[Andropov]

The heroic actions of German ubermenschen liberating the Slavic peoples from their Judeo-Bolshevik oppressors are fully unveiled in a newly released book using secret tapes recorded from German POWs in British camps with the help of hidden microphones.

In the recordings one junior German officer boasted in October 1944 about what he and his men did to a woman they thought was a Russian spy…

“We beat her on the t**s with a stick, clobbered her on the a*** with a pistol, then all eight of us f***** her, then we threw her outside and shot at her. And as she lay there, we threw grenades at her. Every time one of them landed near her body, she screamed.”

MUELLER: “They were working to repair things, these drop-dead gorgeous girls. We simply drove by them, tore them into the car, lay them down, s****ed them and then chucked them out when we had finished. Man, did they curse us!”

What the German soldier described as a "Jewish operation", proving the Holocaust was known and supported by regular German troopss:

BRUNS: “The trenches were 24 metres long and roughly three metres wide. They had to lie like sardines in a tin, heads towards the middle. Above, six machine gunners delivered the neck-shots.

“When I arrived, the trenches were pretty full already and the living had to lie on top before they got the neck-shot. They were all arranged beautifully so not too much space was wasted. They had already been robbed before they got here. On this Sunday I saw a half-kilometre-long queue shuffling forward step by step, the line-up for death. As they got nearer, they saw what awaited them. Around about here they had to give up their suitcases and their sacks of valuables. A little further on, they had to strip, and they could only keep on a shirt or a slip. They were mostly women and children, not much older than two.”

SOLM: “We knew there were kiddies on board before the tinfish were fired. We bagged a kiddie ship! Six thousand tons. We heard on the radio what was on board. No one survived.”

I think it is clear something is deeply sick with the German mentality, considering Hitler was supported overwhelmingly by his population and regular troops had knowledge of and participated directly in some of the worst atrocities the world has ever seen. Stalin's kind heart got the best of him in 1945, when he decided to create East Germany as a German state, instead of deporting all the Germans there to forced labor camps to rebuild the country they themselves destroyed, directly or indirectly, and populate the territory with Russians, Ukranians, Kazakhs, and other Soviet nations.

[Far-Right Sage]

Oh please.

This is utterly ridiculous; spare me.

Shall we discuss the Bolshevik dogs raping children on dining room tables while other men looked on dancing?

[Andropov]

You act as if out of nowhere, the Red Army appeared in Berlin and started committing atrocities- the fact is, the men who made it to Berlin had seen hell on earth for 4 years, with a low survival rate and with many of their closest friends and family members killed by the brutality of the German invaders. And when they arrive in Berlin, they saw that not only did the Germans provide overwhelming support to Hitler's plans, the Germans themselves lived in relative luxury, while themselves supporting the total destruction of the East. Soviet atrocities was retribution for much, much more wrong done to them than what they inflicted, whereas German atrocities were completely unprovoked and denote serious sociological sickness in the German mentality. If a man bludgeons another man nearly to death and the other man manages to incapacitate the aggressor, the defender is not morally to blame.

[Rei Murasame]

Is there any actual audio of these tapes, and are there a lot of these incidents captured on the tapes? Or are we just supposed to believe the British and take their word for it that they have stacks of tapes containing German POWs boasting about every kind of violent act imaginable?

I can't wait to hear about the "we hope to bomb every chip shop in Britain and outlaw vinegar" tape. That just might be the most scandalous revelation of all.

[Andropov]

Oops, I forgot to provide a link: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/se ... ny-1336922

[Far-Right Sage]

Andropov, I'm not going to enter into a moral argument about the mass rape the Red Army committed with impunity in Berlin. Rape has been a factor of war since the dawn of time and fighting men from all sides committed it in the Second World War (no one ever discusses the French Moroccan troops' mass rape and murder of dozens of Italian girls). Obviously, I find it repulsive to know of and have heard horror stories from countless German women.

The moral argument is a distraction. Stalker and I recently agreed upon this. I don't truly care about the fate that befell Soviet civilians and he (and you) don't care about the fate of German civilians. I would say that is natural and expected.

