(Of course virtually everyone on the allied side was also racist.)
Why is that certain? I'm not aware of anything that would support that claim. High ranking nazis and even Hitler himself made positive statements towards plenty of other ethnic and cultural groups. A belief that ethnic groups should have pride in their culture and stay "pure" by only breeding with other members of the same ethnic group may not be popular now, but it is not racist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relations_between_Nazi_Germany_...
>A belief that ethnic groups should have pride in their culture and stay "pure" by only breeding with other members of the same ethnic group may not be popular now, but it is not racist.
Actually it is racist.
I am not going to argue the semantics of racism with you. You know as well as I do that there are no examples of non-racists opposed to interracial marriage. Such people could conceivably exist in principle, but do not in practice. I am not sure what your motivations are for trying to defend these hypothetical non-racist anti-miscegenationists, but this has nothing to do with the Nazis in any case.
1) the US contemplated using its mythical superweapon (a) against the Russians after WWII, (b) against the Chinese and North Koreans during the Korean war. By the time the Vietnam war was going badly, the Russians and Chinese had their own superweapons.
2) The Germans allied with the Russians with betrayal in mind.
3) When the Germans attacked the Russians, they didn't have a second front (unless you consider North Africa a second front). There had been an abortive landing at Dieppe, which if anything had bolstered German confidence that their western front was secure. Bear in mind that the US had not entered the war and England's collapse seemed inevitable (and if Rommel had taken the Suez that would have been it for Britain).
4) Every one of Hitler's major offensives had been thought insane by Hitler's own high command (e.g. the British and French outnumbered the Germans in both men and tanks at the outset of the invasion of France), so their very reasonable objections to the Barbarossa campaign fell on deaf ears. Is there anything more plausible than hubris?
My favorite example of implausible actions in WWII was Hitler's declaration of war on the US after it declared war on Japan. That never made sense to me until I read A World At Arms -- a history of WWII that emphasizes politics, diplomacy, and intelligence over battles. The Germans relied desperately on Japan for rubber (even synthetic rubber required a certain amount of real rubber as an ingredient). A fleet of u-boats was dedicated to transporting rubber from Japan to Germany, and Germany needed Japan on side or it was in deep trouble (fighting the Russians with no rubber).
The fact that the folk history many people think they know may be distant from our best substantiated histories doesn't really detract from the point that folk history of WWII may be kindof incredible.
Plus, there's certainly enough incredible but apparently accurate stuff in our best histories.
Also... "actual history?" By which we mean "what actually happened" or by which we mean "the best substantiated narratives we have"?
Because as far as I can tell, "what actually happened" is pretty elusive. Some histories are better substantiated from recorded observation and evidence than others, but all of them are interpolations of one degree or another from a set of evidence that's always more limited than the larger picture we try to paint.
What actually happened fits very well with that bit of fun narrative. Using a bunch of incorrect stuff detracts from the funness.
my example: the storm troopers didn't wear black. The SS did. But they didn't just wear black, they had runic emblems and skulls and shit. This minor detail is important because remembering details about genocide is probably a good thing.
See Mitchel and Web for a better example.