[i]Mod Note:
This is a thread header for the discussion of how Nazism came to power and the Third Reich came into being split-off from the heated digressions in the Bomber Harris thread. As a part of this thread’s exploration: Were ruthless Allied tactics, both Western and Eastern, such as firebombing and indiscriminate use of artillery in civilian areas justified? Did the Holocaust and Wehrmacht/SS atrocities in the ost lesson the disgrace of the Red Army’s breakdown of discipline, and rampant raping and plundering in Germany during 1945?
Other questions raised in this split off from the Bomber Harris thread:
-What was the nature and the extent of anti-Nazi German resistance?
-How did the Germans allow this to happen?
-Were the Germans the only peoples culpable not only in Nazi atrocities, but of Hitler’s rise to power?
–Nickdfresh[/i]
As I see it, any Aerial Bombardment (from Guernica to Dresden) which dedicatly targeted the civilian population was an atrocity and a war crime. One might understand the motivation behind such attacks when it comes to the british command, but I can also understand, why a father would kill a rapist and murder of his daughter, yet it remains murder and would be prosecuted, and correctly so. The argument “The other one did it aswell” would nowadays usually be found in Kindergarten discussions. And it was in fact a war crime even under the rules back then to target civilians, especially late in the war, say 1944 or 1945, when the writing about the end of the war was already on the wall.
The Allies were at least aware to an extent, what was going on in the death camps. But they weren’t really focusing in it much as the object was to win the War, therebye ending whatever the Nazis were doing. There’s a NYTimes article about all this dating from the 1990s somewhere around here and there were articles printed in the American press regarding extermination camps as early as 1943 or 44…
November 19, 1996 Files Suggest British Knew Early Of Nazi Atrocities Against Jews
By ALAN COWELL
They crouched in makeshift booths in dank, secret parts of wartime England, poring over the coded radio traffic flowing from the commanders of Nazi Germany. With some brilliant coups, and much plodding labor, the British code-breakers tracked the progress of the German Army on its march across Europe.
Then came the summer of 1941 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Now the content of the coded messages used by the German commanders of the SS and police units that followed the front-line troops was shockingly different from routine intelligence about troop movements: July 18 – ‘‘1,153 Jewish looters shot;’’ Aug. 27 – ‘‘Regiment South shot 914 Jews; the special action staff with police battalion 320 shot 4,200 Jews;’’ Aug. 31 – ‘‘2,200 Jews shot.’’
Those messages, many historians now believe, were a shorthand about the beginnings of the Holocaust. But in a striking display of official secretiveness, only in recent days have the contents of the radio intercepts finally been made public in Washington. For historians and Holocaust researchers, they provide a clue to one of the vital missing links of the history of the era: who in the West knew at the time that genocide was beginning?
‘‘What is perfectly clear is that British intelligence had absolutely definite information, not about all of Europe, but certainly about occupied parts of the Soviet Union,’’ Prof. Richard Breitman said.
Mr. Breitman, a historian at American University here, was among a group of American scholars who requested the declassification of 1.3 million wartime documents from the National Security Agency under the Freedom of Information Act. The agency, which was created after the war, released the documents to the National Archives.
Professor Breitman said in a recent interview that 282 pages of radio intercepts from SS and police commanders in Belarus and Ukraine were among the documents. Taken together with earlier British research, he said, they establish that the British knew that Jews were being targeted for atrocities as early as September 1941 – more than a year before Britain or the United States publicly acknowledged the plight of the European Jews.
Even before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Polish resistance and Jewish groups had been telling Britain and its allies of atrocities against civilians in occupied Poland.
By late 1941, Professor Breitman said, ‘‘the British knew a lot about the shootings in the Soviet Union’’ and had concluded that ‘‘it was perfectly obvious that the Nazis were executing every Jew they could lay hands on.’’
