For most ordinary Germans who lived through it, May 8, 1945 was a horrible time, especially if they happened to be in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. The collapse of Nazi Germany kicked off an orgy of rape, murder, destruction and looting unprecedented in history. Why would Germans want to celebrate that?
I've become very careful about this. My grandmother and her mum had to put up a Russian officer in their house and said they were very kind and civil. My dad, nearly starving in early 50s East Germany, was fed by Russian officers' wives. Russians in East Germany where I grew up regularly helped during disasters like flooding and blizzards. We rubbed along. I've heard horrible first-hand accounts about French and British soldiers though. Given the way the world has turned, I now wonder how many of the anti-Russian stories were propaganda driven by anti-Slavic racism (alive and kicking in the UK where I live, where people still believe Russians have no indoor toilets because they read it in the Guardian) and allied competition. It's hard to say.
There were extensive reporting of Russian rapes and attrocities against the German population from the end of the war, which undoubtedly occurred in some scale. Western reports however suppressed evidence of US, French and British troops raping and killing civilians in the western zones. The true numbers weren't made public until the early 2000s.
Similarly, traditional economic history has the Soviets dismantling all east German factories and shipping them to Russia as reparations "down to the door frames and light fittings." While some of this did occur, it was done in conjunction with the western powers, who were also busily stripping German assets. The Soviets soon stopped the dismantling of factories once it became apparent that the western powers were instituting separate regimes in the west and attempting a blockade of the Soviet zone. Restoration of German industry was encouraged - under quite ineffectual state management. Many of the bad decisions made by the East German state were solely the responsibility of the East Germans themselves. Many of them had no actual world experience and were hard core ideological communists. In the aftermath of East German failure they blamed the Russians for their own mistakes.
There is quite a difference between the behavior of officers of a victorious army after they've won a war and that of soldiers of an army trying to win one of the most brutal wars for which we have contemporary reporting.
In 1990s Russia (in relatively democratic times, unlike now) lots of materials were published about Soviet atrocities in Germany, written by people who saw it themselves. So that is all true, according to their own sources. (I have one such book right here, can give quotes if anyone wants, but they are very, very sad and disturbing.)
However, soon after the war has ended, the perpetrators were mostly sent back to USSR, discharged, imprisoned (for other crimes), and so on, while the part of the army stationed in East Germany became a kind of privileged, prestige detachment, with no place for criminal scum as a result. Between military officers in later USSR, perpetrators of then-known war crimes (either against civilians, as f. ex. Marinesko) or against their own soldiers (f. ex. Zhukov) were generally despised and hated. (That honourable mindset was however more or less completely lost at some point after late 1990s, and the result is what we have now.)
And yes, many places in Russia really don't have indoor toilets, Guardian is probably like a standing clock that shows the correct time sometimes.
A bit of a tangent; indoor toilets are a modern convenience and we consider ourselves civilised. Prior to Big Engineering it was considered normal to have a Night Soil Man come and collect "night soil" and cart it off to the local farms to be used as fertiliser.
Italians still use cattle waste of agriturismo microfarms and horse stables.
The Asian contingent used human soil until most recently in the 1950's or 60's when Mao shook hands with Nixon in favour of the first chemical fertiliser plants.
Food is now chemically tainted, is smaller, less nutritious etc. but a new fashion has grown up in certain western permie groups to use "humanure". Most think it's savagely disgusting. If Russia has kept that culture alive which goes back aeons then good on them. Might be foreign to us but so is common sense on the whole.
Now this thing is mainly not cultural but economic/societal (poverty, alcohol, crime, underdeveloped areas, etc.). But you are right if you mean that it's not the most important thing; I myself lived for quite a while in a house like that (when I was a kid), and it didn't bother me much (and yes, a good fertiliser, unless it is in a city). If it's mentioned as an issue, it is usually in the context that the government spends gas/oil money on superyachts (and now on war) and not on the people, and that is true.
Economic yes, as you say but also in that massive plants take medically compromised night soil flushed with drinking water, add chemicals and filler, then slap a price and a fertiliser sticker on it and sell it back. It's a gig for middle men and chemical groups, good for expansive money-making but I'm sure there'll be a healthier solution as tech warms up.
The places without indoor toilets are mostly so called "dachas", i.e. summer houses with small plots, where people only visit in summer to grow gardens and vegetables, tradition going back to soviet days. Now those are often converted and upgraded to have modern conveniences. Permanent houses where people live year-round is not likely to be like that unless in some remote and dying villages.
Around big cities, yes, exactly as you say. The farther you go away from big cities, the more it starts to resemble a remote and dying village.
Cities have their own problems of a similar kind - no warm water / heating in winter, no water in summer, decaying infastructure (taking a shower will only make you dirtier), garbage on the streets, etc. - of course, again, depending on the area.
Overall, plenty of things a responsible government could do for its citizens, instead of buying yachts and starting wars.
When i grew up LIFE magazine was a weekly window into the rest of the world with award winning photography. All the Russian women pictured looked like Nikita Kruschev. Amazing how now the hottest models and beauties are Russian. Deliberate propaganda?
I think you fail to make the distinction between the current "based" russian regime and the horrendous soviet regime. Hence you feel the need to defend russia. The Russian crucified little girls in what was then Prussia. There are photographs of that.
Interesting how the war started for "ordinary" Germans only in 1945 while rape, murder and plunder with millions dead were going on in USSR since 1941. Let's put the blame where it belongs, and not blame the victim. That said, it's hard to believe stories of "2 million women raped", how many soviet soldiers had to be there to make this happen? Too many similarities with the current fairy tales of "Russian atrocities" in Ukraine where most turn out to be fake.
Terror bombing of Germany commenced in 1940 by Churchill.ie the mass slaughter of German civilians. The Soviets killed more Russians (Cheka / NKVD / Gulags / Holodomor) from 1918 onwards
It was both for Russians, decades of mass slaughter for sure. Same with Germans - I remember a story how captured by the Allies German soldiers (about 3 million) were starved to death. US general Patton found out and wanted to put an end to it, but strangely was killed in an accident. Considering Hitler was likely funded by US oligarchs (same way as russian bolsheviks), how evil and sinister that is.
Most of the survivors committed suicide in disappointment of the way how the war ended for them. This war will end in the same way for them: the only difference will be that this time THEY WILL ALL BE LOCKED UP IN THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS THAT THEY BUILT FOR US, KEINE AUSNAHMEN.
Many Germans will celebrate ,May 8 1945 ,because Germany does not have a Ministry of truth yet ,to help sort out the truth from fantasy .If I was a German it wold be a day of mourning ,not celebration for me .
Then the Soviet did not apply same rules to all Germans. They sorted out Communists.
Actually I was always amazed by the fact that Stalinists didn't implement a genocide by mass killing, hard labor and demographic dilution accross USSR of non-Communist Germans.
They didn't think of a collective punishment like the racialism of Germans wanted to inflict on Soviet "Untenmensch".
Estimations are 300.000 to 1 million casualties. And that's not a genocide. Germans planned to exterminate part of russian population, keep the rest for slave labor.
Nothing similar was done by Soviets in Germany: they didn't make a genocide of East-Germans, instead they created DDR.
