Nazi Evil

Hi Suparatu,

If we are going to classify Hitler's Nazis as evil, then I think we can do the same for Stalin's Soviets without difficulty. The problem is common to Totalitarianism of all sorts - Mao, Kim, Hussein.......

However, Hitler's anti-Semitism, although it killed less people than Stalin's regime, was more implacable. There was absolutely no way one could renounce one's Jewishness. It didn't matter how old you were, or how young you were. It didn't matter what your gender was. It didn't matter if you were orthodox, liberal, Christian-convert or secular. If the Nazis thought you were Jewish you were going to die from 1942 onwards.

In Stalin's Russia it was not the norm to kill all the rest of the family, including the children. In Stalin's Russia you could recant your class sins. You could be re-educated. You could survive the Gulags. Evil and destructive of life as Stalin's regime was, it was less implacable to its victims than Hitler's Nazis were to the Jews.

So, if evil is to be the measure, I nominate Hitler's Nazism as the more evil of the two, because it was the more pitiless and implacable to its chosen victims.

Cheers,

Sid.

You didnt pay atenttion, the issue was not about doing it in public, it was about privately owning such a song or similar songs, books, pictures.

Too bad the millions that died werent aware of these facts.

Hi Imp,

I think you will find that people WERE aware of these facts. One does tend to notice if the rest one's family hasn't been arrested, or if a relative returns from "internal exile", or if there is no policy of infanticide. Death rates were extremely high, but unlike the Nazis and the Jews, the Soviet system usually held out some hope of survival. How do we know? Because millions survived.

The Stalinist terror seems to have operated on an uncertainty principle that was less than systematic. The Nazi attempted genocide of the Jews was intended to be totally systematic. There were to be no exceptions. Even babes still suckling were all to be slaughtered without exception.

The Nazis had to be physically stopped from killing every last Jew by Allied invasion. The Soviet system ameliorated itself after Stalin's death.

If the measure is to be "evil", then the Hitler's Nazis were worse than Stalin's Soviets. However, if a simple body count is to be used, then Stalin's Soviets were probably worse, although it should be remembered that they had considerably longer to accumulate their body count.

But as I said before, the problem lies in the nature of Totalitarianism. The best cure so far is Liberal Democracy.

Cheers,

Sid.

P.S. If we are going to be picky, the whole thread is not about the banning or otherwise of the "Horst Wessel" song in public or in private. Will you therefore also be chastising yourself for "not paying attention"?

This is great. Let's try a mental exercise. Let's substitute in your paragraph the word "Nazis" with "American government" and "Europe" with America". Then instead of Hitler, write George Bush and see if the paragraph still makes sense, let's if it would be a paragraph written by someone 40 years from now.

What do you think? striking similarities, right?

This is only a little humour, all ye about to start yelling, heel.

I imagine that though time the immensity of the crimes of Stalin will be known. But here in romania, he was closer to us than hitler was and his shadow even more menacing and i think that more romanians dies because of communism than of nazism. Considering this howcome he have a law against the nazis and none against the communists?

I imagine this law had to be implemented here BEFORE Romania could make steps forward. i.e. gain acceptance in the NATO and later EU because..well...i will not speculate.

Exactly my point. People are too bored and lazy to actually THINK. thay have this model "THEM NAZIS WUZ EVUUL" and they ride that flag regardless. Forget about Bosnia and such...

And this is picked up by the WORST of people, the kind that would hit you in the had with a bat if you dare to mention the fact that there might be examples in their own contry's history that is not that poetic and them would go home to his buddies bragging that he has defeated EVIL, he has beaten up a nazi...

Basically this is what i am against, this numbness of the brain, these stereotypes, this silly black'or'white, us - against - them type of personalities which so often populate the environment.

Hi superatu,

I will try and keep the answers shorter!

What Ehrenburg wrote is not a normal expression of outrage, but an abnormal one, given the circumstances.

