Just a Thought About the Holocaust

[NotAfraidToHope]

So I've recently been to D.C. and saw the Holocaust museum,(very moving museum, by the way) and it got me thinking about something. If the Nazis had not invaded other countries, if they had only put the Jews in their country, in Germany, in concentration camps, would the world have done anything to help those people? It disturbs me that in places like North Korea, terrible things are happening, people are being placed in work camps, and nothing is being done. It seems like the world only takes action against something that's wrong if it directly effects them.

 

[CM-Colorless]

What you have to understand about the holocaust is that the internment of Jews was a side-effect of the war not the Nazi's goal. The original plan was to round up the Jews and ship them off via railway into Poland, the Nazi's didn't want to kill the Jews so much as just get rid of them.


War however is very, very expensive and the German railways needed to be used, not for transporting Jews, but for transporting military equipment, the resources could not be spared to relocating Jews into Poland, particularly when the Third Reich was at war with Poland so what was the next best thing? Putting them into labor camps .


Furthermore while in the camps there was no mass extermination of inmates until the end of the war, in fact it is a bit of a well kept secret that the Jews in Auschwitz actually had access to a movie theater and a swimming pool, the swimming pool structure still exists at Auschwitz today and you can find inmate testimonials about the theater, because in the early part of the war the Germans just wanted the Jews out of the way, out of German towns and cities, they didn't want to massacre them they just wanted them gone.


Furthermore if you read Mein Kampf Hitlers major gripe isn't with the Jews, he says some strong words about them yes, but Hitlers primary targets are Slavs - Russians, Poles, Czechs, etc. That's who Hitler hated, and it's an interesting thing to note that in Eastern Europe that the Holocaust is remembered primarily as a Catholic holocaust, not a Jewish one because Hitler was using the war as an excuse to clear out the native population for his Lebensraum, living room, acquiring territory for German farmers to live on and cultivate.


Hitler had no intention of going to war, I believe, so long as he was able to acquire Danzig from Poland, had he been successful (and it is important to note that Hitler did try to go through the proper political channels to reacquire Danzig as a German city, which it had historically been but the Allied powers kept snubbing Hitler so Hitler did what Hitler does, he took it by force when nobody wanted to play politics) what would have happened is that Hitler would have begun rounding up the Jews similarly how he was doing but instead of interning them in camps he would have railed them out of Germany, either into Poland or somewhere else, homeless, sure, but very much still alive.


The allies declaring war on Hitler is what caused the Holocaust, that's just a sad fact of History, Hitler had made his intentions clear from the start, after all he published a widely read book on what he wanted and what he believed, he made his intentions, wherever he went perfectly clear the allies however wanted to play with fire and it bit them in the ass.


One need not look any further than American Japanese internment camps than to realize that the Allies were on the whole just as monstrous as the Axis powers, they just had the benefit of winning the war.

 

[MusicQueen2016]

I know I can't beat that post up there ^^, but I think that by putting the Japanese into internment camps, America was being hypocritical. They were releasing a group of people from the enemies while they were holding people themselves.


This reminds me of another thing sort of related to this. Do you think America was right when they dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Because I don't. They dropped bombs on innocent civilians and wiped out two whole cities, just because they had a crappy ruler.

 

[NotAfraidToHope]

I don't know, I'm very conflicted about that. I just keep thinking about how many more people would have been killed if we hadn't, because that pretty much ended the war.

 

[Serano]

[/URL]Bolshevization

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevik of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"



This statement also goes to further prove that the target of his hatred wasn't the slavs, as you stated, but was indeed of the Jews. If what you said was true, how then do you rectify the fact that of the people who were killed at Auschwitz, 90% of those were Jews. It was true that he did have a strong hatred for the slavs, but he blamed much of the problems of Germany, and even for the war in general, on the Jews.


And then there is your most absurd assertion. That being the idea that if Germany was only given one more piece of land, than he would of been satisfied. The fact is, that Europe went down that road with Germany before with Neville Chamberlain. Some will say that he only wanted the Sudetenland because it was believed to be the rightful land of Germany. If this was true, than he would of never gone in and annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia. The truth of it was, the Czechs had fortified the Sudetenland to the point that it would of been very costly to try and invade. So, Chamberlain did what they German military could not; that was the defeat the Czech defenses. They rolled in six months later and took the rest.


