Whatever Spliff. Anyways that was an interesting article about Hitler's so-called vegetarianism. Everyone should check that out!
quote: One thing we Germans did not forget just like the jews do was Dresden. My grandpa saw that from the air while he was bombing another city, pulled the pins out of the bombs, then aimed and let them fly.....bombed Germany 25 times and helped end the most evil regime to ever rule in modern times. If the nazi's rise again in my lifetime, I would join up and do the same thing....the most justified war in history.
I find Ernst Rohm much more intresting than Hitler and it was Ernst who put Hitler in power it was also Ernst Rohm who united the german army no so much hitler . if there was man Hitler fear it was Ernst Rohm. [size=+2]The Night of the Long Knives[/size] [size=+0]The four million brown shirted Nazi storm troopers, the SA (Sturmabteilung), included many members who actually believed in the 'socialism' of National Socialism and also wanted to become a true revolutionary army in place of the regular German Army. [/size] But to the regular Army High Command and its conservative supporters, this potential storm trooper army represented a threat to centuries old German military traditions and the privileges of rank. Adolf Hitler had been promising the generals for years he would restore their former military glory and break the "shackles" of the Treaty of Versailles which limited the Army to 100,000 men and prevented modernization. For Adolf Hitler, the behavior of the SA was a problem that now threatened his own political survival and the entire future of the Nazi movement. The anti-capitalist, anti-tradition sentiments often expressed by SA leaders and echoed by the restless masses of storm troopers also caused great concern to big industry leaders who had helped put Hitler in power. Hitler had promised them he would put down the trade union movement and Marxists, which he had done. However, now his own storm troopers with their talk of a 'second revolution' were sounding more and more like Marxists themselves. (The first revolution having been the Nazi seizure of power in early 1933.) The SA was headed by Ernst Röhm, a battle scarred, aggressive, highly ambitious street brawler who had been with Hitler from the very beginning. Röhm and the SA had been very instrumental in Hitler's rise to power by violently seizing control of the streets and squashing Hitler's political opponents. However, by early 1934, a year after Hitler came to power, the SA's usefulness as a violent, threatening, revolutionary force had effectively come to an end. Hitler now needed the support of the regular Army generals and the big industry leaders to rebuild Germany after the Great Depression, re-arm the military and ultimately accomplish his long range goal of seizing more living space for the German people. The average German also feared and disliked the SA brownshirts with their arrogant, gangster-like behavior, such as extorting money from local shop owners, driving around in fancy news cars showing off, often getting drunk, beating up and even murdering innocent civilians. At the end of February, 1934, Hitler held a meeting attended by SA and regular Army leaders including Röhm and German Defense Minister General Werner von Blomberg. At this meeting Hitler informed Röhm the SA would not be a military force in Germany but would be limited to certain political functions. In Hitler's presence, Röhm gave in and even signed an agreement with Blomberg. However, Röhm soon let it be know he had no intention of keeping to the agreement. In April he even boldly held a press conference and proclaimed, "The SA is the National Socialist Revolution!!" Within the SA at this time was a highly disciplined organization known as the SS (Shutzstaffel) which had been formed in 1925 as Hitler's personal body guard. SS chief Heinrich Himmler along with his second-in-command, Reinhard Heydrich, and Hermann Göring, began plotting against Röhm to prod Hitler into action against his old comrade, hoping to gain from Röhm's downfall. On June 4, Hitler and Röhm had a five hour private meeting lasting until midnight. A few days later Röhm announced he was taking a 'personal illness' vacation and the whole SA would go on leave for the month of July. He also convened a conference of top SA leaders for June 30 at a resort town near Munich which Hitler promised to attend to sort things out. On June 17, Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, who had helped Hitler become Chancellor, stunned everyone by making a speech criticizing the rowdy, anti-intellectual behavior of the SA and denouncing Nazi excesses such as strict press censorship. Papen also focused on the possibility of a 'second revolution' by Röhm and the SA and urged Hitler to put a stop to it. "Have we experienced an anti-Marxist revolution in order to put through a Marxist program?" Papen asked. His speech drastically increased the tension between German Army leaders and SA leaders and further jeopardized Hitler's position. But for the moment Hitler hesitated to move against his old comrade Röhm. A few days later, June 21, Hitler went to see German President Paul von Hindenburg at his country estate. Hindenburg was in failing health and now confined to a wheelchair. Hitler met with the Old Gentleman and Defense Minister Blomberg and was stiffly