Little known WWII story....

rwsmith

rwsmith

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Saw a documentary titled, "Hitler's GI Death Camp". It said that American soldiers captured during the opening phase of the Battle of the Bulge were cattle-carred to a camp in eastern Germany. They were put to work building tunnels and underground works for Germany to hide stuff in. The orders to the camp were, "Work them until they die". Several survivors managed to choke out their stories. It was horrible.

While I'm here let me tell about about another documentary, simply called 'Nanking' which was the history of the 'Rape of Nanking' in 1937. I have studied it, seen a lot of really gruesome photos, but this hit me really hard. Live footage and again survivors trying to tell stories about having their families raped and butchered around them. The only 'good' thing about it was that 'foreigners' (including Americans) sheltered people as much as they could. I found it to be very disturbing but I'm glad I watched it.

I intend to search into these stories more. Every time you think you've heard about all of WWII more pops up. De-classification has brought about some of this.
 
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The rape of Nanking is very well known and documented. You'll be able to find a lot of information about that atrocity.

Check out the Massacre at Malmedy.
 
Just when you think you have heard it all about the Nazis, another outrageous story appears.
Like have you seen the one about them attempting to breed an old line of wild 'Germanic' cows?
How bout the massive effort to make a film about the Titanic? From the German point of view, of course. What? You didn't know there was a German point of view about an English ship hitting an iceberg?
 
zzzippper said:
The rape of Nanking is very well known and documented. You'll be able to find a lot of information about that atrocity.

Check out the Massacre at Malmedy.
Click to expand...

Oh... i whish i didn't google it. :(
 
THE PILGRIM said:
Just when you think you have heard it all about the Nazis, another outrageous story appears.
Like have you seen the one about them attempting to breed an old line of wild 'Germanic' cows?
How bout the massive effort to make a film about the Titanic? From the German point of view, of course. What? You didn't know there was a German point of view about an English ship hitting an iceberg?
Click to expand...


Do you mean the Aurochs? Those were wild oxen and not exclusive to Germany. The cave paintings at Altamira and at Lascaux show some.

The Nanking thing was bad but probably no worse that what Isis is doing now in Iraq, like burying captives alive or executing whole groups of them. I wish our USN fighter-bombers luck in killing whole slews of these animals.

I've told here before about Brig. John Masters, D.S.O, etc. and his description of a dispatch sent by a young British officer from Burma. He had had some men "captured by the enemy, presumably executed."

HQ in India retorted that this was not a category for reporting casualties and POW's. He replied, "Sir, we are fighting the Japanese!"

Masters noted that he had no emotion about shooting Japs, no more than killing a roach. He had seen too many of their atrocities. His Distinguished Service Order was for great gallantry and skill in commanding an outpost that repeatedly drove off their attacks. One Japanese regiment was decimated in the process.
 
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rwsmith said:
While I'm here let me tell about about another documentary, simply called 'Nanking' which was the history of the 'Rape of Nanking' in 1937.
Click to expand...
You know you're really degenerate scum if a Nazi Party member thinks you're degenerate scum for your behavior. One of the notable witnesses to the Rape was an ex-pat German in Nanking. He got in some hot water in Germany for talking about the atrocities, after the Japanese made "honorary Aryan" status.
 
"The End" by historian Ian Kershaw depicts the situation in Nazi Germany after the July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life. In short, Germany was not a good place to be in the last 9 months of the war. The Nazi Party had clamped down on the populace and imposed even harsher restrictions. Kershaw makes the interesting point that Germany put out NO peace feelers in those last months. This was unheard of for a country on the edge, if only to test the waters.

It was an ugly war and it became even uglier.
 
kaaskop49 said:
"The End" by historian Ian Kershaw depicts the situation in Nazi Germany after the July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life. In short, Germany was not a good place to be in the last 9 months of the war. The Nazi Party had clamped down on the populace and imposed even harsher restrictions. Kershaw makes the interesting point that Germany put out NO peace feelers in those last months. This was unheard of for a country on the edge, if only to test the waters.

It was an ugly war and it became even uglier.
Click to expand...
Actually there WERE "peace feelers"... just not OFFICIAL ones. Himmler was trying to run his own game, which might well have gotten him killed had Hitler known in time.
 
There is a lot of unknown stories of ww2.

Has anyone heard of the Ustase? It was a Croatian fascist regime in ww2 and their Jasenovac concentration camp. No one has ever heard of it but these guys were worse then the Nazis they emulated. Guards competed in who can kill the most prisoners. Some guards kills numbered in the thousands. Sadistic torture. It is estimated that they killed at least a 100k people. Their camp was considered the most brutal out of all camps in Europe. A German general visiting the prison said "....This camp has reached the hight of hideousness. .."

