Were Dutch people not also, or even more closely, racial cousins? How did he treat the Netherlands?
Dunkirk evacuation
- Thread starter Ranb
- Start date
Beady
Philosopher
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
A damned sight less harshly than he treated the Poles or the Czechs. ISTR, also, that Denmark was given particularly light-handed treatment, to the extent that it wasn't till 1942 that the Nazis started arresting and deporting Danish Jews.
Dave
ETA: Not sure about the Czechs, actually; but certainly true of Poland.
Last edited:
dropzone
Master Poster
- Joined
- May 24, 2009
- Messages
- 2,033
And this differed from parking a Brit vehicle for a week...how?Especially after the retreating British started the engines, drained the oil, and let them run until they seized up.
Did he treat the Dutch state as a "natural ally" on grounds of the Germanic language spoken there? Or the Norwegians as "natural allies"? Granted he treated them better than he treated the Poles, but not as allies. He plundered and oppressed them.
I don't see how that follows. France fell quite quickly and without too much loss for the Germans, either in terms of blood or resources. Britain wouldn't have. Peace with Britain was in his best interests and would have allowed him to focus more resources on the conflict with the USSR. Whether or not he would have seen it that way is a different matter of course, but coming to terms of peace with an active foe is different in kind from showing restraint toward a defeated opponent.
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
True, the big difference was more that he was able to invade and conquer them. That's fundamentally different to a negotiated peace settlement. But there certainly were differences in how Nazi Germany treated conquered countries based on perceived racial characteristics; it was part of what defined Nazism.
Dave
Can I let you two sort this out? Would he have treated the uk as an ally because it resisted him, or because it negotiated a capitulation to his power? Then he could have zapped the commies I suppose, either way.
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
I don't think there's a difference here. Hitler was never in a position to invade and conquer Britain in the same way he did France, so the terms of any peace settlement would have to have been fundamentally different, which is pretty much what Roboramma just said. But I get the impression Hitler felt that Britain should have been either on his side or at worst neutral against the USSR, and that fighting Britain was the wrong war for Germany.
Dave
Yep.
I don't agree. I accept that Hitler's main chosen enemy was the USSR, but in fact he was no more capable of maintaining peaceful relations with the democratic imperialist powers than he was with the communist one. When he defeated one, e.g., France, Netherlands, Denmark or Belgium, he plundered and oppressed it ruthlessly. This was not a "wrong war" for Hitler.
Is there a connection between the first sentence and the second?
Why don't you simply say whatever it is you mean?
My grandfather had a rather different view from those above. He was a conscript in WW2. He said that the events pre-Dunkirk showed the professional army was not fit for purpose, the whole lot equipment and men were useless. His view was that most of the professional (peacetime soldiers) were more interested in finding a safe job than in fighting a war, Dunkirk allowed the re-equipment of the army and the realisation that the conscripts would be the ones to fight the war. His view was it was a propaganda success but Britain would have lost nothing of use if the army had not been evacuated. In his view conscripts wanted to win the war and go home, professional soldiers wanted to avoid the war. I suspect this was a bit unfair but may not have been a unique view.
Now what did he know? His brother was a professional soldier and spent most of the war in a prisoner of war camp. I never got a clear answer about what my grandfather did (he talked quite a lot about what he did in the war that was not fighting including taking me for a tour around London and explaining what it was like), the only active details I got was the he landed on D-day (he still remembered his landing craft allocation) and spent most of the subsequent period in advance of the allied front line doing SigInt, someone here may know what that actually entailed. The only other relevant fact is that he once said that that they were under orders to shoot their officers and not allow them to be captured because the unit were aware of enigma - the assumption being that the officer would be interrogated but not the squaddies. He also said that this was an obvious mistake because the officers did not really understand what the unit did, but the army insisted that they had an officer in charge.
Now what did he know? His brother was a professional soldier and spent most of the war in a prisoner of war camp. I never got a clear answer about what my grandfather did (he talked quite a lot about what he did in the war that was not fighting including taking me for a tour around London and explaining what it was like), the only active details I got was the he landed on D-day (he still remembered his landing craft allocation) and spent most of the subsequent period in advance of the allied front line doing SigInt, someone here may know what that actually entailed. The only other relevant fact is that he once said that that they were under orders to shoot their officers and not allow them to be captured because the unit were aware of enigma - the assumption being that the officer would be interrogated but not the squaddies. He also said that this was an obvious mistake because the officers did not really understand what the unit did, but the army insisted that they had an officer in charge.
Maybe not unique. But almost certainly wrong.
That's actually pretty much what I wanted to say to you. I'm not trying to hide my meaning here, but I'll try to make it more clear. You said that:
Which might be true, but I'm not entirely convinced of that. I can see an argument for it, but rather than putting words in your mouth can you make the argument explicit?
You then said this:
And the placement in your post seems to imply that it's an argument to support the former point, but either you didn't mean it that way or you've failed to make that argument because there's no implicit connection between what he did after defeating those countries and the idea that he is incapable of maintaining peace.
There's a very clear logical connection. If Hitler had been concerned to maintain peace with France or the Netherlands, but somehow against his intentions he had become involved in a "wrong war" with them, when he really intended only to fight the commies - that is a preposterous reading of the situation by the way - then after defeating these unintended opponents, would he have treated them with such murderous rapacity?
He was hostile to these western powers and intended to defeat them if he could. We may recall that in the event he secured Soviet non-intervention before attacking the west. He went west first. That was not to him a "wrong war" waged by inadvertence against countries he would have preferred as allies.
ddt
Mafia Penguin
That was a major reason why the Netherlands had a civilian administration, headed by Seyss-Inquart, and not a military administration as most other Nazi-occupied territories. Hitler certainly intended to try and turn the Dutch to his cause, and go relatively easy on them.
I don't think I ever suggested that Hitler had not intended to fight a war with the western european powers, so if that is what you were arguing against then I can only agree with you.
We seem to be disagreeing about the possibility of a peace agreement with Britain. That possibility, in my mind, would be based upon the fact that Germany had three possible weapons to use against Britain: invasion, blockade, and strategic bombing. In hindsight we can see that they wouldn't win the war with any of these, though at the time it wasn't so obvious. Still winning a war with Britain was obviously going to be more difficult, time consuming, and expensive than had been the war with France, and, particularly blockade did risk bringing the Americans into the conflict. Had Britain been willing to sue for peace, there are good reasons for Hitler to have considered it, as while it may have been an objective it certainly wasn't his only objective.
I would suggest that war with both Britain and France was pursued in order to avoid their interference with his other objectives. His initial victories may have been enough to win concessions in that regard, perhaps enough that he would have been happy with a peace.
I don't know, but it doesn't seem impossible to me.
The biographical record of this leader of a "civilian administration", who was finally executed for crimes against humanity, indicates that Hitler was incapable of displaying solicitude, even when it was in his interests to do so.