The thing is, what did Ehrenburg mean? Was it an actual incitement to kill every German, and did it reflect Stalin and the USSR's policy towards the German nation? I think it probably did not, but was supposed to inspire the troops and reflect their anger. The Communists loved that kind of extreme propaganda.

The difference between that and the Nazis is that Hitler, when he said kill the Russians, Jews etc. was speaking in quite literal terms; not just an expression of anger but a specific and thought out policy directive.

I think you are missing something important as regards the difference between the way many Western countries treated their colonies, and the situation in those colonies, and the Nazi policies; The big Western Empires come into being BEFORE people in the countries involved are aware, in the sense we now consider normal, of themselves as a nation. The British weedled their way into India by replacing, often, other foreign sovereigns who had no particular attachment to the people, other than they are the rulers who they pay tax to.

In Africa, the excuse was always that Europeans had come to civilise and develop Africa, and exploit it's untapped resources.

In practice, they often did not do this, but still, the idea was always there, and Nazi style ideas were only espoused by the most crazed Imperialists. Often colonialism was evil for the indigenous people, but it wasn't as extreme an evil as Nazism.

The Nazis did not make a pretence of even trying to offer anything to the people they conquered, but instead went out of their way to make life worse for them. This is what makes them different.

As a concrete example of how what people thought influenced what they did, compare the Nazi domination in Poland and Russia with even something closely contemporary like the Italian occupation of Abyssinia. The Nazis invest nothing, offer nothing to the Poles and Russians, but destroy functioning states and stable societies. Polish and Russian people are offered no stake whatever in the new state, hold no functions etc. but their culture is actively wiped out.

In Poland, in four or five years the Nazis kill directly and needlessly 6 million. More than the British and the Indians between them in 200 years of struggle. Within months of Barbarossa, 2.5 million soviet POWs are already dead. Another example of Nazis going out of their way to be more barbarous, or as barbarous as the most extreme colonialists.

I would say, in relation to George Bush etc. that some of the things he has done do ressemble what the Nazis did. But consider how much money he has to invest in Iraq, how the Media attack him over civilian casualties, how the Americans try to set up a democratic regime. He hides his aggression and the advantage America will gain, he tries to offer something in return.

I would say that is imoral, but more 'normal' than the extreme Nazi attitude.

Nothing the Nazis did was totally unique or unprecedented in history, but I am arguing that the scale and the ideology that led to it was close to unique, or if it isn't, in other places it arises, it is also evil.

As an example, for the sake of convenience, on a scale of evil, if George Bush is a one or a two, Hitler would be a nine.

Now this is way too long again!!!

But, do you think Romania would have had a future under Nazi domination? What would it have been? What evidence is there?

hmm, i never mentioned Guantanamo. It is funny how you yourself made the connection between nazi concentration camps and Guantanamo.
you said it, not me.

The rest is your post is sooooo Fox News, SOOO things we heard a billion times already (platitudes like "america and its allies are fighting terrorists), i think not even the americans believe that anymore. The rest of the world believed it for about 5 minutes...

I am not trying to justify the nazi violence. merely point out that same techniques were applied by the populations that now shoul the loudest condemning the nazis. and that is very arrogant and hypocritical.

What the germans did in ww1? pleeeease....do not even dare to mix the two periods. that would be wrong. those two regimes had nothing in common in terms of political will. because if you do it would mean that you do not thibk the NAZIS were evil, but he GERMANS, which would make you a reductionist xenophobe.

maybe you would try to elaborate what you mean by "we as a race", cause it is fuzzy. human race, white race...?

Dude, did you just say NUCULAR weapons? NUCULAR?

It is nuclear actually. Nucular it is what those republicans like Bush and his supporters use since they are not that well-read.

NUCULAR?

Man, you are on a military forum and you say nucular?

Jeez, i will never take your opinions into consideration again....

nucular.....

This is finally somebody that dares to say it. cause i observe people here are very restrained about giving judgements except from the nazi regime views, which are commonplace...

