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Weizsäcker's speech on 40th anniversary of WW2's end (1985)

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Re: Weizsäcker's speech on 40th anniversary of WW2's end (1985)

#61

Post by ihm »

coldcode wrote: post #51
ihm wrote: post #24

I couldn’t read the whole thing, but as a Jew whose relatives and culture was murdered by the Germans, I found it did not adequately address the reality that many Germans knew about the camps (to say nothing of the progroms and humiliations that preceded them) and that the people who perpetrated the Holocaust were in large part incorporated unreformed into German society after the war. The speech reads > Yet with eve…

Saying that the German people all knew of what was being done is not historical, nor the experience of my family. When my great grandparents were taken from their home in 1943 along with all the other Jews in town (other than my Grandmother who was married to a non-Jew, and my mother) they had no idea where they were being taken. Of course they all died but no one had any idea until after the war was over and even to…

> To say everyone knew is incorrect; to imagine you could change things if you knew is also wrong. Can we today stop our government from cramming children into cages and then forgetting them? Yet we have modern media and still horrific things are done in our name and we either ignore it or feel helpless to do anything.

I agree with this point and take your criticism that I painted with too broad a brush in terms of who could know what.

Re: Weizsäcker's speech on 40th anniversary of WW2's end (1985)

#62

Post by wazoox »

burger_moon wrote: post #25

Since we're on the topic of Germany WWII. I read a couple books about Treblinka over the weekend. The atrocities that happened there were sickening. To read about what these people were forced to do there in this death camp is painful. The Germans and Ukrainians who did these horrific acts of murder and torture were unaffected by it, as told by two authors who survived. It leaves me with more questions than answers.…

In Indonesia in the 60s several hundred thousands people categorized as communists were deported, tortured killed and often massacred (with the active support of the USA). Nobody was punished for that or asked for repentance, ever.

There is a documentary were some old guys tell and show, while laughing, how they throated children, raped women, etc. They're happy old people still boasting about their horrible crimes 55 years later.

Almost nobody knows about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Killing

Re: Weizsäcker's speech on 40th anniversary of WW2's end (1985)

#63

Post by kmonsen »

untog wrote: post #27
realradicalwash wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be sure that the passage is not misinterpreted (not saying you do, OP): This was not said to excuse the Germans from the responsibility of facing their history. I can personally be not guilty and yet, by being part of a society that builds on a troubled past, bear the responsibilities that come with that past (responsibility to do better, reparations, making amends, and alike). And in this spirit, Weizaecker…

> This point can imv be applied to many historical failings and their long lasting legacies. Feels particularly resonant at this point in the United States. I've heard the argument before that slavery was abolished long ago, so it's time to move on. Unfortunately to the contrary: the effects are still with us. That doesn't mean us white folks have to assume personal guilt as if we held slaves ourselves, but we should…

The US also needs at some point to acknowledge it's past evils. Perhaps no penance is needed, but it is need to acknowledge the evils of the confederacy (and many other things like redlining, but I feel those are widely believed as wrong today).

We as a country need our own truth and reconciliation commission.

Re: Weizsäcker's speech on 40th anniversary of WW2's end (1985)

#64

Post by eruci »

Guilt over past crimes is mainly a western thing.

There is for example, no such thing in modern Turkey over the extermination of the native peoples of Anatolia which led to the formation of the Turkish state with a uniform religious/ethnic composition. On the contrary, that is a source of national pride these days.

Other examples abound (India, Pakistan, China, etc)

Re: Weizsäcker's speech on 40th anniversary of WW2's end (1985)

#65

Post by frudenstein92 »

burger_moon wrote: post #25

Since we're on the topic of Germany WWII. I read a couple books about Treblinka over the weekend. The atrocities that happened there were sickening. To read about what these people were forced to do there in this death camp is painful. The Germans and Ukrainians who did these horrific acts of murder and torture were unaffected by it, as told by two authors who survived. It leaves me with more questions than answers.…

[dead]

Re: Weizsäcker's speech on 40th anniversary of WW2's end (1985)

#66

Post by luckylion »

notkaiho wrote: post #57
barking wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still get duffers in such jobs as often a candidate is put forward who's agreeable all parties and as such can be the lowest common denominator who won't rock the boat.

Term limits, though. :)

Which is interesting, because those aren't common in Germany. For the Bundespräsident, they have another interesting thing: there are no limits on how many terms you serve, you just can't serve more than two in a row.

