From: abkevich@husc3.harvard.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.german,soc.culture.jewish
Subject: Germans and Jews
Date: 24 Jan 93 03:59:07 EST
Followup-To: soc.culture.german,soc.culture.jewish
Distribution: world
Organization: Harvard University Science Center

In article <dieter-220193153324@frueh-koelsch.informatik.rwth-aachen.de>, dieter@informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Dieter Kreuer) writes:
> In article <1993Jan21.201151.19640@husc3.harvard.edu>,
> abkevich@husc3.harvard.edu in reply to Christian Lampl wrote:
> 
>> But germans were generally more cruel during WW2! You could find a lot of 
>> reason, like bad life after WW1 and so on, but is it important. The problem 
>> is that all these cruelties made the whole nation more cruel. And it would  
>> take more then 2 generations to overcome moral consequences of 12 years 
>> Nazi power.
> 
> Currently, a TV series on the Stalingrad battle is being broadcast in
> Germany. No doubt that brutal war crimes had happened during WW 2, but
> on either side. There have been mass executions of German soldiers as 
> well as of Russian ones. I don't know whether the German army was more
> cruel to the Russian civilians than the Russian military to the Germans,
> but I have heard that many Germans prefered to surrender to the western
> allies than to the Russians and fled westward when the Red Army came.

I don't know how cruel were Russians during WW2 but I think they should be
cruel. 1937 purges were only few years ago, so all high-ranking people were
used to be cruel for survival. I remember that Erenburg invented slogan: 
"Father, kill a German!", which was extremly popular (it was in our textbooks
untill at least 1982!). You should also remember how many Russians were killed
and that territory on which in 1940 lived 40% of Russians lied in ruins. Very 
many people wanted to revenge. So it should be expected that Russians were
cruel (of course there is no moral justifications for these cruelties). But
Germans who prefered to surrender to the alles knew these reasons *very* well.
I have never heard about muss executions of German army (except SS members - 
well, Russians considered them all criminals): Stalin was too realistic for
them. He prefered to used prisoners in labor camps for many years after the war
(I lived more than 20 years in Moscow in a house built by prisoners - it was 
*much* better, then houses built by Russians 40 years later). My mother recalls
that conditions in these camps were *bad* even comparing with starving 
Russians. However their conditions were uncomparable with conditions of Russian 
prisoners in Germany. I might recall you, that 3,500,000 Russians prisoners 
died in German camps. And what didn't you like about Stalingrad? German army
was encircled. Hitler didn't let his army to surrender even though he couldn't
help it. That army prefered to fight for more than 2 monthes without supplies,
without hope during extremly cold winter even for Russian merits. You could
name it bravery, you could name it stupidity, you could name it patriotism but
what has it to do with Russian cruelty?
 
> Well, dropping 2 million tons of TNT on civilians and 2 nuclear bombs
> on Japanese cities is also rather cruel, so I would not rate any World
> War 2 participant to be much crueler than another [...]

There was a difference: Allies, especially Western, were cruel during war time.
Germans were extremly cruel especially after they got fool control over 
civilians. If you don't believe it, just compare number civilians murdered by
Germans with number Germans and Japanese murdered by Allies (again - there are
a lot of reasons why these bombing took place, but they also do not have moral
justification). I don't have all necessary statistics, but if you sum at least
10,000,000 Russians (I am talking only about civilians now) and 6,000,000 Jews
it will be more then enough. There are also millions Poles, Serbs and so on. 
 
> [...] But the decisions on these crimes were made by a small
> group of the population. I would not say that the average German
> was more brutal than the average Russian/American/English/French. Only,
> while in the allied countries, dangerous criminals were in jail, here,
> they were ruling the country, and it is the fault of the German popula-
> tion not to have stopped them at the very beginning.

1. Don't you think that it is to easy to explane millions of brutaly murdered
by a small group of dangerous criminals? 
2. Even if decisions were made by a small group of population ther were much 
more who executed them and *MUCH* more those who knew but didn't do a thing
because they were afraid or didn't give a damn?

> What would you have done in their position? Or in the position of a
> German citizen of 1930? 1933? 1939? People were probably not aware of
> their fate in the beginning, and later, the Nazis were too powerful.

Almost certainly I wouldn't be able to stand a presure. But I was happy and I 
wasn't put in such awful conditions, I didn't do it. They did. And were
corrupted.
 
> [...] Look at the Serbs in 
> Yugoslavia. They recently have **democratically elected** a government
> which is fighting a rassist war against their former countrymen. There
> are even concentration camps and mass executions happening in Bosnia-
> Hercegovina. 

That is a point. They have such **democratically elected** goverment because
they inherited mentality of communists. I expect a *lot* of problems in Eastern
Europe and the former USSR. I think that Eastern Germany would be more
rassistic even after economic problems would ease.

> Influenced, yes. But it's really not true that either
> 
> 1) All/most people who had lived during wartime had Nazi ideas,
> 2) the younger generations were educated this way, too, and
> 3) even if they had been, they would have adopted this indoctrination.

Yes, I understand a difference between 1993 and 1933. However Civil War in US
ended in 1865, because of enormous number of emmigrants population of US is now
5 times larger, then was in 1865, population mixed a lot and still Anti-black
movement is much stronger in the South.

> After the destruction of German cities by the allies, after they had
> been shown the concentration camps, and after their sons and husbands
> had come home from a POW time of up to ten years - or had not come 
> home at all, like one of my grandfathers (yes, we also lost relatives
> during the war) [...]

Have I ever said that Germany didn't lose a lot of people, property, territory,
positions in science and so on, that it wasn't divided for many years?
(However, if you began to talk about it would be fare for me to mention that if
Germany lost 1 of every 25 Germans, European Jews lost 2 of every 3, Poles,
Russian and Serbs 1 of every 10). But sadly such loses do not change people's
mentality. It take years for trudition to change. During Civil War 1 white 
Southern of every 20 was killed, economy was ruined (it never fully recovered)
but it didn't prove them that black people have the same rights as white. How
many Germans were killed in WW1?
 
> [...] They felt more liberated than conquered, when
> the allies came. I know of many Germans who were children then, 
> who admired the American soldiers, who gave them chocolate, and after
> the war, the USA had long been an idol country for Germans ("the
> land of infinite possibilities"; when I was a child, I admired so
> much the Apollo program, and the American jet fighters, and my
> admiration for the USA remained until I got there and saw the same
> or even bigger problems as we have here).

So what? If you will ask Serbs today, I almost sure they would cry who they
admire US, "the land of infinite possibilies". Admiring has nothing to do with
behaviour.
 
> The firebombings which have happened recently were not committed by
> the typical young German (the one who has demonstrated against racism),
> but by some rare idiots. It would be very unfair to blame the "German 
> youth" for these things, like it would be to claim that the typical 
> German youngster kills his ex-girlfriend because there had been such an
> incident in our town two years ago. Of course, things like this make
> it to the news. The pupil who makes his homework together with his
> Turkish friend will never.

Well, lets see. I agree that it is not enough to tell smth about "German
youth" from these firebombings. At least now. 

                                Cordially
                               
                             Victor Abkevich