Damn, I've got to stop watching the History Channel. Every time I watch a show about the Holocaust, it makes me feel so depressed. All those images of the bodies and death and the kids that are all unfed. It makes me wonder how someone (Hitler) can be so evil. It also makes me wonder how all those Germans can be just as evil. How can a German look someone in the eyes (The Jews) while killing them just because of their religion beliefs? I hope Hitler is rotting in hell.

i'm sure it's not too hard when you just give the orders.  the japs are just as bad but don't even get half the press the nazis get (chinese holocaust, rape of nanking)brutality goes on for ages, read about the inquisition..some crazy forms of torture.

Hitler was much more of an 'equal-opportunity' killer than is generally published.
Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, mentally and/or physically impaired..........................

Stalin only killed about 20 million but gets little press for his efforts.

As 'inferno' points out, the Japanese were vicious killers of every race they encountered but get so little credit.

You read Rape of Nanking?  God, those pictures still give me the creeps.  Should be required reading, especially for those that think these things don't happen.

The Soviets and Communist Chinese did a pretty good job of butchery as well. And the Soviet house of horrers didn't start with Stalin--it started with Lenin. For example, the early Bolsheviks converted state buildings into brothels, where they gang raped bourgeois  women. Lenin approved, it was an effective means of state terror . . .

Soviets, Chinese, Japanese all were pretty adept at genocide. In far greater numbers.

And look what gets all the press.

Now, you can either do the intellectually lazy thing and call me a Nazi lover, or you can do the intellectually honest thing, and ask "Why is that?"

Hint: It has NOTHING to the ethnicity of the people being genocided((new word I just made up.)

And remember, my favorite rifle is to credit for the death of more Nazis than any other single object in the world.

[:D]

Shortly after WW2, some behavioral scientists (I believe at Harvard) dicided to do a study on what it was about the German society that made ordinary Germans do such horrible things to others.  Before they went, they decided to do a pilot study with American college students.  They enlisted, for pay, a group of undergrad students, put them in a control room with an "Electric Rheostat", and had them look thru a window into another room where there was a person (they were told it was another student) strapped into a chair with wires coming out of it.  They were told that it was an experiment to determine how much discomfort an individual could stand but that nothing they did would permanently injure the person in the chair, so long as they stayed out of the Red Zone area marked on the Rheostat.

As they progressively administered increasing voltage to the strapped in subjects they were subjected to increasing yells and pleas to stop, from the strapped in ones, while being encouraged to keep increasing the doses by the "administrator".  Not one single subject listened to the pleas of the guys in the chair.  They all did exactly what the head guy told them to do, including going into the red zone.

Of course, the guys in the chair were acting, and there was no voltage.

Based on the study, the researchers didn't bother going to Germany. Bottom line, ANYBODY, including free born Americans, can be "trained" to act brutally toward others, so long as authority figures keep assuring them that it's OK to do it.

In fact, the Japanese government seemed to think it was just fine . . .

The same is true of Stalin, who's Red Army behaved just as bad in East Prussia . . .

Quite true.

No one group has cornered the market on evil.

And when someone makes it seem like one particular group HAS cornered the market on evil, you best start watching out what that "someone" wants from you.

And it is worth noting that many of the "cogs" in the Nazi death machine were not Germans. Many were Eastern Europeans of one type or another.

look at the big picture and take into account what Jewish Germans had been doing to Germans between 1900 and the start of WWII.  starvation was common for the poor to average German families while Jewish families tended to live wealthy.  when a people are starving they will take some payback when they can.  don't think the holocaust was primarily over religion.  just like the American Civil war was not about slavery.  


Hitler is in hell only if he did not accept Jesus as his personal lord and savior.   it sucks but that's how Christianity works.

That would be my advice as well. God knows it's their favorite subject.

Well, I think that's lame. It's not my fault if I'm doing better than someone else who's poor.

If the Civil War wasn't about slavery, then what was it about?

I'm REALLY glad I'm not a Christian if you folks accept pure evil as one of your members.

True, but their Tales of the Guns series was really good. I've watched every Basic Training episode so far. Mail call is pretty good. I guess you gotta take the bad with the good.

What I've NEVER been able to understand is how Germany, one of the most civilized nations in the world, could literally goose-step en masse behind such an obvious lunatic, and allow their country to descend to the depths it did.

Mass hysteria? Something in the water? Pure desperation?

None of those hold water in my book. At least not credible water...

