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> My village in Greece was burned to the ground and the Nazis executed 30 people Could we please stop using the term "Nazis" when referring to WWII Germans? A

> My village in Greece was burned to the ground and the Nazis executed 30 people Could we please stop using the term "Nazis" when referring to WWII Germans? A nazi is a member of (Hitler's) NSDAP party, while the war was conducted by GERMANS, not just party members. When you read any texts from say the fourties, no one is speaking of fighting the Nazis - they're fighting the Germans. People who still remember the war also don't ever use term Nazis. It was introduced later to dissociate the German nation from probably the most unimaginable attrocity in human history. Don't fall for the manipulation.

thriftwy 10y ago
This is so true. The Germans suffered virtually nothing for conducting WWII and The Holocaust. Slap on a wrist, and then making them the showcase of socialism & the showcase of capitalism and most successful regions on both sides of Iron Curtain. It is like when, in some third world country, some big boss runs over a kid with his car while speeding. The rhethoric goes like this: We really want to make a lesson to you, fellow citizens, to abide by rules and not speed and certainly never run people over, and we're certainly not going to prosecute this valuable member of the society. Talk about mixed signals in international politics.
- yAnonymous 10y ago
  >The Germans suffered virtually nothing for conducting WWII and The Holocaust. Except for the millions who died in combat or were murdered by the allied forces and the fact that we are still paying today for something we had no involvement in. Anyway, it's almost the same for the U.S. today. All the crap they've pulled in foreign countries since after WW II has no consequences for them at all. U.S. politics are directly responsible for the deaths of millions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... Money and economics has ruled back then (decisions after WW II) and it still does now.
  - thriftwy 10y ago
    > Money and economics has ruled back then and it still does now. Then what becomes of the story of The Holocaust? What's the take away then?
    - taway_1212 10y ago
      I don't think it's actually true. Hitler had two major causes: eradication of Jews and eradication of Slavic people, and none of them were rooted in rational economics. He of course wanted to eradicate the Jews because he believed they were the cause of much of evil in the world - hard to find much rationality there. For the Slavs, it's a bit more complicated. Hitler was hugely fond of and inspired by America's colonization of the West (which required extermination of Native Americans to make room for settlers) and wanted to repeat that in Eastern Europe - murder all the Poles, Ukrainians, Bellariusians and Russians in the territories that he manages to conquest, raze all cities to the ground (hard to find economic justification for that) and then move German settlers in their place. The goal was to make Germany large and powerful enough that it could later tackle America. The joke here was that his thinking was largely antiquated at this point - in the XX century a country's military power was determined by its industrial capabilities, and not population/territory. So again, the entire genocide was motivated by one man's delusional view of the world, and not rational thinking.
      - thriftwy 10y ago
        What you're saying is hilariously true. What Hitler wanted is basically getting a huge slab of agricultural land. But as we all know, in second half of XX century both fertility and agriculture prices fell sharply, so even if he was ultimately successful Germany will have neither people to populate these territories nor economical reason to do so. The settlers will probably be leaving the area en masse towards "mainland Germany" creating "human deserts" of depopulation while being a drag economically. Even now it happens in these territories (Poland, Baltics, Ukraine) as people move west for better life.
      - expertentipp 10y ago
        Eastern lands were important for them for other reasons - they had they own "idyllic" vision of them. High officials and officers were promised as an compensation for being sent to dreaded Eastern Front a large plot of land and Poles/Ukrainians as slaves. Eastern Poland and Ukraine are among most fertile agricultural lands in Europe.
- andrewmu 10y ago
  Perceived excessive reparations for World War 1 were one of the grievances used by the Nazi party to gain power. It was possibly a good idea not to repeat those circumstances.
  - taway_1212 10y ago
    Yep I totally agree. The reparations wouldn't need to excessive - let's say Germany would pay 2-4% of their GDP every year to the victims until all damage they caused was repaired. That would probably take hundreds of years, but would be very bearable for the Germany and also pretty fair.
