In Cold Blood
Drew, Margaret Sanger?
I know who she was, but if memory serves ( and it doesn’t always these days) she preached the right of women and birth control ie condoms etc, but I don’t recall anything re. killing anyone.
Soon as I can I want to watch this whole thing but I question the NKVD training the GESTAPO. The Germans were pretty good at that on their own. German training and weapons testing etc were carried out on Soviet soil long before the war and Germany was paying thru the nose for the privilege, supplying all manner of things needed by the Soviets, in agreements way before the Nazi/Soviet pact of 1939. In fact, Stalin kept upping the price, which the Germans had no choice in refusing at the time.
NO defense of commie bastards in Moscow but there is another difference in their approach to things like race,religion etc. The reds were racist enough in their way, even the anti-semitic attitudes were supported by Jews (in name only), but they never decided on a Holocaust for one religious/racial group. Of course, they were just as happy to kill everybody as you point out. While the Gulags were certainly deadly and can be viewed as death camps, ppl were not sent there for the sole purpose of dying. Although the reds didn’t care if they did. Even so, there was still some chance of survival and a return to society, such as it was. There was NO chance of leaving a Nazi death camp cos that was it’s number one industry. There were a few (very,very few) Jews who worked outside the camps for the Nazis on pain of death. They were informers and Jew hunters, hunting other Jews not yet rounded up.
I am not able to watch the film (many reasons - time included) but Peiper - Margaret Sanger is the goddess of Planned Parenthood - who was into eugenics. She was very into ‘inferior’ people not reproducing - She must be so happy that 94% of PP clinics reside in minority neighborhoods today.
It is frightening - what is happening in the World today - but given any issue - it does seem like the only way is to restrict all our politicians to 2 terms local, 2 State and then 2 Federal and out - forever. They seem to take a seat and then never move. And we need to cut Congress back to the 2 weeks (was it?!?) that they use to meet - so that the Klownposse in DC goes home and remembers exactly where they came from and why they went to DC.
I’m all for no money what-so-ever in the campaigns - as those that give - want something in return.
And a simple flat tax - everyone, whether they make $1000 or a billion - pays the same rate - no loopholes, no deductions, nothing. And for business - nothing beyond about 10% - ever.
I don’t want government doing for me - because then it is able to do to me. And that is what we are on the precipice of in America.
Thanks Wardmama.
Peiper, I may have a couple of the details wrong, but what I wrote was what the film told me. While Snore does not mention Sanger at all, he does touch on eugenics, and I know that she was a major supporter of, or even co-developer of, the theory. And what is targeted abortion if not another form of mass elimination of an undesirable social element? If you’re reading this and thinking of that recent remark from SCOTUS judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you’re making the right connections in your head:
“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
It was a bit difficult to watch this film, not just the content but dealing with the 3 languages part. Pretty sure this is what this Snore guy was saying: that mass murder, secret police, torture, and turning society against one group via propoganda were all well honed in the CCCP long before the Nazis existed, straight out of the Marxist playbook, and that much of the training and teaching of these evils originated there and was passed on. That the Sovs made a fat profit off of the Germans is beside the point. They worked hand in glove in the early takeovers of much of Europe, especially Poland and Finland. Their philosophies were nearly identical, right down to the propaganda imagery.
There has been a 70 year long concerted effort to hide, deny, and blunt the truth of the scope of this early collaboration, and to turn the Evil Empire into kindly “uncle Joe”. Many newspapers, history books, and even top government officials (FDR) have been part of that mariskova (camouflage). We have all been “trained” to think that the Nazis were ultra-rightwingers. But when Snores turned up a paragraph in an early 1930’s American newspaper with a quote that communism and national socialism were only a few shades of gray apart, I really had to listen. The author of that quote was Joseph Goebbels.
