Patton and War Crimes

[drone]

This is where it gets tricky. For example, the biggest indictment against Germany is certainly the concentration camp system, yet only an extraordinarily tiny percentage of German soldiers actually had anything to do with them. IIRC, Treblinka, the site of the killing of nearly 1,000,000 people, was operated by no more than 25 SS officers and 100 guards of mixed nationality. What people often fail to realize is just how few people it took to kill so many, and how much of an effort the Nazis made to hide what they were doing.

So few at the tail end of the disassembly line, but so many more dealing with the infrastructure. The Economic and Administrative Department, General Government, RSHA, various corporations, etc. It takes a lot of logistical planning, organization, and manpower to round up, rob, transfer, rob more invasively, temporarily house, kill (outright, or through starvation/overwork), and dispose of a few million people.

And that gave the Allies carte blanche to dump bombs on civilian centers with the intent of killing and terrorizing many as possible? Again, where is the moral superiority in that?

No, I think the Blitz did that.

Not the race war on the Russian front?

Shhhhh. The godless commies don't count, even the planned extermination via starvation of about 25 million of them. And since they only accomplished about half that, it counts as a failure and doesn't advance the notion of German efficiency. No one must know.

On-topic, for the most part PJ has been arguing that US troops treated Axis troops about the same as the other way around. Probably a fair assessment at the individual level, but I think his moral equivalency argument falls apart due to the treatment of civilians by the armed forces, as well as the organizational acceptance of the war crimes. I'm more interested in this aspect.

[PanzerJaeger]

Not the race war on the Russian front?

You mean the race war inspired in part by America's actions against the indians and British and French colonial policies?

So few at the tail end of the disassembly line, but so many more dealing with the infrastructure. The Economic and Administrative Department, General Government, RSHA, various corporations, etc. It takes a lot of logistical planning, organization, and manpower to round up, rob, transfer, rob more invasively, temporarily house, kill (outright, or through starvation/overwork), and dispose of a few million people.

I think you have to use a bit more specificity when dealing with crimes of such magnitude. Lots of perceived enemies were rounded up and sent to camps during WW2 in both Germany and the US by soldiers who had no real idea what would happen to them and probably didn't care. It was war and they were the enemy. But can you then say that the German private at the beginning of the disassembly line was complicit in the murder of those people? Unknowingly, yes. But there is a reason so few Germans actually spent time at the death camps and why the Nazis made such efforts to keep the final part of the final solution a secret. While standing idly by as the government rounds up your fellow citizens and ships them off to camps during wartime in the name of final victory is certainly immoral (although by that point the Nazis had unquestioned control of the country), it is on a completely different moral level than willfully supporting the gassing of said fellow citizens.

No, I think the Blitz did that.

I think we may have different definitions of moral superiority. To me, moral superiority is not responding to immoral behavior in kind (or in a far greater magnitude). That would be... moral equivalency.

Shhhhh. The godless commies don't count, even the planned extermination via starvation of about 25 million of them. And since they only accomplished about half that, it counts as a failure and doesn't advance the notion of German efficiency. No one must know.

The Allies certainly weren’t above forced starvation of POWs. But really, all mocking aside, your statement highlights the point I was making above. German food policy was planned at the highest levels of the Nazi regime. How many German soldiers knew Germany was intentionally thinning out Soviet POWs through starvation and how many simply thought the dangerously thin food rations simply weren’t enough to go around? (they weren’t) And how many on the front lines had any real knowledge of what was going on in the POW camps at all?

Don’t get me wrong. Plenty of German soldiers were involved in war crimes against Russian POWs. It was a barbaric war on both sides. My point is that when generalized statements attributing things to a collective group are more deeply analyzed, often the reality turns out to be different than what was presented. The knowledge and complicity in Nazi war crimes deviated greatly among German soldiers and the German people, but it is a fundamental misconception to assume that the vast majority of Germans had full knowledge of and supported the worst of those policies. There was no free press, no internet, no real way of knowing the full extent of what the government was doing other than what the government told them.

On-topic, for the most part PJ has been arguing that US troops treated Axis troops about the same as the other way around. Probably a fair assessment at the individual level, but I think his moral equivalency argument falls apart due to the treatment of civilians by the armed forces, as well as the organizational acceptance of the war crimes. I'm more interested in this aspect.