Re: Weizsäcker's speech on 40th anniversary of WW2's end (1985)

#67

Post by the_af »

cygx wrote: post #44
the_af wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Two wrongs do not make a right, and mass murder of innocent civilians is always wrong. Fully agreed. It's hard to see the two events as similar, though. The scale (and intent) alone is mind-boggingly different. The Germans intended to wipe out Slavs (and other undesirables), and you couldn't opt out of this by swallowing the party line or swearing allegiance to Germany (just as you couldn't opt out of being a Jew -…

Compare this with Germans under the Soviet sphere of influence. Puppets, maybe, but alive as long as they cooperated with the ruling ideology. There was no plan to ethnically cleanse them to make room for Soviet citizens in German land. The USSR declared Germans in the annexed territories illegal residents. Going by Wikipedia, in 1947/48, officially, 102,125 Germans got shipped from East Prussia to the Soviet Zone, t…

I understand all of this. However, again look at the numbers and planned genocide: the Nazis aimed at killing -- murdering, not expelling, mind you -- most of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe. About 30 million people would have been killed, both through starvation and shooting/gassing if they didn't die fast enough, because they were deemed vermin and "surplus" population. And this wasn't even retaliation for anything, it was planned in cold blood.

Did the Soviets exterminate all Germans in their sphere of influence once they won the war? What were the Nazi plans had they won (and which they partially implemented during the war)?

This doesn't excuse even a single German civilian killed by the Soviets. But the scale and planning are tremendously different, which is why the comparison makes little sense. I think the latter day equivocation that both sides were more or less the same is a regrettable artifact of Cold War thinking.

Re: Weizsäcker's speech on 40th anniversary of WW2's end (1985)

#68

Post by lefstathiou »

kmonsen wrote: post #63
untog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This point can imv be applied to many historical failings and their long lasting legacies. Feels particularly resonant at this point in the United States. I've heard the argument before that slavery was abolished long ago, so it's time to move on. Unfortunately to the contrary: the effects are still with us. That doesn't mean us white folks have to assume personal guilt as if we held slaves ourselves, but we should…

The US also needs at some point to acknowledge it's past evils. Perhaps no penance is needed, but it is need to acknowledge the evils of the confederacy (and many other things like redlining, but I feel those are widely believed as wrong today). We as a country need our own truth and reconciliation commission.

Out of curiosity what does “acknowledge” mean to you?

I want to do my part to acknowledge, just want to make sure we are aligned on definitions.

Re: Weizsäcker's speech on 40th anniversary of WW2's end (1985)

#69

Post by fsloth »

goto11 wrote: post #55
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It also seems to suggest that the German people couldn’t know what atrocities were being committed, which it was well known what was going on. On this point, as someone whose grandparents lived through the German side of WW2, I am convinced it's allied propaganda used to justify the collective guilt of the German people. I don't doubt it was well known to the Jewish population in America at the time, but any news of…

Why would anyone dismiss it as slander? Eradication of Jews had been the stated goal of the Nazi party from the beginning. Progroms like kristallnacht was used as propaganda for the Nazi party. The Nuremberg laws was a matter of public record.

"Why would anyone dismiss it as slander?"

Because in WW1 the English and French governments manufactured propaganda that claimed all sorts of preposterously horrible things were perpetrated by the germans. After the war (WW1) it became obvious they were mostly extremely exaggerated lies.

That's why in WW2 it was initiallly very hard to start discussion about this. "You know, in last war we claimed the germans were commiting inhuman acts of horror? And we were kind of ... lying? Well, this time its totally true! Please believe us"

It's the case of boy crying wolf... and then wolf comes.

Re: Weizsäcker's speech on 40th anniversary of WW2's end (1985)

#70

Post by hsod »

arethuza wrote: post #32
burger_moon wrote: post #25

Since we're on the topic of Germany WWII. I read a couple books about Treblinka over the weekend. The atrocities that happened there were sickening. To read about what these people were forced to do there in this death camp is painful. The Germans and Ukrainians who did these horrific acts of murder and torture were unaffected by it, as told by two authors who survived. It leaves me with more questions than answers.…

A few years back we did a tour of Auschwitz - the excellent Polish guide gave us his personal view that there is nothing about Germans that made them prone to such acts and that many countries to this day routinely plan for far greater acts of slaughter and somehow we think this is normal.

Interesting. I've been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the author makes the opposite case: the German people, due to their founding mythology and geopolitical history, were susceptible to ideas of authoritarianism and racial superiority. Hegel and Nietszche provided a popular philosophical backing for the supremacy of the state and the view of individuals as primarily agents of the state rather than free actors in their own right.

Hitler saw this and built a political movement around it.

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