Just like the guy who did the Fitna film, Snore lives in fear of his life. He is an enemy of the Russian state, having been burned in effigy and been the target of official Two Minutes of Hate. Towards the end of the film Snore notes that the dark past of the Soviet did come to light for a while under Gorbachev, but today under Putin it’s back to denial and lies. Any criticism of the Soviet state is criticism of modern Russia, and that’s just not allowed. And so the cycle begins anew.
I’m kind of waiting for Turtler to weigh in on this post, with one of his detailed and illuminating essays. We haven’t heard from him in a while, so until then I’ll give Snore a fair amount of credence. There are quite a number of books available that tell parts of a very similar story. The true level of evil embodied by the CCCP and inherent in Socialism itself are, still to this day, mostly ignored or just swept under the rug.
Well said both. But Sanger wasn’t a co-founder but rather like many people of that era, a supporter. It was thought to be very scientific and even logical in it’s time, but I believe the original idea didn’t incorporate mass killings. I did think Sanger worked for women’s rights but was unaware of anything re. abortion. What I mean is, I didn’t associate planned parenthood with that activity.
The modern field and term were first formulated by Sir Francis Galton in 1883,[10] drawing on the recent work of his half-cousin Charles Darwin.[citation needed] At its peak of popularity eugenics was supported by prominent people, including Margaret Sanger,[11][12] Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Emile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus Pauling[13] and Sidney Webb.[14][15][16] Its most infamous proponent and practitioner was however Adolf Hitler who praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf, and emulated Eugenic legislation for the sterilization of “defectives” that had been pioneered in the United States.[17]
, the second largest known eugenics program, created by social democrats in Sweden, continued until 1975.
G. K. Chesterton was an early critic of the philosophy of eugenics, expressing this opinion in his book, Eugenics and Other Evils. Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities, and received funding from many sources.[18] Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenicists with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York. Eugenic policies were first implemented in the early 1900s in the United States.
Actually the commie russians invented the death camps, they rounded up all commisioned forces and killed them ( that bit of enigma the film was true) the fact is the money has allways flirted and loved the commies, JP Morgan helped bankroll the russian revolution, I would put the commies below the nazis in the greater scheme of things, how many german POWs survived the end of the war? this would make a good “fit to teach” test any teachers that support Stalin instant sack, no pension, no nothing as they are morally bankrupt and unfit to teach.
Posted by Chris Edwards
01/23/2010 at 02:39 PM
JD you should also read up on the Fabians and their view on Eugenics. This is the disease that morphed into the Labour party in Britain. Something that really concerns me is that the current British government is composed of numerous student radicals who were avowed Marxists and were on MI5 “watch” lists. People like Jack Staw and Lord Fondlesbums. Yet now they have access to all the State’s secrets.
Lyndon, dont worry about state secrets, the rulers of england keep them at the office in Brussels, what you say about labour is interesting, I did not know that but they allways smelt wrong to me, just goes to show how thick most folks are.
Posted by Chris Edwards
01/23/2010 at 06:38 PM
We CANNOT rest! http://cmblake6.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/follow-along-now-ill-get-there-in-juuust-a-minute/
I’m kind of waiting for Turtler to weigh in on this post, with one of his detailed and illuminating essays.
Well, wait no more, Drew, because I have arrived. Sorry I am late (this was a LOT of material to go over) and for the delays in posting, but I am truly humbled that you put so much faith in me.
And my verdict is that Snore and the film are correct.
Quite correct, actually.
I noticed a couple of errors here and there, but they were VERY few in number and (this is VERY important) they were mainly issues of omission and emphasis rather than outright accuracy. In other words, there is nothing to very, very, very, VERY little you would find outright incorrect on objective grounds, but it seems like he exaggerated some things (such as the extent to which Hitler copied off of Stalin, which was almost certainly less than what is implied, given the fertile history of ethnic bloodletting in Nambia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, France, Denmark, and Belgium that Hitler inherited), and most of those errors (and I believe all of the ‘objective’ ones) were made by those he interviewed, and were almost entirely over historical minutae that pathetically few people would know about unless they sunk thousands upon thousands of hours looking through things.