Again, I do not understand how one can favorably compare the Allies to the Axis based on their treatment of civilians. There is no question that the massive bombing of German cities was a war crime of epic magnitude. The commander of the Royal Air Force himself stated that the bombing of cities was an intentional targeting of German civilians meant to kill and terrorize as many as possible, not collateral damage from targeting military facilities. Unlike the Holocaust, for example, this widespread, targeted killing of civilians was widely known, accepted, and even celebrated throughout the Allied armed forces and greater populations. They even made movies celebrating the heroics of dropping bombs on defenseless civilians.

The only valid argument supporting your point I have seen in this thread is based on scale. There is certainly no doubt that the scale of Axis crimes was greater than those of the Allies – although not by as much as some here seem to believe.

However, as I’ve said before, I’m just not convinced that scale has as much weight as some here would like. Once the collective group accepts and even celebrates the intentional killing of civilians, does it matter how big the final body count turns out to be from a moral perspective? Does murdering 5 people make one morally superior to someone who murdered 10?

I just don’t view the morality of mass killing as a sliding scale. I see it more as two pieces of land separated by a river and connected by a bridge. Once you cross that bridge, once you knowingly accept that your government is killing innocent people in your name, the body count is just a sad function of the means and length of the killing.

[Louis VI the Fat]

I think we may have different definitions of moral superiority. To me, moral superiority is not responding to immoral behavior in kind (or in a far greater magnitude). That would be... moral equivalency.


Again, I do not understand how one can favorably compare the Allies to the Axis based on their treatment of civilians. There is no question that the massive bombing of German cities was a war crime of epic magnitude. The commander of the Royal Air Force himself stated that the bombing of cities was an intentional targeting of German civilians meant to kill and terrorize as many as possible, not collateral damage from targeting military facilities.

No, moral equivalence would have been for the allies to stand by and do nothing, instead of stopping these murderers with the means the allies had at their dosposal.



The total civilian victims of the allied bombings stands at some 300/600k Germans. About the number of what the Germans managed in murdered citizens in their best months. The overwhelming amount of bombs were dropped in 1944, when the scale of the German atrocities had become clear.

Total number for Japan is some 300/500k. Again, overwhelmingly in 1944/5.

[Louis VI the Fat]

http://en.allexperts.com/e/h/hi/hist...tionism%29.htm

[Brenus]

“I appreciate the depth such anecdotal commentary brings to the discussion, but I'm not sure it makes much of a point. I can produce accounts of Allied soldiers witnessing Allied crimes”
PJ, you should have check who is August Von Kageneck:
Brother of Erbo von Kagueneck (Luftwaffe, 67 victories, Oak Leaves to Knights Cross) and Clemens-Heinrich Graf von Kageneck(1913-2005), Panzer commander, Oak Leaves to Knights Cross.
Nephew of Von Papen.

Books:
Lieutenant de Panzers (Lieutenant in the Panzers)
Examen de conscience: nous étions vaincus mais nous nous croyions innocents (Conscience examine: we were vanquish but we believed we were innocents)
La guerre à l’Est (War in the East)
Lieutenant sous la tête de mort (Lieutenant under the Death Head)
De la Croix de Fer à la potence: Roland von Hoesslin, un officier allemand (From the Iron Cross to the Gallows: Roland von Hoesslin, a German Officer).

So I do think that his writings are more than anecdotes

[Horatius]

Most war crimes by both sides went unpunished, but the German war crimes do outnumber allied and are on a much higher scale. At least German and Allied soldiers usually treated each other well (which is why the Germans flocked to surrender to the western allies at wars end), but remember the Eastern front? I don't think I need to elaborate further.

[PanzerJaeger]

The overwhelming amount of bombs were dropped in 1944, when the scale of the German atrocities had become clear.

Are you attempting to make the case that the buildup in Allied bombing from earlier years to '44 was a response to - or even had anything to do with - German atrocities? That runs counter to everything I've read on the subject, which maintains that said buildup was a function of Allied production capacity and the Luftwaffe's ability to resist. Either you've uncovered some shocking new information, or I'm going to have to call this a clear example of negationism.

Total number for Japan is some 300/500k. Again, overwhelmingly in 1944/5.

