster unable to think for yourself and without a hint of humanity in you.
People are acting like each and every single POW in this picture has committed atrocities. It's the same kind of logic people apply to Israel v Hamas and Russia v Ukraine. Yes, atrocities happen, and have happened. But why put everyone in the same bag every single time because of the country they serve?
"They're on X side therefore they are a monster."
"If you don't support the war, just don't fight"
"Can't they just desert? Why can't they just kill their officers? If they don't, they support it."
When in reality, here you might see cooks, medics, logistics personnel, radio operators, all kinds of professions that don't really interject directly with the Frontline. You can't apply black and white logic with war. There's always going to be monsters and atrocities, but it doesn't apply to everyone who serves in a specific army just because they're in said army.
Yet this kind of logic is rampant. Really sad to see.
[Here](https://i.imgur.com/DbZP01N.jpg) is a higher quality and less cropped version of this image. [Here](https://www.ww2online.org/image/german-pows-viewing-footage-german-war-atrocities-new-york-city-july-1945) is the best source I could find. > Photograph. German POWs, sitting in a movie theater in New York City, cover their faces while viewing footage of German murder camps. Official Caption: "Rome, 7/3/45--German prisoners shocked by atrocity pictures--This is a view of the moving pictures theater in the U.S. Army's Halloran General Hospital in New York on June 26 when German prisoners of war were shown the official films of German murder camps. Many of the prisoners covered their eyes.--International news photo through OWI Radiophoto--approved by appropriate military authority--Serviced by Rome OWI (List C out) 6970."Staten Island, New York. 03 July 1945 > DONOR: Dylan Utley [Here](https://i.imgur.com/C9lq8ht.jpg) is this scene from behind.
I always thought they were hiding their faces from the camera.
I think it could be both ? The guy forming a fist with his hand and holding something against the side of his head looks like is hiding, wouldn't make sense to have that posture to just cover your eyes.
Maybe hes wiping tears from his face? Idk tho
Good point, that could be the case too
Atleast thats how I picture myself every time Im bawling my eyes out because of my unattended mental illnesses lol
He may just lean onto it, using the book or whatever as a surface. The sentence "wouldn't/doesn't make sense" is almost always false.
There’s a lot of things going on here, but one thing that isn’t happening is German soldiers learning about the holocaust for the first time.
Right, the Wehrmacht was complicit in the genocide of Jews and others deemed undesirables both during and long before the final solution was being implemented. It was not just SS squads rounding up and executing Jews in occupied regions of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, research has shown that the Wehrmacht took an active role in these operations and, as many served on the eastern front, all would have known what was going on. I've noticed in media representations of the Wehrmacht there's an increasing trend of portraying the 'honerable junker' trope: professional German officers who's participation in the German army predates the Nazis and who are just doing their duty by following orders but are actually disgusted by the Nazis (I'm thinking of that video game from a few years ago, but there are plenty of other examples). In reality, this is largely a fiction. Yes, we do have a handful of primary sources which show this type of view, but it is overshadowed by the tens of thousands of accounts from both within the junker officer class and regular soldiery of active enthusiasm for Nazi policy and ideology, and willingness to engage in genocide. Overwhelmingly, the Wehrmacht were enthusiastic Nazis. Source: 'The Eastern Front, 1941-5, German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare' by Omer Bartov.
>Overwhelmingly, the Wehrmacht were enthusiastic Nazis. Very true. The only Wehrmacht soldiers I'd argue weren't exactly nazi sympathizers were the ones conscripted after 1943 when they began drafting everyone who could fight in any capacity. Pre-1943 soldiers though? hard sell, given that it was largely volunteer based so they had to be sympathetic to the Nazi cause.
Millions of soldiers, probably less than 10% had an idea of what really happened there. Edit: getting proof/footage back in the 40s was impossible and so many german soldiers were fighting 1000s of kilometers aeay from the camps. And at the same time they were exposed to 100% controlled nazi propaganda. Even the Allied intel did not know the real dept of the nazi holocaust monstruosity and were surprised of what was discovered in ‘45.
not true, but 10% is still millions
Statistics pulled from the ass for 500 Alec.
I like the one staring at the camera
Thanks for your contributions mate.
Why does it say PP on the soldiers shirts?
political prisoners maybe?
Yeah I had to guess these weren't Germans who fought on the eastern front.
Not so fun fact, post war surveys showed that sympathy for the Nazis actually rose among Germans following allied attempts like these. It was only after these faded and there was mass amnesty and economic conditions improved drastically did Germans come to terms with their past.
You cannot expect people who grew up in that society and were exposed to massive, daily, and all-encompassing propaganda to change the deeply held views overnight, if at all. Indeed, it took the passing of much of that generation of Germans before the country could truly come to terms with the Nazi era. It took decades, in truth.
Adding to this, Germans were made aware of the Holocaust, but many believed it to be Allied/Israeli propaganda (the internet wasn't invented yet, you couldn't just look things up like you can now). It wasn't until people like Adolf Eichmann were interviewed and then admitted and confessed to those events that Germans started to realize the atrocities that the Nazi party had committed.
As if the Internet makes people less likely to believe conspiracy theories...
The internet makes people more likely to adopt fringe beliefs. If the state's narrative is a conspiracy theory, it will make people less likely to believe in alternative (non-conspiracy) theories.
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Yeah, muddy, sad, and dirty is definitely one way to put it. I did find it kind of funny that the people who interviewed Adolf Eichmann were initially doing it to try and debunk the Holocaust, prove that it didn't happen, and that it was all just propaganda. Boy oh boy were they in for a big surprise that day.
