Talk:World War II/Archive 3

Archived at: Talk:World_War_II_Archive_1 Talk:World_War_II_Archive_2

In the broad sense of "genocidal killing" the U.S. should be listed for her deeds in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and other suffered areas. In a narrow sense only Germany is appropriate. Maveric149 seems to apply the narrow meaning for the U.S. and the broad one for the rest.-- Pinko

No. What the US did was a valid part of war. The genocide of 100,000 Coolies and hundreds of thousands more in China was an illegal act. --mav

The firebombing of Dresden, at least, had no other purpose than to terrorize civilians, and to "punish" Germany for its crimes. Dresden was specifically noted to not be a military target. To assert that it was a "valid part of war," is, well, just that, an assertion. In my mind, terrorizing civilians for no other purpose than to terrorize civilians is not a valid part of war. john 20:25 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

Wanted to add, though, that I don't think these actions really qualify as genocide. john 20:26 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

Of course. "Valid" here is a subjective term (I should have been more specific). My usage was very narrow and in the context of genocide. But US actions in WWII were not directed towards the systematic extermination of any ethic group. So nobody can claim that US engaged in genocide at that time. Now a weak argument can be made that the US tried to do this with Native Americans through the systematic relocation and major hardship the reservation system caused. At the same time placing what Japan did next to what the Nazis did may be a bit unfair to Japan (the Nazis exterminated many millions while Japan exterminated less than one million). So I softened the text. --mav

Hehehe. The U.S. is always right and her enemies are absolutely evil. Americocentrism dominates Wikipedia. That's it. Anyway what Japan did isn't categorized into genocide even if the widespread propaganda is true.--Pinko

I think we need to get rid of this word "genocidal". Imperial Japan killed a huge number of Chinese & Koreans. (From memory, 10 to 20 million, but I'd have to check my texts to be sure.) Given the then-prevailing Japanese attitude to the "sub-humans" of China and Korea, I shold think that that would count as "genocide" even under a fairly strict definition. Better, though, to get rid of that emotive word entirely and rephrase the sentence. Tannin 08:12 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

Another rationale is that the Holocaust was technically a civil activity separate from the war; it's not like Hitler would have spared Jews in 1942 if he had made an alliance with Vichy Britain and ended the war in 1941. Stan 10:14 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

Well, the holocaust didn't start in earnest until the beginning of the war with Russia, and I don't think it's even the slightest bit possible to separate it from the conduct of the war. It was carried out by military units, and was implicated in the conduct of the war. Further, the Holocaust would not have been possible but for the war. Hitler didn't dare to start massacring the Jews of Germany before the outbreak of war. john 08:21 16 May 2003 (UTC)

"Didn't dare to start" implies that there is documented evidence somewhere that before the war Hitler said he would like to do it, but was afraid to do so, or that during the war he said "let's go for it while the war is covering our tracks". Military involvement is kind of meaningless in a militarized society, and anyway the US Corps of Engineers was likely doing flood control work during WWII, but we wouldn't mention it unless a channel being cleared was for navy ships or for other military activity. The Holocaust didn't affect Germany's conduct of the war (high-up officers didn't even know it was happening), stopping it was not a war aim of anybody, etc etc. I'd be interested to see evidence otherwise, I'm no Holocaust expert, but in my WWII reading it only ever appears as an end-of-the-war discovery, not as a factor in strategy or tactics (there have been accusations and insinuations relating to the bombing campaign, don't think they're proven though). The Holocaust has come to be linked in people's minds I think, because it shows up in the catalog of Nazi evil deeds, but before Pearl Harbor most Americans didn't have a problem with Hitler's Germany, even when they knew Jews were being persecuted. Cynically speaking, the Holocaust linkage makes the Allies seem more like heroic crusaders, and distracts from the much-less-heroic part where Congress refused to authorize as many divisions as Eisenhower needed. Stan 14:16 16 May 2003 (UTC)

In broad, I agree with Stan. It did become an Allied war aim, but that was late in the day when the war was well into its final stages. I'd have to dig out the particular date - and it's almost certainly not one exact date anyway - but Churchill and others started to make statements about it quite late in the war. Tannin

