Certain heroism of Wehrmacht & Waffen SS in WW2

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Romulus
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#61

Post by Romulus » 09 Mar 2003, 08:54

Personally I think the Japanese were the worst when it came to attrocities.

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Musashi
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Re: On some examples of Russian and Allied atrocities

#62

Post by Musashi » 09 Mar 2003, 10:56

heinz kling wrote:
Musashi wrote:
heinz kling wrote:The Russkis burnt down a field hopsital with 300 wounded in Werlikije-Luki in 1943. The Brit deliberately firebombed cities, and the Amis shot SS prisoners of war.
Are you suprised? The Germans did exactly the same..........
Btw, it's been proven a lot of executions and pogroms in Poland were initiated and implemented by Poles, who always try to portray themselves as houlier than htou victims.
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#63

Post by CHRISCHA » 09 Mar 2003, 12:02

Heinz Kling, out of intrest without wanting a heated discussion, on what basis do you make the claim that a lot of the executions in Poland were initiated by the Poles themselves? Also, I have to agree with Romulus, I think from the perspective of treatment of western POW's and indeed the Chinese, the Japanese war crimes were worse than the Germans. This forum is obviously predominately about the Third Reich, so this is not necessarily the place to discuss it, but it seems the Japanese crimes are considered further from home ( ie. distance from UK and culturely ), and so people are less able to comprehend or identify with the warcrimes. The Japanese commited horrendous acts eg. rape, murder, mutiation, etc. which were explained by an 'honourable' warrior code, and a simplified outlook on life. People in the UK call Germans Nazi's still, but don't seem to insult the Japanese in the same way, (obviously the Mr. Miaghi charector in Karate Kid built a few bridges). As a US vetran said, ''People still talk of the Alamo, where only 200 died. Christ, there were 40,000 in Bataan and they're forgotten!''

Peeter
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murders

#64

Post by Peeter » 09 Mar 2003, 17:17

Do you know what happened in first days after the war in and around Prague, when Germans and Estonians (20. waffen-SS div.) tried to get to the Americans? It was later called as Czech Hell... Mass murders and executions. And at least estonians were purely front-soldiers, not some sonderkommandos.
And the Red Army did start murdering civilians already in 1941 summer. If some of our friends don`t believe it, I can give the names, but it is very long list...
No doubt germans murdered too, but at least waffen-ss is mostly clean.
No doubt most of German, Norwegian, Austrian , Estonian or whatever soldiers did not fought for Hitler and new nazi order but against bolshevism.
And no doubt many of the Soviet soldiers fought only because they were forced to.

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Oleg Grigoryev
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#65

Post by Oleg Grigoryev » 09 Mar 2003, 19:43

Is there any rational explanation for the things such us this
o doubt germans murdered too, but at least waffen-ss is mostly clean.
No doubt most of German, Norwegian, Austrian , Estonian or whatever soldiers did not fought for Hitler and new nazi order but against bolshevism.
And no doubt many of the Soviet soldiers fought only because they were forced to.
popping up again, again and again despite well established facts?

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#66

Post by Andy H » 10 Mar 2003, 00:59

Please ensure this thread doesn't turn into a slanging match as to who committed the most or worst atrocities, as both were more than capable to do both and frequently did.

Andy

heinz kling
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I do agree that Japs were the worst

#67

Post by heinz kling » 10 Mar 2003, 01:43

But Poles were not that behind. I think the difference between German war crimes and Allied /Jap/Polish/Czech ones is that the former, like the Einsatzgruppe,were under orders, though may be quite a few enjoy the massacre. For the latter, it all comes from individual initiative and mass hysteria (plus unofficial,yet active encouragement from the respective governments), a not will be disciplined bunch of sadists and mass murderers. The Russians were goaded to mass pillage,rapine and murder by Pravda though.

Polish man accused of 'war crimes' against the Germans

By Justin Sparks
in Prague



THE trial of a 78-year-old Pole accused of killing thousands of German civilians in the aftermath of the Second World War is set to become the first of a series of court cases in which Germans are seen as the victims instead of the perpetrators of Nazi-related crimes.

