Hitler's would-be assassin

[Hexxenhammer]

Here's a cool story about one of the surviving conspirators of the attempted assassination of Hitler. He's the guy that built the bomb. This story just confirms my feeling that these guys had big clanking balls of titanium.

Story here. (http://news.excite.com/odd/article/id/384200|oddlyenough|02-09-2004::09:12|reuters.html)

[bjornart]

If just one of those titanium endowed gentlemen who were executed or suicided had shot the guy, or otherwise taken a direct risk to blow the man up in person the attempt might have succeeded. Not that I would have been one to volunteer.

And I like Böselager's motto: Et si omnes ego non.

[Skeptic]

This guy is for real--and it can be verified. But in general, one should be very suspicious of those who claimed to have been "secretly" in the opposition to Hitler. Nobody ever skewered those "good nazis" better than Woody Allen, in "The Schmeed Memoirs", the confessions of Hitler's barber:

First of all, for a long time, I didn't know Hitler was a Nazi. I thought he worked for the phone company. I would have joined the resistance against him, but couldn't, as I just made a down payment on some furniture. Once, near the end of the war, when I realized what a monster he was, I thought of opening his towel and letting some hairs get down his shirt's collar and onto his neck, but at the last moment my courage failed me.

[subgenius]

Originally posted by Skeptic
This guy is for real--and it can be verified. But in general, one should be very suspicious of those who claimed to have been "secretly" in the opposition to Hitler. Nobody ever skewered those "good nazis" better than Woody Allen, in "The Schmeed Memoirs", the confessions of Hitler's barber:


Was that from one of his books? I sure hope I kept my copies. Laugh out loud funny. He did a spoof on college catalogues, if I recall correctly.
I still quote him re the fictitious "Sean O'Sean, Irelands most incomprehensible, and therefore greatest, poet."

You've made me vow to search my shelves and re-read: Without Feathers and.......(help me on the other one)

[Chaos]

Originally posted by Skeptic
This guy is for real--and it can be verified. But in general, one should be very suspicious of those who claimed to have been "secretly" in the opposition to Hitler. Nobody ever skewered those "good nazis" better than Woody Allen, in "The Schmeed Memoirs", the confessions of Hitler's barber:



Indeed.


After the war, a lot of Germans went through a kind of metamorphosis. Staunch Nazis became, all of a sudden, staunch democrats. Almost nobody had ever voted for the NSDAP. Nobody had known anything about Nazi crimes, nobody had ever agreed with the Nazis, nobody had ever done anything wrong themselves, and of course they would have resisted the Nazis if they had known anything...
It was neither the first nor the last incident of Spontaneous Mass Mutation, (Nazis turning into democrats) but certainly one of the most revolting. Not that it is ever not revolting...

[Skeptic]

It's from a book called "Getting Even". The other two he has are "Without Feathers" and "Side Effects".

The book includes, for instance, "Mr. Big" (a private eye needs to find God for a client), "Notes from the Overfed" (a spoof of Dostoyevski's "Notes from the Underground"), and others.

Funniest line in the book comes from "Death: A Play", a spoof of "The Seventh Seal". Death comes to take a middle-aged jewish New Yorker, but agrees to pay Gin Rummy with him for his soul:

Man: "So, let's make it 1/10th of a cent a point?"
Death: "Why do you want to play for money?"
Man: "To make it interesting."
Death: "And this is not interesting enough for you?"

[Skeptic]

Indeed. After the war, a lot of Germans went through a kind of metamorphosis. Staunch Nazis became, all of a sudden, staunch democrats. Almost nobody had ever voted for the NSDAP. Nobody had known anything about Nazi crimes, nobody had ever agreed with the Nazis, nobody had ever done anything wrong themselves, and of course they would have resisted the Nazis if they had known anything...

A history professor of mine found a way around their stories. He interviewed many of these people--in the 1960s and 70s, when many of the top-ranking guys were still alive.

There is no point, he told us, to ask them "did you know about the holocaust?" or "why did you join the party?". They have stock answers for all of those questions.

The question they're not ready for is: "when did you STOP believing in Hitler?". The most common answer he got, usually blurted out before they had time to think? "1946".

[Mr Manifesto]

Originally posted by Chaos


Indeed.