The argument about the implacable policy is a good one, but i can state that there is a similar implacability present in Stalin's Russia.

if Stalin perceived you (so perceived, not proven - in nazi germany you had to be proven a jew at least ) you would be implacably dead...

and i find that even more scary, since you never knew that it might be you. A pure bread german had nothing to fear from the jew-policy, yet it did not matter who you were in Russia, if Stalin thought you might get in his way, you would soon be dead.

in my view, that is even more ruthless..

Saudasdefranchises,

[QUOTE]The thing is, what did Ehrenburg mean? Was it an actual incitement to kill every German, and did it reflect Stalin and the USSR's policy towards the German nation? I think it probably did not, but was supposed to inspire the troops and reflect their anger. The Communists loved that kind of extreme propaganda. [/QUOTE]

how can this be proven. like you said, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.



[QUOTE]The difference between that and the Nazis is that Hitler, when he said kill the Russians, Jews etc. was speaking in quite literal terms; not just an expression of anger but a specific and thought out policy directive. [/QUOTE]

oh i think Ehrenburg was quite specific. very specific i might add.

[QUOTE]In Africa, the excuse was always that Europeans had come to civilise and develop Africa, and exploit it's untapped resources.

In practice, they often did not do this, but still, the idea was always there, and Nazi style ideas were only espoused by the most crazed Imperialists. Often colonialism was evil for the indigenous people, but it wasn't as extreme an evil as Nazism. [/QUOTE]

La mission civilisatrice was nothing more than an excuse to plunger and crime. You say the nazi regime was worse than what the westerns did in their collonies? i wonder if the millions of people that died in Congo as a result of Leopold of Belgium's civilising missions think the same.

[QUOTE] Within months of Barbarossa, 2.5 million soviet POWs are already dead.[/QUOTE]

wel the nazis did not shoot them. most of them died of the conditions, lack of food, water, health conditions. who in this world can handle 2,5 million prisoners. look what happened in abu ghraib. there were 300 men in there and abuse was ripe. maybe it is not a nazi evil thing, maybe it is human nature, since we appear to be best at killing each other, and nobody seems to adress this one...[

QUOTE]I would say, in relation to George Bush etc. that some of the things he has done do ressemble what the Nazis did. But consider how much money he has to invest in Iraq, how the Media attack him over civilian casualties, how the Americans try to set up a democratic regime. He hides his aggression and the advantage America will gain, he tries to offer something in return.[/QUOTE]

i almost have a tear in my eye...Come on, a guy invades a sovereing nation for nothing more that oil and them he tries to justify it by using all sorts of lies ( we go there for the wepons of mass destruction which he obvioulsy has - NOT - then it was for the people - yeah right - ) and when he does what he should, and nothing more, meaning give reparations to the people he tormented - we should see him as a hero? this is such a propaganda spin....like there is one guy in washington actually losing sleep for the fate of the poor irakis. Gimme a break..

the scale of evil has nothing to do with bush. he is too stupid to be in the list.


i have no idea what we would be under a nazi regime. perhaps pretty much as america would be if Jefferson Davis won the war...not good that is.

This post has been edited by Suparatu on October 24, 2006 06:33 am

With regards my Post I dont have access to FOX News and being of Anglo-Irish extraction doubt if I would watch it anyway,

NUCULAR = I spell the word phoneticaly unlike you I have not had the benifit of years talking to college proffesors while forming my opinions at how bad I have been treated by the minority of the world.

And looking at your posts your spelling is not so hot either

I see you make no comment with my posting about the German & JAPANESE NUCULER programs, seeing Hitler had ordered the launching of unguided V1 & V2 against the civilian population of England, do you think there would have been any hesitation to launch against Britain or the USA a German Nuculer weapon??.

WW1 has a very significant role with connection to WW2, the Prussians lost the chance to expand their borders and small colonies, Hitler was a WW1 veteran who hated the fact that he was on the losing side and the "RAPE" of Germany under the Treaty of Versailles.


wel the nazis did not shoot them. most of them died of the conditions, lack of food, water, health conditions. who in this world can handle 2,5 million prisoners. look what happened in abu ghraib. there were 300 men in there and abuse was ripe. maybe it is not a nazi evil thing, maybe it is human nature, since we appear to be best at killing each other, and nobody seems to adress this one... (Most words after a full stop start with a capital letter!)

