The myths of WWII (Eastern Europe)

Hitler was inspired for his method of war against the slavs by the American conquest.

 

With all due respect, I disagree, entirely.

The Second World War was fundamentally different war, with no parallel in the entire human history. According to Herman Göring, the Second World War was »the great racial war« and he knew exactly what's he was talking about. It wasn't a classical war of conquest for domination but a war of extermination of »unworthy« races. There is no other way to explain extreme violence, large number of civil victims and extreme selectiveness of death during two Great Wars. Otherwise, it would be virtually impossible to explain almost complete eradication of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe. There is no other way to explain radical changes in ethnical map of Europe during the past century. The entire 20th century was a century of ethnical cleansing and the process hasn't finished yet, unfortunately. This, along extreme number of victims, makes wars in the first half of the 20th century unparalleled in the entire human history.

To support this I'm sending you a passage from Nial Ferguson’s book »The War ofthe World« dealing with real character of the WW2.

I've OCRed the file to make it smaller and easier to use. I wish you a pleasant Sunday afternoon.

 

Do not also forget that the Nazis started the cleansing in the Reich first. All the disabled were sent to heaven/hell.... Being German was not enough. I recall a document where a man with 6 digits in one hand feared he´d be sent to a concentration camp for...

 

[SIZE=+1]Indeed, nobody was safe! Even Hitler's cousin Aloisia Veit was gassed under the Nazi policy of eliminating mental health patients.

PS: In fact, they have committed racial cleansing of their own nation.

[/SIZE]

 

Tamino, with respect, I feel you are over-simplyfing the issue.

In my opinion nations commit to war for three primal, and inter-related, emotions/reasons. Hate, Fear and Greed. In every conflict I feel you could find each of these motivations in some proportion. It will vary in conflict to conflict and nation to nation, but all three can still be found.

Race hate was a significant motivation for Hitler, perhaps the single largest factor, but not the overwhealming one for his invasion of Russia. greed for her natural weath's and a fear of a competing political system also played its part. If I had to put a number to it I would call it 40/40/20 Hate, Greed and Fear.

If you have an overwhealming race hate for one group of people, then it stands to reason you have an equal love for another. Yes he exalted the Aryan race, but he left signifcant portions out of his creater Germanic Empire. Both the Swiss and Swede's offered millions of racialy pure Aryan stock. Wealth of Swiss banking, minerals out of Sweden, but no attempt to incorporate them. Neither would have presented a serious military problem to his conquest and their joining into the 'Greater German Reich' would have done much to promote his race policies.

You see a modification in his racial views in his selection of allies. Granted he had a meager crop to choose from, but he did cultivate some very non-aryan people to fight under his banner. Italians were a latin race, Hungarian and Rumanian heavily infultrated with slavic peoples. Perhaps not 'sub-human', but definately not of the master race. Worse from his perspective each had Aryan minorities threatened to be over polluted by inferior blood lines.

It would had much greater sense, from a racial purity perspective, to forgo a Russian adventure and to bring these nations into a direct link and control of the Greater German Reich. The million's of racialy acceptable stock would swell his military. The new lands, once 'cleansed of its inferior stock', would provide all the land the remaining Aryan people would need for generations to come. The Rumanian oil fields would suffice to a military not engaged in a massive Russian Adventure.

Yet Hitler forgo's this to invade Russia.

Race hatred cannpot be accepted as his sole or even predominate reason. Greed for what Russia had to offer and a fear that the Communist world view was in direct conflict with his Greater Reich played its part.

 

Thanks Belasar for elaborate reply,

I have just outlined what was written in the attachment to my post #542; there are 13 pages of the introduction to Fergusons' book entitled "The War of The World". Here is more about the author. Nial Ferguson is relatively young but established British historian. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of many notable publications. Please, read the attachment and we could continue discussing this interesting subject later on more in detail. It is late Sunday evening here and I am afraid I will have to go to sleep now, but would like very much to discuss this subject later.

I wish you all a pleasant end of this weekend and successful working week.

 

Hitler did plan to incorporate Sweden and Switzerland, but since he got what he needed from them, he felt there was no rush to force the issue.