If you are still unconvinced, you need only look no further than Mein Kompf. He was looking to build a thousand year empire, and knew that Germany needed land to grow (as you so pointed out). It wasn't going to get from taking Danzig, he'd need a lot more to do that. Besides, you don't have the military ramp up that the Germans did, if you don't intend to use it.


Finally, I come to the most absurd point you tried to make and the one that convinced me that you were simply an apologist for the Nazis. That was the idea that the American Internment camps were in the slightest bit akin to what Germany did to the Jews in their camps. Were they any gas chambers, starvation, or mass killings in American internment camps? Were there any Jews at Auschwitz that volunteered to join the German Army, like many Japanese did? The answer to both of those questions are, of course, no.


In conclusion, I would like to say that I don't mean any of this as some kind of offense to you. You are simply misguided, and I seek to point out the errors in your logic.

 

[Dino]

Right now because im tired all I can say is. The Victor writes history how he wants it.

 

[CM-Colorless]

I'd like to first point out that I never said that Hitler did not hate the Jews, only that the Jews were a secondary concern to him compared to the Slavs. A point you never actually refuted you just pointed out that Hitler didn't like Jews, which I agree he didn't, that was never a question. But why, if Hitler didn't hate Slavs more than he hated Jews would he even try to exile the Jews in the first place? He never tried to relocate the Slavs, he simply slaughtered them. To say Hitler hated the Jews more than he hated Slavs contradicts the fact that the Jews were kept alive for years in camps. Why would he, if he hated the Jews more not give them the same treatment he gave the Slavs?

There is man documented cases of there Jews from Germany were sent back to the country, turned away because no one wanted them. So the idea that they simply would of been carted off is, while at the beginning the idea, never would of played out

I am aware of this as after the fact there were talks of sending the Jews to Madagascar of all places when the other options didn't pan out, but this does not change my argument that the holocaust was the responsibility of the allies not realizing who Hitler was and that he actually meant what he said he intended for Germany. They played with Hitler and it bit them in the ass. The fact is the holocaust was preventable, at least at that point in history. If there would have been a later holocaust attempted, fine cool, there would have been a later holocaust but I'm not arguing that a holocaust never would have happened I'm saying the one we had wouldn't have happened, and if that later one would have happened it would have happened after Hitler had exiled the Jews and people were aware that he meant business.

Also, the idea that the final solution wasn't initiated until the end of the war is simply factually not true.

I wasn't speaking about the entirety of the final solution when I spoke about the inmates extermination (after all if I am talking about inmates I am presuming they've already been incarcerated), the definition of the final solution changed allot prior to the middle of 1941 because of the previous, mentioned failures to ship the Jews off. It's my belief that the concentration camp system was initially a temporary one until the idea of genocide became the decided course of events. The existence of theaters and swimming pools, for the inmates, at the concentration camps demonstrate that there was a progression of intention within the camps for why and for what the Jews were doing there and it strikes me as odd that if the Nazi's had wanted the Jews exterminated from the get-go they wouldn't have done to them what they did the Slavs, just rolled over them, collecting them up and shooting them. It's downright inefficient to house and cloth and feed people who you plan on massacring when you can just get them on their knees and execute them, that's what we saw happen on the eastern front and when there were planned attacks against Jews, which there were, they were carried out in similar fashion, the people were executed if not on the spot relatively soon after.


So while the seeds of the final solution may have been planted as early as 1942 that does not mean that the denouement of Himmlers genocide was in its swing in 1942, the fact that the Jews hadn't all simply had a bullet put in their heads by 1943 and the fact that we found prisoners alive in camps I believe easily demonstrates that there was a progression of events.


Again I have to stress, I am talking about what's going on in the camps, not when death squads march through the polish countryside executing entire villages as I draw a distinction between "The Holocaust" and Hitlers "Lebensraum", in the latter the same was happening to Catholics and Jews alike because they were Slavic as opposed to "The Jewish Question" which regarded what to do with Jews living in Germany.


