Quote:
Originally Posted by Randomizer
One question about the whole affair that nobody ever seems to ask is: "Would KL Hartenstein have commenced rescue operations had Laconia not been chock full of Italian POWs, Italy being Germany's ally at that time?"
- Fair question, I'm sure it has been asked before, perhaps not here, guess we will never know since we don't know what sort of a person Hartenstein was.......i would assume that by the time he found out about that, that he would also have been aware possibly that there were also British and Polish onboard as well, which may, and I do stress may indicate something......
If so, why? She had been a troop ship and so a legitimate target for attack without warning.
If not, why not? Once a person goes into the water, from a life-saving perspective it matters not at all how they got there or what their nationality might be.
- Guess without "beating all the for and againsts to death", we can really only assume that Hartenstein was the sort of human being that had compassion to all human beings, ie was one of those "good guys", a bit like Rommel (I would "like" to believe that).
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On the flipside, we can pose the question about the pilot of the bomber...what sort of a "person" was he? (and i'm certainly not being sarcastic or "against" the pilot, only genuinely asking the question, as it seems throughout history more have been asked of Hartenstein than of the bomber pilot)
Was there any sense of "regret" and "compassion" either at the time of the bombings or years later?
I would assume so.
I am treading carefully here, as I do in most things in life, and it seems to me that the real reason that this incident is so controversial is that Karl Doenitz was actually charged with a war crime over the "giving" of the Laconia order (i won't go into that as we all know what that order was), and he received 11 and a half years for that.......even though the U.S also "practiced" similar actions in relation to the refusal for want of a better word to pick up and/or initiate rescue actions in Submarines.
Anyway, this is not intended to come across as a history lesson, far from it, it's purely a view point, based on hystorical facts, and once again all i can "see" from this most unfortunate incident is that at the end of the day, human error was involved, and that this led to the loss of many lives, however also that it was attempted to rectify this error in the best possible way to save lives, and should there be questions and hypotheticals posed as to why this was done? Let's (and I say this with the fullest respect to those that lost their lives) see it for what it was......the acknowledgement of a mistake and the attempt to save lives.