Is it just me ?

His breeches look like jhodpurs and he is wearing knee-high boots. The rifle appears to be the length of a carbine. My opinion is that he is German cavalry.

 

His breeches look like jhodpurs and he is wearing knee-high boots. The rifle appears to be the length of a carbine. My opinion is that he is German cavalry.

Proof of the morality in fighting WW2 is contained in that single photo.

 

Pollux5 has discovered a family member with a history in the SS.

Let Pollux5 investigate, piece the details together and further understand the history of the family member.Pollux5 will draw his/her conclusions/thoughts once the detail is finalised.

We all know and understand that certain entities committed untold horrors.
What was inhuman then still stands today and the future.
Pollux5 will be aware of this too.

Hear, hear. I agree wholeheartedly with you CL1.

I must say though that this is a very interesting thread. I don't usually get too involved in these types of discussions, but in the back of my mind I have always wondered 'what if I found out [insert relative here] had committed a horrendous crime ect?'

 

One of the lesser joys of trying to be objective when posting is that one is continually arguing with oneself.

To explain:

When I first spotted the thread started by Pollux5
http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/axis-units/42269-discovering-my-family-history.html I asked myself whether or not this was the way the forum was heading and, if so, did I really want to be part of it?

Then, I argued with myself, why should this young man not post an article on the forum telling of his recent discovery and displaying his memorabilia for all to see.

I can’t remember ever seeing a charter that set forth the aims or the guiding rules of ww2talk but as I understand it the forum was set up to deals with WW2 matters and to allow discussion on all topics.

I also think it has become accepted that there is a proviso that articles are not allowed that would attempt to be discriminatory against any race or creed or attempt to promote glorification of the Third Reich.

I couldn’t see where Pollux had contravened any of the rules and so I decided not to make any comment on the thread itself but rather to open another one to discuss the matter and this is where we are at the moment.

It was at that point when I saw the response by 591 Research, and this, I contend, is a completely different kettle of fish.

To refresh your memory, the original posting contained the following:
(I have taken the liberty of highlighting the portion to which I take the most exception)

What a treasure to inherit. I think you hit the jackpot receiving those in to your custodianship to keep for future generations. Thank you for sharing them with us too.

Time has moved on, and there is far less of a stigma attached to which side some one was attached to in WW2. There are plenty of lessons to be learned from individual cases on all sides, and I think it is a wonderful thing that your grandfather's family held on to all these papers all this time. They must have loved and missed him a great deal, and been proud of him too. I hope someone can volunteer to translate the letter for you.

..and don't assume just because he was in the SS he committed any 'crimes' as you put it. You have to apply the law(s) applicable at that time in the places that he served. He may have done things which we today would not approve of, but then most soldiers committed acts which today in peacetime would not be tolerated. That is the nature of war and politics. It still happens in conflict zones around the world now.

Had 591 Research stated some soldiers I could have forgiven him.

Had he said many soldiers I would have not even bothered to make a reply.

591 Research , I would remind you, said “most soldiers” and this I find completely reprehensible and a personal insult to all those who fought and died in the war against evil.

Finally, I feel that nothing he has said since apologises for his original comment.

By contrast, I am heartened to receive support from other members in response to my thread title of “Is it only me?”

It appears not !

Ron

 

Lieutenant General BL Montgomery. My problem is that the British soldier is unlike his professional enemy not a natural born killer. I have to train him hard, and hard again and again. When he is trained and knows what is required of him at all levels he is as good as any.

 

Fully agree with you Ron.

On the one hand I'm actually very impressed with Pollux5 with confronting what must be a difficult discovery about his/her grandfather and then be willing to share those documents publically. It's a thread I'll be following closely and with interest.

I also found the wording of 591 Research's post rather strange. To me it reads as if you're saying having a fully paid up member of the Nazi Party, SA and SS with service at a camp and on the Eastern Front is something to be proud of; that the SS weren't really as bad as any other soldier; and what a windfall to have those documents in the family. Not saying that is your belief 591 Research but that's how you post comes across to me.


Lee

 

Hitler and his gang sterotyped large groups of people, I try not to. Every individual has their own story and I do try and remember that every person plays they own unique part in history. Whether good or bad.

What I think Researcher is attempting to do and I agree rather clumsily in some cases such as with regards to saying 'most soldiers' as opposed to 'a few' is appeal for members to keep an open mind specifically to the story of Polux's Grandfather as it emerges and to let history judge him by whatever he did or didn't do.

