How much of Europe was supportive of the Nazi's during WWII?
musicismylife78
Posts: 6,116
so heres a question that i know that no one here can definitively answer but im interested in your views nonetheless.
say you were now living in Europe, Germany, Poland, at the height of Nazism. How much of the population of those key countries like Poland, or Germany, was actually ProNazi?
I guess first we need to know the population of Germany and of Europe during WWII, then we also have to take into account obviously the fact some people out of necessity had to be publicly pro nazi, but were privately helping Jewish families, or felt that if they spoke out they'd be killed, so they had to be publicly Pro Nazi.
So taking those things into account, as much as you can, how much, percentage wise, or millions of people wise, how much of the population of Europe, of Germany, of France, of Poland, of wherever, were ProNazi during WWII?
Was the majority of the European population as a whole at least publically pro-nazi?
say you were now living in Europe, Germany, Poland, at the height of Nazism. How much of the population of those key countries like Poland, or Germany, was actually ProNazi?
I guess first we need to know the population of Germany and of Europe during WWII, then we also have to take into account obviously the fact some people out of necessity had to be publicly pro nazi, but were privately helping Jewish families, or felt that if they spoke out they'd be killed, so they had to be publicly Pro Nazi.
So taking those things into account, as much as you can, how much, percentage wise, or millions of people wise, how much of the population of Europe, of Germany, of France, of Poland, of wherever, were ProNazi during WWII?
Was the majority of the European population as a whole at least publically pro-nazi?
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You'd think a country that was "hilter's bitch" during the war would be a bit more enlightened!
It still exists in Germany, however, younger people are generally enightened and do what they can to distance themselves from the past.
I'm always curious about Germany and the younger generations thoughts toward the Holocaust. Can anyone give some generalizations about how it's dealt with, discussed, general feelings about, talked about in schools, etc.
interestingly, there is a lot of guilt from the youngest generation. I had several German dudes in my MBA classes and one night over drinks I brought up this touchy subject. I couldn't believe how guilty they felt for their grandparents' decisions.
Granted, this is the opinion of about four German kids in 2003 whilst drunk, so take it with a grain of salt.
On another note. Has anyone ever wondered what the world would be like had the Nazi's won the war? It's hard to even fathom.
The right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail is well-known for its headline "Hurrah For The Blackshirts", but what is not often mentioned is that the supposedly left-of-centre Daily Mirror also published this article:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_m-F6RNSjdyU/T ... irror2.jpg
The fascists, even more controversially, had support from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor:
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/113232
And don't forget Lord Haw Haw:
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/lord%20haw_haw.htm
There was also that priest in Father Ted, but I don't know if we can count him.
I guess this is a situation when an extreme will cause a flourish of enlightened philosophies. Hopefully.
Why limit your question to Europe? Why not include America, George Lincoln Rockwell, and the American Nazi Party?
But in answer to your question, no, most of Europe wasn't pro-nazi, hence why the majority of European countries spent 6 years waging war against Nazism.
i would like to point out that the blueshirts where only quasi facist, and while there was an element of anti semitism it was more to do with the cultural norm and there was no policy of rounding up jewish people...
but anyway carry on
"..That's One Happy Fuckin Ghost.."
“..That came up on the Pillow Case...This is for the Greek, With Our Apologies.....”
Ah, it's true that the blueshirts weren't overtly anti-semitic, and the reason for this might have something to do with what the fictional (and anti-Jewish) Mr Deasy says in Ulysses about Jews never having been "let in" to the country in the first place to precipitate such evident prejudice. But let's quibble a bit about semantics here, because your description of the blueshirts as quasi-fascist perplexes me a bit. Fascism does not necessarily and by definition incorporate anti-semitism but is instead rather more to do with supporting an anti-liberal totalitarianism, and so, fascism without overt anti-semitism is not quasi-fascism. Fascism also evolved over the 1930s and while it involved different beliefs, anti-liberal, one-state absolutism was its core obsession. The blueshirts were minor fascists though, and they evolved over time to become more obviously fascistic in many key respects under Eoin O' Duffy. Under O' Duffy, their support for the Nazis under was most clearly obvious in their involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Franco, interestingly enough, thought Eoin O' Duffy was a drunken arsehole and a pussy for not wanting to fight the Basques.
