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The night of the long knives was not an attack on opponents of the Nazis. It was an internal battle for supremacy within the party itself. SA men were still shouting Heil Hitler as the firing squads shot them.
In the Communist countries the gulags didn't run themselves. And the vast numbers of people who spied on, interrogated, rounded up and kept the card indexes on the deportees weren't outsiders. They were your neighbours. In E Germany alone 175,000 registered informants have been personally identified. The volume of destroyed records suggests the total number was 500,000, while members of E German intelligence estimate there were 2 million informers, if you also count the unregistered ones who saw it as their duty to report their neighbours to the authorities. |
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Maybe it's a little from column A and a little from column B.
Hitler swept to power with a huge 29% of the vote iirc. I suspect it was the eradication of opposition which helped the keenness not to oppose. Who was going to be in the German resistance - hadn't they all been murdered years before? Who was going to argue with Stalin? Also worth remembering, people are sheep. It's why silly fashions take hold and crap records get to number 1. Also people are very selfish, many will gladly get a neighbour taken away to protect themselves. Imagine being warned that in 2 days time family will be limited to 2 toilet rolls next month. In the next 2 days millions of people will buy as many as they can fit in their cars and trolleys. It's what people do. Wasn't Sweden largely a German sympathetic country although neutral, btw? |
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I think the night of the long knives was an attack on perceived opposition as much as actual. Whichever, it would have had the desired effect.
Much of it was a case of power corrupting, releasing criminals and giving them guns and power (Dresden, again iirc) making people regionally powerful. I think the same in Russia. Give a few supporters better homes, better cars, servants, better food and power, they'll do anything asked of them.... to anyone. Thinking about it, there is a case for the OP's assertion. |
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Do not forget there was the fear of a communist revolution in germany. Some saw hitler as a bulwark against this.
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Sweden has this awful reputation because it exported iron ore to Germany, and in 1940 that was the reason given for a hare-brained Allied plan to invade neutral Sweden and seize the ore fields. It was supposed to be vital to the German war effort, and this gets repeated to this day.
But in reality Germany had no need of Swedish iron ore. It just bought it because, like today, it was cheap in a market flooded with steel. At that time 40% of Germany's steel was still going to civilian use, and plenty more was being used for construction and, incredibly, being exported, they had so much of it. It was coming from Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. It's unclear why Churchill and others embraced this idea of Swedish ore being vital for Germany: Len Deighton has suggested that they wanted access to Swedish ports, or that they had some mistaken belief that Scandinavia would be a good venue to fight. All it did was provoke a pre-emptive German invasion of Norway. But hence the idea that Sweden wasn't really neutral. The fact is though that Sweden did save tens of thousands of Jews from Denmark, Norway and (oddly enough) Hungary via the Swedish embassy in Budapest. |
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The Norway campaign of 1940 was partly intended as securing a position to 'link up with the Finns' against Germany's ally Stalin !
It was pretty much a disaster , though tends to be forgotten that a very large part of Germany's surface fleet went to the bottom there. This did diminish the feasibility of invading England a few months later . |
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My dad was a German soldier. Whether he surrendered or was captured I don't actually know. I do know that most German Prisoners of War held captive in Britain didn't actually like Adolf Hitler and didn't want to escape.
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This has been an interesting and informative thread.
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A good pal of mine told me when he was in BAOR that more than one german soldier from the eastern front told how the Russians would capture a german soldier then crucify them onto a door frame and send them downstream to terrorise the defenders in any skirmishes.
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It happened in Yugoslavia too.
My dad ended the War in the Ukrainian division which the Germans formed in 1944. The Ukrainians who had joined had intended to take advantage of the supply of German weaponry to use it against the Russians, who had recently re-occupied Western Ukraine, but instead found themselves fighting Tito's communists in the Balkans. My dad told me once of advancing through a forest there surrounded by the corpses of German troops nailed to the trees. |
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I don't think many of those Ukrainians made it out of Yugoslavia safely.
Stalin demanded they be returned to the USSR for the NKVD to deal with them. They had hoped to be allowed to move to allied countries and I believe the British tricked them into thinking thus would happen and then loaded them onto a train headed for Russia. Harold Macmillan was the person in charge. Long ago I read his biography and I recall shortly after the train pulled out there was a blizzard of paper flying out of the windows as the soldiers realized what was happening. They were destroying their identity papers , knowing they were going to be killed but hoping if they died anonymously the NKVD would not trace their families and kill them too. Macmillan was haunted by it and was accused of being a war criminal by some. |
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It was always a source of grim pleasure in our house when a hideously decrepit Harold Macmillan used occasionally to pop up on the TV news during his twilight years. "Good!" my dad would cry. "Not dead yet. He's still suffering."
