German police arrest 22 in neo-Nazi internet raid

[tater]

Originally Posted by Penguin

Though Germany started an attack war, many soldiers thought they were defending their country and were fighting for a just cause.

They were not fighting for a just cause. The Confederates might have thought they were fighting for a just cause, but they were wrong. They were fighting for the right to own human beings. The Germans—all of them—were fighting for the right to murder people based on surname. They may have deluded themselves otherwise, but that's what it boiled down to.

This fact is the true horror of Nazi Germany. If millions were fooled by a few it is a lot less scary that millions of people who were otherwise decent people enabling (or actively participating in) genocide. The pattern appears in other genocide/democide as well. Regular people doing horrible things.

Failure to recognize this is a real problem if the goal is to not let genocide happen going forward. Placing the blame on a tiny handful and ignoring the culpability of the masses of active and passive enablers is dangerous.

Personal accounts by anyone who has an interest in not looking like an accomplice to genocide (which is virtually everyone) are suspect, and must be filtered under the assumption they will try and minimize their culpability.

Note that I similarly impugn my own country WRT slavery, which was also horrific.

So you're telling me that later in the war the USSR didn't invade Germany? Allied forces didn't invade Italy? D-Day never took place?
Later in the war Allied planes bombed the hell out of German cities. So it was most certainly defending yes.
And even when on the attack, you can still fight for your fatherland.

Again Darkfish, you lacking some history knowledge. USSR was attacked by Germans in 1941, not the other way around, German launch the first attack on England and Germans bomb the hell out of Poland. What exactly did you expect? That everyone will accept fuhrer idiology and raise a white flag. According to some its probably a gooottttttt idea. Suit very well for cowards.

[tater]

The CCCP was a co-beligerant with Germany in Poland. Dunno why they get a pass for that. Had germany not invaded, they would have happily been part of the problem as they were in 1939. The UK and France were most in the right in 1939, period (including the isolationist, neutral US). They put it all on the line for another country attacked by TWO great powers. Oddly, they didn't also declare vs the Soviets who were just as guilty, IMHO.

The decision cost France quite a lot (people forget how very many French were lost in the BoF, even though they folder quickly).

[HunterICX]

^Let's not forget the Invasion of Finland by the CCCP.

HunterICX

[DarkFish]

Originally Posted by Dimitrius07

Are you going to answer my question or not?

You're talking to me? I thought your question wasn't too hard to answer yourself:

Originally Posted by Dimitrius07

And what is your POINT? What are you trying to say by "nothing to do" and "Nothing at all".

but if you don't get it, let me help you.
Hitler didn't start a war to exterminate Jews. He could have done that without a war. Hitler started the war for a number of reasons, "Lebensraum" being one of them, Jews being none of them.

[Penguin]

Originally Posted by Penguin
Though Germany started an attack war, many soldiers thought they were defending their country and were fighting for a just cause.

Originally Posted by tater

They were not fighting for a just cause.

The word "thought" refers also to the last part of the sentence. I meant: thought they were fighting. I will change my original post to avoid room for misinterpretations. Can't really write more atm, gotta eat and then leave, will reply tomorrow to the rest.

[DarkFish]

Originally Posted by Dimitrius07

Again Darkfish, you lacking some history knowledge. USSR was attacked by Germans in 1941, not the other way around, German launch the first attack on England and Germans bomb the hell out of Poland. What exactly did you expect? That everyone will accept fuhrer idiology and raise a white flag. According to some its probably a gooottttttt idea. Suit very well for cowards.

Ehm it's you lacking historical knowledge:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_berlin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Berlin_%28air%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western...ion_of_Germany
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing...n_World_War_II

Sure, the Germans were the aggressors. But that doesn't mean they didn't get attacked in the end.

[MH]

Originally Posted by DarkFish

Ehm it's you lacking historical knowledge:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_berlin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Berlin_%28air%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western...ion_of_Germany
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing...n_World_War_II

Sure, the Germans were the aggressors. But that doesn't mean they didn't get attacked in the end.

Common you gotta be kiddin me.....

