Soldato
You know I really have never ever heard anyone remotely suggest that that Polish state or any significant group of Polish citizens cooperated with the Nazis. I just don't know why the announcement and law change was necessary.
*** Youtube/Video thread ***
- Thread starter Zefan
- Start date
Man of Honour
Is this what the thread is about?
Until now Polish politics did not care when other countries tried to change the Real WW2 history for their own purposes.
'POLAND WAS subjected to the most vicious policies of the Nazi German regime. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, between 1939 and 1945 at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Poles were murdered. In addition, up to 1.5 million Polish citizens were sent to Germany for slave labor. This is in addition to the three million Jewish Polish citizens murdered in the Holocaust. The destruction wrought on Poland was also extreme, with Warsaw razed to the ground in 1944 during the Polish Home Army uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto had already been destroyed during the 1943 uprising.
Poland is right to be angry when it is made to appear that Poles were somehow responsible for the Shoah. Unlike most other countries occupied by Germany during the war, Poland did not provide a ready recruitment base for Nazi collaboration. For instance, the Waffen-SS recruited local units in Albania, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, Latvia, Norway, Romania, Sweden and other countries. It didn’t find recruits among Poles. According to a 1993 letter from the War Crimes Office in Ludwigsburg, an office that had collected material relating to Nazi war crimes in West Germany, “There was no Waffen-SS unit similar to the Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, etc. divisions that would have consisted solely of Polish volunteers.” This account is published in Tadeusz Piotrowski’s Poland’s Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947.
I recall reading Maus, the graphic novel by Art Spiegelman that shows Jews, illustrated as mice, being sent to their deaths. Poles are depicted as pigs in the novel. The novel’s Jewish main character fights the Germans with the Polish army and is later sent to a series of concentration and death camps. Maus made me feel that Poland was somehow responsible for the Holocaust, or at least that many Poles collaborated in it. It was only years later, reading books like Kulski’s that I realized, in fact, the opposite was true. Poland and Poles were major victims, alongside Jews. It’s not a surprise that Maus encountered protests in Poland because the author depicted Poles as pigs. The German Nazis were depicted as cats.
History has an odd way of giving us the sense that Poles collaborated with Nazism, while whitewashing the real collaboration in Western Europe. We are often taught that Denmark saved the Jews. However it is often forgotten that an estimated 6,000 Danes volunteered for Nazi collaborationist units, including SS units like the SS Division Wiking and SS Division Nordland.
THERE WERE 40,000 Nazi volunteers in Belgium, according to George Stein’s 1984 book The Waffen SS. And the Germans found willing collaborators in many other countries as well, where they had no problem staffing local units. In France, they had an entire regime under the Vichy government willing to help expel Jews and do their bidding. Almost everywhere in Europe, except for among some groups such as Serbs and Poles, there was distinct collaboration. By contrast, in most Western countries there was almost no resistance to Nazism. Compared to the Polish Home Army, which had hundreds of thousands of recruits to resist the Nazis, other resistance movements had trouble finding a handful of volunteers.'
Soldato
I'm now 100% with this.
Man of Honour
Thanks
Soldato
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2012
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The thing that gets me about it is how it was industrialised, so cold and clinical that what happened is they basically built factories that manufactured emaciated corpses.
Yes there are many horrific bloodstains in the book of human history but more often than not they're spontaneous, hot blooded murdering on a mass scale. The holocaust just had so much thought and planning put into it.
Everyone always mentions the Holocaust for what it quite rightly is, utterly despicable, but what shocked me more (if that's even possible) is what the Japanese did with Unit 731, as well as at Nanking around the same time. What they did to children made me feel ill. Truly evil.
Soldato
Very true, the experiments carried out by Unit 731 make Josef Mengle look like Mary Poppins. And what's even worse, whilst the Nazi perpetrators of the holocaust were put on trial the Japs behind Unit 731 were granted immunity by the US if they shared their research and findings from the human experimentation. Makes me understand exactly why my two of my Great Uncles hated the Japs 'till the day they died, and why they never spoke of what they witnessed during the war.
Man of Honour
Nothing like a pro London advert to divide the country!
Soldato
for real bra'? I thought that vert was the dogs whisker!
Caporegime
Man of Honour
Cody (of Cody's Lab) made a fairly accurate scale model showing the distance to the nearest star, scaled to the sun being the size of a small pea. He mixes metric and imperial units and I'm converting imperial to metric very roughly in my heard. On that scale, the Earth is a speck invisible to the naked eye about 70cm away. Pluto is about 30 metres away. The Voyager 1 space probe that's the most distant human-made object is a bit less than 100 metres away. I think it's worth having a guess at how far away the nearest star is on that scale. I was way out, out by a factor of 5.
His account has been banned from uploading (again) because someone complained about a video in which he explains a very long and completely impractical way to make gunpowder, something that hundreds of videos on Youtube explain how to do far more quickly and easily. He's obviously being targetted for some reason. There's a lot of really good educational video on his channel, mainly about chemistry.
His account has been banned from uploading (again) because someone complained about a video in which he explains a very long and completely impractical way to make gunpowder, something that hundreds of videos on Youtube explain how to do far more quickly and easily. He's obviously being targetted for some reason. There's a lot of really good educational video on his channel, mainly about chemistry.
Quite enjoyed that!
Nice reference to the Monty Python crew's Four Yorkshiremen sketch throughout and Matrix Reloaded near the end. I'll have to see if there are any more in there.
Also... "I don't even have a whole bike!" made me smile
Soldato
Damn I was just about to post that Nike advert. Its a good advert, but it would have been better to have been about Britain, rather than just London. Especially as they have based the entire advert on a sketch called the 4 Yorkshiremen...
Man of Honour
Which was much funnier.
Caporegime