On the 65th anniversary of D-Day, is it time to let it go?

[Yogi]

Personally, I don't see how the Nazis were more evil than any OTHER country which invaded another one and began enslaving and/or killing the locals with the only difference between Nazis and say, America, is that the Jews were considered more human (read: white) than the Native Americans (though that didn't stop the US from turning away a boat full of Jewish refugees, thereby sending them back to the Nazis.) While I've read Patrick Degan's opinion on the subject, I can't see the connection between "being better at doing something" and "more evil."

[Axis Kast]

Also, a quick comment on France.

The American attitude vis-a-vis France stems not from the experience of the Second World War, but instead of the De Gaulle era, when the French were coming to grips with their much-diminished status in the world and Americans were apt to regard French nationalism as an unwelcome and ill-conceived sideshow to NATO.

[K. A. Pital]

CJvR wins the thread with "bogus conspiracy theories and historical frauds".

Personally, I don't see how the Nazis were more evil than any OTHER country which invaded another one and began enslaving and/or killing the locals with the only difference between Nazis and say, America, is that the Jews were considered more human (read: white) than the Native Americans (though that didn't stop the US from turning away a boat full of Jewish refugees, thereby sending them back to the Nazis.)

Yogi also wins the thread by projecting pre-XX century realities at the XX century. Care to remind which nation's demographic policy was "nigh total annihilation of subhumans" (and truly total annihilation of some kinds of subhumans, like Jews), in the XX century? Even Imperial Japan despite all their evils wasn't totally intent on utterly annihilating China, although they do come close.

Also, are you saying that the genocide of Native Americans by Europe was not a truly evil act of utter annihilation in it's own right? It's in the other century, but the guilty parties are evil - it's just that by the XX century, that genocide was already long complete and almost forgotted - but another one quite like it was, thankfully, stopped in World War II.

[Darth Hoth]

Personally, I don't see how the Nazis were more evil than any OTHER country which invaded another one and began enslaving and/or killing the locals with the only difference between Nazis and say, America, is that the Jews were considered more human (read: white) than the Native Americans (though that didn't stop the US from turning away a boat full of Jewish refugees, thereby sending them back to the Nazis.) While I've read Patrick Degan's opinion on the subject, I can't see the connection between "being better at doing something" and "more evil."

Stas dealt with the dishonest comparison. On another issue, I was not aware that the United States had employed a consistent government policy of genocide on American Indians in any way remotely resembling what evolved into the exterminatory apparatus of Second World War Germany. Would you provide evidence for such?

[Setzer]

I don't think it was a premediated, organized effort. I just think some people attacked Indian villages whenever they wanted. It was more like grassroots genocide then state sponsored genocide.

[PeZook]

For people trying to equate the USSR with Nazi Germany, think about this: What did the Soviets do with their new satellite countries in Eastern Europe?

They installed puppet governments and brutally crushed any opposition to them, yes. Then they proceeded to reconstruct the industries, farms and cities ruined by the Nazis. Poland got its electrified rail network, the phone network and universities in all major cities during Communist rule.

Yeah, therese was opression under Stalin. Yes, terrible injustice happened to partisan fighters happening to have been on the other ideological side than Communism.

However, they didn't try to murder everyone in conquered territories. Sorry, guys - opression and even terror doesn't compare to setting daily food rations for adults to 300 calories.

On the topic of the thread, I think that WWII should not be used as a political argument in any way: quarrels about, say, war reparations sixty years after the fact are pointless and only sour current relations. On the other hand, that war, as Stas said, was a pivotal and defining moment of world history, and must not be forgotten. Fortunately, as time passes, teaching about WWII can be closer and closer to the truth.

Personally, I will make sure my kids remember the war and the sacrifices it demanded.

[Faqa]

What makes the Nazi ideology more evil than the Stalinist/Communist ideology?

Well, my short definition of the two in a sufficiently inaccurate way that Stas will probably disembowel me:

Stalinism - I am leading men to a brave new future. If we try hard enough, this future will happen. Millions of men must die to clear the road for this future.

Nazism - WE are the future. Others are not men. They are animals to be hunted down.

THAT'S the primary difference, to my eye.