There are a couple of misconceptions here. The first is the definition of Holocaust itself and how a society can be brought to perpetuate a "holocaust." In fact, the Holocaust was a gradual process in which anti-Jewish measures built up into the frenzy of mass murder. The first of these was the boycott of shops on April 1, 1933, followed by book burnings, Nuremburg Laws, etc., and culminating in Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938), almost a year before the war broke out. Whether physical eradication of the Jews was the final aim at this earlier stage is debated by historians, but there can be no doubt that there was a progression of violence. As for documented evidence, there are different interpretations of what Hitler says in Mein Kampf, as well as of his first address to the Nazi party in the 1920s (which we have). When the war began, trains carrying German soldiers into Poland were covered with grafitti saying "We're going to Poland to defeat the Jews," in other words, the "war against the Jews was used as an incentive to fight." Roundup of Jews through ghettoization was proposed almost as soon as Poland was conquered, but contained for over a year because of a debate within the German administration of the Generalgouvernment between the SS, Wehrmacht, and civilian administration. In other words, all three factions were involved in a debate over the most utilitarian way to handle the Jewish population--should they be killed, put on a reservation in southern Poland, or used for slave labor. Training for Einsatzgruppen began in spring 1941, so that they would be ready to follow the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union on 22 June. They began operations on 23 June. Jan Karksi, who had been smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and Belzec for the Polish resistance, reported to the government in exile in London in 1942 (I'm writing from memory, so the date eludes me) and spoke to Churchill, before going to the United States where people had a hard time believing him (see David Kennedy for a report on Karski's meeting with Jewish Justice Felix Franfurter). Reports on the Holocaust appeared in the press at the time with some frequency--I have the clippings from the New York Times to prove that. As for affecting Germany's conduct of the war, it certainly did. Think of the resources (human, transportation, cost, etc.) that were diverted for this effort. When you say "high up officers didn't know" what officers do you mean? The occupation forces? Of course they knew? The invasion forces? They were followed by the Einsatzgruppen (wow, and I'm not even getting into Browning's arguments, which are controversial). As for Americans not caring about what was happening in Germany, that is not the case. The country was in the throws of a debate on how to respond. Large sections of America did support stopping Hitler. Jack Warner of Warner Brothers ordered that all filming in Germany stop as early as 1933. I do not believe stopping the Holocaust became an Allied objective until they began encountering the concentration camps as they entered Occupied Europe. On the other hand, as I said earlier, the diversion of resources to engage in the Holocaust certainly had an impact on the German military. Danny

That sounds authoritative, Danny, and squares with what I remember. Now, back to the immediate question, how do we deal with the mass deaths of civilians 1930ish to 1945? We have, in roughly descending order of barbarity:

1. Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews and assorted others, notably Poles
2. Imperial Japan's treatment of the Koreans and Chinese
3. Stalin's treatment of his own people
4. Allied terror bombing of cities with no real military value (Tokyo, Dresden, etc.)

Plus several others that are difficult to slot in, including the goings-on in the Balkans (an area with history that confuses the daylights out of me), and, I should imagine, some pretty dreadful stuff by the Italian Facists in Africa.

Where do we draw the "genocide" line? Wherever we draw it, how do we respond to the very reasonable claim that we should also include event X, because X was near-enough to just as bad as Y? Or, to the claim that we should not include Y, because Y was not quite as nakedly genocidal as Z?

I thnk it is best if we get rid of that emotive and poorly-defined word entirely and just outline the major slaughters without slant or comment. The facts themselves should be sufficent comment. Tannin 07:27 17 May 2003 (UTC)

Just qualify any statement the uses the word "genocide" when there is significant disagreement. We shouldn't back-off from using a word just because some people don't like the label. Per our own def the most clear case is #1 with increasingly weak arguments to support each of the rest. --mav

So, let's say we draw the line after mentioning Germany and Japan. How then do we justify not mentioning the other two (other 6?) in the same context? Was, for example, Stalin's treatment of Soviet citizens "OK" and "not genocidal" because he wasn't particularly concerned about their ethnc status? (What's the old joke? "Stalin wasn't racially prejudiced: he murdered everyone equally?") Sometimes I wonder if there isn't a hidden agenda here: to always define things in such a way that our side isn't mentioned. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that that is your motivation Mav - ain't your style, for starters - but insisting on a rigid and literal interpretation of "genocide" tends to make it look that way. Maybe I should just jump in and tinker with the wording, and see if it gets reverted or not. Tannin

