Nobel Peace Prize 1935/6 - Carl von Ossietzky

[Louis VI the Fat]

Ossietzky published Weimar state secrets and was tried and convicted for it. After being released, he came out as a supporter of Comintern puppet Ernst Thälmann and was an outspoken critic of the Communist's biggest opponent, the Nazi Party. After Hitler came to power, Ossietzky, like many other communists and their sympathizers, was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. The Nazi's did not arrest him as a carry-over from his troubles with the Republic.

Naturally, I do not share your opinion that Ozzietzky was a tool for the communists because he oppossed the 'greatest opponnents' of communism, the Nazis.

By this reasoning, all communism is off the hook because it was the greatest opponent of Nazism.

That is the whole trap, that sad mistake of the 1930s. 'This opposses totalitarianism version X, so this good'.

The real struggle of the 1930s was not between nazism and communism, it was between the totalitarian ideologies and liberal democracy. Internal power struggles within the totalitarian world - fascism vs nazism, nazism vs communism, Leninist-Trostkyism vs Stalinism - are of secondary interest.

[Louis VI the Fat]

Husar, I must say I am surprised to see that you voted that Ossietzky is a traitor, who deserved death.


Brave journalists like him exposed to the German people what was happening in the 1920s. He and like-minded reporters warned about German secret re-armament, about the plots and the agitation and the schemes to overthrow German democracy and re-start a war. They warned Germany for the coming catastrophe. Ozzietzky was also one of the first to understand in 1933 what was happening.

Who is the traitor? The national-conservative powers who secretly (secret for the German people) build a clone army in the Soviet Union, or the reporter who exposed that to the German people?
It is owing to the work of brave reporters like him that the German people were informed, that a majority of Germans understood the attack against German democracy, that the German people have the historical dignity that their democracy was not voted out of existence by themselves, but had to be overthrown in a coup.


Are you not a democrat? Do you support the concentration camps? Do you seriously support that this should've been the fate of this man: The International Red Cross representative allowed to visit him in November 1935 found "a trembling, deadly pale something, a creature that appeared to be without feeling, one eye swollen, teeth knocked out, dragging a broken, badly healed leg . . . a human being who had reached the uttermost limits of what could be borne."

[Husar]

You compare my hyperbole to fairy tales and then suggest that I should not see him as a traitor because he was treated badly by the Nazis?

That the Nazis treated him badly has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not he was a traitor, I also thought cloning was not possible back then, so maybe you pulled that out of your own fairy tales? He revealed a plot that was essentially meant to benefit his nation in the long run, that makes him a traitor, whether a frenchman thinks this revelation was a good thing is completely irrelevant as one man's traitor is usually another man's freedom fighter. That the german people had no big problems voting those secretly training nutcases into office was shown a few years later, when new secret training programs were established and cheered by the german people.
So yes, he was a traitor, maybe not to you or me, but apparently to the german people and government of the time.

The only reason Assange isn't a traitor is that he isn't an American, otherwise he'd be a traitor, too, regardless of whether I approve of his leaking or not.
The clever traitor gets out of the country before he can be caught.

[Louis VI the Fat]

You compare my hyperbole to fairy tales and then suggest that I should not see him as a traitor because he was treated badly by the Nazis?

PJ made the same point. It is correct, one should not confound Ossietzky's incarceration by Weimar with his being slowly tortured to death in a Nazi concentration camp.
But neither should one regard both as separate events either. Ossietzky was released at Christmas 1932 by Weimar, only to be send to the camps a few months later by Nazi Germany, for the same 'crimes'. The Nazi coup was in this respect, as in so many others, not a ceasure but a continuation. A mere intensification.

That the Nazis treated him badly has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not he was a traitor, I also thought cloning was not possible back then, so maybe you pulled that out of your own fairy tales?

You're not a Star Wars fan, I take it.

A Clone Army was build in the outer rim. Initially secret, later approved by the democratically elected Republican Senate. However, the idea had always been to use the army to overthrow the Republic. This was the work of those who secretly conspired to overthrow the Republic, the Sith. The dark Sith lord was eventually installed as Emperor. The Senate granted him emergency powers, because it thought it could contain him. However, the clone army was now used by the Emperor to overthrow the very Republic.
Apparantly George Lucas has read the same history books as I have.

He revealed a plot that was essentially meant to benefit his nation in the long run, that makes him a traitor

The intention was to violently overthrow the peace. To create the possibility of a violent take-over of the German state. The plot was kept secret to the German people, of whom never a majority voted in favour of hard right extremism.

Did this all benefit Germany in the long run? Well if one considers 'May 8th 1945' the long run, then obviously not. It was a catastrophic game they played. It led to a destruction of Germany that was total, and that was complete - moral, poltical, militarily, economically, physically. Some 'benefit for the nation in the long run'. They were all dead, and those Germans left alive by 1945 by the violence of other Germans and foreign retaliations had a Russian in the barn molesting their daughter. Well done. What a great plot, what great benefit to the German nation!

