A Fundamental dilemma?

[Karl Heidenreich]

Bgile:

I always been of the belief that Hitler never intended a conflict against Great Britain. As a matter of fact, Goering once told that the British weren´t "natural enemies" of the German people ( ).
I do believe that if the Britons would have presented favourable conditions to the Germans during or after Dunkirk there could have been peace between those two countries.

Best regards.

[Bgile]

Bgile:

I always been of the belief that Hitler never intended a conflict against Great Britain. As a matter of fact, Goering once told that the British weren´t "natural enemies" of the German people ( ).
I do believe that if the Britons would have presented favourable conditions to the Germans during or after Dunkirk there could have been peace between those two countries.

Best regards.

I believe that to be correct. My real intent was to ask if there was any point at which Britain would have said "yes".

[VeenenbergR]

To Bgile. No the British refused doggedly any offers Hitler made. The British were persistant anti German (and anti French) even up to this day. They never condemned any of their own war crimes like the bombing of Dresden, Berlin or Hamburg even while nowadays it is widely accepted that those bombings were sheer terror and many innocent perished, invaluable culture lost forever within a couple of hours. Many tens-of-thousands of foreigners were killed too and bombing of the refugees fled from the East in once beautiful Dresden was one of the most barbaric acts in our whole human history.
These bombardments gained nothing but destruction of what everone would have liked. Same for the thousands of jews killed in one of the last days of the war by the insane and totally mad destruction of German civilian ships like the Cap Arkona by British ground attack aircraft.
Not to speak of torpedoing of the Wilhelm Gustloff (10.000 killed)the General Steuben and the massive losses of 2 freighters leaving Sevastopol for Constanta in 1944. Germany suffered terrible at the hands of the revengefull and merciless "Alllies".
Even after the war a hidden horror went further in the POW camps were Germans simply were neglected and starved like flies. The numbers are a well kept secret until today and the exact numbers killed will never be known.

[Bgile]

To Bgile. No the British refused doggedly any offers Hitler made. The British were persistant anti German (and anti French) even up to this day. They never condemned any of their own war crimes like the bombing of Dresden, Berlin or Hamburg even while nowadays it is widely accepted that those bombings were sheer terror and many innocent perished, invaluable culture lost forever within a couple of hours. Many tens-of-thousands of foreigners were killed too and bombing of the refugees fled from the East in once beautiful Dresden was one of the most barbaric acts in our whole human history.
These bombardments gained nothing but destruction of what everone would have liked. Same for the thousands of jews killed in one of the last days of the war by the insane and totally mad destruction of German civilian ships like the Cap Arkona by British ground attack aircraft.
Not to speak of torpedoing of the Wilhelm Gustloff (10.000 killed)the General Steuben and the massive losses of 2 freighters leaving Sevastopol for Constanta in 1944. Germany suffered terrible at the hands of the revengefull and merciless "Alllies".
Even after the war a hidden horror went further in the POW camps were Germans simply were neglected and starved like flies. The numbers are a well kept secret until today and the exact numbers killed will never be known.

Well, you took my question about a potential peace between Britain and Germany and turned it into a rant about Allied war crimes. I don't entirely disagree with you, but it might belong under a different topic.

My father in law guarded a German POW camp in the USA for a short time after the end of the war and he said he was on good terms with the prisoners, and I can't believe they were starved or he would have mentioned it. They were only held until they could be properly identified and if they hadn't been charged with a war crime they were repatriated as fast as they reasonably could be.

[lwd]

This is OT but since you brought it up I'll respond once. If you wish to continue pls start a thread in the appropriate forum if it doesn't vilate the guidlines of this site.

...The British were persistant anti German (and anti French) even up to this day.

How so?

They never condemned any of their own war crimes like the bombing of Dresden, Berlin or Hamburg even while nowadays it is widely accepted that those bombings were sheer terror and many innocent perished, invaluable culture lost forever within a couple of hours.