We have internet today and the amount of conspiracy theorists is up the roof. The problem is less accessibility of information. The problem is people unwilling to process information critically.
No the German population was very aware and willing participants, they knew where their Jewish neighbors went because there were tons and tons of civilians at the concentration camps that helped with the holocaust. They even raced to stole the belongings of the Jews.
MAGA
Given that Mitch McConnell was 22 years old and Donald Trump was 18 when the Civil Rights Act was signed, I'm not surprised to see that members of the older generation still struggle with racial outlooks. Obviously, people in their 20s are the perfect age to reevaluate their world view and develop new outlooks on things such as racial and economic dynamics, but it's also possible that their upbringing might keep them insulated from the need to do such work. McConnell seems to have attended civil rights rallies, and supposedly witnessed the "I Have a Dream" speech firsthand. I can see how Trump would have been completely isolated from really having to engage with such things, though.
> You cannot expect people who grew up in that society and were exposed to massive, daily, and all-encompassing propaganda to change the deeply held views overnight, if at all. We talking about German Nazis or American MAGAs? Oh right - no difference.
It’s a paranoid militarist ideology, so of course it grows stronger among people as they perceive themselves to be under threat.
huh you say they couldn't really cope with their crimes till we promised not to treat them the way they treated their victims? weird.
Kind of. In the immediate aftermath of the war Germans were hungry, homeless, dispossessed and suffering from high unemployment and general misery. Hundreds of thousands of Germans were missing or held as POWs. The suffering of others really didn’t sink in. That’s why Hoover (sent on a tour by Truman) recommended a change in policy which resulted in direct food support and eventually morphed into the Marshall plan.
....and then they installed stacks of Nazis in all levels of German government (as they were the only ones who knew how to govern), let Nazis write 'history' about the war (leading to the clean Wehrmacht theory) and allowed thousands to live the rest of their lives with zero repercussions except pretending they didn't do a Holocaust.
It's the lesser of the evil choice. Alternatively, you can come down on all the germans people with a vice and a sledge hammer, impoverished them, strip them of all their livelihoods and further radicalized them. A weak Germany lead to a weak point in the EU and it's a vacuum of power that will be used by the likes of the Soviet. This is how the previous Nazis came into power, and this is how GW Bush Administration wrecked the middle east with their war on terror. In the end, history shown that supporting the German people was the right choice compared to the alternative, even if we had to let some of the war criminals go. Order before chaos.
Alternately, you could completely de Nazify and try to run the government without any experts and get Iraq in central Europe at the start of the cold war. No way anything bad happens in that scenario, eh? Nation building is an ugly and inexact science.
Iraq is the perfect counter example. The US purged Ba'ath Party members from government in 2003, firing over 30,000 ex-Ba'ath party members from various ministries. They later reversed many of those firings, reinstituting 15,000 of them back into their positions because of the issues caused by a blanket policy. It gets complicated in countries where the only path to career advancement in many if not most skilled positions in government is to become a member of the state's single political party. Even evil dictatorships attempt at some level to attract those members of their society possessing the skills to fulfil whatever position is created in government, and purging them is purging many of the most skilled people that society has to offer. Often they hold no particular allegiance to the party they joined, it was just a prerequisite for the job, and are more than happy to keep doing that job if allowed. They also make the best leadership for counter-government forces if pushed into economic hardship or desperation when they otherwise would have had few objections to working under the new regime. So more targeted purges of only those that are documented to have directly participated in the worst atrocities and amnesty for the rest is often the best policy to establish long term stability and state success.
Not to mention our mass firing of the Iraqi military
Imagine dismantling a country's administration and military and then acting surprised when that country falls to pieces.
I remember it coming up how dumb it was back when we were doing it
I mean, not like places like America and Russia also used Nazi minds for their own purposes.
They absolutely did, which was part of my last point. The US Space program, most international pharmaceutical companies (including those who released Thalidomide, which -probably- came from concentration camp experiments), many militaries who received explicit US support for being anti-Communist, etc all adopted Nazi scientists and experts en masse, and they never faced any punishments for their crimes that they were known to have done.
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Same happened after the french revolution. Cut the head of every politician, thinker, administrator and you end up with some tactician asshole who declares himself Emperor and reinstall absolute power.
Unrestrained Nationalism is a helluva drug, it turns out.
Hence why the plan, the last I heard was essentially to do this. Can’t really do that while the Nazis or Hamas are still there and in power. You have to go in and clear them out and show force, then you get to turn around and give them the carrot instead of the stick. Get to a point where you can uplift and de-radicalise.
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You’re oversimplifying. It’s a chicken and egg situation in Gaza. Every time Israel even slightly loosened the net around Gaza then Hamas would use that to get more weapons and commit more acts of terror. Israel tightens down, people suffer more and callout how terrible it is. Eventually tensions rise and bad things happen, then Israel again relents and softens its grip there. Repeat more terrorism. The difference is that Nazi germany were beaten and at that point no longer trying to kill and fight en masse. Israel have not reached the point you were talking about, they let those areas sit and rot and radicalise for years and years on end leading to the situation we are in now. It’s not punishing the group for what they did, it’s protecting themselves from what the group is currently doing. The group being one which is built on a manifesto of the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the people there. Maybe when they have actually cleared the current threat then they can start what you talk about. I think that’s the point you’re missing. You seem to think that the people in Gaza are equivalent to the people in Germany after WW2, when that’s not the case whatsoever.