Words like genocide still do have more or less widely accepted meanings. Of course some people try to subvert the word to serve their own political agenda but we should simply report that A, B and C say X was/was not genocide while a small group D says otherwise. We just need to frame the controversy in a way that simply states the major arguments one way or the other. But since this is an encyclopedia we do need to "draw a line" on just how much detail we include. Thus we give widely-held views more exposure through the above process and less exposure to really far-out groups. In many cases the divide is so wide that we can justifyably exclude the very minority view (thus our article on the Earth is free from any serious consideration of the ideas of flat-earthers). --mav

But this is precisely the point. If we are to follow the widely held view, then we must define "genocide" as what the vast majority of people think it means: killing a lot of people who can't fight back, In that case, we must include, for example, the bombing of Hirshima under the heading "genocide", and then add that a relatively small minority of people (those who own dictionaries and bother to look things up in them) would not defne that particular act as "genocide". Tannin

No. killing a lot of people who can't fight back is mass murder. To be genocide the intent of the killers must be to eradicate an entire ethnic/social/racial class of people and they must have a systematic plan to do so. --mav

Excuse me, but that is exactly the very narrow definition which actually causes confusion, as it isn't in reality followed in every-day usage, nor in mass media, neighter in personal communication. To make the definition usable, you must include actions which seemingly are intended at killing entire populations, or a great faction of a population for no other reason than their ethnicity or something similar. (I dislike the race-word, so I won't use it.) Attempted extermination of villages and towns, or other means of making an area impossible to live in, are perfectly suitable (compare with recent events in ex-Yugoslavia, Rwanda and other lesser known places). As are also produced famine catastrophes and deportation of entire populations to Sibiria if their death there is almost certain. The Nazis intended to make Germany judenrein, and the chosen method was not deportation but genocidal industrial killing. In the case of the Nazis we do know about their deepest intentions, but you don't need to know if Stalin realy intended to kill all kulaks to see that his aim was at least very close to that, similarly you don't need to know if the Nazis in the long run intended to kill all Slavs in the Germany-dependent territories. The treatment of the Slavic civilians is sufficient evidence. In German (or any other language I know well) I wouldn't have called the assaults on Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki "genocide" as they were too isolated to indicate an intention of (close to) total eradication of the German or Japanese population, but "genocidal acts" they surely were (according to my understanding) as the fire-storm method is very well suited to eradicate entire towns. -- Ruhrjung 23:00 20 May 2003 (UTC)

A bit late, but wanted to note that I disagree with much of Stan's claims as to the Holocaust somehow not being a part of World War II. He compares the SS shooting thousands of Jews to the US Army Corps of Engineers doing flood control work doing World War II. I'm not sure what the point of this is. The Holocaust formed a major part of the Germans' military occupation of the rest of Europe. Are the other details of German military occupation of Europe somehow irrelevant to the conduct of the Second World War? He also says that the Holocaust played no role in determining the outcome of World War II militarily. This would have surprised a fair number of Germans, who argued against the Holocaust because it deprived them of slave labor that would be useful for the war effort. Furthermore, and more importantly, in the mind of Hitler and other top Nazis, the murder of the Jews was a part of the war. They saw the Jews as the leaders of a conspiracy against them, and saw the final solution of the Jewish question as one of their principal objectives in the war.

But this may all be besides the point, as Stan's principal purpose seems to be to suggest that talking about the Holocaust as part of the Second World War somehow glorifies the Allies unfairly, since they weren't actually fighting the war to stop the Holocaust. While this is largely true, it's beside the point. Whether or not stopping the Holocaust was one of the allied goals in fighting the war (for the most part, it wasn't), it was most certainly one of the Nazis' goals when fighting the war. To say that it somehow wasn't a part of the war because the allies didn't care about it is to assume that the war ought to be viewed from the point of view of the allies (and especially the western allies.) So, again, the Holocaust was most definitely a part of the Second World War. john 04:07 20 May 2003 (UTC)

