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
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,
begins with the statement “What happened to German civilians was horrible.”
Again however, your calling
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.
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.
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, bolding mine:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
It’s a good thing that I haven’t made any of these arguments then, isn’t it?
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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
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)
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.
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.
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
with something I said, or something that I agree with in any way whatsoever.
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.
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.
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 was issued by Hitler on June 6, 1941, before the invasion of the Soviet Union began. From the link:
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
OK.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To the Soviet Union, yes. I do not believe the other parties had Soviet interests so exclusively in mind, though.
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
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.
However, Dissonance has implied that it was “nothing more than” recapturing stolen Polish land.
However, the way that it was carried out was criminal and defending it does result in you making a case for evil.
Perhaps, in your view.
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.
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.
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.
However, I have not been implying that.
Addressed.
“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.