National Socialism had been stating its intent to exterminate the peoples of Eastern Europe since 1923. This policy was actively enforced and undertaken by the Wehrmacht starting in 1939 in Poland. It became much more explicit in 1941 with the Wehrmacht living off the local peasantry by confiscating all their food, mass enslavements and deportation of civilians.
It's simply absurd for anyone to disagree with this in the light of the Severity Order issued by Walter Reichenau in 1941.
Maybe, don't know. Before that, russians/Ukrainians etc were sent to Germany for forced labor and to concentration camps. Its not a competition who is better or worse, we have to know facts as they are to learn our lessons as humankind and we just do not learn them by clinging and defending to what we think is our "tribe".
MaryJane, agreed. What is a fact is that most of the Nazis were rounded up starting in 1946 and executed as war criminals. Of the more than four million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht during the war, virtually none survived to be returned to the USSR after the war. At least 10 million Polish, Ukrainian and Russian civilians were rounded up by the Wehrmacht, shipped off to Germany as forced labour and subsequently starved to death.
I have never been under any such delusion. I don't wish to imply that the occupying armies of the Western Allies were in any way innocent of atrocities against German civilians. Only that it was much worse in the Soviet zone.
Sounds very much akin to the myth in the US South that General WT Sherman burned everything in his path from Atlanta to the sea and his soldiers committed rape with abandon.
Sorry, you are free to have your own opinion, but you can’t just make up facts. Did you follow the link I posted? Also, a history professor at the University of Georgia, Lee Kennet, did an exhaustive study of the March to the Sea, his conclusion was that in Georgia, with few exceptions, only targets with military importance were destroyed. But, once the troops crossed the border into South Carolina, military discipline broke down and there was much wanton destruction in the “The Mother of Secession,” the state that was viewed as having started the whole damn war.
Historians have been covering up war crimes for as long as civilization, though Tacitus somewhat less than others...The notion that military discipline existed in George but not S. Carolina is confounded by eyewitness accounts...
As an American, amen. The special troops were called "bummers", and were often recruited from criminals and other lowlife. The same was done in the Shenandoah Valley by Sheridan. Both campaigns were successful efforts to destroy the productive capabilities of the South and starve its armies.
Not exactly. Though the term “bummer” is sometimes used to refer to all the soldiers on the March to the Sea, it more appropriately refers to foragers. They were not specially recruited for this purpose from any particular class. One of my g2uncles, in the 27th Ohio VI, was a “bummer” according to one family historian. He was, to be fair, a black sheep of the family, as he was an alcoholic and had many domestic issues after the war. I had several other ancestors on the march in the 78th OVI who were not bummers, in this sense of the word. But, your characterization of bummers is just not historically accurate.
Germany is a relatively new country, at most 200 years old, so it is still trying to define its identity. It's been emasculated enough to not be a dangerous country any more. So these debates are more academic with little consequence.
Many countries and ethnicities, for various reasons, did not survive over the long run and did not keep their ethnic identities. This is fine to me, a neutral observer, and may happen to many nations of the present also. But I am also fascinated by that.
Even the Romans left the Germans at the time the Germanen alone after the battle in the Teutoburger .forest ,that left only one Roman surviving to deliver the message to Rome ,that the legion under Varus did not exist anymore .
there is no German nor Swedish culture around year 0. There were reports of Germanic tribes as they interacted with expansion of Roman Empire and that's all. No texts, no architecture, no monuments, only archeological artifacts. Same for Sweden, that appears in History with Varangians basically. Scanians were barely mentioned by contemporary Roman chronics.
Norse and Russian History starts concurrently around the 8th century with Varangians and it is related their interactions with Byzance and Carolingeans realms.
Russian culture developed more rapidly than Swedish because adoption of Christianity was faster, and it brought with it architectural forms (for churches, monasteries).
you better provide pointers to sources. Civilization (highly organized societies, cultural tools like writing, brick and mortar/stone architecture) is born mostly in the so-called Fertile Crescent, India, China. Obviously because climatic conditions needed for agriculture.
Around 3000 BC there were civilizations there, while Scandinavia was still in neolithic age. Homo sapiens and homo neanderthalus have never been found norther than 55N. Scandinavia is a late comer.
Ironically the oldest human artifacts in Scandinavia are Finno-Ugric: carved and painted stones in Finnmark, in Murmanskaya (Kanozero), and this matches the Finno-Ugric trails spreading from Urals to Finnmark through N-W Russia and Karelia.
Norse and Swedes proper are Germanic, ie. originated from southern areas, basically Danish realms.
Russia is older civilization than Sweden by a little bit. Go check Sturlussons Norges konungasagor for instance. This because the speed of conversion to Christianity from Vladimir Ist ie. also Valdemar.
Early Rus' was basically an hybridation of northern Slaves, Karelians, Chudes, Vepsians, Lithuanians, Varangians, under a Swedish/Norse/Varangian immigrated ruling class at first. Similar Franks+Gallia => France. Byzance WAS still Roman Empire, it did endure after Germanic nations dismantled Western Roman Empire.
So early Rus' had a direct contact with it.
Where is in Sweden something similar to Saint Sophia cathedral of Novgorod, for instance? Nowhere.
Swedes from Roslagen founded what was to become Russia (and Ukraine) centuries later.
Sweden invited Jean Baptiste Bernadotte to take the throne, to avoid civil war between noble families and the actual heirs. By then the role of king was more than 50% ceremonial: his seal or signature made things legal, and as factions couldn't settle their differences over whose marionette would take the throne, an outsider got the job.
Speaking of young nations, Israel was founded in 1948. Probably why they have so much trouble, being such a young nation.
Ukrainian nationalists use this fact (Russians northern roots) to prove that Russians are "untermenschen" and are inferior to them "pure slavs". But basically yes, it's a combination of tribes from the north and west that moved further east and absorbed local tribes that lived there and formed what is now considered "Russia"
I mean... I dunno. Were they? Did they think of themselves that way?
At one point the "Angles" lived in what is now northern Denmark. Yes, the tribe for which "England" is named. Likewise the Saxons and Frisians (Well OK the Frisians still live up in North Holland I think it is) and the people for whom Normandy is named once wandered out of the Frozen North, southeast for a while, and eventually ended up on the west coast of France.
On the flip side, someone had to go north at first, since the Germanic branch of languages is a proto-indo-european offshoot. The finno-ugric languages started out up there, with some of those tribes migrating basically due west from the north Ural mountains to become the Suomi and Sami, some other tribes migrating due east to become some smaller tribes that the Russians abused, and another tribe going "Fuck this weather" and moving to Hungary. ;)
Sorry, I can really only talk about the linguistic part of it as an American. My country is *definitely* only ~250 years old, and our very mixed British / Germanic / Northern European culture only goes back 400 years tops. That said, I'm definitely an "American" now. :D
I can guarantee you my ancestors in the 15th century thought of themselves as swedes, because that is the name of our people, and the word means precisely that:
"We the people" or "Us". Sweden means "the land of the Swedes", and that people was known before Mary told Joseph she was pregnant.
The sámi came here much later than my ancestors did; what would become the swedes came here following the receding ice over 10 000 years ago. The sámi settled in the North some time between Nordic Bronze Age and Nordic Iron Age.
