The question isn't that war is brutal, and some warriors are more brutal than others. The question is what really happened. Winners write the history they want, no matter what the truth is.
I wasn't there. I'd guess you weren't, either. Which historians are writing the truth?
The historical revisions that don’t come out until all of the eye witnesses are mostly dead are the ones to question. There is no reason to doubt the Nazi war crimes. Those crimes were indeed logical necessities if you embrace the Nazi ideology. Everyone in WWII was brutal but there was a distinct difference in their brutality.
From Wikipedia:
Historian Niall Ferguson, in addition to figures from Keith Lowe, tabulated the total death rate for POWs in World War II as follows:
Percentage of POWs that Died
Soviet POWs held by Germans 57.5%
German POWs held by Yugoslavs 41.2%
German POWs held by Soviets 35.8%
American POWs held by Japanese 33.0%
American POWs held by Germans 1.19%
German POWs held by Eastern Europeans 32.9%
British POWs held by Japanese 24.8%
German POWs held by Czechoslovaks 5.0%
British POWs held by Germans 3.5%
German POWs held by French 2.58%
German POWs held by Americans 0.15%
German POWs held by British 0.03%
The record is clear the Germans were selectively civilized based on your race. You were treated pretty well if you were British and totally screwed if you ever came under their power as a “inferior”. The Russians and the Japanese were brutal too but to a lessor degree.
The Nazi’s viewed the Russians as manipulated and controlled by the Jews whom they viewed as the true mastermind and menace. What would a civilization that had no qualms about starving to death almost 60% of their Slavic prisoners of war a population they viewed as inferior dupes feel about the treatment of the race they viewed as the greater menace and the “ mastermind” of communism. The answer of course is mass extermination which is exactly what happened. There are many many eyewitness accounts of the Nazi crimes but beyond that the Nazi crimes were nothing more then the logical extension of the Nazi ideology.
The Germans were right to fear communism and they were also right that the Jews in Russia played a major role in establishing Communism in that country and overthrowing the monarchy. However, in their fear of that evil and in their anger and desire to correct past injustices they allowed themselves to become a darker evil. To obtain the strength to battle monsters they turned themselves into demons.
Here is what Churchill said of the Nazi’s in 1934 many years before the war would begin
After all, my friends, only a few hours away by air there dwell a nation of nearly seventy millions of the most educated, industrious, scientific, disciplined people in the world, who are being taught from childhood to think of war as a glorious exercise and death in battle as the noblest fate for man.
There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective strength. There is a nation which, with all its strength and virtue, is in the grip of a group of ruthless men, preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride, unrestrained by law, by parliament, or by public opinion. In that country all pacifist speeches, all morbid war books are forbidden or suppressed, and their authors rigorously imprisoned. From their new table of commandments they have omitted “thou shall not kill.”
It is but twenty years since these neighbors of ours fought almost the whole world, and almost defeated them. Now they are rearming with the utmost speed, and ready to their hands is the new lamentable weapon of the air, against which our navy is -no defense, and before which women and children, the weak and frail, the pacifist and the jingo, the warrior and the civilian, the front line trenches and the cottage home, all lie in equal and impartial peril.
Nay, worse still, for with the new weapon has come a new method, or rather has come back the most British method of ancient barbarism, namely, the possibility of compelling the submission of nations by terrorizing their civil population; and, worst of all, the more civilized the country is, the larger and more splendid its cities, the more intricate the structure of its civil and economic life, the more is it vulnerable and at the mercy of those who may make it their prey.
Now, these are facts, hard, grim, indisputable facts, and in the face of these facts, I ask again, what are we to do?
