German POWs WW11
- Thread starter darkbeaver
- Start date
What werd? They look fine to me. Are you one of those specimins that make fun of dialects? Because of my station I have an rural accent.
Beaver! I am so surprised you brought up the German soldiers plight in 1945!
Just very recently I talked with my sister-in-law back in Germany. She is the wife of my youngest brother who passed away a few years ago. She confirmed to me that my brother was taken prisoner by the Americans, and hundreds of thousands were herded onto an area of fields, guarded by jeeps and watchtowers. No shelter, no water! They dug holes in the ground to shield themselves from the rain and cold. And no food for the first six weeks!! What I had not heard from my brother was that he weighed only 80 pounds, which is 88 Canadian pounds, at the time he was brought to France. My brother was 1.87m tall. I can't imagine how he could still live! When he finally came home in the fall of 1948 he looked a picture of health! Well-fed, muscular and tanned! He had worked for the past three years on a small farm in Southern France.
Starving them was supposed to be punishment, my brother told me. It was done deliberately.
http://www.lima-wiederladetechnik.de/Krieg/Bilder/Amerikanisches-Lager.jpg
As Walter says, they don't like to talk about it.
Just very recently I talked with my sister-in-law back in Germany. She is the wife of my youngest brother who passed away a few years ago. She confirmed to me that my brother was taken prisoner by the Americans, and hundreds of thousands were herded onto an area of fields, guarded by jeeps and watchtowers. No shelter, no water! They dug holes in the ground to shield themselves from the rain and cold. And no food for the first six weeks!! What I had not heard from my brother was that he weighed only 80 pounds, which is 88 Canadian pounds, at the time he was brought to France. My brother was 1.87m tall. I can't imagine how he could still live! When he finally came home in the fall of 1948 he looked a picture of health! Well-fed, muscular and tanned! He had worked for the past three years on a small farm in Southern France.
Starving them was supposed to be punishment, my brother told me. It was done deliberately.
http://www.lima-wiederladetechnik.de/Krieg/Bilder/Amerikanisches-Lager.jpg
As Walter says, they don't like to talk about it.
The truth is so very different from what we have been taught, none of us will live long enough to unravel the lies and hateful humiliation and neglect. I live to see the bankers hanged with hemp rope from a spool one hundred meters high made specially for the money changers, all of them.
Given the outcry when a murderer or rapist is arrested here and thrown in prison (the vast majority scream 'eye for an eye!'), realistically, why do we expect any better when a soldier is taken as a prisoner of war? Of all the horrific finds, wouldn't the Nazi concentration camps be the most jarring, the most maddening, the most inhumane of spectacles to come across? I don't condone it, but, I can see the American military wanting and eye for an eye, wanting to wreak upon those German soldiers the same sorts of horrors that they had seen wrought upon women and children and the elderly. It's basic human nature it seems.
Dancing_Loon
Americans and many people who subscribe to the charade of the "moral high road" don't like to think about the atrocities commited in their name.... This unwillingness to entertain the truth about an innate barbarism that isn't shed by lip-service to "a people of laws" and "belief" keeps the barriers erected by ideological "camps" sound and secure against both better judgment and humanity.
Several folk here at CC have celebrated the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Japanese through use of the atomic bomb... The rationale for this atrocity is the fantasy that millions of lives were "saved".... From Napoleon to Eisenhower humanity has never and perhaps can't escape its primitivism. Responsibility for the mess in the Middle East is ladled onto the Palestinians and these fine thinkers who favor fire-bombing and starving thousands to death are happy to sit back and selectively pick and choose the "justification" for why one people or another is "appropriately murdered in huge numbers. When we put aside (impossible for most) our biases and our prejudices and simply recall the inhumanity practiced by human being on human being....we don't want to acknowlege that this propensity exists in all of us. We'd rather find some "reason" for our brutality and practices of selective barbarism. When you clutch that flag to your chest and sing that nationa anthem.... you don't want to remember that yes you murdered thousands upon thousands...but of course it was their fault....
They made me do it!
From good Father Sanctus to died in the wool American patriots denying the egregious behaviour of religions and politics as revealed by the bones of millions littering the landscapes of the entire planet.... Mankind has not and may not be able to outgrow his adolescence. Nature has a cure for that.
Americans and many people who subscribe to the charade of the "moral high road" don't like to think about the atrocities commited in their name.... This unwillingness to entertain the truth about an innate barbarism that isn't shed by lip-service to "a people of laws" and "belief" keeps the barriers erected by ideological "camps" sound and secure against both better judgment and humanity.
