What is it with people wanting to serve in the Schutzstaffel?

I think brndirt1's post needs a place in that special section.

 

I don't think the dropping of either bomb was a moral question. With the Allies capturing Okinawa they would have been able to have around the clock bombing of the entire island of Japan. B-29s would have been able to conduct several sorties a day and not refuel. The death toll of conventional bombing, in that case, would far surpass the casualties inflicted by the two Atomic bombs.

 

I'd like to say that there is nothing good about either option we are discussing, violent SS tendancies or dropping the big ones. I'm glad that I wasn't there to witness or be part of either one, or any of the other things that happened during that war or any of the others.

For arguments sake, I can't help but be against the questionable SS practices, and from what I've read, and mass bombing was not effective in breaking civilian morale, but war is hell, and we always have that "collateral damage" thing to justify what we have to do. Retribution killing is fine, as long as you catch the right ones who did what they did to you and yours that is. And to get to my point, I'd still support the dropping of the a-bombs, and so would all those guys who would be included in the projected casualty estimates that would accompany Operations Olympic and Coronet, along with the millions of civilian who would be no doubt be obliterated in the bloody fighting that no doubt would go on during the Battle of Japan.

There, that's my angle.

 

Lou, I'm going to have to spend some time looking through my old files for this, but the effects of radiation from the explosions were not only "unknown", they were largely dismissed. For various reasons.

First these "radiations" were going to come from two completely man-made elements, both highly unstable, which is why they were the canditates for the fission process. Second, while they had found extreme radiation levels at both the experimental labs while they were "twisting the dragon's tail" these were close proximity exposure examples. It was assumed that any person that close to the explosion would cease to exist, and no burns or other detrimental health problems would manifest.

Lastly, the scientist knew so little about "what would happen" when they lit the fuze that Fermi was taking even money on a bet that if it worked they could set the oxygen in the atmosphere alight and incenerate all of the southwest America. That is how little they knew. When the high radiation levels were discovered in the sand at the "Trinity" blast site, they postulated that it had happened at such a high rate of speed, and at such a low level (100 feet), that the released radiation had been "forced" into the sand by the speed of the blast.

This caused them to change the height at which the explosion would be set. From 200 feet to 2000 feet. The idea here was that the blast itself would consume the radiation before it reached the ground, and be a non-factor. Remember nobody knew anything for "sure", these were first off explosions. And both different, using differnt fissionable materials, both "un-natural"elements.

I wouldn't doubt they were as surprised by the radiation sickness that appeared as anyone on the planet.

 

I would argue that this is all rather silly as dropping the A-Bomb and the wholesale murder of civilians, prisoners and so on are entirely different things. Whether it was right or wrong to drop the a-bomb, it had (or at least was percieved to have) a genuine military application, it was going to put a rapid end to the most destructive war in history and save the lives of thousands of allied troops. You can not compare that to taking civilians into a wood, making them dig a pit, kneel along the side, fixing bayonets and placing the bayonet between the shoulder blades to steady your rifle as you shoot them. You can not compare it to machine gunning prisoners of war in barns or fields. You cannot compare it to what happenned in the concentration camps, work camps and death camps (because of course people conveniently forget that even Waffen SS troops were rotated through 'camp' duties).

There is a fundamental difference between bombing a populated area (particularly when that area is full of industry and people who allow that industry to function) and cold bloodedly killing people who have no impact whatsoever on the outcome of the war.

 

It's not clear even today to most just what those long term effects were particularly to people in as complex an environment as war time and post war Japan. From what I've read (unfortunately no source) the post war survival rate was higher among the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than it was for the rest of Japan. I could speculate on some of the possibilities but it would be just that.

 

I remember those "shoe size" x-ray boxes well. I only had my feet irradiated once for a size, back in the fifties when I was about seven. Mom and I both thought it was just the "newest and best" way to see if a kid's shoes fit without him having to walk around and tell the parent if they pinched or were too sloppy.