    - darklajid 10y ago
      How would you even define these damages? I understand property damages, those are easy enough to calculate. But you're talking about money/financial compensation for - in my world - invaluable things (grief, trauma, loss of life). Judges have a hard time coming up with these on a much smaller scale and expectations for compensation vary wildly (my impression is that you can get a loooot of money in the US while the amounts would be a magnitude or two lower in Europe). I'm not saying that we should forget about everything that happened (and people around me don't as far as I know), but I feel that your suggestion isn't easily done. I'm from Germany, in case that matters.
      - taway_1212 10y ago
        As for material/financial compensations, I think it would be calculatable. We could take into account: - damaged/destroyed infrastructure/housing/factories - resources robbed during occupation (Poland was heavily deforested for example). - value of slave labor - predicted lifetime economic output of people who were killed during the war (this prediciton could be tricky) There should also be individual payments for people who suffered hardships during the war, such as: - malnutrition (Germany's central planning had entire Polish population on 700 kcal per day, which wasn't much more than Auschwitz's daily ratio. Luckily, Germans didn't manage to totally control the Polish agrarian economy so, thanks to the black market, we didn't quite starve as quickly as the plan assumed). - slave labor - torture - loss of health - loss of family members For the above section, I'd argue for amounts proportional to the standard of living in Poland back in 1939, which wasn't very high (i.e. I wouldn't want modern US-style $10m per head settlements). The hardest part to estimate are the reparations for murder of political, economical, scientific, social and artistic leaders/talents. I'm really at loss here.
- gonmf 10y ago
  There was also the enslavement of Germans for over a decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_...
  - taway_1212 10y ago
    Yep that's true, you could count their labor towards the overall due reparations.
    - ptaipale 10y ago
      As well as loss of substantial amount of German property to Soviet Union and its satellites. In effect, Poland was shifted left on the map by 200 km or so, and the space and property claimed by U.S.S.R. Also, lots of industrial capacity of East Germany was moved to U.S.S.R. For instance, my dad's first car was a Moskvich 401, which was effectively the same as the pre-war Opel Kadett K38 whose plans and tooling were transferred to a plant in Moscow.
      - rangibaby 10y ago
        I have a very nice KMZ Industar 50-2 camera lens which has similar heritage to that car, a Zeiss Tessar design made using plans and tooling moved to Moscow from Germany.
muse900 10y ago
Yes in reality if you go up to him and ask him in person, or me, I won't use the term Nazis but the term Germans. I just felt it wouldn't be right to blame it on the newer generation of Germans reading yc news etc. I hope that they understand and remember what happened almost half a century ago.
- mercer 10y ago
  In my experience Germans are aware of their past almost to a fault (sufficient negative feelings run the risk of turning into defiance). Just saying.
huxley 10y ago
Maybe it's true where you live, it is certainly not true in the English-speaking world. Fighting the Nazis was the primary way of describing the European war in contemporaneous popular and political writing. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=german%2C+nazi&year_start=1932&year_end=1960&corpus=0&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cgerman%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cnazi%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=german%2C+nazi...
- expertentipp 10y ago
  This is a reason of serious miscommunication when talking about this topic with the non-English native. I'm pretty sure English-speaking world doesn't mean fighting Slovakian Nazis, Latvian Nazis, or French Nazis, but those of two other very specific nationalities.
- taway_1212 10y ago
  Very interesting. In my reading of war-related English language literature from that period (Steinbeck, Orwell) I don't think I've encountered the term "Nazis", but that's hardly a representative sample. Where I live (Poland), people referred to German occupiers as "Germans", and it is also how they spoke of themselves. For example, the sign on streetcarts said "only for Germans", not "only for Nazis" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur_f%C3%BCr_Deutsche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur_f%C3%BCr_Deutsche). Also, on your chart, you can see an over 50% drop of the usage of term "German" in 1945 (without any significant change for "Nazi"). It might have been caused by the US realization that the Western Germany will be an ally from now on, and change of rethoric.
