Favorite History To Learn About

Oh yeah, for sure. My grandaddys even spoke of such dishonor where a man would not pick up a rifle and fight for the Reich! :cuss:

Also, I've read/seen documentaries on the Vietnam war where peace movements and all that a garbage were around in the states at the time. Kinda like Forest Gump hehe. And some guys refused to fight. Thing is, I'm not entirely certain if the Vietnam war was a conscription on US citizens? I can only assume it was for men not to fight?

 

Yes... The draft was in effect during Vietnam.

 

Nice, I am definitely a hex and counter wargamer. Even though I am a computer programmer I prefer to play on paper. There is just something so neat about poring over old maps, like a general in a war room.

Quite a few of my relatives fought in the second world war. My grandfather and all of his brothers fought. Between them they fought in the Pacific, North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France. One of my great uncles went up against the 12th SS Hitlerjugend. I've never actually met any German WWII veterans but I did recently read an extensive collection of war diary entries and interviews from Wermacht soldiers who survived the Stalingrad kessel. An unbelievable read.

This appears to be a problem throughout history. My great uncle who fought in North Africa in WWII said that he had to strike a few soldiers to get them to start shooting back at the Germans.

Regarding the American Civil War I have heard the same references and they do appear to be credible. This is one topic that really interests me, the different ways in which people react to being in combat. Some people talk about being sick for hours or days after their first kill. Others talk about feeling a great sense of pride upon their first kill. Still others say it didn't really affect them until after the killing had stopped. There is a documentary called Last Heroes of the Second World War (and although the special effects are a little overdone) many of the people interviewed spoke about their first kills. Crazy stuff.

 

I thought it must have been.

Another great read is if anyone is interested is... Oh man I cannot remember the name, but the cover is a skull from memory. Red. Something like "The Devils Lair" or similar.

Anyway it's about the German SS soldiers who after WW2 were war criminals. The French took the elite soldiers in their army. When the French fought in Vietnam before the US became involved, many of the troops were actually German SS soldiers. The French said their discipline was unbelievable and no wonder they were such hard competition on the Eastern front of Europe.

But alas, the landscape, the jungle became too much for the SS troops. But what's interesting about it all, is no matter how much you read "Germans are bad etc." they were saved by so many allied countries. For instance my Grandaddy in the East, High Ranked officer in Panzer Divisions, the Irish took him in after the way. The French took others. The Americans pillaged others. Trialled for war crime? Nope. Too good of a soldier for that. But that's not something you'll read in a high school manual.

I'm not a Nazi sympathizer though I'm always being called that on this site. It's just, I've heard stories first hand and bits and pieces of literature confirm what I've been told. Although the Nazis ideology was nasty, it wasn't actually always them that followed through with it. A lot of Europe backed them, mostly for profit, but that's almost just as bad.

Another interesting piece of information about the SS was that Himmler had acquired many foreign soldiers to fight for the Reich. Even Muslim divisions made from volunteers fought in the SS. Now doesn't that throw a racial ideology out the window? Let that sink in. Muslim SS divisions. Now although the Germans led the blitzkrieg, they were the ones on the front line, most of the war crimes were committed by non Germans. I've said few times before, take a look at the attitudes of the Lithuanians, the Latvians and Estonians of that era. They were more than happy, willingly happy to mop up Russian Jews and POWs without a second thought. Even after the war into the 50s, these countries fought the Red Army. There's a lot of bad blood in Eastern Europe concerning Russia.

Now I think most POW, concentration and death camps were manned by German folk. Those atrocities on our hands for sure. But not everything you read or hear.

 

I'd think that you'd feel the recoil if it fired, and on an old time musket that would be some kick. But I could be wrong.

Maybe a persons reaction might be determined to some extent by their belief or lack of belief in their cause - I'm only speculating here, but it seems possible. I saw an interview once with one of the US pilots who flew one of the planes that sank a Japanese destroyer at Midway. He said he felt like a god when he saw their bomb hit. That was a man who was certain of the rightness of what he did.
But I'm sure there are some who are simply not cut out for any kind of combat. I'm way too old to be a soldier, so I'll never know for sure, but I think if I was genuinely fighting to protect my own life or that of my family I'd go ahead and pull the trigger. Damned if I'd fight in someone else's political war though.

