Paris Under the Nazis: Happy Days?

[Ranke]

The Dutch famine was the consequence of the collapse of the Third Reich which losed the ability to take care of its subjects.

The Germans were taking care of their Dutch subjects? Excuse me?


Steven:

I realize this is a forum where debates may occur, but this one has degraded into argument over semantics. Will I now be labeled "anti-semantic"?

How can you suggest that concern about quotes like the one above is an "argument over semantics?" Is the "anti-semantic" comment a joke?

I created a new thread for discussion about the Allied occupation policies:

Good, perhaps you can focus on how happy the French were under the Nazi jackboot (apart from French fascists, I'm sure) and forget the red herring of western occupation of Germany.

John

[Jon G.]

That's pure speculation on your part. And if you consult the numbers I posted above, you'll note that the Germans were actively moving foodstuffs from France to Germany. Your opinion about what the Germans might have done if only more food had been around accounts for nothing in that regard.

You are making a very strange claim...

I wasn't making any claim. I was merely telling your that your remark '...the Germans would give the French higher rations if they had more food...' is pure and idle speculation. And there is no way to prove it.

Incidentally, the Germans left the headache of administering rationing to the French themselves. The problem of rationing was exacerbated in part by German requisitionings, and in part by the artificially low RM to franc rate.

France was a net food importer prior to the war, just like Germany was. Some numbers for degrees of self-sufficiency in this post:

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 60#p754260

IIRC there is only one example of German food exports during WW2 - namely to Norway in the winter of 1944-1945.

Your memory betrays you. The Germans exported food also at least to Finland.

OK, thanks. I should have added the qualifier German food exports to occupied Europe during WW2.

... The Dutch famine was the consequence of the collapse of the Third Reich which losed the ability to take care of its citizens.

Yes, I was calling your memory into question when you wrote that IIRC, Holland was treated better as the Dutch are a Germanic people. - but then calories per day can only go so far. You also need to take such things as wholesale forced conscription of labourers, deportations of Jews, hostage shootings, looting of property (- which all happened in Holland, too) and so on into account before you can establish whether an occupation was humane or not.

[SteveFBS]

The Dutch famine was the consequence of the collapse of the Third Reich which losed the ability to take care of its subjects.

The Germans were taking care of their Dutch subjects? Excuse me?


Steven:

I realize this is a forum where debates may occur, but this one has degraded into argument over semantics. Will I now be labeled "anti-semantic"?

How can you suggest that concern about quotes like the one above is an "argument over semantics?" Is the "anti-semantic" comment a joke?

I created a new thread for discussion about the Allied occupation policies:

Good, perhaps you can focus on how happy the French were under the Nazi jackboot (apart from French fascists, I'm sure) and forget the red herring of western occupation of Germany.

John

Of course it was a joke. I was suggesting that anything put as a response to any statement someone submits in this thread would be picked apart and condemned by someone else.

-Steven

[Ranke]

Steven,
Just checkin,
Cheers

[ThomasG]

I'm wasn't making any claim. I was merely telling your that your remark '...the Germans would give the French higher rations if they had more food...' is pure and idle speculation. And there is no way to prove it.

I disagree. It is not just idle speculation to say that "if the Germans had more tanks they would use them". The Germans had an interest to distribute food like they had an interest to use tanks, IMHO. You are implying that the Germans had a policy to keep the French rations small rather than keeping them as high as possible after taking as much food as was needed to feed the German people.

Yes, I was calling your memory into question when you wrote that IIRC, Holland was treated better as the Dutch are a Germanic people. - but then calories per day can only go so far. You also need to take such things as wholesale forced conscription of labourers, deportations of Jews, hostage shootings, looting of property (- which all happened in Holland, too) and so on before you can establish whether an occupation was humane or not.

Yes. It is also true though that only a minority of French people were Jews or actively resisted the German occupation, a particular class of people. The majority was affected by the labour duty and hostage shootings, though. I don't think the German occupation was humane. I think it was not particularly inhumane but this characterization is admittedly so vague that I don't think it is useful to debate about that. I think that at least a significant minority of "happy people" could be found among the collaborators and the passive majority. The evidence for the existence of these happy people is of course just anecdotal because of the nature of the question.

[Jon G.]

I'm wasn't making any claim. I was merely telling your that your remark '...the Germans would give the French higher rations if they had more food...' is pure and idle speculation. And there is no way to prove it.

I disagree. It is not just idle speculation to say that "if the Germans had more tanks they would use them"...

That's just faulty reasoning on your part. If the Germans had more tanks they would use them, yes. And if the Germans had more food somebody would eat it, yes. It does not logically follow that this surplus food would have been given to the French.

... I think it [the German occupation of France] was not particularly inhumane but this characterization is admittedly so vague that I don't think it is useful to debate about that. I think that at least a significant minority of "happy people" could be found among the collaborators and the passive majority. The evidence for the existence of these happy people is of course just anecdotal because of the nature of the question.

You're right that 'not particularly inhumane' is very vague. However, so is the notion of 'happy people', particularly as a means to describe any occupation as humane or inhumane.

[ThomasG]

That's just faulty reasoning on your part. If the Germans had more tanks they would use them, yes. And if the Germans had more food somebody would eat it, yes. It does not logically follow that this surplus food would have been given to the French.