JB

 

The pictures in this thread should be enough to convince anyone that they weren't 'just soldiers'.

 

The pictures in this thread should be enough to convince anyone that they weren't 'just soldiers'.

Apart from researcher's very unfelicitously worded comment, did anybody on here suggest this?

The men in the photographs clearly aren't "just soldiers". Nobody on here suggested they were.

The problem raised here is that there are about 10 men in the photographs. Quite safely we can state that they are involved in crimes (again, nobody here denied this).
But to conclude from the presented evidence that many German soldiers were involved in crimes (actively or passively), that the whole bunch of them were criminals is unscientific, to say the least. And contrary to common sense.

You cannot seriously suggest that each and every man in the German army (WM and SS) was a criminal just because their political system is a bloody outrage and the war their country fought was primarily of criminal and lawless nature?

 

..and don't assume just because he was in the SS he committed any 'crimes' as you put it. You have to apply the law(s) applicable at that time in the places that he served. He may have done things which we today would not approve of, but then most soldiers committed acts which today in peacetime would not be tolerated. That is the nature of war and politics.

As a rule, I think we are all agreed that one shouldn't generalise and attribute the overall failings of a large group to all individual members of the group. But there are exceptions to every rule. It is just conceivable that there was a member of the early volunteer German SS who didn't participate in any crime, but I very much doubt it.

Himmler would have been quite shocked if any SS member had fallen short of his expectations, and was there any SS commander from SS-Oberstgruppenführer to SS-Untersturmführer who would have disappointed him or tolerated 'moral weakness' in any of his men?

The SS was an elite group in every sense of the word, every candidate member had to provided proof of his 'Aryan' ancestry back to at least 1750 and for senior SS leaders back to 1650. When the head of the SS Race Office, Bruno Kurt Schultz, wanted in view of wartime conditions, to limit the 'proof of ancestry' to six generations, Himmler was outraged. Schultz, he declared, was unsuitable to head the Race Office. Himmler also set great store to indoctrination. Basic indoctrination of SS members had to take place in a total of 28 weeks split into four blocks: blood and soil (8 weeks), Jewry, Freemasonry, Bolshevism (8 weeks), German nation history (8 weeks), SS Year and customs, honouring the dead (4 weeks).

Every SS man was encouraged to marry, but every prospective bride had to be vetted by the SS Race Office and had to be of proven Nazi loyalty and be physically fit - in 1937 Himmler required that the fiancées of SS men should obtain the Reich Sport Badge. Every request for permission to marry was examined in detail by Himmler himself even as late as 1942. On marriage the woman became part of the SS Family for life.

This is Himmler waxing indignant about rumours that the SS had committed atrocities in Poland:Then there's the question of alleged atrocities. It is of course quite possible that in the east a train gets frozen in and not only during evacuations and that the people freeze to death. That's possible. ... You simply can't do anything about it if you are travelling from Lódz to Warsaw and the train gets stuck for hours on end. Then you can't blame the railways or anybody. That's the fault of the climate there. It's regrettable for the Germans, it's regrettable for the Poles, and if you like, it's regrettable for the Jews as well, if anyone feels like being sorry for them. But it's not intended and it can't be helped. I think it's wrong to make a big song and dance about it.

He was less reticent when addressing the commanders of the SS Liebstandarte in September 1940 about having to deal with Poles in minus 40° We had to cart off tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. We had to be tough enough - you're going to listen to this and immediately forget it again - to shoot thousands of leading Poles.

But this was just the start of a Europe-wide SS reign of terror, and let's not pretend that the Waffen-SS was somehow different. There was a constant movement of personnel between the KZ-SS concentration staff and the SS combat divisions.

Of course Ron is right!

Source for speeches:
Heinrich Himmler by Peter Longerich (Oxford University Press, 2012) a fascinating huge tome of a book of 1,031 pages, and a devastating indictment of the SS.

 

Speaking from experience or what you have read in the papers?

Just checking

Just safe in the knowledge that Ross Kemp is there keeping them honest

 

Apart from researcher's very unfelicitously worded comment, did anybody on here suggest this?

The men in the photographs clearly aren't "just soldiers". Nobody on here suggested they were.

The problem raised here is that there are about 10 men in the photographs. Quite safely we can state that they are involved in crimes (again, nobody here denied this).
But to conclude from the presented evidence that many German soldiers were involved in crimes (actively or passively), that the whole bunch of them were criminals is unscientific, to say the least. And contrary to common sense.