  - mercer 10y ago
    At least here in Holland we tend to use 'Nazi' and 'German' interchangeably some of the time, and most of the time in the context of WW2. The meaning of 'Germans' is much more context-dependent of course, to the point that I've noticed others and myself disambiguate by saying 'from Germany', because 'German' (Duitser) in itself has connotations (similar to jew/jood, or perhaps negroe/neger I guess). Of course, being Dutch, many people will intentionally opt for the more rude version to get a rise out of people or 'be edgy'.
pygy_ 10y ago
Putting the blame on the political instrumentation of tribal instincts, rather than on a peculiar tribe, seems like a good idea actually.
- thriftwy 10y ago
  It's very convenient to put blame on something so immaterial as "instrumentation" and "instincts". You can feel good, moralize as long as you like, take stabs at political opponents. But it does nothing towards avoiding repeat of tragic events. How would anyone learn on "crime without punishment"? And that's exactly it, you're not punishing any people, not proportionally to damage done anyway, and ideas don't feel pain.
  - pygy_ 10y ago
    Contemplating the fact that you could be manipulated to perform similar misdeeds may not be pleasant, but it is very important. We all have tribal instincts, and we are "predictably irrational", meaning that we can be manipulated by skilled pupetteers. Tribalism is on the rise once again right now and I find it unsettling. Edit: >But it does nothing towards avoiding repeat of tragic events. How would anyone learn on "crime without punishment"? And that's exactly it, you're not punishing any people, not proportionally to damage done anyway, and ideas don't feel pain. I totally disagree. The punishment of Germany post WW1 lead directly to WW2. The extended hand that followed WW2 is largely responsible of the peace we've had for 70 years in Europe. It turns out that punishment and preventing recidivism do not always go hand in hand.
    - thriftwy 10y ago
      Contemplating the face that if I perform similar misdeeds I might go without accountability or punishment may lead to conclusions, but not the ones that you would like. Moralizing people doesn't prevent them from behaving badly when it's convenient to them. The perspective of punishment works much better. For the Holocaust, very few people were punished. For Turkish genocide, noone was punished. Makes genocide a low-risk tool on a political table, if you ask me. > It turns out that punishment and preventing recidivism do not always go hand in hand. I utterly fail to understand how do you imagine it to work. Imagine I'm a politician in power and I have an idea that some of my country's residents are eligible for genocide. What's there to deter me and my fellow citizens? Certainly not the perspective of punishment. Then what? Hell, in recent history, Croats got away with ethnic cleansings. You just have to be buddies with right countries.
fauigerzigerk 10y ago
If this is about who should bear the blame I think "Nazis" is too narrow but "Germans" is too broad. Hitler won barely 33% of the vote in the last free and fair elections. Even after seizing power and after a violent campaign of intimidation Hitler only got 44% of the vote. It is also doubtful that those who did vote for him expected him to kill all Jews and Romani people. The threats were certainly there but most people believe politicians to be hyperbolic and not follow through on everything they say. At least I can say that my own ancestors who were murdered in Auschwitz did not expect that to happen.
- taway_1212 10y ago
  > Hitler won barely 33% of the vote in the last free and fair elections. Even after seizing power and after a violent campaign of intimidation Hitler only got 44% of the vote. I wish there were polls for support for Hitler after the successful conquest of Poland and France. The accounts from that period speak of enthusiasm bordering on mass hysteria.
  - cafard 10y ago
    In George Kennan was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin from 1939 through 1941. In his Memoirs: 1925-1950, he writes of the Berliners that "they witnessed with a reserved, sullen silence the victory parade of the troops returning from the successful completion of the Polish campaign. Not even the most frantic efforts of professional Nazi agitators could provoke them to demonstrations of elation or approval. The news of the fall of Paris was received with the same inscrutable silence and reserve. I rode miles, that afternoon, on the enclosed upper deck of a bus, where practically everyone's conversation was audible. I heard no one as much as mention the event; the talk was all of food cards and the price of stockings." To be sure, he speaks of them as the least Nazified among the German population.
- 6d6b73 10y ago
  But after he won and started his violet campaign these 67% did nothing. They are directly responsible for what happened during WW2
- 10y ago

