Was life in the third reich nice?

[wm]

It was the Soviet crimes would continue unabated till Stalin's death. For the obvious reason that's a fact.

I'm rather sure Octotrooper meant life in pre-war Germany.
And it doesn't matter if we factor in Soviet crimes or not. Life in Germany was objectively better.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

If you meant, "It was the Soviet crimes would continue unabated till Stalin's death", then you probably should have written it.

I think you may be right as to what Octotrooper meant, but it was not what he wrote.

You post, "And it doesn't matter if we factor in Soviet crimes or not. Life in Germany was objectively better." Yup. And it was "objectively better" under Weimar, as well. Indeed, life in Germany may well have been "objectively better" in Germany than in Russia since at least the height of the Thirty Years War. Germany's "objectively better" situation owed nothing to the Nazis.

The Nazis inherited a highly cultured, highly educated, highly industrialised Germany in 1933. They left it impoverished.

Cheers,

Sid.

[George L Gregory]

So you are saying that life in the USSR was nice because the Jews could serve in the Army, and in Germany they couldn't.
Because there were Jewish civil servants in the USSR, and in Germany weren't any.
Because Russian Jews could have married "natives" and German Jews couldn't.

And that magically cancels the fact the Stalinist USSR was a genocidal state, killed millions, ruined lives of tens of millions.
That's nice but still morally reprehensible.

Of course, the USSR had its own "Jews,"(although their lives, their fate were far worse than pre-Holocaust German Jews) and millions of them. They were called the Lishenets or/and "former people."

wm,

You really are good at creating strawman arguments! Cut it out, it is pointless and stops a genuine debate from happening.

I simply asked you to provide some evidence that laws and decrees were passed in the Soviet Union which made the lives of Jews living there sheer hell which is exactly what happened in the Third Reich even before WW2 and the Holocaust.

I copied and pasted plenty of decrees and laws passed between 1933-39 in the Third Reich.

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=245976&start=60#p2324104

You can't even post a fraction of those decrees and laws passed in the Soviet Union.

This thread is about what life was like in the Third Reich and you think that because German Jews were a tiny proportion of the German population that what they experienced at the hands of the Nazis does not matter. This made me ask you whether or not you are anti-semitic and you refused to answer that question.

I need to remind you again that many German Jews fought in WW1 and when the stab-in-the-back myth started to be spread in right-wing circles German Jews published pamphlets to refuse the right-wing claims.

I really don't understand what you're trying to argue here. Your posts reek of a pro-Nazi stance when it comes to the experiences of every day German Jews between 1933-39.

Why do you keep comparing the Third Reich to the Soviet Union anyway? This thread isn't about comparing the two regimes.

You posted:

And that magically cancels the fact the Stalinist USSR was a genocidal state, killed millions, ruined lives of tens of millions.

When has anyone denied that the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin's rule killed millions of people and ruined the lives of tens of millions of people? :roll:

I think that you just enjoy stirring the pot.

[George L Gregory]

It was the Soviet crimes would continue unabated till Stalin's death. For the obvious reason that's a fact.

I'm rather sure Octotrooper meant life in pre-war Germany.
And it doesn't matter if we factor in Soviet crimes or not. Life in Germany was objectively better.

For whom?

According to whom?

[wm]

There were numerous laws (and actions - including dekulakization, the Holodomor, mass disenfranchisement, purges) that made the life of almost all Soviets citizens sheer hell.

It's not about the Jews, the question is "Was life in the Third Reich nice?" for its citizens.

Yes, it may be argued that the Soviet Jews lived better lives because they were massively overrepresented in all organs of Soviet power, including the organs of mass terror - you may deploy this argument if you wish.
See Walter Krivitsky (a Soviet Jew) and the Marino Sanatorium above.

[wm]

From Everyday Stalinism by Sheila Fitzpatric:

Urban life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s was a mess. In the old cities, urban services such as public transport, roads, and power and water supply were all overwhelmed by sudden population growth, heightened industrial demand, and tight budgets. The new industrial towns were even worse off, since services there were starting from zero.
"The physical aspect of the cities is dreadful," wrote an American engineer working in the Soviet 0 Union in the early 1930s. "Stench, filth, dilapidation batter the sense at every turn."

Outside Moscow, life quickly became grimmer. Even the province surrounding Moscow was poorly supplied with basic services: Liubertsy, a district center in the Moscow region, had not a single bathhouse for its population of 65,000 people, while in Orekhovo-Zuevo a model workers' settlement with nurseries, a club, and a dispensary still lacked street lighting and running water.

