No internet. Television was in its infancy (meaning few even had a television). There were no "24-hour news channels" anywhere. News arrived via newspaper, film short before a movie in a movie theater, or a brief "news update" on a radio station. Information flowed (worldwide) at a snails pace as compared to how quickly we learn of some happening on the other side of the globe today.
I have never been interested in “breaking news” because it is usually pretty impossible to give it context. Reading the news from a few days or even weeks past helps make clear what matters amd what does not.
"The first proposal to bomb Auschwitz was made on 16 May 1944 by a Slovak rabbi." That was 3 weeks before D-Day (June 6, 1944).
Eisenhower's policy was to defeat Germany, and not get distracted. He had planned to bypass Paris, which wasn't on the route to Berlin.[2] (De Gaulle went off-script and liberated Paris ahead of schedule, but that's another story.) Eisenhower was trying to hold an alliance with different goals together. All the allies were agreed on "defeat Germany", but there were other national goals. Britain was concerned about preserving its empire, for example. To hold the alliance together, Eisenhower focused on "win the war" above all else.
The person this article is about was in the Red Army. "One of just 69 men in his 12,000-strong division to survive the war, Mr Dushman suffered serious injuries during the conflict". The USSR had about 20 million casualties in WWII. Never forget that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_bombing_debate
[2] https://www.historynet.com/the-generals-who-brought-paris-ba...
PBS's "Secrets of the Dead" series did an episode about this last year: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/bombing-auschwitz-wnrzgw/47...
How he woke up safe on his bed in the middle of the courtyard ; There were walls when he had gone to sleep before, but the walls weren't there anymore.
When I became older, I learned that fifty prisoners in his barrack had died this night.
Objectives (such as bridges) were often missed by hundreds of meters.
“Of those aircraft recorded as attacking their target, only one in three got within 5 mi (8.0 km).”
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/worldwar2/thea... has data for later years. It got better, but stayed bad.
https://www.airforcemag.com/article/1008daylight/:
“Bombing accuracy was terrible. The average circular error in 1943 was 1,200 feet, meaning that only 16 percent of the bombs fell within 1,000 feet of the aiming point”
I think the same trains or tracks that carried prisoners carried the (paltry) food for the camps, so I guess it's a trolley problem still.
It might have helped but it’s far from a certainty.
The tools of killing were bullets, disease, and starvation.
The Nazis ran out of many things, towards the end of the war. But never bullets.
Edit: I have no idea why people are doing the drive by downvote thing here? Maybe you think I'm denying that gas chambers were real?
No. I'm saying there were concentration camps without them, where prisoners were mass-murdered as I described above. That statement is not controversial.
I don't think destroying the gas chambers would have been enough to stop Auschwitz.
But how many planes would this have taken? How many would have been lost? No loss was affordable during most of the war; industrial production won it for the Allies as much as anything did.
There were no easy decisions to make.
War is not a video game.
Bombing an enemy concentration camp, especially with WWII-era weapons, would mean killing the people you're trying to save.
[1]https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/theresiens...
Oh, wait. We can't ask any of those people, because they seem not to exist. Is that because North Korea is so wealthy that no one wants to leave to work elsewhere? Because North Korea is such a utopia that they don't even want to travel overseas? Because their industry is so advanced and self-sufficient that they need no trade deals with others?
You don't have to believe everything you read about North Korea, but to dismiss it all as US propaganda without offering a significant countervailing body of evidence is, well, silly.
While I do definitely mistrust US propaganda on North Korea, I don't doubt at all that it's a terrible place to live in every possible way, I have read several books by defectors (and visited numerous communist and post-communist countries).
My point was more that the reason we have heard about it is mostly because that suits the Western agenda. Otherwise very few would have any idea about what is going on there. Just like few Americans or even Europeans know much about Transdniestria, a present day communist state in Europe. Or Bhutan, a seemingly very happy little country.
Even in the days of Wikipedia and internet news, most people don't know much more about the world than what is convenient for Western media to tell us.
All this to say that it's inconceivable that people outside Germany could be pretty ignorant about what was going on in the late 30s.
not saying "there is nothing going on there" and "those incarcerations are complete lies" but the whole thing is fishy, especially considering that there are political motives behind screaming bloody murder – for comparison, there is literally zero western pressure on israel on the occupation issue, and the EU is blatantly ignoring the insane conditions migrants are subjected to on the other side of the EU barriers.
