Gixxerman
Senior Airman
Hitler was mild by historical standards and far from the maddest of people. Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin were far worse and certainly far worse. If you kept your head down in WW2 Germany or Reich territory you got to stay alive unless you were jewish.
.....or disabled, or gay , or a gypsy or informed against by anyone with an axe to grind you ended up unlucky enough to be sent away encountered a psychopath in charge on a bad day.
Not forgetting the 'mere' brutal incarceration for a host of other so-called offences (like daring to hold different opinions views).
Hitler might get angry, might rant, but he didn't kill anyone unless he had a good reason.
I find it incredible anyone could seriously write this rubbish in this day age after all we know about the nazi regime.
I suppose disability falls under 'good reason' for you does it?
Or being gay?
What exactly is the 'good reason' underlying a war of extermination?
By definition 'reason' has nothing to do with it, you simply are 'the other' must die.
Within that I include laying waste to a village and its inhabitants for being used by or by supporting insurgent/partisan activities (which often involved deliberately provocative atrocities against German soliers)
.....which ignores the fact that war crimes were a habit of the German army (as well as the SS) long before there was a resistance to speak of.
I think this also falls into "Hitler bad" therefore "Stalin the good anti-hero".
Sorry, but I think you're about to employ the classic bad debating technique of framing this in your own way but claiming it is how most see it,
Stalin killed millions probably more than Hitler who gets to carry the can
They are 2 separate individuals.
Both were vile murderous monsters.
Each committed unique crimes but Hitler was the one who began WW2 and so not surprisingly he gets reviled the most (what with it being the most deadly appalling war ever and the genocidal industrial murder machine which was a facet of Hitlers regime unique in modern history).
he sometimes killed them randomely to show his power and broaden fear (somethingn Hitler never did)
Oh really?
So I suppose the deliberate use of an irregular corps during the pre-Gov electioneering was just for fun giggles?
Or the 'Night of the long knives' was a gentle thing?
Or how about 'Kristallnacht' or the Jewish boycott.....yeah sure, no visible weilding of power or attempting to broaden a state of fear in any of that?
Are you serious?
His purging of the Soviet Army is in some quarters motivated by this as well.
I'm not going to excuse Stalin's crimes but this is an interesting one.
Curious as it is documented that Hitler became a fan of the idea of purging the German armed forces the German officers later in the war.
There are plenty of ethnic Russian Historians who believe Stalin was preparing an invasion of Western Europe
Which is an interesting idea but that is all it is.
A claim.
A suggested possibility, from some but by no means all or even a majority.
There is no proof of this and when it comes down to it it basically is a claim to imply that the russians were just as bad if not worse than Hitler's mob and Hitler's mob therefore weren't really that bad, what with the russians being allied to the western powers.
The suggestion is virulently only opposed in certain quarters of the UK and USa by those one would expect because of their political or ethnic leanings. IE it is a case of being closed to an idea because it rationalises and credits some of Hitlers decisions, it would make his fanatic actions somehow rational.
Nope.
It is dismissed by many (from all over the world) because it is a theory without a shred of actual proof.
It also happens to have the distinct disadvantage inconvenience for those wishing to excuse minimise Hitler's record by being utterly at odds with what actually happened.
Ifs, buts, maybes, coulda, woulda, shoulda.....but Hitler did.
This would turn the world upside down for many.
Actually it wouldn't.
It's nothing like the surprise you seem to think.
We do know Stalin's Russia attacked Poland you know.
Here's another one that might surprise you, we also know 'poor little Poland' attacked Czechoslovakia annexed a part of that state......but none of this is justification, reason or cause for Hitler's actions.
Yes, they'll cling to the work of David Glantz who will show that the 25,000 tanks the Soviets had were mostly in disrepair and that the hundreds of T-34 and KV-1 didn't mean anyting, nor did the thousands of T-34s about to come of massive well planed production lines also didn't mean anything.
....whereas those seeking to excuse, justify and apologise for Hitler's wars will ignore the one stark and obvious reason behind those events - events bourne out by the actual history - Hitler was planning to attack Russia and annex a large chunk of it!
That is simply the fact of the matter.
Sadly for the Hitler apologists it is a fact that in those days Russia had a very good spy network operating in Germany and whilst they may not have known all of the minute detail they were under no illusions as to what Hitler was about and what he his Gov planned.
No wonder they moved their factories.
No wonder they ordered vast numbers of tanks.
This is just a most outrageous case of blaming the victim.
Stalin 'made' Hitler attack eh?
Hitler certainly had affinity to the idea of Lebensraum having seen the defeate of Germany in WW2 as a result of food and resource blockade and deeply resentfull of the enlargement of slavic territory at the expense of ethynic Germans due to the French desire to cut up Germany (implemented via the treaty of Versailes).
Well sadly for Germany she had just lost a major war......and as events were to prove (and how!) when the boot was on the other foot losers don't usually end up doing too well.
Especially when Europe had just gone through the blood-letting of WW1.
Even so after WW1 France never treated Germany as cruelly as Germany did France after 1940.
If Hitler had been serious there were many in the UK USA who felt that Germany had been treated badly at Versailles and better agreements could have been reached.
But Hitler's pre-war 'diplomacy' was not at all about reaching agreement.
It was one extended series of intimidation threat and in several cases ending up in murder.
Reading Hitlers table talk on the German colonisation of the Ukrain is interesting. Its clear he wasn't interested in 'ethnic cleansing'.
No.
What is clear to anyone who has read much about Hitler is that his so-called 'table talk' is just idle shooting the breeze in mixed company and we know Hitler was fastideous about what he would say in mixed company.
His (in fact rather banal) wandering musings are however no substitute for the reality on the ground.
As was pointed out earlier, regardless of what idle chit-chat over the cream cakes in front of the ladies might have been, the Germans were unbelievably brutal in the east and were dumb enough to talk idiotic rubbish about 'race' and treat so many people under their occupation appallingly.
There is a stunning irony here.
I am fully aware of just how awful Stalin his gang were - it just surprises me that those who would spend so long trying to compare contrast Stalin Hitler, so as to claiming Stalin was so much worse can't seem to understand the logic that the people on the ground experiencing this flocked to Stalin's side once they got a fair idea of what Hitler's side had in mind for them.
He was interested in seperating Germans from Russians etc as he felt Germans would be too inclined to organise and fix the problems of the locals and then become of them.
"Seperating"!?
Well that's one way to describe a policy of extermination I guess.
He seemed to have an impression the territory was so vast its resouces were unlimmited.
The irony here being that the nazi ideal of the farming German scraping a living on some freezing stepp is about as unappealing to modern Germans as could possibly be.
Siegfreid
I am all for a rounded discussion of the nazi era and I am quite happy to agree that not every facet of German life under the nazi regime was dreadful.
I'll even agree that for many Germans at least to begin with it sort of made sense given the previous prospect of a slide towards anarchy or communism.
But we now know far too much to be letting slide comments like "Hitler might get angry, might rant, but he didn't kill anyone unless he had a good reason".
Come on, you know better than that.
Apologies to the board but I just couldn't let this one go without rebutting it point by point.
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