From: dieter@informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Dieter Kreuer)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.german,soc.culture.jewish
Subject: Re: Germans and Jews
Followup-To: soc.culture.german,soc.culture.jewish
Date: 25 Jan 1993 10:36:19 GMT
Organization: i4
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: frueh-koelsch.informatik.rwth-aachen.de

In article <1993Jan24.035907.19738@husc3.harvard.edu>,
abkevich@husc3.harvard.edu wrote:
> 
> In article <dieter-220193153324@frueh-koelsch.informatik.rwth-aachen.de>, dieter@informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Dieter Kreuer) writes:

> 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

Recently, mass graves of German soldiers have been found in ex-GDR,
(Poland, 
too?) and Russian historians have admitted that mass executions of German
soldiers have been committed by the Red Army on German ground.

> 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.

True. The Nazis rated them not higher than the Jews, so they were killed.
I do not doubt that German camps were crueler than Russian ones. I only
doubt that average German soldiers were crueler than average Russian ones.

> 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?

I talked of Stalingrad because this TV series is currently broadcasted, and
it is about the whole war in Russia. The atrocities of Germans and Russians
are shown, and therefore, I mentioned it as an example for the cruelty of
both 
sides. Btw., there will also be a movie on Stalingrad in the cinemas, soon,

because the battle has its 50 anniversary now.
  
> > 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. 

Apart form the fact that there isn't much more cruelty beyond dropping an
atom bomb on civilians, the Germans ruling in occupied territories were 
especially chosen and well organized. If you rate cruelty in the number of 
killed persons, you are right with your points, but if you "measure" it in
the number of cruel persons in a random group, I doubt that you are.
  
> > [...] 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? 

See above. Select the right persons, organize them in a pyramid, give
orders
from above and shoot everybody not obeying to them.

> 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?

Correct. Many prefered to kill others than to be killed themselves. Most
human are not born heroes.
 
> > 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.

That is exactly why we, living today and looking back from the lazy chair,
should be careful to judge those who lived then. We should not excuse their
deeds, but consider the causes. We should learn from them, where their
faults were, and how we can prevent them to be made again.
 
> 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.

This might be true. But they will learn, too. Now, they get the same books
at school as we did, and they will encounter more foreign people in their
daylife than in ex-GDR.

> 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.

I don't think that the average white Southern has more against the blacks 
than the average white Yankee. But I can imagine that the racist organi-
zations who existed before the civil war still have a number of followers
today in the same region.
 
> > 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) [...]
> 
>  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?

A Nazi stays a Nazi, no matter how hard he is punished. However, someone
who has been cheated and misused by the government, like the GDR citizens,
or those of Russia, or most Germans during the Nazi era, will learn their
faults. Your argument is only valid for convinced idealists, and most
weren't.

> > [...] 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

> 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.

I was talking about how people regarded the American troopers: As libera-
tors, send from an ideal country. You can only have such an attitude,
when you believe that your former government was bad and ill-willing.
(Of course, this was not the idea of everybody, but of most of the
population. The Nazis had very different ideas from the US).
A people which has this point of view can be expected to adopt the same
rationals as its idol. Or, as an American Jew which I had talked to
some years ago had put it, when he was on a trip around Europe: Germany
is the country which resembles the USA the most in Europe. Guess why.

-----------------------                  ---------------------------------
     Dieter Kreuer      ##     ======== / dieter@informatik.rwth-aachen.de
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