Split Thread WWII & Appeasement

[ddt]

I don't know much about Barbie. I remember the case in the newspapers, when it happened, but I didn't take much notice at the time.

So you knew about his trial. Why then did you assume he went unconvicted, and mentioned him in one breath with Mengele, who indeed evaded being captured? Do you have any other example of a hihg-profile Nazi - and one, at that, who was so cruel to earn the nickname "Butcher of Lyon" - who went to trial and was acquitted?

The newspaper reports never mentioned that Barbie murdered people by throwing them into a lime pit.

I never paid attention to his particular methods of torture, but Google throws up nothing on that. The wiki article I linked to says this:

He established his headquarters at the Hôtel Terminus in Lyon, where he personally tortured adult and child prisoners,[3][4][5]—breaking extremities, using electroshock and sexually abusing them (including with dogs), among other methods. He became known as the "Butcher of Lyon".[6] The daughter of a French Resistance leader based in Lyon claimed her father was beaten and skinned alive, and that his head was immersed in a bucket of ammonia; he died shortly afterward.[4]

and if you follow the links there are many more gruesome torture methods - but nothing about lime pits.

Why do you make stuff up at every single turn?

 

[Henri McPhee]

So you knew about his trial. Why then did you assume he went unconvicted, and mentioned him in one breath with Mengele, who indeed evaded being captured? Do you have any other example of a high-profile Nazi - and one, at that, who was so cruel to earn the nickname "Butcher of Lyon" - who went to trial and was acquitted?

Many of these SS and Gestapo types were never identified after the war. Some were executed and others given lenient sentences. There is a bit about all this in a book called the Secret Hunters by Anthony Kemp published in 1986 and with quotes by Prince Yurka Galitzine:

It was in such an atmosphere that lip service was paid in pursuing the perpetrators of war crimes, with pressure brought by the French and by all the countries in Europe that had been occupied. The French, the Dutch, the Danes and the Norwegians, all were diligent in looking for those responsible. Not so the British; the organisation was there but neither the will or the enthusiasm.......

I have sometimes wondered if the chase should still go on for beasts like Mengele and Barbie and I have come to a very definite conclusion that such monsters must be tracked down and their story re-told. In this way the lessons for the future will not be forgotten. Luckily we have the ability of the media to remind and expose, let us hope that they will continue to watch for any recurrence in the conflicts of today.......

Those of the hunted who had been imprisoned were all released by the early 1950s and those still at large were able to breath more easily as they participated in the 'economic wonder' of Adenauer's reborn Germany. Any still alive were now old men who have probably been able to wash their consciences clean. Apart from a few dedicated prosecutors, there is no desire in Germany today to rake over the Nazi past........

I'd had a lot of vey scarring experiences and one was inclined to be rather wholesale in one's judgements. I was. I didn't recognise the difference between Germans - to me all Germans were cruel, and as a result I was very vengeful.

For many years I just could not bear to be in the same room with a German and it made me absolutely shake. But then after forty years one learns that there are a lot of different facets to a nation. I've got a lot of very good German friends. I've gradually got to know them and respect them. I admit, most of the Germans I know were born after 1939. And to them it's another world, and we never talk about those sort of things.

But at the back of my mind, I shall never forget what happened before and I think it was very important that they were brought to justice, and I think it's very important too that young people of this generation and of the next generation know what happened. Because it could happen again.

 

[jimbob]

but one of the two that you named was convicted.

 

[Craig B]

Many of these SS and Gestapo types were never identified after the war. Some were executed and others given lenient sentences. There is a bit about all this in a book called the Secret Hunters by Anthony Kemp published in 1986 and with quotes by Prince Yurka Galitzine:

The book you refer to appears to be about SAS agents hunting down German servicemen who murdered captured commandos in obedience to criminal orders from Hitler. More of these perpetrators are likely to have remained undiscovered, or been acquitted, as such murders of POWs most often took place during or soon after armed action.

The statement you quote from Prince Golitzine unfortunately contains childish material like this

For many years I just could not bear to be in the same room with a German and it made me absolutely shake. But then after forty years one learns that there are a lot of different facets to a nation.​

Many people learn that in less than forty years.

 

[ddt]

Many of these SS and Gestapo types were never identified after the war. Some were executed and others given lenient sentences. There is a bit about all this in a book called the Secret Hunters by Anthony Kemp published in 1986 and with quotes by Prince Yurka Galitzine:

That doesn't answer my questions:
(1) as you knew that Barbie was put on trial, why did you claim he went unconvicted?
(2) why did you make up the stuff about Barbie dumping bodies in lime pits? Was the actual torture he committed not gruesome enough (in fact, IMHO, more gruesome)?

 

[Tolls]

but one of the two that you named was convicted.

Well, let's be fair, a 50% hit rate is pretty good for Henri.

 

[Henri McPhee]

I still think that if I traded places with Chamberlain in some fantasy land I would have done exactly the same thing in his position. Some say Chamberlain's so-called appeasement policy, and his famous piece of paper, was based on military judgement at the time. I think that's fair comment.

