Holocaust Documentary

[ordnance]

 

Yes. The bombings of London, Liverpool etc were an act of war.

That's fine, if you think targeting civilians is a legitimate act of war, some do some don't. Its some denying that deliberately targeting German civilians to kill demoralise and terrorise did not happen I have an issue with. People can try and justify it but don't deny that it happened.

Edited January 25, 2015 by ordnance

[digger]

I'm agreeing it happened. just as I'm saying what the Germans did in Russia happened. First bombing raids carried out ? Google is your friend. precedes WW2. I'm not denying it one bit. They got what they fervently wished upon others.

[Mentalmac]

history shows that we did not herd them into gas chambers like animals and exterminte them.

 

War is a dirty business but some in history have been shown to have far more hatred for their fellow humans than others .

Unlike our Russian counterparts who set about 'diluting' their blood (the rape of Berlin if you want to read some pretty horrible accounts).

 

War is horrible, it changes people, people's minds get altered and their moral compasses skewed. I sometimes put myself into someone else shoes and think - If my enemy had come and raped and pillaged, killed all men women and children, what would I do to them when given the chance...? I would hope I would be a bigger man and walk away...

[ordnance]

 

First bombing raids carried out ? Google is your friend. precedes WW2. I'm not denying it one bit. They got what they fervently wished upon others.

I am not sure who carried out the first bombing raids has to do with what we are discussing, I did not say you were denying anything i said some were.

 

 

I'm confused, no double standards, they started bombing our cities, we cleared them out, then pushed them back with the Battle of Britain, after which we dominated the air, certainly on this side of the water. We then proceeded to hammer them with bombing, no double standards dear boy, just war, one that the Nazis started.

Again that's fine, my original post did not say it was right or wrong, it was in response to a post saying that I was talking rubbish for saying there was a deliberate policy by the British to target Germain cities and civilians, something that is a historical fact. People should try reading peoples posts before responding.

Edited January 25, 2015 by ordnance

[Dr D]

Here's a quote for both sides of the debate."There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

[DrBob]

I came across this documentary and lasted fifteen minutes. The sight of frightened children, pitifully clutching their parents, was simply too much.

Never again, I thought.

Yet, within the lifetime of the majority of PW members, a new euphemism emerged in the 90's.

"Ethnic Cleansing"; the skeletal prisoners, the mass graves, the torture, rape and murder. In Europe..........

[keg]

And in Africa and will continue to happen, man's inhumanity to man.

 

There was another documentary tonight about Kitty Hart-Moxon who has gone back to Auschwitz for the last time and has taken 2 girls of the same age as she was when she was transported there.

 

Some of us may remember her first visit called "Kitty at Auschwitz" back in the late 70s. It had an effect on me as i was at school with a number of jewish boys in Leeds.

[Vince Green]

You have to remember that the Nazi's masterplan was not just to exterminate the Jews. Many of the death camps were set up initially to exterminate Russian prisioners of war but eventually everyone, including us would have gone up in smoke or been worked to death as slave labour.

 

The Nazi plan was to clear all the lands to the east of them and set up new communities based roughly on the medieval farming town of northern Germany but populated by blond haired blue eyed Aryans who sang as they worked in the fields and danced around the maypole. Perfect communities or ideological claptrap?

 

Do you think it ever could have worked?

[TIGHTCHOKE]

Bloody glad there was some carpet bombing that stopped them!

[ordnance]

 

Do you think it ever could have worked?

Yes if they had won the war.

 

 

Bloody glad there was some carpet bombing that stopped them!

Did carpet bombing stop them, i must have misted that part of history. Soldiers win wars boots on the ground not bombers.

Edited January 25, 2015 by ordnance

[keg]

But air superiority helps?

[FalconFN]

Not as much as the decisions made by a criminally insane mind. Europe would be a very different place now if Hitler hadn't decide to follow Napoleon's ill-fated march into Russia, and no amount if carpet bombing cities would have stopped him.

[double10]

what's the difference between a labour camp (not an extermination camp) and a gulag?

[amateur]

 

Did carpet bombing stop them, i must have misted that part of history. Soldiers win wars boots on the ground not bombers.

 

Looking at the war in Japan, the Americans took area bombing to an entirely new level. The razing of Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama and Kawasaki, not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki, together with attacks on the Japanese merchant marine, did immense damage to the Japanese war economy and effectively stopped it operating.

