herfiehandbag

10 minutes ago, Logosone said:

You are obviously unaware that the huge death camps with factories were all located outside Germany.

 

There wasn't a single one in Germany,  all were in Poland. And of course the reason for that is obvious. Himmler complained time and time again of the sympathy ordinary Germans had for jews, that they did not understand the need for them to be exterminated, hence the death camps were all located outside Germany and the operations were kept secret.

 

 

Mittelburg -Dora was at Nordhausen in Thuringia. Sachsenhausen was at Orianenburg, various of the Krupp works in the Ruhr were large scale users of concentration camp labour. Peenemunde on the Baltic coast of Mecklenburg; all major sites using forced labour by concentration camp inmates, all in Germany.

55 minutes ago, Logosone said:

This whole idea that 80 million people would know of a highly secretive operation of the state is akin to stating the entire population of the UK today knows of the top-secret operations of the UK.

 

It's frankly ludicrous. 

That in itself is a ludicrous comparison.

Let us consider one of the perhaps largest

topsecret operations in the UK - the arrangements for storing and moving the UK's nuclear weapons. A small number of people are involved in this, it is carried out discretely, and in plain view. Many/most simply do not realise what the road vehicles or train which has just passed was carrying. It certainly does not have a banner attached reading "Nukes - please do not look!" This is top secret- the idea is that nobody notices, and only a very small number of people are party to it.

Now compare that with rounding up whole communities, and either marching them to an adjacent wood and shooting them, or putting them in crammed freight trains, which trundle for hundreds of kilometres through the public railway system to be unloaded a vast camps, from which they never emerge. Compare that with huge factories in which slave labour was literally worked to death, in full view of other workers. In the last month's, do you think that the general population did not notice the long columns of emaciated prisoners being brutally forcemarched westwards, again in full view, from the evacuated camps in the east?

To state, in the face of all the evidence that people did not know, is ludicrous. The claims of general ignorance advanced at the war's end were ignored, that does not mean they were accepted, and as far more information has emerged in recent years they have clearly been shown to have little foundation.

Frankly, only a miniscule proportion of the armed forces were convicted because with millions of surrendered personnel to be guarded, processed and released, there was neither the time, resources or will to conduct investigations to put them on trial.

In hindsight, that was perhaps a great failing, it led to frankly spurious "statistics" which can be used in peddling the revisionist theories which you have obviously bought into.

.

1 hour ago, Logosone said:

It's bad enough that you try and portray the events at Celle as somehow indicating the barbarity of the people of Celle, who hosted you, when in fact it was the barbarity of the Allied bombing of civilians that led to over 2000 of the 4000 plus strong transport of prisoners to be killed by Allied bombs. Then you proceed to claim Germans who apprehended escaped inmates and killed 30 for looting were the real bad guys, ignoring that the Allied planes killed 2000 of those very same prisoners. It's pathetic.

 

Just like your attempt to equate David Irving's claims with mine, which are entirely different. However, talking about that trial, in it Evans makes clear that 

 

"the genocide was often described using euphemisms such as "special tasks" and "executive measures"; Einsatzgruppe victims were often described as having been shot while trying to escape"

 

Obviously because those responsible for the genocide knew it was against international law and attempted to keep it highly secret. Holocaust scholarship, even Evans, can't have it both ways, they can't claim on the one hand "Oh they took all these measures to keep it secret, used secret terminology "special treatment" meant killings, but on the other hand "Oh all Germans knew". It's a pathetic claim and obviously wrong.

1. The people of Celle did not "host me". I was stationed there, as part of an international alliance (NATO) intended to deter the very real threat of invasion of Western Europe by the Soviet Union, at, I might add, a very significant cost to the United Kingdom.

2. I went out of my way to mix with the local population, far more so than most of my peers. At the time I accepted their claimed ignorance of what had happened. I accepted that. Subsequent reading, both about Celle and the rest of Germany has led me to believe that knowledge of the genocidal policies enacted by the state, and involving a significant number of it's people, was much more widespread than they claimed.

3. I also said that I don't believe that the German People should pay an eternal price. But I do believe that members of that generation, who were active in the genocide system, should, whilst they survive, be brought to justice.

4. You are beginning to reveal what I suspect are your true colours - as one bent on revisionist interpretations of that evil creed and it's actions. An approach that has been utterly rebuffed by academic research and debate, the courts both in Germany and throughout the western world, and by the simple, factual accounts of history. As a German of a current generation you emphatically do not have to hang your head in shame at what happened; as a person who seeks to revise, shift blame to others, and justify by faux comparisons with the horrors of all out war what was done to the Jews and others by the NAZI state, and to further the ludicrous claim that the people, including those working in the system did not know what was happening, you should (be ashamed).

