How much of Europe was supportive of the Nazi's during WWII?

Mariamaniatis

musicismylife78 wrote:

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?

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.

Byrnzie

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14nazis.html

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.”

JordyWordy

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

The place was crawling with Nazi sympathisers from the early thirties onwards. Britain had its own Blackshirt movement. Google Oswald Mosley, the head of the British Union of Fascists, and Diana and Unity Mitford. Ireland had its Blueshirts, or National Guard, who eventually merged with two other parties, Cumann na nGaedheal and the National Centre Party, to form Fine Gael. W.B. Yeats flirted with fascism for a time in his typically ambivalent and silly fashion.

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.

Mariamaniatis

Mariamaniatis wrote:

musicismylife78 wrote:

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?

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.

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:

Byrnzie

Mariamaniatis wrote:

Mariamaniatis wrote:

musicismylife78 wrote:

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?

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.

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.

Mariamaniatis

Go Beavers wrote:

It would be too hard to come up with numbers on who was pro-nazi, but worthy of discussion. Also to add, consider the level of anti-semitism before, during, and after the war. I remember a survey of current attitudes in Europe, and France scored the highest on negative attitudes toward Jews.

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.

Mariamaniatis

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.[/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

Mariamaniatis

Byrnzie wrote:

musicismylife78 wrote:

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?

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.

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.

Mariamaniatis

dimitrispearljam wrote:

proud that my country fight against Nazi's..

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)

Byrnzie

Mariamaniatis wrote:

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.

So not much different to the U.S in that respect then.

Mariamaniatis wrote:

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.

Maybe you should ask a member of the French resistance, who spent 5 years fighting the Nazis.

Mariamaniatis wrote:

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.

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.

Byrnzie

Mariamaniatis wrote:

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.

Ah, the overly magmanimous lend-lease...where you gave us a bunch of tanks and ships in exchange for a large portion of our overseas territories, and in which the UK finally Paid off Lend lease In 2006 and paid nearly $14.00 for every dollar borrowed. Wonderful.

And you didn't save anyone's asses. The German military machine was defeated by the Russians, not the Americans.

Mariamaniatis

Byrnzie wrote:

Mariamaniatis wrote:

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.

Ah, the overly magmanimous lend-lease...where you gave us a bunch of tanks and ships in exchange for a large portion of our overseas territories, and in which the UK finally Paid off Lend lease In 2006 and paid nearly $14.00 for every dollar borrowed. Wonderful.

And you didn't save anyone's asses. The German military machine was defeated by the Russians, not the Americans.

So, the British had nothing to do with Germanys defeat? I dont actually believe that. But you seem to. Just because the Russians ended up with many more dead doesnt mean they won it. Eisenhower let the Russians have Berlin leading to the false impression that the Russians beat us there. And Ill add it took the US/British force less than a year to take nearly as much territory as the Russians took in 4 years.

redrock

Mariamaniatis wrote:

Eisenhower let the Russians have Berlin leading to the false impression that the Russians beat us there. .

What a distorted view of history. Contrary to Montgomery who wanted the allies to take Berlin, Eisenhower 'wimped' out as he understood that the taking of Berlin would result in a very high loss of life and he wasn't willing to put forth the allied armies and suffer such casualties. The Russians did - at a huge cost to them.

The Russians 'laid the ground' for the final push.

Mariamaniatis

redrock wrote:

Mariamaniatis wrote:

Eisenhower let the Russians have Berlin leading to the false impression that the Russians beat us there. .

What a distorted view of history. Contrary to Montgomery who wanted the allies to take Berlin, Eisenhower 'wimped' out as he understood that the taking of Berlin would result in a very high loss of life and he wasn't willing to put forth the allied armies and suffer such casualties. The Russians did - at a huge cost to them.

The Russians 'laid the ground' for the final push.

Sorry have to correct you too. Loss of American life was an issue for Eisenhower but it wasnt an issue of wimping out. The Allies had already determined that Berlin would fall in the Soviet Sector so Eisenhower saw no reason to take Berlin to only give it back. Would that have been a smart military move? No doubt Monty wanted to take Berlin the Narcissistic twerp he was. But he didnt have it in him.

American forces were right outside Berlin and pushing forward. Ike stopped them. Rightly so.

Byrnzie

Mariamaniatis wrote:

So, the British had nothing to do with Germanys defeat? I dont actually believe that. But you seem to. Just because the Russians ended up with many more dead doesnt mean they won it. Eisenhower let the Russians have Berlin leading to the false impression that the Russians beat us there. And Ill add it took the US/British force less than a year to take nearly as much territory as the Russians took in 4 years.

Nine out of every ten German soldiers killed in WWII were killed on Russian soil.