[tater]

Originally Posted by Penguin

The word "thought" refers also to the last part of the sentence. I meant: thought they were fighting. I will change my original post to avoid room for misinterpretations. Can't really write more atm, gotta eat and then leave, will reply tomorrow to the rest.

I understood it fine. That's why I said the US Confederates might have thought they were fighting for a good reason, but they were in fact wrong, they were fighting for a crappy reason.

Being deluded isn't an excuse, otherwise. Confederates fought to preserve the right to own other human beings, Germans in WW2 fought to preserve the right to murder other human beings. Both are true regardless of what they might have "thought" they were fighting for.

Originally Posted by DarkFish

Ehm it's you lacking historical knowledge:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_berlin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Berlin_%28air%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western...ion_of_Germany
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing...n_World_War_II

Sure, the Germans were the aggressors. But that doesn't mean they didn't get attacked in the end.

And why they were attacked you think? Maybe because Germany start this war as i mentioned before. The other reason is because Germany refuse to surrender even after they knew that all is lost, you also can find information about it. So i don`t see any point of you showing historycal operations which happend mostly on the late stages of war.

[Gerald]

which was previously included in "this thread"

Originally Posted by DarkFish

You're talking to me? I thought your question wasn't too hard to answer yourself:
but if you don't get it, let me help you.
Hitler didn't start a war to exterminate Jews. He could have done that without a war. Hitler started the war for a number of reasons, "Lebensraum" being one of them, Jews being none of them.

So you jump from "Nazi Germany is not so bad" to my nationality again. I am not sure you following me, but whatever.
Also how this is posible:

Hitler didn't start a war to exterminate Jews. He could have done that without a war.

I rest my case on this one .

[Skybird]

In Wikipedia's entry on Denazification, I found an interesting passage that may highlight why simplifying things the way Dimitrius and Tater are doing it, most likely is no adequate description of the true realities back then.
Even those believing in Nazism, most likely did so for a variety of motives and believes, motivated by different understandings of what it was and what was done in the name of it. That'S why I differenciate - like I also do in case of Islam - between the real content of the fixed-on-paper ideology, and the huge variety of different understandings of what the term means, sometimes in conformity, sometimes in violation, sometimes in reduction or misunderstanding of the conception that is behind the term identifying the ideology.

Again, all this is not in excuse of true Nazis and war criminals, of course. Again, Nazism is an evil, inhumane ideology, and the more a person fully submits to it in full knowledge and awareness of it's facts, the more guilty this person becomes.

Surveys





The U.S. conducted opinion surveys in occupied Germany. Tony Judt in his book Postwar : a History of Europe since 1945 extracted and used some of them.[34]

• A majority in the years 1945-49 stated National Socialism to have been a good idea, badly applied.
• In 1946, 6% of Germans said the Nuremberg trials had been unfair.
• In 1946, 37% in the U.S. occupation zone said about the Holocaust that "the extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was necessary for the security of Germans."
• In 1946, 1 in 3 in the U.S. occupation zone said that Jews should not have the same rights as those belonging to the Aryan race.
• In 1950, 1 in 3 said the Nuremberg trials had been unfair.
• In 1952, 37% said Germany was better off without the Jews.
• In 1952, 25% had a good opinion of Hitler.

However, in Hitler, Germans, and the 'Jewish Question,' Sarah Ann Gordon notes the difficulty of drawing conclusions from the surveys. For example, respondents were given three alternatives from which to choose, as in question 1:
StatementPercentage agreeingHitler was right in his treatment of the Jews:0%Hitler went too far in his treatment of the Jews, but something had to be done to keep them in bounds:19%The actions against the Jews were in no way justified:77%
To the question of whether an Aryan who marries a Jew should be condemned, 91% responded "No". To the question of whether "All those who ordered the murder of civilians or participated in the murdering should be made to stand trial," 94% responded "Yes".[35] Gordon singles out the question "Extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was not necessary for the security of the Germans", which included an implicit double negative to which the response was either yes or no. She concludes that this question was confusingly phrased:

Some interviewees may have responded "no" they did not agree with the statement, when they actually did agree that the extermination was not necessary.[36]

She further highlights the discrepancy between the antisemitic implications of the survey results (such as those later identified by Judt) with the 77% percent of interviewees who responded that actions against Jews were in no way justified.[36].