What would you propose to do?
on the EU issue: there isn't one single solution since all the cases are different. a few come to mind. i would not pay blood money to morocco and libya to "keep them at bay" because the EU can't just champion human rights at home and then fund concentration camp-like establishments outside of its borders – we are not funding the ones in xinjiang, we are funding the ones in the libyan litoral. a way more efficient refugee processing scheme with the participation of everyone else would be ethically better. much as i disliked him, matteo renzi put it very well for the eastern european extremists: no refugees, no money. on an EU level i'd also crack down on pushbacks (such as the ones happening in spain and in greece), where the carrot should be a better refugee distribution.
let's not forget that europe's exploitation caused this problem, it's also on us to help people and figure out a solution.
as i have said a thousand times though, i don't think they're approaching this "problem" the right way.
I expect evidence. I do not get upset because it is the fashion to do so. If someone calls me a liar and demands proof I didn't mislead them, I do my best to display evidence in my defense. All that the CCP offers is threats to other sovereign nations.
There is a pattern of behavior from the CCP which indicates duplicity and untruthfulness from the destruction of viral lab samples in Wuhan, to entire fishing fleets going dark off sovereign waters. Every day we receive more of these reports of bad behavior. If China wants us to believe them, they need to start producing evidence. Let observers in. Show the world.
Can you prove that this refutation of those satellite images is false? Let's remember that there were satellite photos of WMDs before the Iraq War also. https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1208288.shtml
> Let observers in. Show the world.
According to China many observers have come, and there is an open invitation for more to come as well: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1180917.shtml
Do you have evidence that this is false?
The Palestinian, Pakistani, and Syrian ambassadors to China have commented on camera about what they observed in Xinjiang: https://youtu.be/ebeGipO6-gU?t=490
Do you have evidence that they are lying? Which Muslim-majority countries or non-Western-aligned Muslim interest groups have condemned China for human rights abuses in Xinjiang?
> The Palestinian, Pakistani, and Syrian ambassadors to China have commented on camera about what they observed in Xinjiang: https://youtu.be/ebeGipO6-gU?t=490
There is every indication that these are sanitized media tours. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Times
[2] https://wokeglobaltimes.com/aac16063149c4e37a8e3ee58066c4837...
Right, and the Western claims all stem from people or organizations connected to the US state department or intelligence apparatus. These claims are propagated by the same bastions of journalistic truth which stoked popular fervor in the run-up to the Iraq War and every other unjustified US foreign coup or war (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony).
Global Times is an organ under the People's Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP. There is no controversy of its origins or whose authority it acts. Given that no newspaper can be wholly privately-owned in China, conflicts of interest are unavoidable.
I don’t think Wikipedia is objective in any way on geopolitics. I don’t think that’s possible. My point was simply that some geopolitical facts are so indisputable that even Wikipedia admits them (of course this only tends to happen once the US has gotten what it wants). You have to decide whether you’re going to reckon with those facts or just talk more about sources. At the end of the day that’s a cover for not having any hard evidence.
It sounds like a major conspiracy.
on the other hand: am i denying the existence of fishy "re-education camps" targeting one ethnic group and one only, where they are brought in under very opaque circumstances? no, i am not denying that.
if you want a very long read with some context behind some of those claims, here's one: https://www.qiaocollective.com/en/education/xinjiang
there are a bunch of things there, a full timeline of the "conflict", a couple of articles debunking both poor google maps journalism and a few poorly-made BBC & vice docs on the matter.
there's also the fact that some of the "punishments" against the uyghurs are forcing children to go to school, to mandarin-speaking public ones even, which is the same policy most countries in the world adopt (a recent request in france to partially allow schooling in catalan in the region of perpignan has been rejected). there are some claims that state-funded xinjiang schools are even bilingual but i haven't dug enough on it.
i won't comment on the wuhan issue because i don't really know enough about it, but as someone who is born in an island with plenty of US bases i laugh at everyone claiming china is "flexing their muscles" with their navy.
to be clear: nobody approaching any of those bases gets allowed in, just like in the "xinjiang camps". does this excuse china? no, it doesn't, but we should probably be fair in our judgment.
China has done a great job of making people frame it as the US/EU lying and the "whataboutism" in your last paragraph. This is also a tactic that Putin loves to use. Using Western shortcomings to justify their own tyranny.
Those may well be actual death camps. The stated amount of people disappeared (2m+) far exceeds just how much people you can physically fit into those camps. They may fit few hundred thousands, but not millions.
on the data: if by "we" you mean adrian zenz then you're out of luck when it comes to quality. i'd like to see better sources than someone who thinks he's in a mission from god like he's the blues brothers. china hasn't done "a great job" at framing the west for lying otherwise there wouldn't be a wikipedia page and we wouldn't be discussing this on hacker news. the sad reality is that china doesn't give a shit about its reputation abroad, which is why many of the rebuttals to those claims are in chinese. one is here: https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/13029926735409111... – it's by the chinese state media so one can still claim they're lying.
on the "cities that were once heavy uyghur communities ..." as i mentioned above: kashgar still has a lot of uyghurs. they go to their mosques and so on.
what is true, however, is that china is encouraging resettlement of han chinese (they've been doing it for decades), for the sole purpose of making the uyghurs a minority in their own land. this is something that personally i don't like, but (here comes the whataboutism) i have not seen a single piece of criticism when this happened literally everywhere else, minus of course when it was accompanied by planned extermination, which only applies to anatolia's christian minorities, as the jews were already a small minority in the locations that were affected by the deportations.
