Re: Patton and War Crimes
“The point that I've been making throughout the thread is that the average Allied soldier was not morally superior to his Axis counterpart”
I would disagree on this part: The average Allied soldier was morally superior to his Axis counterpart, and the scale of the slaughter shows it.
And the fact that the Allis mostly liberated territories, not participating (more or less willingly, I give you this –134,000 Germans arrested by the Gestapo in the first three month of 1944)) in a war of aggression…
I don’t know if the book, Lieutenant de Panzers, from August von Kageneck is translated in English. Read it, and you will see that the average German soldier was aware of what happened in the name of Germany as they witnessed the slaughter from their eyes. Thanks to their officers’ apathy, they didn’t react then participate to it.
“I saw, several times, corps of men with long hair in the ditches. They had been executed. So the German Army was drawn down the rank of witches hunters” (p125).
Here, it is not the result of a revenge due to battle, but the cold blood operation, the same than the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto of Tarnopol (p123) by the SS.
You can gather hundred of case of Germans POW killed by allies’ soldiers. However you hardly find complete Germans villages and populations killed or burned alive by Allied Soldiers, even when the Werewolves tried in vain to conduct a guerrilla war fair. Temptation was there, especially in the French side, but it didn’t happened.
Now, about war veterans (1 on 3) saying they saw somebody else killing at list one prisoner: Absurd.
I interviewed War Veterans of another war (Indochina) and one thing is difficult for them is to admit bad conduct on the field. It took ages that the French acknowledge the fact that in Algeria not only the Paratroopers and the Legion did torture but the Chasseurs Alpins, the usual conscript did it as well…
And having interview war veteran, I can tell you that they tell what you want to heard… This kind of research has to be back up with statistic, and graves…
“And if they were killed after surrendering, they have no one to blame but their killers” and the fact they were in political units supporting a racist ideology that told the world they will give no mercy and expect none…
“As an Allied cheerleader, he would be more prone to downplay Allied war crimes.” Not in you want to sell nowadays.
“Just as the Germans did, the Allied soldiers had no qualms about following immoral orders, whether they were to drop fire bombs on hundreds of thousands of innocent woman and children or to kill POWs”
Do you have the proof that the killed POW in following orders? No, because it was none.
We have the document signed by Hitler ad the OKW, we have the speeches from Himmler, Goebbels, Hitler, Goering and all the others.
And about the killing of innocent by bombing, it was a war that the German started (and the Italians as my grand mother would have testified being under their bombs).
And it was a war that the German innocent population loved, until they realised too late the surge was turning…
“We fought hard, meter per meter, for nothing, no even not honour.
For which honour would we be able to fight for? For the honour of the SS who took refuge, like us, in this hiding place, and executed the last prisoners? For the honour of a German Army that blindly serve the will of the criminal fool who yet prepared in his bunker in Berlin his suicide-escape? For the honour of a Regime we all desired but we ignored the sinister goals? For the honour of the Flag, but which one? We had none from long time ago.” P 180
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Originally Posted by Brenus
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