First, the errors of emphasis:
1. The creation of the “New Man” was NOT the ultimate objective of Communism. Building the ideal Communist society (a process usually referred to as simply “building Communism” from “Socialism") was. The creation of the “New Man”, however, was accepted to be a necessary and unavoidable step towards obtaining that ultimate goal. Granted, one could also further split the already microscopic hairs and say that creating the Aryan Race was not the “Ultimate Goal” of National Socialism, but the creation of a sort of Eden purged of all possible racial and physical impurities populated by that “Aryan Race” was, but one main reason holds me back from putting those two steps on exactly the same level of importance for their respective ideologies; namely that creating the “Aryan Race” in the first place required the “habitat” to be pretty much purged beforehand, and if we can indeed call it an intermediate step, it would still be half a step away from that ultimate goal. The creation of the “New Man”, on the other hand, while still very much an intermediate step near the end if not the end itself, was still supposed to take place before the dissolution of classes and the state entirely, and while they might have thought in theory that that would happen more or less naturally, I have never seen any consensus to that effect, and so the leap is still a bit further than I would make. Though this must seem like splitting exceedingly thin hairs, and that is because it is, but this is how they actually thought (and keep in mind these people were pretty much to a man- or woman- certifiable, so you cna’t expect that much sanity).
2. Stalin’s crimes. Yes, you heard me say that. I realize that Stalin’s crimes are naturally going to be the centrepiece of ANY documentary about Soviet atrocities as a whole, but it just seems like they put far, far too much emphasis on it at the expense of Lenin’s crimes (his coup against Kerensky’s Provisional Republic, the execution of the Czar’s family and millions of others in the Civil War etc), Trotsky’s crimes (that the only time he appears is as a martyr should give you a hint about one of the nastier issues with Snore’s work), and the crimes of those who followed Stalin (Khrushchev’s massacres in Hungary and Poland, Brezhnev’s behaviour in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, etc), and perhaps even Putin’s own appalling behaviour in the Russian Caucasus and Georgia. A soviet purporting to tell “The Soviet Story” should not stop at 1953.
3. The extent to which Hitler was influenced by Stalin. As Pieper touched upon before, Hitler and the Germany he inherited were hardly strangers to systematic institutionalized persecution, and the difficulties in implementing it on such as scale as they did was primarily negotiated by a combination of past experience in the colonies prior to WWI, Alsace-Lorraine, and particularly in occupied Europe and the Ottoman Empire in WWI. While I certainly cannot deny that Stalin’s behaviour in the East certainly gave some inspiration for Hitler and his comrades, what the movie fails to remember is that Hitler also inspired Stalin and his inner circle and continued to do so long after his death, in addition to the fact that many of the tools used by the Third Reich that Snore credits to Soviet influence almost certainly dated back to prior German experiences before and during (and to a far, far lesser extent after) WWI. Notable examples include the Gas Chamber (the first widespread use of it in genocide was almost certainly by the Ottoman Turks in WWI, first involving using natural caves and the smoke of fire to suffocate captives placed inside, though low key experiments on proper gas chambers- using German gas and technical help, for the most part- were conducted upon “undesirables” throughout the war). The practice of institutionalized slave labor using undesirables in occupied territory dated back at the very least to WWI (where thousands upon thousands of Belgians, Romanians, Poles, Russians, Frenchmen, and even a few POWs were forced to work on various projects before Allied protests coupled with the exceedingly bad PR from the Rape of Belgium, Austria’s bad behaviour in the Balkans, Unrestricted U-Boat warfare, the “secret war” with the US in Latin America, and a host of other issues0 all but stopped it.