And you can criticize me fairly for not including Hitler's genocide of Slavs in with the genocide of the Jews and others in the Holocaust, however I just don't see the two as being necessarily the same event even if they did occur by the same people in the same context, one was about purifying Germany and the other the expansion of the Third Reich's territory and it wouldn't have mattered in the latter's case if all the land was already populated with native Germans if those Germans were communists Hitler would have had them killed all the same as any other group. So while separating them might be unfair I think equating them is equally unfair.


Regarding this quote


"Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"


I fail to see what this quote proves? Hitler and the Nazi's believed that the international banking elite were Jewish and that their efforts and collusion with the allied powers are what lost Germany world war 1, Hitler believed that any second world war would have to be the result of these same powers. Hitler is making a threat to these powers that should they bring the world into a second war with Germany, that he would not allow the Jews to bring Communism into western Europe, he would instead exterminate the Jews of Europe. You have to understand that at the time of the first world war there were ALLOT of Jews in powerful industrial positions in Germany and that over in Russia the Bolshevik and communist leaderships were very largely ethnically Jewish, those are not errors on Hitlers part, his error was in equating communism with the Jews and believing in some grand Jewish scheme to "Bolshevize" all of Europe (a plan, incidentally that Stalin did have, Stalin wasn't Jewish but that's not relevant to the Nazi narrative). Notice here Hitler isn't saying that he's going to massacre the Jews, he's saying "if you do X we will respond with Y", which is allot more quarter than Hitler ever gave Slavs. So what you're trying to show here I don't think your evidence demonstrates it at all.


And yes more Jews died in camps than non-jews, but that's perfectly consistent with my position, because Hitler was keeping the Jews more or less alive in the camps while he was just slaughtering Slavs out in the fields of eastern Europe.

That being the idea that if Germany was only given one more piece of land, than he would of been satisfied.

No, I don't believe that either, but I do admit I pretty much said that, I was careless. Hitler would not have been satisfied, he would have wanted to take eastern Europe and cleanse it for Germans. I don't think he would have though, not right away, he would have left the infrastructure in place to do it, he would have left behind plans for doing it, but I don't think he would have carried it out until Stalins army marched for Germany, which it was very much planning to do before the war, whether Hitler knew that I don't know but I do know he believed it. Hitler taking the initiative on Stalin just took the blame off of Stalin and gave him the excuse to invade Germany as a matter of its own defense.

that was the defeat the Czech defenses. They rolled in six months later and took the rest.

Just as an aside, if you feel like me not quoting the full section I am responding to is unfair or I'm taking you out of context I'm not doing so intentionally I'm just trying to show you what I am specifically responding to for ease of clarity. If you still think I took what you said out of context some how just point it out and we can talk about that, I'm just letting you know my responses aren't specifically to these sentneces / sentence fragments, just marking where in your post I'm responding.


The affair with Czechoslovakia was... a messy one, It could very easily be argued (though probably a little disingenuously) that since the Czech government wasn't present for the Negotiations that invalidates the Munich Agreement and so Hitler had no obligation to obey it. I wouldn't make that argument but I think it demonstrates the nature of the agreement as, if not illegitimate, as underhanded a betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the Allied Powers as Hitlers disregarding it and invading the Czechs anyway.


However the argument I would make, specifically to counter your use of Czechoslovakia as an example of Hitlers imperialistic aims (which he had, I'm not disputing that)is that of; why did Hitler grab for the Czech lands? What was his use for them? He wanted them as a stepping stone into Poland, why did he want into Poland? To take Danzig. Had Poland ceded Danzig he would not have any reason to move his army into Czechoslovakia. You can say he would have anyway but we don't have any reason to believe he would except as an extension of the Lebensraum policy, but even then, I don't think he would have, he probably would have left it for Hungary to annex, which he could do easilly, after all his aim was to clear out all of Poland and Lithuania if not go all the way to Russia? What's Czechoslovakia to him compared to that?

Besides, you don't have the military ramp up that the Germans did, if you don't intend to use it.

Agreed, and like I said earlier I believe he intended it for use against Stalin for when he invaded, not necessarily to invade other countries himself, I don't think he was expecting Poland to refuse him or for the French and English to back Poland, I think Hitler thought what happened for the Sudetenland would happen again for Danzig, it didn't and Hitler got mad and did what he did because he was a man with a short temper and a large army.

