Kat wrote:
> >>And I'm damn sure the Germans fighting under Hitler weren't evil and
> >>genocidal,
> >
> >A great many of them were. Hitler didn't run Auschwitz by himself, or
> >Treblinka, or.......
>
> *Some* were, JDG, some were. Some were "just following orders", an evil
> but a less nasty one, and some had only the vaguest idea of what happened
> in containment camps and were guilty only of swallowing the propaganda of
> an evil and charismatic man. I would put the beardless boys on the front
> lines- the ones that we were, for the most part, killing- by and large,
> in that last category. And I would say they were in the majority.
Have you read the book _Hitler's Willing Executioners_ by Goldhagen?
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679772685/o/qid=990931368/sr=8-1/ref
=aps_sr_b_1_1/107-4903320-6343718
It paints a rather unflattering portrait of the citizens of Germany during
WWII. More and more evidence shows that the people of Germany *knew* of the
Holocaust, but simply did nothing. Letters written to home by the members
of police battalions that "cleansed" areas of Poland and Russia of Jews are
quite normal, and read much like letters written by American GI's in tone,
although not in content. They were family men, who adored their children,
loved their wives, and shot Jews. They may not have been evil in the grand
sense of Darth Vader or Doctor Doom, but they were still capable of
astoundingly disgusting atrocities.
To my mind, there is no justification for the commission of atrocities.
There are excuses, and there are explanations, but there is no
justification. If one is empty-headed enough to buy into propaganda
unhesitatingly, or foolish enough to "follow orders" without considering at
least the obvious implications, then one is just as guilty as if he
willingly did it for the sake of doing it. AFAICT, the judges at Nuremberg
felt the same way.
To bring this back to the Soviet Union, read _The Gulag Archipelago_ and _A
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch_ by Alexander Solzhenytsin for a good
glimpse into the workings of Stalin's camps. They weren't as mechanically
efficient as the German camps, but they served their purpose.
I've got to stop agreeing with John on things - is the a sign of a bad
trend?
Adam C. Lipscomb
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