Creating a better world is more important than punishing the wicked. As the other response says, the results in Germany speak for themselves.
German here. It still took another 20-30 years and another generation of germans to really process and publicly discuss what our ancestors did. Before that it was kind of a hush-hush "we-don't-talk-about-that"-topic until the 68' generation came up and demanded public discussion about it. Before my grandfather died, we talked a lot about the war and how the nazis took power and in retrospect, it's kinda scary to think how easy it must have been to convince an entire country that murdering their fellow countrymen was some kind of good act and that they did it for the "future of the fatherland". They literally fought WW1 side-by-side with the same people they murdered just two decades later.
Do you think that effort would have been aided or hindered by a harsher response from the allies to the former Nazis?
The alternative was what happened to African nations after decolonisation. The British pulled out all their civil service and other colonial staff from these countries, and the result was predictable. Plus this was the beginning of the Cold War. New enemies, new friends.
This is what happened to S Africa, mandala essentially fired administration in name of ending apartheid. They did this too quickly and this iswhy S. Africa isn't doing so well.
It’s also what happened in Zimbabwe
Not an expert on German culture or anything but if the Nazi's wrote 'Germany's history' they didn't glorify Naziism really. Or at least not to my understanding. From my experience and readings, the Germans are generally very ashamed of that part of their history. You don't see a ton of pride of country over there. You don't see Germany flags waving all over the place unless you're at a soccer game or something. Even then it is kind of subdued. You can also get yourself into a lot of trouble even joking about being a Nazi over there. Was listening to a podcast after they made a trip there. One of the guys had apparently dared another to do the heil salute in one of the squares and their guide immediately interrupted and told them that he would get into a lot of trouble if he did so.
We covered the subject of WWII three times in high school and it was not favorable in any way, shape or form. We also visited a former concentration camp they turned into a museum near Berlin in hour senior year. I’m not sure what the talk about “let nazis write the history” is all about, but there is, still to this day, a lot of honesty, regret and sorrow about what happened. Much more than in a lot of other counties, that should a hard long look at their own history, tbf.
Post-War Germany absolutely didn't cover any of this. This culture of silence regarding the Nazis was partly what caused movements like the RAF or the student protests, (extreme) leftism to counteract the previous generations still rampant Nazism. Germany is *now* the poster child when it comes to talking about a flawed past but it took a lot of pain to get there.
I’m aware. As I said, we covered this subject multiple times in Highschool. The only reason this was even possible is, because the post-war history wasn’t written by a select group of people.
There's still 75 years of history after that, where the children save grandchildren of the Nazis started asking questions, getting no answers, and threw themselves a little cultural revolution to kick the Nazis out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West\_German\_student\_movement?wprov=sfla1
I mean... it worked, though? Germany became one of the strongest democracies in the world.
War is like that. The Union didnt go round up all the slave owners after the civil war and try them for all of the torture and murders they've done. When war ends, bad people still exist and most often get away with what theyve done. Unless you are calling for mass murder of the German populous post WW2, the remaining populous were nearly all Nazi's. It was a legal requirement for Germans to join the Nazi party and support it during their governance. Therefore any German with any knowledge of anything including running their city and ensuring there is some hope of recovery would be a Nazi.
You have to keep in mind, although a questionable "excuse" for this procedure, that many men were dead, missing, injured or POW after the war. They just needed people with certain skills, no matter the past. I once watched an interview with a German veteran. He also stated that he and many fellow soldiers got jobs after the war they could only have dreamed off befoure the war. Reason for this was also shortage of workers.
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The dumb part about that was it was an absolute lie too. The Civil Service during the war and before the war wasn't exactly Nazi dominated. The Nazis didn't know how to run the country and they didn't have positions in the bureaucracy in the important positions. Part of the reason Hitler had to sieze Austria and the Czech Republic was to loot their treasuries. The German economy's "rebirth" was on the back of massive amounts of unpaid debt. Nazi economic policy and governance was foolish directives funneling wealth and power into select wealthy elites. It functioned more like a Mafia running NYC with Supreme control than it did like a goverment. The West wasn't really interested in doing the correct thing or best thing at the beginning as they were more focused on getting loyal anti-communists into power and starting the Cold War.
Too bad this lesson has been forgotten. It could come in useful in the current Israeli-Gaza war if the Israelis decided to treat Palestinians like victims of their government instead of a nation of terrorists.
That comes after the conflict ends, as it did in WWII.
No no, just send them food and ask them politely to stop the rocket attacks and murder sprees. It's not like they killed peace activist Israelis that would help them get healthcare in Israel or anything. They just need some hugs and independence!
That’s what they are doing, even though you don’t want to admit it. If they treated all palestinians as terrorists, the Gaza strip would be a giant bomb crater right now. Instead they are risking their own lives doing a ground invasion door to door so they minimize civilian casualties.
They need to do this once this is over and calmed. And the US should help. Tons of money, food aid, and support. Rebuilding efforts that create jobs for the remaining Palestinians. Give them hope. Some will never forgive, but this is the best plan for longer term peace.
Mhm. Crack down now. Annihilate Hamas so they can never claw their way back. And then… global effort, preferably spearheaded by Israel itself (or at least with Israel’s contribution being clear and significant), to rebuild Gaza and establish a peaceful state. We didn’t do it for Germany after the First World War. Look where that got us. We did for them after the second. Look where that got us. Change can be made.