My traitor are the plotters, those who sought to end democracy and plunge Germany into war again. These are the traitors to Germany. The reporter who reported it, deserved a Nobel Prize for exposing it.

[Husar]

PJ made the same point. It is correct, one should not confound Ossietzky's incarceration by Weimar with his being slowly tortured to death in a Nazi concentration camp.
But neither should one regard both as separate events either. Ossietzky was released at Christmas 1932 by Weimar, only to be send to the camps a few months later by Nazi Germany, for the same 'crimes'. The Nazi coup was in this respect, as in so many others, not a ceasure but a continuation. A mere intensification.

It still doesn't absolve him from being a traitor.

You're not a Star Wars fan, I take it.

Not really, though I knew most of the things about the clone army, Star Wars is still a fairy tale though.

The intention was to violently overthrow the peace. To create the possibility of a violent take-over of the German state. The plot was kept secret to the German people, of whom never a majority voted in favour of hard right extremism.

Where were the huge protests when Hitler came to power if the majority didn't like him at all? And how big was this secretly trained army that it could have been used for a violent take-over? How come the families of the hundred thousands of soldiers never noticed or told anyone?

Did this all benefit Germany in the long run? Well if one considers 'May 8th 1945' the long run, then obviously not. It was a catastrophic game they played. It led to a destruction of Germany that was total, and that was complete - moral, poltical, militarily, economically, physically. Some 'benefit for the nation in the long run'. They were all dead, and those Germans left alive by 1945 by the violence of other Germans and foreign retaliations had a Russian in the barn molesting their daughter. Well done. What a great plot, what great benefit to the German nation!

So you think the intention of the right wingers was to destroy Germany?
And this particular plot wasn't what lead to the takeover by the Nazis as it was reported, that's what this thread is about, isn't it?

My traitor are the plotters, those who sought to end democracy and plunge Germany into war again. These are the traitors to Germany. The reporter who reported it, deserved a Nobel Prize for exposing it.

Had the allies not removed the Kaiser, then there had never been a reason for the Monarchists to try and overthrow the government again.

[Louis VI the Fat]

traitor

We disagree.


To me, the German (Ossietzky) who warned in 1933 what was coming is not a traitor. Those who silenced him are.
The German who exposed Auschwitz is not a traitor. The German who refused to murder civilians is not a traitor. The German who would not fight for Hitler is not a traitor.

One is not a traitor to Germany for refusing to raise one's right arm, start goosestepping, and go off to kill some Jews. However un-German it may sound, even a German must sometimes disobey orders.

[Hax]

He was a traitor to the Nazi-controlled late Weimar Republic. He was a hero and a patriot to the later BRD and modern state of Germany. Maybe that's the best way to see it, then?

[Louis VI the Fat]

See, I knew we'd all agree.

I hate it when that happens.

All my hope now is with PJ....

The clever traitor gets out of the country before he can be caught.

Should that be so? What of people who stay and put up a fight?


Ossietzky was befriended to Tucholsky, another Weimar journalist. Both men full well realised in 1933 what was coming. Ossietzky decided to stay. He died in 1936. Tucholsky (Jewish) went into exile in 1933. He took his own life in 1935. Neither man even reached the age of fifty.
Both men were dead, even before the world had come to understand what both men had been warning about for their last fifteen years. The books of both men were among the first batch of books the Nazis burned.

At the beginning of the 1930s it became clear to Tucholsky that his warnings were falling on deaf ears, and that his actions in favour of the Republic, for democracy and human rights were apparently to no effect. It was a crushing blow to him, as he recognised the danger approaching with Adolf Hitler. "They are preparing to head towards the Third Reich" he wrote, years before Hitler's Machtübernahme in 1933, and was under no deception as to where Hitler's chancellorship would take the country. Erich Kästner, looking back in 1946, described him as the "little fat Berliner" who wanted to "prevent a catastrophe with his typewriter".

Another vile traitor:

The journalist and writer Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935), who undoubtedly wielded one of the Weimar Republic’s most caustic pens, would have turned 120 this year . He was an outstanding literary critic as well as being an astute observer of contemporary political and social developments.

Born in Berlin on January 9, 1890, Tucholsky remains the archetypal figure of the controversial left-wing intellectual, grappling with his tumultuous epoch while at the same time searching for inner peace. Like Heine, Tucholsky lived in Paris and actively sought to promote understanding between the Germans and the French.