Again the Nazi were required by the rules of the Geneva Convention to look after their prisoners, they kept them behind hastily built wire compounds, with no access to medical care or provisions, the conditions were created by the Nazis, the way they planned from the start to deal with the Untermench-Sub-humans, so the excuse they took too many prisoners to handle is pathetic.

Of all the POW taken in the war, Russians came off the worst with regards to conditions, and treatment. Compared to them, the British, American, French POW etc.. etc..were living in holiday camps.

The second worst offenders in treating prisoners inhumanly after the Germans treatment of Russians were the Japanese, who had no respect for any man who surrendered.

the scale of evil has nothing to do with bush. he is too stupid to be in the list.

Funny when the word STUPID was used in context with YOU, you got quite upset,

i have no idea what we would be under a nazi regime. perhaps pretty much as america would be if Jefferson Davis won the war...not good that is.

Again a comment that has got nothing in common with the topic in hand, how many people here on the forumn would even know what Jefferson Davis would have done back then?? However a lot of people are very familiar with the Nazi methods when taking over new territory, classification of the people, a train ride, a short line for inspection, the words "Links" or "Rechts", a gas shower or the misery of a slow death in a NAZI extermination camp.

The Thousand Year Reich lasted barely five years because of the ineptitude of the Nazis, and the opposition of the Allies.

The USA is still here, and I dont see the masses rising up in the US to change it or any foreign power set to invade it. George Bush will soon be gone, but who ever replaces him will carry on the good fight against terrorism.

You and others like you will still be twisting words to try and justify the EVIL Third Reich, so you are as much a spin doctor as any employed by the democratic free world

Kevin in Deva.

Hi Suparatu,

I rather doubt that on a Romanian forum like this you will find anyone who has a benign or restrained view about Stalinism. Romania had a short, sharp experience of Stalinism in the late 1940s and 1950s, and it wasn't pleasant. (Wasn't this when tens or even hundreds of thousands of Romanians died digging the Danube-Black Sea ship canal?) By contrast, Romania suffered rather less from the Nazis.

Cheers,

Sid.

wel the nazis did not shoot them. most of them died of the conditions, lack of food, water, health conditions. who in this world can handle 2,5 million prisoners. look what happened in abu ghraib. there were 300 men in there and abuse was ripe. maybe it is not a nazi evil thing, maybe it is human nature, since we appear to be best at killing each other, and nobody seems to adress this one...[


i almost have a tear in my eye...Come on, a guy invades a sovereing nation for nothing more that oil and them he tries to justify it by using all sorts of lies ( we go there for the wepons of mass destruction which he obvioulsy has - NOT - then it was for the people - yeah right - ) and when he does what he should, and nothing more, meaning give reparations to the people he tormented - we should see him as a hero? this is such a propaganda spin....like there is one guy in washington actually losing sleep for the fate of the poor irakis. Gimme a break..

the scale of evil has nothing to do with bush. he is too stupid to be in the list.


i have no idea what we would be under a nazi regime. perhaps pretty much as america would be if Jefferson Davis won the war...not good that is.

Hi Superatu,

This is not so difficult to prove; if Ehrenburg had been literal, why did Stalin set up the GDR after the war?

Contrast the GDR with what the Nazis set up in the territories they occupied; the GDR was not a good state to live in, but it was no worse that what the Russians themselves were experiencing.

One Nazi idea for their conquered territories: (I have quoted this before):

'Coming together in Group III/B of the Race and Settlement Main Office. the SS racial utopians began to plan the future German Empire in the East. Their starting point was that thirty million slavs had to be killed.'
Concerning the 'ridiculous 100 million Slavs' (in Hitler's words) again:

'Our guiding principal must be that these people have but one justification for existence. To be of use to us economically.'

or

'whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only insofar as we need them for slaves for our Kultur.' Both quotes from Hitler himself.