After the war, a lot of Germans went through a kind of metamorphosis. Staunch Nazis became, all of a sudden, staunch democrats. Almost nobody had ever voted for the NSDAP. Nobody had known anything about Nazi crimes, nobody had ever agreed with the Nazis, nobody had ever done anything wrong themselves, and of course they would have resisted the Nazis if they had known anything...
It was neither the first nor the last incident of Spontaneous Mass Mutation, (Nazis turning into democrats) but certainly one of the most revolting. Not that it is ever not revolting...

It's probably easy to judge now, years after the fact, full of p!ss and vinegar. To start with, we know who won the war. I imagine those living in Germany or the occupied countries weren't quite so certain.

Don't forget, there were Jews who were helping the Nazis find Jews in hiding. This, more than anything, illustrates how hopeless many found the situation to be. It would be easy to scream traitor to the people who did this, but of course we weren't in their shoes. How would we act if we were in a similar situation today?

Before answering that question, it might be worth wondering how history will judge those of us who sit on the sidelines while America occupies Iraq ostensibly for her own security, while America holds people in prison without charge. What if, ten years from now, America becomes the modern-day version of the Nazis? Will people in the future say, 'why didn't anyone do anything to stop this from happening?'

[Hexxenhammer]

Seven posts before someone compared America to the Nazi's. More than I thought.

[Skeptic]

Originally posted by Hexxenhammer
Seven posts before someone compared America to the Nazi's. More than I thought.

I think a "Godwin number" of seven is probably a record for a post with "Hitler" in the title.

[Mike B.]

Originally posted by Hexxenhammer
Seven posts before someone compared America to the Nazi's. More than I thought.

:D :D :D :D

[Mike B.]

Originally posted by Mr Manifesto


Before answering that question, it might be worth wondering how history will judge those of us who sit on the sidelines while America occupies Iraq ostensibly for her own security, while America holds people in prison without charge. What if, ten years from now, America becomes the modern-day version of the Nazis? Will people in the future say, 'why didn't anyone do anything to stop this from happening?'

Why stop there...Oh Socialist fighter for International Justice!!!?

What will they say about the 2,000,000 dead Animists/Xians killed in Southern Sudan over the past 15 years?

What will they say about the 3,000,000 dead in the Congo and the deliberate chopping off of limbs by the different tribes there?

What will they say about the Copts being wiped out by the Egyptians?

Oh you don't care about those?

Oh I forgot, you only care about human rights when it can somehow be connected to Israel or the US...

[Mr Manifesto]

Originally posted by Mike B.


Why stop there...Oh Socialist fighter for International Justice!!!?

What will they say about the 2,000,000 dead Animists/Xians killed in Southern Sudan over the past 15 years?

What will they say about the 3,000,000 dead in the Congo and the deliberate chopping off of limbs by the different tribes there?

What will they say about the Copts being wiped out by the Egyptians?

Oh you don't care about those?

Oh I forgot, you only care about human rights when it can somehow be connected to Israel or the US...

There's nothing quite like bringing up America's human rights abuses to bring out the strawman in the knee-jerk patriots, is there?

[LW]

Originally posted by bjornart
If just one of those titanium endowed gentlemen who were executed or suicided had shot the guy, or otherwise taken a direct risk to blow the man up in person the attempt might have succeeded. Not that I would have been one to volunteer.

According to memoirs of Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Hitler himself wondered about that shortly after the assasination attempt.

I don't have the book available right now, but it was something along the line that: "how could a German officer be such a coward that he used a bomb and not a pistol". Afterwards, pistols were collected from officers who were not in the "100% certain safe" category so assasination would have been more difficult than before.

[Bottle or the Gun]

Remember, the guys that wanted Hitler out didn't want to die. One of them certainly could have taken him out if they wanted. They were not heroes. There was a an entire cabinet of his staff in the room when the bomb went off. It was a straightforward coup attempt. They wanted him gone and then they go back home at night to their chateaus. Would Hitler and his gang being dead have really changed what was happening in Germany?

[pgwenthold]

Originally posted by Bottle or the Gun
Remember, the guys that wanted Hitler out didn't want to die. One of them certainly could have taken him out if they wanted. They were not heroes. There was a an entire cabinet of his staff in the room when the bomb went off. It was a straightforward coup attempt. They wanted him gone and then they go back home at night to their chateaus. Would Hitler and his gang being dead have really changed what was happening in Germany?

This is what I have been wondering. Didn't they try to kill Hitler because he was an inept military leader? It's not like these guys were anti-Nazi or anything.

