You should check out the book titled A Terrible Revenge, by De Zayas (not sure if it is printed in Russian). In it, he goes into the widespread rape and murder of German women at the hands of the Red Army.

Again, could you provide a source detailing the widespread rape committed by the German military in Russia?

__________________
Success is measured in blood; yours or your enemy's.

1. Dead can not talk.
2. As for sources, it is well described in numerous books in 50s, 60s, 70s. Can you read Russian?

__________________
Please watch this:


Shocking video of results of Georgian attack on South Osetia
CNN is spreading propaganda!
American witness: "Not only Georgia, but also U.S. are responsible for the violence in South Ossetia"
Mark Almond: It's simplistic to cast Russia as sole villain in South Ossetia clashes

Obviously

I cannot. I am mainly asking because I have never read of widespread rape committed by German troops. I find this odd because crimes committed by Germans are quite well documented. I wonder why these are different.

Still, I would be reluctant to take anything printed in Soviet Russia (or any of the post war communist states) as fact. This is not a dig at you or the Russian people, so please do not take it as such. It is just that works printed in that era were done so under strict government control. It would be extremely difficult to seperate fact from sheer propaganda.

__________________
Success is measured in blood; yours or your enemy's.

Why this theme with "massive rapes" appeared now? Just because it is impossible to prove, and you can write all you want. You can write all digits, all rumors, everything you want, because it is impossible to check.

__________________
Please watch this:


Shocking video of results of Georgian attack on South Osetia
CNN is spreading propaganda!
American witness: "Not only Georgia, but also U.S. are responsible for the violence in South Ossetia"
Mark Almond: It's simplistic to cast Russia as sole villain in South Ossetia clashes

The problem of Russians is that we are too kind and were not acting like Germans on occupied german territories.

__________________
Please watch this:


Shocking video of results of Georgian attack on South Osetia
CNN is spreading propaganda!
American witness: "Not only Georgia, but also U.S. are responsible for the violence in South Ossetia"
Mark Almond: It's simplistic to cast Russia as sole villain in South Ossetia clashes

I am not sure how it came up. Maybe that post Neal_Van made.

__________________
Success is measured in blood; yours or your enemy's.

Some might beg to differ.

__________________
Success is measured in blood; yours or your enemy's.

Normally, I oppose the concept of collective guilt, as well. But I have spoken with many old people, many of them even voted for Hitler, and I have to say that hardly all of them still are totally blinded by the propaganda they heared 70 years ago. After the stunning victories of '39, '40 and summer '41, germans were in some kind of intoxination. Many, maybe even most started to believe that they were totally superior to other peoples, some even thought that Germany was meant to fullfill some higher mission from god, from destiny or whatever. From my conversations with such old people, some of them even served in the infamous Waffen-SS (before it became the last contingent), I know that people knew what was happening in Auschwitz and such. Maybe it was fear, maybe it was approval, maybe it was both. But fact is that only one out of a hundred thousand dared to oppose the regime, or fought against Holocaust. This is the stigma this old generation brandished into our people. To my mind, everyone who knew of this and did nothing against it failed as a human being. And it's the masses who failed.

Mabus, there is indeed no excusing the actions taken by individuals in that perioid, reguardless of the approval they recieved for them, or fear of reprisal if they refused to participate. The individual always has a choice.

However, would you not agree that these are still, reguardless of the number of criminals, still individual crimes, carried out by individals?

What arbitary number of individuals merges to create a collective? What level of cohesion and collaberation lumps co-operating individuals into a singular entity? None, I say.

The masses did not fail, a mass of people failed. To buy into the myth of collectivism at all, for any reason, is to endorse the concept of collectivism.

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THE GOVERNMENT HAS SENT ME

I have also spoken with Germans from that era, both vets (some Waffen-SS) and civilians. From my converstaions with them, and from personal research, I don't think the average German knew what was going on at the camps. They knew the Jews were going away, and that was about it. Where they were going and what was being done was something I don't think they could have truthfully known. At least, not outside of rumor. Considering the secrecy surrounding the Wannsee Confrence, and the camps themselves, I do not find that suprising at all. That being said, I do not believe the German people (whom I share ancestry with) have any sort of stigma attached to them.

