# Behavior of armies to conquered civilian female populations in WWII **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 28, 2013, 8:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581 "2013-05-28T20:50:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2013, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/41 "2013-05-30T19:23:43Z")
> [@Rune](#): > > The majority of the millions of ethic cleansed Germans were from East Prussia, parts of what is now Poland and used to be Czechoslovakia, and so on. It’s not like it was ever a secret, since it was agreed upon at the Potsdam conference > [WWII expulsions spectre lives on](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3528506.stm) What you seem to be unaware of, and the hundreds of thousands of German colonists forcibly repatriated to their original homes after the war from Polish land ethnically cleansed of Poles of which I was referring to: [Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_areas_annexed_by_Nazi_Germany) > [@](#): > > The official term used by the Nazi authorities for these areas was the “incorporated Eastern territories” (German: Eingegliederten Ostgebieten).[3] They planned for a complete Germanization of the annexed territories, considering them part of their lebensraum.[4] The local Jewish population was forced to live in ghettos, and was gradually deported to concentration and extermination camps, the most infamous of which, Auschwitz, was located in annexed East Upper Silesia. **The local Polish population was to be gradually replaced by German settlers. The Polish elite especially became subject to mass murder,[5] and an estimated 780,000 Poles were subject to expulsion, either to the General Government or to the Altreich for forced labour.** The remaining Polish population was strictly segregated from the German population and subject to a variety of repressive measures. These included forced labour and their exclusion from all political and many cultural aspects of society. At the same time, the local German minority was granted several privileges, and their number was steadily raised by the settlement of ethnic Germans, including those displaced by the Nazi-Soviet population transfers. > [@](#): > > I used to debate Holocaust deniers and Armenian genocide deniers; I consider people denying or trivializing the crimes against German people in the last months of WW-II and in the period following it, to be of the same category as the other deniers I _know_ you aren’t trying to imply that this is what I am doing, right? For your information I’m well aware of the expulsion of Germans from lands they had lived on pre-WW2, and I’m getting really tired of having to point out to you that the sentence I wrote, > [@](#): > > What happened to German civilians was horrible, but to be blunt Germany had sown the wind from 1941-44 and they were reaping the whirlwind in 1945. begins with the statement “What happened to German civilians was horrible.” Again however, your calling > [@](#): > > the mass rape of German girls (and murder, and ethnic cleansing, etc. of Germans in general) was a crime comparable to some of the biggest in WW-II is still obscene. Was it wrong? Was it horrible? Yes. Was it comparable to some of the biggest crimes in WW2? Only if you ignore the millions upon millions of people murdered by the Nazis. > [@Latro](#): > > Exactly. > The Russians have never been as ‘chivalrous’ in war to the extent that the rest of Western Europe has become, over time. > During WWI the Austrians also complained about ‘dirty tricks’ played by the Russsians, like pretending to surrender and then shoot the exposed captors. I would be very, very careful about making statements like this. The Allies complained of “the Huns” crucifying prisoners in WW1 after all. As to the Russians never having been as ‘chivalrous’, see below and as well it plays on the fears of the Asiatic hordes coming from the east. Kind of like how the use of the word “Huns” to describe the Germans did, never mind that the Germans weren’t descendants of the Huns. > [@](#): > > Remember that our “gentlemen’s agreements” about rules of war are a cultural thing, not shared by everybody. The embodyment of these rules , the Geneva Convention, was not signed by the Russians. First Geneva of 1864 was only signed by 12 countries. The first major convention laying out the laws and customs of war was Hague 1899, and take note of who it was [convened by](http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/final99.asp), bolding mine: > [@](#): > > The International Peace Conference, **convoked in the best interests of humanity by His Majesty the Emperor of All the Russias** , assembled, on the invitation of the Government of Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands, in the Royal House in the Wood at The Hague on the 18th May, 1899. > > The Powers enumerated in the following list took part in the Conference, to which they appointed the Delegates named below: > > [List of Plenipotentiaries] That the USSR was not a signatory to Geneva 1929 (Convention Between the United States of America and Other Powers, Relating to Prisoners of War; July 27, 1929) was used as a spurious excuse by Hitler to issue the Commissar order and declare that the Geneva conventions didn’t apply on the Eastern Front, a defense roundly rejected at Nurnberg. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2013, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/42 "2013-05-30T21:59:24Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > That the USSR was not a signatory to Geneva 1929 (Convention Between the United States of America and Other Powers, Relating to Prisoners of War; July 27, 1929) was used as a spurious excuse by Hitler to issue the Commissar order and declare that the Geneva conventions didn’t apply on the Eastern Front, a defense roundly rejected at Nurnberg. But only because the court had nothing to do with the Geneva Accords; it did not judge based on them. Hitler was in fact legally correct, in that those who do not obey the Geneva Accords do not receive their protections. I suppose even a genocidal madclock with obsessed with the purity of all timekeeping devices is right twice a day. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2013, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/43 "2013-05-30T22:16:52Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > Again however, your calling > > > [@](#): > > > > the mass rape of German girls (and murder, and ethnic cleansing, etc. of Germans in general) was a crime comparable to some of the biggest in WW-II > > is still obscene. Was it wrong? Was it horrible? Yes. Was it comparable to some of the biggest crimes in WW2? Only if you ignore the millions upon millions of people murdered by the Nazis. Sorry. You are trying to play a zero-sum game, here, that is, itself, not appropriate. The idea that the ethnic cleansing of Prussia was not a major crime, simply because Germans had committed bigger crimes, is pretty horrible, itself. You keep noting (correctly), that Germany executed a form of ethnic cleansing against the Poles to permit expansion of the German population. However, the area from which Germans were evicted was not simply a matter of reclaiming Polish land. All of East Prussia and pretty much the entirety of (pre-Bismarck) West Prussia, (populated by Germans for well over 500 years), was subjected to that same ethnic cleansing. The notion that a criminal may not be the victim of a crime is absurd. The notion that millions of people can be cast out of their ancestral homes and/or murdered is, in some way, a “lesser” crime because their government committed worse crimes is does not make sense. ---
**Author:** ![colonial](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/34f0e0/32.png) [@colonial](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/colonial)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2013, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/44 "2013-05-30T23:24:50Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Sorry. You are trying to play a zero-sum game, here, that is, itself, not appropriate. The idea that the ethnic cleansing of Prussia was not a major crime, simply because Germans had committed bigger crimes, is pretty horrible, itself. > > You keep noting (correctly), that Germany executed a form of ethnic cleansing against the Poles to permit expansion of the German population…The notion that a criminal may not be the victim of a crime is absurd. The notion that millions of people can be cast out of their ancestral homes and/or murdered is, in some way, a “lesser” crime because their government committed worse crimes is does not make sense. Murder and rape cannot be justified, but forced session of territory may be, and was in the case being discussed. Poland deserved territorial compensation for the bestial treatment suffered under Germany, and it also deserved a defensible western border with Germany. The lands of the old German provinces of East Prussia, East Pomerania and Silesia fit the bill perfectly for territory, and the Oder-Neisse river line fit the bill perfectly for a border. Czechoslovakia deserved likewise, hence the eviction of the Sudeten Germans. As the other member commented, Germany reaped the whirlwind. It got off more lightly than it deserved, considering that it must have taken thousands or 10s of thousands of Germans to have killed as so many millions of Poles in cold blood. > [@tomndebb](#): > > However, the area from which Germans were evicted was not simply a matter of reclaiming Polish land. All of East Prussia and pretty much the entirety of (pre-Bismarck) West Prussia, (populated by Germans for well over 500 years), was subjected to that same ethnic cleansing. This is a bit garbled, however one defines “West” Prussia. About 30-40% of the territory of the state of Prussia pre-Bismarck lay west of what became the post-WW2 German border. See map: [Expansion of Prussia, 1807-1871](http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/map.cfm?map_id=3666) ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2013, 2:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/45 "2013-05-31T02:03:26Z")
> [@colonial](#): > > Murder and rape cannot be justified, but forced session of territory may be, and was in the case being discussed. Poland deserved territorial compensation for the bestial treatment suffered under Germany, and it also deserved a defensible western border with Germany. One may discuss the justification for or legality of “forced cession of territory” all day, but that is not what happened to the millions of people who were ethnically cleaned from Prussia. That they were part of an evil nation does not justify the way that they were moved and murdered. > [@colonial](#): > > This is a bit garbled, however one defines “West” Prussia. About 30-40% of the territory of the state of Prussia pre-Bismarck lay west of what became the post-WW2 German border. See map: > > [Expansion of Prussia, 1807-1871](http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/map.cfm?map_id=3666) I did not want anyone to think that I was referring to the vast expanse of Prussia that extended even to Saxony and Westphalia, etc. You have made my point, however, that the claim that the ethnic cleansing was nothing more than recapturing stolen Polish land is an error. As to the claim that any evil is justified against all Germans because of German behavior during the Nazi regime, I reject that sort of revenge. I would note that the ethnic cleansing took place without anything truly representing a court and that the burden landed on those Prussians in ways that they never landed on anyone else in Germany. It had far more to do with the Soviet Union looking to provide more buffer land against the West than it did recompensing Poland for its travails. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2013, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/46 "2013-05-31T02:43:29Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Sorry. You are trying to play a zero-sum game, here, that is, itself, not appropriate. The idea that the ethnic cleansing of Prussia was not a major crime, simply because Germans had committed bigger crimes, is pretty horrible, itself. Either you are misreading me, or I am not explaining myself clearly. From the start I have said what happened to German civilians was horrible. I am not trying to play a zero sum game or say it wasn’t a great wrong. However, calling it “a crime comparable to some of the biggest in WW-II” is simply absurd. Some of the biggest in WW2 were pretty big, and this doesn’t rise to the level of being comparable to the Einsatzgruppen murdering over a million people, 3.3 million Soviet POWs being deliberately starved to death, 6 million Jews being murdered, the Rape of Nanking and Japanese occupation policy in China in general, or the ~650,000 German civilians killed in the strategic bombing of German cities to name but a few. > [@](#): > > You keep noting (correctly), that Germany executed a form of ethnic cleansing against the Poles to permit expansion of the German population. However, the area from which Germans were evicted was not simply a matter of reclaiming Polish land. All of East Prussia and pretty much the entirety of (pre-Bismarck) West Prussia, (populated by Germans for well over 500 years), was subjected to that same ethnic cleansing. The notion that a criminal may not be the victim of a crime is absurd. The notion that millions of people can be cast out of their ancestral homes and/or murdered is, in some way, a “lesser” crime because their government committed worse crimes is does not make sense. It’s a good thing that I haven’t made any of these arguments then, isn’t it? > [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Hitler was in fact legally correct, in that those who do not obey the Geneva Accords do not receive their protections. You’ve hit on the point where he was in fact not legally correct. Nations (and guerilla organizations, etc) that aren’t signatories but abide by the conventions are entitled to the protection of the conventions by those that are signatories. Additionally, Germany was a signatory of the Hague conventions, as was Russia and by extension the USSR. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2013, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/47 "2013-05-31T04:41:57Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > Either you are misreading me, or I am not explaining myself clearly. From the start I have said what happened to German civilians was horrible. I am not trying to play a zero sum game or say it wasn’t a great wrong. However, calling it “a crime comparable to some of the biggest in WW-II” is simply absurd. Some of the biggest in WW2 were pretty big, and this doesn’t rise to the level of being comparable to the Einsatzgruppen murdering over a million people, 3.3 million Soviet POWs being deliberately starved to death, 6 million Jews being murdered, the Rape of Nanking and Japanese occupation policy in China in general, or the ~650,000 German civilians killed in the strategic bombing of German cities to name but a few. If you believe you are not playing a zero-sum game, you need to come up with an equivalent term. You claim that it is “obscene” to compare the Prussian expulsion to crimes of the Nazis, yet you include the bombing of German cities in your tally of crimes, while seeking to disallow the Prussian expulsion that had a similar number of deaths–along with the suffering of additional millions removed. You even included the Rape of Nanking that saw quite a bit fewer people killed. I am not quite sure why you are splitting hairs over this issue. (Perhaps you really believed that just a couple of thousand Germans were relocated out of Poland?) However, your “obscene” comment and your defense of your position with inconsistent data is not persuasive. > [@Dissonance](#): > > It’s a good thing that I haven’t made any of these arguments then, isn’t it? Actually, you did and have just done it again. You are claiming that one crime is less bad than other crimes with similar (or smaller) death tolls. Waving around the phrase “it was horrible” does not remove your comment that any comparison is “obscene.” And you have very definitely implied that they “deserved it.” You have also tried to claim that the Prussian expulsion was an action that rectified the German grabbing of _Lebensraum_, even though the number of Germans who had actually settled in Poland was a tiny fraction of the numbers expelled from Prussia. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2013, 6:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/48 "2013-05-31T06:10:49Z")
> [@Latro](#): > > Exactly. > The Russians have never been as ‘chivalrous’ in war to the extent that the rest of Western Europe has become, over time. > During WWI the Austrians also complained about ‘dirty tricks’ played by the Russsians, like pretending to surrender and then shoot the exposed captors. > > Remember that our “gentlemen’s agreements” about rules of war are a cultural thing, not shared by everybody. The embodyment of these rules , the Geneva Convention, was not signed by the Russians. > [@Dissonance](#): > > I would be very, very careful about making statements like this. The Allies complained of “the Huns” crucifying prisoners in WW1 after all. As to the Russians never having been as ‘chivalrous’, see below and as well it plays on the fears of the Asiatic hordes coming from the east. Kind of like how the use of the word “Huns” to describe the Germans did, never mind that the Germans weren’t descendants of the Huns. That’s a strawman, if ever I saw one. Point is that the gentlemanly rules of war, that are an ideal, are only now getting global. They originated in the urbanised West that had a rather idealised view of what war should be like. It is we, in the West, that are the odd one out. War is in its nature a very brutal thing. and