"Cub Driver" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 20 Jun 2004 07:58:16 GMT, "Eunometic"

wrote:

No proof of that for the Germans at all: they complied strictly
with
the Geneva Convention. Over 95% of American POWs of the Germans
survived the war.

That didn't help the ones sent to Auschwitz.


Were those men killed? Do you have any proof? I'm aware that
Germans sometimes refused to negotiate with Jewish officers in POW
camps as they wished to give them no power but that is the extent of
it. I am vaguely aware of some American POWs that ended up there and
they survived (becuase I saw them interviewed I think)

Auschwitz as a term should means nothing for the purposes of this
discusion and you are close to invoking Godwins law, becuase its
rhetorical effect is so massive and emotive and you'll have to explain
what that means.

Auschwitz was a series of 3 camps that supplied labour to the
sorounding factories or included factories. Not all of these were
death camps indeed possibly non of them were. The death rate is
officialy down to 800,000 not the 4,000,000 once noted. Official
hopes to find the gas chambers now mostly rest on a converted but
demolished farm house outside the camp complex. There is a recent
attempt to analyse concrete remains as well.

Most people that went there for this those 800,000 that died either
were killed away from the 3 camps and some died of the diseases and
food shortages that occured in the closing months of the war.

I do not argue that Auswitz was not a death camp, I merely point out
that a trip to Auschwitz was NOT necesarily a death sentence.


A 5 percent casualty rate is pretty high, especially if you're not
fighting, and most especially if you're one of the victims

It includes those dying from 'escaping' and natural causes and the
wounds many naturaly have upon capture (EG downed airmen).
Treatment was offered, including surgery, for those wounded and it is
only proper that their care not be excluded from statistics. Once in
a camp the allied prisoners generally organised their own health care.

Conditions were harsh. These are some reports of the toughest of the
camps he
http://darbysrangers.tripod.com/id64.htm

Escaping prisoners caused the Germans lots of problems both
ecoomically and personally. Some individual guards who has lost a son
or family to Allied bombing, and had leave cancelled that could be
spent with family could be very resentfull and harsh. Naturaly this
depended on the individual with some more philoshophical over this.


75 percent of American PWs of the Japanese survived the war. That
doesn't mean they weren't ill-treated.

OK if I get caputured I'll go with the Germans and you go with the
Japanese.



To be sure, the German military (and more particularly the air
force)
were meticulous with respect to their rules for treating western
PWs.
(They deliberately let Russian prisoners die by the hundreds of
thousands.) But the system didn't work if you got caught by the
Gestapo,

I don't regard that as correct. The huge numbers of prisoners taken
at the begining of the war overwhelmed the German facilities to take
care of them. It was the same with German prisoners at Stalingrad.
It takes the captors days even weeks to even work out how many
prisoners they have.

Argentinians died on the Malvinas due to malnutrition and exposure
only recently.

as happened to most airmen on the run; it didn't work very
well if you were a Jew;

I have to be harsh he I suppose you get many of your ideas out of
watching crap Hollywood war films which are known for their technical,
military and historical inaccuracy. In fact it is hard to beat an
American film in this area for their vile agitprop, sterotypes and
slanders and more irritatingly for converting heroes that were
British, Canadian or Australian into Americans.

At the same time they turn the enemy, usualy Germans into wooden
idiots who have 2/3rds of their bodies hanging out of tank turrets,
don't post sentries, can aim or are always commiting atrocities.

If you read "Robert J Stove's" 'The Unsleeping Eye' a 'brief history
of Secret Police' you will note most arrests of Jews by the Gestapo
(basically the equivalent of FBI) were for protective custody with
most of the Jews released several days latter. Strange but true.

Some of the Gestapo interogrators were brutal whereas others prefered
to rely on their intellectual skills.

There were plenty of American war criminals in the second world war
and they most got away with it from the small shootings of prisoners
in camps or at the time of capture to: Eisenhowers Rhine Death Camps.


and it didn't work at all toward the end, when
the PWs were sent on a lunatic death march to keep them from being
liberated by the Russians on the east or the Americans on the west.

The trafic loss of life (1200 men I think) was not an intentional
Death march and it was not standard practice: it was no worse than
American treatment of POWs but emergent from the rapidly deteriorating
conditions in the last days of the war that was killing civilians and
military alike. That is what happens when the enemy isn't offered
terms of surrender: they fight on and they know they may have no
choice but to fight to the death. The Brutal rapes and massacres
that the Russians were commiting meant that surrender was unthinkable.
Women having their legs torn apart with trucks. The Germans were
perpared to surrender to the Allies.

100,000 Germans died in the Rhine death camps. Many could have been
released much earlier and been better treated. That is only the
'official' number and many sources put the numbers much higher.

The Malmedy massacre was most certainly also not a massacre yet this
non attrocity was used as an excuse to murder surrendered Waffen SS
men, it was used to smash to a pulp the testicles of 22 year old
soldiers to extract confessions often of men who were no where near
the area and simply in a related company.

Americans are capable of Atrocity, Abu Graib showed that. I don't
hold that against them but I don't hold them as superior as they hold
and i don't hold the Germans anywhere near as villainous as they are
made out.

If this war goes on get used to being viewed as and American as being
as ghoulish as the Hollywood stereotype of a German soldier.



all the best -- Dan Ford
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