No - O’Really got it backwards.
Will I judge them? Hell yes I will. An I’ll judge them all guilty as hell. We’re talking about the unit Mengele belonged to. The SS was responsible for some of the greatest attrocities the Nazis committed. And no, “joining because of your buddies” isn’t an excuse. That’s the equivalent of joining the KKK just because your friends are doing so.
Just in case you’re not joking, that was what O’Reilly did – got the story backwards. Twice. Then when called upon it, he weaseled and Fox changed the transcripts so it said Normandy. Olbermann (rightly) tore him a new one for doing so. (NOT for getting it wrong so much but because he didn’t admit it)
Supposedly the Waffen SS were regular army units, not Mengele’s bunch.
No, they specifically weren’t regular army units. They were SS units. And every single member of the SS was declared a war criminal after the war.
You’re thinking of the Wehrmacht. THEY were the regular army. (Rommel, for example, was in the Werhrmacht.)
No, I was thinking that the Waffen SS operated as regular army units rather than SS stuff. They did indeed after 1943, when non-aryans, navy and airforce guys with nothing left to operate were conscripted into Waffen SS units.
Mengele was Waffen SS, too; a doctor with SS Wiking division in the Ukraine, then, after he was wounded, he was moved from front line duty, first to the Race and Resettlement Office, and then a medical officer at Auschwitz’s Gypsy camp. After it was liquidated, he was made Chief Medical Officer at the Birkenau subcamp at Auschwitz.
You’re thinking about the Totenkopfverbaende, which ran the concentration camps, but Mengele was never in the SS-TV, only the Waffen SS. It’s sort of a moot point anyway, because the SS-TV and Waffen SS had a lot of overlap, especially after 1940, when Himmler weakened the SS-TV by putting it under Waffen SS administration.
And you were flat out wrong. They were specifically not regular army units. They were war criminals.
Waffen-SS did do some conscription of Volksdeutsche, though.
But this wasn’t because every one of them committed war crimes, but because they were considered to be political – or Nazi – troops, I believe; while Wermacht who too committed war crimes, was regular troops. Also, I think this was on the initiative of the Soviets, who had all their “political” “soldiers” (commisaars) shot on spot by the German army/SS.
I don’t deny there was conscription into the SS. But they were not regular army units.
So you’re saying that some regular apolitical (or even anti-Nazi) German who got drafted into the SS was somehow turned into some kind of non-human creature of pure evil? How exactly do you think that worked? Were they more or less human than a GI who followed his sargent’s orders to shoot a German prisoner ?
I honestly really don’t understand how you can think that tens or hundreds of thousands of people can be universally described as ‘guilty’. Some did horrible things, some went along with it, some tried to stop or lessen them, and most probably did different things at different times. I mean, I know that I’ve done bad things I’m not proud of; I’ve also stood up for what’s right. How can I possibly think other people are any different?
Again, I agree that organizations can have a culture and organization that affects how individuals within them act; and I’m not denying that the SS had a bad record, and could, as an organization, be described as morally bad. But that doesn’t mean each person involved was pure evil; they were human beings.
Not to get too far off topic, but I’m in the middle of reading The Lampshade. The author has his hands on what appears so far to be a mid-century central-European lampshade made of human skin. He addresses the issue of Holocaust deniers at several points. So far it is quite good, if you can tolerate the subject matter. I’ll keep you posted.