the thin veneer of gentlemanly rules quickly erodes with every example of the enemy not following them. That is why it is so important to self-police your own troops and delay the escalation. The Katyn massacre, the shot German POW’s at the start of the war, the use of partisans contributed to a rapid devaluation of ‘chivalry’ on the Eastern front. Now, what I’m saying is that on one side you had troops whose view of the enemy as inferior humans facilitated atrocities. But that another factor was that the Russian approach to war was more brutal than in the west. Russian brutality was not simply a tit for tat reaction to what had been visited upon them. I’m not saying the Russians were the Mongol Hordes (though of course they have suffered being conquered by them) but put bluntly, yes I believe there was a higher proportion prone to brutality in the Russian army than in Western armies. Also simply because of the fact that the Russian army had a higher proportion of hard uneducated peasant folk compared to city folk with ideas about rules and that you should ‘play nice’. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2013, 11:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/49 "2013-05-31T11:53:31Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > If you believe you are not playing a zero-sum game, you need to come up with an equivalent term. You claim that it is “obscene” to compare the Prussian expulsion to crimes of the Nazis, yet you include the bombing of German cities in your tally of crimes, while seeking to disallow the Prussian expulsion that had a similar number of deaths–along with the suffering of additional millions removed. You even included the Rape of Nanking that saw quite a bit fewer people killed. I am not quite sure why you are splitting hairs over this issue. (Perhaps you really believed that just a couple of thousand Germans were relocated out of Poland?) However, your “obscene” comment and your defense of your position with inconsistent data is not persuasive. I’m well aware that more than a couple of hundred thousand Germans were relocated out of Poland, 200,000 doesn’t even cover 30% of those who had moved in to Poland during the war, to say nothing of those deported from ancestral homelands in East Prussia and elsewhere. I’m not splitting hairs, for the nth time the ethnic cleansing of Germans from the east was a horrible crime. I’m at a loss as to why you are bewildered by the inclusion of the Rape of Nanking (and you’ll note the following words are "and Japanese occupation policies in China in general. [Nanking](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre) > [@](#): > > Following the capture of Nanking, a massacre was perpetrated by the Japanese army, which led to the deaths, estimated by several, of over 250,000 residents in the city, a figure difficult to calculate precisely due to the many bodies deliberately burnt, buried in mass graves, or deposited in the Yangtze River by the IJA. most of this occurring in the span of a few days. The scale of deaths caused by strategic bombing of Germany in WW2 has never been seriously disputed, but the number of ethnic Germans killed as a result of the expulsions has seen figures wildly at odds with each other used, and the methodology of how the figures were arrived at using all different methods to calculate who died from it. From wiki, [Flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–1950)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%931950)) > [@](#): > > The death toll attributable to the flight and expulsions is disputed, with estimates ranging from at least 500,000 confirmed deaths up to a demographic estimate from the 1950’s of 2,2 million. More recent estimates by some German historians put the total at 473,000 attested deaths, they maintain the unconfirmed reports of 1.9 million missing persons are unreliable. The German Historical Museum puts the figure at 600,000 victims, they maintain the figure of 2 million deaths in the previous government studies cannot be supported. However, the position of the German government, the German Federal Agency for Civic Education and the German Red Cross is that the death toll in the expulsions is between 2.0 to 2.5 million civilians. > … > In 2006 the German historian Ingo Haar called into question the validity of the official government figure of 2.0 million expulsion deaths in an article in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.[187] Since then Haar has published three articles in academic journals that covered the background of the research by the West German government on the expulsions.[198][258] [259][260] > > Ingo Haar maintains that all reasonable estimates of deaths from expulsions lie between around 500,000 and 600,000, based on the information of Red Cross Church Service and German Federal Archives. Haar believes figures have been inflated in Germany due to the Cold War and domestic German politics, he also maintains that the 2.225 million number relies on improper statistical methodology and incomplete data, particularly in regard to the expellees who arrived in East Germany. **Haar questions the validity of population balances in general. Haar maintains that 27,000 German Jews who were Nazi victims are included in the West German figures. Haar rejects the statement by the German government that the figure of 500-600,000 deaths omitted those people who died of disease and hunger; Haar stated that this is a “mistaken interpretation” of the data, he maintains that deaths due to disease, hunger and other conditions are already included in the lower numbers.** According to Ingo Haar the numbers have been set too high for decades, for postwar political reasons. > … > > In 2001 the Polish scholar Bernadetta Nitschke noted that historians in Poland maintain that most of the deaths occurred during the flight and evacuation during the war, the deportation to the U.S.S.R. for forced labor and after the resettlement due to the harsh conditions in the Soviet occupation zone in post war Germany.