What is now Russia and Ukraine was founded by settlers called the Ros or Rus. They came from Sweden and mingled with the slavs, becoming chiefs and kings. The reason for this was the trade route from Iron Age Sweden down to Byzantium (called Miklagård in swedish, means "place of businessmen", roughly translated), so places where there is now cities such as Kiev and Novgorod were ideal as waystations.
Americans are in a way an anacronism, rather than something new: in ancient times, being a citizen of a state and belonging to a people didn't necessarily mean the same thing - Rome being the prime example. Today, the US really need to get back to the idea that American isn't an issue of race, creed or such, but a shared notion of citizenry united around the Declaration of Independce, the Bill of Rights and the Amendments (won't go into which ones, don't know much beyond the first two).
We who are of lands where nation and people and culture and history and language and so on is a unity cannot go the route of America, because that equals ceasing to exist. Both ideas can co-exist, there's no conflict inherent in either system towards on another.
Sure, no arguments, that was an expression of pure "I don't know". I knew about the Varangians and the Rus, but I don't speak a lick of Swedish, although I feel like I should almost understand it, knowing German. Still, it's nothing like listening to Dutch as a person who speaks English and German, that's *pure* "Am I having a stroke?" material. :D :D
I **absolutely** agree with your point regarding Americans and who could be one. It's actually the attitude I *do* have, though it's somewhat uncommon, sadly. America is an *idea* as much as a place. Unfortunately, many of the people who were born here, and a lot of the people who are coming here, don't actually *like* that idea.
Fuck the "Hyphenated-Americans". If someone wants to come here and actually *be* an American, insofar as supporting the principles of the Enlightenment and our founding, then I'll embrace them as a countryman and a brother. If they just want to move here and still be a Whatever from Wherever they're from, then they should stay the fuck home.
And I'll absolutely grant this is a very American (or possibly Roman) concept, and that I don't have the right mental and social background to really grasp what it's like to be an ethnicity that's been in a specific place for hundreds or thousands of years. I *know* all of my ancestors moved here not all that long ago, and chose to become what we are now. But it's a really mixed bag that makes that group up. And if one looks at the history, we haven't even been the sort to stay in one place on this continent, either. We started on the East Coast the same as everyone who fought in the Revolutionary War, and moved further and further west, until my generation made it all the way out to Hawaii, and now I'm back in New Mexico (where my grandparents ended up, and my parents met after high school) and my younger siblings are all the way back on the East Coast again. :D
> Describing her circle as "people who want a peaceful life away from oppression," she added, "it's as if Germany has suddenly become the new Turkey for us."
I mean... given how Turkey became Turkey, after what they did to the Byzantines and Greece... maybe it's not that crazy that some people in Germany might object to that concept. And I bet they'd scream bloody murder if Europe whipped it out and pushed the border there back to halfway from the Bosporous to the Caspian.
The debates are academic, as you say, inasmuch as Germany is no longer a military danger to its neighbors. Yet censorship and propaganda still threaten Germany’s own citizens, thanks to political opportunism that exploits the country’s lingering guilt and self-doubt. Therein lies a need for the nation’s psychological liberation, which surely would be worthy of a commemorative holiday someday.
Good observation. Otto von Bismarck cobbled together an amalgam of independent states and regions to create Germany in the mid 1800's. Germans were never truly unified until Hitler became Chancellor. Then the Third Reich ended in ruins. Since that time, Germany has been every other nation's whipping boy. At least as a national entity. The left and right wings of the various German states have been at war with each other since at least Germany's defeat in WW1. What we have today are attempts by the left to continue to punish their opposition. By any and every means available. The results are tragic for a people who deserve something better.
"they were defeated on 8 May; or Germans were themselves victims of an occupying fascist regime, in which case they were liberated on 8 May. You cannot have it both ways. "
There goes Eugyppius again, using that verboten thing called logic.
This kind of conditioned stigma and equally conditioned reflex is why many young in the West look to nations such as Romania or Russia as examples, maybe not in specific political policies but in attitude and self-recognition of culture; their pasts are acknowledged, but there's no shame attached to it, to those alive today.
No "original sin", to be paid for to the n-th generation.
Now consider this: which two nations stood to, and still stand to gain from trying to condition the young of european nations with a collective guilt and shame for being "white" and [insert nationality here]?
Hint: neither of them are in Africa, South America, the Orient or Asia. Or Antarctica or Australia for that matter.
The death toll of the British Empire, given how much longer it was active as a super-power (especially if various semi-private trading initiatives down the centuries are taken into account) by far outstrips the civilians put to death under Aktion T4 and the rest of atrocities.
It's absurd. Should you blame me for Lindisfarne? Do I get to take credit for the founding of York? Should Denmark pay reparations for the bounty paid by Ethelred the Unready?
When is Mongolia going to pay out money to Irak for sacking Bagdad how many times?
It is all absurd. People should embrace their history, warts and all. The vikings had an effect on us. The first English navy was repurposed viking longboats 🤓
Just don't ask me to pay for my people having forged such a durable Middle Eastern blood sacrifice cult with two fractious daughters always trying to commit matricide. We paid enough already.
I've a feeling that if you'd been of that household, there'd been no feud as they both would have been given a stern dressing down and setting straight, as to how to treat each other and their sons.
Don't ask me about my feelings on the royal houses of viking-era Denmark and sweden laying the groundwork for 800 years of war, just because they couldn't co-operate over the herring-tax of Öresund.
Me, I'd've said let the kids pray to any local goddess that suited 'em. I ain't never been for telling one's children what they "ought" to believe in. Just mind yer manners and treat the neighbors decently.
"Just mind yer manners and treat the neighbors decently."
Often the hardest lesson to teach and learn, sometimes the harshest too.
One of the reasons I much prefer the Old Norse texts is that they are free of commandments and orders, but instead full of advice and even the gods themselves aren't immune to human failings and frailties.
"Reparations" are nothing more than an instrument to rob wealth from nations using "collective guilt" as an excuse. We as individuals cannot be responsible for wrongdoing of someone who lived well before we were born or whom we never met just because we share the same ethnicity, or citizenship or skin color or whatever else they can come up with (why not height? Or eye color? Or favorite sports or dish? It makes just as much sense)
Kinda like the USA. Condemn any recognition of the confederates because they fought for slavery, refuse to recognize the 300,000 white Northern men who died to free the slaves because it was really about state’s rights!
That’s the Lost Cause mythology, which until the.turn of the century held sway. Now in the 21st Century the nation’s schools are finally teaching actual facts. This was one war in which for a period of roughly 85 years (1914-2000, the losers wrote the history.
"It was yet another prototypically German orgy of moral incontinence and performative outrage against a defunct political ideology that no longer commands any real support."
"Day of liberation" is a side-stepping euphemism to explain away a lost war & a crushing defeat. Such self-masturbatory & delusional behavior is indicative of the "progressive" left who construct fantasy to mask reality & - (for them) - inconvenient facts they'd rather not address. The very same tactics are utilized in the "what is a woman" discussion.
The allied powers, post WW2, made sure to purge the ranks of both Germany and Japan of any persons who had any nationalistic sentiment, who had any sense of independence, or even showed themselves as moderately aggressive personalities. This was not an accident, and accordingly both nations have wound up with these enfeebled sorts who wind up running the country i.e. the Deep State in both nations.