The trial, scheduled to begin early next year in the Polish city of Opole, has created a furore over a part of Poland's recent history which it would like to ignore. Czeslaw Geborski, the accused, is said to have systematically raped, tortured and murdered German civilians while serving as commandant at the Lambinowice concentration camp in Silesia, where Germans living in the region were interned after the war.

Frantiszek Lewandowski, one of the prosecutors in the case, said:

"The main charge we are bringing against him is that he ordered a building in the camp to be burned down, killing 48 people. As people tried to escape the flames, he personally shot them or had them flung back inside."
The concentration camp was initially built by the Nazis to house Allied PoWs. For most Poles it is inextricably associated with wartime atrocities committed by the Germans.

The trial is set to reverse those roles and portray a Pole as the villain, something simply unacceptable to many who lived through the German occupation and the death of an estimated three million civilian Polish Jews and three million non-Jewish Poles through bombings and in concentration camps. Piotr Radziwinowicz, a 72-year-old pensioner whose father was killed during the occupation said:

"The trial should be stopped. In view of what the Nazis did on Polish soil it was inevitable that some German civilians would be killed in revenge. It was chaos at the end of the war, but we never did anything like the Nazis. They killed millions of Poles."
A museum at the Lambinowice concentration camp commemorates the many Poles and Allied PoWs who died there at the hands of the Nazis, but makes scant mention of the thousands of Germans who subsequently suffered the same fate.

In the decades following the Allied victory, the communists erased such events from their history, and young Poles today know little or nothing of the acts of retribution meted out to German civilians in Silesia and the former East Prussia. Dr Maruska Svasek, a Central European specialist at Queen's University, Belfast, said:

"Hundreds of thousands of German civilians across Central Europe were raped, tortured, killed, or died due to terrible conditions after the war, but communist historiography was simply anti-Nazi and pro-communist, and disregarded the truth about postwar anti-German crimes."
Werner Scholz, a German Silesian who was sent to the camp aged only eight, along with his grandmother and sister, neither of whom survived, believes real reconciliation can never take place between Germans and their Central European neighbours until the "criminals" are brought to justice. He said:

"Everywhere you looked in the camp there were people dead or dying. If a person wasn't beaten to death, then he simply died of typhus, dysentery or starvation. A cold would be enough to finish him off. These were crimes, like Nazi crimes, and they should be treated in the same way and perpetrators brought to justice."
The recollections of German camp survivors bear witness to the harshness of the camp regime. In one instance a man was sealed in a barrel in which nails had been hammered through the side. The barrel was then rolled around the camp until he bled to death. Another survivor claims people were forced to lie on top of each other forming a huge pyramid, until those at the bottom were crushed. Lambinowice was just one of hundreds of Nazi concentration camps throughout Central Europe which exchanged its Jewish and Allied PoWs for German soldiers and civilians once the war had ended.

In all, around 10 million Germans were expelled from their homes in the region, and it is estimated that in Poland alone, between 400,000 and 1.2 million were killed in revenge attacks, during forced labour, transportation, or in concentration camps.

Konrad Badenhauer of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft said:

"The case of Lambinowice is just one of many. There were hundreds of people like Geborskis. In the Czech Republic, for example, we have the names and addresses of many such criminals whose crimes are well documented and who are still at liberty."
The prospect of Lambinowice creating a precedent for the prosecution of postwar acts of retribution has provoked widespread unease. Witold Kulesza, of the Central Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, said seven more trials are being prepared in Poland. Crimes against German civilians were not limited to hard core "communist" criminals, but were widespread.