Actually the Civil War was about states rights. Slavery is just the simple mind numbing excuse the current PC educators like to blame the war on. I was educated in the "north" in the 80's and it was taught that states rights was the cause, and justly so. The argument was that the southern states felt they had the right to pass and enforce thier laws as they saw fit in thier state. The northern states felt this is now how it should be. The reality of it is slavery would have gone away on its own without the Civil War, it just would have taken longer and it would not have cost the lives of so many Americans.

[beer]

not just poor, literaly starving to death poor.

the civil war was about the 10th amendment.  

The body of Christ is not an organization with a "membership".  i can't vote other members out of heaven because i don't like their politics.  

I think the answer can finally be revealed...

[img]http://www.wildcity.com/photofunny/milk_ad.jpg[/img]

UNLESS Hitler wasn't the lunatic everyone claims he was.

I think of him more as a charismatic,  evil genius.

Masses of people DO NOT follow lunatics. But they do follow evil geniuses who know how to use emotion to strike at the heart chords. THIS was Hitlers evil genius.

Always shun people who appeal to emotion, rather than logic, as a basis for your action.

What was the point of killing all the Jews?

Are you serious?

Yeah, I'm serious. It's my understanding that southern land owners didn't want to lose their slaves and the Union kick their sorry asses for it.

Don't expect a COMPLETELY rational explanation for an irrational act, but here goes....

Hitler was above all else FIERCELY nationalistic. This singular trait is what has earned him the ire of the one-worlder and  Marxist types - he was a mustang that would NOT play along with their little games. The fact that he killed Jews (as repulsive as ethnic killings are) is the emotional hook some use to get you to hate him - appealing to your emotion rather than to your logic.  Don't kid yourself into thinking that the one-worlder and Marxist types care one iota about Jewish peoples. Its a ruse to deceive the masses.) (For the record, I don't consider anyone here to be the perpetrators of the ruse, merely people deceived by it)


But I digress. Hilters fierce nationalism is the SAME trait that makes them hate America.

What the German Jews were, as much as anything else, was they were sympathetic to Soviet communism (i.e. NOT nationalistic, but one worlder) rather than Hitlers Nationalist Socialist (aka Nazi) bent.

Thus, they were willing for outside forces (i.e. the Soviet Union) to control Germany the same way it controlled Hungary, Czeckoslavakia, Romania in the late 40's and early fifties.

Thus, Hitler's "real" intent in killing all the Jews was to eradicate Soviet communism from Germany, in favor of his independent homegrown socialism..

His plan was kinda twisted, but had an emotional appeal to it for nationalistic Germans - he appealed to their emotion of a sovereign Germany, and got them to do / allow things that, once his fever pitched voice was gone, in the cold stark reality of daylight, they abhorred (to the extent that they were sane)

WTF?

Are you trying to say that the Jews who were slaughtered somehow *deserved* it as "payback" because they "tended to live wealthy" when others were starving?

That's a load of crap.  They were scapegoated and blamed for the problems of the time, kinda like you're doing now.  

If I have misread your comments, please clarify what you meant.  

I agree with you 100% that Hitler was anything BUT dumb. He was, in fact, a genius, and an evil genius as you so well put. I've never believed anything else.

However, I don't think anyone can deny he was a lunatic. A fiendishly clever, beguilingly charming, brilliantly orating, mass-murdering lunatic, but a lunatic nonetheless.

The rest of what you say (i.e. - pulling heart strings, etc.) is probably dead-on accurate, even though I still find it difficult to accept.

Then again, I've never been truly desperate. Robert A. Heinlein once said that if you don't think that someone will kill you over a can of tomatoes, then you've never been hungry. I guess that is a perfect example of what I mean.

It was about rights.
If America had a civil war right now, most of us (on this board) would be on the side that would resemble what was the south. We would be fighting for local government control, as opposed to a federal government, like Feinstien or McCain would.
Most people in the south did not own slaves, and my guess would be that most of the soldiers did not own slaves. The were fighting for the right to decide, for freedom really. It was a control issue and a war over where the control truly lied.
I personally don't believe that people should have so much freedom that can own other people. But I do believe that we are 50 seperate states, and each one should have been able to decide on its own. It would not have lasted much longer anyways. How long could a slave plantation owner maintain his lifestyle when the morally superior northern states decided not to trade with him? What are you going to do with 50 tons of cotton?

Well, your understanding is wrong.  

For one thing, the South was providing raw materials such as cotton to the north very cheaply, but the north really jacked the price up on the finished goods (damn, the north sure didn't seem to mind slavery as long as they could get cheap raw materials).  The South found that they could import finished goods more cheaply from England than they could buy them from up north.  The federal government then imposed tariffs on these imported goods, thus making them more expensive than the overpriced finished goods from up north.  That was one of the major sticking points.

