D-Day. June 6th. 1944.

[Wildweasel74]

G all these brave germans you talking about, are we to expect that germany as a nation did not know of the ethnic cleansing which was been carried out in their name? i am sure there were many a  brave German soldier who wasn't a die hard Nazi but the reality is the Holocaust of world war 2 is stand alone on the ability of man to committ horrible acts on others they thought are lesser than them, people hatred here of anything British (yet you all support british soccer teams) blinks them to the fact that this was a war to stop a man hell bend on world domination, do you think that Germany conquering England that our neutrality would have mattered a damn to them, i think not, its easy looking at these men as killers but most were conscripted and never wanted a life in the army.

[Zulu]

Not following you Wildweasel74. My point is the German soldier of WW2 is as brave and honourable as the average Allied soldier. That their leaders were evil is irrelevant when measuring their bravery. There are no world powers who can claim a moral high ground, they have all been aggressors and the killers of innocent people.

[red hander]

Christ on a bike.

Exactly. British soldiers are heroes unlike those despicable nazis. They only engage using rules of war and haven't ever deviated from this standard since WWII. Except Falklands and Northern Ireland.

While we're on the subject of fascism, the Nazis weren't the only ones up to that oul craic. MnaG's  beloved Brits behaved like utter fascists in their empire

[Myles Na G.]

Christ on a bike.

Exactly. British soldiers are heroes unlike those despicable nazis. They only engage using rules of war and haven't ever deviated from this standard since WWII. Except Falklands and Northern Ireland.

While we're on the subject of fascism, the Nazis weren't the only ones up to that oul craic. MnaG's  beloved Brits behaved like utter fascists in their empire

Is that why Irish republicans like Sean Russell supported the Nazis? Because of 800 years of oppression, the famine, blah blah fuken de blah, ...

[Windmill abu]

Myles Na G

Which of these is the supporter of Hitler & his genocide policies?

Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (German Army General)

or

Edward VIII (The Duke of Windsor) member of the British royal family.

I will give you a clue. Only one of them was brave enough to try & stop Hitler.

[Myles Na G.]

Myles Na G

Which of these is the supporter of Hitler & his genocide policies?

Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (German Army General)

or

Edward VIII (The Duke of Windsor) member of the British royal family.

I will give you a clue. Only one of them was brave enough to try & stop Hitler.

Edward VIII was a Nazi supporter. Big news. I'd be quite sure he wasn't the only one, given that family's history and lineage. What is your point? That not every German was a Nazi, or that not every member of the German military was a war criminal? I've already said as much. Moreover, those Germans who tried to defy the Nazis deserve to have their bravery and self sacrifice commemorated. My original point is that those Germans who were fighting against the Allies and in support of Hitler and his objectives are not deserving of any such commemoration, given the fact that their regime was engaged in mass murder and genocide - irrespective of whether each and every member of the military was equally to blame for war crimes committed by the Nazis. That was my original point. It has been somewhat lost by the howls of protest from one or two republicans on here, who break out in a rash when they think that something positive is being said about Britain or its armed forces (though if you look closely, you'll notice that I haven't mentioned the British once in this exchange). I'm not sure if that's just their bigoted wee brains kicking in to default mode, or whether there's also a hint of guilty conscience in this instance, given the shameful record of republicans' support for and collusion with the Nazis during World War II.

[naka]

Jeez
Guys  ww11 was not about Ireland ( sure we didn't fight)
Am fascinated by it and by the global killing.
Hitler was a unique leader who led probably the most professional army the world will ever see.britain up til 1944 list nearly every battle it fought with them.
They lost purely because they picked too many fights.
In 1941  before Russia was attacked Britain was losing but credit to the Brits they fought on ( unlike the French) and would not surrender( that took savage courage )
The German soldier/ officer was happy to fight for hitler til they starting losing battles ( Stalingrad etc)
The reality of ww11 was simple Russia won the war for the allied cause plain and simple

At all stages Ireland stayed out ( save to intern republicans in the curragh )

[thejuice]

Just curious to know if Eoin O'Duffy and his crew ever got close to gaining power (no jokes about Inda and his crew now ). I know about Marshes Yard and they went to help Franco but beyond that not much.

Interesting times in England around D-Day memorials. Everyday you see groups of Spitfires and Lancaster bombers flying over.

In the end Hitler probably would have lasted as long as Franco and Stalin if he didn't have such imperialistic ambitions. But god only knows what way Europe would be in now?

[macdanger2]

Jeez
Guys  ww11 was not about Ireland ( sure we didn't fight)
Am fascinated by it and by the global killing.
Hitler was a unique leader who led probably the most professional army the world will ever see.britain up til 1944 list nearly every battle it fought with them.
They lost purely because they picked too many fights.
In 1941  before Russia was attacked Britain was losing but credit to the Brits they fought on ( unlike the French) and would not surrender( that took savage courage )
The German soldier/ officer was happy to fight for hitler til they starting losing battles ( Stalingrad etc)
The reality of ww11 was simple Russia won the war for the allied cause plain and simple

At all stages Ireland stayed out ( save to intern republicans in the curragh )

Not bring anti-brit but did it take savage courage not to surrender?? There was no option really. There must have been some demoralising times though. The financial / manufacturing support of the US would have been a huge bolster for them

[naka]

Britain had an option
Similiar to France
They fought on, hoping the US would join in.
Whilst hating the Brits for what they have done in Ireland I admire their steely determination .