O' Duffy was a cranky Catholic clericalist in the mould of Fr Denis Fahey. Defenders of Fahey try to argue that this priest wasn't strictly an anti-semite but more of a conspiracy theorist, but his belief in the veracity of the Zionist Protocols pretty much gives the game away for him. Fahey wrote a diatribe called The Kingship of Christ, which basically said that Catholic civilisation was being attacked by communists, liberals, freemasons and Zionists.
Speculating, I think, however, it's a safe bet that privately, O' Duffy and his followers would have been influenced by this horrendously paranoid, anti-semitic thinking without publicly stating any final solution as one of its objectives for Irish fascists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_fed ... tion,_1930 Nazi's 18.3%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_election,_July_1932 Nazi's 37.8%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_ele ... ember_1932 Nazi's 33.1%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_fed ... March_1933 (after Nazi suppression of the SPD and Communist vote and their pinning the Reichstag fire on the Communists) Nazi's 43.9%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_ele ... ember_1933 (after all opposition parties were banned) Nazi's 92.2%
It should be noted that two of the opposition parties were also nationalist parties: the German National People's Party and the Bavarian People's Party. But the total nationalist vote was never higher than 46%. A message of nationalism combined with socialism was apparently what got the Nazi's to where there were electorally, but after Hitler decided elections weren't working out the way he wanted them to, we saw the rise of fascism in Germany.
Otto Wels (September 15, 1873 – September 16, 1939) was the chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 1919 and a member of parliament from 1920 to 1933.
On March 23, 1933 the Berlin-born Wels was the only member of the Reichstag to speak against Adolf Hitler's Enabling Act (the "Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich"). The vote took place during the last session of a multi-party Reichstag, on March 23, 1933. Because the Reichstag building itself had suffered heavy burning damage in February, the March session was held in Berlin's Kroll Opera House. Despite the incipient persecution of leftist and oppositional politicians and the presence of the SA, he made a clear speech opposing the Enabling Act, which formally took the power of legislation away from the Reichstag and handed it over to the Reich cabinet for a period of four years.
He declared:
"At this historic hour, we German Social Democrats pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and Socialism. No Enabling Law can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible ... From this new persecution too German Social Democracy can draw new strength. We send greetings to the persecuted and oppressed. We greet our friends in the Reich. Their steadfastness and loyalty deserve admiration. The courage with which they maintain their convictions and their unbroken confidence guarantee a brighter future."
Looking directly at Hitler, Wels proclaimed,
"You can take our lives and our freedom, but you cannot take our honour. We are defenseless but not honourless."
All 96 SPD members of parliament voted against the act; the rest of the Reichstag (besides the Communists, who were disabled of voting) voted in favour. The passage of the Enabling Act marked the end of parliamentary democracy in Germany and formed the legal authority for Hitler's dictatorship. Within weeks of the passage of the Enabling Act, the Hitler government banned the SPD while the other German political parties chose to dissolve themselves to avoid prosecution, making the Nazi party the only legal political party in Germany.
In August 1933 he was deprived of his citizenship, and after the banning of the SPD by the Nazis in June 1933, Wels went into exile to the Territory of the Saar Basin, which at the time was under League of Nations control. He then moved to build up the expatriate SPD, first in Prague and then in Paris, where he died in 1939.
i have a book on it at home but this is just from wikipedia
The Blueshirts are sometimes described as "quasi-fascist",[1] and the extent to which they can be seen as the Irish equivalent of Hitler's Brownshirts and Mussolini's Blackshirts continues to be debated. They employed paramilitary-style uniforms, greeted each other with the Roman salute, and participated in street fights against the IRA.[2] On the other hand, fascist ideology was not widespread among rank-and-file members, many of whom simply shared an opposition to the IRA, the governing Fianna Fáil party, and contemporary economic policies.[3] The organisation was defensive rather than offensive in outlook, and unlike their European counterparts, members were not known to engage in political terrorism. The historian R. M. Douglas has written: "[M]ost scholars... accept that those who have sought to find in the Blueshirts an Irish manifestation of fascism have been looking in the wrong place
German grandchildren of Nazis delve into past
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Hanns Elard Luding, Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler AP – This 1936 photo made by Gottfried Gilbert and provided by Alexandra Senfft shows her grandfather Hanns …
By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER, Associated Press – 1 hr 44 mins ago
BERLIN – Rainer Hoess was 12 years old when he found out his grandfather was one of the worst mass murderers in history.
