Re: OT - Remembering D-Day, 6 June 1944.
Stalingrad was the most important battle of the War and turning point of the
war. Like mentioned above, our guys never make it to the beach because
there would have been many more troops there although Hitler had the bulk
of his troops in Northern France where he expected the invasion to come.
Stalingrad was also important to the N. AFrican campaign. While Hitler's
army was bogged down in house to house fighting there, Rommel was going
thru Africa to get Libya's oil. MOntgomery defeated him only because he
got more supplies and fuel in a week than Rommel got in a month because
of Stalingrad.
Hitler wrote that Napolean should have never invaded Russia and then he
makes the same mistake but he could have won if he listened to his
generals who wanted to go straight into MOscow and cut the head off first
and then go back to Stalingrad.
That's what U.S. did in the Iraqi war. They went straight into Bagdad
and then went back to take the other towns after their army was cut off,
but no Stalingrad, no victory at Normandy.
Ike had no backup plan if Normandy failed. The Germans killed or
maimed over 1/3 of Russia's population and they still defeated GErmany,
thanks to Hitler's stupidity.
Hitler was our best ally and the Allies certainly didn't want him dead when
his own officers tried to kill him - twice.
Check out Tom Cruise's movie - Valkyrie. Chilling, very chilling.
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm22985472...9?ref_=tt_ov_i
Re: OT - Remembering D-Day, 6 June 1944.
Thank all for sharing on this most Historic Day! Visited Omaha Beach, Utah Beach, St. Mere Eglise, Pegasus Bridge and many other heroic landing sites and just simply stood in awe of what 'The Greatest Generation' sacrificed for our freedom! God Bless all of them!
Re: OT - Remembering D-Day, 6 June 1944.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
lobachevsky
knots: I visited Dachau on my first trip to Europe in 1980. Amazing how you walk through the gate & the place just sucks all the color out of a bright summer day.
Interesting that we had exactly the same feeling. I was there in '81, and as soon as I walked through the gate, I stopped, removed the color film from my camera, and loaded a roll of black & white. It seemed to be a place where color shouldn't exist.
Re: OT - Remembering D-Day, 6 June 1944.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
lobachevsky
knots: I visited Dachau on my first trip to Europe in 1980. Amazing how you walk through the gate & the place just sucks all the color out of a bright summer day
My wife and I went to Germany last summer and Dachau was our first stop.
You hit the nail on the head. Once I saw "Arbeit macht frie" on the gates, I knew I was in for some emotions I'd never felt before.
I could feel death all around me. Very chilling but the curators did a fantastic job with the place. Respectful and informative.
Re: OT - Remembering D-Day, 6 June 1944.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
lobachevsky
--the soldiers of the old Soviet Union were tough, brave, determined & could endure just about anything, & their country ran red with their blood. We lost roughly 400,000 citizens on both fronts--the USSR lost 20 million.
Good comments Loba. A lot of Americans don't realize how many Russians died during WWII and Stalin's purges. Here is one of their main memorials to their war dead.
http://www.war-memorial.net/Mamayev-...Memorial--1.93
Re: OT - Remembering D-Day, 6 June 1944.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
moose10101
Interesting that we had exactly the same feeling. I was there in '81, and as soon as I walked through the gate, I stopped, removed the color film from my camera, and loaded a roll of black & white. It seemed to be a place where color shouldn't exist.
Judging from HR's response--
Quote:
Originally Posted by
HoustonRaven
My wife and I went to Germany last summer and Dachau was our first stop.
You hit the nail on the head.
--we weren't alone, & it's still true >30 years on.
Quote:
Once I saw "Arbeit macht frei" on the gates, I knew I was in for some emotions I'd never felt before.
I could feel death all around me. Very chilling but the curators did a fantastic job with the place. Respectful and informative.
It's even more chilling at Buchenwald or Auschwitz.
Though IMO Auschwitz itself--a former Polish Army camp with brick barracks--is not as dramatic as Dachau. (Possibly more informative though--many of those buildings contain exhibits devoted to specific aspects of the atrocities. Not just Jews--I never understood how near the Nazis came to wiping out the Roma ["gypsies"] until I went through the barracks describing it.) You have to make the ~2 km to the Birkenau annex, with the infamous train tracks running into the camp, which blows you away with its sheer size. That's where 1,500,000 human beings were murdered.
En route from Erfurt to Prague in 2010 I detoured to Weimar for a few hours specifically to visit Buchenwald. Jumped off the bus at the wrong spot & ended up following the route of the old train tracks for about 3 km in a heavy mist to reach the camp.
What first blew my mind about Dachau was how close it is to Munich. From the Hauptbahnhof in the city center via the S2 S-Bahn & bus 726, roughly a half hour. I got off the bus, looked around at the charming houses of Dachau-Dorf outside the camp walls, & thought, Don't anyone try to tell me "they didn't know"!