Amazing what the world didn't know about radiation, and how cavalierly people attempted to apply this new "wonder" to everything under the sun. Heck, one of my cousins was treated for acne with massive radiation treatments to his face and neck. That was one of the goofy uses even dematologists attempted. Mike later developed skin cancer on his neck in the form of a melanoma, but nobody could be sure if that was from the radiation exposure as a teen, or his life-long working out of doors on the farm without proper protection from the sun's rays.

 

You cant break a man the same way you break a dog. The harder you hit him the higher he stands. You have to show him that you are the image of Death; you need to get him so scared that he believes himself in a nightmare. Only then will he submit.

 

I could not agree more. Instead of idly speculating on what could have been, people should read the actual standing orders of the German army when it marched to war; the killing of POWs and civilians at the Eastern Front well predated if not precipitated the Russian resistance movement. The "Commissar Order" and "Guideline for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia", both of which issued prior to the invasion of Russia, already ordered the soldiers to execute any political officers, bolsheviks and Jews captured in battle.

An order dated to 3 April 1941 issued by General Quartermaster of the OHK says that to deal with partisan activities, "Self-assured and ruthless behavior towards anti-German elements would prove an effective preventive means." By 13 May, "Decree on the Excercise of Military Jurisidiction in the 'Barbarossa' Zone" declared that not only German troops were to defend themselves "ruthlessly" from the civilian population, but also that the German military prosecutors would not be obliged to prosecute any crime committed by Wehrmacht personel in Russia, as long as the victim was Russian. Of course, on 23 May, Agricultural Group of Economic Organization East already determined that their policy to strip grain and potatoes from Russia to feed Germany would starve "many tens of millions" of "redundant" Russians!

What did the Wehrmacht expect overran Russian civilians and encircled soldiers to do, roll over and just die? Further killings of French, Italian and Belgian innocents by the Waffen SS in Western Europe during the last years of the war was just part of the pattern of excesses and brutality.

A soldier I met spoke better than I ever would. He said, the moral difference between bombing Dresden and the Holocaust was that the Germans could make it stop any time they wanted by surrendering. The civilians the SS slaughtered had no choice.

 

Why do peple sterotype that the entire Waffen SS organization is evil and every one who wants to see what it is like to be apart of it is messed up or a neo-nazi? As most people forget, the SS was broken into 2 parts, Allegemene and Waffen.
The Waffen were the combat, and the Allegemene ran the camps.
I think today people who want to join the SS want to because the way video games portray them as super soldiers. If those games showed the differnce between Waffen and Allegemene (and our texts books don't tell much of a difference either) then maybe people would think otherwise or be more specific of what they want to be.

Besides isn't the point of the "Where would you serve in WWII" thread is to find out where people want to serve in WWII, out of all nations?
So why is it that when some one wants to see what it is like to be in an organization were a minority of it comitted crimes is getting accused of being a nazi? Are the people who want to be NKVD getting this much crap? What about the airmen with the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo?

You don't codemn the acts of a few onto a whole organization.

Every organization- wether Allies or Axis has commited war crimes.
Doesn't matter wether it was a swastika or a star on their uniform.

 

Because as a whole it was.

I doubt most here forget that. What the apolgist seam to gloss over most of the time when pointing this out is that there was considerable flow back and forth from the two parts and that the Waffen SS was also guilty of a considerable number of warcrimes as well.

Perhaps there is not as much difference as you seem to believe.

That's hardly what is happening in this case. More like occasionally miss condeming a few for the acts of the whole organization.

You are quite wrong in this. While members of many military orgainizations commited war crimes in most cases this was condemed by the organizations. In the case of the SS it was often praised or ordered.

 

Hardly stereo types really, more like repeating the Nuremberg verdicts. Nuremberg condemned all SS organizations as criminal, surely this wasn't done because of only a FEW bad apples? Your opinion seems to conflict with that of the judges at Nuremberg which passed such sentences. Is it because you believe you know more then them or just being simply unfamiliar with what these units actually did?

 

Here we go again....

Are you trying to compare the attrocities committed by the SS, who murdered as many innocents as they could to the bombings done by RAF airmen, who had a 50% chance of not returning, and who were risking their lives so that you can make these statements freely? I'm sorry but I have the deepest respect for the Raf bombing crews and there is nothing comparable here.