Finally, I come to the most absurd point you tried to make and the one that convinced me that you were simply an apologist for the Nazis.

I will take the time to comment on this point because I think it is important to do so. Yes I am sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazi's because I agree with some of the things they believed. I believe that Versailles was an absolute rape of the German nation and the Germans were rightfully angry about it. I believe in the right to self determination, if the German people didn't want to be living around Jews they as a people have a right to tell the Jews to leave, after the war the Czech government told the Germans living in Czechoslovakia to leave and go live in Germany, I think they had this right. The people in the Sudatenland were in fact the greatest supporters of the Third Reich because they honestly wanted to live in Germany with Germans, they didn't want to be subject to a foreign government as they were thanks to Versailles, the question was over whether the land was going to move on the map or the people, history proved the people had to leave.


I support the existence of both Israel and of Palestine for this reason, if both peoples want to determine for themselves a nation on this earth and both people want to do so in the same territory that's their conflict to resolve and history will eventually show who wins.


If these disputes are settled peaceably and diplomatically, great, if they are settled through war and tragedy, well, it's not like that's anything new to the human condition.


So yes, I have a sympathy for Nazi era Germany, but what's more I have a sympathy for them because nobody else does. It's a known fact that at the nuremberg trials many Nazi officials lied in order to decrease their sentencing's, the soviets fabricated evidence to create a picture of the Nazi's that didn't exist. These facts aren't questioned, the problem is while we might look very critically at nazi propaganda and say "yeah of course those are lies" we don't look critically at our own propaganda and we just assume every nasty thing said about the Nazi's must be accurate because after all they are the boogeymen of the 20th and 21st century, it's fashionable if not culturally encouraged to hate Nazi's for any reason under the sun we can come up with even if it isn't accurate.


And that isn't fair to them, there's plenty the Nazi's did that are actually morally reprehensible and evil but that doesn't excuse treating them any differently than any other group. I'd argue that the Roman Empire was far more sinister and wicked than the Nazi's ever were but we don't hate on the Roman Empire like we do the Nazi's because the Roman Empire isn't our great Enemy in a way it's our Great Grandfather, so we revere it and look past it's moral failures and it's evils because of it's Grandeur. The Third Reich would have been remembered the same way if it had one the war and was able to put into action it's hopes and plans for Germany.


So it's bullshit that because of their proximity to us in history and the fact that they lost the war and couldn't institute their propaganda means we treat them differently than we treat ancient Rome. So yeah I am a bit of a Nazi apologist, but I am so because nobody is willing to give the Nazi's a fair shake, nobody is willing to give them the same treatment they give to Rome who are guilty of all the same sins as the Third Reich, hell the Romans aren't even innocent of "anti-semitism" they're the guys who actually tore Jerusalem apart and burned down the second temple, Hitler might have massacred the Jews but he never did anything as bad to them as burning down the temple mount, Hitler could kill their bodies he could not kill them spiritually like the destruction of Jerusalem did.

Were they any gas chambers, starvation, or mass killings in American internment camps? Were there any Jews at Auschwitz that volunteered to join the German Army, like many Japanese did? The answer to both of those questions are, of course, no.

The persecution of the Japanese did not begin until after pearl harbor though and their internment did not begin until 1942, the nazi concentration camps had been in operation for the purposes of the final solution as early as 1938-39 following a long history of anti-semitism in Germany from even before the first world war. While yes one was objectively worse than the other in hard terms I do not think if you consider the contexts in which each existed that both are equivalent to each other "when corrected for their context" for a lack of better words.

 

[Serano]

I must admit, you made a lot of valid points in your post colorless. Part of the reason for the delay in posting a response is the size of it. Not that I object to it, as it has several point I don't mind to debate with you on. But like a triple cheeseburger from Wendy's, let's take this one bite at the time shall we?


First, is your point of making the distinction between who Hitler hated most; whether it was the Jews and the Slavs. Looking back over my last post, you were correct in that I didn't refute that point and thus would like to rectify that issue before moving on to other topics.


Part of the confusion I believe you have is that you equate the fact that, since the Jews were treated relatively well in the beginning, (if we can consider having your businesses and homes taken away and put into prison for simply being who you are) as opposed to the Slavs at the outbreak of war, you draw the conclusion of that the Slavs were a priority over the Jews to be dealt with.