11,000 of the Ukrainians handed over to the Yugoslavians and Russians in 1945 had been women and children. All were killed. The few thousand who were actual frontline fighting men (including my dad) were kept in tents in Rimini for two years while their fate was debated. Legally they were in fact Polish rather than Soviet citizens, as western Ukraine had been occupied by Poland after World War One, and it had still been under Polish rule when War broke out. But Russia had then grabbed it for itself as part of its joint invasion of Poland with its German allies. It was a bad time in Rimini, owing to the severe post-War lack of food in that part of the world. My dad knew of three suicides in the camp down to hunger. I don't think he ever bore a particular grudge against the British over it: that was just the way the world was then. But it didn't make it easier to bear. Hunger's a terrible thing to live with when you're trapped behind wire with no idea at all when it might end. Finally, in 1947, the Labour PM Clement Attlee (God bless you, sir) gave the order to declare them stateless and transport them to PoW camps in Scotland. It's still unclear why exactly they were spared in this way. There's speculation that a few thousand bloodthirsty desperadoes with nothing to lose might have come in handy should we ever have found ourselves at war with Russia in that part of the world in the future. Who knows? Maybe they were just seen as a good source of much needed labour at home. Whatever, he and the 400 others now stationed at Lockerbie spent a few months travelling around Britain to places like Bulford and Salisbury Plain defusing unneeded ordinance. (None of them actually knew anything about defusing bombs - it was blowing things up which they were good at - but they were in no position to refuse, and simply learnt the techniques on the job.) Eventually, in 1948 he was handed an agricultural worker's permit, which I still have, releasing him from custody and allowing him to work 48 hours/week as a farm labourer for 10/6 per week. A few of the camp huts survive, one of which the men had converted into a chapel. It's still in use and now a listed building. http://www.nothingtoseehere.net/2007/11/ukrainian_pow_chapel_hallmuir.html |
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Decent thread this. I like a lot of the WW2 pages on Facebook, and some of the pics and stories, especially on those dedicated to the eastern front, are very good.
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I have read a lot about the later stages of the war and how the politics and need to keep Stalin on board mattered whilst the politicians were outfoxed as Russia pushed the germans back, screaming.Some hideous events that make me wonder just how hard it must be at the front end of politics during war.Stalin stood back while Warsaw was nearly oobliterated and Churchill began to realise what was happening in Eastren Europe but couldn't get Rooseveldt to believe him.Two communist spies were very hogh in his administration ? Eisenhower pulled back to allow Stalin to take Berlin and dominate eastern europe while Montgomery was screaming at him to advance only for Montgomery to get smeared by the US press.Macmillan for all of his faults helped keep Greece out of communist hands. A horrible time to live in and your dad deserves our sympathy and respect.
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zorrostrikes 21 May 17 22:05 Joined: 29 Sep 10 | Topic/replies: 6,752 | Blogger: zorrostrikes's blog
one in twenty that surrendered at stalingrad survived, they marched them through the winter snow and exposure killed a lot of them. i think it was the 6th army. i remember a documentary about it - the german general was promoted by hitler and quickly surrendered to the soviets. he negotiated the peace. i think they should have kept fighting. Hitler promoted general Paulus to Field Marshal, having ordered him not to surrender and knowing that no German Field Marshal had ever surrendered before. Paulus did, and if he hadn't, none of his 600,000 would have survived. |
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lfc1971 22 May 17 12:59 Joined: 06 Nov 11 | Topic/replies: 13,428 | Blogger: lfc1971's blog
If you think the British military behaved with the same savagery as the German and Tussian troops you have something wrong. Straight from the Enid Blyton book of Jolly Good Tommy Heroes. Just like the ones in Derry, January 1970. |
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I am not sure there was no resistance in Germany.
Depends on definition but have heard from relatives there were parts of Berlin and other major Cities the SS did not go. I am 50 so only have older people telling me this. Was in South Africa on holiday 2 years ago and met a nice real old boy from Dresden. His family moved to US in 1955. Had to wait 10 years for his older brother to get out of Russia. Said his brother and his mate were thinking of jumping on a boat , throwing their uniforms overboard. His mate said, '....they'll shoot us....' meaning the Germans. Missed that boat then surrender came. 10 years later he came back. In US never spoke German again. The old boy I met had tears in his eyes telling me. You are talking conscripts. Like I said, I am 50 odd now, we do not know. |
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Depends how you define "resistance". I mean, moaning about the government, arguing with officials, not cooperating with the police, even pulling a sickie - they all go on in any society. But actively working to overthrow the government and overturn their policies, or sabotaging the liquidation of the Jews - there didn't seem to be any of that in Germany. Even those few in the armed forces who conspired to some extent to end the war only wanted to do so on the basis of keeping the conquests. They had no intention of unconditionally surrendering. And too many of them seemed to be perfectly comfortable with anti-semitism and what it led to.
There wasn't even an intellectual basis for resistance in Nazi Germany. The universities and their students had been among the most enthusiastic supporters of the Nazis. There had long been a tradition in Germany, rooted in the romanticism movement, arguing that the German-speaking peoples had a mythical national consciousness waiting to be embodied by a great leader, plus a deep-rooted destiny to do whatever they sodding well liked on account of being racially superior, like, innit. But I'm 55. So, like you, it's still only a second-hand interpretation. I worked in W Germany in 1981-2, and as an Englishman the only reference to the events of 40 years earlier I got from talking to the older locals was regular complaints about the apparently needless destruction of their small town by British troops in April 1945. The war was over, and all that. Only years later did I accidentally discover that the town (Uelzen) had been the site of an attack at that time by an armoured column of SS, followed by bitter street fighting with the Guards Armoured Division. |