Speaker: How to Look Good as a Nazi
457 Responses
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Simon, have you read his Pegasus Bridge book?
No, but to be fair, it would've been very difficult to have covered this pivotal battle without giving the correct credit to the non-GIs who pulled it off. I've yet to read a D-Day history that doesn't mark Major Howard's attack & defence as crucial. After 3 Ambrose meanders through the almost single handed glory of the US Army in defeating Nazi Germany, and a how-we-tamed-the-savages book of the US West I gave up.
There's plenty of people who could be forgiven for not knowing that significantly more Turks, French and British soldiers than ANZACs were killed during the Dardanelles campaign.
And it wasn't so many years back that some quick, probably unscientific, survey in Australia determined that the overwhelming bulk of that nation believes that Gallipoli was a substantial ANZAC victory.
But, all nations love their martial myths, and sometimes have industries dedicated to maintaining or even creating them, and many, whilst somewhat loose with the facts, play a part in the maintaining the morale of a nation at war. I guess it's hard to go back after the fact and say, for example, the Battle of Britain wasn't quite the unequal fight the great leader, popular mythology and Hollywood said it was.
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A sharp, but possibly not-so-short antidote to 'the good fight' would be Studs Terkel's 'the good war'.
Enough racism, anti-semitism, racketeering, profiteering, service-dodging to knock the shine off more than a few halos.
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the overwhelming bulk of that nation believes that Gallipoli was a substantial ANZAC victory
Since the Turks, Brits and French *must* have been on the other side, and since as Craig points out more of them got killed, then surely "we" did win?
From an old Aussie beer ad:
They said we'd never make it, as we stormed Gallipoli
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Saving Private Ryan is used to teach the rules of engagement in our NZDF.
And isn't Platoon also shown in official defence circles too?
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I can't recall platoon, but Glory is used for leadership.
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And isn't Platoon also shown in official defence circles too?
Not, presumably, when conducting joint exercises with the Singaporean military. The last I heard it was banned there. Overly sympathetic portrayal of communists. Doesn't take much to get the thumbs down in the real nanny state. They once banned The Thorn Birds for its depiction of unpriestly shenanigans.
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Priestly spitting would have really incensed them.
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Damn, Great thread, a lot of info here, I have some difficulty erasing the image of you guys all gathered around your map with little toy soldiers and whatnot, but it's a fine read.
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I know the dickhead who showed Platoon & Full Metal Jacket etc to the Singaporeans after their mates got blown up with ammunition explotion in Waiberia.
He really didn't think a comedy or surf movie might have been better. -
I have some difficulty erasing the image of you guys all gathered around your map with little toy soldiers and whatnot
Oi, whatever anyone says, Risk is a perfectly acceptable game for consenting adults.
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'Lord of the Rings' version for full nerd points.
Although 'Axis and Allies' would probably be more appropriate for this thread.....
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I have some difficulty erasing the image of you guys all gathered around your map with little toy soldiers and whatnot
Yeah. There's a rather droning sense of ownership, as if the study of history has become and end in itself, rather than a possible path to understanding. And it is exclusively a guy thing. Several times in this thread I've been reminded of Helen Caldicott's anecdote about the kind of guys who'd approach her after a public meeting and tick her off for some tiny inaccuracy in her estimate of US cruise missile stocks. I have more time for the likes of Caldicott than I'll ever have for any self-important historical bean-counter.
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LOL, come on Joe, this entire thread was a Godwin right from the start. So people can indulge their desire to say everything they ever thought about WW2 and the Nazis.
But I hear you on the fixation on details. Personally, I had to deal with an actual German who lived through the Downfall in my house during this time and got to hear a whole lot more silly bean-counting than anything on this thread.
I'd give excerpts but they're more disturbing than funny. Suffice to say that one round of me trying to ignore it ended with "OK man, so even if only one tenth of the people who were claimed to have died in the Holocaust actually did, it's STILL one of the most atrocious things humans have ever done.". That shut him up for a bit. But he came back a bit later with "The Russians did worse", to which the response was immediate "So that makes it OK, then?". Shut him up for the rest of the day.
Debating those kind of statistics does nothing for me. It's a way of avoiding the bigger picture, a lot of the time. As far as I'm concerned the bigger picture of WW2 is that it was the time in which humans of every kind showed just how low they could sink. There was nothing good about it, except that it ended, and to a certain extent prevented the same thing happening again in a few years (unlike WW1).
To fixate on it too much is, IMHO, a wee bit crazy. I couldn't shake the feeling that my father-in-law thinks about it most of the time. It colors his every thought. It's especially evident how crazy it is when the point of view is the opposite of one's own, not so easy to see when we're all sharing a position. That's what's fueling him, I'm sure, a bunch of his old German mates are finally deciding in their dotage that they can finally say everything that they wanted to say over the last 60 years. The antisemitism is there, the racism of every kind, the determination to see through every battle to the bitter end, at whatever cost. Unfortunately for him, the cost is his family and friends (again, ironically), because it's a subject that shits people off no end.