The gardener at his boarding school, an Auschwitz survivor, beat him black and blue after hearing he was the grandson of Rudolf Hoess, commandant of the death camp synonymous with the Holocaust.
"He beat me, because he projected on me all the horror he went through," Rainer Hoess said, with a shrug and a helpless smile. "Once a Hoess, always a Hoess. Whether you're the grandfather or the grandson — guilty is guilty."
Germans have for decades confronted the Nazi era head-on, paying billions in compensation, meticulously teaching Third Reich history in school, and building memorials to victims. The conviction Thursday in Munich of retired Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk on charges he was a guard at the Sobibor Nazi death camp drives home how the Holocaust is still very much at the forefront of the German psyche.
But most Germans have skirted their own possible family involvement in Nazi atrocities. Now, more than 65 years after the end of Hitler's regime, an increasing number of Germans are trying to pierce the family secrets.
Some, like Hoess, have launched an obsessive solitary search. Others seek help from seminars and workshops that have sprung up across Germany to provide research guidance and psychological support.
"From the outside, the third generation has had it all — prosperity, access to education, peace and stability," said Sabine Bode, who has written books on how the Holocaust weighs on German families today. "Yet they grew up with a lot of unspoken secrets, felt the silent burdens in their families that were often paired with a lack of emotional warmth and vague anxieties."
Like others, Hoess had to overcome fierce resistance within his own family, who preferred that he "not poke around in the past." Undeterred, he spent lonely hours at archives and on the Internet researching his grandfather.
Rudolf Hoess was in charge of Auschwitz from May 1940 to November 1943. He came back to Auschwitz for a short stint in 1944, to oversee the murder of some 400,000 Hungarian Jews in the camp's gas chambers within less than two months.
The commandant lived in a luxurious mansion at Auschwitz with his wife and five children — among them Hans-Rudolf, the father of Rainer. Only 150 meters (yards) away the crematories' chimneys were blowing out the ashes of the dead day and night.
After the war, Hoess went into hiding on a farm in northern Germany; he was eventually captured and hanged in 1947, in front of his former home on the grounds of Auschwitz.
"When I investigate and read about my grandfather's crimes, it tears me apart every single time," Hoess said during a recent interview at his home in a little Black Forest village.
As a young man, he said, he tried twice to kill himself. He has suffered three heart attacks in recent years as well as asthma, which he says gets worse when he digs into his family's Nazi past.
Today, Hoess says, he no longer feels guilty, but the burden of the past weighs on him at all times.
"My grandfather was a mass murderer — something that I can only be ashamed and sad about," said the 45-year-old chef and father of two boys and two girls. "However, I do not want to close my eyes and pretend nothing ever happened, like the rest of my family still does ... I want to stop the curse that's been haunting my family ever since, for the sake of myself and that of my own children."
Hoess is no longer in contact with his father, brother, aunts and cousins, who all call him a traitor. Strangers often look at him with distrust when he tells them about his grandfather — "as if I could have inherited his evil."
Despite such reactions, descendants of Nazis — from high-ranking officials to lowly foot soldiers — are increasingly trying to find out what their families did between 1933 to 1945.
"The Nazis — the first generation — were too ashamed to talk about the crimes they committed and covered everything up. The second generation often had trouble personally confronting their Nazi parents. So now it is up to the grandchildren to lift the curses off their families," said Bode.
It was only during her university years — reading books about the Holocaust — that Ursula Boger found out her grandfather was the most dreaded torturer at Auschwitz.
"I felt numb for days after I read about what he did," recalled Boger, a shy, soft-spoken woman who lives near Freiburg in southwestern Germany. "For many years I was ashamed to tell anybody about him, but then I realized that my own silence was eating me up from inside."
Her grandfather, Wilhelm Boger, invented the so-called Boger swing at Auschwitz — an iron bar that hung on chains from the ceiling. Boger would force naked inmates to bend over the bar and beat their genitals until they fainted or died.
