Fate of postwar Germany with a weaker Soviet Union

Cook

Banned
The crucial difference, however, is that it's the Anglo-Americans who march into Berlin and force the German surrender. At that point the Soviets have successfully liberated their own borders, but nothing beyond that (including the Baltic states, which remain Nazi occupied at the time of the surrender).
Given that the Allies are tearing them apart in the west, you don’t think the Germans would strip the east of every spare division to try to stem the tide? Thereby weakening the eastern front and allowing the Red Army to advance faster?
 
The event you are referring to took place at the Tehran Conference, during the dinner at the Soviet Embassy on November 29, 1943 and it was not a joke.

I know it wasn't a 'joke' in the sense of being facetious,: I know it wasn't precisely because it was already happening to many different sorts of people. This was a hard, nasty time.

I am off-put by the sense I get that when Germans are being arbitrarily massacred oh that's different old boy that's not on at all.
 

Cook

Banned
I am off-put by the sense I get that when Germans are being arbitrarily massacred oh that's different old boy that's not on at all.
The difference is that Churchill had no intention of making it British government policy to carry out the very same atrocities that the Germans had been doing in Eastern Europe. Had that happened the Nazis would have had valid grounds for saying that their only crime had been to lose the war. Instead they faced justice at Nuremburg, flawed maybe, but justice none the less.
 
The difference is that Churchill had no intention of making it British government policy to carry out the very same atrocities that the Germans had been doing in Eastern Europe. Had that happened the Nazis would have had valid grounds for saying that their only crime had been to lose the war. Instead they faced justice at Nuremburg, flawed maybe, but justice none the less.

Maybe I'm a vindictive blackened Presbyterian soul, but I can't find myself able to put 'arbitrarily shooting people belonging to a class that had made a job and a holiday of arbitrarily shooting people' with 'exterminating nations' and I worry that people are so willing to do so.

The WAllies killed plenty of people. We blew up more French from the air than the Germans blew up Britons. How many of those French had been cheerily enforcing the Commissar Order?

War is nasty, the 40s were nasty, nasty times, nasty people, a lot of nasty people and a lot of nice people got horribly killed for no terribly good reason.

But when it's the German officers, boom, sympathy, outrage, stern tellings-off!
 
Well, executing 50.000 to 100.000 German officers would have meant executing at least all officers the rank of major and above (roughly speaking). All war crimes on the German side taken into account, this would be one humongous crime larger than Katyn. And odds are that there would be a LOT of men in that crowd who don't hold a iota of guilt.

It's a crime, it's an atrocity and what was done by the Germans beforehand doesn't affect this conclusion in the least. An eye for an eye just isn't right.

Oh, and despite my being German, the nationality of the men in question did not factor into this in the least. It could have been fricking Uruguayans or whatever and it would have been the same.
 
And odds are that there would be a LOT of men in that crowd who don't hold a iota of guilt.

It's a crime, it's an atrocity and what was done by the Germans beforehand doesn't affect this conclusion in the least. An eye for an eye just isn't right.

The argument in the first paragraph is much stronger than "an eye for an eye just isn't right"--in fact, the latter is a concession to the German officers' guilt.
 

Cook

Banned
But when it's the German officers, boom, sympathy, outrage, stern tellings-off!
While Stalin accused Churchill of being fond of the Germans, there is no validity to the claim. Churchill was defending the honour of the British Empire and her fighting forces; there is a great deal of difference between people being killed as a consequence of combat and choosing to murder surrendered troops. At the very least it would have destroyed permanently the protection that the Geneva and Hague Conventions provide to Prisoners of War. It would have also damned Britain and America’s involvement in World War Two to being nothing but a power struggle between empires for control of territory with nothing to differentiate between them except their uniforms and the resources they had available.

Far better to remain honourable and bring the guilty to trial, hold up their crimes for the world to judge and enact justice.
 
While Stalin accused Churchill of being fond of the Germans, there is no validity to the claim.


I'm not accusing Churchill of anything. I'm accusing a miscellanious hantle of posters on the 21st century website AH.com of such selective vision.

Churchill was defending the honour of the British Empire and her fighting forces; there is a great deal of difference between people being killed as a consequence of combat and choosing to murder surrendered troops.

