|
|
|
Comment |
Sorted by
Date Written |
Re: For a more recent take... (Reply to this comment)
by verbatima
Dear Dave,
Personally, I don't have much sympathy even now. All of my family is from Russia, and part of it lived in Rostov-upon-Don during the war, when the city changed hands four (4!) times. All people that have ever recounted what happened at the time are unanimous in saying that the Nazis were absolutely inhuman in their treatment of the occupied areas -- they had no sympathy whatsoever for anyone -- not even infants. At best, people were treated like cattle, and at worst -- as vermin, subject to extermination (the Slavs too, not only the Jews). Many German officers took souvenir photos of each other next to charred bodies and hanging victims; they kept those next to the snapshots of their sweethearts, wives, and children. They coolly and methodically pried gold teeth out of the mouths of corpses, and took jewelry and clothes off dead bodies to send them off to Germany not even as merchadise, but as gifts! They rounded up children under 14 and kept them in their hospitals as a source of healthy blood for their wounded; blood was drawn from these children daily until they died, after which their bodies were casually tossed into a crematorium. They were cool, cynical, and absolutely impervious to normal human emotion. There is not a single family in Russia that has not lost someone to the Nazi atrocities, and, probably, not one that will have anything positive to say about any Nazi.
This is why, to put is honestly, gory stories of the battles of Hamburg and Berlin leave me cold.
There is one Nazi crime that people, even scholars, routinely ignore -- that they desensitized the world to atrocities. I read about the agony of the residents of Berlin in the spring of 1945, and all I can think of is that they had slaves from Eastern Europe that they beat to death, and that they wore mink coats taken off women who had been raped and executed by their sons, fathers, husbands, friends, and boyfriends. And at the end of the day, they got a much better deal than what they gave the Russians. I just cannot empathize with them -- and I blame them for it, too.
V.
|
Mar 31 '04
10:51 am PST
|
|
For a more recent take... (Reply to this comment)
by hist
though I can't say if it's different or not (since I haven't read The Last Battle), try reading The Fall of Berlin by Antony Beevor (my review of it is at http://www.epinions.com/content_96132894340). It does sound incredibly heart-breaking 60 years away from it (I wonder how much sympathy I would have had at the time, though).
Dave
|
Feb 06 '04
1:39 pm PST
|
|
Deutschland Uber Alles (Reply to this comment)
by slayerman
Nice work.
|
Feb 06 '04
4:35 am PST
|
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.