Boger, 41, said it took her several years of therapy and group seminars to begin to come to terms with the fact her grandfather was a monster.
"I felt guilty, even though I hadn't committed a crime myself, felt like I had to do only good things at all times to make up for his evil," she said.
Like Hoess, Boger never personally met her grandfather, who died in prison in 1977. After her father died five years ago, she found old letters from her grandfather begging to see his grandchildren in prison — something that never happened.
"It all just doesn't go together," Boger said. "He is the man who killed a little boy with an apple who came in on a transport to Auschwitz, by smashing his head against a wall until he was dead, and then picked up and ate that apple.
"At the same time, he put a picture of myself as a little girl over his bed in prison. How am I supposed to come to terms with this?"
Tanja Hetzer, a therapist in Berlin, helps clients dealing with issues related to their family's Nazi past. While there are no studies or statistics, she said, many cases indicate that descendants of families who have never dealt with their Nazi family history suffer more from depression, burnout and addiction, in particular alcoholism.
In one prominent case, Bettina Goering, the grandniece of Hermann Goering, one of the country's leading Nazis and the head of the Luftwaffe air force, said in an Israeli TV documentary that she decided to be sterilized at age 30 "because I was afraid to bear another such monster."
Some grandchildren of Nazis find a measure of catharsis in confronting the past.
Alexandra Senfft is the granddaughter of Hanns Elard Ludin, Hitler's Slovakia envoy who was involved in the deportation of almost 70,000 Jews. After Ludin was hanged in 1947, his widow raised the children in the belief their father was "a good Nazi."
In her book, "The Pain of Silence," Senfft describes how a web of lies burdened her family over decades, especially her mother, who was 14 years old when her beloved father was hanged.
"It was unbearable at times to work on this book, it brought up fears and pain, but at the same time I got a lot out of writing it all down," Senfft, a lively 49-year-old, explained during an interview at a Berlin coffee shop.
"If I had continued to remain oblivious and silent about my grandfather's crimes, I would have become complicit myself, perhaps without even being aware of it."
Senfft said she also wrote the book so her children could be free of guilt and shame, and that confronting family pasts is essential for the health of German society as a whole so that history does not repeat itself.
These days Rainer Hoess lectures schoolchildren about the Nazi era and anti-Semitism. A few months ago, he visited Auschwitz for the first time and met a group of Israeli students.
That day was "probably the most difficult and intense day in my life," Hoess said, but it was also liberating because he realized that the third generation of Jews after the Holocaust did not hold him responsible. One Israeli girl even gave him a little shell with a blue Star of David painted on it, which he now wears around his neck on a black leather necklace at all times.
Hoess was embroiled in controversy in 2009 when Israeli media reported he tried to sell some of his grandfather's possessions to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial. But email correspondence seen by the AP backs up Hoess' assertion that he would have been just as willing to donate the items. Hoess eventually donated everything he owned from his grandfather — including a trunk, letters and a cigar cutter — to the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich.
Hoess acknowledges that his grandfather will probably never stop haunting him. After his visit to Auschwitz, he met Jozef Paczynski, a Polish camp survivor and the former barber of Commandant Hoess.
"Somehow, subconsciously, I was hoping that maybe he would tell me one positive story about my grandfather, something that shows that he wasn't all evil after all, that there was some goodness in him," Hoess confided.
Paczynski asked Hoess to get up and walk across the room — then told him: "You look exactly like your grandfather."
Great topic. We have several Holocaust survivors in our family and in and around where we grew up. In just about every country that the Germans occupied they had ample support. France is a great example of a country who would like you to believe they are the embodiment of liberty and equal rights but the facts are 44K Jews were deported from France. Half of France during the War, the Vichy, was allied with Germany. How quickly we forget.
In Poland, where we have relatives who were rounded up, they tell us it was their Catholic neighbors who pulled them all out of their homes, not the Nazis and not under any kind of duress. In Greece, we have a family friend who tells how her family was thrown out by the locals and all of the Jewish property was taken by the locals.
The Holocaust was a Pan-European crime. The Germans did the dirty work, but outside of a few exceptions (Italy) everyone by and large gladly turned over their Jewish countryment.
Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: November 13, 2010
WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.
The 600-page report (http://documents.nytimes.com/confidenti ... ocument/p1), which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.
