Typo
Banned
No, similarly, not every SS or Waffan-SS man directly commited attrocities, but that does not excuse the organization as a whole in any of the cases
The Afrika Korps takes Palestine
- Thread starter jmc247
- Start date
I was talking about the Wehrmacht and not their organization the men who made it up and making the point to another poster it is possible to black wash these men by depicting them all as genocidal killers.
Bearcat
Banned
No, Rommel was not the sort to do something like this. He would have refused these orders, as he had refused others of the sort.
BUT... that would have quickly led to his 'recall', to 'build up our defenses in western Europe'. Then Hitler and Himmler install some reliable lackey in Palestine. The Jews are rounded up and put behind wire. The Germans use some of the local Arab groups who have animosity towards the Jews from the late 1930s uprising to help them. Of course, its quite possible that those same Arabs end up in the same camps later. In any event, within a few months, Arab partisans will also be fighting the Germans, as like the Ukrainians they discover the Nazis are no liberators.
The Final Solution was an expression of Hitler's will. He is going to extend it wherever he can, and Rommel has no power to stop him.
Thank God for the sake of BOTH Jews and Arabs he did not get the chance.
BUT... that would have quickly led to his 'recall', to 'build up our defenses in western Europe'. Then Hitler and Himmler install some reliable lackey in Palestine. The Jews are rounded up and put behind wire. The Germans use some of the local Arab groups who have animosity towards the Jews from the late 1930s uprising to help them. Of course, its quite possible that those same Arabs end up in the same camps later. In any event, within a few months, Arab partisans will also be fighting the Germans, as like the Ukrainians they discover the Nazis are no liberators.
The Final Solution was an expression of Hitler's will. He is going to extend it wherever he can, and Rommel has no power to stop him.
Thank God for the sake of BOTH Jews and Arabs he did not get the chance.
Then what was the message of showing Jewish U.S. soldiers in a big budget Hollywood film scalping dozens of "Nazis" when they were scalping teenage German soldiers and not even Waffen SS.
Typo
Banned
That Hollywood splatters it's movies with casual violence all the time like an over opinionated sociopath?
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin Al Husseini was very much genocidal and worked closely with Hitler.
Amin Al Husseini seen inspecting his Hanzar Division made up exclusively of Muslims, mostly from the Crotia/Bosnia/Serbia region. They actively lead the genocide against Serbs, Serbian Jews and Gypsies
You make a good point there.
It certainly wasn't very likely to happen with Hitler dividing his resources and manpower in a two front war with the vast majority of it going to Russia. Now, if he waited until 1942 to invade Russia and used his military in 1941 to take Malta and say triple the size of the Afrika Korps all bets are off as to what would have happened.
After Rommel took Tobruk there was a no confidence vote against Churchill in parliment which he survived. Rommel's goal in taking Egypt and if neccesary Iraq wasn't mainly to hold them as he didn't think he could with the forces he had. He was hoping that it lead to another no confidence vote against Churchill and that he would have been replaced with someone willing to have a armistice with Germany in exchange for getting their colonies back. With England out of the war the U.S. then would have decided to focus their resorces on fighting Japan.
His plan then was to move his forces unhindered by the British to the Caucasus.
ArmchairPhilosopher
Banned
Yes, the real "revisionism" is that making Rommel out to be some kind of hero. He was a Nazi general--nothing less, nothing more.
The relative lack of atrocities in Africa came from the fact that Rommel was fighting "fellow Aryan" Brits rather than "untermensch" Russians or other Slavs. Wake up.
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"Inglorious Bastards" is another Tarantino murder porn movie.
Take a look at what Discovery or History Channel or National Geographic say about WWII. "Poor noble Wermacht fighting a desperate battle against Soviet hordes". I swear, in a lot of those "documentaries" they keep sympathizing with Germans and mourning their defeats. And all the "documentaries" about Nazi A-bombs, about supertanks, about all the wonderful jets that would have certainly won the war
P).
Take a look at what Discovery or History Channel or National Geographic say about WWII. "Poor noble Wermacht fighting a desperate battle against Soviet hordes". I swear, in a lot of those "documentaries" they keep sympathizing with Germans and mourning their defeats. And all the "documentaries" about Nazi A-bombs, about supertanks, about all the wonderful jets that would have certainly won the war
P).Rommel even in 1941 would have taken umbridge to being called a National Socialist. He considered himself an apolitical soldier who was willing to fight for Germany regardless of the government in power at least until 1944 after it became clear to him that his government was killing millions of innocent people.
If you agree or not that one could fight for Germany during WW2 without being a Nazi is certainly an issue of long standing debate. But, even Churchill would have said and basically did say there were loyal German soldiers who were not neccesarily Nazis.
Bearcat
Banned
The Mufti is indicative of the worst elements in Palestine. He had a band of very fascist-leaning supporters.
Note however: he was hardly representative of the Palestinians as a whole. He became Mufti through british machinations. there was an election for the position. The British were allowed to choose any one of the top three vote-getters. they had already decided it was Amin Al-Husseini's 'turn'.