Indeed, there are a few cases where Germany indisputably led the way, given the controlled famines Germany instituted in the occupied East during World War ONE (to be fair, they almost certainly didn’t start it, but they made absolutely no bones in stating that they were using it to Germanify Eastern Europe), another tool they probably learned from their time in Africa, and Germany’s use of poison gas also far outstretched Russo/Soviet use of it. The movie seems to give the impression that Hitler learned virtually everything from the Soviets, when a look at German history shows he had other teachers in Bismarck, Ludendorff, and the Young Turks.
4. For the LAST time, Nazi Germany’s genocides were NOT limited to Jews!!!!! This is one of my personal pet peeves regarding works about the Third Reich that I have seen again and again and again and AGAIN. I would think, if asked directly, that no reasonable individual would deny that Hitler’s victims were not limited to Jews, and yet I still see te same 5.9-6+ million figure carried about or at least put in isolation. Simply put that figure is nowhere NEAR the actual number of Hitler’s victims, and it is undervalued for the German camps themselves, which I would chalk up to 8,200,500 at LEAST, of which only 5.9-6+ were Jews. And this is FAR before we get to the non-German camps (such as the one Hitler’s Croat vassals set up and ran at Jasenovac that adds at LEAST 46,900+, and might be as high as 600,000+). And this is FAR before we get to issues like the people who were just killed outright (like we see in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the USSR). In short, the 6 million figure doesn’t even begin to cover the extent of Hitler’s crimes, and it is misleading to only focus upon Jewish suffering.
5. The true nature of Soviet-German relations. As we know, Berlin and Moscow had a fairly close strategic alliance, but the film acts as though they were best buddies right until Hitler stabbed them in the back. This was not so, as the personal accounts and propaganda from both sides show the ideological incompatibility and the friction within the alliance. I do not believe this should have been omitted, as it is necessary to gain a realistic appraisal of the alliance between Stalin and Hitler.
Issues of Omission
1. Germany’s Pre-Hitler genocides. As I mentioned before, the crimes of the Kaiserreich helped define modern genocide as we understand it, first in Alsace-Lorraine and the occupied parts of Jutland under Bismarck, then in Cuba and the Philippines along their Spanish ally, then in Germany’s African colonies prior to WWI, to Western Europe during the war, to the aid it gave to the Turks in their war against the empire’s ethnic and religious minorities, to Eastern Europe on their own. With the violence, scope, and ambitions growing at every step. Go say nothing of the crimes of Austria-Hungary in the Balkans and Italy in addition to within its own Empire, where many of Germany’s future war criminals would come. Many of the developments the Germans and their allies came up with would certainly influence the Soviets (for instance, Gas chambers from the Anatolian genocide by the Turks). That Snore does not get into this is a shame, because it clearly demonstrates a pattern of behavior, and part of the varied roots of the genocide that tore Europe and beyond in the 20th century.
2. The Hitler’s early crimes: Simply put,if you knew little to nothing about the subject and you watched this film, you would assume that Hitler more or less learned everything he knew at Stalin’s lap. This, as I mentioned, was not so. While the years 1933-40 were VERY quiet for the Reich compared to what would come later, they saw the start of intentional ethnic cleansing, forced containment of minorities, and other hallmarks of the genocide that would start in earnest in 1941. To not include these is to distort the picture, and fails to show that Stalin also learned from Hitler.
3. Stalin’s crimes NOT relating to orchestrated genocide. Naturally, if Stalin’s crimes are to be the gory crown of any documentary dealing with Soviet atrocities, Stalin’s genocides are naturally the blood red jewel on top. But that does not excuse one from not examining Stalin’s other crimes, like when he purposely manipulated the cream of Eastern Europe’s Democratic forces into destroying themselves in massive risings against the Third Reich after promising them aid only to withhold in at the very last second far after any legitimate reason for nonintervention had passed. His anti-guerrila campaigns against the holdouts (often survivors of the very same uprisings the Soviets designed to destroy the Democratic resistance movements) are also worthy of note for their extreme and wanton cruelty (particularly in the Baltics, in Poland, and in Romania). That, and his similar influence in destroying what vestiges that remained of Spanish Republicanism during the Spanish Civil War and then leaving his puppets and many of the survivors to Franco’s tender mercies while running off with the gold is also worth noting.