The son of a Jewish banker who died when he was only 15, Tucholsky studied law before being conscripted and sent to the Eastern Front during the First World War. He did his first journalistic work while still a young man, but it wasn’t until 1919, in the Weimar Republic, that he made a name for himself as a politically committed journalist and writer. His name is closely associated with the journal “Die Weltbühne” (The World Stage), to which he was a major contributor, writing under various pseudonyms, and for which he worked as a Paris correspondent in the 1920s.

The author of roughly one hundred books and several thousand newspaper articles, Tucholsky was one of the Weimar Republic’s best-known journalists. He was and remained a fierce advocate of democracy, expressing regret that the revolution failed to materialize, although there were socialists among those in power. In the early 1920s, Tucholsky was one of the defenders of liberal democracy, the foundations of which were repeatedly shaken by political murders.
A pacifist by conviction, who detested the contemporary aristocracy’s militarism and who championed human rights, Tucholsky divided public opinion with his statement “soldiers are murderers”. He presciently denounced the rise of the National Socialists long before Hitler came to power. Deprived of his German citizenship, he was one of the first Germans to go into exile, permanently settling in the Swedish town of Hindas near Gotheburg from 1930 onwards. It was there that he took his own life in 1935, plagued by physical and psychological problems.

http://www.germanyandafrica.diplo.de...Tucholsky.html

[Husar]

Should that be so? What of people who stay and put up a fight?

They die a painful death in a cold cellar and only many years after that, once the problem has been solved by people from the outside, some leftists feel the need to sing odes to them for being martyrs, ironically a concept originating from religion.

I'd also still like to know how, in the absence of cloning, they could keep it a secret that their huge army, that was destined to conquer the world soon, could disappear to Russia unnoticed to be trained for world domination on a single airfield?

[Louis VI the Fat]

I do not think Ozzietzky was a communist sympathizer because he opposed Nazism, but because he actively supported the Communist Party and Thälmann in particular. In fact, that alone makes the man a traitor in my eyes.

This raises the question, which Germany must one support to not be considered a traitor?

He who supports (/pals around with) communism is a traitor.
What of he who supports Nazism? A traitor or not?
And he who supports democratic Germany? A traitor?

All three are mutually exclusive, sworn enemies. Do you agree that the Nazi is a traitor to Germany? Or is the German democrat a traitor?

[Louis VI the Fat]

They die a painful death in a cold cellar and only many years after that, once the problem has been solved by people from the outside, some leftists feel the need to sing odes to them for being martyrs, ironically a concept originating from religion.

I'd also still like to know how, in the absence of cloning, they could keep it a secret that their huge army, that was destined to conquer the world soon, could disappear to Russia unnoticed to be trained for world domination on a single airfield?

Secret re-armament does not mean to hide a physical army. One needs to hide the administration of the army.

The funds were hidden, the numbers lied about, statistics were manipulated. With the exception of such developments as a German airforce trained and hidden in the tundra 400 km from Moscow, the secrecy of the remilitarisation was a matter of administration.

Of course, a remilitarisation of the scale of Germany in the 1920s couldn't be kept secret. And so it wasn't. It was well publicised, documented beyond doubt.

Still they could get away with it because the majority of Germans would see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. They 'hadn't known it'.

What the phrase really means, is that the Germans laughed away everybody who warned them, cried that they were traitors, laughed when these 'traitors' were sent to the camps, laughed when they burned their books, laughed when the nazis shrieked it was payback time for these jews and bolshevists.

Then afterwards, once the Germans were done laughing in 1945, they cried that they 'hadn't known it'.

[Husar]

This raises the question, which Germany must one support to not be considered a traitor?

He who supports (/pals around with) communism is a traitor.
What of he who supports Nazism? A traitor or not?
And he who supports democratic Germany? A traitor?

All three are mutually exclusive, sworn enemies. Do you agree that the Nazi is a traitor to Germany? Or is the German democrat a traitor?

Depends entirely on the government in power.
And the exact definition of traitor. If one assumes that people have absolutely no duty or connection to the country they were born in, then even handing that country over to the mongol hordes wouldn't make one a traitor.
The national socialists apparently believed that everyone had to do their best to support the national socialists and their agenda in order to not be a traitor. Most governments seem to think that one does not give out secret information to anyone and that one does not leave the army without approval in order to not be considered a traitor.
Since the guy gave away secret information about a training program for the army, I suppose that explains why the Weimar republic locked him up as a traitor. Sounds very kind even, I thought traitors are shot.

[PanzerJaeger]

This raises the question, which Germany must one support to not be considered a traitor?

He who supports (/pals around with) communism is a traitor.
What of he who supports Nazism? A traitor or not?
And he who supports democratic Germany? A traitor?

All three are mutually exclusive, sworn enemies. Do you agree that the Nazi is a traitor to Germany? Or is the German democrat a traitor?

To answer these questions one must look at what each ideology was offering in the 1932 elections.