Stalinism had a greater good, an idea for the world, however horrific the means to achieve it may have been. Nazism dictated the removal of humanity for whole classes of people. This Jew is not human. This Slav is not human. This German is. It takes the idea of a shared humanity and rejects it. Without a shared humanity, what distinctions man HAS made between himself and the animal become meaningless. Therefore, Nazism is, in the end, poisonous to humanity. Communism is at least only hazardous to humans.

On a tangent, the ease with which the Nazis removed the humanity of the non-Aryan is, in my mind, the most horrific thing about the Holocaust. Because it shows how humanity teeters on the brink of savagery even in at it's most "civilized".

(For examples of ultimate irony, see some Israeli attitudes towards Arabs. *sigh*)

[CaptHawkeye]

I think western media has done such a wonderful job poisoning the well against the old Soviet Union that it's difficult to find any realistic or fair critics of the USSR who aren't basically just "hurr hurr go teh capitlaism beta ded than REDD11!1!" reactionaries.

Yeah, the USSR sure as shit wasn't nice to anyone during the war, but it's not like they were systemically exterminating the populace of every country they walked into. Besides, no one in the Post-War Soviet Union except for the extreme hardliners ever looked back on Stalin as a great guy. His own staff fucking hated him. Their's a reason "De-Stalinization" was enthusiastically supported by the citizens and government of the USSR after Uncle Joe died. They wanted to wash the country's image of him.

[CJvR]

Sources?
Aldrig mer! - Staffan Skott
Gulag och glömskan - Bent Jensen

Well there was a deportation prepared for the Soviet Jews, and given the historical results of those the survival chanses were not too good. Baracks were built in Gulag for them, excuses prepared as to why it was needed "to protect them from the wrath of the population" etc...

Im always amused by the "Glamorous Commie" tag. It reminds me of a charming little scene described in a book about the Gulag where a prisoner recognizes the First Lady of the Soviet Union busy scraping louse eggs from prison overalls with a glas shard.

[Elfdart]

On the positive side of WW2's cultural legacy, it's worth pointing out that sci-fi authors from the postwar era often had wartime experience and as a result, they tended to have much more "grounded" view of things than sci-fi authors today. Modern sci-fi authors seem to base their writing primarily on other movies and TV shows, rather than any kind of applicable life experience.

Most writers in every genre had experience in WW2 since in the US alone, over 12 million men enlisted or were drafted. I would imagine other countries had similar rates or higher.

On another note, I found this article interesting:

BBC

Revisionists challenge D-Day story

By Hugh Schofield
Paris

A revisionist theme seems to have settled on this year's 65th anniversary commemoration of the Normandy landings.

The tone was set in Antony's Beevor's new book, D-Day, which tries to debunk certain received ideas about the Allied campaign.

Far from being an unmitigated success, Mr Beevor found, the landings came very close to going horribly wrong.

And far from being universally welcomed as liberators, many troops had a distinctly surly reception from the people of Normandy.

The reason for this was simple. Many Normandy towns and villages had been literally obliterated by Allied bombing.

The bombardment of Caen, Mr Beevor said, could almost be considered a war-crime (though he later retracted the comment).

Many historians will retort that there is nothing new in Mr Beevor's account.

Harrowing experience

After all, the scale of destruction is already well-established.

Some 20,000 French civilians were killed in the two-and-a-half months from D-Day, 3,000 of them during the actual landings.

In some areas - like the Falaise pocket where the Germans were pounded into oblivion at the end of the campaign - barely a building was left standing and soldiers had to walk over banks of human corpses.
“ The suffering of civilians was for many years masked by the over-riding image - that of the French welcoming the liberators with open arms ”
Christophe Prime Historian

As for the destruction of Caen, it has long been admitted that it was militarily useless.

The Germans were stationed to the north of the city and were more or less untouched.

Twenty-five years ago, in his book Overlord, Max Hastings had already described it as "one of the most futile air attacks of the war."

Though these revisionist accounts were written elsewhere, it is in France that these ideas strike more of a chord today.

It is not as if the devastation wrought by the Allies is not known - it is just that it tends not to get talked about.

And yet for many families who lived through the war, it was the arrival and passage of British and American forces that was by far the most harrowing experience.

"It was profoundly traumatic for the people of Normandy," said Christophe Prime, a historian at the Peace Memorial in Caen.

"Think of the hundreds of tons of bombs destroying entire cities and wiping out families. But the suffering of civilians was for many years masked by the over-riding image - that of the French welcoming the liberators with open arms."