As the decades have marched on, the reasons for this sort of institutional character have been forgotten, replaced by an insistence that in fact This Is The Way Its Supposed To Be
Only such characters would accept the controlled demolition of their economies (Japan 1980's, Germany circa Nordstream) without so much as a peep
Just a gut feeling being an ongoing student of Military History but I've come to the conclusion that the Allies' complete & total humiliation @ the hands of the German Army of 1940 led them to resolve to - once & for all - crush the Prussian Military spirit & make sure that it never rises again. They crush France in 6wks, kicked the British out of Europe 4 times: Dunkirk, Norway, Greece, Dieppe & by early 1942 advance units stood in Astrakhan (on the Sea of Azov): the gateway to Asia. During this journey they inflicted 3.5 million casualties on The Red Army in as many months.
Except that the west quickly stopped it's denazification program and allowed many open Nazis to join the new West German army, media and political classes. The Soviets (and their German communist exiles) were much more thorough in East Germany (obviously). East German propaganda constantly accused the West Germans and NATO as being a US glove puppet Nazi regime. Unfortunately, the communist propaganda of the time - which now seems more accurate - simply comes across as histrionic nonsense. Maybe we've been conditioned to instantly dismiss Communist propaganda. I am finding myself reviewing these old articles with all their bombastic rhetoric with new eyes and realising there actually was some truth to these claims
There are photos of crucified little girls in East Prussia, on the famous "road to berlin". Soviets were brutal and barbaric. People on the right today, myself included, think russia is "based", but one needs to make the distinction between 2024's russua and the Sovier Socialist Regime.
First of all, thanks for reviving my mental picture of standing on the porch on Monroe St. NE Washington DC on 5/8/45. I was six and all the neighbors were out celebrating. My Father, a former Air Raid Warden, had a gas attack klaxon that he was sounding.
Our Civil War had only been over for eighty-five years, but I never heard of any white Southerners celebrating liberation. Other than some communists I doubt that many Germans felt that they had been liberated either.
The only way one can really coitize populations for following a specific leader is to somehow time travel back and experience life at that time.
We are hearing the same sort of pronouncements from our left about our history.
The Germans ruled the sea with their U Boats in the early days of the war. There was concern that a sub could come up the Potomac River and bombard DC.
No America sucked into 2 World Wars for the benefit of who ? - not the American people or Nation that's for sure. No external enemy could ever invade the USA unless traitors invited them in (how's the southern border going ?) All pure propaganda to make people feel they were under threat.
Read "Iron Coffins" by former U-boat Officer Herbert Werner; as XO of the U-230 they traveled up the Chesapeake Bay - laid mines - & came back out going right by Hampton Roads U.S. Naval base. Werner said the lights were all on & they could see U.S. Naval personnel walking around none the wiser.
“Orthodoxy is a subtle and complicated thing. As many an ancient theologian discovered, if you practise it too vigorously, you may find yourself a heretic.”
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What—you think I have all day here just to quote the incredibly great stuff you keep writing?
After a quick look at the online mainstream media here in the Federal Republic, it seems that not too much attention is given to this anniversary. I am a bit puzzled - would that not have been a good occasion to trumpet the "Fight against the Right"? Or is there worry that the occasion is too closely linked with the opulent parades in Moscow, thereby undermining the Putler narrative? Perhaps the Western allies would rather not celebrate either because the absence of the Russians would be all-too-noticeable. Who knows.
After the safe and effective AZ "vaccine" was withdrawn (leaving the even saferer and moar effectiver modRNA LNP jabs) is that a distinction without a difference?
LOL, anyone who goes to the Russian embassy for this kind of thing in 2024 has bigger egg on their face than anyone who doesn't. Though I wouldn't count on German mass media to list those names, at least not if they are among the usual suspects.
"moral incontinence" LOVE IT! EG, may I use the term here in the states to describe so many idiots like the ivy league riff raff poisoning our already decaying institutions?
Can you quantify the number of Germans who died form 1945-1949 under Allied occupation? I have heard the number 2 million but have no way to verify. To me, 2 million civilian dead under allied occupation should be a data point in weather the day is worth celebrating or not.
Nice try. Communism is Globalist not Nationalist. Marxism has Central Banking / no private property / kills masses of the intelligentsia and ordinary people. Germany thrived under National Socialism unlike the Capitalist countries suffering a decade of the Great Depression and the total misery under Communism. etc. etc etc. As I said - National Socialism is the mortal enemy of Bolshevism. Capitalism and Communism are more similar than is National Socialism
When they realise powers with hostile intent to them as individuals and a people abuse the legacy of the war, to keep them down, docile and dependent.
Imagine that strong teutonic emotion they now use to self-flagellate turned on their oppressors. Those who exploit faux guilt and rule by lies have realised they are riding a tiger; all they can do is try to prolong the ride.
For most ordinary Germans who lived through it, May 8, 1945 was a horrible time, especially if they happened to be in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. The collapse of Nazi Germany kicked off an orgy of rape, murder, destruction and looting unprecedented in history. Why would Germans want to celebrate that?
I've become very careful about this. My grandmother and her mum had to put up a Russian officer in their house and said they were very kind and civil. My dad, nearly starving in early 50s East Germany, was fed by Russian officers' wives. Russians in East Germany where I grew up regularly helped during disasters like flooding and blizzards. We rubbed along. I've heard horrible first-hand accounts about French and British soldiers though. Given the way the world has turned, I now wonder how many of the anti-Russian stories were propaganda driven by anti-Slavic racism (alive and kicking in the UK where I live, where people still believe Russians have no indoor toilets because they read it in the Guardian) and allied competition. It's hard to say.
There were extensive reporting of Russian rapes and attrocities against the German population from the end of the war, which undoubtedly occurred in some scale. Western reports however suppressed evidence of US, French and British troops raping and killing civilians in the western zones. The true numbers weren't made public until the early 2000s.
Similarly, traditional economic history has the Soviets dismantling all east German factories and shipping them to Russia as reparations "down to the door frames and light fittings." While some of this did occur, it was done in conjunction with the western powers, who were also busily stripping German assets. The Soviets soon stopped the dismantling of factories once it became apparent that the western powers were instituting separate regimes in the west and attempting a blockade of the Soviet zone. Restoration of German industry was encouraged - under quite ineffectual state management. Many of the bad decisions made by the East German state were solely the responsibility of the East Germans themselves. Many of them had no actual world experience and were hard core ideological communists. In the aftermath of East German failure they blamed the Russians for their own mistakes.
There is quite a difference between the behavior of officers of a victorious army after they've won a war and that of soldiers of an army trying to win one of the most brutal wars for which we have contemporary reporting.
In 1990s Russia (in relatively democratic times, unlike now) lots of materials were published about Soviet atrocities in Germany, written by people who saw it themselves. So that is all true, according to their own sources. (I have one such book right here, can give quotes if anyone wants, but they are very, very sad and disturbing.)
However, soon after the war has ended, the perpetrators were mostly sent back to USSR, discharged, imprisoned (for other crimes), and so on, while the part of the army stationed in East Germany became a kind of privileged, prestige detachment, with no place for criminal scum as a result. Between military officers in later USSR, perpetrators of then-known war crimes (either against civilians, as f. ex. Marinesko) or against their own soldiers (f. ex. Zhukov) were generally despised and hated. (That honourable mindset was however more or less completely lost at some point after late 1990s, and the result is what we have now.)