You cannot seriously suggest that each and every man in the German army (WM and SS) was a criminal just because their political system is a bloody outrage and the war their country fought was primarily of criminal and lawless nature?

I didn't suggest they were, so please don't make assumptions on a single line posted during my lunch hour. I was referring to the SS who by their nature were in favour of the regime. This line backs up my 'just soldiers' comment:

"..and don't assume just because he was in the SS he committed any 'crimes' as you put it. You have to apply the law(s) applicable at that time in the places that he served. He may have done things which we today would not approve of, but then most soldiers committed acts which today in peacetime would not be tolerated. That is the nature of war and politics. It still happens in conflict zones around the world now"

Sounds like a 'just soldiers in wartime' comment to me.

 

I think that Ron did the right thing in starting a new thread and I also agree with him that the comments causing the most concern are not those of the original poster (Pollux's cause me no concern whatsoever) but the subsequent posts which I read as apologist.

I do think that we need to remember though that whilst a separate thread, it is on open forum and as it concerns the original poster, we need to bear in mind that he will probably be following it.

It must have taken a lot of strength to throw the revelations that he has to the lions of a UK based and generally pro-British forum rather than one of those on the web that is frequented by fawning worshippers of the Third Reich (there is no shortage of those places) and where it could be argued that he would receive more and detailed information about locations, postings etc.

I do feel that good manners towards a fellow forum poster who has demonstrated his objective and intelligent way of dealing with difficult issues on other threads should mean that there don't need to be any wild generalisations regarding what his Grandfather may or may not have done. It should be possible to be a little circumspect and leave the conclusions clear without causing any unnecessary distress to a family which cannot have had an easy time in living with the consequences of the events of seventy-odd years ago.

I found this comment a little unfair :-

>> Personally, I find it odd that only the SS/SA/NSDAP membership cards
survived, in mint condition, rather than the birthday cards, but hey, that's
families for you...

A young woman had become pregnant by a married man whom she had not long known and who was killed before her child was born. The correspondence makes it clear that she didn't even know if she was able to contact the father's family. It's perhaps not surprising that she kept the only things that she probably had - the documents that he left behind when he went away and his letters from the front.

We don't know much about Pollux's Grandmother but she clearly lived with this secret for the rest of her life and brought up her son in such a way that his child felt able to post in a well-balanced way on an English-language forum about war crimes committed in Germany.

I find that a hopeful sign.

 

I didn't suggest they were, so please don't make assumptions on a single line posted during my lunch hour. I was referring to the SS who by their nature were in favour of the regime. This line backs up my 'just soldiers' comment:

"..and don't assume just because he was in the SS he committed any 'crimes' as you put it. You have to apply the law(s) applicable at that time in the places that he served. He may have done things which we today would not approve of, but then most soldiers committed acts which today in peacetime would not be tolerated. That is the nature of war and politics. It still happens in conflict zones around the world now"

Sounds like a 'just soldiers in wartime' comment to me.

See VM.

 

Just spotted Peter G's contribution.

Those who have followed this forum for any length of time will know that Peter and I go back a long way to when we were both Researchers/Helpers on the BBC Peoples War site.

Uniquely, Peter is one of those rare people who saw ww2 from two angles, firstly as a young lad in England and then in wartime Italy.

To complete his experience of military matters he also served in the post-war British Forces

His remarkable book: WW2 - The Second World War: A British Boy in Fascist Italy details many horrific incidents concerning the SS and I have often called upon his services whenever I needed reliable and factual evidence concerning events in Italy, the size of his library continuing to cause me much envy !

Thanks Peter, as always, for your support in this matter

Ron

 

Beaconsfield a barracks where I completed one of my many courses - counterinsurgency, part of this - ethics and the rule of law civil and military. Whilst specific crimes must be investigated and charges framed, there is a case to answer when voluntarily belonging to an organization where the doctrine was well known and contrary to international law. Good guys and bad guys? Many pleaded good guy status when it suited, not before.

 

The SS was an elite group in every sense of the word, every candidate member had to provided proof of his 'Aryan' ancestry back to at least 1750 and for senior SS leaders back to 1650.

Hello Peter,

May I ask if you know anything about how the candidates were winnowed down during training? Seems to me that the proof of ancestry process made them a select group but that alone doesn't make them elite, in my opinion, anyway.