As I said before, condem the individuals who committed the crimes.


This topic should almost have its own thread.

__________________
Success is measured in blood; yours or your enemy's.

It's you who fails. Take a look in this page Die Entwicklung des nationalsozialistischen Lager- und Haftstättensystems and you can see that the concentration camp system - including the destruction camps - exploded as Word War II started. In war it's very easy to loose control. And please: I don't like to discuss it really, because I'm a German too - but I lost lots of my family members in concentrations camps and I lost lots of my family members dying in World War II. The Nazis never believed in god - that's a lie. The Nazis were fighting for the "german race". Lots of germans believed in the blue eyes of "Der Führer" - that's all. Nearly no one saw the truth - even it was possible to see the truth.

My mother got once 5000 D-Marks (was in this times about $1000) for her killed father and her four killed brothers. Her children were hungry - so she took the money and I'm alive. That's all. (Both families lost hundreds of thousands.)

Exodus 23,1-9
Do not spread false reports. Do not help a wicked man by being a malicious witness. Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd, and do not show favouritism to a poor man in his lawsuit. If you come across your enemy's ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to take it back to him. If you see the donkey of someone who hates you fallen down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure you help him with it. Do not deny justice to your poor people in their lawsuits. Have nothing to do with a false charge and do not put an innocent or honest person to death, for I will not acquit the guilty. Do not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds those who see and twists the words of the righteous. Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt.

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Scientia et potentia humana in idem coincidunt, quia ignoratio causae destituit effectum
Sir Francis Bacon

On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Well I don't buy into this blame game "Germans voted for the NSDAP, so they are guilty for WW2 and so on". I mean, how on earth can one expect that German voters in 1933 were able to predict what a brutal system the Nazis would build up and that they would start a war 1939?
So voting for them in 1933 means a bad taste, lack of confidance in the other parties or stupidity, but it doesn't mean voting for war and mass murder.

Honestly I don't understand why people always seem to be totaly focused on whether "the people" knew about the crimes of the regime or not.
Damn it, it was a brutal dictatorship, it played no role what people knew.
I think that most people who talk like this, are just totaly unable to imagine how powerless people feel, who are living in a dictatorship.

Ask my father, he was born in '35 and had to run away with his mother from the red army approaching. His memories speak a different language... rape & murder everywhere, planes attacking refugees, no mercy at all!

Doubting that this did happen is foolish! Guilt is a very personal thing - the feeling of revenge does not free anybody from his guilt. And imho there's nothing like colletive guilt, but a clear responsibility of those who know the facts.

Maybe it was Russians who destroyed Dresden inhabited mostly by civilians?

As for rapes. It just a behavior of defeated aggressor to play victim.

Russia lost 27 millions in the WW2, only 9.5 millions were military death (including 3 mlns of POWs that were killed in German camps), 17.5 mlns were civilians. Germany lost only 1,6 mlns of civilians mostly in british/american air attacks. It is noticeable how brits destructed Dresden which had only civilians (military powers were very-very small). The same for Americans with usage of nukes oт civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I repeat, the problem that Russians DID NOT EXTERMINATE Germans. But Germans DID EXTERMINATE Russians. Moreover, Germans had the PLAN OF EXTERMINATION of Russians (it is available in documents), but Russians did not have.

So you can compare. Compare 17.5 mlns of killed civilians only in Russia with 1.6 mlns of killed civilians totally in Germany. And what you talked about rapes?

__________________
Please watch this:


Shocking video of results of Georgian attack on South Osetia
CNN is spreading propaganda!
American witness: "Not only Georgia, but also U.S. are responsible for the violence in South Ossetia"
Mark Almond: It's simplistic to cast Russia as sole villain in South Ossetia clashes

You're missing something. The bill would have allowed people to sue the Iraqi government, in US courts, to recover damages from Iraqi assets held in US financial institutions. This is nothing at all like the German government, which volutarily paid reparations to victims of the Third Reich. If the Iraqis have a beef with Sadam, let them take it directly to their own government. There is no reason to involve our judiciary.