'Sullen' welcome

According to Prime, it was during the 60th anniversary commemoration five years ago that the taboo first began to lift.

At town meetings across Normandy, witnesses - now on their 70s - spoke of the terrible things they had seen as children.

At the same time an exhibition at the Caen memorial displayed letters from Allied servicemen speaking frankly about their poor reception by locals.

That too was an eye-opener for many Normandy people.

For example, Cpl LF Roker of the Highland Light Infantry is quoted in another new book about the civilian impact of the campaign, Liberation, The Bitter Road to Freedom, by William Hitchcock.

"It was rather a shock to find we were not welcomed ecstatically as liberators by the local people, as we were told we should be... They saw us as bringers of destruction and pain," Mr Roker wrote in his diary.

Another soldier, Ivor Astley of the 43rd Wessex Infantry, described the locals as "sullen and silent... If we expected a welcome, we certainly failed to find it."

Sexual violence

In his book, Mr Hitchcock raises another issue that rarely features in euphoric folk-memories of liberation: Allied looting, and worse.

"The theft and looting of Normandy households and farmsteads by liberating soldiers began on June 6 and never stopped during the entire summer," he writes.

One woman - from the town of Colombieres - is quoted as saying that "the enthusiasm for the liberators is diminishing. They are looting... everything, and going into houses everywhere on the pretext of looking for Germans."

“ The evidence shows that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common ”
Author William Hitchcock

Even more feared, of course, was the crime of rape - and here too the true picture has arguably been expunged from popular memory.

According to American historian J Robert Lilly, there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war.

"The evidence shows that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common," writes Mr Hitchcock.

"It also shows that black soldiers convicted of such awful acts received very severe punishments, while white soldiers received lighter sentences."

Of 29 soldiers executed for rape by the US military authorities, 25 were black - though African-Americans did not represent nearly so high a proportion of convictions.

Happy and thankful

So why did the "bad" side of the Allied liberation tend to disappear from French popular consciousness?

The answer of course is that the overwhelming result of the Allied campaign was a positive one for the whole of France.

It was hard for the people of Normandy to spoil the national party by complaining of their lot.

The message from on-high was sympathetic but clear: we know you have suffered, but the price was worth it. Most people agreed and were silent.

In addition, open criticism of British and American bombings raids had long been a hallmark of French collaboration.

In Paris - which, it is often forgotten, was itself bombed by the British - pro-German groups staged ceremonies to commemorate the victims, and the "crimes" of the Allies were excoriated in the press.

After the war, abusing the Allies would have seemed like siding with the defeated and the dishonoured.

Of course, in some communities the devastation was never forgotten.

There are villages in Normandy where until recently the 6 June celebrations were deliberately shunned, because the associations were too painful.

And on the ideological front, there have been intellectuals of both left and right who justified their anti-Americanism by recalling the grimmer aspects of the French campaign - like the "cowardly" way the Americans bombed from high altitude, or their reliance on heavy armour causing indiscriminate civilian casualties.

But in general, France has gone along with the accepted version of the landings and their aftermath - that of a joyful liberation for which the country is eternally grateful.

That version is the correct one. France was indeed freed from tyranny, and the French were both happy and thankful.

But it is still worth remembering that it all came at a cost.

Three thousand five hundred rapes in less than a year? That's ten per day!

[Elfdart]

Personally, I don't see how the Nazis were more evil than any OTHER country which invaded another one and began enslaving and/or killing the locals with the only difference between Nazis and say, America, is that the Jews were considered more human (read: white) than the Native Americans (though that didn't stop the US from turning away a boat full of Jewish refugees, thereby sending them back to the Nazis.) While I've read Patrick Degan's opinion on the subject, I can't see the connection between "being better at doing something" and "more evil."

Stas dealt with the dishonest comparison. On another issue, I was not aware that the United States had employed a consistent government policy of genocide on American Indians in any way remotely resembling what evolved into the exterminatory apparatus of Second World War Germany. Would you provide evidence for such?

I'm pretty sure that if people like Custer and Chivington had cyanide gas, machineguns and crematoria to work with they would have done exactly what the Nazis did.

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, the guys equating Stalinism to Nazism aren't Jews, so I guess they really don't mind that since being exterminated in ovens and gas chambers doesn't apply to them.