[Bottle or the Gun]

Yep! That episode of Hogan's Heroes aside, the attempt on Hitler was not done by the 'good guys'. They were still Nazis. Hitler was unbalanced, incompetent and had only one ball. The death camps would not have been shut down because Hitler was dead. The conspirators were upset that they were losing their goal of power and conquest due to a charsmatic leaders' fallability. The Nazis didn't even have a real philosophy, it was just about $$$ and power.

(Little known: Goering ordered that all good German's are required to eat gruel and drink mineral water daily. Gee, guess who owned the plants that made those products?)

It was still a nervy attempt that the conspirators knew would have dire consequences if it failed. But don't ignore the context in which it ocurred.

[Mike B.]

Originally posted by Mr Manifesto


There's nothing quite like bringing up America's human rights abuses to bring out the strawman in the knee-jerk patriots, is there?

Strawman?

You are the one that brought up the "What if???"

But hey let's stick with Iraq then.

Shouldn't the world be upset that it did nothing (including the US) while 100,000s of Kurds and Shiites were slaughtered by Saddam?

Or again does people killed by Third World dictators not matter to you?

[Mike B.]

Originally posted by Mike B.


To paraphrase Skeptic, "Who cares about 100,000s of dead Iraqis?! This is the fascist, racist, US government we are talking about!!!"

[Bottle or the Gun]

US Human Rights Abuses? Do we feed people to wood chippers? Stick them in ovens? Create entire landfills of the dead?

The only abuse I see is holding some people until it is decided if they are a threat or not. Granted, I'm upset over the constituionality of the detainees. But it's amazing how the US is really the only country that even attempts to act fairly, and other countries question our procedures. What is the fate of people in a Turkish jail? Or Mexico? Or Saudi? The life-expectancy of an American in a Korean jail is one week, and they are allies. You know why diplomatic immunity is so important? The reason the rapist cousin of a visiting diplomat goes home to Rawanda instead of jail? Because in America an embassy worker won't get their hands cut off for political reasons, but in the mid-east they will. I'll be more concerned about the US record of habeus corpus abuses when we start lining a few million people up and leaving their ethnically-cleansed corpses to decompose in a field, like other countries.

[Chaos]

Originally posted by Bottle or the Gun
Remember, the guys that wanted Hitler out didn't want to die. One of them certainly could have taken him out if they wanted. They were not heroes. There was a an entire cabinet of his staff in the room when the bomb went off. It was a straightforward coup attempt. They wanted him gone and then they go back home at night to their chateaus. Would Hitler and his gang being dead have really changed what was happening in Germany?

From what I heard and read, they were convinced that the war was lost and planned to start negotiating with the Allies after Hitler was gone - i.e. to achieve a cease-fire or at least a conditional surrender instead of Germany being crushed completely.
I have no idea, though, what their stance towards the holocaust was.

[Graham]

Originally posted by Bottle or the Gun
US Human Rights Abuses? Do we feed people to wood chippers? Stick them in ovens? Create entire landfills of the dead?

The only abuse I see is holding some people until it is decided if they are a threat or not. Granted, I'm upset over the constituionality of the detainees. But it's amazing how the US is really the only country that even attempts to act fairly, and other countries question our procedures. What is the fate of people in a Turkish jail? Or Mexico? Or Saudi? The life-expectancy of an American in a Korean jail is one week, and they are allies. You know why diplomatic immunity is so important? The reason the rapist cousin of a visiting diplomat goes home to Rawanda instead of jail? Because in America an embassy worker won't get their hands cut off for political reasons, but in the mid-east they will. I'll be more concerned about the US record of habeus corpus abuses when we start lining a few million people up and leaving their ethnically-cleansed corpses to decompose in a field, like other countries.


Do you think your country should be held to the standards of civilised countries or crazy dictatorships?

Why do you compare yourself to Saudi Arabia and Korea rather than, for example, Canada or Sweden?

it's amazing how the US is really the only country that even attempts to act fairly

The only country? In the whole world? Seriously?

Or do you mean the only country in your carefully pre-selected list?

Graham

[Mr Manifesto]

Originally posted by Mike B.


Strawman?

You are the one that brought up the "What if???"

But hey let's stick with Iraq then.

Shouldn't the world be upset that it did nothing (including the US) while 100,000s of Kurds and Shiites were slaughtered by Saddam?

Or again does people killed by Third World dictators not matter to you?

The strawman you have created is that you think I don't care about third world dictators killing people.

This argument, incidntally, is irrelevant. Sudan and the Congo hardly have the sort of power that America has. I doubt we'll be seeing a Blitzkrieg from them any time soon. The same can't be said for America. Already they have occupied one country illegally.