When you fight literal Nazis and still can’t come away looking like the good guys.
Post war Nazi career paths
Get job (allies) 😀
Get job (Soviets) 💀
And if you were a Nazi who was “employed” by the Soviet Union you were most likely not a scientist
On another note I just had a thought about the German scientists who fled the Reich pre WW2 due to prosecution and the German scientists who were employed post WW2. Did they ever meet and work on projects together lmao.
“Remember that time you hunted me and my family, wanting to execute us through forced labor? Haha, good times. Those sure were the good ol days.”
“Hey Albert, I didn’t know you were in Princeton, too!”
Not just Germans. Lots of Frenchmen and Alsatians too! Some had to wait until 1956.
“German military personnel” were also known as Nazis.
I see no problem here, sucks to suck, should have thought of the consequences when they took up arms for a nation who was liquidating every Jewish man, woman, and child they could stick on cattle cars and gas to death.
Would love to live in a world which is as black and white as you think it is. Germans “recruited” from countries they conquered en masse. You got an option to serve or have you and your family be killed. Thinking “500 thousand people, all nazis” is plain wrong. Thinking “all of those that died in gulags past WW2 are nazis” is plain wrong. Especially with the war starting in 39’ with the Nazi - Soviet invasion of Poland and the following elimination of anyone who was in any position of opposing the soviets.
Germans “recruited” from countries they conquered en masse.
Can we take a moment to throw up thoughts and prayers for this brave Victim of Communism in his crusade to eradicate the Soviet menace from his native soil?
Thinking “500 thousand people, all nazis” is plain wrong. Thinking “all of those that died in gulags past WW2 are nazis” is plain wrong.
Its so crazy to phrase it this way, because Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) held by Nazi Germany and primarily in the custody of the German Army were starved and subjected to deadly conditions. Of nearly six million who were captured, around three million died during their imprisonment. . The ratio of dead Soviet POWs to German POWs was 6:1. What makes the Germans so uniquely sympathetic?
It should be noted that many of these German POWs were taken from concentration camps full of Soviet POWs in turn. One might think that perhaps, what goes around will come around. But instead, we’re expected to pretend the Waffen-SS and their auxiliaries were these sweet innocent lambs caught in the teeth of a horrible war.
Even setting aside the knee-jerk “Maybe the Nazis were the bad guys” western response, you’ve got kinda squeeze your eyes shut from 1941 to 1945 and pretend the next couple of years was just Soviets being innately cruel for no discernible reason, rather than on a rip-roaring rampage of (kinda justified) revenge.
While there is a lot of argument (in both directions) on the culpability of the average german soldier to the Nazis: The way you punish that is through trials. I hear Nuremburg had a few of those.
This was russia abducting enemy combatants and using them as slave labor for a decade. And, like most of stalin’s purges and enslavements, had very little to do with whatever crimes the slaves were accused of.
There is no argument about the culpability of the Wehrmacht.
Organisation ≠ person.
Lots of Wermacht soldiers did horrible things, and should have gone to trial for them. Lots of other Wermacht soldiers were forced and did not want the role. Maybe they even surrendered at the first chance they got, and this is what happened to them, died in labour camps.
The vast majority of POW captures were in the final year of the war, when it was teenagers and middle aged people who were quickly trained and sent to the front lines, in many places.
Yup.
It is not an exoneration of the average soldier. A lot did some really heinous shit… like all soldiers in all wars. But a lot were also just there because they were drafted and had no choice. And that is what investigations are for.
People like the black and white of “You wore a uniform, you are pure evil”. And governments ESPECIALLY love that and a lot of media has been funded to specifically reinforce that so it is super easy to Other the other guys (We have always been at war with Eastasia and all that). But when you actually think things through? What is the difference between a conscript terrified in their bunk at night and a civillian who gleefully makes shells and tanks in a factory?
All of which is kind of moot. Because, to reference the great dril: You do not “gotta hand it to them” to ISIS, Nazi German, or Stalin and his cronies in the USSR.
The vast majority of POW captures were in the final year of the war, when it was teenagers and middle aged people who were quickly trained and sent to the front lines, in many places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratlines_(World_War_II)
High-ranking fascists and Nazis who escaped from Europe via the ratlines after World War II: Ante Pavelić, Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele
:-/
More the opposite. The teenagers and war-wounded were forced to fight until the bitter end, buying time for the senior officers to surrender or flee. The POWs that were captured were bureaucrats and administrators, central to the functioning of the German industrial war machine but never responsible for pulling a trigger on the front lines. The surrendered or went underground en mass only after their children and grandchildren had been fed as cannon fodder into the maw of the encroaching American and Russian armies.
Your quote from wikipedia doesn’t corroborate your claim. Prisoners of war were in large majority soldiers, and not bureaucrats.
Yes, these soldiers fighting on the front did exactly that, they bought time for the Nazi regime. If the soldiers were aware of that, who knows. But the average soldier that became a POW has little to do with the high ranking bureaucrats who escaped through the rat lines.
In fact, while the soviet union, was murdering ordinary soldiers in its labour camps it was already offering amnesty and intelligence agency roles to many former high ranking Nazis.
Prisoners of war were in large majority soldiers, and not bureaucrats.
They were military personal. And the military is flush with bureaucrats.
But the average soldier that became a POW has little to do with the high ranking bureaucrats who escaped through the rat lines.
Nuremberg Defense ass response.
Yes the military are flush with bureaucrats, but bureaucrats tend not to be on the front lines, where most POW are captured.
The Nuremberg trials were specifically the trial of 22 of the most high ranking Nazis. Most bureaucrats.
Would you say they were just following orders?
Agreed fuck Nazis.
But also fuck those who mistreat their POWs.
USSR had a chance to take the high road and instead commited pseudo-genocide in Ukraine and killed millions of their own citizens in gulag.