As I've said, I'm no expert on the Holocaust; my doubt about the closeness of the connection is based on, for instance, Liddell Hart's comprehensive history of the war, in which Jews and concentration camps apparently don't rate even a passing mention. Most of Hitler's surviving generals professed ignorance of the Holocaust; although no doubt some of this was an attempt to save their skins, to me Mellenthin's reference to "deeds which shook us to the core and made our cheeks burn with shame" sounds pretty heartfelt. So if the final solution was a principal reason for the Nazis to go to war, they certainly kept it quiet. In any case, we're not supposed to be doing original research, but regurgitating the conclusions of recognized authorities. Mine is Liddell Hart (who will likely become the first entry in the shockingly-omitted reference section of this article); who's yours? Stan 16:32 20 May 2003 (UTC)

With the greatest respect for you all, of whom the very most surely has a wider general understanding of World War II than I have, I must question the assertions regarding the Holocaust being a part of World War II. Regardless of if you define the Holocaust as the process commenced in 1933 or earlier, or if you define it as the industrial killing of (mainly) Jews, you ought to realize that the chosen understanding of "the Holocaust" doesn't fit with the assertation that "the Holocaust was a part of the war". In the first case, if you define it as the process, it had started at least 6 years before the war, and it was the need of Lebensraum, which in reality rather was wheat, oil and minerals than space to colonize, not the need of somewhere whereto deport the Jewry, which was the driving force behind the assault on Poland. In the second case, one might argue that due to the war the number of Jews to get rid of increased that very much that the industrial killing became the only possible means. I would rather say that the Holocaust (in the second meaning) was contemporary with, and mutually influencing, the war. -- Ruhrjung 23:00 20 May 2003 (UTC)

---

I think I partially agree and partially disagree with this. I'd agree that, perhaps, "The Holocaust was a part of the war" isn't the best way to phrase things. It is, however, more accurate than the opposing statement that "the Holocaust was not a part of the war." Stan seemed to be arguing that the two were wholly separate phenomena, which could be discussed without impinging on each other. This is ridiculous. Any discussion of the Second World War should include some discussion of the Holocaust, and any discussion of the holocaust should include a fair amount of discussion of the war. (This goes back to your "mutually influencing" idea, I suppose, which suggests that we differ more over semantics than substance). But I'd go a bit further than this. Looking at the German war aims, one might note that the German motives for invading the Soviet Union were heavily influenced by anti-semitism. The idea that the Soviet regime was run by Jews was high in the minds of the top Nazis. Furthermore, the first mass exterminations in the Soviet Union went hand in hand with the invaders. The Einsatzgruppen came in the wake of the front line forces. To try to enforce some kind of separation between the war and the holocaust would be artificial. john 23:23 20 May 2003 (UTC)

OK, I've seeded the reference list. It would have been easy to make it as long as one's arm, but I stuck to general histories, figuring that more specialized works, such as "Navy in WWII" and the like, should be referenced in their own articles. Stan 16:51 20 May 2003 (UTC)

I think that is wise, Stan. In a moment I'll add Martin Gilbert, and that should just about do it - and also help counter-balance the inclusion of two major but very early works by participants. I suggest that we stick to the recognised major general works. Tannin

Stan, Liddell-Hart is a military historian, interested in the details of military campaigns. The history of a war is about far more than just the course of military campaigns in that war. Does Liddell-Hart go into much detail on the home front of any of the countries? In any event, there are many general histories of the war that do talk about the holocaust. There's that damned huge recent one, whose title and author I can't recall. As far as the German generals not knowing anything about it, they may not have known about the gas chambers. Other aspects of the holocaust were widely known. The fact that the Jews of various countries were being gathered and sent off to camps in Poland, for instance, was hardly a secret. Nor was the fact of the vast massacres on the Eastern Front, carried out as the army advanced, unknown. So, you're right, the Holocaust was not a *military* part of the Second World War, but a history of World War II cannot simply be limited to military activities. john 21:19 20 May 2003 (UTC)