And yes, many places in Russia really don't have indoor toilets, Guardian is probably like a standing clock that shows the correct time sometimes.
A bit of a tangent; indoor toilets are a modern convenience and we consider ourselves civilised. Prior to Big Engineering it was considered normal to have a Night Soil Man come and collect "night soil" and cart it off to the local farms to be used as fertiliser.
Italians still use cattle waste of agriturismo microfarms and horse stables.
The Asian contingent used human soil until most recently in the 1950's or 60's when Mao shook hands with Nixon in favour of the first chemical fertiliser plants.
Food is now chemically tainted, is smaller, less nutritious etc. but a new fashion has grown up in certain western permie groups to use "humanure". Most think it's savagely disgusting. If Russia has kept that culture alive which goes back aeons then good on them. Might be foreign to us but so is common sense on the whole.
Now this thing is mainly not cultural but economic/societal (poverty, alcohol, crime, underdeveloped areas, etc.). But you are right if you mean that it's not the most important thing; I myself lived for quite a while in a house like that (when I was a kid), and it didn't bother me much (and yes, a good fertiliser, unless it is in a city). If it's mentioned as an issue, it is usually in the context that the government spends gas/oil money on superyachts (and now on war) and not on the people, and that is true.
Economic yes, as you say but also in that massive plants take medically compromised night soil flushed with drinking water, add chemicals and filler, then slap a price and a fertiliser sticker on it and sell it back. It's a gig for middle men and chemical groups, good for expansive money-making but I'm sure there'll be a healthier solution as tech warms up.
Can you please let me know the author’s name? I’d like to know if it was a Soviet author or someone from the western countries.
You mean, the author of the book I mentioned? If so, Nikolay Nikulin, "Memories of war" / "Vospominania o voine". He has a wikipedia page in Russian:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD,_%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B9_%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87
Yes, I do! Thank you! I did hear about this author, but I never read his books. Thank you for the link!
The places without indoor toilets are mostly so called "dachas", i.e. summer houses with small plots, where people only visit in summer to grow gardens and vegetables, tradition going back to soviet days. Now those are often converted and upgraded to have modern conveniences. Permanent houses where people live year-round is not likely to be like that unless in some remote and dying villages.
There are a lot of permanent houses in Russia where people live year-around with no indoor toilets. You don’t have to travel long to look for them.
I am sure you know better. What would someone who grew up in the middle of nowhere in siberian part of russia know?
Of course I know better. I live there.
Around big cities, yes, exactly as you say. The farther you go away from big cities, the more it starts to resemble a remote and dying village.
Cities have their own problems of a similar kind - no warm water / heating in winter, no water in summer, decaying infastructure (taking a shower will only make you dirtier), garbage on the streets, etc. - of course, again, depending on the area.
Overall, plenty of things a responsible government could do for its citizens, instead of buying yachts and starting wars.
But also citizens can be more responsible and not wait for the government to do something.
When i grew up LIFE magazine was a weekly window into the rest of the world with award winning photography. All the Russian women pictured looked like Nikita Kruschev. Amazing how now the hottest models and beauties are Russian. Deliberate propaganda?
I think you fail to make the distinction between the current "based" russian regime and the horrendous soviet regime. Hence you feel the need to defend russia. The Russian crucified little girls in what was then Prussia. There are photographs of that.
https://m.vz.ru/society/2024/5/9/1267097.html
Interesting how the war started for "ordinary" Germans only in 1945 while rape, murder and plunder with millions dead were going on in USSR since 1941. Let's put the blame where it belongs, and not blame the victim. That said, it's hard to believe stories of "2 million women raped", how many soviet soldiers had to be there to make this happen? Too many similarities with the current fairy tales of "Russian atrocities" in Ukraine where most turn out to be fake.
Terror bombing of Germany commenced in 1940 by Churchill.ie the mass slaughter of German civilians. The Soviets killed more Russians (Cheka / NKVD / Gulags / Holodomor) from 1918 onwards
It was both for Russians, decades of mass slaughter for sure. Same with Germans - I remember a story how captured by the Allies German soldiers (about 3 million) were starved to death. US general Patton found out and wanted to put an end to it, but strangely was killed in an accident. Considering Hitler was likely funded by US oligarchs (same way as russian bolsheviks), how evil and sinister that is.
Most of the survivors committed suicide in disappointment of the way how the war ended for them. This war will end in the same way for them: the only difference will be that this time THEY WILL ALL BE LOCKED UP IN THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS THAT THEY BUILT FOR US, KEINE AUSNAHMEN.
SNAP
Many Germans will celebrate ,May 8 1945 ,because Germany does not have a Ministry of truth yet ,to help sort out the truth from fantasy .If I was a German it wold be a day of mourning ,not celebration for me .
Yes and history is written by the victors
Oh, some green have no problem celebrating the rape, pillage and burn. Then they turn around and want to see todays Russians burned on the stake.
A lot of that in the Western zone too, from what I hear....
Unprecedent in History certainly not.
Then the Soviet did not apply same rules to all Germans. They sorted out Communists.
Actually I was always amazed by the fact that Stalinists didn't implement a genocide by mass killing, hard labor and demographic dilution accross USSR of non-Communist Germans.
They didn't think of a collective punishment like the racialism of Germans wanted to inflict on Soviet "Untenmensch".
3 million German soldiers were used as slave labour by the Soviets at war's end. Not many came home
Estimations are 300.000 to 1 million casualties. And that's not a genocide. Germans planned to exterminate part of russian population, keep the rest for slave labor.
Nothing similar was done by Soviets in Germany: they didn't make a genocide of East-Germans, instead they created DDR.
Disagree
National Socialism had been stating its intent to exterminate the peoples of Eastern Europe since 1923. This policy was actively enforced and undertaken by the Wehrmacht starting in 1939 in Poland. It became much more explicit in 1941 with the Wehrmacht living off the local peasantry by confiscating all their food, mass enslavements and deportation of civilians.
It's simply absurd for anyone to disagree with this in the light of the Severity Order issued by Walter Reichenau in 1941.
Nonsense
Maybe, don't know. Before that, russians/Ukrainians etc were sent to Germany for forced labor and to concentration camps. Its not a competition who is better or worse, we have to know facts as they are to learn our lessons as humankind and we just do not learn them by clinging and defending to what we think is our "tribe".
MaryJane, agreed. What is a fact is that most of the Nazis were rounded up starting in 1946 and executed as war criminals. Of the more than four million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht during the war, virtually none survived to be returned to the USSR after the war. At least 10 million Polish, Ukrainian and Russian civilians were rounded up by the Wehrmacht, shipped off to Germany as forced labour and subsequently starved to death.
History is written by the victors.
Americans also stole a lot of gold and other valuables and smuggled it back to the States...
I have never been under any such delusion. I don't wish to imply that the occupying armies of the Western Allies were in any way innocent of atrocities against German civilians. Only that it was much worse in the Soviet zone.
Sounds very much akin to the myth in the US South that General WT Sherman burned everything in his path from Atlanta to the sea and his soldiers committed rape with abandon.
https://78ohio.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/The_Mythology_of_-Shermans_-March.pdf
As an American, that is no myth...Sherman's troops robbed, raped, and sometimes murdered civilians...
