Telemark Talk / Telemark Tips Forum

wooley12 wrote: ↑

Sat May 18, 2024 11:41 am

Question.My wife's family owned a restaurant in Timmerlah. Every day a Jewish man ate dinner alone reading the paper. A few miles was Braunschweig, where the SS had one of the first SS-Junker Schools for leadership training. One day an SS came to the restaurant and told them they could no longer serve him. They complied. Where they SS sympathisers or WWII survivors in your judgement?

They were "ordinary Germans" who made the Holocaust happen by deciding to comply. You see the same thing today. How many people who posted the Ukrainian flag all over their social media are doing the same for Palestine? How many people in Europe did nothing about the refugee concentration camps that followed their countries' participation in NATO's brutal, unprovoked bombing of Libya?

Some people are violent, sadistic sociopaths who think of the things the SS let them do as "the happiest time of their life" (that's how Yaroslav Hunka put it). Being sociopaths, they will lie about what they did and why to avoid any responsibility. Some people try to twist their thoughts into pretzels with rationalizations, excuses, and whining about why they participated, in ways large or small, in the Nazi regime. The decision to comply is still a decision. One of my great-grandparents was imprisoned for almost a decade for collaborating with the Nazis, and one of his brothers was hanged for it. It really disgusts me when people refuse to own up to their own bad decision-making. This is part of the reason why I say that West Germany, and to some degree the GDR, was never de-Nazified.

Being a hobby historian of the events, I take into account the chronology of events happening and factor in human nature. Sacrificing everything, business, family and life, to defy the SS at that time before the Holocaust was known would be abnormal behavior IMHO.

My father went into Buchenwald with a US Army medical team as an interpreter. He was there when the townsfolk were made to see what had happened and heard them say "We didn't know". He could never speak of the experience but did bring home these propaganda cards showing life in the camp to the townspeople. First impressions are lasting and hard to dislodge. Brain Science.

Anyone who is absolutely certain they'd be the ones getting tattoos rather than the ones giving them should take a good hard look in the mirror.

wooley12 wrote: ↑

Sun May 19, 2024 11:05 am

Being a hobby historian of the events, I take into account the chronology of events happening and factor in human nature. Sacrificing everything, business, family and life, to defy the SS at that time before the Holocaust was known would be abnormal behavior IMHO.

To quote Daniel Goldhagen, "Not once in the history of the Holocaust was a German killed, sent to a concentration camp, or punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews." https://web.archive.org/web/20040112175 ... gold9.html

Being such a history buff and taking the chronology of events into account, you obviously know that the Nazis started Dachau as a torture camp in 1933, something like a German Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib, and many Germans had soon heard about the torture and murders happening there. Anne Seghers even wrote a best-selling book about it in 1939 (later made into a 1944 Hollywood film starring Spencer Tracy). Buchenwald a little later, 1937; by that time most Germans knew that people were being tortured and killed in the Nazi concentration camps. The Nazi government's position on, and actions towards, Jews, were also hard to miss if you were German. What was happening was even well known outside of Germany at the time (Daniel Greene & Edward Phillips. Americans And The Holocaust). The excuses literally do not pass the smell test: "We struck something that felt as palpable and real as a wall. It was a huge, overpowering odor — the kind of odor I remembered from the days the Kushner Packing Company burned its waste in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana." https://87thinfantrydivision.com/max-wh ... ll-lingers "Never did he believe their claims they knew nothing of Buchenwald. The smell of death emanating from the camp alone refuted such assertions." https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/a ... nwald-1945

The difference between Guantanamo Bay and Dachau is that in 1933 the German state had actually tried to prosecute the SS torturers (Timothy Ryback. Hitler's First Victims: The Quest for Justice). The "little Eichmanns," as Ward Churchill called them, running Guantanamo Bay were never held to account. The only person ever sentenced for the CIA torture program was John Kiriakou, for exposing it to the public. Joe Darby's family had to go into hiding. Sometimes people know there will be real consequences, and they do the right thing (what you call "abnormal behavior") anyway.

And to quote Derrick Jensen, "The Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had a higher chance of survival than those who went along."