Although Britain and the United States shared intelligence during the war, it remains unclear when the British passed on this information, including copies of the documents, to the Americans, who entered the war in December 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The documents reaffirm that in the wartime German hierarchy, responsibility for the mass killing of Jews lay not only with elite SS units, but also with municipal police units – the Order Police – supposedly drawn from less fanatical Germans.
The disclosure, moreover, raises the troubling question of why the transcripts, still classified in Britain, were not released earlier to assist in the prosecution of war criminals.
The documents have opened a new fault line among historians of the Nazi era in the United States, Britain and Germany over questions relating to the very definition of the Nazi genocide and the Allied response to it: is it reasonable, half a century later, to assume that the British code-breakers would extrapolate from the messages that Nazi Germany planned the destruction of the European Jews? And, if Allied intelligence had drawn that conclusion, why was the beginning of the Holocaust the object of a cover-up?
The transcripts draw a chilling picture of events from July to August 1941, as German SS and police units moved through the Soviet Union, chronicling their achievements with a blend of precision and horror, at once terse and boastful.
Explosive Reports Of Nazi Killings
On Aug. 4, 1941, for example, a German commander reported: ‘‘Up until Aug. 3, SS cavalry brigade liquidated 3,274 partisans and Jewish Bolshevists. Own losses: none.’’
Even at that time, the transcripts were evidently viewed as so explosive that British intelligence analysts marked them: ‘‘To be kept under lock and key. Never to be removed from the office.’’
Significantly, though, the flow of detailed information relating to atrocities was interrupted on Sept. 13, 1941, with a coded order from Berlin on the same network that all future reference to executions be delivered by courier, not by a radio system vulnerable to interception. From now on, the message from Kurt Daluge, Commander of the Order Police in Berlin, insisted, executions should be treated as ‘‘most secret matters of the Reich.’’
That order itself, decoded on Oct. 9, 1941, provided ample evidence that the Germans themselves attached such importance to the atrocities as to classify them alongside the highest state secrets.
‘‘What is totally new is that the British were able to intercept the cables,’’ Prof. Wolfgang Wippermann, a German historian who supports Professor Breitman’s assessment of the importance of the disclosure, said in a telephone interview from Berlin. ‘‘That the Allies knew all the details, this is a scandal. And it’s still a scandal in 1996 because disclosure of this information was necessary for research, for the courts and for the survivors.’’
Reports Not Open At Nuremberg Trials
None of the information in the intercepts, Professor Breitman said, were used at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II because the documents were then still classified.
Indeed, Professor Breitman said, one of the main Nazi commanders involved in the massacres, Gen. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewsky, was able to testify as a prosecution witness at the trials and escape prosecution for ‘‘four or five years’’ after the war – even though his activities were known to Allied intelligence. He was later convicted by a West German court, Mr. Breitman said.
One transcript, for instance, from the town of Slonim in Belarus, states, ‘‘In yesterday’s cleansing action in Slonim by the police regiment Mitte, 1,153 Jewish looters were shot.’’ The message on July 18, 1941 – less than a month after the German invasion – was signed by General von dem Bach-Zelewsky, the German commander in Belarus, and transmitted to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, and Commander Daluge of the Order Police.
The transcript notes that the message was decoded just three days later.
In another message, dated Aug. 7, 1941, General von dem Bach-Zelewsky wrote, with evident self-congratulation: ‘‘The action of the SS cavalry brigade proceeds. By noon today, a further 3,600 were executed, so that the total number by Cavalry Regiment Eastern is 7,819. Thereby, the number of 30,000 in my area has been exceeded.’’
The disclosures come in a turbulent period in Holocaust research. Earlier this year, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a Harvard historian, came out with a book that asserted that the Holocaust had its roots in a specific German anti-Semitism that turned the destruction of Jews into a ‘‘national project.’’
While Professor Breitman disputes that contention, the transcripts reaffirm what Professor Goldhagen and a 1992 study by Prof. Christopher R. Browning of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington had explored: that ordinary police battalions – not just SS units – were widely used in the mass killing of Jews after front-line soldiers had subdued occupied lands.
