Posted on 05/10/2015 1:08:52 PM PDT by MuttTheHoople
The most extraordinary things about Stephen Harding's The Last Battle, a truly incredible tale of World War II, are that it hasn’t been told before in English, and that it hasn’t already been made into a blockbuster Hollywood movie. Here are the basic facts: on 5 May 1945—five days after Hitler’s suicide—three Sherman tanks from the 23rd Tank Battalion of the U.S. 12th Armored Division under the command of Capt. John C. ‘Jack’ Lee Jr., liberated an Austrian castle called Schloss Itter in the Tyrol, a special prison that housed various French VIPs, including the ex-prime ministers Paul Reynaud and Eduard Daladier and former commanders-in-chief Generals Maxime Weygand and Paul Gamelin, amongst several others. Yet when the units of the veteran 17th Waffen-SS Panzer Grenadier Division arrived to recapture the castle and execute the prisoners, Lee’s beleaguered and outnumbered men were joined by anti-Nazi German soldiers of the Wehrmacht, as well as some of the extremely feisty wives and girlfriends of the (needless-to-say hitherto bickering) French VIPs, and together they fought off some of the best crack troops of the Third Reich. Steven Spielberg, how did you miss this story?
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
Very true about assaulting a castle. Cool that a castle is still a SOB to take even with modern weapons. That’s my first takeaway. And that 17th SS looks like that second tier type SS.
First formed in 43, with draftees and Romanian Germans. Got introduced to our paratroopers several times and disliked them.
But these weren’t the “no cavity” “perfect Aryan” SS of 1939 types.
And agreed,, on May 5, 1945,,,a wise SS monkey should really be thinking about routes to Argentina.
That wouldn't surprise me. At that stage of the war, many SS soldiers were draftees.
This from scribd is one.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/160228318/Communist-Attrocities-in-Buchenwald#scribd
Basically the nazis allowed the prisoners to set up a form of self governance inside the camp and control was promptly seized by the communists who proceeded to brutalize everyone else.
I think I heard about it from some captured American airmen on one of the history shows. They spoke of the communists attacking the nazi guards at the end of the war and driving them away only to continue running the show till the allies arrived a few days later.
Have a link to what you are referring to?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchenwald_concentration_camp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Th%C3%A4lmann
From the beginning, the Nazi movement was opposed to communism. Communists were among the first to be placed in confinements once the Nazis came to power.
The real inglorious bastards was on AHC last night.
Crazy stuff. They were torturing a Jewish spy who had been acting as an SS officer at Innsbruck Austria and less than 24 hours later ranking SS officials took him out to the woods where he thought they would kill him but they offered their surrender instead.
To me WWI looked like a family feud.
As I recall, there was an instance of American and Japanese
troops in a temporary truce during some situation in
the Philippines, where troops of both sides were marching
down opposite sides of the same street...
Any one remember this?
Amazing story. No, funny that story never got out.
From the beginning the National Socialist Party was just another bunch of commies. There’s only room for one political authority under such a system. The Nazis finished their consolidation first, that’s all. Stalin’s network in Germany between the wars concluded that Hitler was their best bet.
I do NOT agree that the Nazi movement was closely affiliated with communist political philosophy. It was nationalist, authoritarian, driven by resentment from WWI humiliation, however.
Stalin had nothing to do with Hitler coming to power.
“beginning, the Nazi movement was opposed to communism.”
So the Nazis always say. The main difference I see between Nazis and Bolsheviks is whether or not the factories must be state owned. Other than that, they are both hard core socialists.
Its like Baskin Robbins being bitterly opposed to Ben and Jerrys.
But they pretended it was real.
there is also the story that the Canadians had a deal with the Germans in Holland in May 1945 not to shoot at their planes dropping food to the Dutch civilians in return for the Canadians not bombing the Germans. It worked.
“So the Nazis always say. The main difference I see between Nazis and Bolsheviks is whether or not the factories must be state owned. Other than that, they are both hard core socialists.
Its like Baskin Robbins being bitterly opposed to Ben and Jerrys.
But they pretended it was real.”
Then by your reasoning, there is no purpose in classifying political/economic systems.
The fascist movements in Europe were nationalist, private ownership of factors of production, with heavy state direction, etc.
Now if you are satisfied to lump fascism together with communism, because you dislike both, go ahead. To call them the same is not supported by history.
Who owns the factories, and farms, and houses, and equipment, and virtually everything is the whole point of communism, along with the religion-like belief the state knows best how to arrange “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
Fascism makes no pretense to do that.
Capitalism continues under fascism, but not under communism.
This is fascinating. I had never heard of this battle before.
“I do NOT agree that the Nazi movement was closely affiliated with communist political philosophy”
The differences are too trivial to worry about. They both called themselves Socialist. Both had widespread use of mass murder, suppressed and murdered intellectuals, had widespread rooting out of political heretics, worshipped and swore allegiance to one infallible heroic “dear leader”. had an aggressive foreign policy, etc.
The differences between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia are no different really that the differences between any two communist countries.
Consider...
A Vietnamese communist VC might tell you he is Buddhist and that Ho is just a nationalist. A North Korean communist might tell you Kim IS God and that business is evil. A Chinese communist wants to sell you Iphones and banking services and doesn’t care about religion as long as its not Fallon Gong that hates the state. Pol Pot says everyone with glasses who can add numbers must be killed, and that everyone must be Agrarian in year zero. Central American communists claim to be good Catholics and that they follow Liberation Theology.
A Soviet communist is also a Russian nationalist, and is different by era. A Russian from 1920s would have been horrified by a Russian of the 70s and 80s. And a Russian communist from the 70s and 80s mostly looked at the Stalin era as a big nightmarish mistake, (but would NEVER admit that to an outsider.)
The point is that almost every communist nation is drastically different in many deep order fundamental ways. Castro privately scoffs at the belief that Kim is a God born without an a$$hole.
So the differences between a German Nazi and a soviet are no greater than can be found between any other two random communist nations. Its fair to call a Nazi a type of communist, and it has the added benefit of annoying them.
A final thought, a stunning number of early Nazis and brownshirts were communist street brawlers at first. They didn’t become Nazis because their philosophy changed, they simply moved to what they saw as a winning team.
It was the Brits and Germans. A British company made a commercial about that. SAINSBURY CHRISTMAS AD
The soccer games occurred during the “Christmas Truce” of 1914. Hundreds of British and German troops fraternized in no-man’s land as the guns fell silent during the holiday.
They shared food, sang carols, and of course, played soccer.
The generals (on both sides) made sure there was no repeat of the holiday truce during the rest of the war.
Another strange tale from the annals of World War I are the allied attacks on the morning of November 11, 1918. Commanders knew the armistice would go into effect at 11 am, so they launched final pushes to gain more territory and give the Allies a more advantageous negotiating position. By some accounts, 3,000 men died needlessly on that final morning of the war.
“Capitalism continues under fascism, but not under communism.”
You may not have heard of this one communist nation called “the Peoples Republic of China”. It’s kind of small, you may not have heard of it.
And there’s another single party Communist country called Vietnam.
Both are rather famous for their capitalism and have many
privately owned businesses.
Your example falls apart. There is always this destructive desire to pretend that Nazis are some sort of an anti communist. Its a relic of cold war thinking, but nothing could be further from the truth. It’s destructive because it leads people to mistakenly see Nazis as facing a common enemy in communism.
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