4. Putin’s own crimes. This one is understandable, given the Russian audience, the Russians who helped this documentary, and other touchy issues, but this is still a glaring one. The film fails to connect Stalin’s genocides to those committed by Putin in the Caucasus and occupied Georgia (either directly or by proxy), and his connection to the old Soviet Regime (the fact that it never brought up the VERY public fact that Putin was a member of the KGB of the very regime he is defending now is more than a little galling), and that part of the problem Russia has is that it has never had to look in the mirror and clean out at least a good percentage of the trash like the Axis nations have.
5. Nazi Germany’s victims were not merely limited to the Jews!!!! Said again because it also falls under this and because it REALLY needs to be said again.
6. The Russo-German alliance’s origins. While the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact clinched the deal, ties between Berlin and Moscow ironically started with the old militarists, most notably Herr Seeckt, the Weimar Regime’s military commander.
Objective Errors
1. Marx as first to advocate Genocide. This depends very, very much upon your definition of “public person” (at the time Marx wrote that, he was a hack journalist and hobo with ridiculously little recognition, even by the undistinguished standards of his lifetime recognition) and “Europe”, but the Turkish government certainly had been openly making noises like this before, Bismarck and Nicholas I were dropping some casual, somewhat publicized comments, mainly regarding their intentions for the Poles, and I am sure if I dug back far enough and got obscure enough, I could find even more examples.
2. Katyn as the First Massacre of its size in WWII. Even if we are to only count the European war (thus ignoring Japanese crimes of vastly larger scopes in China during the thirties), the Germans were known to have already begun committing massacres on similar sizes, particularly in Poland.
3. The origin of Gas Chambers. The basic principle is centuries old (force everyone into a cave and set fires at the mouth to suffocate), and even if we accept the exceedingly dubious idea that Shaw’s suggestion was the origin of the Soviet design for it (a supposition I do not believe in the least, given Soviet experiments with gas during the Civil War and their close ties with German intelligence during and after WWI) we know without a doubt that the first truly modern gas chambers made for the purpose of genocide were experimental models used by the Ottoman Turks in WWI with German technical aid and supplies.
And finally, there are just some things that are not historical errors, but just bug the hell out of me.
Posted by Turtler
01/24/2010 at 04:02 PM
1. Skipping over the Soviet-German War. Simply put, it is RIDICULOUSLY jarring to move from talking about the alliance between Hitler and Stalin only to suddenly switch and mention that the Soviets had “joined the allies” out of the blue. This is jarring as it is, but if someone didn’t know the story, how are they supposed to tease out the nature of Barbarossa and the like? It is just a very galling case of poor pacing, all the more unbelievable given the above-average pacing throughout the rest of the movie.
2. The dubbing. Perhaps this is just me (though I highly doubt it), but there are several notable cases where the audio trails behind the people speaking, particularly the silence that accompanies most interviews, when the interviewee is first speaking.
3. The intro is decent, but could have been FAR, FAR better.
Now, this might seem like I am ripping the movie, or believe it is exceedingly inaccurate. This is not so. Indeed, I was quite impressed by it, and it probably features less of these errors than your average documentary. It is just that I am obliged to chronicle each and very error or other troubling bit I noticed. The vast, vast majority of the film is accurate and obviously well researched, and I give it my seal of approval.
Now, as for specific questions/points of interest, let me start with Pieper:
but I question the NKVD training the GESTAPO. The Germans were pretty good at that on their own.