Which is why bringing up this topic is ridiculous. First of all, if we are to even believe the reports, it means some German servicemen in the Wehrmacht and possibly elsewhere committed rape. So what? It wasn't instituted German policy or encouraged. Rommel had two German infantrymen hanged for the rape of a Libyan woman during the North African campaign. The Soviets seemed to have a very different approach to all this.

At the end of the day, your feigned moral outrage is silliness. You call into question the German national psyche which supported Hitler? Give me a break. You would have been passing out NSDAP literature if you were an ethnic German; the whole tirade of the original post comes across as sour grapes for so many Germanic beasts having escaped the hangman's noose and dying comfortably in their beds, fortunately.

The overwhelming majority of Germans supported Hitler because he liberated our ancient folk from an alien half-Marxist, half-liberal waste of a regime and transformed German society into a revolutionary vanguard ready to tackle destiny. Today folks are brainwashed, but I can assure you that if you spoke with German people and German expats before the chaos of the 60's, he was very much still considered a national father and rightly so.

This was a conflict I ultimately came into the world on the cusp of and had nothing to do with physically, but I shall never make any apology for German, Italian, Japanese, Romanian, Hungarian, Finnish, Free Indian, Free Iraqi, or Spanish actions of the period, because I believe firmly as I have since rearing with every fiber of my mortal being that the Axis was waging conflict for a sacred cause, a monumental cause, a holy war of liberation from the materialistic paradigm which has ensnared the world and raped our collective heritage and societies for centuries now.

Do you want to know the one form of action I will condemn the Axis for? Anything which didn't advance the Axis. Do you want to know the forms of action I will praise the Axis for? Anything which advanced the Axis.

No compromise and absolutely no shame for that period of unparalleled heroism.

[Rei Murasame]

Well, Andropov, what I'm noticing is that the Mirror, the Sun, and the Daily Mail and so on, are all carrying a strange and sensationalised version of this story which seems to focus exclusively on the select instances of Germans allegedly saying that they were 'having fun' in combat against everything that moved.

But then on the flip-side, book review sites and papers like the Guardian seem to carry a different tone entirely, which described how 'everyone seemed to be aware but not concerned' about excesses which were occurring, and have placed their focus on different alleged quotes about different topics.

Overall this seems to be a matter of which sources you think are going to give you story of these alleged comments in context. Since British centre-right newspapers love a story about Nazis, one would expect to see them transform this book into some kind of 500 page treatise on the unique and special evil of Wehrmacht soldiers, even if that's not actually what the book is about.

The book's conclusion is that "soldiers kill because it it their job".

The chapters are:

• 1. What the Soldiers Discussed
• 2. The Soldier's World
• 3. Fighting, Killing, and Dying
• 4. Frame of Reference: Annihilation
• 5. Sex
• 6. Technology
• 7. Faith in Victory
• 8. Ideology
• 9. Success
• 10. Frame of Reference: War
• 11. How National Socialism was the Wehrmacht's War?
• 12. War as Work

So I think that those who believe the British centre-right newspapers and think that buying the book "Soldaten" will give them access to a giant tome of a chronicle of unique and unthinkable German rampages, will find themselves a little disappointed, because that it not what it is about, and the book itself does not make any moralistic declarations about what is alleged to have been discussed.

At several points Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer apparently make contrasts between what they are analysing from the alleged German comments, and actions taken by the Allied powers which they consider to be equivalent.

There are also stories about how partisans would attack German wounded soldiers and kill them, and that other German units would then retaliate by doing it back to them. But these are of course not the sort of quotes that British centre-right newspapers would print.

[Far-Right Sage]

Of course not, because Andropov, out of Russian nationalism, is using dubious moral arguments of the sort that have been made to attack individual German patriots and the collective German nation since '45. Andropov, as an illiberal person, you are better than to utilize liberal non-logic in these silly arguments. You should be better than this!

[ThereBeDragons]

This is abhorrent but not remotely surprising (I've read less about rape in the Wehrmacht, but it's well known they were frequently called in to do SS work). Regular soldiers from many armies have participated in countless atrocities. In a war where armies are not kept on a tight leash, society's hidden rapists, murderers, and sadists that would be perfectly content to bake bread during peacetime come out to play. Atrocities don't have to be sanctioned from above to happen en masse. They simply have to be permitted. Once armies realize that there are no consequences for raping and murdering children, soldiers go wild. In a nation worth respecting, these people would be court-martialed and shot.