Unfortunately, the Palestinians didn't agree. He came in fourth.
No problem: the Brits browbeat one of the top three to 'withdraw', and proclaimed the A-hole the winner.
ITTL, he and his merry men will cooperate fully with the SS. By three months later, there will be a Palestinian Arab resistance fighting with the remnants of free Jews to expel the Nazis.
Just for a minute, let us forget how ASB the scenario might be. If the Afrika Corps did somehow reach Palestine, the inhabitants would not act anything like the milqutoast European Jewry did, and walk quietly to the gas chambers. The Sabras would put up a bloddy resistance, and many a German soldier would rue coming up against the Palmach. Rommel would win on the battlefield if it even came to any sort of pitched battle, but it would be mostly bloody guerilla warfare, followed by reprisals against civillians; an altogether unpleasant affair.
No doubt the Jews in Palestine would put up a guerilla war to protect their lives and the lives of their families, but I don't see it going down quite how you listed.
First Rommel had three main goals in his campaign; take Egypt, take Iraq, and the Caucasus.
If Rommel makes it to Palestine I don't see him staying there long and letting UK forces in Iraq prepare themselves. If he is having fuel problems at longest I see him waiting is for those to be resolved.
Hitler and Himmler knew very well Rommel's position on the Jews and killing civilians and would have waited until he had left to send any SS units there. They did something similar in Tunisia in that they slipped in an SS unit while Rommel was busy off fighting in Egypt.
So, the way I see it the local Jews would be prepared to fight a guerilla war against the Afrika Korps and quickly figure out that it isn't needed. Then the Afrika Korps leaves for Iraq and soon thereafter Amin Al Husseini along with the SS enter the scene and the guerilla war starts.
In war bad things happen. By today's standards the US Army of WW2 was a bunch of butchering monsters. Trying to surrender as an individual in combat is always a dicey thing for example. This said... as time went by the German Army got nastier and nastier. It started in Poland when they didn't punish war crimes. Hitlers order for Russia made it worse and the result was peoples war with rivers and rivers of blood.
As to Rommel he did try to stay with in the rules and since N Africa was in effect his private little war he was able to do so there. It also helped there weren't many civilians around either.
Michael
Oh yeah, where have I heard that before?
Doesn't anybody else find it odd how many ex-Wehrmacht soldiers just happened to have "never seen anything" and "never done anything" and were among those who were apolitical or actively (sometimes passively) opposed to Hitler and the Nazis?
If their "claims" to interviewers, average joes and tv documentaries are anything to go by the history that we all know is really alternate history and what really happened was that the Nazis were overthrown in a popular revolution in 1940 and the guys who replaced them just couldn't be bothered to change the symbols.
Here's a question I would love to see answered: If everybody only "hears" of bad things happening elsewhere in their organization and nobody ever does it, then how did those bad things happen?
I suppose the next logical step with those ex-soldiers will be claim that any and all deaths were in fact carried out by the vicious, sub-human NKVD and Red Army and they were actually there to protect the civilians. Pffft.
I've encountered enough folks who wish to forget the truth (as well as just plain ol' liars) to know that unless there is massive supporting evidence to back up their claims (or unless I personally witnessed it myself) then it should be taken with massive doses of salt. If we take everything that your ex-Wehrmacht acquaintance said at face value then not only did he not do or see anything bad (save for this one time in 3 years when a group of Red Army soldiers were shot who should have been taken prisoner) but nobody else in his unit or those units that interacted and saw on a regular basis did anything bad either (otherwise he would probably have seen them).
No, he said he saw a lot of terrible things on the Eastern Front, but never Wehrmacht soldiers killing cilivians. He didn't answer in regard to the Waffen SS and what he saw from them. He only said the Waffen SS was sort of like the U.S. Marines without any rules or boundries.
That's rather of insulting of him. I mean what did the US Marines ever do to him?
I still would only believe him as far as I could throw him though. What you've said has been repeated very often (in fact, far too often) by various ex-Wehrmacht soldiers in documentaries and whatnot for it to be believable considering the history that is known. Maybe he really was a good soldier, but it's hard to believe given how many claim to have been when the facts just can't fit if every single one of them was telling the truth. If more of them would actually tell the truth then perhaps the good soldiers could be believed. Worse, when people say things like this:
it only makes me wonder if folks are really coming from ATLs and doing interviews about their time in the Wehrmacht and posting on sites like this considering that I can't recall how often I've heard or read about the "Red Army" and "rape" going together in almost any documentary or article on WWII nowadays (even in those cases where the Battle of Berlin had absolutely nothing to do with the article or documentary - such as a documentary on Stalingrad where at the end the presenter will then give a very quick overview of the rest of the war of which will basically consist of something like this: "and after the battle, the Red Army continued to push the Germans back until they took Berlin in a gigantic battle in 1945. Thousands of women and girls were then raped by the victorious Red Army." If that's whitewashing I would hate to see the Red Army blackwashed.).
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Believe him or not the man has a terminal illness and isn't long for this Earth. If there is a heaven or hell he will be judged for his actions not by you or I.