Several folk here at CC have celebrated the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Japanese through use of the atomic bomb... The rationale for this atrocity is the fantasy that millions of lives were "saved".... From Napoleon to Eisenhower humanity has never and perhaps can't escape its primitivism. Responsibility for the mess in the Middle East is ladled onto the Palestinians and these fine thinkers who favor fire-bombing and starving thousands to death are happy to sit back and selectively pick and choose the "justification" for why one people or another is "appropriately murdered in huge numbers. When we put aside (impossible for most) our biases and our prejudices and simply recall the inhumanity practiced by human being on human being....we don't want to acknowlege that this propensity exists in all of us. We'd rather find some "reason" for our brutality and practices of selective barbarism. When you clutch that flag to your chest and sing that nationa anthem.... you don't want to remember that yes you murdered thousands upon thousands...but of course it was their fault....
They made me do it!
From good Father Sanctus to died in the wool American patriots denying the egregious behaviour of religions and politics as revealed by the bones of millions littering the landscapes of the entire planet.... Mankind has not and may not be able to outgrow his adolescence. Nature has a cure for that.
These are human beings, there suffering is no different from those percieved to be innocent. The Ukranians were starved in thier millions, millions died under bombs in southeast asia 10 million have died in the Congo three million combined in Afghanistan and Iraq, all of them were human as were thier killers. The last centurys wars killed hundreds of millions and every one of them made the bankers rich. The common German soldier was just the same as the common Allied soldier, a pawn of the international monied class. As long as they could consume a weapon product and create a market doing it they're deaths served nothing but the wealthy.
2-13-02
Adolf Hitler, Jesse Owens and the Olympics Myth of 1936
By Rick Shenkman
Mr. Shenkman is the editor of HNN.
Everyone knows that at the 1936 Olympics Hitler snubbed Jesse Owens. As the story goes, after Owens won one gold medal, Hitler, incensed, stormed out of Olympic Stadium so he wouldn't have to congratulate Owens on his victory.
Such a performance would have been perfectly in character, but it didn't happen. William J. Baker, Owens's biographer, says the newspapers made up the whole story. Owens himself originally insisted it wasn't true, but eventually he began saying it was, apparently out of sheer boredom with the issue.
The facts are simple. Hitler did not congratulate Owens, but that day he didn't congratulate anybody else either, not even the German winners. As a matter of fact, Hitler didn't congratulate anyone after the first day of the competition. That first day he had shaken hands with all the German victors, but that had gotten him in trouble with the members of the Olympic Committee. They told him that to maintain Olympic neutrality, he would have to congratulate everyone or no one. Hitler chose to honor no one.
Hitler did snub a black American athlete, but it was Cornelius Johnson, not Jesse Owens. It happened the first day of the meet. Just before Johnson was to be decorated, Hitler left the stadium. A Nazi spokesman explained that Hitler's exit had been pre-scheduled, but no one believes that.
Several other misconceptions about the 1936 Olympics are prevalent. Not only was Owens not rebuffed by Hitler, Owens wasn't shunned by the German audience at the Berlin stadium either. Baker reports that Owens so captured the imagination of the crowd it gave him several ear-shattering ovations. Owens had been prepared for a hostile reception; a coach had warned him in advance not to be upset by anything that might happen in the stands. "Ignore the insults," Owens was told, "and you'll be all right." Later Owens recalled that he had gotten the greatest ovations of his career at Berlin.
Another popular belief is that the games marked a humiliating moment for the Nazis because a few blacks walked away with a fistful of medals while Hitler had predicted the Teutonic lads would be the big winners, proof of the superman abilities of the white race. In reality, the competition was anything but a German humiliation. It is forgotten that Germany managed to pick up more medals than all the other countries combined. Hitler was pleased with the outcome.
This article was excerpted from Rick Shenkman's Legends, Lies and Cherished Myths of American History. © Rick Shenkman
Adolf Hitler, Jesse Owens and the Olympics Myth of 1936
By Rick Shenkman
Mr. Shenkman is the editor of HNN.
Everyone knows that at the 1936 Olympics Hitler snubbed Jesse Owens. As the story goes, after Owens won one gold medal, Hitler, incensed, stormed out of Olympic Stadium so he wouldn't have to congratulate Owens on his victory.
Such a performance would have been perfectly in character, but it didn't happen. William J. Baker, Owens's biographer, says the newspapers made up the whole story. Owens himself originally insisted it wasn't true, but eventually he began saying it was, apparently out of sheer boredom with the issue.