Of course, most nations don't do anything of the sort, and while German soldiers may have eagerly participated in the most organized mass killings of civilians in history, there is nothing particularly German about it. It just so happens, though, that Western democracies usually at least pay lip service to "respect for human life" and all that, and Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan didn't even play at such pretenses, so nobody pretends to respect them, and you end up with several tens of millions more murdered civilians at the end of the day.

Those who wage war bear the responsibility for the consequences. If leaders don't keep their army on a leash and they do something abhorrent, they're on the hook for whatever atrocity may occur. The declaration of a war is the seed of whatever evil may come to pass (they said as much in the show trials at the end of the war in question. The supreme international crime and all that shit nobody cares about.)

Except since I am the only liberal in the room, you all probably consider what others call "war crimes" and "monstrosities" minor and inconsequential footnotes to honorable struggles for national liberation. So whatever.

[Preston Cole]

You act as if out of nowhere, the Red Army appeared in Berlin and started committing atrocities- the fact is, the men who made it to Berlin had seen hell on earth for 4 years, with a low survival rate and with many of their closest friends and family members killed by the brutality of the German invaders. And when they arrive in Berlin, they saw that not only did the Germans provide overwhelming support to Hitler's plans, the Germans themselves lived in relative luxury, while themselves supporting the total destruction of the East. Soviet atrocities was retribution for much, much more wrong done to them than what they inflicted, whereas German atrocities were completely unprovoked and denote serious sociological sickness in the German mentality. If a man bludgeons another man nearly to death and the other man manages to incapacitate the aggressor, the defender is not morally to blame.

Get the fuck out of here with that bullshit. Russians routinely got drunk and practiced their aiming on children in occupied Moldova in 1944. But they were justified because they'd seen 3 years of hell. [rule 3 breach removed - SD]

I think it is clear something is deeply sick with the German mentality, considering Hitler was supported overwhelmingly by his population and regular troops had knowledge of and participated directly in some of the worst atrocities the world has ever seen. Stalin's kind heart got the best of him in 1945, when he decided to create East Germany as a German state, instead of deporting all the Germans there to forced labor camps to rebuild the country they themselves destroyed, directly or indirectly, and populate the territory with Russians, Ukranians, Kazakhs, and other Soviet nations.

Oh, please forgive them for not sucking Stalin's dick even more during the Marxist occupation. Yes, I see, they should have packed their stuff voluntarily and fled to that haven that your pathetic Russian nationalism keeps referring to, Siberia. The place populations are unrooted to serve in the better Stalinist future. Siberiaaa, Siberiaaa, God lay your ethnic cleansing grace on me! With the Collective Guilt you instituted in that country it might have even worked. But I have the feeling the Western Allies would have been provoked by the sizable German and German-Jewish minority in the US to pressure the USSR into dropping its deportation efforts in Germany, that psychopathic tendency it had displayed until the death of Stalin to deport entire populations and wreak havoc wherever it set foot. So much for your Stalinist wet-dream.

[Andropov]

I don't assume you have any evidence whatsoever for Red Army men "practicing their aiming on children" in "occupied" Moldova, unlike myself, who has provided microphone-recorded confessions of Wehrmacht troops committing atrocities.

As for FRS, I agree with you that I would have been in the NSDAP if I was a German living at the time, and you probably would have been a firebrand Commissar on the Front if you lived the USSR during Stalin. The simple fact is German Nazism was a Germanic supremacist ideology, believing that all historical figures of worth possessed Germanic blood, and was based on a racial division of the world with the Germanic race on top. Naturally, for those of non-Germanic stock such as the Slavs, a hostility towards German Nazism is to be expected.

[Malatant of Shadow]

Andropov, to me several things are clear and obvious.

1) You don't need any sensationalistic crap to justify condemning the German invasion of the Soviet Union or the conduct of the war thereafter. By any reasonable idea of a just war or a justifiable military action, the Germans were in the wrong and hardly anyone disagrees with that statement. The only ones who might are a) die-hard racist Nazis who believe Hitler was right in his philosophy and the Slavs are subhuman brutes, and b) foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Communists who justify the invasion on an ends-justify-the-means basis. Both groups of people may be dismissed as not worth paying any attention to. So there's no need of this at all.