Perhaps becasue they were not war crimes even though innocents parished and cultureal items were lost. It is not widely accpted by teh way that they were "sheer terror" bombings.

...These bombardments gained nothing but destruction of what everone would have liked.

That's one opinion bat hardly one supportable by the facts.

Same for the thousands of jews killed in one of the last days of the war by the insane and totally mad destruction of German civilian ships like the Cap Arkona by British ground attack aircraft.

Well let's see. Here's a quote from wiki at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cap_Arcona

In 1940, it was taken over by the Kriegsmarine and .... In early 1945, the Kriegsmarine reactivated it

Doesn't look like it was a civilian ship to me. Then there's this:

Unknown to the RAF[5], the ships were carrying between 7,000-8,000 prisoners from the German concentration camps

Not much to blame the British for there.

Interesting spin you put on things

[Vic Dale]

Hess had visited Bismarck prior to her Atlantic foray and it is believed that he made many associations aboard her.

Where have you read that?

Hi Jose.

I have searched all day and found everything except this.

I'll keep looking.

It may have been in a post on some other site.

Vic

[VeenenbergR]

To Bgile: the German prison camps in the USA and Britain were "a heaven" compared to those in France, Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and the US-camps near the Rhine, were huge numbers were starved to death. Official numbers were intentionally published with lower numbers by SU, France and USA.

To Iwd: on the picture in Wikipedia the Cap Arcona is clearly a civilian ship. In the war most of those ships were painted over in all kind of dazzle scheme's. I personally find this act of war so near to the end "barbarish": to shoot even at people in an ice cold sea when their ships were sunk. That the British did not know these people were prisoners is even more tragic but in essence not so important. It is the way they destroyed virtually everything so near at the end. This mentality is totally wrong.

To Iwd. Ok judging Architecture is subjective. There is however a large public which loves Barocke buildings.

In the Netherlands I bought a novel for my mother (her last Santa Claus) in 2005: "Sonny boy" of Annejet van der Zijl.
This deals about a boy of a relation between a Dutch woman and a negro man from Surinam. This boy was on the Cap Arcona at 3 may 1945 and survived the terrible massacre of prisoners by the British, he managed to swam ashore to be shot by 15 and 16 year old boys from the Waffen-SS. It is only a novel based on facts (photo's inside of Sonny boy) but the novel tells me that war is totally lawless and senseless. I convict strongly these barbaric acts. The war was not decided or won by massacring civilians at a huge scale. It shows no respect for life. The pilots are mere robots which may not think.
It is all the same if reading books about the Concentration camps, the senseless bombing of Dresden, the behaviour of the Russians in Budapest, Breslau or Königsberg. After reading if have an awfull feeling.

[Bgile]

I'm not aware of US troops deliberately starving any German PoWs postwar. Please provide some documentation of this.

[lwd]

Let's see what was on topic in this post. I'll edit out all the off topic verbage.

....

wow look at that nothing left. If you want to continue this discussion pls start a thread where it's appropriate and we can correct some of your misconceptions and misunderstandings. PLS do not continue it here.

[Karl Heidenreich]

Wasn´t this a discussion of German naval doctrine?

[Lutscha]

@VeenenbergR

The Cap Arcona was to be sunk with all prisoners aboard by the Germans. Only the premature sinking by the Allies let some of the survive which is grotesque. Who would have survived a mass drowning under deck at high sea?

"SS-Sturmbannführer Gehrig informed camp commander Pauly of captain Bertram's refusal to take prisoners on board and Pauly informed Head of Gestapo Graf Bassewitz-Behr who reported to Gauleiter Kaufmann. On the evening of the 21st April Kaufmann sent his personal advisor SS-Hauptsturmführer Horn to John Eggert, chairman of the board of directors of the Hamburg-Süd shipping line to inform him that Captain Bertram was to follow the SS order to take prisoners on board or be shot. Eggert telephoned Bertram who in turn called Admiral Engelhardt head of naval transport.
It was clear to all that the Cap Arcona was to be scuttled with the prisoners on board.
Engelhardt sent captain Rössing to Kaufmann to lodge the navy's formal protest against the impounding of the Cap Arcona but he only got as far as SS-Hauptsturmführer Horn who ordered Lieutenant-Commander Lewinski and SS-Sturmbannführer Gehrig to impound the ship with force of arms."