So, using your own numbers, the Allies killed between 600,000 and 1,100,000 civilians just through the bombing of civilians centers in Germany and Japan and not counting the bombing of Italy, the killing of POWs and surrendering soldiers, or anything else. That's what you're defending so adamently?

http://en.allexperts.com/e/h/hi/hist...tionism%29.htm

I don't appreciate the implications. I'm not the one trying desperately to explain away the intentional targeting and murder of millions of civilians. I'm not the one justifying unjustifiable war crimes. I'm not the denier in this discussion.

I wasn't talking about Russian POWs. Soviet citizens were to be starved from occupied lands through food management. ATPG might think the way I do about it. The brutality between the armies on both sides in the East is fairly well known, and the Holocaust has better PR, but in terms of scale the Slav civilians caught the brunt of it.

Of course. Not sure why I went off on a tangent about POWs... was trying to pay attention to a lecture at the same time. Anyway, my comment applies to the Russian civilians as well.

Scale matters a lot, since large scale generally means there is an organizational and institutional approval of the deed.

That applies to the Allies as well. Would you agree that there was certainly organizational and institutional approval of destroying large civilian centers? I don't think Harris' words can be interpreted any other way.

They lost the Battle of Britain by bothering to fight it at all. Total waste of resources and the death of many skilled aircrew to achieve more or less nothing. Even if they had won hands down, shattering the RAF, they would have achieved nothing strategically. Pointless vanity by Goering as near as I can figure it.

It was meant to gain air superiority in preparation for Operation Sea Lion.

Neither side treated civilians appropriately according to modern expectations of combatants. That having been acknowledged, it simply isn't accurate to stack the often programmatic efforts of the Germans against that of the Western Allies.

You wouldn't say that the Allied bombing was a programmatic effort with the expressed intention of killing civilians?

PJ, you should have check who is August Von Kageneck:
So I do think that his writings are more than anecdotes.

I am aware of who he is, but his recollections are one set out of tens of millions.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

...It was meant to gain air superiority in preparation for Operation Sea Lion.

Bollocks. The Germans made virtually no preparation whatsoever for anything resembling an invasion of England. Hitler was, at best, lukewarm about the whole idea. The aerial bombardment, coupled with low morale following France, was supposed to bring England to the negotiating table.

There never was going to be a Sea Lion, and it could never have been successful had one been staged. Absolutely nothing in the figures on sealift, naval covering forces, etc. give any hope for a sustained effort by Germany following an amphibious strike. Total pipe dream.

The Germans badly under-estimated England's will to resist and wasted a ridiculous number of pilots from what was probably the premier tactical support air force in existence at the time (better even than the USMC who pioneered the close support stuff).

[Seamus Fermanagh]

...You wouldn't say that the Allied bombing was a programmatic effort with the expressed intention of killing civilians?

The aerial bombardment of Germany was specifically designed to kill as many Germans as possible. We didn't think it would break their will to resist, we wanted them to die. If we killed enough of them and broke or disrupted enough of their infrastructure, then maybe they wouldn't be able to fight so effectively. We were every bit the coterie of heartless murderers they were and have no right to take a moral high ground approach on anything aside from the Holocaust. We also did it a heck of a lot better than they did and killed scads more of them then they did us.

On the other hand, we didn't start the killing -- they did. We were not the first to expressly target civilians in that war -- they were. What we did was classic tit-for-tat, a system of behaviorial response that has worked effectively for a few millenia. So if you accept reciprocity as a valid response, then you shouldn't have a problem with what happened. If you don't then you always will. You burden either way.

Why do you always push it with WWII Germany, PJ? Is there something about you that revels in all of us having a moral equivalence to that regime of sick, twisted fucks? Ultimately, we simply don't. I guess for me the real core issue of the whole thing is pretty simple. That regime was evil and its leaders and key supporters knowingly did evil. The Allies did some horrific things in pursuit of a larger and more worthwhile goal. Does the end justify the means? Sadly, sometimes, it does.

[drone]

I think we may have different definitions of moral superiority. To me, moral superiority is not responding to immoral behavior in kind (or in a far greater magnitude). That would be... moral equivalency.

I wasn't commenting on the moral superiority of the bombing campaigns, just the direction of the air war started by the Germans. There were no conventions covering the conduct of air warfare, the Allies just followed the leader. Double whammy, really, since the Blitz lost the Luftwaffe the Battle of Britain.