[264] The Polish scholar Piotr Eberhardt found that; Generally speaking, the German estimates…are not only highly arbitrary, but also clearly tendentious in presentation of the German losses. **He maintains that the German government figures from 1958 overstated the total number of the ethnic Germans living in Poland prior to war as well as the total civilian deaths due to the expulsions. For example, Eberhardt points out that the total number of Germans in Poland is given as equal 1,371,000. According to the Polish census of 1931 there were altogether only 741,000 Germans on the entire territory of Poland.** > … > > The German historians Hans Henning Hahn and Eva Hahnova have published a detailed study of the flight and expulsions that is sharply critical of German accounts of the cold war era. The Hahn’s believe that the official German figure of 2 million deaths is an historical myth that lacks foundation. They place the ultimate blame for the mass flight and expulsion was the wartime policy of the Nazis in Eastern Europe. **The Hahn’s maintain that most of the reported 473,013 deaths occurred during the Nazi organized flight and evacuation during the war, and the Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union; they point out that there are 80,522 confirmed deaths in the post war internment camps.** They put the post war losses in eastern Europe at a fraction of the total losses: Poland-15,000 deaths from 1945 to 1949 in internment camps; Czechoslovakia- 15,000-30,000 dead, including 4-5,000 in internment camps and ca. 15,000 in the Prague uprising. Yugoslavia-5,777 deliberate killings and 48,027 deaths in internment camps. Denmark- 17,209 dead in internment camps. Hungary and Romania no post war losses were reported. **The Hahns pointed out that the official 1958 figure of 273,000 deaths for Czechoslovakia was prepared by Alfred Bohmann an ex-Nazi party member who had served in the wartime SS, Bohmann was a journalist for an ultra-nationalist Sudeten-Deutsch newspaper in post war West Germany. The Hahn’s believe that the population figures of ethnic Germans for eastern Europe include German speaking Jews killed in the Holocaust,** they believe that the fate of German speaking Jews in East Europe deserves the attention of German historians. Regarding the strategic bombing, a case can be made that deliberately targeting civilians was on its face a war crime. While the expulsion of ethnic Germans from historical lands they had lived for generations at was horrible and a crime, yes it is obscene to call the scale of the deaths comparable to the at least 10 million murdered in the Holocaust. And no, that’s not a zero sum game, feeling pity for the innocent victims of the ethnic cleansing of Germanic peoples doesn’t detract from pity felt for victims of the Holocaust. One can, and I do, feel pity for both. Saying they were crimes of equal magnitude, however, is absurd. The not too subtle insinuation by **Rune** that I’m the equivalent of a Holocaust denier has rather gotten my blood up as well, more so since he seems to have been unaware that part of those forcibly repatriated were colonists sent from Germany to parts of Poland ethnically cleansed of Poles. > [@](#): > > Actually, you did and have just done it again. You are claiming that one crime is less bad than other crimes with similar (or smaller) death tolls. Waving around the phrase “it was horrible” does not remove your comment that any comparison is “obscene.” See above. The death tolls were orders of magnitudes lower than those perpetrated by the Nazis. They were less bad. I’m not “waving around” the phrase it was horrible. I mean exactly what I said: it was horrible, it was undeserved, and they were victims. Putting the forced expulsion of Germanic peoples on the same moral plane as “a crime comparable to some of the biggest in WW-II” i.e. the Holocaust is obscene. > [@](#): > > And you have very definitely implied that they “deserved it.” You have also tried to claim that the Prussian expulsion was an action that rectified the German grabbing of _Lebensraum_, even though the number of Germans who had actually settled in Poland was a tiny fraction of the numbers expelled from Prussia. The fuck I have. Show me where exactly I said or implied that they deserved it, or where exactly I tried to claim the Prussian expulsion was an action that rectified German grabbing of lebensraum, or where I claimed that the repatriation of Germans who had ethnically cleansed Poles was more that a fraction of the number of Germanic people forcibly expelled post war. Nowhere have I said or implied that they deserved it. All I have said is retribution by those the Nazi government had spent three years doing their best to commit genocide on was hardly unexpected. That most certainly does not mean that they deserved it, I don’t feel they deserved it, I have never felt they deserved it. I truly hope that you did not confuse **colonial’s** reprehensible comment of > [@](#): > > It [Germany] got off more lightly than it deserved, considering that it must have taken thousands or 10s of thousands of Germans to have killed as so many millions of Poles in cold blood. with something I said, or something that I agree with in any way whatsoever. ---