That earlier research, though, relates to events in Poland in 1942, rather than what is now widely acknowledged to be the beginning of genocide in the Soviet Union.
The transcripts shed light on a period predating both the Wannsee Conference of Nazi leaders in January 1942 that formalized the ‘‘final solution,’’ the decision to kill the European Jews en masse, and the construction of the Auschwitz and Dachau death camps in 1942.
The question of what they say about the Allies is more opaque.
‘‘What’s not new is that the police regiments were carrying out massacres,’’ Professor Browning said after the documents were made public. ‘‘What is new is that the British intercepted this. But you cannot deduce a ‘‘final solution’’ from that. There is no way you could conclude’’ on the basis of the transcripts ‘‘that the Germans had a plan to exterminate all the Jews.’’
‘‘This is where we are going to have a difference of interpretation,’’ he said. ''Those who are looking for someone to blame are going to see this in terms of: here is proof of perfidy and British cover-ups.
‘‘And then there are those who argue: here is Britain, fighting alone, looking for something else and they have a whole lot of problems without looking for any others. These are the two poles between which this debate is going to take place.’’
Indeed, said Prof. Hans Mommsen, a German scholar who differs with Professor Breitman on the origins of the Holocaust, while the British intercepts relate to the summer and early fall of 1941, the Nazi leadership itself did not resolve ‘‘to carry out the systematic elimination of European Jews’’ before early 1942.
Intelligence analysts in Britain thus could hardly be expected to reach conclusions in 1941 about events that still defy a comprehensive explanation half a century later, he said.
‘‘How could the British be aware that this was a systematic process?’’ Professor Mommsen said. ‘‘There was no program, no order.’’
Moreover, said Gitta Sereny, a British writer in London who published a new study of the Nazi leader Albert Speer last year, it is still unclear whether the British knew ‘‘that the killings which began in July 1941 were the start of the genocide of all European Jewry and the systematic elimination by murder of Eastern Europe’s non-Jewish cultural elite.’’
‘‘The truth about this will not be found in German or Russian documents, but in Britain, where it is as yet carefully hidden away,’’ she said.
Nonetheless, the transcripts do raise disturbing questions about Allied reticence.
One tactical reason for their silence, Professor Browning said, was that the British were ‘‘desperate to keep secret the fact that they were breaking the German codes’’ and, therefore, any public acknowledgment of the atrocities would have alerted the Germans to modify their encrypting methods.
The British intelligence analysts who were handling the transcripts were under orders to glean as much as they could about the military situation on Germany’s Eastern Front, not about the mass killing of Jews. ‘‘Some of the people who were looking at these things had a very narrow focus,’’ Professor Breitman acknowledged.
Beyond that, though, the evidence of massacres collided with many other reasons to avoid the conclusion that genocide was under way – a reluctance among the Allies even to acknowledge the monstrousness of German plans, a refusal to recast World War II as a war on behalf of European Jews and a strain of anti-Semitic thinking at high levels of British officialdom.
Additionally, as the war ground on, a variety of strategic considerations – ranging from concern about Arab sentiment in the contested Middle East to the argument that aiding Jews could prolong the war – were cited in Washington and London as grounds for playing down the Holocaust.
‘‘In the eyes of some officials in both London and Washington, virtually any publicized assistance or attention to European Jews jeopardized some requisite of the war effort,’’ Professor Breitman wrote in a 1985 article. ‘‘To a remarkable degree, Adolf Hitler had succeeded in devaluing the lives of European Jews in the eyes of the rest of the world.’’
Lets malke it clear, Hitler happened because majority of Germans wanted, Nazi camps and wholesale extermination of nations and ethnicities happened because german nation accepted it as a prize for their power.
Today apologetics claim that it was just some germans or that the german crimes were not widely known, that is NOT true.
