"The Waffen SS Were Honorable Soldiers" Topic

Ask the people of Guernica or Coventry, or the towns with no war industry to speak of that were heavily bombed because they were in the guidebooks as places to see, about the bombing of Dresden and see what answers you get.

Dresden was both a strategic and tactical target at the time of its bombing.

Such events are about context.

The SS was bad in all contexts. There are no mitigating circumstances, there is no good apples, if they were members of the SS they carried the weight of every action done by the SS.

Too often after the war the statement, we never knew it was there, was made by locals close to labour, work and concentration camps, generally places the relieving troops could smell long before they could see them, but it was 'convenient' to ignore for the locals.

bakblast, you have problems.

and martin, to say that just because someone wore the ss runes was a "bad apple", well, i'd say pick up a book…

War isn't pretty, nor clean. Nor can it be made such.

Is the babe at its mother's breast, or in it's mothers womb a demonic creature we must kill as a moral duty? Is he or she deserving of death? Be careful, all of you, with your all too facile arguments, designed to accuse or exhonerate your randfather, or countries or peoples now or long gone, and at the same time do not be too hasty in moralizing and confusing the state of war and the state of peace, and the morality that is in the one and not the other.

There is no war that is good.

There is no war that benefits its participants.

The tragedies of war falleth on the just and on the unjust, and takes no account of persons. States who go to war to preserve "the old order" or "the way things are" find, that even for the victors, at the end, everything has changed.

I have said this before and in other places, many times, but it is good to say and we should hear it often.

In war fine handsome young men die, or are mutiliated in mind and body, and sent home to families and friends, mere shells of what they once were -- sometimes. Men and women are ripped from their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, cousins and all. Lives are ripped apart and blighted, often never to recover. Women suffer all this with the he added crimes of rape and battery, terror and the loss, often before their own eyes, of the babes they suckled and raised. Morals are degraded, sensibilities brutalized, cruelty forced in where only compassion should flow, lassitude, despair, despondence take the place of hope and joy, and love. Millions of women will never have families because their men lay in foreign fields. Millions of men will never have wives because of the death and mutilation that will overtake them. And on top of this, hunger, pestilence, plague, fear, anguish, tears and want for all.

Lives are blighted. The careful accumulation of stone upon stone is blasted apart and ruined. The pleasant memories of a lifetime are turned into cruel tortures of what are long gone. The labor of ages on our homes, farms, business, cities, are wrecked in an instant, and peoples pitiful few heirlooms are looted or just smashed. Families and their families often forced into slavery, economic and chattal. It wastes a tremendous amount of money and effort. Art, the beauuties of the sublime, is burned and wrecked and destroyed. Even the spiritual product of our souls, our asesthetics is ruined, and despoiled and wrecked. Even nature itself is destroyed. One still wanders around the forests of Verdun at one's peril. The earth and the sea is poisoned as are men's souls. Generations are born to loss and tears and hate, and the urge to revenge, it warps their souls, bends their minds to evil and simply perpetuates its own horrors.

I am no pacifist.

The world is a terrible place where evil men conspire to wreak upon their fellow man slavery, loss, pain, suffering, even upon their own people,to smash and degrade their lives, and these persons must be resisted in every way and often that means using the very awful form of war. Therefore good men and women must endure the horrors for the resistance to evil. In the hope that some day all that was lost can be rebuilt.

War is endemic and systemic to man's existence. But it is not the natural state of man, nor the desired state. If it was, there would be no peace-- nay, even the idea or concept of peace would exist in our minds if it were. War, at least in the West, is an abberative state, a state which is NOT the nominative, not the normal, not accepted "as of course," and the strongest clue as to who is evil is when someone says it is.

War is a state where all of the laws of civility, of love, of society are suspended and where morality itself is dispensed with. Anything can happen in war and usually does, and to accept these things as "necessary" in war is the awful truth, a frightful necessity, but it in no sense exhonerates or exculpates us. We do in war things that we would be terrified or ashamed to do in peace. Be it by advocacy, acquiescence, or accident, the crimes remain. The guilt lays upon us even when we are "exhonerated" or fought in the right cause. It is no wonder that so many men who have been in real war decline to talk about it.