Sorry, you are free to have your own opinion, but you can’t just make up facts. Did you follow the link I posted? Also, a history professor at the University of Georgia, Lee Kennet, did an exhaustive study of the March to the Sea, his conclusion was that in Georgia, with few exceptions, only targets with military importance were destroyed. But, once the troops crossed the border into South Carolina, military discipline broke down and there was much wanton destruction in the “The Mother of Secession,” the state that was viewed as having started the whole damn war.
https://www.harpercollins.com/cdn/shop/files/9780060927455_9ccc3e77-d10f-4409-b0eb-f085f892c3c6.jpg?v=1715360603&width=350
Historians have been covering up war crimes for as long as civilization, though Tacitus somewhat less than others...The notion that military discipline existed in George but not S. Carolina is confounded by eyewitness accounts...
https://www.amazon.com/Marching-Through-Georgia-Soldiers-Civilians/dp/0060927453?dplnkId=eb48b4e6-10dd-450a-a7d7-37b44922f87b&nodl=1
As an American, amen. The special troops were called "bummers", and were often recruited from criminals and other lowlife. The same was done in the Shenandoah Valley by Sheridan. Both campaigns were successful efforts to destroy the productive capabilities of the South and starve its armies.
Not exactly. Though the term “bummer” is sometimes used to refer to all the soldiers on the March to the Sea, it more appropriately refers to foragers. They were not specially recruited for this purpose from any particular class. One of my g2uncles, in the 27th Ohio VI, was a “bummer” according to one family historian. He was, to be fair, a black sheep of the family, as he was an alcoholic and had many domestic issues after the war. I had several other ancestors on the march in the 78th OVI who were not bummers, in this sense of the word. But, your characterization of bummers is just not historically accurate.
Yes..They also starved at least 1 million Northerners to death, with a comparable toll on the Southern side...That's why it was a war crime.....
Germany is a relatively new country, at most 200 years old, so it is still trying to define its identity. It's been emasculated enough to not be a dangerous country any more. So these debates are more academic with little consequence.
The nation state, yes. The country, the people and the culture, no.
Sweden the nation-state is 500 years old. Were my ancestors in the 14th century not swedes anyway?
Many countries and ethnicities, for various reasons, did not survive over the long run and did not keep their ethnic identities. This is fine to me, a neutral observer, and may happen to many nations of the present also. But I am also fascinated by that.
Germany the culture dates back to before year Zero, christian reckoning. As does Sweden the culture.
Our peoples have lived here since the Ice Age started to end.
There are remains of simple agriculture near where I sit right now, dating back to 6 000BC or earlier.
To us, even Russia is a young culture.
Even the Romans left the Germans at the time the Germanen alone after the battle in the Teutoburger .forest ,that left only one Roman surviving to deliver the message to Rome ,that the legion under Varus did not exist anymore .
there is no German nor Swedish culture around year 0. There were reports of Germanic tribes as they interacted with expansion of Roman Empire and that's all. No texts, no architecture, no monuments, only archeological artifacts. Same for Sweden, that appears in History with Varangians basically. Scanians were barely mentioned by contemporary Roman chronics.
Norse and Russian History starts concurrently around the 8th century with Varangians and it is related their interactions with Byzance and Carolingeans realms.
Russian culture developed more rapidly than Swedish because adoption of Christianity was faster, and it brought with it architectural forms (for churches, monasteries).
Pure nonsense. Go read up on archeological finds from Scandinavia. And our history.
you better provide pointers to sources. Civilization (highly organized societies, cultural tools like writing, brick and mortar/stone architecture) is born mostly in the so-called Fertile Crescent, India, China. Obviously because climatic conditions needed for agriculture.
Around 3000 BC there were civilizations there, while Scandinavia was still in neolithic age. Homo sapiens and homo neanderthalus have never been found norther than 55N. Scandinavia is a late comer.
Ironically the oldest human artifacts in Scandinavia are Finno-Ugric: carved and painted stones in Finnmark, in Murmanskaya (Kanozero), and this matches the Finno-Ugric trails spreading from Urals to Finnmark through N-W Russia and Karelia.
Norse and Swedes proper are Germanic, ie. originated from southern areas, basically Danish realms.
Russia is older civilization than Sweden by a little bit. Go check Sturlussons Norges konungasagor for instance. This because the speed of conversion to Christianity from Vladimir Ist ie. also Valdemar.
Early Rus' was basically an hybridation of northern Slaves, Karelians, Chudes, Vepsians, Lithuanians, Varangians, under a Swedish/Norse/Varangian immigrated ruling class at first. Similar Franks+Gallia => France. Byzance WAS still Roman Empire, it did endure after Germanic nations dismantled Western Roman Empire.
So early Rus' had a direct contact with it.
Where is in Sweden something similar to Saint Sophia cathedral of Novgorod, for instance? Nowhere.
Didn't Peter the Great import European technology for the modernisation of Russia ?
Yes, we can see it well with our own eyes. The impression is as eternal as indelible.
Good point, I believe that at some point Russians invited a ruler from Sweden just to tidy up their unruly and disorganized kingdom
Swedes from Roslagen founded what was to become Russia (and Ukraine) centuries later.
Sweden invited Jean Baptiste Bernadotte to take the throne, to avoid civil war between noble families and the actual heirs. By then the role of king was more than 50% ceremonial: his seal or signature made things legal, and as factions couldn't settle their differences over whose marionette would take the throne, an outsider got the job.
Speaking of young nations, Israel was founded in 1948. Probably why they have so much trouble, being such a young nation.
Takes time to create an Israeli out of so many ethnicities and cultures.
Ukrainian nationalists use this fact (Russians northern roots) to prove that Russians are "untermenschen" and are inferior to them "pure slavs". But basically yes, it's a combination of tribes from the north and west that moved further east and absorbed local tribes that lived there and formed what is now considered "Russia"
I mean... I dunno. Were they? Did they think of themselves that way?
At one point the "Angles" lived in what is now northern Denmark. Yes, the tribe for which "England" is named. Likewise the Saxons and Frisians (Well OK the Frisians still live up in North Holland I think it is) and the people for whom Normandy is named once wandered out of the Frozen North, southeast for a while, and eventually ended up on the west coast of France.
On the flip side, someone had to go north at first, since the Germanic branch of languages is a proto-indo-european offshoot. The finno-ugric languages started out up there, with some of those tribes migrating basically due west from the north Ural mountains to become the Suomi and Sami, some other tribes migrating due east to become some smaller tribes that the Russians abused, and another tribe going "Fuck this weather" and moving to Hungary. ;)
Sorry, I can really only talk about the linguistic part of it as an American. My country is *definitely* only ~250 years old, and our very mixed British / Germanic / Northern European culture only goes back 400 years tops. That said, I'm definitely an "American" now. :D
I can guarantee you my ancestors in the 15th century thought of themselves as swedes, because that is the name of our people, and the word means precisely that:
"We the people" or "Us". Sweden means "the land of the Swedes", and that people was known before Mary told Joseph she was pregnant.
The sámi came here much later than my ancestors did; what would become the swedes came here following the receding ice over 10 000 years ago. The sámi settled in the North some time between Nordic Bronze Age and Nordic Iron Age.