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LOL, come on Joe, this entire thread was a Godwin right from the start. So people can indulge their desire to say everything they ever thought about WW2 and the Nazis.
Right you are Ben, and I'll fess up to having been a touch beady-eyed during the course of things. Apart from the input of someone I don't take seriously anyway, it's been a pretty edifying thread overall.
Life's lottery has certainly dealt you a rough hand with your father-in-law. Horrible old bastards with massive chips on their shoulders weren't uncommon in Oz/NZ a few decades back, especially with a few drinks in them. Their usual refrain was around the theme of Anzac as a death cult, decrying the useless long-haired bastards who wouldn't fight the next war. Copping serious aggro from someone old enough to be your dad who didn't like the cut of your jib wasn't uncommon. By the mid-80s those who hadn't died of embitterment had largely mellowed out.
From what you've said about your father-in-law I'd got the impression that he wasn't exactly typical, but your last paragraph makes me wonder if he's part of a wider pattern. In my limited experience the aggressive blowhard war veteran tends to be someone who survived their service relatively unscathed. Those who suffered major physical damage or serious mistreatment tended to have a more sober outlook. In your case, how badly did the old guy suffer?
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Well I did ask for it, marrying a girl with a German dad. But he wasn't such a cock back then, he's built up to it slowly, taking advantage of my general tolerance for alternative views. Then he divorced the MIL, shacked up with a German woman (MIL is Mauritian French and far too sensible to discuss politics of any kind). Since then he's devolved, as they say in Criminal Minds . His acquaintances seem to be almost exclusively German now, having basically given the big finger to everyone on the other side of the family (who never liked him anyway, it seems). He has no family downunder - Australia, btw, not NZ - wife is Ozzie.
He was a child during the War, so I doubt he was involved in any fighting, but he lived through extensive bombing at the end of the war, and his father was killed in the Luftwaffe. So he certainly suffered, but not from any physical harm. Amusingly his only tale of severe harm was at the hands of some German bully boys who knocked out many of his teeth.
Is he typical? I don't know. I met up with the rest of his family a few years back on a trip to Germany, and they seemed much more sensible. Living in Germany, they don't fetishize it, whereas I think he does. It seems to live in his memory as a golden land of the past, despite the totally fucked up times that he lived through. His own brother suggested to me that he "Hat ein Vogel", tapping his head. Birdbrain, we might say in English, although I don't think it's the exact same metaphor. They see Germany as it is now, not then, and it's good and bad, of course. Their complaints are not about the War, but about more recent problems like the East Germans, Gastarbeiter, the EU etc. They were wonderfully generous, helpful, well-educated, and seemed to be Americophiles and Francophiles mostly. My only complaints were the sheer volume of food that they insisted I eat, and their total lack of interest in the Antipodes. If I brought up the war (it seldom came up), they just shook their heads, and said that everything they ever wanted to say on the matter had been said long ago.
The only argument I had was about Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche, a landmark church in Berlin which was bombed, and is kept in its damaged state as a reminder about the war. One relative said it was stupid, and they should fix it. I pointed out that it was a reminder, and she said "Yeah, like we need more reminders". Not sure how I felt about that, and even less sure how I felt about seeing what they were doing to Dresden - rebuilding it as it was before the atrocious firebombing. It seems a little like trying to erase memory, but then we all do things like that. It's not a memory Germans want, and it really was a beautiful city before Bomber Harris went to work on it. Unsurprisingly, war memorials are very few on the ground in Germany.
But FIL might be typical for an ex-pat German of that period. I'm pretty sure his mates have similar views to him. He sings in a German choir, so perhaps that's just a form of self-selection, and the more integrated ex-pats would not be caught dead in such company. I just don't know.
I don't feel too bitter about him, though. If you can get him off the subject of politics and culture then he's entertaining enough, and I even managed to open his eyes to the miracle of Wikipedia while he was here, so maybe he'll get some good out it all. Not holding breath though.
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I may be biased as someone who's spent a bit of time working with historical detail, but I don't think it's necessarily unhealthy to be interested in the minutiae of a subject like WW2, as long as you can actually snap out of it and link all that stuff back into the broader picture somehow.
I've sensed in this thread that pretty much all participants have been able to juggle numbers and statistics for argument's sake without losing sight of the overall issue. And with a subject as laden with appalling human suffering as WW2, it's hard sometimes not to shy away into details in refuge from the horror of it all.
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I've got a friend whose Dad is Austrian living in Australia, a sweet, quiet and almost timid man.
He has a few scars from his childhood there and a little bitter over his dealings with his past employer and some issue about his retirement fund in Oz..