[Guardsman Bass]

Personally, I don't see how the Nazis were more evil than any OTHER country which invaded another one and began enslaving and/or killing the locals with the only difference between Nazis and say, America, is that the Jews were considered more human (read: white) than the Native Americans (though that didn't stop the US from turning away a boat full of Jewish refugees, thereby sending them back to the Nazis.) While I've read Patrick Degan's opinion on the subject, I can't see the connection between "being better at doing something" and "more evil."

Stas dealt with the dishonest comparison. On another issue, I was not aware that the United States had employed a consistent government policy of genocide on American Indians in any way remotely resembling what evolved into the exterminatory apparatus of Second World War Germany. Would you provide evidence for such?

I'm pretty sure that if people like Custer and Chivington had cyanide gas, machineguns and crematoria to work with they would have done exactly what the Nazis did.

I'm not so certain. The main point of the Indian expulsions was to just get them off the land - they didn't particularly give a shit where they went, as long as it wasn't on the land they wanted and they weren't a security threat. That's why they didn't simply annihilate the Cherokee, for example, instead sending them on a very brutal march into territory west of the Mississippi and largely considered worthless at the time. It wasn't until later that you had them rounding up the Indians onto reservations, and even then they were more content to let them waste away than going to the trouble of directly killing them off in the reservations.

It's not as if the technology was some big barrier as well - just look at the history of massacres throughout history that weren't committed with guns, plus the incidents in the 19th century when the US really did try to completely annihilate the native population in a local area, like the aforementioned Chivington massacre.

Compare that to the Nazis, who deliberately went out of their way to capture Jews and other minorities, spend resources shipping them to camps, and then set up an official method for extermination after working them to death.

[CmdrWilkens]

Personally, I don't see how the Nazis were more evil than any OTHER country which invaded another one and began enslaving and/or killing the locals with the only difference between Nazis and say, America, is that the Jews were considered more human (read: white) than the Native Americans (though that didn't stop the US from turning away a boat full of Jewish refugees, thereby sending them back to the Nazis.) While I've read Patrick Degan's opinion on the subject, I can't see the connection between "being better at doing something" and "more evil."

Stas dealt with the dishonest comparison. On another issue, I was not aware that the United States had employed a consistent government policy of genocide on American Indians in any way remotely resembling what evolved into the exterminatory apparatus of Second World War Germany. Would you provide evidence for such?

I'm pretty sure that if people like Custer and Chivington had cyanide gas, machineguns and crematoria to work with they would have done exactly what the Nazis did.

Yet at the same time Custer would suffer through at least one court martial at the direction of Hancock. Though technically for being AWOL it was largely for the excess that he had shown. While there was a general cultural derision towards Native Americans (much as there was great derision towards freed slaves) there was no form of organized government murder. The closest one could come to that is the "Trail of Tears" back a generation before Custer. Everything else was more akin to the randomn destruction that plagued conquering armies in virtually every recorded war from the plundering of the Germanies during the 30 years war to the actions of "Bloody Ban" Tarleton during the American War of Independence to privations forced on Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, or the indiscriminate civilian deaths in the occupation of Belgium in the 1st World War. In other words the deaths in most of the plains state tribes is more readily attributable to the oldest rules of civilian suffering during wartime rather than a formal governmental attempt to wipe out the tribes.

[Yogi]

Yogi also wins the thread by projecting pre-XX century realities at the XX century. Care to remind which nation's demographic policy was "nigh total annihilation of subhumans" (and truly total annihilation of some kinds of subhumans, like Jews), in the XX century? Even Imperial Japan despite all their evils wasn't totally intent on utterly annihilating China, although they do come close.

Who cares what century it's in really? Was it less wrong because it occurred the previous century?

Also, are you saying that the genocide of Native Americans by Europe was not a truly evil act of utter annihilation in it's own right?

No. The opposite, actually.

Stas dealt with the dishonest comparison. On another issue, I was not aware that the United States had employed a consistent government policy of genocide on American Indians in any way remotely resembling what evolved into the exterminatory apparatus of Second World War Germany. Would you provide evidence for such?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. How does the Nazis being better at doing something (in this case, killing people) make them worse with people who happen to use cruder and less organized methods? You made the claim, you back it up.

