You should read all the words in your cite:
" By the turn of the century, in both America and Great Britain, infant circumcision was near universally recommended."
Recommended being the operative word here. It’s almost universally recommended that people maintain a healthy body weight, but over 1/3 of the USA is considered obese.
As a further data point, most births in the USA were at home until the 1930s. So most US soldiers in WWII were born at home, and almost certainly weren’t circumcised.
Oh yes, on the subject of food, Cavanna also mentions that sometimes (for good behaviour, or in his case for long periods without too much obvious slacking off) the prisoners would be granted ration tickets (bread tickets being the local gold equivalent), to be spent in town as they were tasked with street clearing after Allied bombings, and that they’d often sell/black market those for an opportunity to get a few "Stahm"s.
Stahm was a ticket-free stick-to-the-ribs street dish. Potatoes, lard, bacon, various cereal and black bread all cooked together to make a sort of ultrathick porridge ; served with a side of watery malt beer. To him and his Russian sweetheart, at the time, this was culinary high heaven.
He also mentioned that Russian POWs seemed to really enjoy sunflower seeds ; as it kept their saliva flowing and mouth working all the time, which made them feel like they weren’t starving.
(past time edit) The Russians would ironically dub them “Schokolade” - chocolate.
A thing I’ve read of in WW2 POW memoirs, and found intriguing: one way in which it was easy for POWs to mess their captors about, was in the “swapping of identities” – not hard to do, with the enormous numbers of POWs, and their being frequently transported hither and yon. You just exchanged identifying documents with the other guy – for the Germans, so long as the numbers tallied up, they weren’t further bothered.
This stratagem was useful in various ways, for escapes. Also – some officer prisoners found the boredom and inactivity so mad-driving, that they took the opportunity of identity-swaps with “other ranks” prisoners – the “other ranks” guy took the place in the officers’ camp, and the officer became an “other rank”. People with this kind of temperament, found gruelling menial labour preferable to mega-tedious idleness. Also, if you wished to carry on the fight; being sent out on working details could give better opportunities for sabotage, and for escape attempts, than being banged-up the whole time in a camp.
One of my junior high social studies teacher was a POW (ironically another was Guard for Japanese POWs in Hawaii. He admitted he had an easy war). He talked about it at length on day and this is what I remember
I remember that show. I believe all the POWs were officers, which is why they were given so many privileges.
I’ve known/knew several veterans of the German camps and was lucky enough to sit in on a conversation between several of them at one time about their experiences. (College project) What I took from it was how you got treated depended on time and exactly whose camp you were in. Early 42 or so and a Luftwaffe camp and things were not too terrible. It was a prison and you were a prisoner but things weren’t barbaric. Late war and one of the camps guarded by foreign volunteers (SS or Army; memory fails me) to the Reich and things could/did get pretty bad; especially for regular enlisted men. Plus by that time rations for the German people weren’t all that great. So I believe its a serious case of YMMV.
While we’re updating things, here’s the Wikipedia page for the death march my uncle was in.
And the Red Cross inspections of POW camps were a joke. The Germans knew ahead of time and would distribute blankets and such before and take them away after. Do not trust anything about those reports.
My uncle died last year. All the men in the family of my parent’s generation who were of age served in WWII. This uncle was the last one. They are all gone now.
As far as Stalin’s regime was concerned, any Soviet soldier who allowed themselves to be captured was ipso facto suspicious if and when they were ever liberated - hence the resistance among so many to being returned to the USSR (and any other communist-controlled territory) after the war.
And yet, a lot of the German POW’s like the South (and America in general) so much that a lot of they stayed and never went back to Germany.
How Germans could be shocked over the treatment of African Americans, knowing how the Jews were persecuted and murdered in their own concentration camps back home, is beyond me.
I don’t know what General Patton "said" but when he saw, for the first time, a German concentration camp, he vomited. I think that about says it all.
And in some places, even worse. I have it from too many sources too many different places that the Red Cross people, even while physically there, were more likely to sell/swap something to the POWs as they were to give anything. The one group everyone seemed to agree actually did some good back then and there was the Salvation Army. The “Sallies” as I was taught to call them were the one group the people I knew never forgot and would donate to whenever they could. Red Cross; not so much.