I admit that I always try to discredit any positive traits attributed to them because I hate them so much but the claims made in many of the TV documentaries seem a bit hard to swallow. Typically they'll say that anything from one man out of ten to one man out of 500 made it through training. I've never seen anything in a reputable book that describes their training except for the political portions. Seems to me that it would be very hard to fill out the ranks, especially if the pool was already small to start with due to all the ancentory screening. I know about later in the war when they took anyone.

Thanks,

Dave

 

Hello Peter,

May I ask if you know anything about how the candidates were winnowed down during training? Seems to me that the proof of ancestry process made them a select group but that alone doesn't make them elite, in my opinion, anyway.



The SS could be called "an elite" from the ideological and "racial" point of view in the beginning. Certainly not military though - apart from the fact that nobody ever gave a conclusive definition of "military elite" anyway. Their training wasn't sufficient, and neither was their officers'. However, they gained military experience soon, at least the core divisions did.
They always had trouble filling their ranks, because the supply of fresh recruits in Germany wasn't limitless and they were constantly fighting the Wehrmacht who were recruiting, too (which is why the SS took in so many forgeigners btw).
In 1943 the Waffen-SS went through a massive expansion; a lot of personnel, esp. battle experienced officers from "old" divisions was transferred to new divisions (as was the case with the LSSAH and her sister division HJ).
There isn't so much known about the training in the Waffen-SS; some claim it was exceptionally tough and brutal and that you were beaten up by superiours. I don't know whether whether that's true, and if yes, how exceptional it was.

Btw, Himmler was convinced that it all came down to "the blood", that good, i.e. aryan blood could achieve anything as long as the will (i.e. NS ideology) was there.

 

A young woman had become pregnant by a married man whom she had not long known and who was killed before her child was born. The correspondence makes it clear that she didn't even know if she was able to contact the father's family. It's perhaps not surprising that she kept the only things that she probably had - the documents that he left behind when he went away and his letters from the front.

We don't know much about Pollux's Grandmother but she clearly lived with this secret for the rest of her life and brought up her son in such a way that his child felt able to post in a well-balanced way on an English-language forum about war crimes committed in Germany.
I would be quite surprised if the young lady kept this a secret.

At the outbreak of war Himmler became concerned at 'the loss of good blood' caused by the death of any soldier in battle, particularly that of the SS. Not only the fallen 'hero' but the incalculable loss of any Aryan children he might have had. After agonising about this issue he came up with the brilliant solution that his SS warriors, whether married or not, should impregnate as many racially pure German girls as possible, particularly young childless war widows. He set an example himself by impregnating his secretary, Hedwig Pottast, twice; after having done the 'decent thing' and informed his wife Margarete (he advised informing wives only after a girl was made pregnant).

When the commander-in-chief of the army, Walther von Brauchitsch heard about this he hit the roof, strongly objecting to his soldiers' wives being encouraged to get pregnant by the SS, but his objections to the 'Childrens Decree' (as Brauchitsch politely termed it) fell on deaf ears. Interestingly, Himmler's 'Procreation Order' (Zeugungshefehl) caused more agitation within the Wehrmach than the crimes committed in Poland by the SS.

Here is an extract from Peter Longrich's Heinrich Himmler at page 462: "On issuing this order Himmler had provided the following justification: 'Every war is bloodletting of the best blood. Many a military victory won by a nation has been at the same time a crushing defeat for its vitality and its blood.' However, the 'inevitable death of its best men, however sad, is not the worst thing' about it; it is rather 'the non-existence of the children who have not been produced by the living during the war and by the dead after the war [...] He who knows that his clan, that all that he and his ancestors have wanted and have sought to achieve, will be continued through his children can die in peace. The best gift to the widow of a fallen soldier is always the child of the man she loved.' And then Himmler comes to the point: 'Beyond the limits of bourgeois laws and conventions, which are perhaps necessary in other circumstances, it can, even outside marriage, be a noble task, undertaken not frivolously but from deep seriousness, for German women and girls of good blood to become mothers of the children of soldiers going to war of whom fate alone knows whether they will return or die for Germany."

Himmler fully expected his SS, whether single or married, to obey his Procreation Order and the SS gave full support to the many young women who gave birth under it. No doubt many of them did fall in love, although Himmler did not approve of emotional attachments; he intended it to be a general appeal that went beyond 'the bounds of bourgeois laws and habits'.