I always thought "Holocaust" referred specifically to the extermination part; after all, the US put Japanese in concentration camps, but few people call that a holocaust! At the risk of invoking the shade of communist state :-), I do think there should be should be some sort of distinction made between "the war" and "everything that happened between 1931 and 1945". If you will recall, the root of the discussion was the attempt to have a list of genocides that were conducted as part of WWII. I'd still like to see a bald statement by an authority that "the Holocaust was part of the war" which is stronger than "Nazis exterminated people and started wars at the same time". I don't have any fundamental problem with adding a "part of the war" statement, it's just that I don't recall an authority saying it, and can't seem to find anything like it in my 30-odd WWII books (which are admittedly military-focused). BTW, I note that Holocaust suggests there is a debate among historians on the war connection, so it's not just me. :-) In fact, let's get Holocaust fixed up in this respect first, then World War II can include the one-sentence synopsis that can't be disputed, because it'll be based on known-authoritative Wikipedia material. :-) Stan 23:11 20 May 2003 (UTC)

Simple. The European Theater in World War II is essentially about the fight against Nazism. After the war, the Nuremburg Trials tried the Nazi leadership for their war crimes, which were deemed "crimes against humanity." These war crimes included the Holocaust. Ergo, the Holocaust was considered a part of World War II by a body as authoritative as that. Danny

I would put more stock in something by an objective historian. I believe it's generally agreed that Nuremburg trials were at least partly motivated by guilt; Jews had been trying to get the Western powers to pay attention to the Holocaust for years, and had been accused of making it up - then American soldiers (and journalists) unexpectedly ran into piles of bodies that couldn't so easily be dismissed as fabrications. The trials were the right thing to do; but I always thought it was massively dishonest on the part of the Allies to ignore the reports of misdeeds all through the war, then afterwards to hold them up as the evils of Nazism that they were fighting against. (Heh, should be putting all this in an article, not a talk page, eh?) Stan 00:12 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Stan, I agree that the Holocaust should include only the extermination part, at least in its tightest construction. And, at the moment, I don't have any sources at hand which would say "the Holocaust was part of the war". (or any very good sources about World War II, period). Perhaps that statement is too sweeping. But what I will say is that the German war effort and the German treatment of the Jews were pretty closely integrated, and that it becomes very hard to speak of one without referring to the other. Debates over slave labor, for instance, the use of the railway system, etc., were important to both the Holocaust and the war effort. And, as I said before, German motives in launching the war and in launching the extermination of the Jews were closely interrelated. As to the Holocaust article, at present, is not very good. Currently, I don't particularly have the time or resources to redo it, but there's a lot more that could and should be said about the mechanics of the process, especially with respect to the Jews. (Oh, and I agree with Danny's remarks.) john 23:23 20 May 2003 (UTC)

You allude to lots of bits I want to learn more about, they should definitely be in the 'pedia somewhere. I just want to be careful that the Holocaust's "sound bite" in this article doesn't make claims that are too strong. This is an area where the victors are known to have worked hard to rewrite history, and today, for instance, few people realize the extent to which the Congress prolonged the war by starving Eisenhower of troops - I was astonished to read about it, and the information certainly casts a different light on the version of the war that was fed to the public. Stan 00:25 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Stan. This is actually a major part of my professional field. It seems that in your rebuttal you are confusing some of the Jewish responses to the Holocaust that were taking part in the States with what was known. Reports were leaking out. Like I said earlier, on my desk at work I have a stack of newspaper clippings from the "New York Times describing the concentration camps and gas chambers as early as '42. One interesting account claimed that Jews were killed by an electric current that ran through the steel floor. There were daily reports of the Jewish population disappearing in Europe, even before the invasion of Normandy. Just one month after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, a play about the event was broadcast on public radio in New York. In other words, people did know something was going on, though they were hard pressed to imagine the severity of it. It was only after concentration camps began being liberated that they realized something was going on. Oh, and the soldiers and journalists with the American Army liberated concentration camps in Germany proper, not death camps (Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army), so that they did not get to see the full fury of the Reich. The demonstrations (10-minute strike, Madison Square Gardens Rally, March on Washington) were largely ineffective, but they certainly did raise public awareness. By the way, Roosevelt warned Germany's leaders that they would be punished for what they did even before D-Day. Now let's look at the German side. Einstazgruppen (SS killiing units) followed the Wehrmacht through Russia. Trains that could have ferried troops to the front were diverted to bring Jews to the camps. Anti-Semitic propaganda was used to promote the war effort. German fighting units were used to suppress the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which erupted in response to the transports to Treblinka. The Ghetto held out longer than Poland and there were considerable German casualties. Other German unit were used to round up and arrest Jews. Hitler often described the war as a means of ridding the world of Jewish Bolshevism. Etc., etc. By the way, I agree with John that the Holocaust article should be expanded and developed. I just deal with that material all day, and am not in the mood to do it again in my leisure time. Danny