Which Muslim?
Germany was USSR's ally in their planned occupation of Europe, which fortunately never happened.
USSR spent the remaining 45 years of its existence erasing the fact Union-Germany military alliance from the history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-German_cooperation_(1926%...
Quite strange to see Chinese in German uniforms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-German_cooperation_(1926%...
#/media/File:Chiang_Wei-kuo_Nazi_2.jpg){kind=link}
Pupils in Russian secondary schools are now told this > never happened, and it was all American propaganda lies: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Bundesar...
The key phrase in the article:
> Hitler announced it was his last territorial claim in Europe.
Of course it were Lebrun, and Chamberlain who were soiling their pants just few years later when they understood their own folly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
1. Occupation of Czechoslovakia - Poland happily took part in this. Does it count as dividing Europe together with nazis?
2. Munich agreement between nazi Reich and UK and France. Does it count as dividing Europe together with nazis?
A big part of the Western establishment was happily planning for chummy future in Europe with Hitler, and things he did.
Of course when the war came, and German attacked not some Czechoslovakia, but France — a Great Power, and made aggression towards GB, and USA, everybody instantly picked a barely believable narrative about them not doing so.
And yes, they soiled their pants. Chamberlain locked himself in his cabinet and drank for days.
That's a lie/hyperbole that is being pushed in the last decade or so. Although I imagine every country had some plans of occupying Europe at some point or another, saying USSR was planning on occupying it based on Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is lie.
To this public pact of nonaggression was appended a secret protocol, also reached on August 23, 1939, which divided the whole of eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Poland east of the line formed by the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers would fall under the Soviet sphere of influence. The protocol also assigned Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland to the Soviet sphere of influence and, further, broached the subject of the separation of Bessarabia from Romania. A secret supplementary protocol (signed September 28, 1939) clarified the Lithuanian borders. The Polish-German border was also determined, and Bessarabia was assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence. In a third secret protocol (signed January 10, 1941, by Count Friedrich Werner von Schulenberg and Molotov), Germany renounced its claims to portions of Lithuania in return for Soviet payment of a sum agreed upon by the two countries.
https://www.britannica.com/event/German-Soviet-Nonaggression...
1. what was exactly (and please be specific) was the Soviet military's objective after moving 600,000 – 800,000 troops, in 33 divisions with ~5,000 guns, 4,700 tanks, and 3,300 aircraft onto Polish soil on 17 September 1939?
2. were say the USA to land a similar expeditionary force in Russia tomorrow, what would you call it?
Was Poland a Nazi ally with intention of occupying Europe when it amassed its army in Czechoslovakia?
Citing the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Axis_tal...:
> Stalin directed Molotov to draft a new pact with a much greater scope, including the division of Europe, Asia and Africa among the four powers [i.e. USSR, Germany, Italy, Japan]. On November 25, the same day as the surprise statement of Soviet nonresistance to Bulgaria's joining the Axis and a potential Soviet joining of the pact [sic], the Soviets offered a counterproposal to Ribbentrop's draft agreement. It began, "The Soviet government is prepared to accept the draft of the Pact of Four Powers on political cooperation and economic mutual assistance". [...]
> On several occasions, Molotov asked German officials for their response to Moscow's counterproposals, but Germany never answered them.
> Regarding the counterproposal, Hitler remarked to his top military chiefs that Stalin "demands more and more", "he's a cold-blooded blackmailer" and "a German victory has become unbearable for Russia"...
Also, I'm not saying that these talks were honest - they were diplomacy after all. But none of the sides were in the "minding my own business" business.
Well, Stalin saying this, on record, many times, also told "American lies?"
The giant USSR's military buildup prior to WW2 was for fighting whom? Stalin did not believe his own spies telling him Hitler was planning an attack on him.
This sentence comes up a lot and I've never seen it fail as an indicator of either ignorance or Nazi apologism
It's always jarring to me, with my modern/simplistic/naive perspective of these major historical events, to consider that the people who lived during and/or participated in these events didn't understand full extent of what they were seeing or what was happening. It totally makes sense, academically...fog of war, slow/spotty spread of information, determining what's propaganda and what's not.
But still, there's something mind-blowing to me about a soldier mowing down the fence at Auschwitz with a tank, but not knowing what the place was.