informed the SA problem must be solved or the president would simply declare martial law and let the German Army run the country, effectively ending the Nazi regime. Meanwhile, Himmler and Heydrich spread false rumors that Röhm and the SA were planning a violent takeover of power (putsch). On June 25, the German Army was placed on alert, leaves canceled and the troops confined to the barracks. An agreement had been secretly worked out between Himmler and Army generals ensuring cooperation between the SS and the Army during the coming action against the SA. The Army would provide weapons and any necessary support, but would remain in the barracks and let the SS handle things. On Thursday, June 28, Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels attended the wedding of Gauleiter Josef Terboven in Essen. Hitler was informed by phone that he faced the possibility of a putsch by Röhm's forces and also faced the possibility of a revolt by influential conservative non-Nazis who wanted Hindenburg to declare martial law and throw out Hitler and his government. Hitler then sent Göring back to Berlin to get ready to put down the SA and conservative government leaders there. The SS was put on full alert. Friday, June 29, Hitler made a scheduled inspection tour of a labor service camp and then went to a hotel near Bonn for the night. He was informed by Himmler that evening by phone that SA troops in Munich knew about the coming action and had taken to the streets. Hitler decided to fly to Munich to put down the SA rebellion and confront Röhm and top SA leaders who were gathered at the resort town of Bad Wiessee near Munich. Arriving in Munich near dawn, Saturday, June 30, Hitler first ordered the arrest of the SA men who were inside Munich Nazi headquarters, then proceeded to the Ministry of the Interior building where he confronted the top SA man in Munich after his arrest, even tearing off his insignia in a fit of hysteria. Next it was on to Röhm. A column of troops and cars containing Hitler, Rudolf Hess, and others, sped off toward Röhm and his men. At this point, the story is often told (partly conceived by the Nazis) of Hitler arriving at the resort hotel about 6:30 a.m. and rushing inside with a pistol to arrest Röhm and other SA leaders. However it is more likely the hotel was first secured by the SS before Hitler went near it. Hitler then confronted Röhm and the others and sent them to Stadelheim prison outside Munich to be later shot by the SS. An exception was made in the case of Edmund Heines, an SA leader who had been found in bed with a young man. When told of this, Hitler ordered his immediate execution at the hotel. A number of the SA leaders, including Röhm, were homosexuals. Prior to the purge, Hitler for the most part ignored their behavior because of their usefulness to him during his rise to power. However, their usefulness and Hitler's tolerance had now come to an end. Later, their homosexual conduct would be partly used as an excuse for the murders. Saturday morning about 10 a.m. a phone call was placed from Hitler in Munich to Göring in Berlin with the prearranged code word 'Kolibri' (hummingbird) that unleashed a wave of murderous violence in Berlin and over 20 other cities. SS execution squads along with Göring's private police force roared through the streets hunting down SA leaders and anyone on the prepared list of political enemies (known as the Reich List of Unwanted Persons). Included on the list: Gustav von Kahr, who had opposed Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 - found hacked to death in a swamp near Dachau; Father Bernhard Stempfle, who had taken some of the dictation for Hitler's book Mein Kampf and knew too much about Hitler - shot and killed; Kurt von Schleicher, former Chancellor of Germany and master of political intrigue, who had helped topple democracy in Germany and put Hitler in power - shot and killed along with his wife; Gregor Strasser, one of the original members of the Nazi Party and formerly next in importance to Hitler; Berlin SA leader Karl Ernst, who was involved in torching the Reichstag building in February, 1933; Vice-Chancellor Papen's press secretary; Catholic leader Dr. Erich Klausener. Saturday evening, Hitler flew back to Berlin and was met at the airport by Himmler and Göring in a scene later described by Hans Gisevius, a Gestapo official, present. "On his way to the fleet of cars, which stood several hundred yards away, Hitler stopped to converse with Göring and Himmler. Apparently he could not wait a few minutes until he reached the Chancellery?From one of his pockets Himmler took out a long, tattered list. Hitler read it through, while Göring and Himmler whispered incessantly into his ear. We could see Hitler's finger moving slowly down the sheet of paper. Now and then it paused for a moment at one of the names. At such times the two conspirators whispered even more excitedly. Suddenly Hitler tossed his head. There was so much violent emotion, so much anger in the gesture, that everybody noticed it?Finally they moved on, Hitler in the lead, followed by Göring and Himmler. Hitler was still walking with the same sluggish tread. By contrast, the two blood drenched scoundrels at his side seemed all the more lively?" As for Ernst Röhm - on Hitler's order he had been given a pistol containing a single bullet to commit suicide, but