 

Many of the British upper classes were very sympathetic to Hitler, including the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, who was forced to abdicate in 1936 after only a few months as sovereign.. His wish to marry an American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, is usually cited as the reason, but it's highly possible that the government saw conflict with Germany coming, thought he was too close to the Nazis, and forced him to abdicate mainly because of that. Of course the British public couldn't know that
The plan drawn up by Germany for the occupation of Britain after an invasion included putting him back on the throne. A telling fact I think.

The camps were a serious crime against humanity - on that I won't budge a millimetre. But if Germany had won? Who knows. In the long run it might have been better.(not for Jews of course) Soviet communism crushed - no cold war, Korea, Vietnam. Europe unified. The Nazi empire would have been bigger and had more resources than the USA. The entire course of history would have been very different.

Edit:sp.

 

Well, we'd all be driving VWs (like I do now) and I think our technology and medicine would be more advanced. But that's just me. Hitler also had a plan to give Israel back to the Jewish people but then I've read he also had plans to move them into Madagascar. That dude was fucked up on drugs, I don't even think he knew what he was doing. Terrible commander. He did exactly what he said he wouldn't do, create a two front war that ended up being all fronts. Huge mistake.

On my way back from America I picked up a pocket edition of a The Art Of War, by the Chinese guy I think. Everything that guy wrote, seems Hitler went the opposite. He really needed to read that book. I know he was a knowledgable reader, but he needed to read or re--read that book before doing what he did.

 

'Hitler couldn't stand still, Stalin knew how to sit, as only a peasant knows how to sit' - William S. Burroughs.

If only Hitler could have waited a few years.

But he was an extremely incompetent commander,and that's why I always dismiss any comparison of Adolph with Napoleon. In that last film, where he's inspecting the children who are to defend Berlin, he looks like one who has entirely lost the plot. Maybe it's the amphetamines.

It has emerged that the SOE, the British intelligence service in the war, had decided against any plan to assassinate him because of his incompetence. He was more of an asset alive than dead.
From what I know about military history, I'd say that he threw away one of the finest military machines the world has seen, and all because of his huge blind egotism and insistence on micro-management. I don't think the word 'strategy' was even in his dictionary. He ought to have left it to his generals.

Even then, our Monty kicked the ass of the Afrika Corps with Rommel commanding. But as Hitler said 'the British are not our natural enemies'.

 

Downfall, the movie? Der Untergang.

I thought that was a great portrayal of Hitler. Great movie really.

The English made a Rise of Hilter. Is laughable. Lol.

 

Really an incredible movie. The guy who played Hitler was just right - as good as it's ever going to get.

The British love to laugh at Hitler - goes back to the post war period, less common now.
As a person who is a real mix genetically - english, welsh, french , irish, I'm not your typical briton though. My tendency has always been to see Britain as the villain - but that's because of my anti-establishment hippie roots as well as the gene mix, which actually was forced by the first world war. So I'm a child, or more properly, a grandchild of war in one way, and more specifically a child of the war between our two nations. My aim is ideally to make everyone my friends, no matter their history or race.

 

Personally, I side with the Irish, Scots, Welshman over the English.

I know Braveheart is riddled with historic innaccuracy and a perception that William Wallace only hated the English for murdering his wife, romanticized rubbish, but still, I hate the English because of that movie.

 

A very mixed lot the English. One one hand you have the vicious oppressors of the Irish and the Scots, (Welsh too), a nation whose history is soaked in blood from 2 big civil wars and countless imperialist conflicts. The slave trade under the British Empire was probably as bad as anything Himmler and his underlings came up with. The British establishment is a vile and depraved beast that feeds on the deaths of children whilst it sips champagne at the races, gambles in money earned from illegal arms deals with Islamic tyrants in the most casual and self congratulatory manner - It's beyond my capacity to express at this late hour the utter contempt I have for those people. In terms of the genetic make up I described you can see it's 3 to 1 against. But I was born here and aculturated here, and there are some advantages to that.