What is now Russia and Ukraine was founded by settlers called the Ros or Rus. They came from Sweden and mingled with the slavs, becoming chiefs and kings. The reason for this was the trade route from Iron Age Sweden down to Byzantium (called Miklagård in swedish, means "place of businessmen", roughly translated), so places where there is now cities such as Kiev and Novgorod were ideal as waystations.
Americans are in a way an anacronism, rather than something new: in ancient times, being a citizen of a state and belonging to a people didn't necessarily mean the same thing - Rome being the prime example. Today, the US really need to get back to the idea that American isn't an issue of race, creed or such, but a shared notion of citizenry united around the Declaration of Independce, the Bill of Rights and the Amendments (won't go into which ones, don't know much beyond the first two).
We who are of lands where nation and people and culture and history and language and so on is a unity cannot go the route of America, because that equals ceasing to exist. Both ideas can co-exist, there's no conflict inherent in either system towards on another.
Sure, no arguments, that was an expression of pure "I don't know". I knew about the Varangians and the Rus, but I don't speak a lick of Swedish, although I feel like I should almost understand it, knowing German. Still, it's nothing like listening to Dutch as a person who speaks English and German, that's *pure* "Am I having a stroke?" material. :D :D
I **absolutely** agree with your point regarding Americans and who could be one. It's actually the attitude I *do* have, though it's somewhat uncommon, sadly. America is an *idea* as much as a place. Unfortunately, many of the people who were born here, and a lot of the people who are coming here, don't actually *like* that idea.
Fuck the "Hyphenated-Americans". If someone wants to come here and actually *be* an American, insofar as supporting the principles of the Enlightenment and our founding, then I'll embrace them as a countryman and a brother. If they just want to move here and still be a Whatever from Wherever they're from, then they should stay the fuck home.
And I'll absolutely grant this is a very American (or possibly Roman) concept, and that I don't have the right mental and social background to really grasp what it's like to be an ethnicity that's been in a specific place for hundreds or thousands of years. I *know* all of my ancestors moved here not all that long ago, and chose to become what we are now. But it's a really mixed bag that makes that group up. And if one looks at the history, we haven't even been the sort to stay in one place on this continent, either. We started on the East Coast the same as everyone who fought in the Revolutionary War, and moved further and further west, until my generation made it all the way out to Hawaii, and now I'm back in New Mexico (where my grandparents ended up, and my parents met after high school) and my younger siblings are all the way back on the East Coast again. :D
Apparently my people had a Wanderlust. :D
As for the idea of nation states with significant ethnic majorities, I ran across this article a while ago: https://www.dw.com/en/does-erdogans-defeat-signal-hope-for-turkish-diaspora/a-68761039 and it just pissed me off.
> Describing her circle as "people who want a peaceful life away from oppression," she added, "it's as if Germany has suddenly become the new Turkey for us."
I mean... given how Turkey became Turkey, after what they did to the Byzantines and Greece... maybe it's not that crazy that some people in Germany might object to that concept. And I bet they'd scream bloody murder if Europe whipped it out and pushed the border there back to halfway from the Bosporous to the Caspian.
The debates are academic, as you say, inasmuch as Germany is no longer a military danger to its neighbors. Yet censorship and propaganda still threaten Germany’s own citizens, thanks to political opportunism that exploits the country’s lingering guilt and self-doubt. Therein lies a need for the nation’s psychological liberation, which surely would be worthy of a commemorative holiday someday.
Instead, Germany has always been par excellence in four chronological stages, according to Rolf Peter Sieferle:
1) cultural nation par excellence (Goethe)
2) nation state par excellence (Bismarck)
3) totalitarian state par excellence (Hitler)
4) post-nation state par excellence (insert palm face emoji)
Germany has ever been totalitarian, since the Salier dynasty.
Good observation. Otto von Bismarck cobbled together an amalgam of independent states and regions to create Germany in the mid 1800's. Germans were never truly unified until Hitler became Chancellor. Then the Third Reich ended in ruins. Since that time, Germany has been every other nation's whipping boy. At least as a national entity. The left and right wings of the various German states have been at war with each other since at least Germany's defeat in WW1. What we have today are attempts by the left to continue to punish their opposition. By any and every means available. The results are tragic for a people who deserve something better.
"they were defeated on 8 May; or Germans were themselves victims of an occupying fascist regime, in which case they were liberated on 8 May. You cannot have it both ways. "
There goes Eugyppius again, using that verboten thing called logic.
This kind of conditioned stigma and equally conditioned reflex is why many young in the West look to nations such as Romania or Russia as examples, maybe not in specific political policies but in attitude and self-recognition of culture; their pasts are acknowledged, but there's no shame attached to it, to those alive today.
No "original sin", to be paid for to the n-th generation.
Now consider this: which two nations stood to, and still stand to gain from trying to condition the young of european nations with a collective guilt and shame for being "white" and [insert nationality here]?
Hint: neither of them are in Africa, South America, the Orient or Asia. Or Antarctica or Australia for that matter.
They keep trying this in Britain and the polls show the Brits stubbornly refuse to hate their own history 😜
Wonder why?
The death toll of the British Empire, given how much longer it was active as a super-power (especially if various semi-private trading initiatives down the centuries are taken into account) by far outstrips the civilians put to death under Aktion T4 and the rest of atrocities.
It's absurd. Should you blame me for Lindisfarne? Do I get to take credit for the founding of York? Should Denmark pay reparations for the bounty paid by Ethelred the Unready?
When is Mongolia going to pay out money to Irak for sacking Bagdad how many times?
It is all absurd. People should embrace their history, warts and all. The vikings had an effect on us. The first English navy was repurposed viking longboats 🤓
Just don't ask me to pay for my people having forged such a durable Middle Eastern blood sacrifice cult with two fractious daughters always trying to commit matricide. We paid enough already.
I've a feeling that if you'd been of that household, there'd been no feud as they both would have been given a stern dressing down and setting straight, as to how to treat each other and their sons.
Don't ask me about my feelings on the royal houses of viking-era Denmark and sweden laying the groundwork for 800 years of war, just because they couldn't co-operate over the herring-tax of Öresund.
Me, I'd've said let the kids pray to any local goddess that suited 'em. I ain't never been for telling one's children what they "ought" to believe in. Just mind yer manners and treat the neighbors decently.
"Just mind yer manners and treat the neighbors decently."
Often the hardest lesson to teach and learn, sometimes the harshest too.
One of the reasons I much prefer the Old Norse texts is that they are free of commandments and orders, but instead full of advice and even the gods themselves aren't immune to human failings and frailties.
"Reparations" are nothing more than an instrument to rob wealth from nations using "collective guilt" as an excuse. We as individuals cannot be responsible for wrongdoing of someone who lived well before we were born or whom we never met just because we share the same ethnicity, or citizenship or skin color or whatever else they can come up with (why not height? Or eye color? Or favorite sports or dish? It makes just as much sense)
Kinda like the USA. Condemn any recognition of the confederates because they fought for slavery, refuse to recognize the 300,000 white Northern men who died to free the slaves because it was really about state’s rights!
That’s the Lost Cause mythology, which until the.turn of the century held sway. Now in the 21st Century the nation’s schools are finally teaching actual facts. This was one war in which for a period of roughly 85 years (1914-2000, the losers wrote the history.
