only 71? bah!
Hindenburg died in 1934, long before the climax of nazi atrocities, so it's 82 years later for him.
EDIT : I do not condone neither try to minimize the nazi actions up to 1934.
A Bavarian town has somewhat belatedly voted to rescind vegetarian dog-lover Hitler's honorary citizenship, a mere 71 years since the Führer and his missus went up in smoke in the Reich Chancellery garden. By unanimous vote, the town council of Tegernsee stripped Adolf of the honour, along with the same bestowed on former prez …
It seems to be a knee-jerk overreaction by the good burghers of Tegernsee to include von Hindenburg in this removal of honorary citizenship. A loyal servant to crown and country, pushed and prodded in his dotage into actions he would have flatly rejected as a younger man still possessed of a sound mind.
BTW Lester, Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January of 1933.
Kurt Meyer,
I admit that it's quite unfair to blame Hindenburg for everything that happened after his death - given that he was not a well man, or seemingly much in charge by the end. But then again he did make himself and Ludendorff virtual dictators in the last couple of years of WWI, so I'm not sure that "loyal servant" is quite such an accurate description of him either.
I ain't Spartacus,
You are entirely correct to point out the assumption of, if not the out right seizure of, dictatorial powers by von Hindenburg and Ludendorff in 1916.
The only mitigation I can see at this distance, is an apparently complete absence of any desire for self-aggrandisment, i.e. the military dictatorship was for the benefit of Germany, not for his own benefit.
Ludendorff's motives, especially in light of his post war behavior, seem, at first glance, much more murky, although I am probably doing him a disservice vis-à-vis his actions in 1916.
There seems to be no dispute by scholars of the period that von Hindenburg disliked and distrusted Hitler from their first meeting, and no change in these views has come to light in all the years since then. There also seems to be a consensus that he was suffering from periods of dementia by 1932, if not somewhat earlier.
It is a matter of record that he was reluctant to serve a second term as President, and was only persuaded to do so on the grounds that he was the only man in Germany who could defeat Hitler.
His repeated refusal to appoint Hitler to the Chancellorship is also a matter of record, and the fact that he finally did so in January of 1933, speaks to me, at least, of senility, rather than a change of heart. We may never know the real story.
I will not suggest that von Hindenburg's was a stainless life, I don't possess any knowledge that would lead me to think so. Nonetheless, it seems to me to be a sad endcap to a life spent in the service of his country.
As Lester says, it will be discussed and debated for a long time to come.
I ain't Spartacus, it has been a pleasure to have this "discussion" with you, perhaps some day we'll have the chance to enjoy a pint or two.
Yummy. Pints are always nice...
I agree, Hindenburg did try to stop Hitler. And to be fair to him, Germany had reached a political impasse by the early 30s. They had reached the point where either the communists or the Nazis were going to have to be brought into government, because between the two of them they had a blocking majority in the Reichstag. The other option was probably military dictatorship.
@Kurt Meyer - I believe part of the reasons Hindenburg finally appointed Hitler Chancellor were the Nazis had the largest (minority) bloc in the Reichstag and the fact many leaders of the other parties in the initial coalition badly underestimated Hitler. Hindenburg was German patriot and tried to do what he thought best even when he was wrong. Hitler was able to seize power after Hindenburg died and effectively combined the Presidency with the Chancellorship. into one.
It is said that it would be hard to prove direct involvement of him into war crimes or the concentration camps, he would take care not to be confronted with papers.
Although maybe leaving 300.000 of ones own soldiers to freeze away in Stalingrad, 300km from the own lines, is technically a war crime. The fact they were there was a direct result from his refusal to take back front lines before winter.
I'm not sure Karadic ever actually signed anything either. But he got convicted in the Hague last week anyway. When you're leader for so long, it doesn't really matter what you sign. If stuff is happening on your watch for years, and you do nothing to investigate or stop it - you don't really need to prove guilt. It can be safely assumed you approved, and were just careful not to write stuff down. Otherwise you could have done something about it.
Particularly when the crimes are so systematic. Hitler may not have signed anything, but almost everything else about the holocaust was oh so carefully written down and recorded. Even where the army dipped its hands in the blood, they still wrote stuff down. Like the Commissar Order - which even accepts in its text that international law can't be allowed to apply to a conflict as important as the invasion of Russia. The order was to kill all Russian commissars (political military officers or civilian communist leaders), and to err on the side of caution and shoot people if you couldn't be sure. So they apparently restricted the copies issued to only senior officers, but still kept them on file, rather than doing it verbally. Whereas Hitler did issue the order apparently, but in verbal form at a staff meeting, and didn't sign it, as it came from Wermacht HQ. Although I'm not sure if his later refusal to rescind it was verbal or written.
