World War Two
Published 14 Sep 2022When Italy leaves WW2, The Nazi German Reich immediately begins occupying the country, and the occupied nations it has held until now.
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September 15, 2022
Italy Switches Sides in World War Two – WAH 077 – September 11, 1943
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September 13, 2022
The Greatest Escapes of World War Two – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 12 Sep 2022This is an intimate story inspired by real events (notably inspired by the story of a member of the Danish resistance and grandmother of Hans von Knut Skovfoged, Head of Development at PortaPlay. A story told not on the front line, but in the intimate setting of a small Danish village.
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September 10, 2022
QotD: “Working toward the Führer“
Sir Ian Kershaw was broadly right about how the Third Reich operated. He says Nazi functionaries were “working towards the Führer“. In other words, the Führer — the idealized, mythologized leader, not Adolf Hitler the individual — made it known that “National Socialism stands for X“. Hitler was famously averse to giving direct orders, so that’s often the only thing big, important parts of the government had to work from — the Führer‘s* pronouncement that “National Socialism means X“. It was up to them to put it into practice as best they could.
This had several big advantages. First, it’s in line with Nazi philosophy. The Nazis were Social Darwinists. Social Darwinists hold that “survival of the fittest” applies not only to humans as a whole, but to human social groups as well. Any given organization, then, must exist to do something, to advance some cause, to reach some goal. Ruthless competition between groups, and inside each group, is how the goal works itself out (you should be hearing echoes of Hegel here). The struggle refines and clarifies what the group’s goal is, even as the individual group members compete to reach it. The end result gets forced back up the system to the Führer, such that, dialectically (again, Hegel), “National Socialism means X” now encompasses the result of the previous struggle.
[…]
As with philosophy, “working towards the Führer” fit well with German military culture. Auftragstaktik is a fun word that means “mission-type tactics.” In practice, it delegates authority to the lowest possible level. Each subordinate commander is given an objective, a force, and a due date. High command doesn’t care how the objective gets taken; it only cares that the objective gets taken. Done right, it’s a wonderfully efficient system. It’s the reason the Wehrmacht could keep fighting for so long, and so well, despite being overpowered in every conceivable way by the Allies. The Allies, too, were constantly flabbergasted by their opponents’ low rank — corporals and sergeants in the Wehrmacht were doing the work of an entire Allied company command staff (and often doing it better).
Consider the career of Adolf Eichmann. In the deepest, darkest part of the war, this man pretty much ran the Reich’s rail network. Say what you will about the Nazi’s plate-of-spaghetti org chart, that’s some serious power. He was a lieutenant colonel.
The final great advantage of “working towards the Führer” is “plausible deniability”. Let’s stipulate Atrocity X. Let’s further stipulate that we’re in the professional historian’s fantasy world, where every conceivable document exists, and they’re all clear and unambiguous. It’s a piece of cake to pin Atrocity X on someone … and that someone would, in all probability, be a corporal or a sergeant. Maybe a lieutenant. What you wouldn’t be able to do is trace it up the chain any higher. Everyone from the captain to Hitler himself could / would give you the “Who, me?” routine. “I didn’t tell Sergeant Schultz to execute those prisoners. All I said was to go secure that objective / defeat that army / that National Socialism means fighting with an iron will.”
*I’m deliberately conflating them here — to make it clearer how confusing this could be — but in talking about this stuff the terminology is crucial. Adolf Hitler, the man, played the role of The Führer. What Hitler the man wanted was often in line with what the Führer role required, of course, but not always. This is one of the footholds Holocaust deniers have. Did Hitler-the-man actually put his name to a liquidation order? No. Did Hitler-the-man actually want it to happen? Unquestionably yes, but like all men, Hitler-the-man vacillated, had second thoughts, doubted himself, etc., and you can find documented instances of that. But The Führer very obviously wanted it to happen, and it was The Führer that motivated the rank-and-file. The man created the role, but very soon the role started playing the man …
Severian, “Working Towards the Deep State”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-06.
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September 5, 2022
Amon Göth: The Super Nazi – WAH 076 – September 4, 1943
World War Two
Published 4 Sep 2022While the Allies give up on the first Battle of Berlin, Amon Göth goes on a murderous rampage in the Tarnow Ghetto.
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August 29, 2022
The Astonishing Nazi Underground Slave Factories – WAH 075 – August 28, 1943
World War Two
Published 28 Aug 2022While the RAF and USAAF continue to try to bomb Germany into submission, the German Nazis move their war production underground. In the process they create an underground slave camp that defies imagination.
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August 23, 2022
Greece Burns Under Nazi Occupation – WAH 074 – August 21, 1943
World War Two
Published 21 Aug 2022The aerial bombing of Germany takes a new turn but continues to fail to bring long-term results. In occupied Greece and Poland, over a thousand children are murdered by the Nazis.