German crimes and extermination policies were not known in detail but every german had the general idea, the german people despite all this loved Hitler and endorsed his ideology, not some nazi from the moon but german people including civilians.
Harris said that if a hundred thousand civilians died to save one british soldier that was an acceptable price, i cant agree more,crushing majority of germans were nazi supporters, today they are different people but back then even wholesale extermination of the german people to save the lives of their victims i would find acceptable, germans of WW2 deserved total war, they deserved every death, every rape, every bomb.
Thats not hate talking through me, like i said today these men and women are dead or old and new generations are different people but back then it was men and women of Germany who made concentration camps possible, they did not deserve mercy, pity or leniency, its one time when group responsibility was actually a pretty fair implementation of justice.
Harris was not a hero but i find his approach extremely healthy( even if not politically correct ) under the circumstances.
Wow, bullshit of the day award would be very deserved for this post. It’s exactly that kind of uninformed generalization of unbelievably complex things that makes people like hitler possible.
And it’s presumptuous to the max to claim you’d know what people 70 years ago thought, knew or felt just because it fits into your confused little world of jingoism.
Drake i come from a family of germanized poles, i know first hand what people 70 years ago thought ( not that there isnt a ton of documentaries where people say what they thought ).
Germans. Loved. Hitler. Even today they admit it, youtube is your friend, you can see random german citizens, now elderly people or dead confirming that they felt pride with the power of Germany and when asked about nazi crimes they claim ignorance.
Well my gramps who was in the Wehramcht saw it that way, “Jewish neighbours vanished, we knew that they wont be coming back but we didnt want to know the details” and thats the stand with the whole bloody german society of the day, you get discovery programs, specialist literature, all kinds of sources that say Hitler and his regime were widely and enthusiastically accepted.
Also do not compare poles or lithuanias of the time to Nazi Germans, your nation is responsible for the single most horrid crime in the history of the human race, not some random mysterious creatures called the nazi but men and women of Frankfurt, Berlin and all the cities and villages who did not say “NO”.
There was no opposition to Hitler and when they finally tried to blow him up it wasnt to save jews or slavs but to save what was left of their precious Germany, what i am saying is not generalisation, the german people as a nation were co-responsible for Hitler and all his regime brought and as such the only one whom they can blame for their suffering is themselves.
I am neither a hatefull person nor am i generalising, i can understand that for you as a German it is hard to grap or accept but the fact is a vast majority of adult Germans of the 3rd Reich were active or passive nazi supporters so yes Harris was right in his bombing campaign.
That doesnt make him a hero since bombing of civilians even ones that back up their pretty little murderous regime aint heroic but he was still right, deal with it.
One more thing, do not compare other nations sufferings to your nation, Germany started the war, Germany is to blaim, suffering of the Germans was caused by Germans themselves, when a killer goes to prison its because he killed, poles and lithuanians were innocent victims whereas all the suffering your people endured was if not justifiable than understanble at the very least.
Which is why i’m saying the guy was not a hero however german civilian population deserved total war, quite frankly burning german cities and civies would shake the gerries enough to punch through the propaganda blanket that covered the nations collective mind and make them realise that this is no longer to get more lebensraum but a fight for survival and war is coming home.
Its much easier to fight a broken and terrorised nation and in this particular case anyone willing to do it had the luxury of moral justification, it would never be good or heroic but acceptable and understandable.
Ignoring several other events which might rank as as the single most horrid crime in history, if all Germans were so keen on Hitler, how come he never managed to get anywhere near a majority of them to vote for him and that he came to power by devious devices which were necessary to overcome the lack of majority support after about two thirds of Germans had voted against him?
His best electoral result still had well over half of Germans saying “NO”.
All the historical evidence is against your condemnation of the German people as unanimous supporters of Hitler.
Given Poland’s treatment of Jews, it’s unwise to get too moralistic about Germany’s ‘horrid crimes’.