[muppet]

Normandy yesterday. 9,000 bodies etched into the sand.

It is terrible how people can follow blind ideology even when it leads to the deaths of millions of ordinary Germans, Jews, Arabs, French, British, Italians, American, Irish, etc etc etc.

[easytiger95]

Zulu you should read Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor. He examines that issue precisely - the German insistence that the Wehrmacht were an honorable force led astray by a weak general staff in awe of the furher. But what he actually concludes that this is a myth. Certainly on the Eastern Front, not only did Paulus' 8th Arny have large elements of SS Sonderkommando who committed a sustained campaign of atrocities against the civilian population, the general orders issued to the Wehrmacht Landsers encouraged them to view their opponents as subhuman, and they also contributed to many atrocities. Indeed, the savage German invasion staged by the Red Army was driven by propaganda which directly related the behaviour of the Wehrmacht in the Stalingrad campaign to the outrages the Red Army were carrying out. It was a campaign of revenge and many Russian soldiers when going through the German countryside marvelled at the neatness of the buildings and farms, because they couldn't understand how such a lush, lovely country could produce the barbarians they met at Stalingrad.

the Wehrmacht were not all guilty - but certainly a large proportion of them participated in war crimes on the Eastern Front under orders that would never have been issued to British Tommies or the Yanks. There have also been large scale social and psychological studies on the German population that concluded that a majority of them knew at some level of the genocide of the Jews. Credit to modern day Germans they confront this fact at every level of their society. The Nazis ran a murderous, criminal, rogue state - but they were voted in democratically and really only started to lose popular support in Germany after Stalingrad. Even then, had there been elections it was very possible they would have been voted back in even as late as mid 1944.

[Eamonnca1]

My take (sorry for the long post):

The two world wars were really a continuation of more or less the same war.  It started in a time when there was no UN, no European Union, no IMF, no World Bank, no WTO, and little of the international diplomatic bureaucracy that we take for granted today.  European nations today see each other as business partners who might have the odd tiff once in a while but they have systems and structures in place that lets them iron out any differences peacefully.  Europe in the early twentieth century wasn't like that. 

European nations saw themselves as competitors and their neighbors as rivals at best and potential threats at worst. The way to maintain "peace" was to arm yourself to the teeth, form alliances, and threaten everyone else with war if anyone dared to look at you the wrong way.    Add to that you have this newfangled "Germany" contraption that was pulled together by Bismarck, a lot of people in Europe barely recognized this new nation's right to exist.  Didn't take much of a spark to blow that power keg up.

The Treaty of Versailles put the anti-German sentiment into action and created the perfect conditions for an extremist ideology to take hold, which it soon did. 

So in WWII you had a hateful ideology that had taken hold of a decent chunk of the German population.  You had atrocities committed on both sides of the battle. We're all well versed in the atrocities committed by the Nazis and the Japanese.  The bombing of civilians in England was as bad as the bombing of civilians in Germany IMHO.  You can argue that it "served them right for electing the Nazis" but that's not much comfort to a baby getting blown to bits in his own home before he's even able to walk.  The US military had an entire R&D division dedicated to finding better ways to ignite a firestorm in Tokyo using mocked-up housing areas as a testing range, specifically built from the same kind of materials found in typical Japanese homes.  As for dropping the nukes on two Japanese cities, that's often justified by the "it saved as many lives as it took" doctrine but others say that Japan had been trying to surrender for months but nothing would satisfy the Americans who seemed determined to press the button.  I agree that the tendency to whitewash the whole thing with "all allies good, all axis bad" is simplifying things a bit.

Were there good people on both sides?  Of course there were.  Rommel was highly respected by his opponents and by all accounts stuck to the rules of war and didn't carelessly waste the lives of his men at whim even when ordered to do so by that madskull of a Bohemian corporal who had taken personal command.  Claus von Stauffenberg  and his co-conspirators came to within a few feet of assassinating Hitler, shutting down the SS without a single shot being fired, and they could have ended the war and saved thousands more lives but for Hitler taking a few steps away from the bomb.

But when all is said and done, the liberation of the death camps is probably where it all becomes clearer.  No matter where it all began, on balance, you have to say the good guys won in the end.  If Hitler had taken Britain, Ireland would have been overrun as quickly as Holland was.  Plans had been drawn up for British and Irish troops to fight side by side in the event of an invasion, but it probably wouldn't have been much of a contest.  There's no way Hitler would have left Ireland alone for the yanks to use as an aircraft carrier.  Organizations like unions and the GAA would have been banned, and there was no shortage of "undesirables" that Hitler would like to have "liquidated" in Ireland.

When I hear people gripe about the cost of running the European Union and how wasteful it is, I think they're probably right, a lot of money is wasted running it, and on state visits and Presidential pomp and ceremony.  But it's a small price to pay for living in a world where we get along with international neighbors.  And when I hear people gripe about how hard done by they are with austerity and student debts and what have you, I think yes they probably have a point, but compared to the men that were encouraged/brainwashed/coerced/forced into going over the top of the trenches and not making it into their twenties, I think this generation doesn't have it all that bad.

[rossiewanderer]

there was no shortage of "undesirables" that Hitler would like to have "liquidated" in Ireland.

The sisters of mercy did their own take on it in tuam