Hmm, I have heard about those attempts to raise awareness in the US; it seems strange, almost foreign to think that our own parents and grandparents knew of them and yet were disbelieving or indifferent. For the Germans, the test I would use is "could the Holocaust have happened without WWII?" If so, then its connection to the war is coincidental. Personally I think it would have happened irrespective of the war, because there was no nation of the time that would have been willing to tangle with Germany just to save Jews, but of course this is just a hypothetical speculation. BTW, I can relate to the part about not wanting to do work-related wikipedia on one's own time, I almost never touch the computer science stuff myself! Stan 03:17 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Stan, the holocaust would certainly not have happened irrespective of the war, due to the basic fact that the vast majority of the Jews killed would not have been under German control without the war. I suppose it's possible they would have murdered the German Jews without the war, but there's no particular eveidence of this. john 05:34 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Yes, good point! Although I wonder if Hitler could have talked Poland into handing over Jews if he'd worked at it a little harder... but I should shut up and go read the Weinberg book you nicely added the ref to, it has massively glowing reviews on Amazon... Stan 05:52 21 May 2003 (UTC)

I haven't read it (although I've gotten it from the library and skimmed it, but it's apparently the current definitive history of WWII. It's pretty enormous. As far as talking Poland into handing over Jews, I'm not sure how that could have happened. Even as it was, he wasn't able to convince his wartime allies Italy, Hungary, or Bulgaria to turn over their Jews. john 07:15 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Even less so the Finns (although I cautiously avoid to call them "allies") who had Jewish soldiers and officers (not that the Finnish Jewry was any huge part of the population) fighting on the same side as Germany against the Communists (and (as far as I remember) declined to receive Nazi war-decorations). -- Ruhrjung 14:49 21 May 2003 (UTC)

It's hardly possible to tell if the holocaust (in the sense "industrial killing") would have happened, without Hitler achieving the opening of the war. Some other method of making Germany, and akin nations, free of Jews might have become deemed more fit. But I'm baffled by the, in my opinion, distorted perspective above which puts the eradication of the Jewry in focus, and the attempted acquisition of wheat, oil and minerals to a subordinate matter. It was the latter which was a threat against "the free world" including USA, and which ultimately must have been the reason behind USA's engagement on the side of the Communists and the English.

The current wording is totally acceptable (who strives for perfectionism?):

Although the Nazi genocide or "Holocaust" was largely unknown to the allied soldiers fighting the war, it has become an inseparable part of the story of World War II.

One must differentiate between primary goals of a war - and propagandized goals. In the anti-semitic setting, where Bolsheviks and US Capitalists were similarly accused of being either agents for the conspiratoric Jewry, alternatively true Jews themselves, it was totally in accordance with the Zeitgeist in Nazi-Germany to sell the wars to the population as wars against the World-Jewry. But that doesn't make the Holocaust to the "real" reason of the war, as little as the war was the reason of the Holocaust. The war determined many aspects of the Holocaust, and made a strong incentive for the accellerated industrial killing, but it wasn't The Reason.

-- Ruhrjung 14:49 21 May 2003 (UTC)