As for Eisenhower 'letting' the Russians take Berlin, do you have anything to back that claim up?

OutOfBreath

Mariamaniatis wrote:

And Ill add it took the US/British force less than a year to take nearly as much territory as the Russians took in 4 years.

That may have something to do with the fact that top german officers calculated that they'd rather lose to the british/americans than the russians, who they quite correctly feared would wreak terrible vengenace for Germany's misdeeds in the east. Thus troops were more vigorously applied to the eastern front.

Peace
Dan

gimmesometruth27

most generals wanted to take berlin, monty, patton, etc. but it was the better political move for post war relations to allow the russians to take berlin. the battle of stalingrad alone caused millions of casualities so it was only right to allow he russians to take berlin. the russians lost nearly an entire generation of young men in world war 2. besides, the americans had a whole other war to fight in the pacific after germany surrendered and we did not need to be sending our soldiers into the slaughterhouse of berlin because we needed them in the pacific. letting russia take berlin was the right thing to do from my perspective.

Jason P

Suggested Book - Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944 - 1945 by Max Hastings

This is a good book that covers the fall of Nazi Germany from many different viewpoints. There is astounding amount of suffering that took place in the final years.

Hastings details that the Allies' failure to capture and secure the port in Antwerp during the Battle of the Bulge allowed the Germans to get reinforcements and drag the war out for several more years ... which turned out to be one of the worst things that could have happened to any Dutch civilians and Germans stuck in that theater.

The Red Army had its men keep "revenge" journals and great suffering was inflicted once they crossed into Germany. As well, it allowed the Holocaust to continue into it's final evil stages.

The book is great, but there is a lot of detail in it (if you are not a fan of flipping back and forth in a book to keep track of everything, avoid this).

Byrnzie

gimmesometruth27 wrote:

most generals wanted to take berlin, monty, patton, etc. but it was the better political move for post war relations to allow the russians to take berlin. the battle of stalingrad alone caused millions of casualities so it was only right to allow he russians to take berlin. the russians lost nearly an entire generation of young men in world war 2. besides, the americans had a whole other war to fight in the pacific after germany surrendered and we did not need to be sending our soldiers into the slaughterhouse of berlin because we needed them in the pacific. letting russia take berlin was the right thing to do from my perspective.

But did you 'let' the Russians take Berlin? Were the allies in any position to tell Stalin what he could or couldn't have?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/ ... n_01.shtml

'...The Americans had recently crossed the Rhine and the Soviet leader was concerned that they might capture Berlin before him. To speed up his campaign, he split the command of the Berlin operation between Marshall Zukhov in the centre and Marshall Konev in the south. Stalin thus effectively triggered a race between his two most senior commanders, as both of them were eager to be credited with the conquest of the German capital.


...So what are the reasons for Stalin's hurry to reach Berlin? After all, he was happy to share the city with his western allies after the city's surrender. The traditional explanation is that it was a question of Soviet prestige and mistrust of the west. However, during his research, Beevor discovered a startling new document: 'It struck me so powerfully that the moment I started to read it I knew I had to look at a totally different aspect of Stalin's interest in Berlin.'

Nuclear legacy

The document shows that Stalin was desperate to get his hands on the German nuclear research centre, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the southwest of Berlin - before the Americans got there. The Soviets knew through their spies of the American atomic bomb programme. Stalin's own nuclear programme, Operation Borodino, was lagging behind and Soviet scientists wanted to find out exactly what the Germans had come up with during the war.

As it turned out, the special NKVD troops despatched to secure the German institute discovered three tons of uranium oxide, a material they were short of at the time. 'So the Soviets achieved their objective,' says Beevor, 'the uranium oxide they found in Berlin was enough to kick start Operation Borodino and allow them to start working on their first nuclear weapon.'

After the battle, more than a hundred thousand German prisoners of war were marched to labour camps in the Soviet Union. Only now did the totality of their defeat sink in on the German people. The country lay in ruins and the population was close to starvation. In addition, confirmation of the Nazis' mass extermination of the European Jews meant that Germany faced a complete moral catastrophe.

The battle for Berlin had brought to an end the bloodiest conflict in European history. 'There's no family in the Soviet Union, Poland or Germany where they didn't lose at least one close relative,' said Beevor in our final interview. 'In Britain, the suffering was real, but it simply cannot be compared to the scale of suffering in Central Europe.'

cajunkiwi

whoprincess wrote:

Go Beavers wrote:

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.

I asked a German friend how it is taught in school and he said that the emphasis is all on "never again."

I used to date a girl from Heidelberg, and she said pretty much the same thing. They're embarrassed by it and don't like to talk about it, and they feel bad that whenever people talk about Germany it's usually in conjunction with WWII.