"The corpse is a corpse no matter what colors it wears, the home is destroyed no matter who lived there, a life is smashed, no matter whose life it was. One cannot transfer the moral certainties of life and law to war. As the Romans said "Inter Armes Silent Leges"-- "In times of arms the law is silent."

As for granpa and the rest. Remember as it says in Deuteronomy. "No man shell be punished for the sins of the son, nor any son for the sins of the father. Each man shall be punished for his own sin." As historians all (in some way) we must recognize that we are little more than the coroner of the crimes of humanity, the doxographers of the demonic.

As for our war games, they are not war, nor are they anything but games. Nor are any of the little lead figures possessed of any sort of link or parallel with their real life counterparts. They are not mystically connected in some way. It's just a game. They are just toy soldiers.

I don't like the Nazi's. I don't like the Communists. For my games on WWII I use Imagi-nations. So if I have a pang of conscience about these things, I simply use the armies for "Fahrvergnuggen" or "The Workers Wonderland of Freeland" or the New Nited States, or the 443rd (and counting) Republic of Flounce.

I prefer warfare in the 18th century, but I am under no illusions as to Frederick or Napoleon or any of the others who led their countries into war. I like to think of the 18th century as a period of restraint, and island of civility between the grand guignol of the 30 Years War and the Gotterdammerung of the two World Wars. I know, it'a an illusion, and the corpses were just as dead in 1756 as in 1943. But the legend is so much better.

BUT NONE of this affects war games. War Games is simply a game, with toy soldiers which has no relationship whatever with reality, and The Person who plays the Waffen SS unless, in his heart he really idealizes and embraces the goals of the SS playes only with toy soldiers. The Person who bombs a city, even if there are little 20mm civilians in it, does not want to commit aerial genocide, unless in his heart that's what he wishes.

We are not telepathic creatures. We cannot know what is in each others hearts, even if they tell us. They might be lying.

Therefore I again ask, what's the point?

All I can tell you is that my "Fahrvergnuggen, or the 7 3/4 Reich" is a WWII Germany as seen in the Three Stooges movie "I'll never heil again," and the rest in the same vein.

Mel Brooks made a whole career out of making fun of the Nazi's This is a good thing.

Irish Marine you are either selectively reading posts or are being deliberately ignorant.

No one has said what you are stating. Most people are saying that motivation for fighting is important. It is.

If you don't understand that then the people who live around you should be seriously worried.

By your stupid argument a cop who kills 30 criminals who were about to kill others is worse than a criminal that guns down two criminals in a drive by shooting.

One is fighting for order the other is perpetuating mayhem.

You have a serious problem if you can't see the difference.

How many other countries in the world do you know of that have killed over 2 million people in the last 60 years? – in the name of "democracy".

We are no better or worse than any other country when we go to war.

I would maintain that it has always been an effective way to deflect guilt by point at the guilt of others.

"There is no war that is good.

There is no war that benefits its participants."

Seriously? How can anyone make such a silly statement? Had we gone by this philosophy the US would have stayed out of WWII and Germany would rule Europe, the Jews would be wiped out, and there would be totalitarianism from the Atlantic across Asia to the pacific.

Anyone who argues we shouldn't have bombed German or Japanese cities is arguing that we should have allowed Britain and China to be devastated from the air and allowed the Germans and Japs to live in peace. How would victory have been remotely possible if you allowed your enemy to live in peace while your own civilian population is devastated?

Dear DN Jackson

I did not argue that, but you want to, so go find someone else.

No war brings benefits to its participants. If you and read carefully, my post, which you did not you would realize how stupid your objection is. Go back and read again…where I said

"I am no pacifist.