I mean, come on. Even Churchill supported the Soviet Union against the Nazis. And he was about as unfriendly to Communism as any Western politician who ever lived.

2) In trying to claim that there is something about Germans that make them uniquely brutal as soldiers, you sound more like a Nazi yourself than a Communist. Why?

That brutality occurs in war and that soldiers sometimes commit rapes and other atrocities is not news. That the German soldiers sometimes did these things during World War II is not surprising. (The contrary would be surprising.) That Soviet soldiers also did things like this is equally unsurprising (and your suggestion that they were paragons of virtue is without credibility).

Regarding the Holocaust, there were special SS units in Russia who were responsible for rounding up Jews and killing them. (They were also responsible for doing the same with Soviet political officers.) These were military units of a sort, but they were not part of the Wehrmacht and should not be confused with them.

[Andropov]

All I am saying is the Germans under Hitler's banner were infused with a particular energy of racial superiority and the thirst for world domination- naturally, this resulted in brutality towards "lesser races" and a messianic borderline religious devotion to fulfilling the holy mission of the Nazi party. Apart from sociopaths, no human beings acts immorally according to their own moral categories- the moral categories of Germans during Hitler's rule were very different from those of other WW2 combatants, resulting in widespread immorality according to the moral categories of the majority of the world's population today. And Hitler's ideology itself did not come out of nowhere- it had deep roots in German Romanticism, among other movements.

[Decky]

This isn't really news, everyone knows what happens when German is not kept controlled. Luckily the civilised countries all have nukes there days. As long as the EU collapses before the Germans can unify Europe under one banner we should be safe.

[Malatant of Shadow]

All I am saying is the Germans under Hitler's banner were infused with a particular energy of racial superiority and the thirst for world domination- naturally, this resulted in brutality towards "lesser races" and a messianic borderline religious devotion to fulfilling the holy mission of the Nazi party.

There is no evidence that I know of (and you have presented none) that German soldiers were more brutal to people in occupied areas than soldiers usually are in such situations. I'm talking about Wehrmacht soldiers now; if you want to talk about the SS Totenkopf divisions that's another subject -- those were true believers in Nazi ideology and for them what you say was true.

As for Germans in general under Nazi rule, one should not oversimplify matters. Remember that Hitler, whatever his moral defects and military incompetence, was a very skillful politician. There were certain things he presented to the German people that they liked a lot (hence his ability to take over the government): German national pride, tearing up the Versailles treaty, unifying all ethnic Germans under one government, building up the military, restoring the economy, strong authoritarian leadership (Germans weren't really accustomed to democracy at that point, it takes about a generation).

There were also some things that we now know in hindsight about his intentions that he kept carefully hidden. One was his intention to start a war. Partly that was to keep the enemy from finding out, but partly it was to keep Germany from finding out. The German experience in WW1 was not pleasant and the idea of starting another one wasn't popular. Popular opinion on this turned after early German victories, especially the victory over France which hadn't been possible in the earlier war. (The Germans did like that they clobbered France so easily.) When the war in the Soviet Union bogged down and they began to lose, Hitler lost a lot of popularity.

Another thing that was concealed was the depth of Nazi antisemitism. Some degree of antisemitism was out in the open, but even something as mild (compared to the Holocaust proper) as Kristalnacht (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristalnachtraised some eyebrows. The Holocaust proper, i.e. the shooting of Jews in the Ukraine and especially the death camps in Poland, was concealed from the knowledge of Germans; there is little reason to believe these actions would have been approved.

The Nazi regime was an atrocity and I'm not saying otherwise, but it's possible to overstate the case in regard to how complicit most Germans were in what the regime did and I believe you have done that here. (It's also possible to understate that complicity, of course.)

[Rich]

I think it is clear something is deeply sick with the German mentality,

What a strange thing to say. Everything I've heard indicates Latvians Romanians and others seemed to have been far more brutal. I means the gas chambers themselves are testament to the sensitivity and softness of Germans. A lot of Eastern Europeans had no problem about killing Jewish women and children. Or take the British were they really that much more bleeding heart liberals than the Germans? When the RAF saw what the Germans did to Coventry were they dismayed by the horror, of course not they were inspired with the Fields of Eaton competitive spirit: "We'll show the Germans how to fire bomb cities."