thriftwy 10y ago

This is so true. The Germans suffered virtually nothing for conducting WWII and The Holocaust. Slap on a wrist, and then making them the showcase of socialism & the showcase of capitalism and most successful regions on both sides of Iron Curtain. It is like when, in some third world country, some big boss runs over a kid with his car while speeding. The rhethoric goes like this: We really want to make a lesson to you, fellow citizens, to abide by rules and not speed and certainly never run people over, and we're certainly not going to prosecute this valuable member of the society. Talk about mixed signals in international politics.

yAnonymous 10y ago
>The Germans suffered virtually nothing for conducting WWII and The Holocaust. Except for the millions who died in combat or were murdered by the allied forces and the fact that we are still paying today for something we had no involvement in. Anyway, it's almost the same for the U.S. today. All the crap they've pulled in foreign countries since after WW II has no consequences for them at all. U.S. politics are directly responsible for the deaths of millions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... Money and economics has ruled back then (decisions after WW II) and it still does now.
- thriftwy 10y ago
  > Money and economics has ruled back then and it still does now. Then what becomes of the story of The Holocaust? What's the take away then?
  - taway_1212 10y ago
    I don't think it's actually true. Hitler had two major causes: eradication of Jews and eradication of Slavic people, and none of them were rooted in rational economics. He of course wanted to eradicate the Jews because he believed they were the cause of much of evil in the world - hard to find much rationality there. For the Slavs, it's a bit more complicated. Hitler was hugely fond of and inspired by America's colonization of the West (which required extermination of Native Americans to make room for settlers) and wanted to repeat that in Eastern Europe - murder all the Poles, Ukrainians, Bellariusians and Russians in the territories that he manages to conquest, raze all cities to the ground (hard to find economic justification for that) and then move German settlers in their place. The goal was to make Germany large and powerful enough that it could later tackle America. The joke here was that his thinking was largely antiquated at this point - in the XX century a country's military power was determined by its industrial capabilities, and not population/territory. So again, the entire genocide was motivated by one man's delusional view of the world, and not rational thinking.
    - thriftwy 10y ago
      What you're saying is hilariously true. What Hitler wanted is basically getting a huge slab of agricultural land. But as we all know, in second half of XX century both fertility and agriculture prices fell sharply, so even if he was ultimately successful Germany will have neither people to populate these territories nor economical reason to do so. The settlers will probably be leaving the area en masse towards "mainland Germany" creating "human deserts" of depopulation while being a drag economically. Even now it happens in these territories (Poland, Baltics, Ukraine) as people move west for better life.
    - expertentipp 10y ago
      Eastern lands were important for them for other reasons - they had they own "idyllic" vision of them. High officials and officers were promised as an compensation for being sent to dreaded Eastern Front a large plot of land and Poles/Ukrainians as slaves. Eastern Poland and Ukraine are among most fertile agricultural lands in Europe.
andrewmu 10y ago
Perceived excessive reparations for World War 1 were one of the grievances used by the Nazi party to gain power. It was possibly a good idea not to repeat those circumstances.
- taway_1212 10y ago
  Yep I totally agree. The reparations wouldn't need to excessive - let's say Germany would pay 2-4% of their GDP every year to the victims until all damage they caused was repaired. That would probably take hundreds of years, but would be very bearable for the Germany and also pretty fair.
  - darklajid 10y ago
    How would you even define these damages? I understand property damages, those are easy enough to calculate. But you're talking about money/financial compensation for - in my world - invaluable things (grief, trauma, loss of life). Judges have a hard time coming up with these on a much smaller scale and expectations for compensation vary wildly (my impression is that you can get a loooot of money in the US while the amounts would be a magnitude or two lower in Europe). I'm not saying that we should forget about everything that happened (and people around me don't as far as I know), but I feel that your suggestion isn't easily done. I'm from Germany, in case that matters.
    - taway_1212 10y ago
      As for material/financial compensations, I think it would be calculatable. We could take into account: - damaged/destroyed infrastructure/housing/factories - resources robbed during occupation (Poland was heavily deforested for example). - value of slave labor - predicted lifetime economic output of people who were killed during the war (this prediciton could be tricky) There should also be individual payments for people who suffered hardships during the war, such as: - malnutrition (Germany's central planning had entire Polish population on 700 kcal per day, which wasn't much more than Auschwitz's daily ratio. Luckily, Germans didn't manage to totally control the Polish agrarian economy so, thanks to the black market, we didn't quite starve as quickly as the plan assumed). - slave labor - torture - loss of health - loss of family members For the above section, I'd argue for amounts proportional to the standard of living in Poland back in 1939, which wasn't very high (i.e. I wouldn't want modern US-style $10m per head settlements). The hardest part to estimate are the reparations for murder of political, economical, scientific, social and artistic leaders/talents. I'm really at loss here.
gonmf 10y ago
There was also the enslavement of Germans for over a decade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_...
- taway_1212 10y ago
  Yep that's true, you could count their labor towards the overall due reparations.
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    As well as loss of substantial amount of German property to Soviet Union and its satellites. In effect, Poland was shifted left on the map by 200 km or so, and the space and property claimed by U.S.S.R. Also, lots of industrial capacity of East Germany was moved to U.S.S.R. For instance, my dad's first car was a Moskvich 401, which was effectively the same as the pre-war Opel Kadett K38 whose plans and tooling were transferred to a plant in Moscow.
    - rangibaby 10y ago
      I have a very nice KMZ Industar 50-2 camera lens which has similar heritage to that car, a Zeiss Tessar design made using plans and tooling moved to Moscow from Germany.