The Emancipation Proclamation was not issued until well into the war of northern agression.

The north sent black soldiers, many of them freed slaves, into battle, unarmed, at the front of many charges.  They were just cannon fodder.  Yeah, the north was real concerned about the plight of black people.......NOT!

Before you make remarks like "the Union kick their sorry asses for it.", how about having a clue.  Oh, it would be KICKED, not KICK.

My family never owned slaves, nor did the vast majority of people in the South.  Do you think that so many Southerners fought so fiercely to preserve something that they were not part of nor benefitted from?

I suppose you agree with the reparations crowd, too.

As for some of the other comments on this subject,  I am not surprised at comments about how the Holocaust is just an emotional thing to stir people up and only dummies fall for it and support the Jews and Israel, or how it was done to stop communism, or they deserved it.  More Jew bashing disguised with faux-intellectual rantings that are trying to give the appearance of something well thought out.  It really is just Jew hating at it's best.  Best of all, if you don't agree with them, you are just some moron who fell for the 'emotional' stories of the Holocaust.  They always try to distract by pointing out that Stalin and the Japanese were just as bad, if not worse.  They were, but that doesn't lessen what Hitler did and what they did is irrelevant to a thread about Hitler.

Only on AR15.com can we have asingle thread about Hitler, the Nazis, Jews, and the Civil war.  [:D]

Wonder if we could get abortion, homosexuality, and evolution tossed in before this goes six or seven more pages?

[:P]

I was a history major in college.  Many years ago while I was going to school, I took a very interesting class entitled, "Hitler's Europe".  One of the texts was William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich".  I highly recommend it.  Long...but a very good read.

Hitler a lunatic?  Yes...certainly out of touch with reality in the last couple of years.

Stalin as bad?  Yes in some ways...but mostly within the Soviet Union.

Japanese as bad?  Absolutely.  Worse in some ways.

The big difference is that the Germans murdered millions with typical German efficiency and precision.  They did it BETTER than either the Japs or the Sovs.

Germans robotic followers of a FATHER FIGURE?  Yes.  Goes WAAYYYY back to their Teutonic history and culture.

More later...Gotta think about this without beer clouding what brain cells I have operational...and try to remember some of that old stuff.
[;D]

you got it!!!  or rather you got hitler's take on it.
 
my personal feelings is there is a little bit of truth in his statements about the Jews.  only because it's hard to convince someone of a complete lie but add a little truth and a desperate person is more likely to believe.  the German government was rar more at fault than the Jews.

True, but with all this said and done, the south LOST. Get over it. The south LOST. LOSERS.

And no, I don't agree with the reparation crowd. If I did, then the Chinese who died building the rail road should be compensated. The Indians whose land was stolen from should be compensated. And so on...

[b]Folks, Folks, Folks![/b] Let's get back to the original theme of this thread 'Hitler & The Nazis' before someone says something about the South which they will regret!

If y'all want to talk about the War Between the States, and its causes, go start a new thread.

But don't hijack someone else's thread to do it!

Eric The(Sensible)Hun[>]:)]

So, you're saying the Jews were also at fault? How, because they were more wealthy than the Germans? Still not enough reason for genecide. I know of some Jews who are ridiculously more wealthy than me. Doesn't mean I want to go out and kill them.

Bullshit!  The Jews were not "at fault" at all for any of it.  Not for the war, not the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi's or anything like it.  Jews are not responsible for their own mass murders.

If that's what you're saying, I feel sorry for you.

If what you're saying instead is that some German Jews were wealthy and successful, and some non-Jewish Germans envied them their success and therefore *blamed* them for the political and economic problems of the time, then you're absolutely right.  That's what scapegoating is all about.

So which is it?

The Mosin-Nagant?

Or the Norden Bombsight?

Well, now we are well into semantical nuances.

To me (and the dictionary, I believe) a lunatic is incapable of tying his own shoes, routinely has drool running down his cheek, and is incapable of stringing together a coherent sentence.

As such, Hitler was NO lunatic.

Just becasue a person does some insane things DOES NOT mean they are insane.

Well, to begin with, the German Army was never really defeated in the field in WW1. So all of those WW1 German soldiers went home looking for a reason why they had lost, and they blamed the Jews (when they should have blamed the Royal Navy and the industrial capacity of the US).

Then, the Allies imposed harsh and vindictive measures upon Germany, causing economic instability and starvation.

The combination of the above resulted in an opertunity for Hitler and the Nazi Party, who gained control of Germany.