The world is a terrible place where evil men conspire to wreak upon their fellow man slavery, loss, pain, suffering, even upon their own people, to smash and degrade their lives, and these persons must be resisted in every way and often that means using the very awful form of war. Therefore good men and women must endure the horrors for the resistance to evil. In the hope that some day all that was lost can be rebuilt."

But of course you were so eager to pound your chest as to trumpet your own self-righteousness (and do not despair you made a satisfyingly hollow sound) you no doubt ignored it.
No one is saying that we should not have gone to war, at least I am not, but you WANT someone to say it, so anyone will do. You just read into things what you want.

As for not bombing Germany or Japan again, I did not argue that.

Maybe I did misread your post, but I still don't see where you there is a good war or that there has been a war that brings benefits to the participants. Please enlighten me which wars you consider good and which have brought good to those involved.

War is war, not a sporting event. The only "score" is if one side wins or loses.

The Western Allies "won" WW2 and most of us live in that success, both winners and "losers".

The alternative was to lose. I'll spare you the alternative ending that that would have resulted in and the world you'd live in now as a result.

War is death and destruction, period. There are many causes of war, most bad, but not all.

Saying that a nation defending itself is as guilty as the nation forcing the war, I'd suggest you think deeply about that and reconsider.

The killing of any human being is terrible. Unfortunately in war, that is the solution to winning. Killing an armed individual, the worker making the weapon carried by that armed individual, the factory, housing or infrastructure that shelters the worker, all are targets if one wishes to "win" a war.

Suggest an alternative to war. Suggest an alternative to being attacked. Pretend that there are alternatives that do not involve violence.

The German state was an criminal state that intended and did invade its neighbors, killing millions in its insane beliefs. The German military, SS and population, actively or non-actively, supported that ambition.

Is the soldier guilty and the factory worker who makes the weapons or ammo he uses, less? Is the mother and child that has no choice less of a victim than the slave laborer forced to produce said weapons and ammo in an factory?

The SS was an evil organization, fighting to support the spread of an evil power, that murdered directly hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of unarmed civilians and prisoners of war. Aided and abetted by the regular German army, they raped, murdered and destroyed their way across nation after nation. To even state that there was no difference between them and Western Allied actions (I carefully do not include Soviet troops) is to expose your moral inability to know black/white.

Dan

I like to paint my SS troops little poncho things on the belt in camo. Sometimes I paint their helmets camo as well. I just think it looks better and brakes up the uniformity of it all. Not many other chances to paint camo except maybe paras or USMC helmet covers. All in all I think the SS are the best for the overall points cost though. :)

"The Waffen SS Were Honorable Soldiers" …
Really ? … Let's not go there …

A stupid topic, rehashed every year, regular as clockwork.

Nothing to be learned either way from these postings.

Yup 60 plus posts on a non-war-game topic with idiots comparing democracy to concentration camps! Like one of my old NCOs used to say "can't fix stupid"!

On a serious note what percentage of Germany's army was made up of SS?

"War is war, not a sporting event."

Makes a darn fine spectator sport when viewed from more than 50 years away though…

just like the idiots comparing concentration camp guards to front line soldiers…

Dreseden= Legitimate Military target. Tokyo. The same.

The Bombing of Dresden, a strategic military target or a bit of revenge?
link

Strategic Bombing in World War II
link

Robert

Leadyjunky wrote
On a serious note what percentage of Germany's army was made up of SS?
I thought yours was the most serious post on this topic. This is a site about playing games with toy soldiers after all. If I wanted to discuss the moral values of any particular army, I may go to pointlessinternetdiscussions.com or yourgrandadkilledmorebabiesthanmygrandad.com. if I want to discuss how nice they look cast in lead, painted and based, I tend to visit this site.

The late Great George Macdonald Fraser OBE served with the Border Regiment in Burma in WWII. In his memoir "Quartered safe out here" (a great history of the latter part of the Burma campaign and should be mandatory reading in all schools describing a generation who knew what "Duty" was). Whenever he was approached by the peaceniks who put it to him that the use of the nuclear bomb on japanese civilians was immoral, replied that what right had they to risk the lives of the Tommies and GIs(and the children they might never have) in an amphibious invasion of japan to salve their beliefs. If it was put to the soldiers in theatre on whether they ought to risk their lives by hiting the beach or dropping the bomb, the latter would be the answer.