3 hours ago, Logosone said:

 

There is a thing called "chain of causation". It means that you first have to establish factual causation, in other words "but for the conduct of the defendant" would the harm have occurred? There were many camp guards in WWII. Many camps, in most there were no gassings. It certainly can not be said that being a camp guard inevitably resulted in gassing or killing of prisoners. But for the conduct of Dey would these killings have happened or not? In other words was Dey's conduct a direct factual causation in killing or gassing prisoners? Very obviously it was not. Plenty of guards watched over inmates but their conduct did not result in killings or gassings.

 

For example if A kills victim B then A is factually responsible for the killing. The birth of A's grandmother is a causally relevant condition but not a cause.   On the other hand, A's gunshot, being a deliberate human intervention in the ordinary state of affairs, is elevated to the status of "cause".

 

This was just not the case with Dey's actions. Dey did NOT play a part in the holocaust, which refers to the killing of jews. Dey did not participate in the actual killing. Nor was Dey an accomplice. He had no direct, planning or causal connection with anyone who did any killing, and never worked actively to cause any killing.

 

He did not kill any Jews. He was not part, knowingly, of a scheme to kill Jews. He was unaware of such a scheme. When Dey was conscripted the holocaust was no known the way it is today. In 1943 a poll of Americans revealed that half of all Americans thought the holocaust was just a rumour. Dey did not know that he was doing anything other than being a tower guard.

 

To say he played a part in comitting 5000 murders is simply ludicrous. 

 

As for knowing or not knowing, no-one is pretending that nobody knew, obviously some did, however the very vast majority of Germans simply did not know. They did not participate in the killings, only 0.11 percent of the Wehrmacht were found guilty of that, they had no jewish neighbours (only 400,000 - 500,000 in Germany at the time, 80 million Germans). 

 

You illustrate this yourself in your Celle story when you say  "but it was, I am now sure, a secret kept by her father, and her uncles (whom I met) and the old boys with whom I spent such happy times running model trains!", of course those who were involved had every motivation in the world to keep it secret. Some didn't, but that was a very small minority.

 

Most Germans did not know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

3 hours ago, Logosone said:

As for knowing or not knowing, no-one is pretending that nobody knew, obviously some did, however the very vast majority of Germans simply did not know. They did not participate in the killings, only 0.11 percent of the Wehrmacht were found guilty of that, they had no jewish neighbours (only 400,000 - 500,000 in Germany at the time, 80 million Germans). 

 

You illustrate this yourself in your Celle story when you say  "but it was, I am now sure, a secret kept by her father, and her uncles (whom I met) and the old boys with whom I spent such happy times running model trains!", of course those who were involved had every motivation in the world to keep it secret. Some didn't, but that was a very small minority.

 

Most Germans did not know.

 

Everyone in Celle in 1945 was aware of "The Great Celle Rabbit Hunt". That is a lot of people. Then consider the numbers of other people who lived adjacent to all the other camps, the people who worked in the industries which used the slave labour which they provided, all those who worked on the railways which played such a major part in moving the victims, all those who simply saw the trains pass through stations whilst they waited on the platforms, and so on and so on. It is quite simply incredible that what was going on was unknown. Oh they may have not known the details, how many died in which week, and from what causes, but absolutely it must have been common knowledge that something awful, and broadly understood, was going on in these camps, both within Germany itself and throughout the Reich.

Only a very small proportion of the Wehrmacht or SS were convicted, true. Only a very small proportion of the German Armed Forces were prosecuted, true. There were many prisoners held by May 1945, millions. The pressure ion the Western Allies was to demobilise them, get them home, to start to rebuild Germany. The East had perhaps slightly different priorities, to use them to rebuild the damage from the war in the Soviet Union and what had become it's satellite states. There were very limited resources to screen and investigate. I had the privilege of speaking to men (at a veterans reunion which I was involved in hosting) who went into Belsen in the hours after the liberation of the camp. They were of the opinion, forcefully expressed, that every single German in uniform, should have been held in the camps and the parts which they played rigorously investigated. I'm sure that opinion was shared by those who went into Birkenau, Dachau, Auschwitz and every other place where the 3rd Reich, and the men who served it, (as did Dey, however humble their role) had uncovered the entrances to hell. That was of course not possible, so the vast majority of perpetrators went unpunished.

As for the poll of Americans in 1943, that was 2 years before the camps were liberated. Quite probably many of those polled only had the haziest of ideas as to why the US was at war with Germany. Maybe they should have been asked again in 1946, when the facts were known, and the men who had discovered them had returned home.