[Far-Right Sage]

I agree with Rich in that pretending German forces were the most unequivocally brutal of the war is silliness. Many Germans serving, particularly in the Wehrmacht, could not purge Jews in the manner some Romanian fascists and paramilitaries did during the Legionaire's Rebellion, for example. The Wehrmacht also criticized Japanese actions in Nanking and the SS reportedly wrote to Berlin from Croatia about the Ustase's methods being excessive. That's not to speak of Soviet and associated Allied "war crimes".

It was a brutal time and brutality needed to be used to bring about certain changes. Today, there is no less brutality, but it is currently at is strongest where Western powers seek to enrich themselves over the graves of millions of brown peoples.

Really, the only reason NS Germany is considered an anomaly whatsoever is that they dished out the treatment the British and French had been in their African and Asian colonies for centuries to a people who were considered culturally white (the Jews). That is essentially their historical crime. And its silliness.

Millions of Germans were and are unashamed, because there is nothing to be ashamed about. We live in a violent world, and harsh action in itself when applied properly brings spiritual renewal rather than despair. I feel no need for apology or regret for any Axis action whatsoever.

[Rich]

Really, the only reason NS Germany is considered an anomaly whatsoever is that they dished out the treatment the British and French had been in their African and Asian colonies for centuries to a people who were considered culturally white (the Jews). That is essentially their historical crime. And its silliness.

Well it was different. Genocide is a form of respect. We saw this with the Armenian and the Tutsi genocides in both cases the perpetrators feared the superiority of those they killed. What the Romans did to Carthage again was a mark of respect: an enemy that must never be aloud to gain the upper hand again. The Germans didn't just exploit the Jews they systematically exterminated them at significant cost in scare resources. To most people the Jews were not a threat and so their murder is senseless and horrific. Most people don't respect the Jews as a people. They don't believe they were or are no threat. I agree with most people in this. The Jews loved Germany prior to the Nazis. This senseless murder of some of the most creative and productive people was very different from say the brutal exploitation of the Congo by innocent little Belgium. Even the extermination of the Polish elite was different. They were a threat to German domination and control, however weak. The Jews were only a threat to Germany in the fevered imaginations of fantasists.

Its a bit like Islam today. Neither the lefties nor the Western establishment have the slightest respect for Islam. The foreign policy establishment sees them as tools to be used to ensure western control of oil supplies. The leftie liberals also see them as tools, that can be used to undermine western Christianity, western Conservatism and Western nationalism. Some Liberal minded establishment types see the Muslims as tools that can be used for both purposes, hence their glee at filling up Brussels with Muslims. I do respect Islam as a deadly enemy.

[Smilin' Dave]

The only thing more absurd that Andropov's exaggerated horror in this thread in FRS's lame attempt to deploy moral equivilency. 'Hey, horrible things were done by both sides, its war etc.' is a fantastic argument until you give the game away by using value laden language like :

having escaped the hangman's noose and dying comfortably in their beds, fortunately.

Or

The overwhelming majority of Germans supported Hitler because he liberated our ancient folk from an alien half-Marxist, half-liberal waste of a regime and transformed German society into a revolutionary vanguard ready to tackle destiny. Today folks are brainwashed, but I can assure you that if you spoke with German people and German expats before the chaos of the 60's, he was very much still considered a national father and rightly so.

Or you know, posting a thread about how Gaddafi was a "glorious martyr". Clearly you are not interesting in genuinely dismissing the question of morality in general, but rather in negating the question when it comes to your own particular preferred side. It's almost disrepectful that you've tried to do this, since you must think we're pretty stupid to not notice how disingenuous your approach is.

Really, the only reason NS Germany is considered an anomaly whatsoever is that they dished out the treatment the British and French had been in their African and Asian colonies for centuries to a people who were considered culturally white (the Jews). That is essentially their historical crime. And its silliness.

Millions of Germans were and are unashamed, because there is nothing to be ashamed about.