**Author:** ![Dissonance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/85f322/32.png) [@Dissonance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dissonance)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2013, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/50 "2013-05-31T13:10:41Z")
> [@Latro](#): > > That’s a strawman, if ever I saw one. Clearly you have no idea what a straw man is then. On reflection, scratch that. I hadn’t meant to imply that you subscribed to the Asiatic hordes coming from the east philosophy if that’s how it came across, just that it’s a very stereotypical view. > [@](#): > > Point is that the gentlemanly rules of war, that are an ideal, are only now getting global. They originated in the urbanised West that had a rather idealised view of what war should be like. It is we, in the West, that are the odd one out. Horsepucky. Did you not read the quote I gave to you on the 1899 Hague Conventions on the Laws and Customs of War on Land? It was convened by the Czar of Russia. It was also the first time the Laws and Customs of War on Land were spelled out and agreed upon by the entirety of the civilized world. It wasn’t the West in its urbanized chivalry that convened it on the behalf of humanity, it was the Russians. > [@](#): > > That is why it is so important to self-police your own troops and delay the escalation. The Katyn massacre, the shot German POW’s at the start of the war, the use of partisans contributed to a rapid devaluation of ‘chivalry’ on the Eastern front. Look, you are clearly ignorant of what happened on the Eastern Front, when it happened and why. The Germans were all about self-policing thier troops, but not to delay the escalation of atrocities but quite the opposite to carry them out from the very start in an orderly fashion on a truly monsterous scale. The Katyn massacre was the murder of the Polish officer corps that had fallen into Soviet hands when Poland was divided between Germany and the USSR. The Germans were busy at the same time using Polish POWs as slave labor, murdering the Polish intelligentsia (including the Polish officers _they_ had captured) ethnically cleansing Poles from their homes to make way for German settlers, and rounding up all the Jews in Poland and forcing them into ghettos or worse. I’m unsure if by ‘the shot German POW’s at the start of the war’ you are confusing the victims of Katyn as being Germans rather than Poles, or if you are imagining the Soviets shot German POWs at the start of Barbarossa. Quite the opposite was occurring, actually. [The Commissar Order](http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007454) was issued by Hitler on June 6, 1941, before the invasion of the Soviet Union began. From the link: > [@](#): > > To the Germans, commissars represented the true “pillars of opposition,” the link between the Bolshevik ideologies and the minions in the military who the Nazis believed fought blindly for Bolshevism. For that reason, German soldiers were ordered to shoot any political commissars who were taken prisoners. > > The Commissar Order read: “The originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare are the political commissars… Therefore, when captured either in battle or offering resistance, they are to be shot on principle.” [Note by me: see what I mean about the Asiatic hordes coming from the East?] > > During the initial attack on the Soviet Union throughout the summer and autumn of 1941, the German armed forces generally complied with this order. In May 1942, however, the Commissar Order was rescinded at the urging of German field commanders, who came up against much stronger resistance when the routine shooting of the commissars became known to Soviet soldiers. > > Just as the Nazis targeted political commissars as agents of the Soviet Communist Party, they regarded Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) as an integral part of the so-called Bolshevik menace. The Germans killed POWs in massive numbers, not as a result of military operations but as a part of Nazi racial policy. As noted previously, over 3.3 million Soviet POWs were murdered by deliberate neglect by the Germans, the 2nd largest group of victims of the Holocaust. Not altogether surprising given the fervent Nazi belief in Jewish-Bolshevism, and their view of the Slavic people as untermensch. The guerilla fighting began as a result of the atrocities of German occupation. Following right on the heels of the advancing German armies in Barbarossa were four [Einsatzgruppen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen) > [@](#): > > After the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Einsatzgruppen’s main assignment was to kill civilians, as in Poland, but this time its targets specifically included Soviet Communist Party commissars and Jews.[33] In a letter dated 2 July 1941 Heydrich communicated to his SS and Police Leaders that the Einsatzgruppen were to execute all senior and middle ranking Comintern officials; all senior and middle ranking members of the central, provincial, and district committees of the Communist Party; extremist and radical Communist Party members; people’s commissars; and Jews in party and government posts. Open-ended instructions were given to execute “other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins, agitators, etc.).” He instructed that any pogroms spontaneously initiated by the occupants of the conquered territories were to be quietly encouraged.[49] On 8 July, he announced that all Jews were to be regarded as partisans, and gave the order for all male Jews between the ages of 15 and 45 to be shot.[50] On 17 July Heydrich ordered that the Einsatzgruppen were to kill all Jewish Red Army prisoners of war, plus all Red Army prisoners of war from Georgia and Central Asia, as they too might be Jews.