It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.
The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.
Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.
The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.
The report also documents divisions within the government over the effort and the legal pitfalls in relying on testimony from Holocaust survivors that was decades old. The report also concluded that the number of Nazis who made it into the United States was almost certainly much smaller than 10,000, the figure widely cited by government officials.
The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006. Under the threat of a lawsuit, it turned over a heavily redacted version last month to a private research group, the National Security Archive, but even then many of the most legally and diplomatically sensitive portions were omitted. A complete version was obtained by The New York Times.
The Justice Department said the report, the product of six years of work, was never formally completed and did not represent its official findings. It cited “numerous factual errors and omissions,” but declined to say what they were.
More than 300 Nazi persecutors have been deported, stripped of citizenship or blocked from entering the United States since the creation of the O.S.I., which was merged with another unit this year.
In chronicling the cases of Nazis who were aided by American intelligence officials, the report cites help that C.I.A. officials provided in 1954 to Otto Von Bolschwing, an associate of Adolf Eichmann who had helped develop the initial plans “to purge Germany of the Jews” and who later worked for the C.I.A. in the United States. In a chain of memos, C.I.A. officials debated what to do if Von Bolschwing were confronted about his past — whether to deny any Nazi affiliation or “explain it away on the basis of extenuating circumstances,” the report said.
The Justice Department, after learning of Von Bolschwing’s Nazi ties, sought to deport him in 1981. He died that year at age 72.
The report also examines the case of Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi scientist who ran the Mittelwerk munitions factory. He was brought to the United States in 1945 for his rocket-making expertise under Operation Paperclip, an American program that recruited scientists who had worked in Nazi Germany. (Rudolph has been honored by NASA and is credited as the father of the Saturn V rocket.)
The report cites a 1949 memo from the Justice Department’s No. 2 official urging immigration officers to let Rudolph back in the country after a stay in Mexico, saying that a failure to do so “would be to the detriment of the national interest.”
Justice Department investigators later found evidence that Rudolph was much more actively involved in exploiting slave laborers at Mittelwerk than he or American intelligence officials had acknowledged, the report says.
Some intelligence officials objected when the Justice Department sought to deport him in 1983, but the O.S.I. considered the deportation of someone of Rudolph’s prominence as an affirmation of “the depth of the government’s commitment to the Nazi prosecution program,” according to internal memos.
The Justice Department itself sometimes concealed what American officials knew about Nazis in this country, the report found.
In 1980, prosecutors filed a motion that “misstated the facts” in asserting that checks of C.I.A. and F.B.I. records revealed no information on the Nazi past of Tscherim Soobzokov, a former Waffen SS soldier. In fact, the report said, the Justice Department “knew that Soobzokov had advised the C.I.A. of his SS connection after he arrived in the United States.”
(After the case was dismissed, radical Jewish groups urged violence against Mr. Soobzokov, and he was killed in 1985 by a bomb at his home in Paterson, N.J. )
The secrecy surrounding the Justice Department’s handling of the report could pose a political dilemma for President Obama because of his pledge to run the most transparent administration in history. Mr. Obama chose the Justice Department to coordinate the opening of government records.
The Nazi-hunting report was the brainchild of Mark Richard, a senior Justice Department lawyer. In 1999, he persuaded Attorney General Janet Reno to begin a detailed look at what he saw as a critical piece of history, and he assigned a career prosecutor, Judith Feigin, to the job. After Mr. Richard edited the final version in 2006, he urged senior officials to make it public but was rebuffed, colleagues said.
When Mr. Richard became ill with cancer, he told a gathering of friends and family that the report’s publication was one of three things he hoped to see before he died, the colleagues said. He died in June 2009, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. spoke at his funeral.
“I spoke to him the week before he died, and he was still trying to get it released,” Ms. Feigin said. “It broke his heart.”
After Mr. Richard’s death, David Sobel, a Washington lawyer, and the National Security Archive sued for the report’s release under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Justice Department initially fought the lawsuit, but finally gave Mr. Sobel a partial copy — with more than 1,000 passages and references deleted based on exemptions for privacy and internal deliberations.
Laura Sweeney, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the department is committed to transparency, and that redactions are made by experienced lawyers.
