[est1895]

I found this video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE5AERj_7Zs

These are suppost to be the real life stories, told from the German soldiers themselves that survived the war.

Is this an accurate portrail?  Is anyone currently watching this mini-tv series?

[Mongoose]

...why do I feel like this is a massively-loaded question?

[est1895]

I think some of the people in the Germanic area would be watching.  It looks pretty good, but is it truthful?

[Scotty]

Are you asking whether SS troops (who by definition were also members of the Nazi party) would shoot Russian children?  I'm 99.9% sure it happened at some point.

Nazi Germany was not a nice place, and extended their lack of nicety to a lot of different places.

[BrotherBryon]

I'm sure there were those who questioned their orders as is portrayed by the young lieutenant there but like him they either could not or were too afraid to do anything about it. I imagine that with how fanatical the SS troops were they instilled a lot fear among regular army troops less they be seen as undesirable sympathizers and punished themselves. Not all German soldiers were fanatical Nazis after all. Just to be clear I don't I approve of what the Nazis did, the acts of brutality they committed still scar the landscape in a large number of places to this day.

[Grizzly]

I am currently watching the airing on dutch telivision, down to episode 2. It's a good series.

Is it accurate? I don't have the historical knowledge to judge. However, it does seem plausible to me. SS officers comitted many atrocities on the eastern front. Killing a child with the ease one kills a rat or a pig seems entirely possible - after all, that is what the jews were in the eyes of the SS.

[Flak]

There was a joke, in WW2, the Wermacht are Germans, the SS are Nazis.

[The E]

It's not very accurate. The portrayal of the german soldiers is too positive, everyone else's too negative. There probably were people like that, but they were a tiny minority amongst the people who willingly committed these crimes.

[Dragon]

Yeah. Like in every totalitarian regime, the troops in Nazi Germany were heavily indoctrinated. SS were certainly the worst of the bunch, but regular Wehrmacht was pretty "Nazified" too. Especially those on the front lines, usually in such regimes anyone with a shred of conscience would be relegated to some backyard duties and stuck in low ranks, while any advancement would require greater and greater devotion to the ideology. Also, refusing to commit an atrocity would usually result in a death sentence, too, and I'm pretty sure many of them did all those horrible things just to stay alive. It's no different from other totalitarian regimes, really. People who had guts to stand up to their commanders existed, but were few, far between, and most were killed for that.

In fact, perhaps the only relatively Nazi-free service was the Kriegsmarine. This was shown quite well in Das Boot, IIRC, it only had a single Nazi party member, and he wasn't really a liked person. But then, Kriegsmarine wasn't really required to do a whole lot of this "atrocities" thing. Perhaps the worst thing they did was attacking hospital ships, but it's not like other navies didn't do it, either (not that it makes it any less of a war crime, but both sides are equally guilty of that one...).

[StarSlayer]

To be fair, fascist regime isn't really necessary for this state of affairs to occur.  Most of the old colonial powers and their corporate monopolies similarly purged local indig populations with as much zeal as Nazi Germany.  What the Nazi regime attempted in Russia in the 40s, the American Colonies and later the United States successfully did during the days of Manifest Destiny. 

Sadly humans easily take to this kind of brutality when put in the right conditions. 

[Mongoose]

Dehumanizing the enemy as much as possible is probably as old as warfare itself.

[Mikes]

I'm sure there were those who questioned their orders as is portrayed by the young lieutenant there but like him they either could not or were too afraid to do anything about it. I imagine that with how fanatical the SS troops were they instilled a lot fear among regular army troops less they be seen as undesirable sympathizers and punished themselves. Not all German soldiers were fanatical Nazis after all. Just to be clear I don't I approve of what the Nazis did, the acts of brutality they committed still scar the landscape in a large number of places to this day.

Those that openly protested such orders would either have been arrested or shot themselves before long.

It's really an impossible situation to be discussing from an onlookers perspective, i.e. would you do "the right thing" if you saw anyone else "doing  the right thing" before you being disappeared/shot with no effect or change? Of course it's easy to say you would do "the right thing", but would you really if you knew deep down that nothing you did would have a snowflakes chance in hell of changing on fu**ing thing?

Ultimately it's statistics... you disappear/shoot anyone objecting for a while and no one will be left who objects, or rather the rest will be either too scared or acknowledge the futility and just try to "get by" themselves.

Of course you had guys like Stauffenberg with the opportunity, the means and a plan to have a chance of success... but as a frontline soldier? Not so much.

Keep quiet or be shot yourself, those were your options. No ifs or buts. As said above, an impossible situation to "think through" from an onlookers perspective really.