refused to do it, saying "If I am to be killed let Adolf do it himself." Two SS officers, one of whom was Theodore Eicke, commander of the Totenkopf (Death's Head) guards at Dachau, entered Röhm's cell after waiting fifteen minutes and shot him point blank. Reportedly, Röhm's last words were "Mein Führer, mein Führer!" On Sunday evening, July 1, while some of the shooting was still going on, Hitler gave a tea party in the garden of the Chancellery for cabinet members and their families to give the appearance things were getting back to normal. By 4 a.m., Monday, July 2, the bloody purge had ended. The exact number of murders is unknown since all Gestapo documents relating to the purge were destroyed. Estimates vary widely from 200 or 250, to as high as 1,000 or more. Less than half of those murdered were actually SA officers. In one case, a man named Willi Schmidt was at home playing the cello. Four SS men rang the doorbell, entered and took him away, leaving his wife and three young children behind. They had mistaken Dr. Willi Schmidt, music critic for a Munich newspaper, for another Willi Schmidt on the list. Dr. Schmidt was assassinated and his body later returned to his family in a sealed coffin with orders from the Gestapo that it should not be opened. On July 13, Hitler gave a long speech to the Nazi controlled Reichstag (Parliament) in which he announced seventy four had been shot and justified the murders. "If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people." "It was no secret that this time the revolution would have to be bloody; when we spoke of it we called it 'The Night of the Long Knives.' Everyone must know for all future time that if he raises his hand to strike the State, then certain death is his lot." By proclaiming himself the supreme judge of the German people, Hitler in effect placed himself above the law, making his word the law, and thus instilled a permanent sense of fear in the German people. The German Army generals, by condoning the unprecedented events of the Night of the Long Knives, effectively cast their lot with Hitler and began the long journey with him that would eventually lead them to the brink of world conquest and later to the hanging docks at Nuremberg after the war. A few weeks after the purge, Hitler rewarded the SS for its role by raising the SS to independent status as an organization no longer part of the SA. Leader of the SS, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler now answered to Hitler and no one else. Reinhard Heydrich was promoted to SS Gruppenführer (Lieutenant-General). From this time on, the SA brownshirts would be diminished and all but disappear eventually as its members were inducted into the regular Army after Hitler re-introduced military conscription in 1935. The SS organization under Himmler and Heydrich would greatly expand and become Hitler's instrument of mass murder and terror throughout the remaining history of the Third Reich, another eleven years.
The beginning of the Nazi terror against homosexuals was marked by the murder of Ernst Rohm on June 30, 1934: "the Night of the Long Knives. "Rohm was the man who, in 1919, first made Hitler aware of his own political potential, and the two were close friends for fifteen years. During that time, Rohm rose to SA Chief of Staff, transforming the Brownshirt militia from a handful of hardened goons and embittered ex-soldiers into an effective fighting force five hundred thousand strong -- the instrument of Nazi terror. Hitler needed Rohm's military skill and could rely on his personal loyalty, but he was ultimately a pragmatist. As part of a compromise with the Reichwehr (regular army) leadership, whose support he needed to become Fuhrer, Hitler allowed Goring and Himmler to murder Rohm along with dozens of Rohm's loyal officers. For public relations purposes, and especially to quell the outrage felt throughout the ranks of the SA, Hitler justified his blatent power play by pointing to Rohm's homosexuality. Hitler, of course, had known of Rohm's homosexuality since 1919. amd it became public knowledge in 1925, when Rohm appeared in court to charge a hustler with theft. All this while the Nazi Party had a virulently anti-gay policy, and many Nazis protested that Rohm was discrediting the entire Party and should be purged. Hitler, however, was quite willing to cover up for him for years -- until he stood in the way of larger plans. * * * The Nazi Party came to power in 1933, and a year later Rohm was dead. While Rohm and his men were being rounded up for the massacre (offered a gun and the opportunity to shoot himself, Rohm retorted angrily: "Let Hitler do his own dirty work"), the new Chief of Staff received his first order from the Fuhrer: "I expect all SA leaders to help preserve and strengthen the SA in its capacity as a pure and cleanly institution. In particular, I should like every mother to be able to allow her son to join the SA, Party, and Hitler Youth without fear that he may become morally corrupted in their ranks. I therefore request all SA commanders to take the utmost pains to ensure that offences under Paragraph 175 are met by immediate expulsion of the culprit from the SA and the Party." Hitler had good reason to be concerned about the reputation of Nazi organizations, most of which were based on strict segregation of the sexes. Hitler Youth, for