With reference to the Congo, the Belgian government took over to stop the extremes of exploitation which had been happening while it was the Congo Free State.

Parts of Nazi ideology were similar, and probably derived in part from Western Colonial attitudes. What I was saying is that the Nazis were similar to the more extreme and racist wing of the Western colonialists.

But, whereas in most countries these extremists were counter balanced by other more moderate forces, in Nazi Germany they were allowed to dominate.

By the 1930s in most Western countries, there was also opposition to colonialism, and opposition to governments who were colonialist, who watched what happened in the colonies, and criticised. The Nazis forcibly surpressed all of that in favour of adopting the most extreme of colonial mentalities. With no supervision and challenge to their attitudes extremes of abuse could spread.

I think your comparaison between the American abuses in Abu Gharib and the Germans killing off 2.5 million Soviet POWs in a couple of months is monstruous.
Given that the Germans had killed this many in a few months, and that three or four million more would follow by the end of the war...

By deliberately letting these soldiers die (obviously, the Germans controlled great parts of the USSR by then, easily enough to have fed these men if they had wanted) the Nazis gave an example of the worst in human nature on a vast scale. In World War 2 many nations, including the Germans, found ways to deal with big numbers of prisoners, when they wished to.

Or, given that 300 iraqis were imprisoned in Abu Gharib, it was common German policy to execute, for ever German soldier killed in partisan activity, 50 or 100 civilian hostages. In Poland, more. One Nazi official is supposed to have said 'I did not hesitate to say that for every German killed, up to 199 Poles would be shot.' (quoted by Klaus Fischer, Nazi Germany p.489.)

Aparently in France about 30,000 civilian hostages were killed!

Coming back to the main point I was making about the Nazis, that started this whole discussion, the evil of the Nazis is a question of degree.

Nothing they did was unprecedented or totally unique in human history.

The key reasons they are remembered as particularly evil are linked to the fact that Nazism was a consciously chosen ideology; the Nazis offered their ideas as a revolutionary attitude claiming to offer Germany a better future. Their ideas were developed from a reactionary challenge to the left, as a defence of imperialism, racism, dictatorship and brutal and simplistic solutions to problems etc.

None of this has much to do with the US in Iraq as far as I can see.

There aught to be nothing wrong in saying the Nazis were evil, but you aught to have some good idea why.

But just saying there was nothing specially extreme about them, there is no basis to that either.

Please stick to the original topic. Irak and George Bush are totally irrelevant. Some posts were deleted (more will probably edited tommorow, if I will have more time)

Suparatu, typos do occur. Not everybody is very accustomed to the computer keyboard for different reasons. We are not here to discuss eachother's writing and making such a big fuss out of a typing mistake is uncalled for.

ok. i agree.

The soviet terror was operating on a clear principle - the liquidation of the class enemies. There were to be no exceptions either.

Hi SDF,

"Who in the world can handle 2.5 million prisoners?" you ask.

The answer is that anyone who actually wants to can. The British and Americans took some 3.5 million prisoners each in the last weeks of the war. There was a death rate of under 1% in captivity over three years.

Moreover, the Germans are condemned by their own earlier actions and those of their Allies. TheGermans fully intended and expected to capture millions of prisoners in the USSR. The year before they had captured some 2 million Western Allied servicemen with minimal post-capture losses. If some 2 million Soviet POWs died in German hands over 1941-42, this was no accident. It was malign neglect. By contrast, Soviet prisoners in Romanian hands had a low death rate by comparison.

Finally, it should be remembered that the Germans were legally obliged to look after Soviet prisoners of war under the Hague Conventions, to which both Nazi Germany and the USSR were subject by virtue of having inherited the international obligations of their respective imperial predecessors in this regard.

The deaths of millions of Soviet POWs in German custody over 1941-42 was by far the biggest war crime of WWII until the so-called Holocaust got under way on an industrial basis later in 1942. There is no excusing it.

Cheers,

Sid.