Gordon states that if the 77 percent result is to be believed then an "overwhelming majority" of Germans disapproved of extermination, and if the 37 percent result is believed to be correct then over one third of Germans were willing to exterminate Poles and Jews and others for German security[36]. She concludes that the phrasing of the question on German security lowers the confidence in the later interpretation.[36].
Gordon follows this with another survey where interviewees were asked if Nazism was good or bad (53% chose bad) and reasons for their answer. Among the nine possible choices on why it was bad, 21% chose the effects on the German people before the war, while 3-4 percent chose the answer "race policy, atrocities, pogroms"[36] However, Gordon highlight the issue that it is difficult to pin-down at which point in time respondents became aware of the exterminations, before or after they were interviewed. e.g. questionaire reports indicate that a sinificant minority had no knowledge until the Nuremberg trials. She also notes that when confronted with the exterminations there was an element of denial, disbelief, and confusion. Asked about concentration camps, very few Germans associated them with the jews, leading to the conclusion that they did not understand how they had been used against the Jews during the war and instead continued to think of them as they were before the war, the place where political opponents to the Nazis were kept. "This naivete is only understandable if large numbers of Germans were truly ignorant of the existance of these camps".[37] A British study on the same attitudes concluded that

"Those who said National Socialism was a good idea pointed to social welfare plans, the lack of unemployment, the great construction plans of the Nazis....Nearly all those who thought it a good idea nevertheless rejected Nazi racial theories and disagreed with the inhumanity of the concentration camps and the 'SS'.[37]

Sarah Gordon writes that a majority of Germans appeared to approve of nonviolent removal of Jews from civil service and professions and German life.[36]. The German public also accepted the Nuremberg laws because they thought they would act as stabilizers and end violence against Jews.[37] The German public had as a result of the Nazi antisemitic propaganda hardened their attitudes between 1935 and 1938 from the originally fairly favorable. By 1938 the propaganda had had effect and antisemitic policies were accepted, provided no violence was involved.[37] The Kristallnacht caused German opposition to antisemitism to peak, with the vast majority of Germans rejecting the violence and destruction, and many Germans aiding the jews.[37] The Nazis responded by intimidation in order to discourage oposition, those aiding jews were victims of large scale arrests and intimidation.[37] With the start of the war the anti semitic minority that approved of restrictions on Jewish domestic activities was growing, but there is no evidence that the general public had any acceptance for labor camps or extermination.[37] And as the number of antisemites grew, so too did the number of Germans opposed to racial persecution, and rumors of deportations and shootings in the east led to snowballing critizism of the Nazis. Gordon states that "one can probably conclude that labor camps, concentration camps, and extermination were opposed by a majority of Germans."[37]
Gordon concludes her analysis on German public opinion based German SD-reports during the war and the Allied questionnaires during the occupation, with:

..it would appear that a majority of Germans supported elimination of Jews from the civil service; quotas on Jews in professions, academic institutions, and commercial fields; restrictions on intermarriage; and voluntary emigration of Jews. However, the rabid antisemites' demands for violent boycotts, illegal expropriation, destruction of Jewish property, pogroms, deportation, and extermination were probably rejected by a majority of Germans. They apparently wanted to restrict Jewish rights substantially, but not to annihilate Jews.[37]

In Wikipedia's entry on Denazification, I found an interesting passage that may highlight why simplifying things the way Dimitrius and Tater are doing it,

Sorry Skybird but you wrong! I don`t need Wikipedia to defend my position againts people who don`t like the some of the historycal facts. In deep i feel like someone is really bored here or something

So you say that Hitler wasnt surrounded by mass hysteria love from Germans he did not march into Austria as a great leader of German race?

Did I?
Oh of course thats what I said as is demonstrated by me not saying it.

He had opposition but he also had won most of average Germans.to his side which was his first priority before making any moves.

If he had most germans before he started making moves then why was he making moves as soon as he got a minority of the vote?