It's also disregarding the systemic issue or rather the nature of the police state and it's effects on every day life - someone raised in a free western society really wouldn't have a clue what everyday life for people was in Nazi Germany ... keep in mind we are talking about a "society" where even parents had to be careful what to say in front of their children as those children early on already became conditioned in "youth organisations" and could easily get their parents in trouble with the local authorities if the wrong words or (state hostile) opinions were uttered. (Or even the wrong radio stations listened to at home.)

Those with the courage to stand up and speak out still have to be applauded ...  but the bigger problem was that anyone who did,  was simply quickly disappeared and never heard of - if not shot openly - not just in the military, but civilians in everyday life as well.

So yeah, what would we have done, really? Kept quiet or died another senseless death? I don't think anyone can really say truthfully unless you actually are in such a situation.

[Dragon]

Well, someone raised in a free western society would indeed have problems comprehending this, but there are plenty of people still alive raised under a very similar system - that of Soviet Union. It was very little different from Nazi Germany, especially under Stalin. The biggest difference was that Soviets were much more equal-opportunity. Nazis did most of their atrocities to "non-Aryans" (mostly Jews and Poles), Soviets did pretty much the same, but to random people. In fact, a lot of stuff said here about Nazi Germany also applies to Soviet Union.
In both cases, there were people who really did "the right thing". Some got shot for this or ended up in a labor camp, others managed to get away with it. But even when it did happen, it was very rarely talked about, precisely because people talking about such things would be quickly eliminated - such regimes have a looong memory. As such, it's near impossible to compose a good statistic on this.

[Al-Rik]

I found this video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE5AERj_7Zs

These are suppost to be the real life stories, told from the German soldiers themselves that survived the war.

Is this an accurate portrail?  Is anyone currently watching this mini-tv series?

I haven't seen the the mini-tv series, but in some German media ( especially from the left political spectrum ) it was criticized as to harmless.
An other point of the critic was that the characters and their development are to predictable (the good, the bad, the babe...).

About the killing of civilians by German troops or officers:
Most of the dirty work was done by German policemen (the Police force was merged with the SS at the beginning of the Third Reich).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einsatzgruppen

[Torchwood]

Keep in mind that Germans used to think a lot differently about a century ago. At the time of the Weimar Republic, ideas like imperialism, nationalism and monarchy were widespread and accepted by a majority of the population. The democratic government were the new guys back then, viewed by many as a questionable substitute for the emperor at best, and criminal pretenders at least. These frictions were exacerbated by economic turmoil (occupation of resource-rich territories by the French, hyperinflation causing mass impoverishment of the middle class, and of course the Great Depression) resulting in the rise of right-wing radicals - few were aware of the full extent of the crime, but because many had at least some right or conservative leanings. Needless to say, the Allies would see to it that this could never happen again - among other things, a denazification program was imposed to postwar Germany, removing all with right-wing or Nazi party loyalties from media and education. This encouraged the younger generation to reject the traditional values of the olders, and within a few decades, liberal ideas became dominant - although probably a little more than the American government would have like, because some youths developed socialist sympathies as a result.

On the subject of Stauffenberg, a lot of people like to glorify him mostly because he failed. He was very much a nationalist with anti-semitic leanings who wanted to assassinate Hitler because he believed the Führer was not up for the job and would lead Germany to its demise. Case in point - the Allied governments would not sanction the assassination of Hitler because of concerns that he might be replaced by someone just as ruthless, but more cunning and less crazy.

[Al-Rik]

Keep in mind that Germans used to think a lot differently about a century ago. At the time of the Weimar Republic, ideas like imperialism, nationalism and monarchy were widespread and accepted by a majority of the population. The democratic government were the new guys back then, viewed by many as a questionable substitute for the emperor at best, and criminal pretenders at least.

That's IMHO not quite right.

Democratic Government was nothing new in Germany, many old and important city's have had some kind of elected government since 1200 a.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsstadt
Even some of the German Kingdoms have had constitutions with a parliament - since 1500.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landst%C3%A4nde
Establishing a German parliament and constitution failed in 1848, but after the unification in 1871 a new one was created to integrate the Republicans into the new German Empire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848

The new thing 1933 was Fascism.
It was new, it was modern and it seems to be an alternative to the old, rotten system and the new but brutal system of the Soviet Union.
The National Socialist Worker Party of Germany offered a third way between the course of the democratic party's (more or less a reformation of the political system) and the course of the communist party (nothing less than revolution).
It was also a party of young Professionals, so it was kind of anti-establishment. Many of those young professionals get a good job after the Nazis came into power and replaced the old Bureaucrats.

[Phantom Hoover]

worth mentioning that 'german' as a national identity is a relatively new thing (much newer than the US, for instance)