And yet no one hears about it
 
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All known stuff. The difference now is with the declassification of the data in 1995 and the proliferation of data with the information age..
 
It is likely that the average American knows nothing about any of these horrific incidents, and as we move further away from WWII in time there will be fewer and fewer with any such awareness. And to younger Americans, this is all ancient history and therefore irrelevant to their lives today. What is even sadder is that children are being taught virtually nothing about WWII, other than how terrible the USA was in placing Japanese-Americans into internment camps. The Vietnam war is being taught as an example of how imperialist and brutal America was to the poor, peace loving peoples of Vietnam. If you think I am exaggerating just look at what passes for history or social studies textbooks in our schools today.

Japan still refuses to acknowledge, let alone try to make amends for the Rape of Nanking or other WWII war crimes, and we are so in love with their TV's, cameras, cars and other goodies that most of us don't want to think about their past. Germany has certainly made real efforts to atone for their Nazi history, but you can be sure that they are not doing very much now to keep the memory of those times alive.

Young Americans, I fear, even if made aware of the specific atrocities noted by the OP would probably say something like "well, awful things are done by both sides during a war". They are being taught that America is characterized by genocide of Native Americans (a total fabrication of the truth), terrible racism by our Founding Fathers (a distortion at the least), imperialism against Mexico, and immoral wars against weaker peaceful peoples (i.e., Vietnam, Iraq). Our children are being raised to view history through the perspective of moral equivalence so even if they were to be made aware of true historical events they would not likely have any sense of outrage.
 
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In high school I had the privillage of hearing several WWII Vets speak about their Capture by the Germans. They survived German slave labor camps. Jewish GIs didn't always go to regular POW camps. Was amazing listening to their stories.

Sent from my PantechP8000 using Tapatalk 2
 
Arik said:
There is a lot of unknown stories of ww2.

Has anyone heard of the Ustase? It was a Croatian fascist regime in ww2 and their Jasenovac concentration camp. No one has ever heard of it but these guys were worse then the Nazis they emulated. Guards competed in who can kill the most prisoners. Some guards kills numbered in the thousands. Sadistic torture. It is estimated that they killed at least a 100k people. Their camp was considered the most brutal out of all camps in Europe. A German general visiting the prison said "....This camp has reached the hight of hideousness. .."

And yet no one hears about it
Click to expand...
Knew a guy who married a gal in Germany. Her dad was one of the Moslems in the SS, I think he was from Bosnia. He was a company commander who wound up running from the Russians.
He made it back to Allied occupied territory and had a successful post war life in West Germany.
There was a standing shoot on sight order for him in Yugoslavia.
 
From an American perspective, the Japs and the Nazis are everyone's favorite boogeymen for obvious reasons, but the brutality and scale of the Russian communists' (and their eastern Euro cohorts) crimes make Unit 731 and T4 look like childplay. Dig deeper than Wikipedia and find out what the NKVD used to get up to, for starters.
 
I've studied a lot of the world history, especially the pre-1950 conflicts, and the eco-politics of the era.

The powers that were never had clean hands, since their political aims were never individual freedom. Whether it was called socialism, Fascism, Nazism, Japanese Imperialism, or Communism, the aspirations of the individual were always secondary to those of the state. Each of those political philosophies required subservience or death, to attain the goals of the state.

As we study that era, we have to remember that people alive today are not the tyrants who were the leaders of then. To those ends, Italians, Japanese, Germans, and Russians today, are not the same as those from 1936. We shouldn't be surprised that those modern governments wouldn't want to admit the tyranny of old. At what point do we cease retribution and begin to remember history so we don't forget the past?

Do you want a modern Japanese, German, Italian, or Russian to continue to wear the hair shirt, and start every conversation with a "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa"? It wasn't their war or their war crimes. I don't expect them to accept that guilt. For the same reasons, I carry absolutely no guilt over the fact that some of my ancestors were slave owners in Virginia.

We can see the retributions of those in power against ghosts of affronts and barbarism a millennium ago ago, in the Balkans. We see the same in the Middle East. And it isn't just Muslim vs. Jew, or Muslim vs. Christian. The Shiia vs. Sunni, etc., are just as bloody and barbaric.

I surely wish I had the answers, but as long as folks live in the past, and carry millennial old grudges, there won't be peace anywhere.

I'm not naive to believe that there will be any type of "universal peace". I still think that one's motto for peace to be "Si Vis Pacem, Parabellum", but at some point, history has to be a teachable moment, and not a call to war.
 