Thanks Pictor and Dan for maintaining a moral compass here. I don't think the point of these re-hashes is to learn something, but to stand up for something.

The 'It's OK to invade most of Europe and murder your way through it – as long as you have good kit and funky uniforms' brigade must always be challenged. Although, I do appreciate that very few posts in this thread have gone that far. They have just tried to put my Godfather in Bomber Command on the same level as Eichmann.

Is it perhaps a worrying age thing too? Some of MY direct relatives died. Many younger people see it as 'history'. When I was at school, my RE teacher had been an infantryman at Dunkirk, standing unarmed up to his neck in water while Messerschmidts machine-gunned the lines of stretcher cases. My Chemistry teacher ate grass in a Japanese prison camp. My history teacher was a Chindit officer who had to shoot his own wounded to deny the Japanese torture opportunities. (Meanwhile the Japs shot their own wounded in case the evil British gave them first aid!) War makes men hard, but fascism makes them beasts.

Wow It's always the Evil Nazi Party I see many on hear Attacking ( the now for the most part Dead Nazi Party ) . But how often do you hear about the USSR the Great Big Evil of the 20th Cent. and still kicking today Nobody ever Really Payed for the Over 17.000.000 People Killed in the great Rev. Red Blood RevaliThe Russians even say that's the # ( Real. # is more like 45.000.000 to 70.000.000 !? ) They killed More Christians then all the Peoples that were killed by the Nazi Party ! I grew up hearing the real Stories that were told to me by my Moms best friend Ruby ( they would make you sick the Level of Pure Evil and Hate ) they were real they were Unthinkable what was done to that poor poor ladies Christian Famly :,-( She crude all the time . Just FYI it was an Evil German SS Ofc that saved her Urkraining Famly . He was a Real thug . He and his unit payed for a German Christain group run by older men and ladies to get them to Germany Then France then they got to USA in 44 . The USSR is and has been Responsible for Killing more then 200.000.000 + pepole all over the World

I'm sorry for the long Post but if this fellow wants to say the Nazi had some honor ? I don't see anything wrong with his stating his feelings . My friend Ruby First Hand said they did They saved her from Prue Hate! I'm sure Not all but there is Never all of one Kind in a Large Group ? But the guys that jumped on him so fast should know the Reichs time is Done ( for the most part) ! Today it's very sad God help you if you say Somthing good about the Nazis! But you can joke about the old Russian Demons and say how they were not so bad and have lots of real honor Uuhhh. I hear that kind of Crud said by our kids in Collage and there Teachers !? And Nobody says a Word most of the time Saddly ( just Me) . How fast the blood of good folks are Forgotten even Right now :-(

Oh sorry for the 10year thing forgot I'll say no more :-)

This might be an heated argument but at least none of you have walked through the ruined streets of Oradour-sur-Glane with their mother only for her to say, rather loudly;

"The thing about the French is that they like to exaggerate about their suffering in the war. The French resistance didn't even do much."

As you can imagine, my this didn't go down very well with the near by French people, let alone myself. What's even more ridiculous is that she leave 40 mins from Oradour!

Some people are just unbelievably ignorant!

And as for war, every side commits atrocities. I know people who have done so, and others who have know others and whilst I can't excuse nor would ever seek to do so, unless you have been under fire, or seen mates blown up and butchered, I think it's very hard to understand what goes through a soldier mine, be it if they are SS, NKVD, French Old Guard, Vikings or Romans. War is just crap.