There is a quote in a biography book called Sir Antony Eden about the hare brained Edenites like Churchill by Alan Campbell-Johnson published in 1955:

He would perhaps have reacted more strongly if he could have known that a mere ten days after Munich Hitler with unparalleled arrogance was to make the maintenance of good relations with Germany conditional upon the continuation in office of Britain's existing leadership. Should Eden, Churchill or Duff-Cooper come into power, the result, declared the Fuhrer, would inevitably be war with the Reich.

A sense of humour was not Eden's strong point.

Britain seems to have signed the Geneva convention on prisoners of war, unlike Isis/Taliban now, who have also never signed the UN convention on chemical warfare, or on beheadings. The International Criminal Court should be informed of this.

For some unknown reason the Russians never signed any of those agreements and they suffered greatly in the war as a result. The British investigated some German war criminals after the war as it affected murdered Britishers, and British agents. The Israeli Mossad tracked down German war criminals in South America, including Eichman who was executed. The Americans quickly regarded German war criminals as being on their side, while as far as I know the Russians did practically nothing about German war criminals. It's true that only a small percentage of German prisoners of war taken to Siberia ever returned home.

Somebody on that World at War TV documentary said that about a million Russian prisoners of war were shot dead by the Germans. Others were tortured or made slave labour. That's monstrous.

There is some background information to this on the internet:

Peter Calvocoressi, Guy Wint, Total War — "The total number of prisoners taken by the German armies in the USSR was in the region of 5.5 million. Of these, the astounding number of 3.5 million or more had been lost by the middle of 1944 and the assumption must be that they were either deliberately killed or done to death by criminal negligence. Nearly two million of them died in camps and close on another million disappeared while in military custody either in the USSR or in rear areas; a further quarter of a million disappeared or died in transit between the front and destinations in the rear; another 473,000 died or were killed in military custody in Germany or Poland." They add, "This slaughter of prisoners cannot be accounted for by the peculiar chaos of the war in the east. ... The true cause was the inhuman policy of the Nazis towards the Russians as a people and the acquiescence of army commanders in attitudes and conditions which amounted to a sentence of death on their prisoners."

 

[Craig B]

Britain seems to have signed the Geneva convention on prisoners of war, unlike Isis/Taliban now, who have also never signed the UN convention on chemical warfare, or on beheadings. The International Criminal Court should be informed of this.

I'm not sure what your post is about, but with regard to that point about ISIS: I don't think it would be regarded as competent to sign undertakings of that kind, as it is not recognised as a legitimate state. In November 2015, the UN Security Council declared SC/12132, 20 November 2015

The Security Council determined today that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant/Sham (ISIL/ISIS) constituted an “unprecedented” threat to international peace and security, calling upon Member States with the requisite capacity to take “all necessary measures” to prevent and suppress its terrorist acts on territory under its control in Syria and Iraq.​

In 1938 the governments involved in the various international transactions were all recognised as legitimate and competent to sign treaties and make other commitments.

 

[Henri McPhee]

There's a story I've heard, possibly apocryphal, that Sandhurst war-gamed a German invasion in 1940 in which the forces available to Britain were Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel, Captain Pugwash and the Black Pig, and the Walmington-on-Sea platoon of the Home Guard, and the German invasion still failed. Germany's logistical planning was virtually non-existent; their plans involved requisitioning the entire stock of barges in northern Europe (handwaving away the economic effects), towing them in strings across the channel, working up to full speed before releasing them to turn inland and hit the beach by momentum alone, blowing the bows off with explosive bolts to land the troops, then re-using the same set of beached, bowless barges for a daily cargo lift until they could capture a major port in good enough shape to use it - something they later found wasn't all that difficult to prevent. Plus, the Army demanded a large scale attack on multiple fronts, while the Navy could barely scrape together a plan for a single landing. There never seems to have been a coherent enough plan for any of it to be more than just a colossal bluff.

Dave

Churchill and the public and the House of Commons and mainstream media thought the German threat of invasion, with amazing complacency, had been exaggerated. This was not a view shared by the British High Command who thought that a wrong answer may mean the end of life as we have known it in this country and the end of the British Empire.

From the diaries of General, later Field Marshal, Alan Brooke:

I had been worried by the possibility of the Germans combining an airborne attack on London with their invasion. There was ample room for a series of parachute landings in the large London Parks. The more I examined those possibilities the more I realised the chaos which such landings would create, if they occurred at night it would be necessary to rush troops into London, and their arrival would clash with the morning flow of men, women, milk, vegetables, fruit, fish, etc. I therefore prepared an exercise to test out the very complicated arrangements required to minimise the chances of chaos.....