The amount of food Germans could eat themselves was limited. It was in their interest to distribute the surplus to people in occupied countries (also to the French) to minimize resistance and improve local economy. It follows that the French would have benefited from more food.

[Jon G.]

It follows that the French would have benefited from more food.

Yes. What doesn't follow is that the Germans would have made more food available for them if they had had it. Your logic doesn't stand up, and your introduction of hypotheticals to the discussion does not make anyone any wiser.

[ThomasG]

Yes. What doesn't follow is that the Germans would have made more food available for them if they had had it.

It would be harmful to the war effort to withhold the food. Why would the Germans do so? You haven't explained that.

[Jon G.]

Yes. What doesn't follow is that the Germans would have made more food available for them if they had had it.

It would be harmful to the war effort to withhold the food. Why would the Germans do so? You haven't explained that.

I don't have to explain why, in a hypothetical situation in which more food obtained in occupied Europe, the Germans would have given more food to occupied France. Because 1) It is a counterfactual, and thus un-verifiable, and 2) it does not answer the basic question whether the German occupation was humane* or not.

* or 'not particularly inhumane', or whichever other qualifier is your flavour of the moment. You've simply skated over 99% of my critisism of your assertions about the German occupation of France - hostage shootings, forced devaluation of the franc, forced labour conscription &c. instead concentrating on a calorie debate in which you freely introduce hypotheticals when it suits you.

You've made a very poor case, in other words.

Since this seems to be a day of Bible quotes, I point you to Proverbs 3:13 before you warp your own topic still further. Or somebody puts a sock in this topic. Whichever comes first.

[uhu]

The French on occasion would bring out the wrong flag at the wrong time to hang out of their window.

Do you know what had the most casualties during the war in France? It wasn't the Americans, not the British, not the Canadians, not even the Germans. The most casualties were the French civil population, and most of that due to bombing by the Allied Air Forces.

[Patzinak]

Nice strawman. It is a debatable question whether the Jews are a nation or just an ethnic group.[…]

Then debate elsewhere; it has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Crimes against French Jews were (amongst other things) crimes against French citizens, ie, crimes against the French nation. This has nothing to do with Zionism, the Bible, Stalin, or your definition of nation or ethnic group. Your artificial separation of one group of citizens of France from the rest of French citizens is based on criteria anchored in the National Socialist concept of race (not on the Bible, Halakha, or Stalinist dogma), and it is therefore a racist, and specifically an anti-Semitic, attitude.

FWIW, I am a firm supporter of Israel and not an anti-Semite.

I couldn't care less if you were a card-carrying member of Mossad or Shin Bet or both. It has no relevance to the point. What you wrote, and the distinction you made, was racist and anti-Semitic.

Please apologize for your insults.

Let me put this as politely as I know how: Get stuffed (with knobs on).

To be a member of the resistance is to make a conscious choice -- just like joining the NSDAP or joining the Communist party. One does not choose one's ancestry.

What does that have to do with anything?

It has to do with this:

[…] A member of a small persecuted minority group or a resistance fighter is not an "average Joe".

that is, with your lumping together of two dissimilar categories.

Btw, I'm glad to see you stopped citing Stalin, tovarishch. That means you've caught up with 1956. Keep going, and, who knows? soon enough you'll catch up with 1991.

--Patzinak

[Patzinak]

[…] while Germany was receiving aid, it was also making reparations and restitution payments that were well over $1 billion. […]

Revenues from occupied countries and dependent states, 1939–45: RM131 billion, ie >USD52 billion, at the exchange rate used in the book (Aly, p287).

The total sum of over 131 billion reichsmarks […] represents only a part, albeit a large one, of the external revenues Germany extracted via plunder between 1939 and 1945. Wage taxes automatically paid by slave laborers, their contributions to the social welfare system, and the de facto subsidies their labor provided to German agriculture should be added to the total. General administrative revenues extracted from the compulsory savings accounts of Eastern European workers and sham remittances of wages to family members drive the final reckoning even higher.[…]

Foreign labourers, voluntary or involuntary, were paid 15–40% less than German ones (ibid, p156). Of this, a large part (>3/4, in the case of E European workers) was confiscated by the German state under various procedures, resulting in "a major source of income for the German treasury" (ibid, p157).

Source:

• Aly, G (2007) Hitler's Beneficiaries : Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. 1st US ed, New York: Metropolitan Books. ISBN 0805079262.

--Patzinak

[ThomasG]

Then debate elsewhere; it has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Crimes against French Jews were (amongst other things) crimes against French citizens, ie, crimes against the French nation. This has nothing to do with Zionism, the Bible, Stalin, or your definition of nation or ethnic group. Your artificial separation of one group of citizens of France from the rest of French citizens is based on criteria anchored in the National Socialist concept of race (not on the Bible, Halakha, or Stalinist dogma), and it is therefore a racist, and specifically an anti-Semitic, attitude.

Vichy France enacted anti-Semitic legislation and collaborated with Nazi Germany in the extermination of Jewry. The Holocaust in France was not a crime committed against the French nation as you claim. The French state participated in committing that crime and the French nation like the German nation was in the role of a perpetrator, not a victim.

[B5N2KATE]

Well I must say this has been a most entertaining debate.....

I can only comment by giving you my impression of Sylvestor Stallone doing Shakespeare....

"TO BE....(spit)
OR NOT TO BE....
.....uhhh....What was the question?"


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