PK
Moderator note -
it has always been a standard on the forum that when discussions on war crimes arise, the sins or not of one side are NOT measured against or excused by those of the other.
it has always been a standard on the forum that when discussions on war crimes arise, the sins or not of one side are NOT measured against or excused by those of the other.
It did.And with that, let's veer away from the general discussion and back to the camps/E-gruppen/Waffen-SS knowledge/responsibility specifics before that Moderator cut-in cuts...in
Hegel - or me in the AHF harker thread? LMAOHegel said: and here I paraphase. First history is written by the participants. Then after time it is rewritten using the documents, etc. available. Then much later it is written about how it effected events and sytems downstream.
Michael, it seems that the 1950s and very early '60s was the era of Allied personal memoirs and diaries being published, together with "offical histories" and Allied official regimental histories. Increasingly I'm coming across '60s and early '70s paperback editions of earlier memoirs to buy when I'm looking for stuff. Hence ten years after THAT we see the start of broad "popular histories" written using those memoirs as secondary sources, such as the various works on Crete, Dunkirk, D-Day, North Africa, the Battle of Britain etc. that we all know and grew up with, starting in the 1960's. THEN we get a "second" wave of broad histories contradicting the first wave or picking up on different points. Thus trends develop...
BUT that is why there is no big wave of Allied divisional and regimental histories and biographies coming out NOW, like there is of Axis units and personalities - a huge number have already been done, and are almost lost to public consciousness. It was a different generation of "personal literacy", especially in Britain - almost everyone with something to say or recall or put down for posterity did so THEMSELVES in the 1950s. The only Allied biog you're guaranteed at any given time to see now in the "fashion" bookshops (carrying current editions) is yet another "coffee-table" book on Monty or Winston LOL
...And it's also why there isn't a decent Allied equivalent of Feldgrau or AHF - there are relatively few totally blank areas to be filled by research. A LOT more detail is available to be found on dusty bookshelves somewhere.
The Axis side is VERY different. Yes, there have been unit histories - and the occasional private memoirs - but not the same coverage and bulk as in the "Allied" nations, and they very rarely got translated and reprinted abroad. NOW they are, and NOW a lot of gaps are being filled - gaps that grew up because people that perhaps SHOULD have...didn't want to remember. The problem is - of course - in many cases...it's in the main too late for memoirs instead they are biographies. My point being - the DEMAND is out there - because the Net allows people who are interested to see what ISN'T there for them, as well as what is. There are more blanks on the Axis side than the Allied - and "Nature abhors a vacuum"
...to be a "war criminal" you have to have COMMITTED a "war crime", and be judged to have before a military tribunal, court martial, or court of law. Thus -What constitutes a "war crime" is a breach of the various treaties defining the laws of warfare, treatment of non-combatants, destruction of property, treatment of POWS, etc. - or the commonly-held "customs of war" underpinning them...
Feldgrau regards "War Crimes" as specific breaches of ANY internationally-agreed rules of conduct or treatment bearing on warfare that are in effect and legally-binding at the time the crime/alledged crime occured. The Forum management does not condone the application of ANY other standard or criteria - everything else is supposition with no bearing on the realities of the crime. The only exception is where crimes are judged to have been against the underlaying intermationally-accepted "laws and customs of war" underpinning these conventions, and if not "judged" per subsequent events, then there needs to be suitable levels of proof that such laws and customs were indeed customary.
...the situation is the other way round; as i said up the thread "that's the legal situation and precedent the IMT left us with - whether we like it or not, whether we agree with it or not. That the SS was a criminal organisation - but membership of it was NOT a crime."a SS veteran who was drafted or volunteered for a SS unit at age 18 in 1944 was not a war criminal usually.
Paddy Keathing claimed - But the majority of Waffen-SS men had nothing to do with mass-murder. However, to accept this simple fact is to risk frank and open discussion of a subject that is extremely embarrassing for everyone, especially since events have now shown us that Jews, contrary to Nazi racist rantings, are exactly like anyone else, as the Israel model shows us.
That statement is quite true. According to my calculator, adding up all those officers from MacLean's research gives a total of 569. Mathematically, that supports Keating's line of thinking.valhalla wrote:Comments like this are misleading and fail to take consideration of the facts.