To answer, yes, the NKVD (and GRU) did train the Gestapo (and the Abwehr). That much I certainly can confirm. However, your point is also correct, and the main confusion comes from what the movie omitted for whatever reason: namely that the Gestapo and Abwehr also trained NKVD and GRU officers. But, naturally, those were the minority (sort of like modern cross-service cross training), with the majority of the training done in-house within the respective regimes (it wasn’t like either side was exactly short on experienced Secret policemen, given the cadres of hardened Cheka- and some Okhrana defectors- agents the Soviets had and the veterans of German and Austro-Hungarian intelligence).
Pretty sure this is what this Snore guy was saying: that mass murder, secret police, torture, and turning society against one group via propoganda were all well honed in the CCCP long before the Nazis existed,
And he would be correct, albeit with the reservation that just because the Nazis didn’t exist didn’t mean there weren’t hardened and extremely unsavory German officers trained in torture, genocide, and the hallmarks of police oppression, given the nature of the Bismarckean Empire and its behavior before and during WWI (and the freelance brutality of its ideological heirs in the immediate aftermath).
Actually the commie russians invented the death camp
Ludicrously, ludicrously disputable. The idea of caging your opponents or suspect minorities into a tiny area and either killing them off or letting them die is as old as cages themselves, and while I might be willing to accept that the Soviets created the modern death camp system with modifications to the old Czarist prison system, the idea that they invented the Death Camp themselves is exceedingly unlikely, particularly given what the Turks did in WWI.
how many german POWs survived the end of the war?
Just over half. But it is true that, over all, less than half of the Axis POWs taken survived.
And finally, I must state again that I give this film my stamp of approval, and I must say I am sorry for the long absence.
Posted by Turtler
01/24/2010 at 04:03 PM
It amuses me that some still lie for Stalin, try looking up how many german POWs were murdered for stalin, hard to find, the Italians lost 85% in russian torture camps but most germans got home, but only 5000 out of 90000 from just one battle. The fact is the communists have support everywhere yet despite the great pr the majority hate it, it is truly the root of modern evil.
Posted by Chris Edwards
01/24/2010 at 08:56 PM
It amuses me that some still lie for Stalin, try looking up how many german POWs were murdered for stalin, hard to find,
I obviously did, because I correctly stated that OVER HALF of the Germans survived, albeit just barely.
the Italians lost 85% in russian torture camps
And that was disproprortionately high, and totaled in to the full amount of LESS THAN HALF AXIS POWS survived, which I mentioned before.
but most germans got home, but only 5000 out of 90000 from just one battle.
Which would be disproportionally high. The Soviets weren’t kind prison masters (understatement of the millennium), but that was not a typical proportion of German POWs.
So tell me, does your point directly contradict my statistics?
The fact is the communists have support everywhere yet despite the great pr the majority hate it, it is truly the root of modern evil.
No, but it is one of the major subsidiary reasons. The true root of evil, as far as any know, lies in the nature of human nature, and from those desires (for bloodlust, for power, for conquest), all secondary evils- Fascism, Communism, Socialism, Tyranny in general- flow from.
Posted by Turtler
01/24/2010 at 09:35 PM
Funny thing is when you google the german pow losses to the red bastards google’s first offering was wikpedia and they give the corrupt figs that T quoted, as usual wikpedea and its impartial moderators do their usual, try correcting their bit on mandela and re-entering his terrorist activities, those with no lives or jobs expunge the truth pretty damn quick! Still I had better go to work now-as I have a job and a life.
Posted by Chris Edwards
01/25/2010 at 07:03 AM
Funny thing is when you google the german pow losses to the red bastards google’s first offering was wikpedia and they give the corrupt figs that T quoted
Oh, I have no doubt that the self-appointed gods of Wiki have helped fudge the numbers, which is why I rarely, RARELY use the figures they offer.