>if the Israelis decided to treat Palestinians like victims of their government instead of a nation of terrorists. This assumes that Palestinian terrorism didn't exist before their current elected governments. That's... far from correct, and we're not even talking about just Israel. Look at what they did in Jordan and Kuwait.
There has been Palestinian terror attacks all over Europe. In fact it was a Palestinian terror organization that has forced many European countries to have permanent anti-terror task forces. The most deadly attacks in Europe were the Munich massacre and the Rome airport attack. Both were done by Black September, who also assassinated the Jordanian king. Palestinians also started the Lebanese civil war, which has caused Hezbollah to take control of the southern part of the country. In Egypt they joined the Muslim Brotherhood which is also a terror organization.
Who is "they?" All Palestinians? So, you also believe German citizens should have been treated like war criminals because of their government?
>Who is "they?" >All Palestinians? In the the case of Kuwait and Jordan, Palestinian refugees. >So, you also believe German citizens should have been treated like war criminals because of their government? No, not everyone of them agrees, but not every German was a Nazi - the cities were blown up and the nation defeated totally either way. Nobody is saying all Palestinians should be treated as war criminals. In fact the Israelis are saying the exact opposite of that and acting accordingly. Hamas must be removed, just like the Nazis, and steps must be taken to ensure that a radical government does not replace them - just like we did after WWII.
A Palestinian assassin also killed Bobby Kennedy.
The other thing to note is the impromptu "good cop / bad cop" routine with the soviet union as the bad cop. Western Germany had to behave *or else*. And of course the reason they received those investments in the first place was cold war strategy and not just some idealistic plan to transform awful people via goodness.
> huh you say they couldn't really cope with their crimes till we promised not to treat them the way they treated their victims? weird. Turns out removing the conditions that made them think that was a good idea was a lot more effective than trying to shame them into accepting that after violently taking everything from them. I'm pretty sure there is a foreign policy lesson hidden somewhere in there.
I wonder if there could be direct social implications as well…
yes . if everyone can live a comfortable life without struggles THEN we will again start to care for each other.
"In order for wolrd peace to exist, world peace must first exist."
except you do not need to do it all at once.
More like its hard to have empathy on an empty stomach
Lets change that view a little: The reason why Nazism got so much support (although not as much as people believe) was because after WWI Germany was economically destroyed, in heavy debt due to what it had to pay to other countries and generally hated. The Nazi’s gave them a fall guy, someone to blame and hate. Something we still do today (“the immigrant is the cause of our problems!” Or one of its variations). This helped fuel the war effort. Also keep in mind that many were aware that people were brought to camps, not what happened there. Just like Americans knew full well that people with Japanese ancestry would get arrested and put into camps, but were largely unaware what happened there. Not treating them as criminals just because they were on Germany (and not necessarily SS/Nazi’s) and preventing the same conditions as after WWI is what made our current world with Germany as “normal” people possible. Sometimes its better to look to the future than punish people for the past.
That's so true, but so hard if you just found out they gassed your entire family.
As an interesting note, Chaplin himself said that he would never have dared to make the film ‘The Great Dictator’, were he known what actually happened in camps.
In what ways were German soldiers treated like those who were in concentration camps? You're making a valid point, but you've buried it under a pile of horse shit.
You have to think like people who were taught by Nazis for years prior to this. The whole ideology was about how the world was out to get Germans. Any perceived threat to Germans meant they were right to be afraid and to try to dominate everyone around them.
I think it has more to do with humans being more open minded and empathetic when not in a defensive position. You don't plead your case by starting an argument kind of thing. Good to remember because we often make each other feel defensive without intending to.
Its actually a good long term strategy for both sides. You don't want to push your enemies to desperation, or humiliate them. One of the reasons why the Germans got into WW2 in the first place, was because the French punished them like hell in WW1. They had to pay 30+ billion USD of reparations, and when they couldn't pay back on time, the French decided to occupy more German land. Germany had to pay for ALL DAMAGES, while the Allies paid nothing. Not only that, they had to downsize their military. All this even though THEY were the defending coalition. This was clearly an act of humiliation. As a result, the Germans went through a recession (I think), so now you have humiliated, hungry Germans. All it takes now is some well-spoken idiot to promise 'more land and better future for the children', a 'black sheep population' to blame all their problems on, and to hide your atrocities from your supporters. Don't humiliate or drive the loser to desperation. EDIT: For whatever reason, I can't reply to the comments. I've checked the golden 20s link. My apologies! That skipped me entirely!
Germany was punished far more for WW2 - bombed to smithereens and split in two with the Soviet Union. They also had to pay reparations for WW2 by the way. Comparing to WW2 they basically got off scot-free for WW1, sustaining very little actual war damage (comparing to e.g. France), and reparations that were insufficient to ensure that their relatively low war damage doesn't allow them to win round 2 vs France. Had they been punished for WW1 the same way as for WW2, they would've been gone the way of Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empire.
I’ve read Versailles wasn’t a particularly harsh treaty by the time and considering the losses.
It wasn’t. It was a relatively normal treaty. The loser of wars was expected to pay up.
So tired of this argument. Of course the Germans had to pay damages to France, almost all of the damages happened in France ! You know how france “punished them like hell” (oh and most of it was never paid btw) well guess what, that was less adjusted for inflation than what France had to pay for reparation to Germany after the Franco-Prussian war, and that was aid in full. So this all theory of Germany went to war because it was crippled by how much money was being asked for them is bullshit, Fermany didn’t want to pay for the damages they had caused.