This, surely, enabled the US Army to land in mainland Japan with no (or very few) casualties.

 

Had we had the technology and the capability earlier in the war to do the same to Germany, and forced an earlier end to the war, saving countless Allied troop lives and possibly curtailing the Holocaust, who is to argue that area bombing would be immoral?

[keg]

what's the difference between a labour camp (not an extermination camp) and a gulag?

Nothing except Stalin was on our side which is why we turned a blind eye to that and the Katyn Massacre...

[cant hit rabbits 123]

There have been people on this thread discussing Dresden like it was an atrocity like the world had never seen before. Granted, it was a truly awful that should never have come to pass, but the same tactic was used from the very outset of the war, by both sides.

 

December the 12th, 1940. A Luftwaffe raid on Sheffield was launched, the pathfinder flight arriving over target at 7 41 PM. This pathfinder unit, consisting of 13 medium bombers, dropped 11,089 incendiary bombs on residential suburbs on the opposite side of the city to the industrial targets. Another 280 bombers followed, dropping a mixture of incendiary and high explosive munitions, almost all of which fell on the city centres or residential areas. The bombing carried on until 4 AM, many aircraft carrying out multiple sorties on the same night on the same target. Notable hits were Sheffield Cathedral, the C & A building and the Marples Hotel, the latter two being totally destroyed with significant loss of life in single incidents.

 

Bombing conditions were perfect, a still cloudless night with a full moon. Residential areas and the city centre were deliberately targeted.

 

The central first aid centre at the Grand hotel couldn't keep up with the wounded, nor could they deal with the massive amount of horrific burns victims, many of whom were untreatable and could only be comforted before they died. The centre ran out of medical supplies after only the first wave of bombers passed.

 

This was one night, in one city, and by no means was it the worst. This sort of bombing happened across Europe on an almost daily basis for the duration of the war. Dresden was a humanitarian disaster, an act of cruelty and possibly verging on war crimes. However, to dress it up as a single incident that was perpetrated by vengeful allied air command is absurd. And whether you meant to or not, that is how it has come across.

 

Back on topic, I believe it is the duty of everyone to learn about the holocaust. So long as such horrors are remembered, one can hope they will never be perpetrated again.

[sako751sg]

Yes if they had won the war.

 

Did carpet bombing stop them, i must have misted that part of history. Soldiers win wars boots on the ground not bombers.

 

You must have missed the wee bit in the war concerning Japan.Please google it then repeat that statement.

[Mungler]

Did carpet bombing stop them, i must have misted that part of history. Soldiers win wars boots on the ground not bombers.

You're wrong on that.

 

The Germans carpet bombed England in an attempt to break the will of the Country. They believed that the weak liberals wouldn't have it and like the French would want to sue for peace and then let the Reich in. It had the opposite effect as it hardened the nation's resolve.

 

The A bombing of Japan was the final act of fighting with a mad dog - rather than have the Japanese string the war out to a bitter conclusion as more Allied servicemen died and the Japanese sent every man woman and child to their deaths the A bomb short cut that process and got to 'the end' right there and it broke the will of Japan.

[TIGHTCHOKE]

Ordnance, just accept you're wrong!

[Thunderbird]

Isn't there some ad hominem reasoning at play here too?

 

Many times, as soon as people start talking about the Holocaust, there is a contingent of people who can't help themselves bring up 'atrocities' committed by the allies. Dresden, Darmstadt, (and the atom bomb) being classic examples.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong but this thread was to have been about the power of this documentary and the horrific nature of the Holocaust, it seems quite sad it's been diminished to a degree by point-scoring pedantry.

 

I do wonder whether some of this is a hangover from the postcolonial handwringing that we still get shoved down our throats sometimes, which tends to provoke a knee-jerk reaction in the interests of 'balance'.

 

Well screw balance, both Germany and Japan simply could not be allowed to win that war, and post-war (death camps etc) this became even more apparent than during.

 

This isn't an excuse for Stalin, Bomber Harris or anyone else, it just is what it is.

 

And if some Junior Common Room debating society wannabe comes out with the classic "well it was the British that invented the concentration camp in the Boer War" I shall scream.