Capercaillie wrote: ↑

Sat May 18, 2024 4:47 pm

wooley12 wrote: ↑

Sat May 18, 2024 11:41 am

Question.My wife's family owned a restaurant in Timmerlah. Every day a Jewish man ate dinner alone reading the paper. A few miles was Braunschweig, where the SS had one of the first SS-Junker Schools for leadership training. One day an SS came to the restaurant and told them they could no longer serve him. They complied. Where they SS sympathisers or WWII survivors in your judgement?

They were "ordinary Germans" who made the Holocaust happen by deciding to comply. You see the same thing today. How many people who posted the Ukrainian flag all over their social media are doing the same for Palestine? How many people in Europe did nothing about the refugee concentration camps that followed their countries' participation in NATO's brutal, unprovoked bombing of Libya?

Some people are violent, sadistic sociopaths who think of the things the SS let them do as "the happiest time of their life" (that's how Yaroslav Hunka put it). Being sociopaths, they will lie about what they did and why to avoid any responsibility. Some people try to twist their thoughts into pretzels with rationalizations, excuses, and whining about why they participated, in ways large or small, in the Nazi regime. The decision to comply is still a decision. One of my great-grandparents was imprisoned for almost a decade for collaborating with the Nazis, and one of his brothers was hanged for it. It really disgusts me when people refuse to own up to their own bad decision-making. This is part of the reason why I say that West Germany, and to some degree the GDR, was never de-Nazified.

"The happiest time of their life". Not to trivialize the history of Nazi Germany, but I see hints of a metaphor for the covid 19 pandemic here. People got real strange

Covid. No parties We celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary like a couple of newly weds at an Airbnb with a private beach next to a Native American cemetery. Strange times indeed.

Just heard a scholarly someone opine on the subject. Basically that with humans, doing dirty deeds is easier if the Govt says it's OK. And the more you do it the easier it gets.

Anyone want to opine on how far east Russia would go if Putin had his way? Worst case.

One limiting factor on the Russia thing, I wonder if democracy would start to come into play if they started to move strategically beyond that region? Say they went at Finland, or Alaska or the Canadian North. Would at some point their citizens say enough? Or is it a true dictatorship? Hard to know what happens inside the country with the limited media coverage inside (on top of media bans internationally, hell I can't even get the news on Facebook anymore)

FB has lost almost all value for me as well. Groups is a good place for interacting with people of common interest. I'm in a few WWII Unit history groups, motorcycle racing and ski groups that I get benefit and entertainment from. Never used FB for news myself. What Elon sends me on X is currently a Sh** Show mixture of outrage posting Anti American bots.

I have a few news sites where I get some insight into the region.

https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/about-us
https://www.understandingwar.org/
https://www.kyivpost.com/
https://www.newsinenglish.no/

wooley12 wrote: ↑

Mon May 20, 2024 9:05 pm

Anyone want to opine on how far east Russia would go if Putin had his way? Worst case.

Being a gambling man, I like to look at past odds.

List of US invasions and air bombing in Asia since 1850:
1871 Korea
1899 China
1899 Phillipines
1918 Russia
1945 Japan
1950 Korea
1958 Indonesia
1965 Vietnam
1970 Cambodia

I probably missed a few.

List of Soviet invasions and air bombing in the Americas:

List of Russian invasions and air bombing in the Americas:

List of Chinese invasions and air bombing in the Americas:

List of Korean invasions and air bombing in the Americas:

List of Phillipine invasions and air bombing in the Americas:

List of Vietnamese invasions and air bombing in the Americas:

List of Cambodian invasions and air bombing in the Americas:

List of Indonesian invasions and air bombing in the Americas:

List of Japanese invasions of the Americas:
1942 Aleutian Islands
Pearl Harbor does not count - Hawaii did not become a state until 1959. None of the December 7, 1941 attacks by Japan were made on the United States (one of the more blatant lies taught in US "public school" indoctrination centers) - all were on foreign US military bases in occupied Pacific nations.

The odds aren't looking so good.

To compare apples to apples, after 1900, how many invasions by the US were undertaken so the US could make the invaded a part of the US? How many times did we kidnap 1000's of children to reeducate? None I think.