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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

As I mentioned before, not only do the Nazis have an urgent plan to conquer the world ASAP, but they also have super science weapons research. Stealth bombers, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and jet planes. Yet, at the beginning of the war, they faced cavalry charges! There are real life super-scientists engaged in real-life super-science intrigue to keep nuclear secrets out of Nazi hands. And on top of that, these guys are worse or on a par for atrocities with anyone ever, real or imagined. And to cap it all off, they're running around doing this stuff while wearing outfits designed by Hugo Boss.

It's like the Nazis escaped from the pages of fiction and invaded reality using a time machine.

EDIT: Turns out Hugo Boss didn't design the uniforms. Still, they were quite stylish.

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"And on top of that, these guys are worse or on a par for atrocities with anyone ever, real or imagined."

This is a Euro-centric perspective. The Germans did not do anything different than any of the colonial powers in their own colonies. The difference with the Germans is that they decided to colonize Europe.

In terms of excess mortality, the man-made British famines in India are worse. The genocide of Native Americans by the Spanish, English and French colonists is unparalleled in human history for its duration, brutality and number of casualties. In Africa it is much the same - forget Belgians in the Congo, the British had death camps in Kenya in the 1950s!

I was thinking in terms of quality, not quantity.

Technological innovations do make a big difference. I'm sure the Mongols or Ottomans would have implemented similar methods of mass execution if they had the tools. But OTOH the living conditions on European and American slaving ships actually make German death camps seem humane in comparison.

Also the Irish potato famine was likely caused by the British.

"these guys are worse or on a par for atrocities with anyone ever, real or imagined"

If you look at the total number of people killed, hitler's atrocities pale in comparison with those of Stalin and Mao.

True but if you look at the manner in which it was done then the Nazis are up there. What was horrible was the systematic way it was done. It wasn't a city gassed on a whim, or a population shot because they where rebelling. Those are terrible, but what is terrible about what the Nazis did was in the planning and efficiency of it all.

And you can combine that with guards picking up children by the ankles and dashing their brains out on the nearest building.

Another big difference was that in Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China just about everyone was under potential threat - being a member of the party or close to the leader wasn't really any help.

Whereas in Nazi Germany it was a much colder clinical decision to systematically remove "undesirable" elements from society. I think it is the systematic element of their terror, rather than the sheer lunatic barbarity of the communist regimes, that makes them so scary.

isn't this a reductionist view? the night of the long knives is just the first example I can think of, but I'm pretty sure there were more examples of people _becoming_ undesirable.

But in the Soviet Union the arrests were made to quota to feed the slave labor camps of the gulag - not because of anything the prisoners had actually done (of course, they had to confess).

There were some courageous Germans who chose to defy the Nazis (e.g. the White Rose group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rose) but that to me is quite different.

The overwhelming majority of Germans, if they didn't belong to one of the racial or political categories hated by the Nazis, had nothing to fear unless they chose to defy the state. Most didn't.

I had not heard of a "arrest to quota" design in the USSR, could you point me to a relevant source so I can read about it?

I still disagree on the main point that to be at risk in nazi germany you had to somehow defy the regime.

Your view seem to be that in nazi germany you could simply comply with the ruling ideology and be fine, but as I said above, you can think of the killings and arrests by the thousands of the SA (which had been key to hitler's seize of power) as a glaring counter example.

Moreover, the gestapo mostly run operations based on delations from common citizens (the origin of the "gestapo=big brother" misconception), it's not hard to imagine how mundane they can be. Unless you have a much better view of humanity than I have :)

It's either from:

http://www.simonsebagmontefiore.com/stalincourtredtsar.aspx

http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/140003...

Whenever shit like that happens, you can be sure that there are people taking advantage of the situation to settle old scores. Wherever the official reason for depriving people of life or liberty, corrupt functionaries will trump up accusations to suit their personal agendas.

What kind of asshole draws historical conclusions based on /numbers/ dead? Reducing the dead to numbers and comparing a lost life to another an atrocity in itself.

Classic morality problem: sacrifice 1 you know for 10 you don't. Have you solved it? Enlighten us.

"One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic"

Stalin

The total numbers pulled from Reagan's imagination?

edit: I'll post some sources when I get home

As promised:

This includes the best available numbers on the people imprisoned and executed for counter-revolutionary (political, kulaks, etc.) crimes from 1921 to 1954 in the entire Soviet Union (includes republics annexed in 1939) from a report ordered by Khruschev (ie - the real numbers, not speculation), as well as an analysis of the commonly published speculative numbers:

http://www.thewalls.ru/truth/repress.htm (Russian)

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h... (Google English translation)

642,980 executed, 2,369,220 imprisoned, 765,180 internally exiled over a 30-year period. That is 21,433 people receiving capital punishment each year, and 78,974 imprisoned per year. To put it in perspective, 89,000 people were sentenced (up to a maximum term of 5 years) for cannabis possession in the UK in 1998.

If you include the number of excess deaths from the Ukrainian and Kazakh famines of 1932, the direct and excess deaths from the civil war and the civil war famines, there's still no comparison to the Third Reich.

According to Solzhenitsyn a quarter of the population of Leningrad were arrested in and around 1937. Apparently this turned out to be a conservative estimate.

If this is so, your numbers cannot be correct.

And yes, the Holodomor counts too.

I'm so glad this article was posted on HN recently:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

Sorry, but those two didn't made lanterns and mattresses out of people. Hitler very much one-upped everyone in 20th century in terms of atrocities.

As for the count, there are reasons to believe that Hitler was direct cause for WW2 in Europe. That one took quite a bit more people than 6M Jews you seem to imply.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/tyrants.htm

I had to check out that Hugo Boss one: they were one of thousands of manufacturers; they didn't appear to have "designed" the uniforms (they manufactured police and postal uniforms back then). They didn't do suits til the 50's http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/15/business/hugo-boss-acknowl...

tschild's two comments here summarize my thinking: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=257389#...

I stand corrected. Still, the Nazis were pretty stylin.

By "cavalry charges" I assume you are referring to the Polish cavalry who did not, in fact, charge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_cavalry#World_War_II

I have read about Soviet cavalry charges as late as 1942, but in memoirs, not history books.

Speaking of the intrigue to keep secrets out of the hands of the Nazis, there were some truly inspired espionage that would make Bond look like an unimaginative phony.

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