"It was yet another prototypically German orgy of moral incontinence and performative outrage against a defunct political ideology that no longer commands any real support."
Great line!
or does it continue in mirror world forms such as "green" eco-socialist fascisms or the feudalist globalist socialism of the WEF?
no
yes
no no
WITZBOLD !!!
It's TWO lines ....
🤣🤣🤣🤣
"Day of liberation" is a side-stepping euphemism to explain away a lost war & a crushing defeat. Such self-masturbatory & delusional behavior is indicative of the "progressive" left who construct fantasy to mask reality & - (for them) - inconvenient facts they'd rather not address. The very same tactics are utilized in the "what is a woman" discussion.
The allied powers, post WW2, made sure to purge the ranks of both Germany and Japan of any persons who had any nationalistic sentiment, who had any sense of independence, or even showed themselves as moderately aggressive personalities. This was not an accident, and accordingly both nations have wound up with these enfeebled sorts who wind up running the country i.e. the Deep State in both nations.
As the decades have marched on, the reasons for this sort of institutional character have been forgotten, replaced by an insistence that in fact This Is The Way Its Supposed To Be
Only such characters would accept the controlled demolition of their economies (Japan 1980's, Germany circa Nordstream) without so much as a peep
Just a gut feeling being an ongoing student of Military History but I've come to the conclusion that the Allies' complete & total humiliation @ the hands of the German Army of 1940 led them to resolve to - once & for all - crush the Prussian Military spirit & make sure that it never rises again. They crush France in 6wks, kicked the British out of Europe 4 times: Dunkirk, Norway, Greece, Dieppe & by early 1942 advance units stood in Astrakhan (on the Sea of Azov): the gateway to Asia. During this journey they inflicted 3.5 million casualties on The Red Army in as many months.
Good point
Except that the west quickly stopped it's denazification program and allowed many open Nazis to join the new West German army, media and political classes. The Soviets (and their German communist exiles) were much more thorough in East Germany (obviously). East German propaganda constantly accused the West Germans and NATO as being a US glove puppet Nazi regime. Unfortunately, the communist propaganda of the time - which now seems more accurate - simply comes across as histrionic nonsense. Maybe we've been conditioned to instantly dismiss Communist propaganda. I am finding myself reviewing these old articles with all their bombastic rhetoric with new eyes and realising there actually was some truth to these claims
There are photos of crucified little girls in East Prussia, on the famous "road to berlin". Soviets were brutal and barbaric. People on the right today, myself included, think russia is "based", but one needs to make the distinction between 2024's russua and the Sovier Socialist Regime.
they also did the same at home...
5eyes have a lot to answer for.
First of all, thanks for reviving my mental picture of standing on the porch on Monroe St. NE Washington DC on 5/8/45. I was six and all the neighbors were out celebrating. My Father, a former Air Raid Warden, had a gas attack klaxon that he was sounding.
Our Civil War had only been over for eighty-five years, but I never heard of any white Southerners celebrating liberation. Other than some communists I doubt that many Germans felt that they had been liberated either.
The only way one can really coitize populations for following a specific leader is to somehow time travel back and experience life at that time.
We are hearing the same sort of pronouncements from our left about our history.
Think about it - an air raid warden in the USA. For what ?? That's fear propaganda from FDR and the warmongers for you.
The Germans ruled the sea with their U Boats in the early days of the war. There was concern that a sub could come up the Potomac River and bombard DC.
No America sucked into 2 World Wars for the benefit of who ? - not the American people or Nation that's for sure. No external enemy could ever invade the USA unless traitors invited them in (how's the southern border going ?) All pure propaganda to make people feel they were under threat.
Read "Iron Coffins" by former U-boat Officer Herbert Werner; as XO of the U-230 they traveled up the Chesapeake Bay - laid mines - & came back out going right by Hampton Roads U.S. Naval base. Werner said the lights were all on & they could see U.S. Naval personnel walking around none the wiser.
“Orthodoxy is a subtle and complicated thing. As many an ancient theologian discovered, if you practise it too vigorously, you may find yourself a heretic.”
---------------------------
What—you think I have all day here just to quote the incredibly great stuff you keep writing?
After a quick look at the online mainstream media here in the Federal Republic, it seems that not too much attention is given to this anniversary. I am a bit puzzled - would that not have been a good occasion to trumpet the "Fight against the Right"? Or is there worry that the occasion is too closely linked with the opulent parades in Moscow, thereby undermining the Putler narrative? Perhaps the Western allies would rather not celebrate either because the absence of the Russians would be all-too-noticeable. Who knows.
The moment I heard the suggestion to combine WW 1 and WW 2 as a second 30 years war, I was convinced.
Sorry to distract from history and focus on modern hypermorality:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/in-germany-you-must-be-fully-vaxxed-before-your-death-by-assisted-suicide/?s=08
After the safe and effective AZ "vaccine" was withdrawn (leaving the even saferer and moar effectiver modRNA LNP jabs) is that a distinction without a difference?
LOL, anyone who goes to the Russian embassy for this kind of thing in 2024 has bigger egg on their face than anyone who doesn't. Though I wouldn't count on German mass media to list those names, at least not if they are among the usual suspects.
"moral incontinence" LOVE IT! EG, may I use the term here in the states to describe so many idiots like the ivy league riff raff poisoning our already decaying institutions?
yes feel free to borrow as necessaey
Can you quantify the number of Germans who died form 1945-1949 under Allied occupation? I have heard the number 2 million but have no way to verify. To me, 2 million civilian dead under allied occupation should be a data point in weather the day is worth celebrating or not.
When do the German people decide that Never Again means just what it is? That seems like an easy lesson to get.
I mean do they need a history lesson everyday so they can self flagelate for the sins of their grandparents?!
They must drill this shit, over and over again, in the minds of the children.
Seems unhealthy to me.
Deeply unhealthy. I suspect part of the fear of AfD is their more positive take on Germany. I mean we can't have positive nationalism now.
yet it was the socialism bit that made the country toxic, just like it's ally the soviet union.
They politics of national socialism and international socialism merely disagreed about which order and group to predate upon and murder.
National Socialism was the mortal enemy of Communism
Both are Marxist
National Socialism described itself as Marxism without Jewishness.
Nice try. Communism is Globalist not Nationalist. Marxism has Central Banking / no private property / kills masses of the intelligentsia and ordinary people. Germany thrived under National Socialism unlike the Capitalist countries suffering a decade of the Great Depression and the total misery under Communism. etc. etc etc. As I said - National Socialism is the mortal enemy of Bolshevism. Capitalism and Communism are more similar than is National Socialism
When they realise powers with hostile intent to them as individuals and a people abuse the legacy of the war, to keep them down, docile and dependent.
Imagine that strong teutonic emotion they now use to self-flagellate turned on their oppressors. Those who exploit faux guilt and rule by lies have realised they are riding a tiger; all they can do is try to prolong the ride.
I suspect this will be the fate of those who abuse not just the Saxons but their wayward cousins too. The backlash will be epic.
Yeah. Well said
BINGO !!!
{...They must drill this shit, over and over again, in the minds of the children...}
Just guess, who operates the drill ??? ...🤔🤔🤔
A German mind ??
NO !!