I was traveling back to town on the S-Bahn with 3 other Yanks, a gorgeous blond med student (broke my heart we were headed in opposite directions) & two young priests from Iowa, when a middle-aged woman got on with her elderly mother. We gave up seats for them & the daughter, who spoke some English, asked us cheerily how we were enjoying München. We allowed as how it was quite nice...& then I said, "We have just come from Dachau." A dark cloud seemed to sweep across her face & she stammered, I was very young, and I did not know--
We don't choose our parents or our birthplaces. But it was very hard not to glance at her mother...
Re: OT - Remembering D-Day, 6 June 1944.
The Germans always said they didn't know.
Some US soldiers that freed some of those camps above were interviewed on TV and said
they interrogated a priest in the town about what went on and he said he didn't know anything
had happened.
The soldier knew he was lying because the entire town smelled of corpses that all over the camp.
He said none of their training and combat experiences prepared them for what they saw
at those camps.
I don't think I could handle the emotions going to Dachau. God destroyed the earth because
of what man did to each other before the flood. That was nothing compared to what man did to man in the 20th Century.
Re: OT - Remembering D-Day, 6 June 1944.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
lobachevsky
What first blew my mind about Dachau was how close it is to Munich. From the Hauptbahnhof in the city center via the S2 S-Bahn & bus 726, roughly a half hour. I got off the bus, looked around at the charming houses of Dachau-Dorf outside the camp walls, & thought, Don't anyone try to tell me "they didn't know"!
I'm going to take issue with this here.
My wife's "German Parents" (her host parents when she lived in Sauerlach) are well into the 70's and we've had many frank discussions with them. Sure, there were rumors and rumblings, but they did not know the full extent of what was going on.
Take a look at an aerial view of Dachau back then. Other than quarters for the troops, there's literally no housing anywhere close to the camp. Nothing but trees and a long dirt road separated Munich from Dachau back then. Today, it's like any other suburb but back then it was "in the sticks" as we would say.
The Nazi's went to great lengths to hide what was going on. Even in the camp itself, most troops had no idea what was going on just across the creek in that secluded little brick house.
Re: OT - Remembering D-Day, 6 June 1944.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
HoustonRaven
I'm going to take issue with this here.
My wife's "German Parents" (her host parents when she lived in Sauerlach) are well into the 70's and we've had many frank discussions with them. Sure, there were rumors and rumblings, but they did not know the full extent of what was going on.
Take a look at an aerial view of Dachau back then. Other than quarters for the troops, there's literally no housing anywhere close to the camp. Nothing but trees and a long dirt road separated Munich from Dachau back then. Today, it's like any other suburb but back then it was "in the sticks" as we would say.
The Nazi's went to great lengths to hide what was going on. Even in the camp itself, most troops had no idea what was going on just across the creek in that secluded little brick house.
Oh sure the "Nazis went to great lengths to hide" etc...you mean like painting JUDEN on store windows, beating Jews in the streets, taking civil and job rights away, and burning books? AND that started in the 1930's. Of course Hitler had the trains running on time.
IMO they knew... Bc
Re: OT - Remembering D-Day, 6 June 1944.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
BcRaven
Oh sure the "Nazis went to great lengths to hide" etc...you mean like painting JUDEN on store windows, beating Jews in the streets, taking civil and job rights away, and burning books? AND that started in the 1930's. Of course Hitler had the trains running on time.
IMO they knew... Bc
When the topic of "they knew" comes up, it's about if Germans knew about the mass killings.
Read <insert the most basic history text here> and you'll quickly find out the average German citizen were in the dark about the "Central Solution".
Of course they knew of the oppression and discrimination by the regime. Nobody argued otherwise. It's the mass killing that wasn't known until well into the war.
Re: OT - Remembering D-Day, 6 June 1944.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
HoustonRaven
When the topic of "they knew" comes up, it's about if Germans knew about the mass killings.
Read <insert the most basic history text here> and you'll quickly find out the average German citizen were in the dark about the "Central Solution".
Of course they knew of the oppression and discrimination by the regime. Nobody argued otherwise. It's the mass killing that wasn't known until well into the war.
While I'm not disputing your post here, every step the 3rd Reich took was another step down the slippery slope to Hell. The German people looked the other way, and allowed it to fall into what it ultimately became. OR are you saying if they (German people) would have known, they would have done something about it? ... Bc
P.S. - I think those savage bastards called it "the final solution."
Re: OT - Remembering D-Day, 6 June 1944.
As the US soldier said on TV, you knew the priest was lying because you could smell the
death of the camps all over the town. A lot of GIs threw up when they entered the camps.
Not only that there were plenty of German citizens that ended up dead in those camps
for hiding Jews.
Corrie Tenboon's entire family perished in one of the camps. Her family hid Jews for
years before getting caught. She was the only one who survived because of a clerical
mistake that sent her to another camp that was then liberated. She was a little girl
later wrote a book about it that became a movie - THE HIDING PLACE.
http://www.google.com/search?client=...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
The Holocoust Museum in Israel has about 20 trees lined up the walk way leading to
the building and a memorial marker is on each tree of people that helped the Jews
during the Holocoust.
Tinboom's name is the only non-Jewish name on one of the trees and she's from
Denmark.
The German's knew alright. FDR said after his troops liberated the camps that he
heard about it but just didn't believe it.