It's futile trying to construct a qualitative scale of badness. After all, the worst people frequently didn't physically kill anybody at all, which just goes to show that it's a mad mad planet that we live on.

And I am not saying it was wrong to conduct bombing operations, quite the opposite. Sherman was right.

But I am saying that I sigh and shake my head at a world in which it can be proven that the blowing up of children and the elderly is morally superior to the shooting of people who were, to an enormous extent, already up to their necks in genocidal policies.

At the very least it would have destroyed permanently the protection that the Geneva and Hague Conventions provide to Prisoners of War.

I am asking people to remember that those worthy conventions meant somewhat less than sweet fanny adams to Soviets in the hands of the Germans and to reflect on how this may have affected Soviet attitudes; and to recall that while all this was going on, the Soviets were looking after the German prisoners well enough that a majority lived, and then to ask whether, of all the things that happened in the war, and of all the things that were done by Stalin, this one is the outrageous one.

It would have also damned Britain and America’s involvement in World War Two to being nothing but a power struggle between empires for control of territory with nothing to differentiate between them except their uniforms and the resources they had available.

And which one was committing, you know, genocide. This is what bothers me. People appear to believe that 'German officers' are a category like 'Slavs' and 'Jews'. They're really not.

Besides which, the British imperial state was a violent dictatorship ruling over millions and millions of people. It was a quiet dictatorship with no expansive or genocidal ambitions, content to watch itself gradually unwind, governed by an imperfect but working democracy for a tiny minority of its subjects who nonetheless were happy to let the other subjects go, and with thoroughly public-school notions of decency; but it was still a huge big empire. The war was already a struggle for power among rival imperials and at the same time a mass-mobilisation of people on behalf of liberty because History, it has been observed, is Complicated.

Far better to remain honourable and bring the guilty to trial, hold up their crimes for the world to judge and enact justice.

It's a lot better than the alternative, and the alternative is still ten to the twelve times a lot better than the Nazis.
 
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Well, executing 50.000 to 100.000 German officers would have meant executing at least all officers the rank of major and above (roughly speaking). All war crimes on the German side taken into account, this would be one humongous crime larger than Katyn.

Bigger than Katyn? Yup! Bigger than the crimes of the Stalinist state? Um. Bigger than the Holocaust? Um...

I am not vindicating the shooting of random people, I am criticising discourses about it here on AH.com. Of course shooting people at random is wrong. I would have hoped that was so obvious as to be outside debate.

My point is that this was a war in which a whole lot of people were killed in horrible ways and yet people are jumping on a hypothetical crime which is, comparatively speaking, drops in the ocean and declaring that it would have meant the End of Honour and the exact equivalence of the Allied forces with Nazism.

I mean, it even seems to me to be a weird assessment of Stalinism. Starve millions of peasants in Ukraine and other places, deport ethnic groups to Kazakhstan, liquidate people for giving you a funny look, and you're a pretty bad person. Shoot the German officers, and you're outrageously bad.

And odds are that there would be a LOT of men in that crowd who don't hold a iota of guilt.

My people traditionally believe that everybody is basically guilty of everything and you have to respect my traditional folkways. :p

Seriously, though, the German army had issued standing orders governing mass-murder of enemy civilians and prisoners of war and any member of the officer classes employed on the eastern front who had not gone out of their way to prevent them being enforced was involved in war crimes.

Enormous numbers of people on all sides were involved in war-crimes or in behaviour which I think we can all agree is not super-nice whatever the legalities, such as blowing up non-combatants - most of whom were basically decent ordinary people who would return to normal lives. I think that the decision to apply some sort of organised justice to the real killers and to forgive and forget when it came to the rest on all sides was absolutely the right one.

But the idea of the Puir Innocent Wee German Officers is frankly a nonsense. It was a dirty war.

It's a crime, it's an atrocity and what was done by the Germans beforehand doesn't affect this conclusion in the least. An eye for an eye just isn't right.

I'm not arguing that it's right, I'm arguing that arguing that it's the same as the Holocaust and the Holodomor isn't right.

When did this discussion shift from actually existing posts on AH.com to purely hypothetical war-crimes?

Oh, and despite my being German, the nationality of the men in question did not factor into this in the least. It could have been fricking Uruguayans or whatever and it would have been the same.

This is an admirable sentiment and I hope we understand why very few people held to it at the time.
 
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