The commissars were the backstop for fleeing Russian soldiers. They would sit behind the lines and kill any Russian soldier running back, in 1941 and 1942 thousands of ill equipped and badly led soldiers were killed by the commissars.
They also mined the city center of Kiev before their retreat in 1941 with 5 ton of dynamite to be set off using radio controlled detonators, due to pure luck it did not work. The commissars were waging war on the Russian population to make it look like the German did these things, the Germans did the Russians in fact a favor with the Kommissarbefehl.
Besides that, the whole discussion about war crimes in the Eastern front is moot, since Stalin never gratified the Geneva convention. Anyone interested how it was, should read "The Eastern Front" written by Leon Degrelle.
The Russians didn't sign Geneva, but the Germans did. So it still applied to them regardless. And not only was the order illegal, the order even admitted it was illegal in its own text. And various German generals took the trouble to lie after the war, claiming they didn't implement it, when they had. Plus the written order only went to senior officers, with them told to only verbally instruct their juniors. So they knew it was wrong. And in 41, the army probably had the power to ignore that order. After all, Hitler didn't sign it himself.
Like getting involved in the purge of the SA (Brownshirts) for political advantage, this was one of the early acts that got blood on the hands of the senior army leadership. They did illegal things willingly, and early, and so compromised themselves.
The order was also stupid. Killing prisoners has a habit of persuading people not to surrender. And so senior officers were pleading with HQ and Hitler to rescind the order for the first year of the war on the Eastern front.
Not that Stalin was any better, obviously. According to Anthony Beevor's book, the NKVD (eventually became the paramilitary bit of the KGB) killed more Russian soldiers at the battle of Stalingrad than the Germans did!
If they didn't shoot you, they could demote you below private soldier, into one of the penal battalions. These were tasked with holding the very front lines, and were to be shot by their own side if they lived long enough to retreat. Theoretically an act of heroism, or time well served, could get you promoted back into the regular army again. But in reality, the paperwork was so slow that you were most likely to be already dead.
@naive
"...the whole discussion about war crimes in the Eastern front is moot, since Stalin never gratified the Geneva convention."
Stalin didn't gratify too many people, unless you count those sturdy zeks with a deep and abiding interest in constructing log roads in the Kolyma region. Then his numbers take a rather sharp upturn.
Anyone interested how it was, should read "The Eastern Front" written by Leon Degrelle.
Léon Degrelle? Three time winner of the "Most Popular Man in Belgium", 1946-49? That Léon Degrelle? Did some travelling after the war? Is that the fellow you're referring to?
Yes... this man.... https://archive.org/details/Campaign-in-Russia-Leon-Degrelle
The Russians came at dawn, the better part of two regiments, men and tanks silhouetted against the blood-red sun as they moved forward across the steppe. Huddled among the peasants' huts of Gromovaya-Balka, the men of the Wallonian Legion awaited them, silently cursing the frozen earth, which had offered implacable resistance to their entrenching tools.
Against the oncoming Soviet troops—4,000 of them—and the 14 tanks which accompanied them, the 500 Belgian volunteers who held the village disposed of no weapons heavier than machine guns. Their only hope was to hold on until the German command, hard pressed all along the Samara front, could rush them reinforcements badly needed in other sectors.
Corporal Leon Degrelle crouched behind the frozen carcass of a horse, sighting down the barrel of his MG34. He gave no heed to the bitter cold or to his injured foot, painfully broken two weeks before.
Not only in Germany, although it is understandable that Germany is somewhat more of a focal point on that subject.
So I applaud the motion, even though I still think it's about 50 years too late. Hitler has been tried by the court of Public Opinion and, despite the Holocaust deniers, has been declared guilty, and the Nazis with him.
So it is not a matter of "rewriting" History, it is most certainly a matter of trying, at all costs, to not repeat it.
Because we're damn capable of doing much, much worse now.