In Voronezh, similarly, new apartment buildings for workers were being built without running water or sewage connections as late as 1937.
In the cities of Siberia, the majority of the population lacked running water, sewage, and central heating.
With a population approaching half a million, Stalingrad still had no sewage system in 1938. Novosibirsk, with limited sewage and water systems in 1929, had only three bathhouses for a population of over 150,000. Dnepropetrovsk, a booming and well-established industrial city in the Ukraine with a population of close to 400,000, situated in the midst of fertile agricultural land, had no sewage system as of 1933, and its workers' settlements lacked paved streets, public transport, electric light, and running water. Water was rationed and sold for 1 ruble a bucket in the barracks. The whole city was short of power—in the winter, almost all the street lights on the main street had to be turned off—even though the big Dnieper hydroelectric project was next door.
In 1933, the party secretary sent a desperate appeal to the center asking for funds for urban improvement, pointing out that the public health situation had seriously deteriorated: malaria was rampant, with 26,000 cases registered that summer as against 10,000 the year before.

The new industrial towns had even fewer amenities. Top officials of Leninsk city soviet in Siberia painted a gloomy picture of their town in a begging letter to a senior Siberian official.
With a population of 80,000... Leninsk-Kuznetsk is extremely backward in the area of culture and urban amenities.... Out of 80 kilometers of city streets, only one street is paved and that not completely. Because of the absence of proper roads, crossings, footpaths etc, the mud reaches such proportions in spring and autumn that workers have great difficulty getting to work and back home, and classes are interrupted in the schools. Street lighting is also substandard. Only the center is lighted for a distance of 3 kilometers, the rest of the city, not to speak of the outskirts, is in darkness.

Magnitogorsk, the paradigmatic new industrial town, in many respects a showplace, had only one paved road of 15 kilometers and little street lighting. "Most of the city [was] served by outdoor cesspits, whose contents were emptied into cisterns hauled away by trucks"; even the comparatively elite Kirov district did not have a proper sewage system for many years. The city's water supply was contaminated by industrial effluents. Most of Magnitogorsk's workers lived in settlements on the outskirts of town consisting of "makeshift housing along a single dirt road, ... covered by huge puddles of filthy water, piles of garbage and numerous open outdoor toilets."

Residents and visitors to Moscow and Leningrad have left vivid descriptions of its streetcars and their incredible overcrowding. There were strict rules that passengers must enter the car through the rear door and exit at the front, requiring a constant forward-squirming motion by the passengers. Often, the crush made it impossible for passengers to get out when they reached their stop. Schedules were erratic: sometimes streetcars simply failed to run;

In provincial towns, where paved roads were still a comparative rarity at the end of the decade, public transport services of any kind were minimal. Stalingrad in 1938 had a streetcar system with 67 kilometers of track, but no buses. Pskov, with a population of 60,000, had no streetcar system and no paved roads in 1939: its entire municipal transport consisted of two buses.

[wm]

It was dangerous to walk the streets in many Soviet cities in the 1930s. The new industrial towns and the workers' settlements in old ones were the most perilous. Here drink, the congregation of restless single men, inadequate policing, bad living conditions, and unpaved and unlighted streets all contributed to a lawless, frontier atmosphere. Robberies, murders, drunken fights, and random attacks on passersby were common. Ethnic conflicts often occurred at worksites and barracks with an ethnically mixed labor force.

The flavor was caught in the catalogue of "hooligan" acts listed in a law journal in 1934: insults, fistfights, breaking of windows, shooting off guns in the streets, challenging passersby, breaking up cultural events in the club and smashing plates in the cafeteria, disturbing residents' sleep with fights and noise late at night.
The upsurge of hooliganism in the first half of the 1930s became a matter of public concern. In Orel, hooligans so terrorized the population that workers stopped going to work; in Omsk, "workers of the evening shift were obliged to remain at the plant and spend the night so as not to risk being beaten and stripped." In Nadezhdinsk in the Urals, citizens have been literally terrorized by hooliganism not only at night but even in the daytime.

Hooliganism took the form of pointless accosting, shooting on the street, hurling insults, fisticuffs, breaking of windows, and so on. Hooligans go in whole gangs to the club, breaking up cultural events, going into the cafeteria and snatching plates from waiters, and so on. [They] go into the workers' dormitory, making a pointless noise there and sometimes fighting, interfering with the workers' sleep.

Hooligans disrupted the triumphant opening of the Khabarovsk Park of Culture and Rest. The park was poorly lit, and as soon as darkness fell, "the hooligans began 'doing the rounds.'... [They] bumped women unceremoniously from behind, knocked off their hats, used foul language, and started fights on the dance floor and in the alleys."
Trains and railway stations were other places where crime flourished. Gangs of robbers preyed on passengers in suburban and intercity trains in the Leningrad region.

