Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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Well... for all the atrocities the Germans committed the Poles that I have talked to that survived the war were uniformly appreciative of the restraint of the German officers and conscripts occupying their villages[+], as opposed to the Russians who pretty much destroyed the country they supposedly liberated, killing and raping civilians as they went along.

So there definitely are differences in how the rules of engagement are interpreted from one actor to another. Needless to say this doesn't justify anything the Germans did and I acknowledge that Russia was instrumental in beating the - actual - Nazi's but still, that difference does stand out.

It's a pretty tricky thing because technically the Russians were 'on our side' and the Germans were clearly the enemy and just writing about it in an objective way is hard enough keeping in the back of your mind everything else that the Nazi's were up to.

+ Note that the Germans committed plenty of war crimes in Poland as well and that there were quite a few really bad things that happened in areas under German occupation, but on a relative scale they were considered the 'lesser of two evils' from the point of view of the civilian population that was not directly in the crosshairs of the Germans.

As a German who got some first / second hand accounts from children of Polish survivors and Polish survivors I disagree. The German army and other occupying forces did awful things in Poland and not just to the Jewish population. Just because the violence and killing was maybe more methodical and less unstructured like randomly raping civilians, doesn't make it any less awful. Even the initial attack that resulted in the occupation of Poland was done without regard to the lives of the civilian population.

Yes they did. And still compared to the stories about the Russians they showed considerable restraint. This is not about absolutes, it is about relatives.

Having no control over your army and the atrocities it commits because the higher ups simply don't care at all about the kind of image they are projecting is exactly the reason why things are utterly out of control in Ukraine today. Lack of discipline, lack of enforcement and in general using the army as a weapon of terror is what is happening, there is zero restraint.

I cannot speak to rape nor Russia vs Germany, but for the suffering of the Poles at German hands I am compelled to add this from my eyewitness family history lest German abuse of Poland be discounted.

It is not often discussed, but millions of Poles, not just Jews or Jewish Poles were killed in concentration camps.

This (sans "millions" which is my own research finding) was my grandfather's observation as a US officer liberating such camps- there were a lot of non Jewish Poles in such places.

"Lebensraum" came through Polish genocide from what I can tell.

(I am not Polish.)

Although the part where non-Jewish poles were in concentration camps, while true, also led to them being forced to participate in the genocide, which still was primarily directed at Jews, while everyone else was doing (mostly) forced labor. The conditions in the forced Labour camps were obviously horrible and children especially routinely starved while in captivity with their mothers.

All 6 siblings of my partner’s grandmother were killed on arrival in Ausschwitz, as were her parents. She was spared by Mengele and subjected to experiments.

Ultimately weighing atrocities against each other is not super productive. But the myth of a “clean Wehrmacht” had been so persistent and convenient that it took decades to root out in German main stream opinion.

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