WW2 was really a continuation of WW1. If we had truely beaten the German army in WW1, WW2 would not have happened. Likewise, if we beat Germany in the way we did and treated them with respect afterwards, WW2 would not have happened.

The Jews were not the cause of German suffering, but they were a handy scapegoat.

All of the serious history I've read of Hitler in WW2 suggests that he was quite sane. Like other succesful leaders (like Patton & Andrew Jackson), Hitler was good at putting on an act for people he wanted to influence . . .

Excuse me, but are you suggesting that being prosperous somehow inflicts damage on someone else?

The treatment of the Jews (and slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, the poles, and others) by the Nazis is absolutely NOT understandable in any way, shape, or form.

[b]Quoted:[/b]


[img]http://www.wildcity.com/photofunny/milk_ad.jpg[/img]

[img]http://carcino.gen.nz/images/image.php/38c0f559/hitler.jpg[/img]

Read the book: Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

You forgot to include the Japanese Unit 731 that played with biowarfare and did medical experiments including "live" autopsies. Of course they were never prosecuted for war crimes.  They were given full immunity in exchange for information by the U.S.

Shamayim:
I wish with all of my heart you were wrong. However, experience proves you're right.

Bill

Thats right -- Blame the Jews. It was all their fault.

It might be a point of interest, to know that the Catholic Church, has never excommunicated Adolph Hitler.

Bill

Garandman:
Have you read the book, [b]"Tragedy and Hope,"[/b] by Carroll Quigley? The explainations, in the book parallel, what you are saying.

Bill

I recall that study, as well.

The only complaint that I have is that the task of applying electrical shocks to an unknown person in the next room, shocks that you know are not lethal, can never be compared to what it takes to grab a young child by the arm and knowingly lead him or her into a gas chamber where you know that this child, who is passively obeying and instinctively following you, an adult, as he or she has been taught, will die an utterly horrible, cruel, and terrifying death!

[b]It is simply [u]not[/u] the same thing![/b]

And for these scientists to say that it could be is to equate American society with German society.

And we all know that German society failed in the 30s and 40s to comply with any sort of standards of common decency!

The society that produced Bach and Beethoven suddenly produced Streicher and Kaltenbruner.

And American society didn't produce such men as heroes.

None.

Eric The(MoralEquivalencyDoesn'tPlayHere)Hun[>]:)]

Those of you who have not done so, need to read the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  Hitler was a master manipulator, and due to some of the Jews' social practices, they made a handy scapegoat of themselves.  So did the evangelical Christians, Communist Party members, and anyone else Hitler could think of.

 I truly believe that Hitler was indeed a type or model of the Antichrist.  The most alarming part about Hitler and the Third Reich is the frightening number of parallels between Germany in the Thirties and the USA today.  Not to hijack the thread, but the number of parallels is indeed remarkable.

First off,IMO hitler was no genius.He had political talent,and a talent for making a speech.If you look at the many mistakes he made that lost the war I feel it proves he wasn't genius.The way he decided to ignore the best military brain trust in the world ,and impose his experence as a corporal in WW1,as commander of military operations down to army level after the first faze of the war.He declared war on the USA for no particular reason...ect.

I also believe anyone that would engage the entire world in war and systematically murder people in an industrial manner could very well be insane.

As for how he came to power,that was a matter of the right man with the right cause in the right country at the right time in history.A coincidense that would probably never be duplicated.

You must remember that(like mentioned before)WW2 in europe was a continuation of WW1.

United Germany in 1914 was a relativly young country.After the Franco-Prussian war of 1870,when the Germans marched through Paris and imposed terms including land and reparation payments,Germany was THE super power in europe ,militarily and as time went on economically.They were acquirring colonies overseas and building a high seas fleet to rival Great Britain.

After WW1,started by circumstance,and a war they really didn't lose militarily,they agreed to an armestice. They were put under the heal of the allies.They forfited all overseas possessions,a border region adjacent to their industrial heartland(Ruhr)alsace-lorraine,was occupied by the French army.East Prussa was severed from the fatherland by the Danzig corridor,a strip of land given to Poland so they could access the Baltic.Their military was totally immasculated.No airplanes.No navy.No U-boats.No tanks and the standing army was limited to 100,000.(This is why they devoloped innovative tactics and the leadership for hitlers future adventure,highly professional.)On top of all this they were strapped with reparation payments to the allies that they could not possibly pay.