example, was disparagingly referred to as Homo Youth throughout the Third Reich, a characterization which the Nazi leadership vainly struggled to eliminate. Indeed, most of the handful of publications on homosexuality which appeared during the Fascist regime were devoted to new and rather bizarre methods of "detection" and "prevention." Rudolf Diels, the founder of the Gestapo, recorded some of Hitler's personal thoughts on the subject: "He lectured me on the role of homosexuality in history and politics. It had destroyed ancient Greece, he said. Once rife, it extended its contagious effects like an ineluctable law of nature to the best and most manly of characters, eliminating from the reproductive process precisely those men on whose offspring a nation depended. The immediate result of the vice was, however, that unnatural passion swiftly became dominant in public affairs if it were allowed to spread unchecked." * * * The tone had been set by the Rohm putsch, and on its first anniversary -- June 28, 1935, the campaign against homosexuality was escalated by the introduction of the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour." Until 1935, the only punishable offence had been anal intercourse; under the new Paragraph 175a, ten possible "acts" were punishable, including a kiss, an embrace, even homosexual fantasies! One man, for instance, was successfully prosecuted on the grounds that he had observed a couple making love in a park and watched only the man. Under the Nazi system, criminal acts were less important in determining guilt than criminal intent. The "phenomenological" theory of justice claimed to evaluate a person's character rather than his deeds. The "healthy sensibility of the people" (gesundes Volksempfinden) was elevated to the highest normative legal concept, and the Nazis were in a position to prosecute an individual solely on the grounds of his sexual orientation. (After World War II, incidentally, this law was immediately struck from the books in East Germany as a product of Fascist thinking, while it remained on the books in West Germany.) Once Paragraph 175a was in effect, the annual number of convictions on charges of homosexuality leaped to about ten times the number in the pre-Nazi period. The law was so loosely formulated that it could be -- and was -- applied against heterosexuals whom the Nazis wanted to eliminate. The most notorious example of an individual convicted on trumped-up charges was General Werner von Fritsch, Army Chief of Staff; and the law was also used repeatedly against members of the Catholic clergy. But the law was undoubtedly used primarily against gay people, and the court system was aided in the witchhunt by the entire German populace, which was encouraged to scrutinize the behaviour of neighbours and to denounce suspects to the Gestapo. The number of men convicted of homosexuality during the Nazi period totalled around fifty thousand: 1933: 853 1934: 948 1935: 2106 1936: 5320 1937: 8271 1938: 8562 1939: 7614 1940: 3773 1941: 3735 1942: 3963 1943: 966 (first quarter) 1944-45: ? The Gestapo was the agent of the next escalation of the campaign against homosexuality. Ex-chicken farmer Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer SS and head of the Gestapo, richly deserves a reputation as the nost fanatically homophobic member of the Nazi leadership. In 1936, he gave a speech on the subect of homosexuality and described the murder of Ernst Rohm (which he had engineered) in these terms: "Two years ago...when it became necessary, we did not scruple to strike this plague with death, even within our own ranks." Himmler closed with these words: "Just as we today have gone back to the ancient Germanic view on the question of marriage mixing different races, so too in our judgement of homosexuality -- a symptom of degeneracy which could destroy our race -- we must return to the guiding Nordic principle: extermination of degenerates." * * * A few months earlier, Himmler had prepared for action by reorganizing the entire state police into three divisions. The political executive, Division II, was directly responsible for the control of "illegal parties and organizations, leagues and economic groups, reactionaries and the Church, freemasonry, and homosexuality." Himmler personally favoured the immediate "extermination of degenerates," but he was empowered to order the summary execution only of homosexuals discovered within his own bureaucratic domain. Civilian offenders were merely required to serve out their prison sentences (although second offenders were subject to castration). In 1936, Himmler found a way around this obstacle. Following release from prison, all "enemies of the state" -- including homosexuals -- were to be taken into protective custody and detained indefinitely. "Protective custody" (Schutzhaft) was an euphemism for concentration camp internment. Himmler gave special orders that homosexuals be placed in Level Three camps -- the human death mills described by Neudegg. These camps were reserved for Jews and homosexuals. The official SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, announced in 1937 that there were two million German homosexuals and called for their death. The extent to which Himmler succeeded in this undertaking is unknown, but the number of homosexuals sent to camps was far in excess of the fifty thousand