[51] Unlike in Germany, where the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 defined as Jewish anyone with at least three Jewish grandparents, the Einsatzgruppen defined as Jewish anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent; in either case, whether or not the person practised the religion was irrelevant. > … > Hilberg estimates that between 1941 and 1945 the Einsatzgruppen and related agencies killed more than two million people, including 1.3 million Jews. > [@](#): > > Now, what I’m saying is that on one side you had troops whose view of the enemy as inferior humans facilitated atrocities. But that another factor was that the Russian approach to war was more brutal than in the west. And yet 1) it was the Russians who convened the laying out of the first written convention regarding the Laws and customs of War on Land, which included such basic things as not murdering POWs, and it was the Western Germans who sent death squads behind thier troops, who killed 6 million Jews, and who murdered 3.3 million Soviet prisoners. But of course the Russian approach to war was more brutal than in the West and was the other part that facilitated atrocities. Never mind that the Nazis had already laid out plans to commit genocide against the Jews and the Slavic peoples before they invaded, and started carrying it out immediately. > [@](#): > > Russian brutality was not simply a tit for tat reaction to what had been visited upon them. If Russian brutality was tit for tat to what had been visited upon them, they would have depopulated Germany after WW2. See up thread the proportion of peoples to be exterminated by the Nazis as part of Generalplan Ost: Poles 80-85%, Russians 50-60% to be physically eliminated and another 15% to be sent to Western Siberia, Belorusians 75%, Ukrainians 65%, Lithuanians 85%, Latvians 50%, Estonians 50%. The low end estimate of Soviet civilians killed by the Germans during the war is [13.7 million](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union#Civilian_losses) > [@](#): > > Also simply because of the fact that the Russian army had a higher proportion of hard uneducated peasant folk compared to city folk with ideas about rules and that you should ‘play nice’. As opposed to those educated, urbanite Germans who’s ideas of rules and that you should ‘play nice’ included murdering 6 million Jews, 3.3 million Soviet POWs, 13.7 million Soviet civilians… being educated and an urbanite does not inoculate one against becoming a monster. A lot of serial killers are educated and live in cities. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2013, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/51 "2013-05-31T16:17:28Z")
> [@Roderick\_Femm](#): > > Actually, this is exactly what I was looking for. This is the sort of thing that Hashimoto could point to (if he knew about this particular implementation) to “prove” that it is unfair to single out the Japanese for this kind of practice. The Japanese had “comfort stations” and the Brits had brothels. The nitpicky differences between physical coercion and economic necessity are just details (note that I am putting words into Hashimoto’s mouth, this is not my view). > Roddy Unless the women were being kidnapped by the British military and forced at gunpoint to work in the brothels, I don’t think a fair comparison can be made. Lots of armies have had camp followers and the stationing of allied troops throughout Asia was certainly one of the driving forces behind the growth of the sex industry in much of Asia and of course countless US soldiers in Vietnam frequented brothels in Vietnam and the countries they had R&R in, but none of those are fair comparisons with the “comfort women” of Korea. ---
**Author:** ![colonial](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/34f0e0/32.png) [@colonial](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/colonial)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2013, 4:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/52 "2013-05-31T16:28:56Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > One may discuss the justification for or legality of “forced cession of territory” all day, but that is not what happened to the millions of people who were ethnically cleaned from Prussia. That they were part of an evil nation does not justify the way that they were moved… and murdered. Forced cession of land usually does not include eviction of the population. However, in the case of Germany’s cession to Poland, the victors reasonably felt that Poland’s future security would be best protected if there were few ethnic Germans within its new borders. There was also consensus that Poland deserved radical compensation for the radical criminal acts it suffered from German invasion and occupation. > [@tomndebb](#): > > …and murdered. From first sentence of my earlier reply: “Murder and rape cannot be justified.” And I think all other respondents to this thread agree. Since that is not a matter of contention between us there should be no need for you to mention it again. > [@tomndebb](#): > > I did not want anyone to think that I was referring to the vast expanse of Prussia that extended even to Saxony and Westphalia, etc. OK. > [@tomndebb](#): > > You have made my point, however, that the claim that the ethnic cleansing was nothing more than recapturing stolen Polish land is an error. I agree it was not “nothing more than”, which does not mean the same as “none”. 10s of thousand square miles inhabited by millions of Poles pre-war _was_ recaptured stolen land. > [@tomndebb](#): > > As to the claim that any evil is justified against all Germans because of German behavior during the Nazi regime, I reject that sort of revenge. I am not making a case for “any evil.” Try to get that into your mind and keep it there, OK? I am making the case that the cession that took place was justified: it was justified as a form of compensation to the victim for evils commited and as a provision for the future security of the victim. > [@tomndebb](#): > > I would note that the ethnic cleansing took place without anything truly representing a court… The unconditional surrender documents signed were sufficient legal justification for all that followed short of extra-judicial and mob violence which sadly could not be completely deterred. > [@tomndebb](#): > > …and that the burden landed on those Prussians in ways that they never landed on anyone else in Germany. It would have been impossible to distribute the burden evenly, and even if it had been possible German needs short of the minimum necessities for life took lowest priority, certainly lower than compensation to its victims. > [@tomndebb](#): > > It had far more to do with the Soviet Union looking to provide more buffer land against the West than it did recompensing Poland for its travails. To the Soviet Union, yes. I do not believe the other parties had Soviet