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Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins
And the German submariners themselves were the first and loudest to say it. They HATE Das Boot and Iron Coffins because they do not speak for those who know better. There was no heroism there, only capitulation to evil. A hero would have left Germany in the mid 1930's. Many did. Now wannabe Nazis worship at the altar of a petty sandbox bully whose proudest achievement was the destruction of the world's cultural and scientific pinnacle, the home of Goethe, Schumann, Hermann Hesse and Albert Einstein. They would all have been ashamed of the "honor" of the SS. You need not be patriotic to any but Germany to see that as truth.
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It was just a matter of time until Godwin's Law came into action in this thread... sheesh...
I am actually a bit tired of "America's better than you are" comparisons coming into existence by leaving out several facts that would prove uncomfortable...
For example.... percentage values look really nice since German percentages are lower than the US ones.... however in raw numbers German U-Boats still sank triple of tonnage compared to US boats... and that against two opponents highly developled in anti-submarine tactics and one oppenent being quite an expert in mass-producing freighters. That turned the war in the Atlantic into a war of attrition. And since the US produced freighters faster than the Germans could sink them, the equasion was in favour of the allies.
Now the funny thing about the aftermath of WW 2 is that the Americans wasn't so discriminating once it got to securing the spoils of war... like dividing up German submarines of all types... Russia, UK and US each took 6 of them for studying... and the funny thing is... almost all following sub types bore resemblance to a German sub of a later type (you know which).
Also a fact worth mentioning.... the hailed scientist who made Mercury, Gemini and Apollo possible was Wernher von Braun... the same von Braun who kept developing and building V2 Rocket for the Nazis until the day the war was over. It was known he was a Nazi... using Jews in Dora-Mittelbau building those things under abhorrend conditions. The US authorities chose it would be wiser to purge all his records of his Nazi past.
Jet technology wasn't that interesting though.... although the Germans were the first to mass produce jet aircraft, they didn't lay the foundations (that were the Brits).
On the other hand.... soundguided torpedos were first developed and fielded by the Germans (not being quite effective due to the allied use of the Foxer bait system) and also wireguided anti-tank missiles were developed by the Germans.
On further note.... a man named Zuse developed workable computers to calculate flight trajectory data for rockets and cruise missiles (what do you think, the V1 was?) and was quite successful in that.
So.... in addition to the tragedies of what happened in Germany in those years it is also tragic that the Allies (especially the US and Russia) chose to reap the spoils of torture and industrialised genocide to further their own technological development.
By the way.... you forgot Heinrich Heine in your list who spoke the words "There where people burn books, they will soon burn humans"