“Wow, stereotype much?”
No. Just a person that has read enough of their history from unification till today to know that they were either spoiling for a fight or needing other nations to keep them from causing trouble, that is when they aren’t slapping themselves around.
“Should we talk about the English treatment of the Irish and Scots, or about what France inflicted on the rest of Europe in the Napoleonic wars, or Russia’s colonial treatment of most of its empire, or Japan’s ... ?”
Well this article isnt about them. Post one and go hog wild.
“The Germans are a remarkable people, if you don’t include world wars.”
- William F. Buckley Jr. praising his Plath handheld computer ca. 1981.
From reading about the American Indian wars, the British and Boer wars against Africans , the French efforts in Algeria and morocco and the Belgium work in the Congo, all of the colonizing powers were pretty tough cookies in their own way.
Part of the problem was in the initial stage of any conflict the Europeans would go about a limited war, that if fight along European conventions and rule observance. The opponents would not, the native populations waged total war, and prisoners of war were taken for torture. Colonial Women and children were generally killed, often by brutal means. It was the native way of saying “don’t come here”
The reactions of the Europeans to those sorts of activities were brutal, but that is the way man is. Read some of Chinese military history, you will find them to be just as brutal. In the US The Nat Turner uprising that involved killing women and children, with the example of Haiti in 1804 resulted in a very harsh attitude by southerners.
That said, the Germans have always had a blind spot when it comes to partisan war, be it Africa, Russia, the Balkans, France in the winter of 1870/71 or Belgium in the summer of 1914. They simply view those who do not fight in uniform according to the rules of war as deserving of no regard in nay way. Must be a cultural trait, likely goes along with the very precise way they live and think.