TheIronRuler said:
Wintermoot said:
the Nazi's are the only group that is 100% evil.
No other group systematically killed people as the Nazi's did.
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I can pull out at least three examples out of the top of my head that are more "evil" than the Nazis-
Khmer Rogue
Soviet engineered Holodomor
Soviet "Great Purge"
err... look, I want to be nice here, but I don't think you should call the Nazi's "100% evil".
Oscar Schindler [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler] was a Nazi.
I admittedly do not know a great deal about the scale and motivations surrounding the Holodomor so I cannot really comment on it (if it was as bad as some say it was, I would say it is certainly comparable to the Holocaust), but their is no way that Stalin's Great Purge comes even close to the Holocaust in terms of atrocity or "evil". I fail to see how the genocide in Cambodia is somehow worse than the genocide conducted by Nazi Germany.
TheIronRuler said:
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Were the soldiers of the time aware of the atrocities Germany at the time committed? Do note that the allies themselves did some very nasty stuff themselves. For the most part they were comfortable watching the USSR burn till they realized that the Soviets were pushing back.
The soldiers of the Waffen SS were very much aware of these atrocities as they were typically carrying them out. The Wehrmact rarely took an active role in such atrocities but their High Command was fully aware that they were being carried out. This passive role ranged from quiet disapproval to rounding up "undesirables" and handing them over to the SS to be murdered. I doubt that the average Wehrmact soldier knew the scale of the Holocaust but it seems highly unlikely that they would have no idea as to what was occuring, particularily if they served on the Eastern Front.
Alot of people took an active role in the Holocaust, it is not as though Hitler and Himmler killed 11 million people by themselves. It took a large force of German citzens who fully bought into the ideology to kill that many people.
Yes, the Allies did regularily bomb civilian populations in Japan and Germany towards the end of the war. The Germans, Japanese and Italians had been bombing/gasing/executing civilian populations before the war had even started proper. These tactics worsened as the war dragged on and the Axis became more desparate. Even if one ignores the death count of the Holocaust, Germany had a lot more blood on its hands than any Allied nation. Many historians estimate that at least 6 million Soviet civilians and 2 million Soviet POWs were intentionally murdered by Germany.
No, the Allies were not content to watch the USSR burn early in the war. When Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, Great Britain and the Commonwealth were very happy to have an ally (if perhaps one of convience) to stand against Germany. The British Commonwealth sent large amounts of supplies to the Soviets well before the US Lend Lease was even considered. During these early days, the Brits even sent ships of Hawker Hurricanes and veterans pilots to Leningrad to equip and train Russian pilots in the region. Large numbers of Valentine tanks were also sent from Canada at this time. The British Campaign in North Africa was partily an attempt to take some pressure off the Soviets.