Edited January 26, 2015 by Thunderbird

[shaun4860]

 

Correct me if I'm wrong but this thread was to have been about the power of this documentary and the horrific nature of the Holocaust, it seems quite sad it's been diminished to a degree by point-scoring pedantry.

.

You are right,

 

I started this thread after watching the documentary after I found it both moving and shocking, beyond shocking actually.

 

I still stand by the fact that it should never be allowed to be just left to the history books,

 

If people want to discuss blanket bombings and the like then start your own thread, do not try and deflect the inhumanity of what happened in the death camps,

 

There is simply no comparison to what the Nazis did and to be honest it's quite sad that people try and deflect this.

 

[Kes]

As well as the atrocities committed In the camps, those same camps would have been used to eliminate the young men in this country and possibly any 'genetically imperfect' women and children as part of th insane re - population of conquered lands with 'true aryan' stock.

Hitler had a breeding programme - the name escapes me.

Others experimented on children, Mengele for example, Some skinned and tanned their prisoners with 'interesting tattoos' and made lightshades out of them. Many other atrocities, far worse were perpetrated on defenceless peoples the Nazis 'conquered, because they were 'racially inferior'. The whole country supported Hitler, when he was winning he was a god to them, feeding the beast so it knew no excess.

It is a sad fact that carpet bombing killed innocents but in my view it was entirely justified for the thousands in Britain who died and the hundreds of thousands who died in Europe, not to mention the entirely unchallenged (in Germany) initial demonising and subsequent extermination of any Jew they could get their hands on. The Germans knew it was going on, the smell from the camps was obvious many miles away.

 

Were the atom bombs justified to finish a war to which the japanese people were sacredly committed - of course it was. We have the benefit of hindsight.

 

Would Britain have dropped an A bomb on Germany ? Would Germany have dropped A bombs on Britain and on the USA ? do you really need to ask.

 

It was about surviving and ridding the world forever of every last vestige of an evil, cancerous and insane regime and its allies.

 

My only personal regret is the the statue to 'Bomber' Harris was erected only recently, it would have been better had it be done immediately the war ended.

 

Just noticed the above post - my apologies for adding my comment to the off topic comments.

Edited January 26, 2015 by Kes

[Thunderbird]

I think people will excuse such a sensible post Kes.

[Mungler]

As above

[Sha Bu Le]

As well as the atrocities committed In the camps, those same camps would have been used to eliminate the young men in this country and possibly any 'genetically imperfect' women and children as part of th insane re - population of conquered lands with 'true aryan' stock.

Hitler had a breeding programme - the name escapes me.

Others experimented on children, Mengele for example, Some skinned and tanned their prisoners with 'interesting tattoos' and made lightshades out of them. Many other atrocities, far worse were perpetrated on defenceless peoples the Nazis 'conquered, because they were 'racially inferior'. The whole country supported Hitler, when he was winning he was a god to them, feeding the beast so it knew no excess.

It is a sad fact that carpet bombing killed innocents but in my view it was entirely justified for the thousands in Britain who died and the hundreds of thousands who died in Europe, not to mention the entirely unchallenged (in Germany) initial demonising and subsequent extermination of any Jew they could get their hands on. The Germans knew it was going on, the smell from the camps was obvious many miles away.

 

Were the atom bombs justified to finish a war to which the japanese people were sacredly committed - of course it was. We have the benefit of hindsight.

 

Would Britain have dropped an A bomb on Germany ? Would Germany have dropped A bombs on Britain and on the USA ? do you really need to ask.

 

It was about surviving and ridding the world forever of every last vestige of an evil, cancerous and insane regime and its allies.

 

My only personal regret is the the statue to 'Bomber' Harris was erected only recently, it would have been better had it be done immediately the war ended.

 

Just noticed the above post - my apologies for adding my comment to the off topic comments.

 

Yes Kes a very pertinent and sensible post. Your comment (in red) was very true. The Nazis had a list ready to use (had they invaded Britain), it contained the names and details of all prominent people, Churchill included, church and political leaders of all religions not only Jewish, Once the prominent and influential had been murdered I think it highly likely they would have widened their attention to other areas. Certainly British Jews, who knows where they would have stopped.

 

I remember as a young boy seeing early T.V. documentaries about the concentration camps (late(ish) 50's) they were so horrendous (and probably heavily edited for the decade) that not even my dad made a derogatory comment and he was a total xenophobe.