Railway stations were always thronged with people—recent arrivals with nowhere to stay, would-be travelers trying to get tickets, black marketeers, pickpockets, and the like. A station in the Leningrad region was described in the mid 1930s as "more like a flophouse than a decent station"; "suspicious people live for three or four days in the waiting room, drunks are often lying about, speculators trade in cigarettes, various dubious types flit to and fro. In the buffet there is continual drunkenness and unbelievable filth.

At the Novosibirsk railway station, the only way to get a ticket was to buy it on the black market from a gang headed by "the professor": "middle height, nickname 'Ivan Ivanovich,' in a white straw hat with a pipe in his mouth.

[wm]

At the Saratov railway station it appeared that "all of Russia was on the move."
Urks, as the Soviets called orphaned child-thieves, wandered about the station waiting for an opportunity to steal, everyone lived on the floor, in one spot he saw a woman being raped. No one paid the scene any attention.
Caviar and Ashes by Marci Shore

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

And all that was worse than what had preceded it under the Tsars?

Your piece talks of the infrastructural limitations of Stalingrad in 1938. Hadn't this been "Tsaritsyn" only twenty years earlier. Was it able to boast of its sewerage systems and bus services then?

The USSR was a work in a very uneven state of progress.

Nazi Germany inherited a much more materially advanced society than the USSR had. As a result, it was a relatively nicer place to live than the USSR. However, this didn't make Nazi Germany "nice", especially of you were Jewish, gay, a Jehovah's Witness, congenitally disabled, a principled Catholic priest, a political opponent, a Romany, a conscientious objector, a pacifist, etc., etc..

Cheers,

Sid.

[wm]

Yes, it was better under the Tsars.
The Russians were poor but lived peaceful lives without dekulakizations, Holodomors, mass disenfranchisements, purges, Gulags, banditry, hooligans.
And in hard times, their religion gave them consolation and strength to survive.
Man does not live by bread alone.

[Martin_from_Valhalla]

I think if you were a careless young man who didn't mind politics of the Nazi party, then life might be quite nice for you before WW started. Stipulated that you are a German. Economy was thriving, universities were opened - get your education and then a job you like. And if you were loyal to ideas of Nazi party, things would look even more propitious to you.

[Hans1906]

Shortly after the German surrender, my grandfather wrote a document, a good twenty pages long.

Probably for himself, I do not know, whether it was an apology, I also do not know.
The grandfather was a strict National Socialist, on the way to the rank of general in the labor services, that was probably his final goal at that time.

Did the man regret anything after 1945, very sure, a fellow traveler, intent on the best possible career in the labor services.
Were the family well, indeed, very well, his father was anathema to his son's career.

It is not for me personally to judge, I was born in 1956.
It would be my wish to talk to the grandfather even for a single hour, that will not be.

Hans1906

[wm]

So he was a general in the RAD.
The Eastern Bloc countries had their own RADs - full of officers including generals too. It wasn't any different.
Well, even pre-war Poland had its own (although voluntary) RAD.

[Hans1906]

No, not a "Generalarbeitsführer at that time just another officer on his way to the higher ranks.

His own career was the issue, there's nothing to shake about that, a common career at the time.

"Nazi", very sure, to rise to those ranks at the time with only 8 years of elementary school, unusual back then.

Hans1906

Attached photo, the grandfather officer in the RAD.
I know today, decades later, that the grandfather regretted his past as a strict National Socialist in later years, but all that is history.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

You post, "Yes, it was better under the Tsars. The Russians were poor but lived peaceful lives without dekulakizations, Holodomors, mass disenfranchisements, purges, Gulags, banditry, hooligans." The kulaks only developed in the last years of the Czars after they finally got round to ending serfdom. You can't "dekulak" if you have barely allowed kulaks to evolve. There was no Holodomor under Czarist Russia, but there were centuries of cultural assault on Ukrainian identity, which is part of the definition of genocide in international law today. It is difficult to have "mass disenfranchisements" when most of the population didn't have the franchise in the first place! Purges there were aplenty. The Gulags were a massive extension of a system already used under the Czars - Katorga. The Caucasus was rife with banditry, to the point it was a running sore. No "hooliganism"? Then why is there an article entitled, "Rural Crime in Czarist Russia: The Question of Hooliganism, 1905-1914"?

Have you ever wondered why the words "pogrom" and "knout" exist in the English language?

You post, "And in hard times, their religion gave them consolation and strength to survive." I guess, to coin a phrase, you might call it "the opium of the masses" as it dulls the pain of all the real-world miseries of existence!

Czarist Russia was improving, but it was very far from being an earthly paradise. In contrast, pre-Nazi Germany looks like the land of milk and honey, by comparison! The Nazis inherited a highly cultured, highly educated and highly industrialized society and reduced it to rubble without ever having had a golden period at all!

Cheers,

Sid