Since you're so keen on parallels FRS, can you cite me an instance comparable in terms of scale and method to the Holocaust from French or British colonial history from the 19th Century? We won't go any further back then that, because otherwise we'll end up with some absurdity like justifying a massacre in 1944 with something the Teutonic Knights did centuries earlier.

There is no evidence that I know of (and you have presented none) that German soldiers were more brutal to people in occupied areas than soldiers usually are in such situations. I'm talking about Wehrmacht soldiers now; if you want to talk about the SS Totenkopf divisions that's another subject -- those were true believers in Nazi ideology and for them what you say was true.

As I'm sure someone else has mentioned in this thread, the Wehrmacht did participate in the actions of the Einsatzgruppen so this division claimed between army and SS isn't really as serious as you claim. I would also defy you to find a parallel from the western side with the massacre of thousands of Italian prisoners by the German Wehrmacht in 1943, an event where I don't think a single SS unit was present
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_o ... i_Division

Anyway, have a read of this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes ... _Wehrmacht

Well it was different. Genocide is a form of respect. We saw this with the Armenian and the Tutsi genocides in both cases the perpetrators feared the superiority of those they killed.

I don't think this would always be the case. I don't think the Sinti and Romani were particularly well respected, yet they were set for destruction also during the war.

[Far-Right Sage]

The only thing more absurd that Andropov's exaggerated horror in this thread in FRS's lame attempt to deploy moral equivilency. 'Hey, horrible things were done by both sides, its war etc.' is a fantastic argument
until you give the game away by using value laden language like :

Or you know, posting a thread about how Gaddafi was a "glorious martyr". Clearly you are not interesting in genuinely dismissing the question of morality in general, but rather in negating the question when it comes to your own particular preferred side. It's almost disrepectful that you've tried to do this, since you must think we're pretty stupid to not notice how disingenuous your approach is.

I'm not quite sure what your argument is here. The world runs on violence, which both sides commit. No, it's been a long time since I've believed in the puerile world of cowboys and Injuns, good guys and bad guys, pushed onto a population of infantile hysterics to serve a narrative. Again, what exactly is your point? I have never obscured or attempted to obscure my sympathies for the world-altering struggle National Socialist Germany and other forces set out on, nor have I obscured my sympathies for Qaddafi (who isn't germane to the topic of this discussion in any sense). You seem to be attempting to demonstrate some hypocrisy here. What hypocrisy? I have never accused our opponents, the Red Army or present-day benefactors of the liberal-capitalist order of being "evil" or "bad guys". They are factions pushing their own economic and social interests wrapped in a belief system; it simply happens to be a belief system I oppose and wish to see eradicated. There is no contradiction in supporting any faction and having an opinion and ideological influences, as I do, and recognizing the inherent amorality and relativity of the course of history.

Since you're so keen on parallels FRS, can you cite me an instance comparable in terms of scale and method to the Holocaust from French or British colonial history from the 19th Century? We won't go any further back then that, because otherwise we'll end up with some absurdity like justifying a massacre in 1944 with something the Teutonic Knights did centuries earlier.

I'm not aware of whether or not you have ever heard me say anything on this topic, but I have always considered the scale argument to be nothing but trivial bunk from day one. What the hell difference does scale make? The German action was objectively worse because it was more efficient than British or French colonial administrations of the 19th century, or any European or Asian conqueror of antiquity or the Middle Ages? If the Mongol Empire had Zyklon-B, there likely wouldn't be a nation of Iraq today. Genghis Khan is lionized in Mongolia today. Again, so what? You have a fine mind for history and analysis, but you seem to lock yourself forever in some irrelevant moral narrative crafted by men who themselves are a product of the era. I attempt to look outside this epoch for a greater understanding than one could glean from the biased tripe of English moralists who criticized German actions after holding the world hostage on a rape, murder, slave, and terrorist spree for centuries. I couldn't care less about what British analysts have to say about German actions. German resistance to the world order engineered by England was the most fantastic and glorious act in the history of our people since Arminius stood defiant of the Roman hordes. It should never be apologized for. Anyone who presents the mere suggestion within Germany today is a traitor worthy of nothing but deprivation and extrajudicial execution.