You are both hateful and generalising and furthermore unbelievably ignorant. Before you actually comment on complex matters try to gather enough knowledge to not make a complete fool of yourself (and the poles in general, if your theories had a grain of truth).
Btw. the poles of the time were hardly innocent bystanders on the holocaust, they gladly helped and killed some more jews even after the germans were gone.
What the Luftwaffe tried on England wasn’t comparable with the Allied bombing campaign against Germany, nor did Germany run such a sustained campaign as the Allies did against Germany.
Germany never had a heavy bomber, let alone thousands of them, that could inflict anything like the damage on England that the Allies inflicted on Germany.
Popular history throws up Rotterdam and Coventry in conjunction with Dresden and Cologne and Hamburg and even Tokyo as examples of the power of and death visited by bombers.
Check out the death tolls and you’ll find that Rotterdam and Coventry weren’t in the same league. They were just terrible in the early days of the war when there wasn’t anything worse to compare them with. That came later, in the Allied campaigns against the Axis powers.
That is a filthy lie on which i am going to hold you for evidence, there was a single tragic incident in Jedwabne post war, by and large Poland was the most active country when it comes to aiding the Jews, i will now ask you to prove that poles assisted in holocaust, i stand ready to provide documentation which proves we tried to stop your people in their murderous intent as best as we could hiding hundreds of jewish families, providing evac routes and organising escapes.
Calling your forefathers murderers is not hatefull, its true, when i see a dog i call it a dog and screw political corectness.
Polands treatment of Jews ? You mean inviting and being host to the largest european community of Jews who took active part in our life or the fact that 90% of Jews saved from the holocaust were saved by the poles ?
And long before the Germans arrived, and independently of the Germans during the German occupation.
Which raises the issue that is conveniently ignored by various European nations that there was often enthusiastic local support for Nazi anti-Semitic measures. The Nazis didn’t have to round up and load every cattle car full of Jews headed for concentration camps from occupied, or as in Hungary even non-occupied, territories.
Germans weren’t the only people who should have been in the dock at Nuremberg. They just made the mistake of losing the war and being blamed for everything that happened in Europe during it.
Long before the Germans arrived the Jews were legally represented group going as far as one of them becoming polish president, they were not opressed either officially nor unoficially, the society accepted them as nothing less than full polish citizens and anti-semitic excesses were extremely limited unlike in France, Russia or Germany, i will again ask you for the proof of your blatant lies.
I am perfectly aware that there were pre and post war anti-semitic crimes in Poland but as far as history is concerned Poland was the kindest of all european countries, here Jews were free of opression and welcome as a valuable part of society and during the war it was us, the poles who saved 90% of the total of Jews saved from holocaust.
Both the communist and nazi propaganda worked hard to reverse that picture but the actuall documented proof says otherwise, so again i ask you to forward what you base your anti-polish prejudice and “racism” on ?
There were two such events, the first one is still not clear and its suspected that SS instigated and perhaps even carried it out acting in plain clothes, the latter 1945 is undeniably polish in nature.
That is the one and only time when Jews were murdered by polish citizens, standing against thousands of accounts where poles died and risked their lives to save their jewish co-citizens.
Again i ask for proof that Poland was taking part in holocaust as opposed to trying to save as many as it could, i always enjoy discussing with nazi revizionists since sooner or later we hit the hard undeniable burden of proof, for which i am asking now.
A single incident, yeah right :roll:. Some 1500 jews were killed in poland after ww2 in pogroms (f.e. Kielce) and the majority of jewish population that was left fled the country til 1950 because they feared the raging antisemitism.
It’s just very convenient for the french, the poles, the dutch and others to point their fingers at the germans as the sole perpetrators, but it’s hardly historically correct. And the poles were also not particularly friendly to the germans in poland before ww2, following your argumentation I assume your nation deserved everything you received from my murderous forefathers.
I can provide documentation for germans who tried to save jews and resisted the nazis as well, btw.
As you might see, an undifferentiating approach to issues of historic proportions is hardly a viable one.
