On Wed, Mar 02, 2011 at 10:57:41AM -0600, Gregg Dennhardt wrote:
> Norm:
>
> Dornitz had standing instructions early in the war for his U-Boat
> Captains to give aid.
I'm not sure where you got that idea, but it makes no sense whatsoever.
A U-boat - which is a small, confined environment which is already
cramped to the maximum - cannot render anything resembling useful aid to
a ship that they just sank, which may have had hundreds of men aboard.
In addition (and I had occassion to read the
"Unterseebootkommandantenhandbuch", the "U-Boat Commander's Handbook",
fairly recently), the Germans were very aware of just how vulnerable a
U-Boat was, and that it could be disabled by even minimal damage such as
produced by small-arms fire; there's no possible way that they would
have been told to closely approach an enemy who was not completely
disabled - i.e., dead. The instructions in the U.Kdt.Hdb., e.g., those
for taking a ship as a prize, make that exceptionally clear.
> But as I recall this was taken back when Allies
> straffed a U-Boat doing so off if Africa. They had communicated their
> intent but apparently this never was received by our Air Crews. The
> mistake, afterwards, resulted in no more aid being offered.
I'm going to grant you the benefit of the doubt here, and say that
you're laboring under a misconception (rather than trying to apologize
for the "noble" Nazis.) There was nothing like a pretty "honor among
gentlemen" agreement implied in this type of warfare; sub warfare was
*intended* to be as furtive as possible, and striking with no warning
was not a preference but the only possible means of sinking the Allied
ships and murdering the men aboard. Again, this is made exceptionally
clear in the sub manual.
This is not a comment on modern Germans, but the people who initiated
the use of poison gas in warfare can have no possible claim on anything
like honor or fairness. The "noble Aryan race" was just a myth, and one
that was more poisonous than that gas in its effects, both for Germany
and the rest of the world. Trying to ascribe high motives to them is, at
the very least, macabre and distasteful.
> As for the monstrosities you are correct. Iin war all sides of a
> conflict often engage in such.
We aren't discussing a tit-for-tat, "both sides" situation; there's a
reason that shooting a criminal in your house is not called "murder" but
"self-defense". Germany began a war of aggression, and practiced almost
every evil known to man: genocide, wholesale murder, organized torture,
on and on. Vileness of the sort that the Nazis brought into being
deserved to be stamped out by any means whatsoever - and the people who
destroyed them, no matter the means, are heroes. I won't go into the
details, but I am completely clear on the meaning of what I've said: *no
matter the means*.
Yes, horrible things are done in war. I know all about it; my father was
in it (they dug 20 shell fragments out of him, and had to leave 2 of
them in, since they were too close to the brain for wartime surgery to
be of use), and my uncle died at the front. I'm a Russian Jew of a
generation that was directly affected by WWII; I had relatives who died
in the labor camps, I've seen the ruins of the cities - *every single
person I knew growing up* had lost someone. Try to comprehend the scope
of that. That's a bit different from reading about it in books, where
you can draw any picture you like; reality is stark and exceptionally
clear, and doesn't leave much to the imagination.
I suggest that it would be best to avoid saying anything that even
smells of justification for the Nazis' acts. They're not in any way
defensible.
Ben
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