And while this idea isn't without merit, I still disagree with it. The reason I can do so, is that I believe the reason for the cautious approach that the Nazis took in regards to the Jewish question, was more due to a fear of reprisal from the Allied or Soviet powers. Despite Hitler's apparent aggressiveness that has been attributed towards his neighbors, in the beginning he took things slow. We see this played out in that it took both in concern to the Treaty of Versailles as well as the Sudetenland crisis.


Hitler, and indeed Germany's approach to the treaty, was that of small steps. In the beginning, they sought to simply look into new forms of warfare to circumvent the treaty, as well as the other arms limitations. For instance, it was for this reason that Hitler and the Nazis interest in Rocketry as that wasn't explicitly prohibited. As for the other parts of the treaty, such as the occupation of the Rhineland, didn't occur until three years after Hitler assumed the role of Chancellor.


My reason for bringing these examples up are to illustrate the fact that it wasn't simply that Nazis hated the Jews less, but that they were cautious in their implementation of the final solution. As far proving the Jews were more hated than the Slavs, I would point out the way the final solution was implemented.


What has always disturbed me most with the Nazis treatment is just how thorough they were with attempting to eradicate the Jewish race. For example, part of the requirements to get into the Himler's elite SS was they had to be checked for any Jewish heritage. This not only included a background check to determine their "purity", but they also developed a pseudo-science in measure the dimensions of the body to determine if they had Jewish features.


This level of paranoid fanaticism, simply wasn't there for the Slavs. And while I don't disagree that there were wholesale slaughter of slavs, it wasn't carried out in the same way with the Jews. It was an obsession for the Nazis, to the point that they wanted to document every Jewish individual so as to ensure that their destruction was complete. With the Slavs that died, it was war. With the Jews however, it was a obsession.


I would also point out, that this obsession wasn't confined simply to the German borders. In the United States, the Nazi party had very strong roots. They even went so far as to hold a meeting in Madison Square Garden. Americans had no care about the Slavs; for them, they saw the economic plight that had befell the country as being the fault of business (and by extensions the Jews). This should serve to prove that while the Slavs may of been important to Hitler, for the Nazis and the across the first world, it was the Jews that had to be eliminated.


Also, it wasn't like we had to wait for the Himmler's infamous letter to see Jewish blood spilled on the streets of Germany. Take for example the Kristallnacht, or the Night of the Broken Glass. In the aftermath of the burning of the Reichstag, 91 jews were killed and thousands of jewish establishments were destroyed, including 95 synagogues in Vienna alone. This level of hatred simply didn't exist for the Slavs at that time


In conclusion, I would postulate that while Slavs were also a target of the Nazis and Hitler, it did not in anyway approach the level of vitriol for Jews. As well, with the exclusions of pogroms such as the Night of the Broken glass, that the apparent benign treatment of the Jews can be more attributed to the Nazis overall caution than any sense of concern for Jews.


I will probably begin topics shortly on the other points raised so as to keep things simpler to manage.

 

[Desu Juice]

TLR


/shot


Ah, see, but some countries simply do not get involved to prevent worsening relationships with the country committing the vile act.


Also, think about this example; I read this somewhere- yet I do not remember from where.


Soldiers were going to free some captives, but once they bravely slaughtered their way to the center of the opposing side's camp, they found that the captors had slain their captives!


Thus, I believe sometimes countries do not get involved to prevent situations similar to this one.


Aside from this, war, or even fighting to free any enslaved people, takes money, and lives.


I am not particularly well-informed on this topic, therefore, I shall say no more. Instead, I will stay and listen.

 

[Quill]

Er. I have relatives who are German historians and enjoy history myself, and several aspects of this thread's second post are questionable. I'm not saying you are necessarily wrong, Colorless, but it's generally better for a calm, intelligent discussion to present a subjective interpretation of history as one's opinion rather than raw fact.

[QUOTE="CM-Colorless]What you have to understand about the holocaust is that the internment of Jews was a side-effect of the war not the Nazi's goal.