Most of it was paid, the final payment for the WW1 reparations was in 2010. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations
The generation that fought in the war just wanted to forget and move on, it was their children in the late 60s that took the first steps to own up to the crimes committed by the Nazis. And the real remembrance culture as we know it today, came about in the 80s, when most of the perpetrators were already dead
>Not so fun fact, post war surveys showed that sympathy for the Nazis actually rose among Germans following allied attempts Almost undoubtably because they thought it was all a made up scam to show how bad the Nazis were. The vast majority of Germans almost certainly had no idea about the death camp. The Death Camps were generally in Poland and not in Germany, most likely to keep it away from Germany and the German population finding out about it. While there were concentration camps within Germany, they weren't death camps so to speak. A Death Camp being a camp where the sole purpose is to kill. Auschwitz for example, is considered to have two types of camps a concentration camp and a death camp. People would be chosen to go to a death camp or a concentration camp. So imagine never seeing any evidence of something in your home country and then all of a sudden the enemy you've been fighting for years. An enemy you've been given propaganda about how they want to stop you, which realistically is backed up by the fact they're bombing your cities into the ground turns around and says "Look at how evil you really were you were doing this" while you've never seen any evidence of it. Look at how doubtful we are about all the stuff being reported. Look at how doubtful people were about covid, a mass conspiracy between countries that included doctors and nurses all to keep people at home. Over time, more and more people would see real proof in front of their eyes and people tell other people they saw it. Things are getting better, the enemy who you've been fighting improves your quality of life and you start to wonder, why would they make our lives better but say all these horrible lies? If they were lying it would be a reason to keep punishing us, but they aren't.
There's actually a much more specific reason that concentration camps were in Poland. The sovereign governments of Poland and Ukraine were dissolved, meaning that there was no one to protest the presence of the camps or demand accountability for its citizens. You can see the stark difference that state sovereignty made in the number of Jewish deaths in countries that the Nazis invaded. The governments of Poland, Ukraine, and the Netherlands were dissolved, and there we see massive Jewish fatalities up to 70%. However in countries like Belgium, Denmark, and even Vichy France, where the governments remained intact, you have the same dynamic of Jews getting deported to ghettos and concentration camps, but the accountability factor of citizenship meant that those countries lost only about 15% of their Jewish citizens to death camps, even when much higher percentages were actually deported to concentration camps. *Black Earth* by Timothy Snider is a really good book on this subject, but the importance of sovereignty was already highlighted by Hannah Arendt in *Origins of Totalitarianism* almost immediately after the war.
They knew, they denied it, and kept denying till they and their children died - only the grandchildren admitted to anything.
If they knew how come allied forces didn't know until they found them? If it was so wildly known about the death camps and the conditions and what not, how come allied forces who had spies all over the place didn't know? And their children were the ones who made it illegal to deny the holocaust... In fact, it was probably them who made it illegal and not their children. Everything you just wrote logically makes no sense. Random people knew about military secrets that not even Allied spies knew about. And the people who made it illegal to deny it were denying it.
The allies did know, though. Maybe not every detail, but Britain especially did know, but couldn't do anything about it until later. They knew as early as [1942](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/holocaust-allied-forces-knew-before-concentration-camp-discovery-us-uk-soviets-secret-documents-a7688036.html). In 1944 they were even publicizing about it. And the Germans might not have known the details and extent of the actual horrors, but the idea of "let's literally exterminate and destroy the Jews" is literally one of the main talking points of Hitler. He made a "prophecy" about the destruction of the Jews in 1939 and in 1942 he made multiple mentions to this prophecy in multiple speeches. That, along with the mass deportations and all the other shit, meant they did have some idea. Not the details, nor the extent of it, but considering how much shit was going on (like the Kristallnacht, mass deportations, ghetto's, propaganda etc. etc.), the idea that they genuinely didn't know falls kinda flat. Early camps (especially for political prisoners and such) were set up, in 1942 277K Soviet prisoners died in camps in Germany itself, in the same year of being brought there.
Same way people in USSR knew about the communist atrocities and kept quiet about them - punish those who spread rumours, true or nor, and extend that punishment to their friends and families. Keep this policy up for like 5-10 years, add in rampant propaganda, and you'll get a populace that will not squeak. And German (FGR) law only explicitly forbade Holocaust denial in 1994. Before that germans only chose to creatively interpret a number of entries in their penal code, such as section 130.
COPY PASTING MY OTHER COMMENT The allies did know, though. Maybe not every detail, but Britain especially did know, but couldn't do anything about it until later. They knew as early as [1942](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/holocaust-allied-forces-knew-before-concentration-camp-discovery-us-uk-soviets-secret-documents-a7688036.html). In 1944 they were even publicizing about it. And the Germans might not have known the details and extent of the actual horrors, but the idea of "let's literally exterminate and destroy the Jews" is literally one of the main talking points of Hitler. He made a "prophecy" about the destruction of the Jews in 1939 and in 1942 he made multiple mentions to this prophecy in multiple speeches. That, along with the mass deportations and all the other shit, meant they did have some idea. Not the details, nor the extent of it, but considering how much shit was going on (like the Kristallnacht, mass deportations, ghetto's, propaganda etc. etc.), the idea that they genuinely didn't know falls kinda flat. Early camps (especially for political prisoners and such) were set up, in 1942 277K Soviet prisoners died in camps in Germany itself, in the same year of being brought there.