who served jail sentences. The Gestapo dispatched thousands to camps without a trial. Moreover, "protective custody" was enforced retroactively, so that any gay who had ever come to the attention of the police prior to the Third Reich was subject to immediate arrest. (The Berlin police alone had an index of more than twenty thousand homosexuals prior to the Nazi takeover.) And starting in 193 9, gays from Nazi-occupied countries were also interned in German camps. The chances for survival in a Level Three camp were low indeed. Homosexuals were distinguished from other prisoners by a pink triangle, worn on the left side of the jacket and on the right pant leg. There was no possibility of "passing" for straight, and the presence of "marked men" in the all-male camp population evoked the same reaction as in contemporary prisons: gays were brutally assaulted and sexually abused. * * * "During the first weeks of my imprisonment," wrote one survivor, "I often thought I was the only available target on whom everyone was free to vent his aggressions. Things improved when I was assigned to a labour detail that worked outside the camp at Metz, because everything took place in public view. I was made clerk of the labour detail, which meant that I worked all day and then looked after the records at the guardhouse between midnight and 2 am. Because of this 'overtime' I was allowed seconds at lunch -- if any food was left over. This is the fact to which I probably owe my survival...I saw quite a number of pink triangles. I don't know how they were eventually killed...One day they were simply gone." Concentration camp internment served a twofold purpose: the labour power of prisoners boosted the national economy significantly, and undesirables could be effectively liquidated by the simple expedient of reducing their food rations to a level slightly below subsistence. One survivor tells of witnessing "Project Pink" in his camp: "The homosexuals were grouped into liquidation commandos and placed under triple camp discipline. That meant less food, more work, stricter supervision. If a prisoner with a pink triangle became sick, it spelled his doom. Admission to the clinic was forbidden." This was the practice in the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen, Natzweler, Fuhlsbuttel, Neusustrum, Sonnenburg, Dachau, Lichtenberg, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck, Neuengamme, Grossrosen, Buchenwald, Vught, Flossenburg, Stutthof, Auschwitz, and Struthof; as well, lesbians wore pink triangles in the concentration camps at Butzow and Ravensbruck. In the final months of the war, the men with pink triangles received brief military training. They were to be sent out as cannon fodder in the last-ditch defence of the fatherland. But the death of other pink triangles came much more swiftly. A survivor gives this account: "He was a young and healthy man. The first evening roll call after he was added to our penal company was his last. When he arrived, he was seized and ridiculed, then beaten and kicked, and finally spat upon. He suffered alone and in silence. Then they put him under a cold shower. It was a frosty winter evening, and he stood outside the barracks all through that long, bitterly cold night. When morning came, his breathing had become an audible rattle. Bronchial pneumonia was later given as the cause of his death. But before things had come to that, he was again beaten and kicked. Then he was tied to a post and placed under an arc lamp until he began to sweat, again put under a cold shower, and so on. He died toward evening." Another survivor: "One should not forget that these men were honourable citizens, very often highly intellegent, and some had once held high positions in civil and social life. During his seven-year imprisonment, this writer became acquainted with a Prussian prince, famous athletes, professors, teachers, engineers, artisans, trade workers and, of course, hustlers. Not all of them were what one might term "respectable" people, to be sure, but the majority of them were helpless and completely lost in the world of the concentration camps. They lived in total isolation in whatever little bit of freedom they could find. I witnessed the tragedy of a highly cultured attache~ of a foreign embassy, who simply couldn't grasp the reality of the tragedies taking place all around him. Finally, in a state of deep deperation and hopelessness, he simply fell over dead for no apparent reason. I saw a rather effeminate young man who was repeatedly forced to dance infront of SS men, who would then put him on the rack -- chained hand and foot to a crossbeam in the guardhouse barracks -- and beat him in the most awful way. Even today I find it impossible to think back on all my comrades, all the barbarities, all the tortures, without falling into the deepest depression. I hope you will understand." The ruthlessness of the Nazis culminated in actions so perversely vindictive as to be almost incomprehensible. Six youths arrested for stealing coal at a railroad station were taken into protective custody and duly placed in a concentration camp. Shocked that such innocent boys were forced to sleep in a barracks also occupied by pink triangles, the SS guards chose what to them must have seemed the lesser of two evils: they took the youths aside and gave them fatal injections of morphine. Morality