[/QUOTE]
Describing Jewish internment as "a side-effect of the war" is already politically incorrect seeing as the actions that started the war, namely Hitler's invasion of Poland, was done for two reasons: 1) to reclaim German territory lost during WWI, and 2) to "annihilate" the Jews there. For the most part, Polish Jews were not captured and interned, but rounded up and shot on the spot. Which of these two motives was more important to Hitler and the Nazi cause is a highly debatable matter that no historian has yet conclusively provided an ultimate answer for.

[QUOTE="CM-Colorless]The original plan was to round up the Jews and ship them off via railway into Poland, the Nazi's didn't want to kill the Jews so much as just get rid of them. War however is very, very expensive and the German railways needed to be used, not for transporting Jews, but for transporting military equipment, the resources could not be spared to relocating Jews into Poland, particularly when the Third Reich was at war with Poland so what was the next best thing? Putting them into labor camps. Furthermore while in the camps there was no mass extermination of inmates until the end of the war.

[/QUOTE]
Here is where you miss over a crucial element of the Semitic extermination. The Nazis wanted to do two things: 1) exile Jews, and 2) annihilate the Jews who would not leave. Towards the end of the war, Step 1 was abandoned in favor of all-out Step 2. There were two reasons for this, none of which had to do with not wanting to annihilate the Jews: 1) they knew they were losing the war and they were desperate to "get rid" of as many Jews as possible in what time they had left, and 2) it took them until late in the war to develop more efficient ways to kill Jews. The labor camps had always been seen as the most efficient method – they not only died, but worked for Germany first – but as the camps became grossly overpopulated and the war became hopeless it grew clear that more drastic methods would have to be taken. Shooting millions of Jews in concentration camps would require a ridiculous expenditure of firepower. It wasn't until a late meeting in Berlin that some twisted a-hole came up with the idea of gassing them. The Nazis then proceeded with intense gassing until the camps were finally shut down by the invading Allied forces. Had the Nazis thought of this method any earlier, I personally don't have the slightest doubt in my mind that they would have employed it there and then. As early as 1941, Himmler ordered Rudolf Hoess, the Nazi Auschwitz commander, to prepare the camp for mass extermination.

[QUOTE="CM-Colorless]In fact it is a bit of a well kept secret that the Jews in Auschwitz actually had access to a movie theater and a swimming pool, the swimming pool structure still exists at Auschwitz today and you can find inmate testimonials about the theater

[/QUOTE]
It really, really, really, really wounds me whenever I hear this preposterous claim made. There was no swimming pool or movie theater for the Jews in Auschwitz. You have obviously not been there yourself if you believe that such structures are still visible today or indeed have ever existed. I have been there myself with my family and I can one thousand percent attest to the absence of such luxurious provisions. Not a single viable source has ever made this claim. The rumors can be traced back to a wholly preposterous, ignorant and staggeringly offensive book by Carolyn Yeager, and they have been conclusively disproven by countless academics, historians, witnesses and government officials since. According to Ms. Yeager, the room in which inmates had their clothes stripped from them and their hair torn out doubled as a ballroom. Unsurprisingly, she officially joined the National Socialist cause in the 1990s.

[QUOTE="CM-Colorless]Furthermore if you read Mein Kampf Hitlers major gripe isn't with the Jews, he says some strong words about them yes, but Hitlers primary targets are Slavs - Russians, Poles, Czechs, etc.

[/QUOTE]
Again, did you even read Mein Kampf? I have read it in the original German, and every five minutes Hitler is referring to the Jews secretly dominating the world, the Jews being the source of all evil, the Jews being the reason for every bad thing that has ever happened to Germany, the world being impure and all goodness threatened so long as Jews exist. He has no such hatred for Slavs, as much as he showed disdain for them, and you'll notice he did not put them in extermination camps, nor did he ever refer to Slavs as the source of all evil. Hitler's primary target in Mein Kampf are certainly not Slavs.

[QUOTE="CM-Colorless] Hitler had no intention of going to war, I believe, so long as he was able to acquire Danzig from Poland, had he been successful

[/QUOTE]
Hitler was actually jailed for a brief period of time because he tried to overthrow the government a few years after the end of WWI. Ever since then he was desperate to reclaim Germany's lost land, and have Germany conquer the world. It's really hard to not see war factoring into this vision.