Neither pro or con… history is written by the victor…. think of all of the "unknown" history… or the way it is taught today. Even in my lifetime, I have seen the changes in History books ot make them more PC, etc…

Consider this… just for a moment. Growing up I absolutely hated the Germans for killing the Poles in WW2… I always htought of the Soviets as saviors…. my ignorance was bliss…. until I learned the cold hard truth about the excavations done later in my lafe where they dug up Polish mass graves only to find they were all killed by Soviet bullets. The Soviets had a plan for Poland… kill off all of the intelligencia…. I never knew this…

What does that statement have to do with the price of tea in China…. simply this…. we will never know all of the horrible things/crimes done in war… and the blame is not always asigned correctly either, once found out.

It is like folks in glass houses… the only difference is.. how you feel about it… killing innocents is killing innocents, no matter if it is from thousands of feet in the air or at the end of a bayonet. A lot of those men followed orders against their moral compass…. on all sides.

Dan

Dear Dn Jackson

If you're going to look for a point where I say any war is good, you've got some task. That was my point, No war is Good, No war brings benefits to its participants. That was my original post which you took issue with saying, I wouldn't have supported ending the Nazi holocaust, or would not have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now you're completely reversing your stance!

My point was that the horrors and waste visited by war on the just and on the unjust were equal. Heartache, suffering, and destruction fell to each side and the nobility of one cause or heinousness of the other in no way really changes that.

Further, War and the morality of war has nothing to do with our gaming.

If you're going to look for a point where I say any war is good, you've got some task. That was my point, No war is Good, No war brings benefits to its participants.

I respectfully disagree with you, and submit that the American War for Independence brought much benefit to Americans.

Sincerely,
E

Dear EthanJt21

No it didn't.

At best-- The aftermath of the war did.

The war did not.

And even then go ask the tories and loyalists who were rounded up and expelled, some of them after their property was expropriated.

Granted it might have been necessary, it might have been the only way, but the war was not a benefit to those who fought and died in it, those who suffered, the money spent..

oh yeah! The money spent! Wasn't our money!

go ask the French who bankrupted themselves to fund the American War and humiliate Britain and rendered the French Revolution inevitable. Was the pile of severed heads and 20 years of military dictatorship worth the gloating rights over England, who recovered almost immediately-- not the French.

But the American Revolution was the last of the wars of the 18th century, fought by peoples who were extremely similar if not identical. It was fought, compared to the bloodbaths of previous and latter centuries a minor affair.

And ALL of it could have been avoided with a little more tractability on both sides. One knows not how, but a modus vivendi could have been reached.

At best-- The aftermath of the war did.

It was pretty obvious the colonists had enough. There was no realistic way for compromise to be reached, it was going to become a war eventually. England would never just LET them go independent scott free. The only way to attain that "aftermath" is through the successful revolution.

There was a similarly asinine debate a few weeks ago on TMP about whether or not peace is gained through arms. Peace is earned with blood and the loss associated with bloodshed. Empires are not maintained through timidity. These examples persist throughout known history. It is impossible for all humans to simply get along and sing kumbaya and be peaceful.
To believe that is tantamount to stupidity, because it has never worked.

To tell me the war was not a benefit is foolish, as it surely was. Did the men who died on either side benefit? That depends on your OPINION. Some people believe death for your country is a benefit in and of itself. Is your opinion superior to theirs? I think not. If my opinion was that dying in a war to help secure my family's future is beneficial to them, thus meaning it is beneficial to me, am I wrong? Why? Just because you say so?

To assume you're view is superior to others and try to tell me that the war was of no benefit is awfully foolish. Why is your view of peace superior to someone else's? Every man who died in that war (at least on our side) was fighting for a future for everyone else. That alone is a benefit, to be one of the people who laid the bricks of freedom for everyone else.

Please step off that high horse of yours and sit on a pony, sir.

If the Germans had had an effective strategic bomber force they would have done a Dresden on every city in Britain. The fact that they didn't wasn't because they were nice guys – just strategically flawed. After all, the V1 and V2 were hardly anything other than terror weapons.

I would be interested to know how Irish Marine views the US strategic bombing of North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia? They dropped more bombs in SE Asia than all combatants dropped EVERYWHERE in WW2.