Whose war crime was it?

Sure we Germans suffered war crimes as well but we outdig the Allies by a very good margin to say the least...

And saying that that Dresden with about 30k deaths (I use the official, not the right wing revisionist figure) is one of "the most barbaric acts in human history", then what were the German "acts" compared to this?
What do you intend by using such attributes and crediting the Cap Arcona to be an Allied war crime which it was not?

[Vic Dale]

To All,

We got a thread locked off recently, because some of us did not pay sufficient attention to the theme of the thread we were writing too. The main theme is fascinating, so please let us concentrate on that here and open a separate thread devoted to "War Atrocities."

Thanks Vic

[VeenenbergR]

Hi guys. I stop writing about this. Glad to hear that the Cap Arcona incident was not only an Allied attrocity, but Germans also had their part in it. Let us all return to the Kriegsmarine dilemma and as I said Germany was ill-prepared for war and could still have easily won if:
- stopping after Poland, consolidating over the next decades and making the western borders and air defenses impregnable (Chancellor Bismarck would have favoured this option);
- or if going 1 step further (not to be advised): eliminate all British ground forces at Dunkirk (1); then attack with all Luftwaffe units consequently the British airfields (2) and after 3 months proceed with the invasion as planned (3); sending NO troops to help the Duce (4). German surface fleet (and Luftwaffe Stuka's) is then used to protect the invasion fleet.
The problem afterwards is what to do with the occupied Western countries??
- or if really going over the border (of the East): be simply friendly to the Ukrainian and Soviet conquered peoples.
In all above instances the war would be totally different and far more succesfull for the Germans, but clearly seen option ONE is the only one which could have make sense for the long term.

[RF]

Germany had once held colonies in Africa and returning them to German control was being discussed even as late as after Hitler attained power.

Vic Dale

As part of the appeasement process there were informal discussions between the British and the Germans (principally between Sir Horace Wilson and Goering) up to 1937.
But Hitler was not interested in African colonies, although he made public platitudes for propaganda purposes, and there was little interest from German industrialists.
The main stumbling block to these discussions - which never had any prospect of achieving anything - were the circumstances surrounding the former German territories. Togoland was offered to the Germans, but it was the smallest of Imperial Germany's African possessions, a narrow strip of land adjacent to Ghana with no natural resources, and as demonstrated in August 1914 it was militarily undefensible. The British simply walked in and seized the place almost without any fighting.

Cameroun (or Kamerun as the Germans called it) was more promising. It was adjacent to Nigeria and bordered on the Nigerian oilfields - indeed modern Nigera incorporates the British seized part of Kamerun, including the oilfields discovered there after WW1. However the French retained their part of Kamerun as Cameroun, the modern day African state. As colonial rulers giving up Cameroun was one concession the French were not prepared to make, it was one part of the French Empire that held the prospect of oil.

As for South West Africa, this was mandated by the League of Nations to South Africa, a self governing dominion of the British Empire. The South African government made it crystal clear that they did not want the Germans back in South West Africa. It was theirs and they were keeping it. The South Africans also virulently objected to any proposal to give Tangiyika ~(now Tanzania) back to the Germans, or even as proposed in 1940, to give it to the Italians as a trade to keep Italy out of WW2.

[RF]

Not until 1937 did Hitler begin his expansion and then very tentatively.

Vic Dale

This is not correct. You are forgetting the murder of the Austrian chancellor Dollfuss in 1934 by the Austrian Nazis, and only the intervention of Mussolini prevented the ''Anschlus'' from happening four years earlier than it actually did. That was why Hitler had to wait while the Heer was built up.
The expansion started in 1935 when a referendum resulted in the retuen of the Saar to Germany - the one acquisition which didn't require armed force.