In many cases German farms were taken over by Poles and previous owners were either killed or kept on as slave labour. Inevitably, all such cases are a fight against time as those involved are now nearing the end of their lives. Czeslaw Geborski's trial which involves 40 volumes of evidence and more than 300 witnesses is likely to last up to a year, and it may well be that the opportunity for such prosecutions has already been missed.
Last edited by heinz kling on 10 Mar 2003, 07:50, edited 2 times in total.

heinz kling
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Here's a link to Jap war crimes (off topic though)

#68

Post by heinz kling » 10 Mar 2003, 01:49

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?action=op ... Id=6963120

Polish Church Apologizes for 1941 Massacre
of Jews


By Rob Strybel


WARSAW (Reuters) -- Poland's Roman Catholic Church was taking an important step to improve relations with the Jewish community Sunday by apologizing for the Poles who took part in a massacre of up to 1,600 Jews during World War Two.

The 1941 massacre in the town of Jedwabne came to prominence last year with the publication of "Neighbors," a book by émigré scholar Jan Gross, who alleged that Poles, not occupying Nazi Germans, had brutally murdered Jews and taken their possessions.

"We wish to apologize above all to God, but also to the wronged, on behalf of those Polish citizens who committed evil against citizens of the Mosaic faith," Polish Primate Jozef Glemp said in an interview in the Catholic weekly Niedziela.

An expiation service being held in Warsaw's biggest church, near the site of the former Jewish Ghetto, was to include a prayer by Polish-born Pope John Paul, a champion of Christian-Jewish reconciliation.

But the service was unlikely to succeed in bringing Catholics and Jews together since it coincided with the Shavout, a major Jewish holiday.


The American-born rabbi of Warsaw and Lodz, Michael Schudrich, said in a letter to Glemp he could not attend the service because "I cannot be in two temples at once."

Gross's book ignited one of the country's biggest national debates since the 1989 collapse of communism in Poland, a staunchly Roman Catholic country.

Jewish circles expressed satisfaction that the blame was finally being placed where it belonged. But many Poles, accustomed to viewing themselves as war victims and heroes, resent being regarded as co-perpetrators of the Holocaust.

"Neighbors" describes how the Jedwabne Jews were bludgeoned, beaten and stabbed to death by their Polish neighbors, and how most were herded into a barn and burned alive, but many details of the case remain unclear.

MOTIVES FOR PROGROM


Historians and journalists have questioned whether the Jedwabne Poles had acted on their own, as Gross maintains, or were forced to cooperate at gunpoint by the Germans.

Jewish collaboration with the Soviets, who had occupied the Jedwabne area for nearly two years prior to Germany's invasion, has also been cited as a possible motive for the pogrom, a point repeatedly raised by the Church.


"Shouldn't Jews also admit their guilt for collaborating with the Bolsheviks in sending Poles to Siberia or prison ... or for the leading role played (in post-war Poland) by the Communist secret police of Jewish ancestry?" Cardinal Glemp asked in the Niedziela interview.

Poland's National Remembrance Institute (IPN) has started an investigation into the massacre and promised to bring those responsible to justice. Half a century ago, 23 Poles were sentenced for complicity in the massacre.

The IPN, a state body probing war crimes, is now supervising the exhumation of the mass grave in Jedwabne to determine the exact number of victims and how they died.

The Church has often been at loggerheads with Jews over a variety of issues in Poland, including a Catholic nunnery and religious symbols at the Auschwitz death camp, where 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis during the war.

In the mid-1990s, Pope John Paul had to intervene to remove the nunnery from the vicinity of the Auschwitz camp, viewed by the Jews as their biggest burial ground in the world.

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#69

Post by Panzermahn » 10 Mar 2003, 03:22

Don't you forget that the Amis and the Brits forcibly repatriated even russian refugees and cossacks to the Bolsheviks? (Operation Keelhaul) Isn't this an atrocity?