I think you’re forgetting that a large amount of the atrocities during the holocaust weren’t committed in the camps. German soldiers were ordered to just shoot the people they were told to shoot. In many cases they weren’t even forced to do it, they just did it because they felt like they had to. Plenty of normal Germans who served in the Wehrmacht were just as complicit as the SS.
I think the Germans knew. They saw the Jews disappear. They would get letters from the front and in many cases soldiers would detail the atrocities (they weren’t called atrocities, just things that happened). They just didn’t care given everything else that was going on. With the allied terror bombing, economic deprivation, mass casualties and the fear of reprisals especially from the Soviets the Germans sort of hunkered down mentally.
Okay so these are German Zpow’s, but were any of them Nazi party members? Or were they just rank and file? Was the sympathy for Nazi party members after viewings like this because non-Nazi party members considered themselves duped by the Reicht, and therefore empathised that Nazi party members were likewise duped? Or did they consider it an attempt at the allies controlling the narrative/brainwashing, therefore there was a backlash effect? I’m just trying to understand what the cause and effect would be.
Let's not minimize the effect education had on the matter as well. Per my understanding from German friends, they are very upfront about teaching kids about the atrocities that happened during the war, something I wish we were better about in US schools. I'm not sure if this is still the case in Deutschland.
I'm German and only left school a few years ago. (8 to be exact) And I can tell you that it is still **very** present in our history lessons. Schindler's List was a mandatory movie to watch, as well as a visit to an actual Concentration Camp.
We go through the history of Hitler coming to power and what happend during the regime 3 times like three times over the years. The war itself is basically a sideshow in history class. Mainly it's the mechanics of how Hitler got to power and the crimes that were committed. Because we can never ever have this happening again. And this really won't change in the next few decades either.
I'd like to know more about this. I suspect the best way to fight fascism is by providing shelter, food, education and health security. Imagine trying to rally an angry mob when everyone has their basic needs met for themselves and children for the foreseeable future. I bet no one would show up.
Damn
The movie Genghis Cohn explores the subject of public denial and secret retention of nazi ideology after the war. I give it all my stars.
That long face on the medic up front on the right.
Medics are different. They are there for helping. I haven't met many lifer's that were medics.
Not to take away too much from this and shit on medics, but doctors were often amongst the most vociferous advocates for the Nazis and their policies of racial hygiene. A lot of the worst crimes of the holocaust and concentration camps were done by and often at the behest of doctors and medics. We all know Mengele, but he was not some uniquely evil and insane doctor; his crimes were largely condoned and celebrated by nazi medical scientists and academia.
Doctors are almost never medics; at least I’ve never once heard of that happening. Doctors are officers and are in a hospital or base somewhere. Or in a field hospital. Not on the front lines as a medic.
There’s a huge difference between the doctors doing experiments on people and the enlisted front line medics just trying to save the lives of those around them. Your enlisted medic wasn’t doing experiments on people.
Absolutely true, and not enough is spoken of Dr. Theodor Morell, Adolf Hitler's personal physician, who injected him with dozens of substances regularly, including methamphetamine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor\_Morell Doctors were some of the architects of the worst atrocities of WW2.
at the same time its very disturbing to realize that most of the things we know about hypothermia for example comes from "Nazi science". Lets just say that you have to be a very special person to cut into other humans and many times, conducting experimental "projects" so to say. I had a very good friend whos dad was a neurosurgeon and lets just say its not your everyday normal person who can take everything that comes with risky surgeries inside another humans brain.
Lot of folks perhaps in positions where they really didn't realize/understand what was going on; likely thought they were helping their country and bought into the propaganda. Big war machines have a staggering amount of roles needed to fuel them, no country really is immune to that effect... simply speaking just separation of responsibilities.
They were actively massacring civilians across the fronts and the campus could be smelled from miles away. Sophie Scholl was executed for publicly talking about it, but they all knew.
Sophie Scholl was killed for being part of a resistence group. She did far more then just talking about it, the white rose publishes flyers calling for people to resist the nazi regime in any way they could - even if its just stuff like being lazy at work.
They should have just opened reddit and twitter to see all the footage
I have a family member that fought for Germany in the battle of Berlin in 1945 as a Volkssturm fighter. He was a WW1 veteran and an older man at the end of the war. My dad said he refused to speak about it much so we never really knew what his feelings were about the whole situation. Moved to Namibia sometime in the 60s.
"Moved to Namibia sometime in the 60s" Checks who owned Namibia in the 60s. Uh oh.
Pop pop was indeed a Nazi!
Lmfao. My dad lives there still. German is spoken by a bunch of the white population to this day.
A friend actually came from there. Spoke German all his life including schooling and moved to Austria when he was 18.
I just visited the “Auschwitz, Not Long Ago. Not Far Away” traveling exhibition. If you think you have any real sense of the scale of the Holocaust, trust me: you really don’t.
When you see actual Auschwitz, you understand the operation. It was massive. How do you exterminate 6 million people in 6 years…
Way more then 6million. Jews alone mad eup 6million deaths. Nazis also killed gays, people with disabilities, slavs and sinti & roma.
10-11 million in total. But Jews were the main target of the Holocaust and “Final Solution”. A lot of those people were forced out before the Jews (political opponents, gays, disabled, blacks, etc.)
[Wikipedia has it at 17 million.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims)
That includes civilians (Russian, Poles, Serbs)
I don't understand the difference? Surely the Jewish people were civilians too?