People have a great talent for ideas and perceptions which – looked at objectively and rationally – are inconsistent, and don’t make sense. Possibly, for these guys, Jews were utterly beyond the pale; but African Americans – a category of people new to them – they rated as human (or as “sub-humans”, but acceptable and likeable ones), and accordingly felt empathy.
It’s unlikely that they did know that, since few of them would ever have seen it happen, and may indeed have been in Allied hands from before the time the Final Solution really geared up.
Ordinary Germans knew that German Jews were being compulsorily resettled. They did not know, or at least could avoid knowing or could persuade themselves that they did not know, much more than that. Whereas the way Black people were treated in the souther US was played out right in front of their eyes.
PBS this afternoon showed an episode of NOVA which featured some Brits recreating the glider at Colditz. I was only half listening but what I remember, there was only one photo of the glider after it was finished. No one knows what happened to the glider itself. The reenactment itself was more or less successful. The glider was launched, with a dummy in the pilot’s seat, and it did fly via remote control but they had to alter the optimum flight path to avoid buildings that didn’t exist back then and the glider ended up crashing.
But discrimination against Jews went beyond that - they were barred from public office and most jobs, their stores were routinely thrashed and synagogues burnt, they were forbidden from marrying non-Jews (and vice versa), and of course they had to wear the star so they could be spat on/roughed up in the streets. Then, yes, they got arrested* en masse *and had all of their property seized which, even if you never knew the rest (and honestly, that’s always been a bullshit excuse - they knew. The Führer made speeches about it for a decade), is kind of a bad thing, yanno ?
Jim Crow’s South may have been a shitty place for black folks, but I’m not convinced it was as bad, as systematically as that.
Maybe on reflection, propinquity had something to do with it: don’t know the figures off top of head, but I believe Jews made up a fairly small proportion of the population of Germany – likely many Germans were not, so far as they knew, personally acquainted with anyone Jewish. It’s easier to close your mind and heart, re an abuse which you don’t witness at first-hand. With as many black people as white, in the American South: the situation would have been in one’s face the whole time.
It is of course important to note, for those not familiar, that the Luftwaffe was part of the German State itself, not the Nazi party, and was thus not directly involve with running the death camps (nor shutting the death camps down, either).
You might find the story of Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds to be of interest.
I know I am replying to a 3-year old post, but I felt that something should be said.
Well, to begin with - they were young officers and many felt that they should be doing something to help the Allied war effort instead of rotting behind barbed wire. No matter how relatively “nice” Stalag Luft III might have been, it was still a prison camp. The prisoners were chafing in captivity, no matter how apparently close the end of the war might be.
It is unfair to say that the officers in charge of the escape knowingly sent many people to their deaths – it sounds as if the poster thinks that the organizers of the escape stayed behind. They didn’t: they went out, and in fact most of them were killed afterwards (George Bushell, the mastermind behind the tunnels, was one of them).
Reading about the escape it becomes apparent that the people who organized and took part in the escape did not really believe that the Germans would actually go and shoot recaptured prisoners (in contravention of the Geneva conventions, signed by Germany). Yes, they expected that most of the escapees would be recaptured, but they also expected that, at most, the recaptured officers would be sent for a stint in solitary or sent to Colditz castle. Deliberate murder of recaptured officers was something that the escapees considered as basically unthinkable. Naïveté? Perhaps. But that was the case. Allied airmen were responsibility of the Luftwaffe, and they expected the usual lenient Luftwaffe treatment afterwards, not that they would be handled by the Gestapo instead.
And, linking with my first point, George Bushell himself apparently said that the escape would be worthwhile even if nobody made it home, because a mass escape would divert German men and supplies into searching for the escapees – men and supplies that Germany was already short of and which would be temporarily unavailable for the German war effort itself.
I think that the escape was understandable and not the result of hubris.
Being born at home doesn’t mean they weren’t circumcised. First of all home birth didnt necessarily mean no doctor as they often made house calls. Not having it at the time of birth doesn’t mean no circumcision either My son wasn’t circumcised until a month after the birth. Even Jews don’t get circumcised the day of the birth. Also parents weren’t as big about disregarding their doctors recommendations back then. Lastly the point is deciding every prisoner who was circumcised is Jewish would result in a LOT of false positives.