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, the concept of "war crimes" was only invented rather recently. Centuries ago, warfare was routinely conducted in barbaric fashion, with the victor taking the spoils of war - loot, defeated soldiers, and women from conquered lands to be turned into wenches for the victors of war.

It's no less immoral, but back in the day rape and pillaging were also common place and you don't see anyone complaining about it.

[Ziggy Stardust]

How does the Nazis being better at doing something (in this case, killing people) make them worse with people who happen to use cruder and less organized methods? You made the claim, you back it up.

Do you honestly not see the differences between America's westward expansion and the Holocaust? Do you not see how one of them is an order of magnitude worse than the other?

[Darth Wong]

Well, the concept of "war crimes" was only invented rather recently. Centuries ago, warfare was routinely conducted in barbaric fashion, with the victor taking the spoils of war - loot, defeated soldiers, and women from conquered lands to be turned into wenches for the victors of war.

It's no less immoral, but back in the day rape and pillaging were also common place and you don't see anyone complaining about it.

What's the point of complaining about it? It's ancient history. We do, however, use terms like "savage", "backward", "barbaric", and "medieval mindset" as insults.

[Qwerty 42]

Well, the concept of "war crimes" was only invented rather recently. Centuries ago, warfare was routinely conducted in barbaric fashion, with the victor taking the spoils of war - loot, defeated soldiers, and women from conquered lands to be turned into wenches for the victors of war.

It's no less immoral, but back in the day rape and pillaging were also common place and you don't see anyone complaining about it.

What's the point of complaining about it? It's ancient history. We do, however, use terms like "savage", "backward", "barbaric", and "medieval mindset" as insults.

Indeed, I don't know that anyone attaches the same moral imagery to ancient campaigns that they do to the Normandy proceedings. Medieval players like Atilla, Alexander, and Sun Tzu are appreciated for the military exploits, not really for their ethical superiority.

[CmdrWilkens]

Well, the concept of "war crimes" was only invented rather recently. Centuries ago, warfare was routinely conducted in barbaric fashion, with the victor taking the spoils of war - loot, defeated soldiers, and women from conquered lands to be turned into wenches for the victors of war.

It's no less immoral, but back in the day rape and pillaging were also common place and you don't see anyone complaining about it.

What's the point of complaining about it? It's ancient history. We do, however, use terms like "savage", "backward", "barbaric", and "medieval mindset" as insults.

Yet the terms "savage", "barbaric" , and "backward" amongst others have been used since time immemorial. Its the designation of a group of others as lesser for some perceived or real flaw in their culture related to the "superior" culture. While Medieval is a more recent insult the decrying of ones opponents as subhuman in how the engage in both everyday life as well as warfare is probably as old as civilization itself.

Each generation is left to judge the previous one and more often than not we find ourselves looking down on their inferior morals. Everything from complaining about the decadence of Rome, the capriciousness of the Papacy, or the vices of Kings and Emperors we have found a way to declare the New to be morally superior to the Old.

[Patrick Degan]

Personally, I don't see how the Nazis were more evil than any OTHER country which invaded another one and began enslaving and/or killing the locals with the only difference between Nazis and say, America, is that the Jews were considered more human (read: white) than the Native Americans (though that didn't stop the US from turning away a boat full of Jewish refugees, thereby sending them back to the Nazis.) While I've read Patrick Degan's opinion on the subject, I can't see the connection between "being better at doing something" and "more evil."

Excuse me, but that is not "my opinion" on the matter, THAT IS ROCK-SOLID HISTORICAL FACT. There is a decided difference between simple brutality and the deliberate, engineered targeting of entire ethnicities for systematic slave labour and extermination on an industrial scale. Even the ethnic cleansing performed by U.S. soldiers against the Native Americans in the 19th century doesn't compare to the programme the Nazis laid out for their Brave New World —which aimed at rendering the Jew, the Slav, and anybody else declared subhuman by their edict, extinct.

[Patrick Degan]

Maybe, but we can't have our cake and eat it too. If WWII was a grand crusade to free the world from Hitler and Tojo, then we deserve some criticism for refusing to get involved until we were dragged into it.