The Allies certainly weren't above forced starvation of POWs. But really, all mocking aside, your statement highlights the point I was making above. German food policy was planned at the highest levels of the Nazi regime. How many German soldiers knew Germany was intentionally thinning out Soviet POWs through starvation and how many simply thought the dangerously thin food rations simply weren't enough to go around? (they weren't) And how many on the front lines had any real knowledge of what was going on in the POW camps at all?

Don't get me wrong. Plenty of German soldiers were involved in war crimes against Russian POWs. It was a barbaric war on both sides. My point is that when generalized statements attributing things to a collective group are more deeply analyzed, often the reality turns out to be different than what was presented. The knowledge and complicity in Nazi war crimes deviated greatly among German soldiers and the German people, but it is a fundamental misconception to assume that the vast majority of Germans had full knowledge of and supported the worst of those policies. There was no free press, no internet, no real way of knowing the full extent of what the government was doing other than what the government told them.

I wasn't talking about Russian POWs. Soviet citizens were to be starved from occupied lands through food management. ATPG might think the way I do about it. The brutality between the armies on both sides in the East is fairly well known, and the Holocaust has better PR, but in terms of scale the Slav civilians caught the brunt of it.

Again, I do not understand how one can favorably compare the Allies to the Axis based on their treatment of civilians. There is no question that the massive bombing of German cities was a war crime of epic magnitude. The commander of the Royal Air Force himself stated that the bombing of cities was an intentional targeting of German civilians meant to kill and terrorize as many as possible, not collateral damage from targeting military facilities. Unlike the Holocaust, for example, this widespread, targeted killing of civilians was widely known, accepted, and even celebrated throughout the Allied armed forces and greater populations. They even made movies celebrating the heroics of dropping bombs on defenseless civilians.

See my first.

The only valid argument supporting your point I have seen in this thread is based on scale. There is certainly no doubt that the scale of Axis crimes was greater than those of the Allies – although not by as much as some here seem to believe.

However, as I’ve said before, I’m just not convinced that scale has as much weight as some here would like. Once the collective group accepts and even celebrates the intentional killing of civilians, does it matter how big the final body count turns out to be from a moral perspective? Does murdering 5 people make one morally superior to someone who murdered 10?

I just don’t view the morality of mass killing as a sliding scale. I see it more as two pieces of land separated by a river and connected by a bridge. Once you cross that bridge, once you knowingly accept that your government is killing innocent people in your name, the body count is just a sad function of the means and length of the killing.

Scale matters a lot, since large scale generally means there is an organizational and institutional approval of the deed.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

I wasn't talking about Russian POWs. Soviet citizens were to be starved from occupied lands through food management. ATPG might think the way I do about it. The brutality between the armies on both sides in the East is fairly well known, and the Holocaust has better PR, but in terms of scale the Slav civilians caught the brunt of it.

That's what I was getting at. To my knowledge only Germany fought a campaign whose purpose was one of ethnic cleansing (though Japan's actions in China are pretty horrific and may have been very deliberate; I am unfamiliar with it). German conduct (both SS and Whermacht) on the Eastern Front went way beyond shooting POWs (or not taking prisoners).

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I wasn't commenting on the moral superiority of the bombing campaigns, just the direction of the air war started by the Germans. There were no conventions covering the conduct of air warfare, the Allies just followed the leader. Double whammy, really, since the Blitz lost the Luftwaffe the Battle of Britain....

They lost the Battle of Britain by bothering to fight it at all. Total waste of resources and the death of many skilled aircrew to achieve more or less nothing. Even if they had won hands down, shattering the RAF, they would have achieved nothing strategically. Pointless vanity by Goering as near as I can figure it.


PJ:

Neither side treated civilians appropriately according to modern expectations of combatants. That having been acknowledged, it simply isn't accurate to stack the often programmatic efforts of the Germans against that of the Western Allies.

Did we bomb civilians? Yes, as had the Germans. In the first days of the war, the UK bombed Germany....with leaflets. The Germans bombed Warsaw, to scare the Poles into quitting. They would do the same in Rotterdam 9 months later. They had done the same in 1937 at Guernica. All three attacks were carried out despite the Luftwaffe's official stance opposing the terror bombing theory of Douhet.

More later