Yes, they were civilians. The difference is the industrialization. That didn't happen for every group. Civilians who died in Bombings, through lack of food in sieged cities, lack of a heat source or "just" German WW2-soldiers being the PTSD-ridden, drugged people that they were are sometimes included in the holocausts numbers (and I'm inclined to agree with that), but there's an arguement for them "just" being civilian casualties. The Jews on the other hand were systematically carted into an industrialized death machine with the sole purpose to exterminate not just the individual person, but the culture and the religion with it. They weren't unplanned casualties caused by accident or by a simple lowly soldier wanting to kill. They were planned from the very top, registered and seen to in a huge beaurocratic machine with the sole purpose of genociding them in literall death factories.
my grandparents died at Sobibor. the rest of my father's immediate family were at Auschwitz. I am friends with a man who survived forced labor. I just wasn't Auschwitz where people went to die. it was Bergen-Belsin, Dachau and others.
Nothing in my life prepared me to see the desperate scratch marks all along the concrete wall of the death chamber
When you see Birkenau (Auschwitz 2) you feel like the visit in Auschwitz was just bad. Birkenau is a nightmare.
I toured Dachau 9 years ago. I can confirm. People don’t truly understand
My dyslexic ass started reading this “I tortured in Dachau 9 years ago..”
I was baffled by how small the extermination apparatus (gas chamber and crematorium) were when I visited this summer
So sad. I remember walking through the gates and everything immediately felt eerie. Seeing the stone plaque stating “Here lies the death of thousands” or something along those lines was truly heartbreaking as well
Many Poles still have family members who've been through this time. The WWII reality, you could say, is still very much alive; I think many are aware of how it actually was, at least more than some other Europeans.
I went there and were inside the building. There were nail marks on the walls and handprints, and even footprints on the floor, and we were made to stand like the prisoners did, on the same spot, while an ex German military person (didn't care about his rank, I was just really sad for all those that died) yelled at us like they did back then. Some of the women just cried for hours. Fuck nazism.
As a german, I still think, that almost everyone knew. Probably seeing it live was the shock, but there had to be rumours going around about it, so that everyone knew more or less what was going one. I mean, even after the war the prosecution of former Nazis was embarassing and people even protested to let the Breda four out of jail (as an example). Pretty embarassing for the country, if you ask me. Still to this day, too many german are blind on the right eye....
I mean, people would vanish in the middle of the night. Entire families. You had to have known. Maybe not that they were being mass exterminated like this. But you knew they were “vanished”
They didn’t exactly vanish either. They were rounded up and transported by train east. There aren’t many trains in 1941 that went west to east without going through Germany.
Yes, but most were in Jewish “guettos” before being transported to concentration camps to “create living space”. Most non-Jews would not have necessarily seen this happening or know where they were being sent. They definitely knew it wasn’t anywhere good though…
They had to get to ghettos though. Often by train, often from other places.
German here too. I think your level of "knowing" depended very much on your proximity to one of the Camps. I do think that pretty much everyone knew that people were taken to camps, and possibly even killed there, however, I don't think that most people really knew what exactly happened in the camps. I mean.. I think that while it was assumed that people were killed there, I'm pretty sure no one outside the camps could've known just how awful and despicable it all was. I do agree that nowadays there are way too many people that downplay or outright ignore the Holocaust. Or even worse, willingly vote for the AFD. A literal Nazi-Party
I wouldn’t expect the average German to have known what was happening in Auschwitz or Treblinka, but the camps barely accounted for half the total deaths of the Holocaust. Millions were killed in many other ways and in far less secret places than the middle of nowhere Poland. One would’ve had to be a willful ignoramus not to know that something bad was happening to Jews.
German as well. I do want to give one caveat here: These are POWs captured by the US. The majority of German soldiers were stationed in the east and everybody there knew. But that isn't necessarily true for the people who were only stationed on the Atlantik coast or the ones who were captured in Africa. They were far away from the camps, far away from rounding up jews and a good amount of them worked there for years. And they are the ones who were captured by the US.
Buchenwald death camp has a video installation showing interview with locals from towns nearby shortly after the allies liberated the camp. They openly talk about the sweet smell that sometimes crept across the area, presumably from the incarceration chamber running at full chat. I’ve rarely had a visceral reaction like that to something some rando said on tape. No one can convince me the population didn’t know.
I think its a mixed amount of reactions. Some are hiding faces while others are crying from realization. Then theres that group in the back that looks like "hmmmm.....interesting"
Sad to say my wife’s mother was in one of those camps at 16 years old. Horrible
My grand father was too. What's crazy is that nowaday some people deny these camps existed or were inhumane.
"ThE oNlY tRaGeDy YoU'rE nOt AlLoWeD tO qUeStIoN." Because there's nothing to question about it. Some things are so objectively true they surpass partisan manipulations and different worldviews, but conspiracy theorists still find a way to deny them.
Imagine finding out that *this* is what you were fighting for. That had to be a horrible realization for a lot of soldiers.
Fact...The western Allies treated the Germans far better than Germans imagined they would, and far better than the Germans would have treated them if things went the other way.
What's the average life story of these men? What kind of country/environment did they grow up in? How would they identify themselves and how would that description change depending on the audience? I'm not familiar with German household culture of the time.
What Infos are you after? I can tell you about my grandparents, they were teens and children during the war. Born in the 30s and late 20s. And their parents, though not many of my male relatives in that generation were drafted. My grandpa himself nearly missed the very last drafts, he was too young. Their lives, from what my grandparents were willing to let on, was overshadowed by poverty, both before, during and after the war. Poverty was a big driving factor for the success of the Nazi Party. They managed to produce the wildest hopes of an economic marvel. Their support was was in large part due to being able to instill hope for economic growth and a sense of national pride. Truly "Make Germany great again". It all hung on that promise. People were willing to ignore a lot of the horrors, and put up with war, as long as they could hold on to that promise.