And who has said that the holocaust was the "Reason" for the war? I certainly haven't said that. On the other hand, I'm uncertain about this "wheat, oil, and minerals" thing. I think this is to put a materialist spin on what was not, in the mind of Hitler and other Nazis, at least, largely a materialist cause. The present sentence is vaguely appropriate, except that it somehow assumes that what the "allied soldiers fighting the war" knew about is somehow integral to what the war was about, and that other things, not involving the allied soldiers fighting the war, need to be justified for inclusion. This seems wrong to me. Surely an activity which millions of German soldiers fighting the war knew about is worthy of inclusion, if that is the basis of what merits inclusion. john 16:47 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Isn't it a fairly common knowledge that the war as a war of ideologies was a UK/US construct? Hitler had no ideological problems when he shared Poland and Balticum with Stalin, nor did he have any such problems when he supported the Finnish (jew-friendly) Democracy after the Winter War. Already my first history book in school told that the Nazis (but in Germany many more than them) primarily were out to restore Germany's glory, strength, domination, European supremacy or hegemony (I don't remember the exact terms chosen), and that Britain's support to Poland was an reaction thereon. Germany was in need of Lebensraum. One crucial question is how the leading Germans thought of when they said Lebensraum. Another is if USA considered the threat Germany would be, as ruhrjung points out above, dominating Ukraine, Middle- and West-Europe. Johan Magnus 04:32 22 May 2003 (UTC)

The "war of ideologies" was not a UK/US construct. It appeared in the 30s, especially in response to the Spanish Civil War, where Communists fought Fascists, seemingly. It was somewhat shattered by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but returned again after 1941. You're right, Hitler had no ideological problems with a short-term alliance with the Soviets, but everything we know about him says that he never regarded that alliance as permanent. As far as Nazi aims, in Germany much of the population was out to restore Germany's glory, strength, domination, and European supremacy or hegemony. And for a while, it seemed as though the Nazis were leading Germany to that, which is why so many non-Nazis supported them for so long. But the Nazis themselves were ideologically committed to things that had little to do with increasing Germany's power. Things like massacring the Jews. And carrying out a hopeless crusade against Soviet Russia. So, yes, Hitler was flexible in his short-term moves, but they were all part of a large, long-term ideological construct. By your arguments, Lenin was not an ideologue because he made a short-term alliance with Wilhelmine Germany in order to come to power in Russia. And, again, how in the world was Germany "in need of lebensraum"? What does that mean, even? Hitler and the Nazis thought Germany was in need of lebensraum. Anyway, I'm utterly uncertain what people are trying to argue here. That Nazi Germany did not have ideological concerns which had little to do with material goals? That Hitler was merely a "crafty opportunist"? That all of history is determined by material factors, and thus Hitler could not possibly have been motivated by ideology? (Even Marx wouldn't have gone so far. "Men make history, but that do not make it as they please," I recall him saying.) What exactly is going on here? john 05:47 22 May 2003 (UTC)

Interesting question. I was actually wondering too. Regarding myself, I think I can tell that the focus and the perspective of the article allienates me somewhat, but I preferred to study the talk-page instead of doing bold editing. On this page, I commented on what seems connected to my feelings on the article. (With regard to Materialist history view I feel pretty much innocent, but possibly more of a Realist than an Idealist. ;->)

-- Ruhrjung 17:39 22 May 2003 (UTC)

Just a note on when America knew about the Holocaust. According to David Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning Freedom from Fear (1999), on page 794, news reached the Americans in August 1942 of what was happening, it was treated with disbelief but confirmed and corroborated, so that on December 8, 1942, Roosevelt summoned Jewish leaders to his office to inform them that there was now "proof that confirms the horrors discussed by you." Danny

With the new expansion (good work, btw) we have a Hitler-Stalin pact in addition to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Djmutex, are they the same or did you have different treaties in mind?TeunSpaans 20:58 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Thank you. They are the same, and apparently Ruhrjung has taken care of the confusion. djmutex 10:20 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure I like the current lists of "allied countries" "supporters of the allies" "axis countries" "Supporters of the axis" and "Countries that were occupied or switched sides". The idea that the Soviet Union (and France, for that matter) are not listed on the allied side, but a bunch of Latin American countries that did practically nothing are, is pretty ridiculous. And that the Soviet Union, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland are all in the same category is pretty ridiculous. Perhaps some better system could be worked out here. john 00:04 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

This is very true. Also the table on losses would need some work. -- Ruhrjung 01:35 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

To be honest I pasted the Soviet Union in "Countries that were occupied or switched sides" just because I found this list rather insulting for France, Poland and Czechoslovakia and certainly others. Ericd 11:06 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Sorry Tannin, my source wrote British troops. You know the free French forces in Italy where mainly Moroccan, Tunisian or Algerian we don't have any word like Commonwealth for French Empire this could be useful in many cases. Ericd 12:49 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)