The full report disclosed that the Justice Department found “a smoking gun” in 1997 establishing with “definitive proof” that Switzerland had bought gold from the Nazis that had been taken from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. But these references are deleted, as are disputes between the Justice and State Departments over Switzerland’s culpability in the months leading up to a major report on the issue.
Another section describes as “a hideous failure” a series of meetings in 2000 that United States officials held with Latvian officials to pressure them to pursue suspected Nazis. That passage is also deleted.
So too are references to macabre but little-known bits of history, including how a director of the O.S.I. kept a piece of scalp that was thought to belong to Dr. Mengele in his desk in hopes that it would help establish whether he was dead.
The chapter on Dr. Mengele, one of the most notorious Nazis to escape prosecution, details the O.S.I.’s elaborate efforts in the mid-1980s to determine whether he had fled to the United States and might still be alive.
It describes how investigators used letters and diaries apparently written by Dr. Mengele in the 1970s, along with German dental records and Munich phone books, to follow his trail.
After the development of DNA tests, the piece of scalp, which had been turned over by the Brazilian authorities, proved to be a critical piece of evidence in establishing that Dr. Mengele had fled to Brazil and had died there in about 1979 without ever entering the United States, the report said. The edited report deletes references to Dr. Mengele’s scalp on privacy grounds.
Even documents that have long been available to the public are omitted, including court decisions, Congressional testimony and front-page newspaper articles from the 1970s.
A chapter on the O.S.I.’s most publicized failure — the case against John Demjanjuk, a retired American autoworker who was mistakenly identified as Treblinka’s Ivan the Terrible — deletes dozens of details, including part of a 1993 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that raised ethics accusations against Justice Department officials.
That section also omits a passage disclosing that Latvian émigrés sympathetic to Mr. Demjanjuk secretly arranged for the O.S.I.’s trash to be delivered to them each day from 1985 to 1987. The émigrés rifled through the garbage to find classified documents that could help Mr. Demjanjuk, who is currently standing trial in Munich on separate war crimes charges.
Ms. Feigin said she was baffled by the Justice Department’s attempt to keep a central part of its history secret for so long. “It’s an amazing story,” she said, “that needs to be told.”
I want to chip in on the Blueshirt thing;
The Blueshirts were a movement created to oppose growing IRA movements, (Ireland wasnt yet a full Republic remember) and they had no outright fascist ideology. It's worth remembering that their leader, Eoin O'Duffy had been in government for years, but within a year of creating the Blueshirts his political career was in tatters.
Fine Gael get a lot of slagging nowadays for it, but in reality the Blueshirts wore blue, had that dreadful one-arm salute, but the fascist elements end there. They were solely devised to defend the FreeState, which was similar to a commonwealth state, from Republicanism - (thats the reason they get slagged now).
Ireland's political stance during WW2 was questionable anyway, but there was never any real risk of Ireland siding with the Axis, if it joined the war it wouldve been for the Allies - but siding with Allies meant being invaded by the British Army again, and the support for Germany that was present in the country would have been due to the fact that only 20 years prior Germany had supplied the weapons that helped in the independence movement. What I think 1940s Ireland should be criticised for mostly is the lack of any formal invite for victims of the war to come live there. It was an unusual stance for a young country to take, especially as both the Government, opposition parties and the public in general were so committed to democracy (this commitment to democracy also helped crush the Blueshirts).
As for the OP -
The level of support (and opposition) to Nazis could be measured by the number of Resistance movements in countries. I dont like quoting Wiki, but this is a great compilation of the resistance movements during WW2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance ... rld_War_II
Members of the puppet regimes in Nazi-occupied countries clearly sold their countries out, but even the co-operation in the puppet governments varied a fair bit. Even Ireland and Sweden could be criticised for staying neutral.
Countries like Finland, Denmark, Romania (after 1944), Hungary get a bad rep in the history books for their part. Some countries were also far more "efficient" at deporting Jews to camps. And then the issue is blurred by the often unstable political situation within these countries themselves, particularly Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, etc. The internal struggle between the old governments, puppet governments, and the small communist and nationalist elements makes it different for each country...
but overall I wouldnt say any single country had a majority population that wouldve supported the Nazis if they'd been given a choice.
