This day in 1944: Hunger, frostbite, gangrene

From: (The Enlightenment)
Date: 12/23/2003 11:20 PM Central Standard Time
Message-id:

(B2431) wrote in message
...
From: "The Enlightenment"

Never happened that way. You refer to the Malmedy tragedy? It was a
small breakout attempt by 2 prisoners that turned into a few shots that
became a panic breakout that cost about 18 lives. It eventualy became a
propaganda lie that it seems to me is passionatly cherished perhaps
because
it serves a purpose. An almost completely fabricated version of it is
endlessly and somewhat disgracefullty repeated without footnote in the
Movie
"The battle for the Bulge". It Seems to have been an excuse for
justifying
the murdering of the excedingly young conscipt Germans trying to surrender

Those things happened on an individual basis by all sides. The age of the
conscript had no bearing. He was in an enemy uniform.

and particularly Waffen SS. What little "evidence" that exists was
discredited as it came via the beating to a pulp of 18 German prisoners
testicles after the war.

Having personaly spoken to Austrian Army POWs who were held in open pens
in
the snow for weeks and dieing from exposure and had to suffer several
murders by pot shots a night I know that elements of the US military can
be
very savage. To be fair it seems to have been mainly Polish American
units
that did this.


Another version is this:


The "Malmedy Massacre" is argued by others to be a hoax invented by
wartime
sensation-mongers. During the Battle of the Bulge, a unit of the 1st
Panzer
Division killed over 80 GIs during a fire fight. The American dead were
laid
out in rows in the snow, but the Germans were forced to withdraw from
Malmedy before the dead soldiers were buried. Allied propagandists blew
this
event up into a major atrocity story, claiming that the Americans had been
taken prisoner and then lined up and shot. Several Germans were tried
after
the war for their participation in this war crime.


I will wait patiently while you provide verifiable sources for either of
those
fantasies.

I am on holidays at the momment and not anywhere near my materials.
However if you try Karl Poppers method of testing the orthodoxy by
falsifying it you can find lots of very strong arguments against a
deliberate massacre on the web yourself. They were so strong that the
trial had to be abandoned.



The photographs I have seen show a lot more than 18 dead.

Either way, Malmedy was not characteristic of the Germans in the west.

Not of the Wermacht, maybe, but your beloved 2nd Waffen SS DID. How about
Maise? How about Putten? As much as you adore your Nazis you can't rewrite
their criminal actions.


And Oradeur wasn't either, I suppose?

No that's right. There is a huge amount of inconsistancy in the case
against the Germans. You can find quite a lot of this on the internet
and the case was eventualy dropped. A likely explanation was a
Marquis munitions store under the church blew up.

Ok, now explain how the church is mostly intact including the floor. Explain
how many buildings showed evidence of fires being started inside. I suppose the
citizens of Oradour killed themselves?

The Maquis were not active in all parts of France. Were they even there?


That was a small town in France where
your beloved SS shot all the men they could find and locked all the women
and
children they could find in the church, then setting fire to it. I guess
burning women and children to death wasn't their way in the west either.

All very terrible but it isn't true: not in that form anyway.

The truth is hard to accept for all sides sometimes. Humans by nature
use lies and exaggeration to villify others and thus to generate
cohesive action. This is so inportant we happily decieve even
ourselves by not inquiring too deeply and readily going along with
convenient "atrocities". The cohesive actiona is the objective and
not the truth so dissidents who try to expose the truth are not always
liked: they can damage the myths that unify us.

Neverthelss living a history that is not a truth is excedingly
dangerous.


Amazing, next you will tell us how 6 million Jews and 6 million non Jews were
not murdered in Baba Yar, Sobibor, Madainek, Auschwitz, Dachau etc? You will
then tell us those numbers are exaggerations despite all the documents the Nazi
pigs kept and fell into Allied hands?


Dan, U. S. Air force, retired