interests so exclusively in mind, though. ---
**Author:** ![Roderick\_Femm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/roderick_femm/32/14875_2.png) [@Roderick\_Femm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roderick_Femm)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2013, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/53 "2013-05-31T16:44:08Z")
> [@Ibn\_Warraq](#): > > Unless the women were being kidnapped by the British military and forced at gunpoint to work in the brothels, I don’t think a fair comparison can be made. Of course not, but I am suggesting that an unscrupulous arguer (such as Hashimoto might be\*) could throw that out there as an example of “similar” practice, relying on the fact that 99.9% of his listeners won’t be familiar with the case, nor will bother to look it up, nor even care if the differences are pointed out to them by commentators after the fact. This is why unscrupulous arguers do that sort of thing, because it works for them. \*Is Hashimoto an unscrupulous arguer? I confess that my command of the Japanese language was not equal to keeping up with his various press appearances while I was there, but I suspect he often is, based on his political ambitions and his “manner” of speaking. However, these observations probably belong in the Elections thread instead of here. Roddy ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2013, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/54 "2013-05-31T22:27:30Z")
> [@colonial](#): > > From first sentence of my earlier reply: > “Murder and rape cannot be justified.” And I think all other respondents to this thread agree. Since that is not a matter of contention between us there should be no need for you to mention it again. Sorry. You don’t get to play that game. The Prussian expulsion included a lot of murder and simply saying “yeah, that was bad,” does not actually eliminate it from the discussion. > [@colonial](#): > > I agree it was not “nothing more than”, which does not mean the same as “none”. 10s of thousand square miles inhabited by millions of Poles pre-war _was_ recaptured stolen land. However, Dissonance has implied that it was “nothing more than” recapturing stolen Polish land. > [@colonial](#): > > I am not making a case for “any evil.” Try to get that into your mind and keep it there, OK? I am making the case that the cession that took place was justified: it was justified as a form of compensation to the victim for evils commited and as a provision for the future security of the victim. However, the way that it was carried out was criminal and defending it does result in you making a case for evil. > [@colonial](#): > > The unconditional surrender documents signed were sufficient legal justification for all that followed short of extra-judicial and mob violence which sadly could not be completely deterred. Perhaps, in your view. > [@colonial](#): > > To the Soviet Union, yes. I do not believe the other parties had Soviet interests so exclusively in mind, though. The “other parties”? The decision was made by three men: the leaders of the U.S. and the U.K. who were each new to their positions with little background in dealing with Stalin and did not want to rile up the Soviets at a time when they still faced an ongoing war in Japan, and the Soviet leader who dictated the terms. No one else was included in the decision. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2013, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/55 "2013-05-31T22:58:31Z")
> [@Dissonance](#): > > See above. The death tolls were orders of magnitudes lower than those perpetrated by the Nazis. They were less bad. I’m not “waving around” the phrase it was horrible. I mean exactly what I said: it was horrible, it was undeserved, and they were victims. Putting the forced expulsion of Germanic peoples on the same moral plane as “a crime comparable to some of the biggest in WW-II” i.e. the Holocaust is obscene. And yet you continue to want to minimize what happened in Prussia while dragging in other events of similar magnitude. I am afraid that your protests are unpersuasive. ---
**Author:** ![colonial](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/34f0e0/32.png) [@colonial](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/colonial)\ **Post date:** [June 2, 2013, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581/56 "2013-06-02T18:30:49Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Sorry. You don’t get to play that game. The Prussian expulsion included a lot of murder and simply saying “yeah, that was bad,” does not actually eliminate it from the discussion. My position in this discussion is that the sentence of eviction was just. The justice of a sentence is not affected by the unauthorized inhumane behavior of those responsible for carrying out the sentence. > [@tomndebb](#): > > However, Dissonance has implied that it was “nothing more than” recapturing stolen Polish land. However, I have not been implying that. > [@tomndebb](#): > > However, the way that it was carried out was criminal and defending it does result in you making a case for evil. Addressed. > [@tomndebb](#): > > The “other parties”? The decision was made by three men: the leaders of the U.S. and the U.K. who were each new to their positions with little background in dealing with Stalin and did not want to rile up the Soviets at a time when they still faced an ongoing war in Japan, and the Soviet leader who dictated the terms. No one else was included in the decision. “Other Parties” means in this case every politician in America and Great Britain, all of whom were committed to the restoration and security of Poland. No change in top leadership had any effect whatsoever on this commitment, which was the immediate cause of the war to begin with, one year and nine months before the USSR even became a belligerent. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/behavior-of-armies-to-conquered-civilian-female-populations-in-wwii/659581.md?page=2)