Quotulatiousness

April 7, 2021

Hitler and Stalin’s Child Soldiers: The Hitler Youth and KOMSOMOL – WW2 – On the Homefront 008

Filed under: Germany, History, Italy, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 6 Apr 2021

Patriotism and war enthusiasm sweeps through the totalitarian countries in the run-up to the Second World War. This doesn’t leave out children either, who are supposed to become the prime soldiers of the future.

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Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Hosted by: Anna Deinhard
Written by: Fiona Rachel & Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Fiona Rachel
Edited by: Karolina Dołega
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations by:
– Mikołaj Uchman
– Daniel Weiss

Sources:
– Bundesarchiv
– Library of Congress
– RIAN NOVOSTI: 25358
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe NAC
– Yad Vashem: 6884/13, 6884/14, 6884/5
– National Archives NARA
– Picture of Boy Scouts at a Campsite courtesy of Springfield College, Archives and Special Collections
– English children at school in 1920s courtesy of pellethepoet from Flickr – https://tinyurl.com/yerg47hn​
– Fortepan: 5660, 1371, 32045, 55755,
– Picture of the League of German Girls with children courtesy of Facing History and Ourselves & Hoover Institution Archives – https://tinyurl.com/yzrfozas​

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sounds:
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf|
– “Weapon of Choice” – Fabien Tell
– “Remembrance” – Fabien Tell
– “Moving to Disturbia” – Experia
– “Break Free” – Fabien Tell

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com​.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
3 hours ago (edited)
When thinking of people who have been affected by the horrors of war, children are not usually the first group to pop into one’s mind. Of course, fathers away at the front and wartime propaganda bring the war closer to children’s homes, but with state-controlled youth organizations in totalitarian countries, we have yet another topic at our hands, how the war crept into children’s lives. Even though with the end of the war this dark chapter of youth movements in Europe mostly got to an end, clubs and associations are still an important part of youth culture to network and emancipate oneself. Have you been part of a club or other youth organizations in your childhood? Please let us know in the comments.

Cheers, Fiona

Bring back the … guillotine?

Filed under: France, History, Law, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’d always generally assumed that Colby Cosh was a libertarian-leaning chap, but here he is banging on the table for executing criminals with that revolutionary French device, the guillotine:

A double guillotine
Musée de la Révolution française via Wikimedia Commons.

The history of the death penalty in the English-speaking world looks extremely bizarre from any vantage point in the year 2021. The electric chair, now abolished throughout the United States, has always been a stupid, barbarous idea: it sprouted from a time when electricity was a fashionable new technology, and then just kind of stuck around for a century. Gas chamber arrangements came and went.

Hanging, which is still employed in Japan, has centuries of technique behind it, but is recognizably a holdover from a period when the risk of prolonged death was considered a feature, not a bug. Now the U.S. depends on lethal injection methods, some of them antiquated or illogical, that are very capable of being screwed up.

And in the meantime, the guillotine had its foolproof two-century run in France. The famous Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was a revolutionary opponent of capital punishment who advocated for the device as being more humane than existing methods. Can this be argued against even now? Measurement of the suffering involved with various methods of execution (or euthanasia) involves more uncertainty than anyone likes to admit, but patients receiving lethal injection, whether at their own request or the law’s, do receive sedation before actually being administered a fatal substance. The maximum duration of suffering in a beheading is a matter of seconds, not minutes; and if you believe in capital punishment without cruelty, there is no reason a person with a guillotine appointment should not be permitted to load up in advance on drugs of their own choosing.

The guillotine’s last use in France, and anywhere else in the world, took place on Sept. 10, 1977. It is associated in Anglo-Saxon minds with everything from French revolutionary terror to the Gestapo and the Stasi. There are good reasons to be reluctant to introduce mechanization of any kind into the process of executing murderers. Perhaps it makes the fatal step toward killing mere political enemies a little easier.

But, again, Americans used the electric chair without noticeable shame for more than 100 years: it came into use on a wave of passion for modernity before anyone even knew exactly how electricity kills you. Beheading’s principal problem, assuming one is willing to contemplate the taking of a human life by the state, is janitorial.

Britain’s First Standard Trainer: the No 2 Mk IV*

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Jun 2018

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The British military started using training rifles in 1883, with the .297/.230 Morris cartridge in adapted Martini rifles. This would give way to the .22 rimfire cartridge for training shortly after the Boer War, and a substantial variety of rifles converted to .22 rimfire. Standardization would take until 1921, when the “Rifle, short, .22 inch, RF, Mk IV” was formally adopted – a conversion of the No1 MkIII SMLE to a single shot .22 rimfire weapon. This was modified to Mk IV* in 1925, when an empty magazine body was added to the rifle, to act as a brass catcher.

Just to make things more confusing, the nomenclature system was retroactively changed in 1926, and the designation became Rifle, No2 Mk IV*. This rifle is a very simple conversion. It used a standard bolt body, with the striker and bolt head modified for a rimfire type firing pin and .22 caliber extractor. The sight was not even changed; instead a conversion chart was issued with the rifles to specify the proper sight settings for .22 rimfire shooting (ie, set sight to 300yd for shooting at 25yd). These rifles would be used into the 1950s, particularly by India and Australia, who did not produce No4 rifles and thus did not produce No4 trainer conversions either.

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QotD: The G-[pick-a-number] meetings

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are far too many of these “summits,” far too undistinguishedly attended, expensive to organize, and conducted in public in ways that attract swarms of hooligans who vandalize shops, beat up bystanders, and provoke the police. Canada spent $400 million on three days of photo-ops at La Malbaie, to achieve practically nothing. For the first nearly 30 years of summiting, there were only nine such meetings; Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at Tehran and Yalta (1943 and 1945), Stalin, Truman and Attlee at Potsdam (1945), Eisenhower and the divided Russians and Anthony Eden and Edgar Faure at Geneva (1955), Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Macmillan and de Gaulle at Paris (1960), Kennedy and Khrushchev at Vienna (1961), Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin at Glassboro (1967), and Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev at Moscow and San Clemente, Calif. (1972, 1973).

The first three were essential to plan for victory and peace, though many of their key provisions, especially for the liberation of Eastern Europe, were ignored by Stalin. The first Nixon-Brezhnev meeting was substantive and a couple of the later Reagan-Gorbachev meetings were very productive. These were intense business meetings between people who really were at the summit of world power and influence. The only matter agreed to in meetings between Soviet and American leaders between 1945 and 1972 was in the “kitchen debate” between then vice-president Nixon and Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959, when (forgive my coarseness in the interests of historical accuracy), Khrushchev accused Nixon of uttering “Horse shit, no, it is cow shit, and nothing is fouler than that” to which Nixon replied, “You don’t recognize the truth, and incidentally, pig shit is fouler than cow shit.” Khrushchev conceded the second point.

Conrad Black, “Take heed Canada: the U.S. would win a true trade war”, Conrad Black, 2018-06-16.

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