Anyway, like @stevenl I'm leaving the subject - it is clear that you will not accept the involvement of that generation of Germans in what happened, nor the inevitable and inescapable fact that they must have known. Further discussion will only lead, I suspect, to denial, at least of the scale of the Holocaust, if not of it's very existence.

I'm out.

6 hours ago, Logosone said:

Knowledge of the holocaust was certainly not universal in the German military.

 

If you read Richard Evans, he makes clear that German documentation went to great lengths to disguise mass killings.  Why use the term "Special treatment" if not to hide what was actually meant.

 

Dey may have heard rumours of gas chambers, but it was war time. A lot of the talk about the holocaust would have been dismissed as propaganda.

 

Only 0.11% of the German military were convicted of war crimes. Those involved were an incredibly small minority.

 

Dey was not guilty of anything. He was a tower guard. He killed nobody. Yet he is convicted of 5000 plus murders? And nobody bats an eyelid?

In the late 1970s early 1980s I spent three years (as part of a much longer career), as a British Soldier, based in a place called Celle, a small town between Hannover and Luneburg in Lower Saxony. Perhaps slightly unusually amongst my peers, (even then I was regarded as a dangerous radical) I made some efforts to interact with the local community. I spoke some German from school, and worked hard to improve it. I spent several months - the best part of a year - enthusiastically chasing the affections of a (gorgeous) local girl, the daughter of a "senior and well regarded" member of the community - her family name prefixed by "Von". I joined the local Model Railway Club, based in an old signal box at the main railway station. 

Amongst all the Germans (of the generation who had lived/served during the war) the recurrent mantra was "of course we knew nothing of all that". Information was much less freely available back then (no internet) and so I accepted that at face value.

Celle is an important railway junction. The railway station and yards lie within the area of the town. One of the branch lines runs to Bergen Hohne, a few kilometres away, and then known as Bergen Belsen. The trains carrying their tragic cargoes to that camp would have been marshalled in those yards, and run through the station and out through the suburbs of the town. In early 1945, during an air raid on the railway yards, a large number of Jews, bound for Belsen, escaped from a train and hid in the heathlands and pine forests to the North and West of Celle. What followed was known as "The Great Celle Rabbit Hunt". The adult and teenage population of the town enthusiastically hunted down the escaped inmates. Some were beaten to death, most  were returned to the camps, marched through the streets. Their pitiful state could hardly have gone unnoticed. At the time I knew nothing of this - it was never mentioned. The Internet has allowed it to be known now. 

Now I don't think that the entire community must carry endless guilt for this - I am sure that the lovely Julianna (ah such memories!) would be horrified to know of it - but it was, I am now sure, a secret kept by her father, and her uncles (whom I met) and the old boys with whom I spent such happy times running model trains! It was most certainly not an "unknown". That, and the knowledge of what happened throughout the sorry mess which was the Third Reich must be admitted. Only then, and even now, can that guilt be expunged. Pretending that no-one knew, or that there were comparable atrocities, or that it is exaggerated (yes I have read David Irving's spittle flecked apologist books on the subject) simply prolongs the "national guilt"

This fellow played a part in the holocaust, he was a camp guard. It is right that his guilt, as part of that terrible action, should be confirmed, I also think that it is right that mercy was demonstrated in sentencing him, as a man in his 90s. Mercy which was not displayed to those he guarded.

240 million for promoting government policy, or  1.35 billion for (another) VIP airplane...

2 hours ago, Tippaporn said:

If the mayors and governors are fine with riots and unlawful acts then normal people, including Trump, aren't. 

Goodness gracious me, are you suggesting that Mr Trump is a "normal person"?

18 minutes ago, robblok said:

Yes i loved part of what the junta did when i thought they would have been gone quickly. Now i see that they are as corrupt as the Taksin goverments (if not worse). 

 

Problem is even if there is blood on the street without a party that is good like future forward to vote upon nothing will change. A corrupt Taksin party or a corrupt junta party. I mean without a 3rd good choice nothing will change. 

I doubt whether very many of the participants in this movement will have been old enough to vote for Thaksin, or his sister. 

I suspect that those of them that have voted almost certainly voted for Future Forward.

If the Junta falls ( and it won't step aside in the interests of fairness, that is as naive an expectation as imagining that the Junta only took power for very limited objectives over a short time!) then there is nothing to prevent Future Forward from reforming.

These protests are Future Forward, or the movement which grew out of it. Whilst Thaksin might regard them with a benevolent eye, he is not driving them.

That a Government Agency, tasked with organising policy to counter the Covid Pandemic is run by a General, and is proposing to the Cabinet ( also run by Generals) an extension to the State of Emergency ( which essentially suspends what little accountability government had) tells you everything you need to know about governance here.