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I'm afraid some will be lost....

I'm afraid that some stories will be lost to history. Many have great difficulty relating their experiences due to the horror. Especially people that found themselves doing what they hated and would never do except when pushed beyond the limits.
 
Gen. Robert Cardenas, American Hero

I get some Email from Gen. Cardenas on one of my military loops.
You are probably thinking who? When Chuck Yeager dropped out of that B-29, Bob Cardenas was flying the B-29. He also flew the YB-49.
On 3/18/44 he was flying a B-24 he shot down over Germany. He tried to get to Switzerland, but bailed out in Germany and swam across a lake to Switzerland. There he joined other Allied airmen in an interment camp.
Later he checked out Swiss pilots in B-24s and B-17s which had landed in Switzerland.
Then with help he escaped and got back to England. He also did a bunch of things after that! Including test flying captured German planes including the ME-262.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cardenas
 
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Arik said:
There is a lot of unknown stories of ww2.

Has anyone heard of the Ustase? It was a Croatian fascist regime in ww2 and their Jasenovac concentration camp. No one has ever heard of it but these guys were worse then the Nazis they emulated. Guards competed in who can kill the most prisoners. Some guards kills numbered in the thousands. Sadistic torture. It is estimated that they killed at least a 100k people. Their camp was considered the most brutal out of all camps in Europe. A German general visiting the prison said "....This camp has reached the hight of hideousness. .."

And yet no one hears about it
Click to expand...

I've read about the camp, and the Ustase. I've also read that several SS officers were horrified at how the prisoners were killed. If it upset people like that I don't even want to know any more about it.
 
When word started getting out....

cmort666 said:
Morally, there's nothing to choose between Hitler, Stalin and the Japanese militarists (no single dictator).

It's a matter of Charles Manson versus Jeffrey Dahmer, versus Little Nicky Scarfo.
Click to expand...

People emphatically stated that there was no way the Germans or Japanese could do such things because they were too cultured and civilized.
 
In reading "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by Wm Shirer he mentioned the Nazis had exclusive dinner parties for high up officers and their wives and high ups in the party and after dinner for entertainment they would go out on the veranda and have a shooting gallery. Except the targets were Jewish prisoners.

How sick was that?
 
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang may she rest in peace. The research arguably drove her crazy and she never recovered and ultimately committed suicide about 10 years ago:

"The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000-80,000 women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, and nail them alive to walls.

"Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practices, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks and burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds.

"So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of 'bestial machinery.' "
 
I can't say I 'like' this....

HOUSTON RICK said:
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang may she rest in peace. The research arguably drove her crazy and she never recovered and ultimately committed suicide about 10 years ago:

"The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000-80,000 women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, and nail them alive to walls.

"Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practices, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks and burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds.

"So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of 'bestial machinery.' "
Click to expand...

I didn't want to 'like' this one, but thanks for elucidating. Words just can't convey it.

Update: I just looked into it and 'Nanking', the documentary I started this thread with was based on Iris Chang's book.
 
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"Fathers were forced to rape their daughters...." Ya know, I don't believe that. Find me a man on this forum who has a daughter who will say it is conceivable.

I will say that, of course, the "Rape of Nanking" was an atrocity.

By the way, the Japanese have apologized for their role in WWII quite a few times. Here is one list: List of war apology statements issued by Japan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here we are, what, nearly 70 years later... Seems to me, time to move forward.
 
HOUSTON RICK said:
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang may she rest in peace. The research arguably drove her crazy and she never recovered and ultimately committed suicide about 10 years ago:
Click to expand...
I was on usenet soc.culture.japan at the time and it was interesting to see the Japanese ultra-rightwingers... and Western neo-Nazis pretending to be Japanese trying to "debunk" the book. As usual, they only made themselves look like bigger jackasses.
 
HOUSTON RICK said:
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang may she rest in peace. The research arguably drove her crazy and she never recovered and ultimately committed suicide about 10 years ago:

"The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000-80,000 women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, and nail them alive to walls.

"Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practices, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks and burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds.

"So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of 'bestial machinery.' "
Click to expand...
I didn't want to type this in my original post but this is basically what the Ustase did in the concentration camp. Use kids as bayonet practice. Infants would be tossed in the air and the guard would try to land it on a bayonet all the wile taking bets on how many attempts it would take. Other guards had throat cutting competitions. One guard killed over a 1000 people in one night. Another guard killed a man slowly by cutting off body parts piece by piece for refusing to acknowledge his buddy as a saint.

What people do to each other is just repulsive.
 
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