Anyone who can seriously equate bombing a city to sticking live babies in baker's ovens (as was done at Ouradour) is in my opinion a very sick puppy indeed.

On a sidebar, why is it that the SS and Nazi apologists are often American?

"On a sidebar, why is it that the SS and Nazi apologists are often American?"

link

Pedobear, that just means that nazi apologist that we can hear and read are American, plenty of them in Germany and throughout europe they are just afraid to speak their minds.

I personally think those laws are idiotic.

Please understand. NONE of my comments engaged the moral debate of which side is wrong or right or just or unjust. To the victims, whoever they are the suffering and pain is cut from the same cake. Certainly one can make the case that bombing cities from the standpoint of one side or the other which may be just is a legal argument and certainly the case can be made that such activitiy, if atrocious, is one step removed from the purposefully slaughter of the innocent. I'm not going there, and therefore the arguments are irrelevant. If one were to point out that Americans or British, or the allies organized PURPOSEFUL exterminations out of government policy then that would be another matter, but there was no American or British "Wannsea Conference." Note, I leave the Russians out of this.) There is a difference in motive and agency. It is a small one, and to go to my original argument, an irrelevant one from the point of the victim.

However.

The whole of this thread is irrelevant because none of us honors SS men, or the institution, nor EVEN IF WE DID IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WARGAMES!

My point is that Wargames does not model war. Or, more correctly it does not model those things which are the substance of my argument. It does not model killing for killings sake, it does not model waste or destruction because we want to model waste and destruction, it does not simulate brutality and horror and loss because we wish to revel in these things. It models war as an abstract, like chess. So therefore SS apologists have nothing to do with wargames, because we do not "apologize or defend them, and at the same time, SS apologists aim is not to play war games, and even if they do the point of the game is not to defend or apologize for the SS.

And, if anyone cares to read my original thoughts on this matter. You will see that it has turned up exactly as I predicted.

Ok have to weigh in one more time since somebody asked me a question. if you read my original post to this topic I don't disagree that the SS were bad, totally get it, but I was also playing devil's advocate, so instead of 14 or 15 posts of "Yeah SS sucked man, or yup SS were evil" I hoped to start a good discussion. And for the record I am a 20 year vet of the US Marine Corps all infantry I fought in Panama, Kuwait, Somalia and Iraq so I all for my side winning including carpet bombing someone into the stone age; Yes civilians getting killed in war sucks the high hard one but it does happen and a lot of times we can't control when or how.

This topic comes back sometimes on TMP and always gives the same (uneffective?) debates.

There are good and bad guys in every army.

BUT the SS were something special, they were a political army group of a political regime. Talking about "evil" is probably (religiously culturally?) American, I don't really understand what it means… I would just say that the SS had been created for what they did; and it was hate. That doesn't mean that all these guys were all "evil" or bad, but certainly that their military units were made for what they did. And they were a part of it. And they did it.

…and there were some Frenchmen (German-speaking Alsatians) in the SS unit which destroyed Oradour. link

Unfortunately factories and the people who worked in those factories and the people and institutions who supported them, became legitimate targets.

The Germans and Japanese turned to cottage industries. Parts of weapons were built in peoples homes. They did this knowing they would become targets. To the Allies it was about ending the war as soon as possible. What other tactic would you have suggested to the Allies, instead of bombing cities?

The atrocities committed by the Germans and Japanese on civilians and prisoners of war goes well beyond anything the Western Allies did. Germany carried out a systematic plan to exterminate people because they did not look or act like them.

One only has to read about the actions taken by the Japanese in China, Korea and in such places as Unit 731 and the Bataan Death March. This is very different from the Allied Strategic bombing campaign.

The Japanese and German governments were indifferent to the suffering of their civilians. I cannot believe that anyone would equate our strategic bombing campaign to what Japan and Germany did in WWII. Essentially accusing brave American air crews who suffered horrendous casualties of the same crimes the Nazis and Japanese committed.

Petrov, I totally agree.