Picture of the day

Hitler at Vimy:

vimy_ridge_hitler_4.jpg


We're all familiar with the monster, but it's thought he admired the message of the memorial - it's a monument to loss more than victory. As a WW1 vet, he would have appreciated that.
 
Imagine living in a small town, and having the majority of able bodied young men from your town all wiped out on the same day, in the same place, in a far away land...

Similar headlines would roll across the country in the weeks after Vimy.

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Hitler actually respected Canadians quite a bit, and because of the peaceful message the monument stood for he ensured that German troops did not desecrate it during the Blitzkrieg or thereafter.

It didn't hurt that German First World War dead were treated with respect in France after that war. There is a large German cemetery very close to Vimy
 
Absolutely.
Holocaust is the most sobering reminder of Nazi crimes, however people in the western world tend to forget that Nazis were much more vicious and brutal towards Slavic people, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians. Belorussia itself lost may be half of its population during ww2. While Holocaust is somewhat documented, extermination of Slavic race was not and numbers of people exterminated is mind boggling. Soviet union lost according to soviet sources 20 million lives during ww2. To say that it was minimalistic amount is understatement. So probably much more.

There's an interesting Belorussian film called "Come and See" about the partisan movement in occupied Belarus as well as the war crimes of the SS Einsatzgruppen. It's a pretty disturbing film although some scenes are just plain awkward (long shots of people's faces). Some people dismiss the film as Soviet propaganda, but after watching it and reading a bit more about the Einsatzgruppen, I would wager that it's pretty accurate depiction of events. It seems pretty clear that the Nazis wanted to colonize much of Eastern Europe, which would involve enslaving or exterminating various Slavic peoples. Hitler even declared in Mein Kampf that the German people needed Lebensraum ("living space") in Eastern Europe.

Come and See: Pt 1
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvhe2n_come-and-see-1985-pt-2_creation

Come and See: Pt 2
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvhe2n_come-and-see-1985-pt-2_creation
 
Hitler actually respected Canadians quite a bit, and because of the peaceful message the monument stood for he ensured that German troops did not desecrate it during the Blitzkrieg or thereafter.
The Somme had cost Canada 24,029 casualties, but it was here that the Canadians confirmed their reputation as hard-hitting shock troops. "The Canadians," wrote Prime Minister David Lloyd George, "played a part of such distinction that thenceforward they were marked out as storm troops; for the remainder of the war they were brought along to head the assault in one great battle after another. Whenever the Germans found the Canadian Corps coming into the line they prepared for the worst.

But usually they didn't find out until the bombardment opened.
 
The SR-71 has to be the most beautiful aircraft ever made... Doesn't matter what angle you look at it from, it stares right back at you saying "Faster baby, faster..."
 
The term used for non-Aryan races was "untermenschen" - sub-humans. This included Slavs, Jews, Gypsies and other "undesirables". For a chilling account of the process of racial determination, watch Kenneth Branagh in "Conspiracy", the story of the high level meeting organized and chaired by Adolph Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich. The meeting was held at the Wannsee estate near Berlin in January of 1942.

No record or notes were to be taken, but that proved impossible to prevent. The movie is based on the only surviving record. The upshot was the formulation of the "Final Solution" to the Jewish problem - annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe. Other non-Aryans were just collateral victims, caught up in the Nazi net, victims of a state sanctioned genocide.

That a "civilized" nation like Germany could be the originator of such wholesale slaughter staggers the imagination. I've toured a concentration camp and the tour guide pointed out that we were not likely to see a song bird anywhere on the site. If we did, he wanted to know about it. he said that the place still had the pall of death about it and birds could detect it.

Pretty much my expoeiancexpirianceexpieriance with that and any mass killing / ethnic cleansing area I have been to
 
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