The facts are simple. Hitler did not congratulate Owens, but that day he didn't congratulate anybody else either, not even the German winners. As a matter of fact, Hitler didn't congratulate anyone after the first day of the competition. That first day he had shaken hands with all the German victors, but that had gotten him in trouble with the members of the Olympic Committee. They told him that to maintain Olympic neutrality, he would have to congratulate everyone or no one. Hitler chose to honor no one.
Hitler did snub a black American athlete, but it was Cornelius Johnson, not Jesse Owens. It happened the first day of the meet. Just before Johnson was to be decorated, Hitler left the stadium. A Nazi spokesman explained that Hitler's exit had been pre-scheduled, but no one believes that.
Several other misconceptions about the 1936 Olympics are prevalent. Not only was Owens not rebuffed by Hitler, Owens wasn't shunned by the German audience at the Berlin stadium either. Baker reports that Owens so captured the imagination of the crowd it gave him several ear-shattering ovations. Owens had been prepared for a hostile reception; a coach had warned him in advance not to be upset by anything that might happen in the stands. "Ignore the insults," Owens was told, "and you'll be all right." Later Owens recalled that he had gotten the greatest ovations of his career at Berlin.
Another popular belief is that the games marked a humiliating moment for the Nazis because a few blacks walked away with a fistful of medals while Hitler had predicted the Teutonic lads would be the big winners, proof of the superman abilities of the white race. In reality, the competition was anything but a German humiliation. It is forgotten that Germany managed to pick up more medals than all the other countries combined. Hitler was pleased with the outcome.
This article was excerpted from Rick Shenkman's Legends, Lies and Cherished Myths of American History. © Rick Shenkman
I was lucky, Beaver, I escaped the brainwashing!!! By the time they got the history books ready for the German kids I was already gone!!
And yet, the Americans refused to accept the boatloads of Jewish people Hitler sent across the Atlantic!! Same with Canada! The ships had to return. England had a law of sorts, forbidding Jewish immigrants!
Geneva Convention prevented Allied occupation forces from making POWs come face-to-face with the reality of concentration camps and blasted cities. Civilians - the very folks who'd done without to support the troops - had to do the dirty work and seek shelter where they could. I have family from both sides, and they all seem to agree that POW camps were often more humane retribution for the revenge a world wanted, and some penance for a Hell deserved.
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That seems awfully irrelevant to the topic at hand. The death of the Jews was not excusable simply because other countries wouldn't take them, and has no bearing on soldiers' reactions to finding the concentration camps.
That is so true. But, Mikey, what gets my dander up is, when those young snotnoses talk as if they know all, and condemn the entire German soldery, even the whole German population as criminals, as NAZIS!!! It is a personal insult to me! I had the finest, most honest and upright Nazi-parents! They raised us kids to be decent, responsible and HONEST!!
To label my brothers as war criminals is an insult without comparison!!! Then all soldiers of the world are war criminals, including the Americans!!
Soldiers are the frontline defence as well as offence against the enemy. They are trained to be fit, tough and fearless. And, yes, they get training in target shooting, so they can kill another human being!!! That is the face and the substance of war. In no way can we condemn the soldiers who follow orders, unless they kill and torture for their own pleasure.
Now tell me, what is nature's cure??:smile:
Indeed so, Karrie. Does beg the question: What the hell did all the Jews have to leave for??
Maybe the Chinese were after them...........no.........!!!..........The Russians............no........!!!
Now, just WHY does one think they were in those boats??
Must have all been on a big vacation.............:angry3:
8O
As one of the soldiers either here, or on a similar forum once said to me.... 'war criminals are simply the soldiers who lost'. The victor is never (or extremely rarely) tried for war crimes. That's a distinction reserved for the losing armies.
As for your own brothers being labeled... history will label the soldiers of war according to the war that was fought. The German army fought a criminal war of genocide. If your brothers fought for that end, then history will label them accordingly. If you know they were fighting for another end, then tell their specific story. But, you can't change the fact that history holds its view of that particular war.
Maybe I'm missing something, but don't people do that on this website all the time?
History dosen't hold a view other than the truth, it cannot be changed. Total war is genocidal no matter the participants nationality, the second world wars horrors were eclipsed long ago. Consider the incineration of the Japanese at Heroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the common soldiers who have fought the wars have no idea why they fought except what propaganda was embedded in them by the media of the day and the standard indoctrination, the young between 16 to 22 those most physically able to engage in war cannot understand the reasons they are not educated nor mature. The allies fought a criminal war for consolidation of markets and assets and to act as a foil for the soviet empire, there are no other reason all else is motivational propaganda. Follow the money from wall street to the German Military Industrial Complex, the bankers built the German war machine.