Then there's the Britain of Isaac Newton, Charles Dickens, James Watt, Shakespeare, John Lennon, Joe Strummer, Mary Shelley,Clement Atley and a whole host of other great people the islands have produced. Of that I think anyone could feel some justifiable pride. But if I'm totally honest, I don't feel much pride, because for me it's outweighed by the negatives. Other than Newton,who was a Jew and therefore an outsider anyway, all the others I thought of off the cuff were somewhat anti-establishment.

Similar to Germany with all the best composers right up to modern times,(other than Tchaikovsky) writers like Goethe, Mann, Schiller, Hesse, Grass, all the great scientists etc, vs. Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler, and some other minor tyrants.

 

It says a lot that that isn't even the worst film Mel Gibson has ever starred in in terms of totally re-writing history in order to demonise the English. Compared to the patriot it is at least only laughable rather than legitimately offensive.

 

Newton wasn't Jewish, but he was a puritan which would have made him an outsider anyway, a status cemented by his possibly having some form of autism (or by just being "that guy" at college who experiments with light refraction by pushing needles into his eyes). As an Englishman, I tend to feel neither pride at the achievements of Englishmen of the past, or shame at their failings and wrongdoings. I'm generally mistrustful of nationalism and patriotism, but recognize that I am unavoidably a product of my country and those who came before me, for better or for worse.

 

I'm not sure I can entirely agree with that, One of the biggest mistakes Hitler ever made was banning Jews from holding academic or scientific positions in Germany and demonising all of Einstein's teachings as "Jewish science". Considering that he would most likely extend this ruling to all conquered territories, a German win would mean missing out on all of the scientific contributions from Jews in the 20th century. Good luck putting a man on the moon without them Not to mention contributions to fields like quantum physics, the atomic bomb, anthropology and psychoanalysis to name but a few.

 

Completely and utterly false. The atrocities committed by ordinary German Wermacht personnel are among the most well established and documented historical facts you will ever come across. And of course regular German soldiers were committing atrocities long before the Second World War. It is also important to realize that the einsatzgruppen were composed largely of Wermacht volunteers.

 

Keep studying, boy.

 

Yeah but where has any of that actually gotten us in life? The moon landing? Debatable. Operation Paperclip, weren't Jewish scientists. The American space program was the German space and rocket program. Hard to deny. With all the book burnings and banned teachings you mention, the Reich did pretty well without it on the technological aspect of the war. They actually even went back to basic, downgraded technology to make it more efficient like the Stürmgeschutz, turretless tanks. T-42 dunno what hit them. I think the war would have been different too had the Panther been rolled out in full production but it was useless at that point, only minimal numbers were rolled into battle, though the Tiger II stood its ground reasonably well. I love the Tiger II, it's such a brick. I've been in a few, had my grandaddy take me for a ride once.

The atomic bomb, hell, Hitler already had that sewn up but again it was too late, so the production was tossed. He needed it soon, now but it would take too long, project abandoned, uranium sunk to the bottom of lakes. The V2 rocket! I'm not sure if it was invented with Jewish knowledge. I'd assume not?

Medicine may have been created etc. later in the 19th century, but I believe although in horrible circumstances, the world learned a lot from the atrocities in camps. Terrible, unthinkable ways to die and torture, but we learned a lot. It wasn't just scientists as a protected species after the war, medics too.

Has anyone read into the "Bell" that supposed scientists created to travel to different dimensions etc? How cool would that have been if it existed lol.

One of the things I like about the Reich was its motivation towards mythology on Himmlers part. Himmler loved the Norse, which I think is amusing considering he never looked Nordic, and hard to call him a warrior or Wiking. But the SS were designed around a lot of the mythology. Hitler dismissed it has nothing more than a good stage play, but I love the architectural ideas that Spear came up with, a fortress, castle of sorts, replicating medieval and mythological cities.