muse900 10y ago

Yes in reality if you go up to him and ask him in person, or me, I won't use the term Nazis but the term Germans. I just felt it wouldn't be right to blame it on the newer generation of Germans reading yc news etc. I hope that they understand and remember what happened almost half a century ago.

mercer 10y ago
In my experience Germans are aware of their past almost to a fault (sufficient negative feelings run the risk of turning into defiance). Just saying.

huxley 10y ago

Maybe it's true where you live, it is certainly not true in the English-speaking world. Fighting the Nazis was the primary way of describing the European war in contemporaneous popular and political writing. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=german%2C+nazi&year_start=1932&year_end=1960&corpus=0&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cgerman%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cnazi%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=german%2C+nazi...

expertentipp 10y ago
This is a reason of serious miscommunication when talking about this topic with the non-English native. I'm pretty sure English-speaking world doesn't mean fighting Slovakian Nazis, Latvian Nazis, or French Nazis, but those of two other very specific nationalities.
taway_1212 10y ago
Very interesting. In my reading of war-related English language literature from that period (Steinbeck, Orwell) I don't think I've encountered the term "Nazis", but that's hardly a representative sample. Where I live (Poland), people referred to German occupiers as "Germans", and it is also how they spoke of themselves. For example, the sign on streetcarts said "only for Germans", not "only for Nazis" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur_f%C3%BCr_Deutsche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur_f%C3%BCr_Deutsche). Also, on your chart, you can see an over 50% drop of the usage of term "German" in 1945 (without any significant change for "Nazi"). It might have been caused by the US realization that the Western Germany will be an ally from now on, and change of rethoric.
- mercer 10y ago
  At least here in Holland we tend to use 'Nazi' and 'German' interchangeably some of the time, and most of the time in the context of WW2. The meaning of 'Germans' is much more context-dependent of course, to the point that I've noticed others and myself disambiguate by saying 'from Germany', because 'German' (Duitser) in itself has connotations (similar to jew/jood, or perhaps negroe/neger I guess). Of course, being Dutch, many people will intentionally opt for the more rude version to get a rise out of people or 'be edgy'.