I dont think there is a topic on this board or in world history generally that you somehow have not tried to blame the United States for. Now its Nazi collaborating? I guess we didn't lose enough lives in two wars against Germany to satiate you. :roll:
Was your post aimed at me 'Last Exodus', aka 'The Face', aka about 5 other banned usernames? Because every one of your 25 posts on this board so far has been.
As an answer to your latest crap, I've simply shown that Americans are/were no better or worse than the small minority of Europeans who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII.
And let's not forget that the U.S had little interest if fighting Nazism until December 1941, after it had been attacked by Japan, and after the Germans were bogged down in Russia, fighting the war on two fronts. Yet somehow you place yourselves on some sort of exalted pedestal? Pathetic.
That's absolutely right and I would wager a guess that if you did a poll today that France would STILL rank the highest in its latent and patent anti-semitism. Yes even higher than Germany. Although I think the Germans have just been programmed to say the right things when asked. They havent changed. I think its a good question to ask what percentage of Europe conspired with the Germans and with a little digging you could probably come up with some numbers, but some things to consider.
The German Army, especially towards the end of the war was not just an ethnic German Army. Putting aside the issue of anti-semitism there were hundreds of thousands of non Germans in the regular German Army and many were volunteers. There were Scandinavians, Slavs, Russians, Ukranians, etc, etc, etc. And its crap to suggest they were all conscripted. Some were. Many were not. There were Fascist Governments in Italy, Spain, Hungary, Croatia. Vichy France was allied with Nazi Germany, which was composed of half of France. The French were no friends of ours. Dont kid yourselves. They were after we won.....Jus saying. American troops and Vichy French troops were shooting at each other in North Africa in 1942. France makes me ill.
Oh, and lest we forget about who did the Nazis banking. Those loveable neutral Swiss! All that stolen Jewish property...Where do you think the Nazis parked that dough? Half that country is German.
Another interesting observation. After the war, just how many Jews that were left alive after the Holocaust went back to their countries of origin? That's rhetorical.
And let's not forget that the U.S had little interest if fighting Nazism until December 1941, after it had been attacked by Japan, and after the Germans were bogged down in Russia, fighting the war on two fronts. Yet somehow you place yourselves on some sort of exalted pedestal? Pathetic.[/quote]
Small minority ey? You clearly missed a good portion of your history or you are a.....revisionist. Here's some actual history. Fairly accurate. Interesting point missed. The collaboration did not extend just to Europe. There were Central Asians that volunteered and a good number or Muslims recruited primarily by that loveable figure in history, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, religious leader of the Palestinian Arabs.
So we had no interest in combating the Nazis before December 1941? Did you study lend-lease or did you miss that part of history in which the United States supplied, more or less, all of the tanks your bone-headed generals had lost as well as naval vessels, aircraft, and other arms you and the Russians needed until we showed up to save your asses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborat ... rld_War_II
Secondary source rebutting the "small minority" unsupported opinion
http://library.flawlesslogic.com/euro_2.htm
Astonishing. Yes the US was an intolerant racist country in the 1940's. No argument. Let me just correct you on a few of your other historical....missteps. The Soviet Union, making up a pretty large amount of the territory of Europe signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler and then joined the Germans dividing up Poland until 1941 when Hitler turned on them. France...What fighting exactly did they do? I missed that part. I remember the quick defeat, faster surrender followed by 4 years of no combat and collaboration. Italy? A German ally. Hungary? A German ally. Romania.? A German ally. Bulgaria? A German ally. Switzerland....Neutral. Sweden...Neutral. Austria. Allied and united with Germany.
Did I miss anything? So that leaves basically only Britain fighting non-stop since 39 and since the Soviets didnt change sides until 1941 they technically fought only 4 years. A little less. Before 41 they were happy to join Hitler in dividing up Eastern Europe. They got what they deserved.
Your country is one of the few that had very little collaboration and actually handed the Germans their asses quite a bit. I know this because im a Maniatis. (By marriage)
So not much different to the U.S in that respect then.
Maybe you should ask a member of the French resistance, who spent 5 years fighting the Nazis.
Like most of the country's listed in your post, the Soviets never joined Hitler. They signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis. And as for those countries who chose neutrality, that's just what they were: neutral. They didn't 'support' the Nazis, and in fact most of these countries aided the allies.