was saved. The self-righteousness that prompted this type of action cuts through the entire ideology glorifying racial purity and extermination of degenerates to reveal stark fear of homosexuality. Something of this fear is echoed in the statement by Hitler cited above, which is quite different in tone from the propagandistic cant of Himmler's exhortations. Himmler saw homosexuals as congenital cowards and weaklings. Probably as a result of his friendship with Rohm, Hitler could at least imagine "the best and most manly of characters" being homosexual. Hitler ordered all the gay bars in Berlin closed as soon as he came to power. But when the Olympics were held in that city in 1936, he temporarily rescinded the order and allowed several bars to reopen: foreign guests were not to receive the impression that Berlin was a "sad city." Despite, and perhaps because of, their relentless emphasis upon strength, purity, cleanliness and masculinity, the all-male Nazi groups surely contained a strong element of deeply repressed homoeroticism. The degree of repression was evidenced by the Nazi reaction to those who were openly gay. In the Bible, the scapegoat was the sacrificial animal on whose head the inchoate guilt of the entire community was placed. Homosexuals served precisely this function in the Third Reich. The ideological rationale for the mass murder of homosexuals during the Third Reich was quite another matter. According to the doctrine of Social Darwinism, only the fittest are meant to survive, and the law of the jungle is the final arbiter of human history. If the Germans were destined to become the master race by virtue of their inherent biological superiority, the breeding stock could only be improved by the removal of degenerates. Retarded, deformed and homosexual individuals could be eliminated with the dispassionate conscientiousness of a gardener pulling weeds. (Indeed, it is the very vehemence and passion with which homosexuals were persecuted that compels us to look beyond the pseudo-scientific rationale for a deeper, psychological dynamic.) * * * The institutionalized homophobia of the Third Reich must also be seen in terms of the sexual revolution that had taken place in Germany during the preceeding decades. The German gay movement had existed for thirty-six years before it (and all other progressive forces) was smashed. The Nazis carried out a "conservative revolution" which restored law and order together with nineteenth-century sexism. A system of ranking women according to the number of their offspring was devised by Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, who demanded that homosexuals "be hunted down mercilessly, for their vice can only lead to the demise of the German people." Ironically, the biologistic arguements against gay people could be supported by the theories advanced by the early gay movement itself. Magnus Hirschfeld and the members of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee had made "the Third Sex" a household term in Germany; but the rigidly heterosexual society of the Third Reich had no patience with "intersexual variants" and turned a deaf ear to pleas for tolerance. The prominent Nazi jurist Dr. Rudolf Klare wrote: "Since the Masonic notion of humanitarianism arose from the ecclesiastical/Christian feeling of charity, it is sharply opposed to our National Socialist worldview and is eliminated a priori as a justification for not penalizing homosexuality
If the german army were fighting the nazis, then yes I would join. I'll just have to keep killing the American ones when I encounter them on the street until then.
Your confused the British and Spaniards were they kill, plunder, and enslaves millions and wipe out millions of Native South and North American Indians and enslaves the africans for 300 years.
I hear you, but still give the nazis the edge...Germans are much easier for me to dislike than British or Spaniards anyway, their language is ugly The Spanish actually had a truce with Hitler during the war...there were even concentration camps in Catalunya, Northern Spain. Many Spanish did join the French Resistance though. I wonder how many germans my grandpa killed with bombs he dropped, 10,000, 20,000?
PS there is an excellent series on PBS right now called "the Perilous War: America's role in WW2" All color films made before and during the war...lots of footage I hadn't seen.
The Spanish people saluted Franco in the exact same way Germans saluted Hitler...the two were probably good friends...although in hand to hand combat, Franco would probably win, especailly since anyone above age 12 could have taken sickly Adolph in a fight.
[ I wonder how many germans my grandpa killed with bombs he dropped, 10,000, 20,000?[/QUOTE] In Dresden around 400.000 civilians more than the 2 atomic bombs drop in japan on a city of little or non military value a city the germans did not even bother to put anti aircraft guns it was a city open for war refugies and wounded soldiers and it was level at a time every one knew german army was finish. so in a sense it was a holocoust.
Thats the result of what the what someone called "great leader"of Germany led his country too, pissing the rest of the world off enough to cause them to bring absolute ruin to his country and people to break their morale, its ugly, but too bad I guess, I liked the end result.