Then comes the depression.I've got pictures of germans literaly pushing around wheelbarrows full of deutchmarks to pay for some bread.So these people go from the top of the world to massive inflation and unemployment.On top of this the Weimar Republic(the interwar government, pre hitler)had no solutions and was really not in control of things ,even law and order.There was fighting in the streets between right wingers and commies.Just really chaos and dispair in a country prided on order and duty.

So in these circumstances,along come the national socialists(nazis).Publicly(privatly one party domination) representing patriotism,a return to traditional values.They used lots of imagery and themes from german legend,and they were the anti commies.They also appealed to all those unemployed(millions)war veterans that had nothing to do.So they gave them a little brown shit and a purpose.

They also gave them a tangable reason for their plight,the international jewish conspiracy.After all these people held together with their own tradition no matter what country they lived in.They were for the most part educated.They owned businesses and weren't those banks that financed the allies and handled the german reparration payments run by jewish dynasties?These people were loyal to no one but themselves and could care less about the plight of the average german other than to make a buck off of him in these desperate times....no?

Sadly this view seems to the curse of the jews throughout history.

Anyhow,the population was already reaching into its military past for leadership when they elected an 80+ year old Paul Hindenberg president.Eventually to placate all those brown shirt wearing trouble makers in the street,he appointed hitler chancellor.He thought once in he could control him,as did hitlers oligark?(big business) backers.Well soon afterward Hindenburg died.Through physical intimidation of the entire  reichstag(german parliment)hitler assumed and consolidated his power.He abolished the presidencey,Changed the armed forces oath from the fatherland to himself personally and eventually got emergency powers that basically let him lead by decree.

Once in,the nazis made sure every house had a radio.And of course the media was totally dominated by the....nazis.This is where the average german got his news and info(indoctrination).The nazis did start detaining undesireables like the retarded,gypsies ect.No one cared about these people.I beleive the people knew that unsavory things were going on,but probably thought it would not happen to them as long as the were good germans.Eventually it got out of control,and one day I'm sure everyone really put some thought into it and realised that if they didn't go along they'd be a bar of soap aswell.

In the meantime ,the nazis had restored order.Cleared lawlessness from the streets.Gave people jobs,public works projects like the autobahn and rearmament.They stressed traditional values like family and physical fitness and german culture.They put on massive rallies in Nuremburg to messmarize the sheeple.They put germany back on the world stage with the 34' olympics.Heck I think even Time Magazine put hitler on their cover as man of the year in 36'.

Later hitler brought back german pride by publically denouncing the Versilles Treaty.and showing the world the rebourn wermacht,along witht their tanks and airplanes.Then he went a step further and restored germany back to whole.He re militarized alsace-lorainne,reunited with Ausrtia and got the allies to sellout the Czechs.All this he did at no cost in blood and treasure.The german public was so in love with this "genius" that they were ready to start another world war to restore german control over Danzig and Poland if thats what their leader deemed necessary.The last thing in their mind was what was happening to a few "non german" fringe groups.Hitler and the nazis had reinstated the collective pride of the german people and they were once again on top,or at least an equal with the "great powers".

Later,I believe the war was a good excuse for lots of people to do these awfull things to the jews and others and call it "orders".And like I said,many probably relised that the knock could just as easily come at their door.

Lets face it,there were also lots of evil people that did it cause they believed in the cause.

It's been a couple of years since I read Albert Speer's memoirs, "Inside the Third Reich" [a good read, btw] but the picture that Speer paints of Hitler, his beliefs, and the way he acted in everyday life, leads me to firmly vote "Lunatic."

How can people goose-step behind...etc.?  Look at some of the comments made on this board in other contexts,  "how can people vote for...etc."  It's easy, the right charisma, good press, etc.  Hitler had the additional benefit of a society which was on its knees, and falling further.


Byron, above, has a fairly good synopsis of the events, but there might be more emphasis on the liberal, weak republics, and the privation of the people, and how things were taken from the people, all looking "legal" because some had sources from abroad.  There was mention of that earlier in the thread, and it broke into angry argument.  Many Americans have to learn things the hard way.  An accurate description of what happened in the interval between WWI and II would only be exchanges of simplistic flames, especially as regards Jews.  Two comments:  there is a difference between Jews who are such because they espouse the religion of Judaism, and those who want to be like all too many, well,  Jews.  People wouldnt understand or even listen to what someone tells them as fact, learned from those who were in a position to know. So, after America has enough problems here, instead of being able to look at others from ease, and after some food shortages especially, then all will understand all too well.  Of course it will be "different."  ANd, it will all seem like a good idea at the time.  But, then you'll know.

If Hitler was alive today and ran for president while promising "The Final Solution" to the muslim "problem" then he would win by a landslide here.