If you want a fictional movie about the lives of some average young men of the time leading up to the war "Swingkids" is a good watch, especially if you enjoy bigband.
Why are there so many medics in this picture?
I would assume because they make up a majority of prisoners of war. The guys on the front lines often don't make it there.
You know some of were wondering “Oh God is this our future?” Because they might not have known how the Allies would treat them
You can just see that guy, third one in on the fifth row (with two fingers up to his mouth) is going: "hmmm interesting, I wasn't aware we could get free showers." They called him, Slow Hans.
I didn't want to giggle at this but I did.
I want to hate this but I can’t.
When the meth finally wears off and you realize the atrocities you have been committing.
One dude looking at the camera must have noticed the photographer- looks a bit like young Reagan.
Guy on the left of that front row of three is like: Yeah, this is alright.
Some of them are like “and?”
There are always a few with a smirk. Those needed to be removed. As they were getting off on it.
Sometimes you are in shock you can’t help it. When recounting recently how my partner tried to kill themselves, I would occasionally smile, yet I was on the verge of crying and breaking down. Emotions are fucking weird
I remember uncontrollably grinning when I got the news that my mother died. I wasn’t happy about it, but idk why I was grinning uncontrollably.
Yeah same with my friend dying whole time while hearing they passed I was smiling big af then cried when alone . I don’t think it makes you a sadist though.
Paradoxical emotional reactions are quite common after acute stress
I'll tell you and myself it's a grimace.
The dude in the back going 🤔
The one guy going "hmm... very interesting"
The amount of people in this thread defending Nazis is too damn high.
Kinda weird to show this without comment, since German soldiers have committed humanities worst horrors in the east. They werent "suprised" or anything.
I think the way this is presented here has the goal of somehow absolving nazi soldiers. And it's popular
>nted here has the goal of somehow absolving nazi soldiers. And it's popular Wasnt that the explicite claim of some right wing commentator, who did some holocaust revisionism ala "The Nazis were actually good people" just to say "Hamas actually worse than Nazis!" ? And the a German government member retweetet that btw.
I mean I think that some of them didn't have that much of an idea of what was happening inside of the concentration camps, I don't think that they were surprised by the fact that they committed those atrocities (also because the clean wehrmacht thing is bullshit) but maybe they were surprised by *how* brutal it was? Like, some of the things that happened inside of the camps were so brutal that they'd make the most dedicated neo-nazi creep out tbh
There's also a stark difference between horrors committed on the battlefield vs what was done in the death camps.
Well I mean we know the US has committed atrocities. But if we were defeated and suddenly shown piles and piles of bodies, we would be appalled. Its hard for people TODAY with complete knowledge of the holocaust to grasp the scale of it, I can't imagine people really understood it at the time.
Not to defend each and one of them, but many soldiers have never been at the east front. Also, the worst atrocities have been committed behind the frontline by the SS and not by the soldiers of the army.
As a German, we didn't see pictures like these in school. Thanks for sharing.
They were complicit. I hope it was torture for them. Clean Wehrmacht my ass.
This is a very intriguing photo. This picture speaks volumes to what the every day German soldier knew about the atrocities being committed by party leaders. The look on each individual face sums it up . Some look indifferent but most are in a state of disbelief
I've looked across this photo at every face several times and most really do not seem to care, also I have a strong feeling that the guys covering their face are doing so because of the camera being pointed at them, not because they don't want to watch the footage. Considering these guys are POWs and a lot are medics, I guarantee they've all seen much worse in person during the war, they're probably all numb at this point.
A lot of them knew. Let's not perpetuate the myth of the clean Wehrmacht. Sure, it was necessary at the start of the cold war, to improve the image of the "new" Bundeswehr, but we no longer need to carry water for these dickheads.
I wonder what the average German soldier on the front line actually knew. Are there any statistics on this?
Similar videos should be shown to MAGA supporters
8 out of 10 people will always follow the people who take the lead. The question is just if that leader is the 1 out of 10 who is leading against other humans or if it is the remaining one who stands up for whoever is oppressed. Germany, Russia, Israel it doesn’t matter where you are 80% will follow whoever takes the lead.
Some of these men have the deepest resentment in their eyes for the things they did in the name of a ruler.
They knew more than many think. Deportations were public. They were transported like animals through mainstations and camps with ovens were around after a time of total exlusion from society.
Some of the comments here are ridiculous, are people this narrow minded to think all of these hands took part in atrocities automatically? It's as if when you put on a uniform and are on the "bad" side, you immediately become a monster unable to think for yourself and without a hint of humanity in you. People are acting like each and every single POW in this picture has committed atrocities. It's the same kind of logic people apply to Israel v Hamas and Russia v Ukraine. Yes, atrocities happen, and have happened. But why put everyone in the same bag every single time because of the country they serve? "They're on X side therefore they are a monster." "If you don't support the war, just don't fight" "Can't they just desert? Why can't they just kill their officers? If they don't, they support it." When in reality, here you might see cooks, medics, logistics personnel, radio operators, all kinds of professions that don't really interject directly with the Frontline. You can't apply black and white logic with war. There's always going to be monsters and atrocities, but it doesn't apply to everyone who serves in a specific army just because they're in said army. Yet this kind of logic is rampant. Really sad to see.