 

I dissagree. Ethinic cleansing is hardly new or a 20th century invention. Read the Bible for some pretty clear examples. The Saxon conquest of England is another historical case not to mention the European conquest of the Americas. Anthropolgical evidence has also pointed to such events happening in prehistoric time around the world. The casualty lists may have been smaller but so were the base populations and the technology availble limited it as well. Certainly it is an extreme example but it is hardly the only one in human history.

 

I have to agree with belasar. The racial issue, in my opinion, was a distraction to keep the volks eyes away from what Hitler was doing. He also used it as a Nationalist form of espirit de corps. He gave the German people a way to feel proud after the First World War/Weimar Fiasco. He needed the German people behind him. He made them feel proud again. He really just wanted to have Germany on top again. In everything I have read, he really did not want war in the West. He wanted what was Germany's back and more to make her independent.

 

This?

 

Let me address this subject with reference to some remarkable thoughts of Niall Ferguson:

Three things seem to me necessary to explain the extreme violence
of the twentieth century, and in particular why so much of it happened
at certain times, notably the early 1940s, and in certain places, specifically
Central and Eastern Europe, Manchuria and Korea. These may
be summarized as ethnic conflict, economic volatility and empires in
decline. By ethnic conflict, I mean major discontinuities in the social
relations between certain ethnic groups, specifically the breakdown of
sometimes quite far-advanced processes of assimilation. This process
was greatly stimulated in the twentieth century by the dissemination
of the hereditary principle in theories of racial difference (even as that
principle was waning in the realm of politics) and by the political
fragmentation of 'borderland' regions of ethnically mixed settlement.
By economic volatility I mean the frequency and amplitude of changes
in the rate of economic growth, prices, interest rates and employment,
with all the associated social stresses and strains. And by empires
in decline I mean the decomposition of the multinational European
empires that had dominated the world at the beginning of the century
and the challenge posed to them by the emergence of new 'empirestates'
in Turkey, Russia, Japan and Germany. This is also what I
have in mind when I identify 'the descent of the West' as the most
important development of the twentieth century. Powerful though the
United States was at the end of the Second World War - the apogee
of its unspoken empire - it was still much less powerful than the
European empires had been forty-five years before.

 

Now, we agree on one subject: we disagree. ... but don't worry; disagreements reinforce friendly relationships.


PS: and let me recall you that this is on what we don't agree:

 

It wasnt Germany's, it was taken from Poland two hundred years earlier.

 

Poles still inhabited that land alongside some isolated "isles" of ethnic Germans which relocated to Polish lands. It was assumed as natural, that mere presence of recently colonized German minority made that land entirely German.

 

Why then he bothered with mass graves, Einsaatzgruppen, extermination camps, gass chambers, etc. That would have been just a waste of valuable resources.

Germany had lot of other real things to be proud of: Beethoven, Göthe, Bach, Kant, Hegel, great history, wonderful country, great people … In fact, he has caused the greatest shame in great history of German people.

That's entirely valid statement.

But why not if he wanted resources to make Germany independent. Western countries were much richer prey than poor, backward Soviet Union?

 

The Soviet Union was backward according to Hitler and it had massive resources ready for the exploitation. The idea of exploiting Russia was one reason the Germans took so much territory during the treaty of Brest Litovsk, so the concept was nothing new. What made Hitler unique was not so much what he did, it was his willingness to try.

 

Indeed. Since the Second World War weapons have developed and their destructiveness has increased by orders of magnitude. And yet, the violence of later conflicts was much lower because those who possess new weapons have different objectives and different view on the value of human life.

 

My opinion of NF is very ,very negative

 

Although different terms have been and are used confusingly as "races", the "slavic peoples" actually refer to linguistics, not really to genetics.
Neither the Hungarians nor the Rumanians are slavic and not really more infiltrated with "slavic peoples" than e.g. the Germans.

I'm sure you are referring to the thinking of the Nazies, which - as we know - was not actually academically sound...

 

As I mentioned Hitler used the conquest of the American Indians as an example of what he thought was the proper path to take and dont forget Britains "white mans burden" as an example of similar racist conquest of other people. Germany was simply a hundred years late.