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August 17, 2022
Amazing Money Heist by Polish Resistance – WAH 073 – August 14, 1943
World War Two
Published 14 Aug 2022The reality of war finally seeps through to the majority of Germans, and it didn’t match up with the propaganda. Meanwhile resistance is increasing, and part of that is a classic money carriers when the Polish Home Army robs a money transport.
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August 13, 2022
The Great Escape from a Death Factory – WAH – August 7, 1943
World War Two
Published 12 Aug 2022While enslavement, and mass murder continues unabated in August 1943, at the Treblinka Death Factory the forced laborers decide that enough is enough, and bring battle to the SS in a daring escape attempt.
Huge thanks to Purple Purple, Steven Yarnell, Pieter Kleij and Ruben Alikhanyan for their support during the episode premiere.
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August 1, 2022
Hamburg’s Citizens Burnt Alive – WAH 071 – July 31, 1943
World War Two
Published 31 Jul 2022In Italy the Fascists fall from power in a peaceful coup, while in Germany the RAF and USAAF bring down a rain of fire of biblical proportions in Operation Gomorrah, launching the Firestorm of Hamburg.
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July 31, 2022
Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free
Joshua Styles on a book written after the Second World War that appears to have renewed relevance today:
“I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. I felt — and feel — that it was not German man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.” — Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, ix.
It’s been more than seventy-five years since the Nazis were defeated and Auschwitz was liberated. Seventy-five years is a long time — so long, in fact, that while many still learn of the horrors of the Holocaust, far fewer understand how the murder of the Jews happened. How were millions of people systematically exterminated in an advanced Western nation — a constitutional republic? How did such respectable and intelligent citizens become complicit in the murder of their countrymen? These are the questions Milton Mayer sought to answer in his book They Thought They Were Free.
In 1952, Mayer moved his family to a small German town to live among ten ordinary men, hoping to understand not only how the Nazis came to power but how ordinary Germans — ordinary people — became unwitting participants in one of history’s greatest genocides. The men Mayer lived among came from all walks of life: a tailor, a cabinetmaker, a bill-collector, a salesman, a student, a teacher, a bank clerk, a baker, a soldier, and a police officer.
Significantly, Mayer did not simply conduct formal interviews in order to “study” these men; rather, Mayer had dinner in these men’s homes, befriended their families, and lived as one of them for nearly a year. His own children went to the same school as their children. And by the end of his time in Germany, Mayer could genuinely call them friends. They Thought They Were Free is Mayer’s account of their stories, and the title of the book is his thesis. Mayer explains:
“Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we — you and I — saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, ‘the democratic part’. The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it” (47).
Until reading this book, I thought of what happened in Germany with a bit of arrogance. How could they not know Nazism was evil? And how could they see what was happening and not speak out? Cowards. All of them. But as I read Mayer’s book, I felt a knot in my stomach, a growing fear that what happened in Germany was not a result of some defect in the German people of this era.
The men and women of Germany in the 1930s and 40s were not unlike Americans in the 2010s and 20s — or the people of any nation at any time throughout history. They are human, just as we are human. And as humans, we have a great tendency to harshly judge the evils of other societies but fail to recognize our own moral failures — failures that have been on full display the past two years during the covid panic.
Mayer’s book is frighteningly prescient; reading his words is like staring into our own souls. The following paragraphs will show just how similar the world’s response to covid has been to the German response to the “threat” of the Jews. If we can truly understand the parallels between our response to covid and the situation in Hitler’s Germany, if we can see what lies at the end of “two weeks to flatten the curve”, perhaps we can prevent the greatest atrocities from being fully realized in our own day. But to stop our bent toward tyranny, we must first be willing to grapple with the darkest parts of our nature, including our tendency to dehumanize others and to treat our neighbors as enemies.
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July 25, 2022
Stalin, Hitler, and Churchill – Architects of Death – WAH 070 – July 24, 1943
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July 18, 2022
General Patton Orders War Crimes – WAH 069 – July 17, 1943
World War Two
Published 17 Jul 2022This week, we see a contrast in the way different civilians behave within occupied Ukraine, Patton orders war crimes, and Jewish resistance give up one of their own fighters.
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July 12, 2022
Killing the Resistance, and Rockets of Death – War Against Humanity 068 – July 10, 1943
World War Two
Published 10 Jul 2022The Polish and French resistance find themselves weakened by the lots of their leaders. Hitler decided to give Werner von Braun hundreds of thousands of slaves to launch the German rocket program.
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July 11, 2022
The Master Race of Asia? – WAH 067 – July 3 1943
World War Two
Published 8 Jul 2022
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July 6, 2022
Decapitating the French Resistance – WAH 066 – June 26, 1943
World War Two
Published 5 Jul 2022The Gestapo deals a devastating blow to French Resistance, and in Bengal, British India the famine is only getting worse.
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