How about General Vlasov who was betrayed by the Brits? He went to negotiate with the Brits with his entourage about the fate of his people but was disarmed and sent back to the Bolsheviks?
But Poles were not that behind. I think the difference between German war crimes and Allied /Jap/Polish/Czech ones is that the former, like the Einsatzgruppe,were under orders, though may be quite a few enjoy the massacre. For the latter, it all comes from individual initiative and mass hysteria, an undisciplined bunch of sadists and mass murderers. The Russians were goaded to mass pillage,rapine and murder by Pravda though
Correct again..look at the hate-filled and virolous propaganda by Ilya Ehrenburg, a Russian Jewish Bolshevik who extort the russians to raped the german women and kill every of them (Cornelius Ryan, the Last Battle)

If Mr. Justice Jackson of the IMT can term Julius Streicher as a venomous vulgarian during his judgement and hang him, why couldn't he do that to Ehrenburg? Why is this double standards?


As Napoleon has said, victors wrote history, as in this case, the victors and Red Bolsheviks and Western Allies

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Czech still refuses to acknowledge its despicable crimes

#70

Post by heinz kling » 10 Mar 2003, 05:43

All the summary executions, rapes and dispossesion, but only against unarmed civilians or surrendering soldiers. For those like the Waffen SS, who refused to be cowed by this mob, they gave way.

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Hey Heinz..............

#71

Post by Michael Kenny » 10 Mar 2003, 06:53

Whilst you are on about the Czechs what is your explaination of Lidice?. Were the 173 men shot all 'partisans'?. Did all the children gassed deserve it? Of the 82 children murdered 19 were under 5 (runners for the partisans?). How can you explain these murders or do you think it is an example of 'heroic' Germans defeating the enemy (i.e. unarmed and defenceless civilians). Of course you agree it was simply a savage and unprovoked crime you need not reply to my query. (p.s. The butchers were so proud of their worked they even filmed it)
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heinz kling
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The assasination of Heydrich

#72

Post by heinz kling » 10 Mar 2003, 07:46

It was planned by the Brits and the so called Resistance to incite German reprisals, as Heydrich whilst ruling with an iron fist, was reinvigorating the economy and the workers were getting pacified.

They knew in advance that the costs will be heavy, especially on the local population, yet they still went ahead. Now they were the real criminals, after all, what can taking out Heydrick do to the occupation?

And the civilian toll is NOTHING compared to what the Czechs had done to the Sudeten Germans. Even today, the Czechs still portray themselves as the victims, when they, after the war, slaugthered millions of Germans and illegally disposessed them of their properties.

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#73

Post by CHRISCHA » 10 Mar 2003, 11:28

I agree that the perpertrators of any crimes should be punished, as in the case of Lewendowski. The act of mudering civilians no-matter what went on before or nationality should be punished with the death sentence, even this long after the event. I also agree it was known the consequences of assasinating Heydrich would be sevre, but it was considered it would save more lives long term, perhaps it did, but I don't think it was a war crime to still go ahead. Peeter, please read up on history before making comments like you have. I think I can see the point your trying to make, but the way you made it annoys people. The strongest supporter of the Waffen SS admits units commited attrocities throughout the war, which unfortunately has tarnished their reputation.

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#74

Post by Peeter » 10 Mar 2003, 19:35

I agree with you, Chrischa. Sorry, I did not want to annoy here anybody, it was maybe hard to get my point...
Anyway, I don`t think waffen ss should be taken as a punch of war- criminals, most of them were not. ( Well, the whole organisation of SS, that was definitely antihuman)The other extremity is to look at them as heroic warriors, warshipping Thor.... They were just the best soldiers.
And the Red Army should not taken just as good men protecting their homeland...
Btw., I did not say anything about Heidrich in my previous posts.
Best regards

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#75

Post by CHRISCHA » 11 Mar 2003, 11:12

Peeter, I agree that the Waffen SS have been made a scapegoat for the war crimes commited by Germany during WW2. On the whole (certainly at the begining of the war) they were well trained soldiers fighting for an ideal. All counties who fought in WW2 had an element that commited warcrimes. I also agree the Soviet Union commited equally horrendous acts against humanity, and when discussing warcrimes of WW2 this must be remembered. Have a track through the posts in this forum (Warcrmes and Holocaust ), there is probably plenty to intrest you. The comments regarding Heydrich were building onto heinz Kling's post previously. Kind regards Chris.

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