Have I really taken the proper dispositions for the defence of this country? Am I sufficiently insured in the South-East? Can I reinforce this corner without taking undue risks in the North? Am I under-appreciating the air threat? Ought I to further denude the beaches to cover the aerodromes? If I do , am I opening the door to sea-invasion? Will the air support be as efficient as the Air Ministry would like us to believe? How long will the Navy take to concentrate its forces in Home waters? Shall we be able to hold the thrust of Armoured divisions in Kent during this period?....

 

[Tolls]

Brooke was having a bit of a mental tizzy there.
A Para drop in Hyde Park would have been a disaster for the Germans.

Dropping paras with no support, and no chance of support for weeks (not days), is simply throwing away your troops. Look at Arnhem and Crete, both of which were planned to receive land support within days.

 

[Dave Rogers]

From the diaries of General, later Field Marshal, Alan Brooke:

Talking about what could at worst have been a nuisance raid. Paratroops can't just invade a country unaided, and it looks like what he was worried about was just the level of disturbance involved.

Dave

 

[ddt]

Brooke was having a bit of a mental tizzy there.
A Para drop in Hyde Park would have been a disaster for the Germans.

Dropping paras with no support, and no chance of support for weeks (not days), is simply throwing away your troops. Look at Arnhem and Crete, both of which were planned to receive land support within days.

To put it more into perspective with the time he wrote it: on 10 May 1940, the day Germany invaded the Netherlands, there were various para drops to capture airfields and the Royal Family in the West of the country. They were all spectacular failures.

 

[Henri McPhee]

Brooke was having a bit of a mental tizzy there.
A Para drop in Hyde Park would have been a disaster for the Germans.

Dropping paras with no support, and no chance of support for weeks (not days), is simply throwing away your troops. Look at Arnhem and Crete, both of which were planned to receive land support within days.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. There were two SS divisions opposing the landings at Arnhem. Crete was a victory in the end for the German paratroopers. General Alan Brooke was not so sure about the situation at that time as people seem to be nowadays. This is from his diaries of September 15th 1940:

Still no move on the part of the Germans. Everything remains keyed up for an early invasion, and the air war goes on unabated. This coming week must remain a critical one, and it is hard to see how Hitler can now retrace his steps and stop this invasion. The suspense of waiting is very trying, especially when one is familiar with the weakness of one's own defences. Our exposed coast line is just twice the length of the front that we and the French were holding in France with about eighty divisions and the Maginot line. Here we have twenty-two divisions of which only about half can be looked upon as in any way fit for any form of mobile operations. Thank God the spirit is now good and the defeatist opinions expressed after Dunkirk are no longer prevalent. But I wish I could have six months more to finish equipping and training the forces under my command. A responsibility such as the defence of this country under existing conditions is one that weighs on one like a ton of bricks, and it is hard at times to retain the hopeful and confident exterior which is so essential to retain the confidence of those under one and to guard against their having any doubts as regards final success.

 

[Tolls]

To put it more into perspective with the time he wrote it: on 10 May 1940, the day Germany invaded the Netherlands, there were various para drops to capture airfields and the Royal Family in the West of the country. They were all spectacular failures.

Quite.
The only major success was the drop on Eben Emael. And they were relieved in about 24 hours.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. There were two SS divisions opposing the landings at Arnhem. Crete was a victory in the end for the German paratroopers. General Alan Brooke was not so sure about the situation at that time as people seem to be nowadays. This is from his diaries of September 15th 1940:

Crete cost the Germans their airborne force.
Arnhem was supposed to be relieved in 3 days.
What German force could have got across the channel and into London to relieve a few hundred paras in 3 days?

 

[ddt]

Quite.
The only major success was the drop on Eben Emael. And they were relieved in about 24 hours.

Yep, and that was, what, 30 km from the border. And they had been training for that nearly a year.

 

[Tolls]

Yep, and that was, what, 30 km from the border. And they had been training for that nearly a year.

And they struck lucky that one of the gliders landed on the roof.

 

[Craig B]

And they struck lucky that one of the gliders landed on the roof.

The last UK parachute drop was at Suez. It was successful in securing its target, but the campaign as a whole was a fiasco.

 

[Tolls]

The last UK parachute drop was at Suez. It was successful in securing its target, but the campaign as a whole was a fiasco.

One of these days I'll actually read up on Suez...

Obviously there were lots of successful drops, but all of them had the idea of being relieved within a couple of days at most.

Dropping in a park in London doesn't really fit the bill.
I was thinking of other issues with it...how would you handle the landing? I know London had blackouts, but wouldn't any pathfinders have issues? How are you supposed to guide the rest of the paras in?

As I say, the most likely explanation for Brooke's comment is he was having a tizzy at the time over the initial reports coming in from the continent. May was not a happy time.

 

[Craig B]

... May was not a happy time.

I misread that at first. The words "May" and "happy time" don't go together very well.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Crete was a victory in the end for the German paratroopers.

You mis-spelled "was a victory and the end for the German paratroopers."

General Alan Brooke was not so sure about the situation at that time as people seem to be nowadays. This is from his diaries of September 15th 1940:

Which doesn't mention paratroopers at all.

Dave