The WWII Dresden Holocaust - 'A Single Column Of Flame'[size=+1] 2-6-2[/size] [size=+1]"You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."[/size][size=+1] --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr[/size] [size=+1]On the evening of February 13, 1945, an orgy of genocide and barbarism began against a defenseless German city, one of the greatest cultural centers of northern Europe. Within less than 14 hours not only was it reduced to flaming ruins, but an estimated one-third of its inhabitants, possibly as many as a half a million, had perished in what was the worst single event massacre of all time. [/size] [size=+1]___[/size] [size=+1]Toward the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death and destruction over Germany, the old Saxon city of Dresden lay like an island of tranquillity amid desolation. Famous as a cultural center and possessing no military value, Dresden had been spared the terror that descended from the skies over the rest of the country. In fact, little had been done to provide the ancient city of artists and craftsmen with anti-aircraft defenses. One squadron of planes had been stationed in Dresden for awhile, but the Luftwaffe decided to move the aircraft to another area where they would be of use. A gentlemen's agreement seemed to prevail, designating Dresden an "open city." February 13/14 1945: Holocaust over Dresden, known as the Florence of the North. Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600.000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked for "suggestions how to blaze 600.000 refugees". He wasn't interested how to target military installations 60 miles outside of Dresden. More than 700.000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every 2 people. The temperature in the centre of the city reached 1600 o centigrade. More than 260.000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the centre of the city can't be traced. Approximately 500.000 children, women, the elderly, wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were slaughtered in one night. [/size][size=+1]On Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, a flood of refugees fleeing the Red Army 60 miles away had swollen the city's population to well over a million. Each new refugee brought fearful accounts of Soviet atrocities. Little did those refugees retreating from the Red terror imagine that they were about to die in a horror worse than anything Stalin could devise. Normally, a carnival atmosphere prevailed in Dresden on Shrove Tuesday. In 1945, however, the outlook was rather dismal. Houses everywhere overflowed with refugees, and thousands were forced to camp out in the streets shivering in the bitter cold. However, the people felt relatively safe; and although the mood was grim, the circus played to a full house that night as thousands came to forget for a moment the horrors of war. Bands of little girls paraded about in carnival dress in an effort to bolster warning spirits. Half-sad smiles greeted the laughing girls, but spirits were lifted. No one realized that in less than 24 hours those same innocent children would die screaming in Churchill's firestorms. But, of course, no one could know that then. The Russians, to be sure, were savages, but at least the Americans and British were "honorable." So, when those first alarms signaled the start of 14 hours of hell, Dresden's people streamed dutifully into their shelters. But they did so without much enthusiasm, believing the alarms to be false, since their city had never been threatened from the air. Many would never come out alive, for that "great democratic statesman," Winston Churchill--in collusion with that other "great democratic statesman," Franklin Delano Roosevelt--had decided that the city of Dresden was to be obliterated by saturation bombing. What where Churchill's motives? They appear to have been political, rather than military. Historians unanimously agree that Dresden had no military value. What industry it did have produced only cigarettes and china. But the Yalta Conference was coming up, in which the Soviets and their Western allies would sit down like ghouls to carve up the shattered corpse of Europe. Churchill wanted a trump card--a devastating "thunderclap of Anglo-American annihilation"--with which to "impress" Stalin. That card, however, was never played at Yalta, because bad weather delayed the originally scheduled raid. Yet Churchill insisted that the raid be carried out--to "disrupt and confuse" the German civilian population behind the lines. Dresden's citizens barely had time to reach their shelters. The first bomb fell at 10:09 p.m. The attack lasted 24 minutes, leaving the inner city a raging sea of fire. "Precision saturation bombing" had created the desired firestorm.[/size] [size=+1]A firestorm is caused when hundreds of smaller fires join in one vast conflagration. Huge masses of air are sucked in to feed the inferno, causing an artificial tornado. Those persons unlucky enough to be caught in the rush of wind are hurled down entire streets into the flames. Those who seek refuge underground often suffocate as oxygen is pulled from the air to feed the blaze, or they perish in a blast of white heat--heat intense enough to melt human flesh.[/size] [size=+1]One eyewitness who survived told of seeing "young women carrying babies running up and down the streets, their dresses and hair on fire, screaming until they fell down, or the collapsing buildings fell on top of them." [/size][size=+1]There was a three-hour pause between the first and second raids. The lull had been calculated to lure civilians from their shelters into the open again. To escape the flames, tens of thousands of civilians had crowded into the Grosser Garten, a magnificent park nearly one and a half miles square. The second raid came at 1:22 a.m. with no warning. Twice as many bombers returned with a massive load of incendiary bombs. The second wave was designed to spread the raging firestorm into the Grosser Garten. It was a complete "success." Within a few minutes a sheet of flame ripped across the grass, uprooting trees and littering the branches of others with everything from bicycles to human limbs. For days afterward, they remained bizarrely strewn about as grim reminders of Allied sadism. At the start of the second air assault, many were still huddled in tunnels and cellars, waiting for the fires of the first attack to die down. At 1:30 a.m. an ominous rumble reached the ears of the commander of a Labor Service convoy sent into the city on a rescue mission. He described it this way: "The detonation shook the cellar walls. The sound of the explosions mingled with a new, stranger sound which seemed to come closer and closer, the sound of a thundering waterfall; it was the sound of the mighty tornado howling in the inner city."