The republican parties offered more of the same - a Versailles created, Western-styled democracy, with all the associated inefficiencies and legislative sloppiness that comes with it, along with the perceived international weakness, internal turmoil, and economic depression that was unique to the Weimar Republic. Germany ruled by Germans.

The Nazis offered a return to the authoritarian form of government that many in Germany were accustomed to from the Empire. They ran on nationalism, order, and restoring Germany to prominence. (Note that to Germans of the time, authoritarian did not equate to totalitarian, and Hitler did not campaign on turning the country into a police state.)

I could see German patriots, or as you would probably say, misguided patriots, voting for either ideology.

The KPD, on the other hand, was a completely different animal. At this point I am repeating myself, but it is important to point out the lengths to which Thälmann went to make German communism subservient to the Comintern and the Soviet Union. The KPD spent the majority of its time and effort during the '20s and early '30s not fighting the far right, but destroying the more organic German communist parties and purging any of its own members who sought a more independent German communist state.

Despite my personal feelings towards communism, I do not consider all communists to be traitors to their nations. There have been plenty of organic communist movements all across the globe that were made up of people who truly believed the ideology represented a step forward in living standards and equality for their respective nations.

German communism and its supporters, including Ossietzky, were not among those groups. The KPD made no secret of seeking to directly subvert German independence to the Soviet Union. They were the most obvious traitors in 1932.

Of course, a remilitarisation of the scale of Germany in the 1920s couldn't be kept secret. And so it wasn't. It was well publicised, documented beyond doubt.

Still they could get away with it because the majority of Germans would see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. They 'hadn't known it'.

What the phrase really means, is that the Germans laughed away everybody who warned them, cried that they were traitors, laughed when these 'traitors' were sent to the camps, laughed when they burned their books, laughed when the nazis shrieked it was payback time for these jews and bolshevists.

Then afterwards, once the Germans were done laughing in 1945, they cried that they 'hadn't known it'.

Yet again you're mixing separate events, replacing reason with rhetoric, and making emotional appeals to cover for logical holes in your narrative.

The scale of German remilitarization in the '20s was tiny both in its own right and in comparison to the Western nations. The effort was technological, not numerical - an attempt to keep up with the military developments of other nations.

The subtle, or not-so-subtle rhetorical linkage you're trying to make between Weimar and the Third Reich also belies all historical reality. The fact that the Weimar Republic sought to undermine the ridiculously strict Versailles military restrictions that left it defenseless does not make it the Third Reich-lite. Weimar continuously fought off coup attempts by the far-Right conservatives, including Hitler, that you seem to imply were running the show.

Here Panzer, here is a nice strong German to emulate

Thanks Strike! I had never, ever heard of this Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck before!! The existence of one of Germany's greatest military heroes is news to me!

[PanzerJaeger]

Naturally, I do not share your opinion that Ozzietzky was a tool for the communists because he oppossed the 'greatest opponnents' of communism, the Nazis.

I do not think Ozzietzky was a communist sympathizer because he opposed Nazism, but because he actively supported the Communist Party and Thälmann in particular. In fact, that alone makes the man a traitor in my eyes. Any educated German that understood the KPD and its allegiances, as Ozzietzky most certainly did, and made the decision to vote for Thälmann supported a far more obvious subversion of national interests - to the will of the Soviet Union - than Hitler represented at the time. (Not to mention the election was not a choice between Hitler and Thälmann exclusively. Most moderate, republican oriented voters chose Hindenburg.)

The intention was to violently overthrow the peace. To create the possibility of a violent take-over of the German state. The plot was kept secret to the German people, of whom never a majority voted in favour of hard right extremism.

No, it wasn't. Versailles left Germany defenseless in the heart of Europe. French attempts to incite rebellion in the Rhineland and the looting of German businesses in the Ruhr by French troops highlighted that weakness.

Weimar defense policy was simply that - defense. The country spent far less on defense in terms of GDP than the Western Allies during the period. As Husar pointed out, the German military at the end of the Republic was miniscule in comparison.

Finally, you'll note that neither Hitler nor the 'conservative conspiracy' you often refer to used the military to overthrow the republic. In fact, that same military was used to stop Hitler's attempt at doing just that.

To me, the German (Ossietzky) who warned in 1933 what was coming is not a traitor. Those who silenced him are.
The German who exposed Auschwitz is not a traitor. The German who refused to murder civilians is not a traitor. The German who would not fight for Hitler is not a traitor.

Ossietzky was not convicted of treason for being anti-Nazi. Emotional appeals to the Holocaust do not change that.

He was a traitor to the Nazi-controlled late Weimar Republic.

The Nazi-controlled late Weimar Republic? He betrayed the Republic before the Nazis had any control of the German government. The defense policy he published was that of a the moderate, republican Grand Coalition of the SPD, Center Party, and other smaller liberal parties.