The numbers I got were from West German intelligence and Gehlen’s (Hitler’s intel man in the USSR, the first head of Western German intelligence after the war, and NO friend of the Bolsheviks) personal estimate: namely that the survivability rate was over half for the Germans and under half overall. Now, perhaps some of his agents were corrupted and fed back false info (I can’t imagine why though, after all, a Soviet mole has vastly more important things to expend their credibility on than figures for a conflict that has long ago ended).
I wholeheartedly agree with your feelings on Wiki (the damn bastards did ban me for life for exceedingly thin and indefensible reasons without recourse), but you must understand that I didn’t get those sources from them.
Posted by Turtler
01/25/2010 at 07:12 AM
Turtler,
Welcome home. Question of long standing for me re. Intel WW2.From what I have been able to read over the years with regard to history and German Intel service, it almost always appears that the Germans were caught flat footed. I’ve read the bio on Gehlen some years ago btw, and found it most interesting.
The service was not populated by overwhelmingly stupid people, but their performance never seemed to measure up (from what I have read) to the Brits, and the Russians seemed especially adapt. Of course, the reds did have an advantage in that so many more home grown traitors in England as one example, were communists first and Brits second, and thought they they were working for the right side in spying for the Russians. I don’t think there were that many entrenched pro Nazis living in England or America willing to work for Hitler. There may have been some but doubtful they were well connected and working in sensitive areas.
I have read the Germans did send would be spies and a group did make it to America and quickly rounded up. There is hardly a case I have heard about where the Nazis were able to find dedicated ppl and even worse, they often didn’t give very good training to those they had. Example, the ones who made it to America. And the ones who landed in England faired no better.
Pieper:
Welcome home.
Thanks. good to be back.
As for your answer, the factors you pointed out are part of the problem, but much of it simply boiled down to the fact that the Soviets and to a far lesser extent the West had an advantage that the Germans did not: an intelligence apapraturs that was united in a common goal.
Simply put, on top of the prexisting bureaucratic conflicts within Germany’s intelligence organizations, soon after the US entered the war, Canaris gave orders to his trusted advisors to “Sabotage our sabotage.”
In short, Canaris began to intentionally undercut German intelligence operations against the West to an extent. They naturally didn’t stop entirely (and in the East they didn’t stop at all), but from 1942 onward, the Abwehr began to more or less toss away several assets in order to undermine Hitler’s control of the regime in the hopes that eventually Canaris and his fellow Imperialists could depose the Nazi regime (like they tried with Operation Valkryie).
And when you realize that Canaris was in charge of most of Germany’s intel ops in the British isles and the US, and there you go.
Posted by Turtler
01/25/2010 at 01:51 PM
Turtler, maybe the numbers you found are for losses under captivity? having spoke to one ex pow way back in the 1970s the conditions were awful, the brutality total, as you would expect from a Stalinist state, digging around I found a couple of quotes saying about half the prisoners died before they got to the camps, giving a total not too dissimilar to the Italians.
Personaly I feel it is a shame that Hitler did not get Stalin and russia, there was a lot more room for humans under national socialism than international, also the nazis had very few supporters in the free world, as you point out there were communists everywhere before and after the war, it would be fair to argue that the reds enabled Hitler in the first of his adventures outside his own country, the reds had infiltrated the french army and ruined its resolve, some of the french army leaders had red leanings, the standard commie practice of nationalising had ruined the best aircraft industry in the worls, they only managed to produce a handfull of modern fighters before the defeat, they had, prior to having the industry stolen by the reds, designed and even flown some advanced types but the total ineptitude of all things nationalised (outside Germany anyway) ensured defeat before the battle.
Peiper, I was reading the Churchill war diaries and the German spys had all been found by (if my recall is good) mid 1943, and their places taken by substitutes who were pasing on low grade and out of date intel up until D Day when they sent misleading intel, I am sorry I only found where you lived recently as I gave all my books to charity before we left, I would have loved to have given you the good ones instead!
ChrisPosted by Chris Edwards
01/25/2010 at 07:07 PM
01/23/2010 at 05:49 AM
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