He hides at parties but once it all dies down you can have a good long pleasant chat with him.The story that stays with me is of him as a 17yr old (virgin) befriending a girl, who he latter found out was a prostitute. The deprevation of their collective situations ment no-one judged each other as each made their way the best they could and her kindness to him, kept him from hunger on more than one occasion. Of course they lost touch when he moved out to Australia.
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the study of history has become and end in itself, rather than a possible path to understanding.
And there has also been some quite fascinating discussion of abstract concepts, for example Simon's arguments that the seeds of fascism are present in every society and every individual, and must be guarded against. I would also argue that at least this point relates directly to the point of the original post, and so is entirely on topic.
For my own part, I was, and am, interested in exploring the idea that the seeds of the Nazi's own downfall were contained in their philosophy from inception. Exploring this abstract historical-political idea necessarily involves bean-counting and hair-splitting. I'd hope that I'm able to 'snap out of it and link all that stuff back into the broader picture somehow', as Kyle says. It's also probably off-topic, but that's the direction the discussion took.
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And with a subject as laden with appalling human suffering as WW2, it's hard sometimes not to shy away into details in refuge from the horror of it all.
Indeed -- but also the details matter, because the Nazis didn't only destroy millions of lives and reduce so much of Europe to rubble. They also laid waste to a rich cultural and academic tradition, where language and art was no longer a tool to understand the most profound truths about the world we all live in, but the plaything of a totalitarian ideology where even the inside of your head was no longer your own. Unpalatable realities had no place in the Third Reich, and voicing them in the wrong place at the wrong time could quite literally be a matter of life and death.
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For those who haven't read it yet I'd highly recommend Richard Evans' The Third Reich in Power (2005). It's Book 2 of Evans' trilogy on the Reich (the other two volumes deal with the origins and wartime functioning of the Nazi state, respectively).
It's a readable, historiographically up-to-date chronicle of society and everyday life in Germany from 1933 to 1939. And an example of historical 'nit-picking' done right that doesn't distract from the tragedy, but puts you face to face with it.
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I have some difficulty erasing the image of you guys all gathered around your map with little toy soldiers and whatnot
Perhaps guilty as charged (and I did like an Airfix or two when I was much, much younger). But I do like to know, to state it in it's most reduced form, what happened, and quite clearly we do future generations, and just as much, past, a very grave disservice if we don't try to work that out, and in the most minute detail..broad sweeps simply don't wash.
The rise and implementation of the thing we seem to now define quite tidily (and thus debase the evil it implies), when put next to it's ugly complexity, as 'Nazi Germany, 1933-45' is something we need to fully understand, and not just in it's German form.
Simon's arguments that the seeds of fascism are present in every society and every individual, and must be guarded against.
This thread has made me re-read, as I mentioned earlier, Richard J. Evan's The Coming of The Third Reich, which should almost be required reading for any aspiring politician, political journalist, jurist, or tertiary student, if only to prevent the ordinary becoming the unthinkable.
Although I'm not sure the WaPo reviewer on the Amazon link read quite the same book as the one I'm looking at.
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Snap, Sam...
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Hey, you still have time to beat me to reading the third book in the trilogy (came out last year IIRC).
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I've already read it. The first 2 are the more essential reads, IMO. Third covers much covered ground, but I think I'd be doing a disservice to Evans fine work to not the finish the trilogy. And I think the way he uses Victor Klemperer's diaries takes it out of the archives and behind the doors of the nation's drawing rooms. They are important if just for that, and were not available to earlier historians (pre 95).
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I'm pleased to see such strong and well-informed recommendations singling out Richard Evans' Third Reich trilogy, as I splashed out and bought it a couple of months ago as a very handsome boxed set of heirloom quality books, and it would be a shame if it was no good.
So now I'm reading The Coming of the Third Reich, and finding much to appreciate. But I see also some truth in parts of the Washington Post review on the Amazon site that Simon linked to a few posts above – that it “often skimps precisely on the themes it recognizes as crucial” is certainly true of the German Revolution of November 1918 (or is it 1918-19?). Evans emphasises its importance (in many references back to it) in what came later, and claims to be writing narrative history, but oddly makes no attempt to provide a basic overview of what happened. Which, since it was a multi-faceted shambles, would have been very helpful. And since the ambiguity to the Germans themselves of the ‘November Revolution’ and how WWI ended was exploited in the polemics of so many parties including the Nazis in the ongoing foment, again, this is an area that needed more attention in what might have been a definitive account of the coming of the Third Reich.
I reckon Richard Evans and his editors noticed and agreed quietly, and that’s why volumes 2 and 3 are each at least 50% longer.
OTOH the WaPo reviewer’s “Most troublesome is the contradiction between the author's central contention that the rise of Nazism was not inevitable and his simultaneous assertion that the republic was doomed from the start” is a classic failure of the binary brain – as if there was only two possible outcomes, a thriving Weimar Republic or its overthrow by Nazism.
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