Well, you can blame one Thomas Woodrow Wilson for the public's reluctance to get into the fight. The FDR administration and Congress, however, weren't so isolationist: passing the Neutrality Act of 1937 with the "cash-and-carry" loophole, then later repealing the Neutrality Act altogether, passing Lend-Lease, and the beginnings in 1938 of the military buildup which brought forth the war machine which crushed the Axis on two sides of the globe —that didn't happen overnight or even in two years. Plus, we were already convoying war materiel across the Atlantic to Britain in 1941 and our destroyers had shoot-on-contact orders against German U-Boats. So we were hardly uninvolved in the run-up to war.

Oh, don't get me started on Wilson. Don't get me God damned started. Reading the history books you'd think Wilson was some great and noble President who was betrayed by cynical Europeans and vicious isolationist Republicans. That man is one of the most overestimated, overhyped "great Presidents" in American history. At least Andrew Jackson has the Nullification Crisis as a positive point to his Presidency. "Wilson the Just" indeed. *spits*

And who said I was defending Wilson? I see him as one of the people who managed to derail the proper course of history for an entire century and I've had my knife in for him for quite a few years now.

[Patrick Degan]

The Stalin regime racked up a huge death toll over decades. The Nazis, however, in six years made the practise of genocide into a scientific and industrial enterprise; almost tried making it into an artform. Their victims were specifically targeted on the basis of racial and religious ideology and, once tagged, subjected to a process which not only steadily stripped them of their humanity before the killing but was specifically designed to extract the maximum economic value from each prisoner before their usefulness was finally expended. Every aspect of the subject was catalogued for material value: expense per prisoner per day per camp, value of all personal property confiscated from each prisoner, value of the gold in the teeth, amounts of hair and body fat that could be recycled into useful material, which subjects were suitable for slave-labour and which were better suited for experiments of the most vile and hideous "research" into the limits of human endurance and all of it conducted quite clinically. Methods of more efficient killing were researched even as the effort was being executed. It was not only extermination which was the object but also to render a profit in the process. Genocide, Inc. —run by the SS as an empire within an empire. Some of the finest minds of Nazi engineering and industrial management were tapped to bring this enterprise into full, hideous flower, and to carry it out to the fullest extent practicable even as Nazi Germany was going down to defeat. The extermination project was always more important than the war.

While I would not disagree with your overall point, I do believe that there is some amount of exaggeration there. The Intentionalist school in Holocaust studies has generally been discredited; there was no one grand "Master Plan of Evil" for carrying out the Judaeocide that was decided on in 1939, minutely directed and supervised from the highest echelons of command. Rather, the shift to genocidal policy was gradual and relied to a large extent on improvisation. There were also several inherently conflicting aims within its various branches (for example, exploitation vis extermination). The "system" as such was only developed as and when it was needed, and continued to mutate as it went along.

I think the evidence of the War Crimes Commission and the Nuremburg Trials speaks volumes on the issue.

[CmdrWilkens]

While I would not disagree with your overall point, I do believe that there is some amount of exaggeration there. The Intentionalist school in Holocaust studies has generally been discredited; there was no one grand "Master Plan of Evil" for carrying out the Judaeocide that was decided on in 1939, minutely directed and supervised from the highest echelons of command. Rather, the shift to genocidal policy was gradual and relied to a large extent on improvisation. There were also several inherently conflicting aims within its various branches (for example, exploitation vis extermination). The "system" as such was only developed as and when it was needed, and continued to mutate as it went along.

Without getting too deep into the question one would have to say that the Wansee Conference in 42 disproves the idea that there was anything less than a systematic, or at the very least intentional, plan for the elimination of European Jewery. The minutes and Eichmann's later testimony as to the intent behind the words makes it clear that there would be a consistent and near-unversal as possible policy towards the crounding up and disposal of every Jew within the reach of the government. While the methods were not discussed beyond bland statements that Jews who could be put to hard labour would be worked to death and the others eliminated somehow the point was clear. I'll quote Heydrich:

Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival.

Based on the rather clear implication and Eichmann's later testimony that the post conference talk was devoid of such deceptive language no one could mistake the statement as anything less than being the intention of the government to systematically work to death any Jew who had valuable labor skills and kill the rest.

[Steve]

And who said I was defending Wilson? I see him as one of the people who managed to derail the proper course of history for an entire century and I've had my knife in for him for quite a few years now.

Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to imply you were defending Wilson, I was simply indicating my own feelings concerning "Wilson the Just".