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Mr Rajoy, will be very pleased to hear that he's no longer treated worse than the wee monotesticled Austrian.
http://www.thelocal.de/20160406/flying-spaghetti-monster-church-sues-brandenburg
"a racist genocidal mass murderer, "
@raj
thats claiming a bit too far.......your Indian and Pakistani brethren were quite capable of genocidal campaigns without British help. If anything, we delayed the inevitable Hindu vs Muslim confrontation for 200 years or more. See what happened after we left - at your (collective) request. ...How many died during separation? That wasn't us firing the bullets then
Raj,
That's bollocks. Churchill was certainly a racist. A man of his times, when racism was not only normal, but many people believed it was scientifically validated. He also spent the 1930s complaining about more rights (or even home rule) for India, which is obviously a lot less worthy than his constant (and correct) warnings about the Nazis.
He was an imperialist too. Though you'll find that the current national curriculum covers the British Empire, and why taking over a quarter of the world was a bad thing. I see nothing in modern British culture to suggest that we haven't accepted that the empire was "a bad thing<sup[TM]</sup>". And Britain has consistently been one of the world's largest foreign aid donors, providers of peacekeeping troops, supporters of global institutions and norms, since the war. Partly as a result of an imperial past.
But you'll have to come up with some justification for "genocidal" (which has a specific meaning). Or admit you're talking bollocks.
Come to think of it, mass murder as well. The bombing of German and Japanese cities is an interesting moral problem. After Dresden, it's clear that the British were beginning to have their doubts. Churchill pissed off Harris by criticising him for that, and changing policy. The Germans were also particularly criticised for terror bombing in Spain, and at the start of the war. So it was obviously seen as immoral. On the other hand, it was the only offensive tool the British had against Germany after the fall of France. And it was the committment to the bombing that did a lot to convince neutral opinion that Britain was serious, and intended to continue to fight until Germany was defeated. Would the USA have joined the war in Europe after Pearl Harbour if the phoney war had resumed after the fall of France - or just fought Japan? Also without the air attacks on Germany, would they have been able to beat the Russians in 1941 or 42? Admittedly the Germans made a pisspoor job or running their war economy, production actually peaked in mid 1944, according to the US Strategic Bombing Survey after the war. Because they didn't really start operating a planned economy until 1942 - and even then they wasted too many resources on having too many different models of tanks and planes, rather than just picking one, and bashing out lots of them.
Anyway it's a lot more morally complicated. Mass bombings of civillians are now unequivocally illegal. But then nowadays we have the technology to do precision bombing. Again, according to the US Strategic Bombing Survey, only 2% of bombs dropped in WWII fell within 500 yards of their target.
Well done "not Spartacus", a very coherent and well argued post. We need more of this type of thing. I do not entirely agree with your entire analysis but I have considerable regard for the way you have presented it. I am unfortunately short on time and am not in a position to reply in a way that would do your post justice but, all the same, thumbs up for this.
Key difference between Hitler and Churchill is Hitler followed a deliberate, planned genocide. Churchill never advocated such a policy nor carried one out. Churchill's attitudes to the Empire are completely out of step with our sensibilities but were not unusual before WWII.
The area bombing of cities in WWII, in retrospect, was not worth the casualties suffered by both sides in Europe. It basically made the civilians more determined to see the war through to victory and civilian morale was much more durable than pre-war theorists believed. Area bombing of Japan was more effective economically because the natural dispersion of Japanese industry in major cities but I do not think Japanese civilian morale was negatively affected by it.
Interestingly, the Dresden casualty levels have been accepted at 250,000 or so since young Mr Goebbels applied a 10 fold increase to official figures published by the German's own statistics body. Nobody has bothered to question the numbers, but sadly the loss of life in Dresden was no worse than many other cities bombed in the closing stages of the war. People like David Irving happily use the inflated figure to justify calling the British mass murderers and compare it to the Nazi holocaust. And they call themselves historians......
Mooseman,
Thanks. I completely missed that. I wasn't even aware that there was a controversy about the Dresden deathtoll. The figures I've seen, which I think mostly came from older (pre-1960s?) sources, suggested 40,000. The biggest fire raid death-tolls were in Japan, where the cities were more prone to burn - and the bombing started later in the war, when the allies had more resources - so the raids were bigger. One of the Tokyo fire-storms is supposed to have killed over 100,000.
Anyway, the third result on Google had a death-toll of 600,000 - which is ludicrously huge - as that's probably more than half the people in the city at the time - and beats Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
Der Spiegel had an interesting article on it here: in english.