[/size] [size=+1]MELTING HUMAN FLESH[/size] [size=+1]Others hiding below ground died. But they died painlessly--they simply glowed bright orange and blue in the darkness. As the heat intensified, they either disintegrated into cinders or melted into a thick liquid--often three or four feet deep in spots. Shortly after 10:30 on the morning of February 14, the last raid swept over the city. American bombers pounded the rubble that had been Dresden for a steady 38 minutes. But this attack was not nearly as heavy as the first two. However, what distinguished this raid was the cold-blooded ruthlessness with which it was carried out. U.S. Mustangs appeared low over the city, strafing anything that moved, including a column of rescue vehicles rushing to the city to evacuate survivors. One assault was aimed at the banks of the Elbe River, where refugees had huddled during the horrible night. In the last year of the war, Dresden had become a hospital town. During the previous night's massacre, heroic nurses had dragged thousands of crippled patients to the Elbe. The low-flying Mustangs machine-gunned those helpless patients, as well as thousands of old men, women and children who had escaped the city. When the last plane left the sky, Dresden was a scorched ruin, its blackened streets filled with corpses. The city was spared no horror. A flock of vultures escaped from the zoo and fattened on the carnage. Rats swarmed over the piles of corpses. A Swiss citizen described his visit to Dresden two weeks after the raid: "I could see torn-off arms and legs, mutilated torsos and heads which had been wrenched from their bodies and rolled away. In places the corpses were still lying so densely that I had to clear a path through them in order not to tread on arms and legs."[/size] [size=+1]****************[/size] [size=+1]Kurt Vonnegut was in Dresden when it was bombed in 1945, and wrote a famous anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse Five, in 1969.[/size] [size=+1]In February 1945, Vonnegut was witness to another pretty good imitation of Mt Vesuvius; the firebombing by Allied forces of Dresden, the town in eastern Germany, during the last months of the Second World War. More than 600,000 incen-diary bombs later, the city looked more like the surface of the moon. Returning home to India-napolis after the war, Vonnegut began writing short stories for magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post, and, seven years later, published his first novel, Player Piano. ...[/size] [size=+1]Finally, in 1969, he tackled the subject of war, recounting his experiences as a POW in Dresden, forced to dig corpses from the rubble. The resulting novel was Slaughterhouse Five. Banned in several US states - and branded a "tool of the devil" in North Dakota - it carried the snappy alternative title: "The Children's Crusade: A Duly Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, a fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much) who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany - the Florence of the Elbe - a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale: this is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizopfrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamodre, where the flying saucers come from, Peace." ....[/size] [size=+1]In December 1944, Vonnegut was captured by the German army and became a prisoner of war. In Slaughterhouse Five, he describes how he narrowly escaped death a few months later in the firebombing of Dresden. "Yes, by your people [the English], may I say," he insists. "You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. I'm fond of your people, on occasion, but I was just thinking about 'Bomber Harris, who believed in attacks on civilian populations to make them give up. A hell of a lot of Royal Air Force guys were ashamed of what Harris had made them do. And that's really sportsmanship and, of course, the Brits are famous for being good sports," he concedes.[/size] [size=+1]The Independent, London, 20 December 2001, p. 19[/size] [size=+1]***************[/size] [size=+1]The death toll was staggering. The full extent of the Dresden Holocaust can be more readily grasped if one considers that well over 250,000 -- possibly as many as a half a million -- persons died within a 14-hour period, whereas estimates of those who died at Hiroshima range from 90,000 to 140,000.* Allied apologists for the massacre have often "twinned" Dresden with the English city of Coventry. But the 380 killed in Coventry during the entire war cannot begin to compare with over 1,000 times that number who were slaughtered in 14 hours at Dresden. Moreover, Coventry was a munitions center, a legitimate military target. Dresden, on the other hand, produced only china--and cups and saucers can hardly be considered military hardware! It is interesting to further compare the respective damage to London and Dresden, especially when we recall all the Hollywood schmaltz about the "London blitz." In one night, 1,600 acres of land were destroyed in the Dresden massacre. London escaped with damage to only 600 acres during the entire war. In one ironic note, Dresden's only conceivable military target -- its railroad yards -- was ignored by Allied bombers. They were too busy concentrating on helpless old men, women and children. If ever there was a war crime, then certainly the Dresden Holocaust ranks as the most sordid one of all time. Yet there are no movies made today condemning this fiendish slaughter; nor did any Allied airman--or Sir Winston--sit in the dock at Nuremberg. In fact, the Dresden airmen were actually awarded medals for their role in this mass murder. But, of course, they could not have been tried, because there were "only following orders." This is not to say that the mountains of corpses left in Dresden were ignored by the Nuremberg Tribunal. In one final irony, the prosecution presented photographs of the Dresden dead as "evidence" of alleged National Socialist atrocities against Jewish concentration-camp inmates! Churchill, the monster who ordered the Dresden slaughter, was knighted, and the rest is history. The cold-blooded sadism of the massacre, however, is brushed aside by his biographers, who still cannot bring themselves to tell how the desire of one madman to "impress" another one let to the mass murder of up to a half million men, women and children.[/size]
wow. my grandpa was flying about 100 miles away I believe, and eveyone on his plane were amazed...they had never seen anything like that, even from that distance.