pygy_ 10y ago

Putting the blame on the political instrumentation of tribal instincts, rather than on a peculiar tribe, seems like a good idea actually.

thriftwy 10y ago
It's very convenient to put blame on something so immaterial as "instrumentation" and "instincts". You can feel good, moralize as long as you like, take stabs at political opponents. But it does nothing towards avoiding repeat of tragic events. How would anyone learn on "crime without punishment"? And that's exactly it, you're not punishing any people, not proportionally to damage done anyway, and ideas don't feel pain.
- pygy_ 10y ago
  Contemplating the fact that you could be manipulated to perform similar misdeeds may not be pleasant, but it is very important. We all have tribal instincts, and we are "predictably irrational", meaning that we can be manipulated by skilled pupetteers. Tribalism is on the rise once again right now and I find it unsettling. Edit: >But it does nothing towards avoiding repeat of tragic events. How would anyone learn on "crime without punishment"? And that's exactly it, you're not punishing any people, not proportionally to damage done anyway, and ideas don't feel pain. I totally disagree. The punishment of Germany post WW1 lead directly to WW2. The extended hand that followed WW2 is largely responsible of the peace we've had for 70 years in Europe. It turns out that punishment and preventing recidivism do not always go hand in hand.
  - thriftwy 10y ago
    Contemplating the face that if I perform similar misdeeds I might go without accountability or punishment may lead to conclusions, but not the ones that you would like. Moralizing people doesn't prevent them from behaving badly when it's convenient to them. The perspective of punishment works much better. For the Holocaust, very few people were punished. For Turkish genocide, noone was punished. Makes genocide a low-risk tool on a political table, if you ask me. > It turns out that punishment and preventing recidivism do not always go hand in hand. I utterly fail to understand how do you imagine it to work. Imagine I'm a politician in power and I have an idea that some of my country's residents are eligible for genocide. What's there to deter me and my fellow citizens? Certainly not the perspective of punishment. Then what? Hell, in recent history, Croats got away with ethnic cleansings. You just have to be buddies with right countries.

fauigerzigerk 10y ago

If this is about who should bear the blame I think "Nazis" is too narrow but "Germans" is too broad. Hitler won barely 33% of the vote in the last free and fair elections. Even after seizing power and after a violent campaign of intimidation Hitler only got 44% of the vote. It is also doubtful that those who did vote for him expected him to kill all Jews and Romani people. The threats were certainly there but most people believe politicians to be hyperbolic and not follow through on everything they say. At least I can say that my own ancestors who were murdered in Auschwitz did not expect that to happen.

taway_1212 10y ago
> Hitler won barely 33% of the vote in the last free and fair elections. Even after seizing power and after a violent campaign of intimidation Hitler only got 44% of the vote. I wish there were polls for support for Hitler after the successful conquest of Poland and France. The accounts from that period speak of enthusiasm bordering on mass hysteria.
- cafard 10y ago
  In George Kennan was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin from 1939 through 1941. In his Memoirs: 1925-1950, he writes of the Berliners that "they witnessed with a reserved, sullen silence the victory parade of the troops returning from the successful completion of the Polish campaign. Not even the most frantic efforts of professional Nazi agitators could provoke them to demonstrations of elation or approval. The news of the fall of Paris was received with the same inscrutable silence and reserve. I rode miles, that afternoon, on the enclosed upper deck of a bus, where practically everyone's conversation was audible. I heard no one as much as mention the event; the talk was all of food cards and the price of stockings." To be sure, he speaks of them as the least Nazified among the German population.
6d6b73 10y ago
But after he won and started his violet campaign these 67% did nothing. They are directly responsible for what happened during WW2
10y ago