[QUOTE="CM-Colorless](and it is important to note that Hitler did try to go through the proper political channels to reacquire Danzig as a German city, which it had historically been but the Allied powers kept snubbing Hitler so Hitler did what Hitler does, he took it by force when nobody wanted to play politics)

[/QUOTE]
This is simply incorrect. I am sorry, but historically this holds no water. During the 1930s, the Allied Powers, especially France and Britain, used a foreign policy historians today call "appeasement": because they were militarily unprepared to fight a war against Nazi Germany, they conceded to Hitler's demands in order to maintain peace in Europe, hoping that diplomatically "appeasing" Hitler would prevent war. From 1935-1938, Britain and France allowed Germany's rearmament, remilitarization of the Rhineland territory, and annexation of Austria! They topped it off by handing large parts of western Czechoslovakia to Germany at the Munich Conference. The Allied Powers weren't just playing politics, they were playing it desperately to the point of severely threatening their foreign relations and domestic security.

[QUOTE="CM-Colorless]The allies declaring war on Hitler is what caused the Holocaust, that's just a sad fact of History,

[/QUOTE]
This is just so wrong. The Holocaust officially began in 1941. The Allied powers declared war on Germany in 1939 because Hitler was invading them. And the "cause" of the Holocaust was none other than the Nazis themselves. No action by any foreign power should be grounds to persuade a nation to commit mass genocide.

[QUOTE="CM-Colorless]One need not look any further than American Japanese internment camps than to realize that the Allies were on the whole just as monstrous as the Axis powers, they just had the benefit of winning the war.

[/QUOTE]
While Japanese internment camps are not to be underestimated and were a gross violation of the US Constitution and remain a huge blot on American reputation and history, they are just not comparable to German concentration camps. There was no genocide, there was no legally sanctioned murder or torture, conditions were significantly better, especially in terms of hygiene, and 7000 Japanese were interned as opposed to 3.5 million concentration camp prisoners. The ordeal, inhumane and unforgivable as it was, cannot be equated with the Holocaust.

 

[bettsyboy]

I know I can't beat that post up there ^^, but I think that by putting the Japanese into internment camps, America was being hypocritical. They were releasing a group of people from the enemies while they were holding people themselves.
This reminds me of another thing sort of related to this. Do you think America was right when they dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Because I don't. They dropped bombs on innocent civilians and wiped out two whole cities, just because they had a crappy ruler.

Well to be fair, America didn't have much choice.


they could have won the war island-by-island, causing entire citied to be demolished, millions killed, the japanese nation completely in ruins, their legacy destroyed and their scraps to be fought over by the Chinese and Americans, or they could have dropped 2 devastating weapons of war on civilians to force the japanese into total surrender.


There was no right, moral way for america to beat japan, there was the bad way, the worse way, the horrible way and the unthinkable way, there was no good way, if japan didn't surrender or gget destroyed, the war would never end.


I'm not saying what america did there was right, but given the situation it was going to come down to populations of civilians getting killed either way.


and if japan didn't surrender, then china would have invaded, and they would have done a LOT worse than 2 cities vaporized.

 

[Quill]

To those who believe America dropped the atom bomb for any excusable moral reason, I have only one question.


Why two?


Fact is, they dropped two in order to "test out" and "experiment with" different methods. They commited a massive, wholly unforgivable war crime by deliberately, and this is very clear in transcripts, choosing cities that were as yet relatively undamaged and full of civilians, in order to inflict not only the maximum amount of damage, but also be able to best observe the effects of the as yet unexplored nuclear energy. Frankly a few regular bombs would have done the trick as much as anything. If they were doing this for the sake of harming as few Japanese as possible while still ensuring surrender, one would have been more than enough.


In fact, there is solid reason to believe, and if I am challenged on this count I will be happy to pull examples from several book sources, that while the Japanese emperor could not for political reasons surrender publicly and shame his person, nation, and people, he was engaged in genuine peace negotiations with the US via the Soviet Union. (Additionally, just statistically speaking, there is no way Japan could have invaded the US, and any such claims are preposterous. Japan had a population of 71,998,104, soldiers and citizens inclusive; the US, 139,994,000 – practically double. Not to mention the travel involved.)


In my personal opinion as an American who loves their country, it was an unforgivable crime and a huge stain on what we stand for as a "constitutional" nation.