And thirdly, an article in a newspaper authored by a film director can be considered a direct order of the government with a very big stretch. Even considering the fact that all newspapers at that time were under the control of the state
Kill !
Here are excerpts from three letters found on the murdered Germans:
Manager Reinhardt writes to Lieutenant Otto von Schirach:
"The French were taken from us to the factory. I chose six Russians from the Minsk district. They are much hardier than the French. Only one of them died, the rest continue to work in the field and on the farm. Their maintenance costs nothing and we should not suffer from the fact that these animals, whose children may be killing our soldiers, eat German bread. Yesterday I subjected two Russian beasts to light execution, who secretly devoured skimmed milk intended for pig queens..."
Matthias Zillich writes to his brother Corporal Heinrich Zichlich: "There is a camp for Russians in Leiden, you can see them there. They are not afraid of weapons, but we talk to them with a good whip..."
Someone Otto Essman writes to Lieutenant Helmut Weigand: "We have Russian prisoners here. These types devour earthworms on the airfield site, they rush at the garbage bucket. I saw them eating weeds. And to think that these are people..."
Slaveholders, they want to turn our people into slaves. They take the Russians to their place, mock them, drive them to insanity with hunger, to the point that, dying, people eat grass and worms and a filthy German with a rotten cigar in his teeth philosophizes: "Are these people?.."
We know everything. We remember everything. We realized that the Germans are not people. From now on, the word "German" is the most terrible curse for us. From now on, the word "German" discharges the gun. Let's not talk. Let's not be indignant. We will kill. If you haven't killed at least one German in a day, your day is gone. If you think that your neighbor will kill a German for you, you didn't understand the threat. If you don't kill the German, the German will kill you. He will take yours and torment she in his accursed Germany. If you can't kill a German with a bullet, kill a German with a bayonet. If there is a lull in your area, if you are waiting for a fight, kill the German before the fight. If you leave a German to live, a German will hang a Russian man and disgrace a Russian woman. If you killed one German, kill another - there is nothing more fun for us than German corpses. Don't count the days. Don't count the miles. Count one thing- the Germans you killed. Kill the German!- the old mother asks for it. Kill the German!- this is the child begging you. Kill the German!- this is the native land screaming. Don't miss. Don't miss it. Kill !
Ilya Ehrenburg
I see no one appreciated the work
youlik put into his post because it is such an obvious
"hot potato". This very hot potato ,whether we like it or not, is something that exist just below the surface of the social order of many countries in the West. It has to do with the image and attitude of the West toward the East. I will draw that line as falling on the countries that are considered to be Slavic in Europe versus the rest. Czechs without Slovakia being in the West. I know I'm sticking a stick into a hornet's nest on this forum because people frequenting this place are from exactly these countries. Sorry friends, I think this topic need a few words.
So what in the world does this have to do with what is happening in Ukraine right now, you might ask. Well I think EVERYTHING.
The first clue is Putin's speech at the 2007
Munich Conference on Security Policy in Munich. I'd say it is instructive to watch it all again and carefully observe the audience. Not all are giving the game away but enough are to make it visible.
-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4MAsIh3zMA
It is my opinion that at this Conference indirectly Putin was told, "You are NOT in the Club. You are Not an Equal. No matter what you might do.". I would argue that since 2007 that message has been consistently the same.
It never changed. I am convinced that ordinary people in the population may change their attitudes but that of the political/financial elites this does not happen. I don't have access to their personal discussions but enough crumbs of information are available from their behavior to justify such a position. Thus the attitude of
"Drang nach Ost" never died in those circles.
Here is a text from a French paper written in 1918 which buttresses my hypothesis,
German Colonization in Eastern Europe
Jean Brunhes and Camille Vallaux
Geographical Review
Vol. 6, No. 6 (Dec., 1918),
AN APOSTLE OF PAN-GERMANISM
With all the more reason the Pan-Germans had proclaimed the theory of the necessity for establishing the Germans throughout the world. One of the most characteristic books which appeared before the war was that by Otto Richard Tannenberg entitled "Gross Deutschland," published in 1911. The name Tannenberg is a pseudonym bitterly reminiscent of the battle in which the Knights of the Teutonic Order were annihilated by the Poles on July 15, 1410. Unfortunately, the Germans have already taken revenge upon the Slavs on the fields of this same Tannenberg on August 30, 1914.
Might makes right. All might has inherent right to full development. This is the two-fold idea, juristic and historic, which consciously or unconsciously is at the root of German political philosophy, as revealed in this book. Let us try to disengage from this brilliant but arduous discussion what are the main elements of might which Pan-Germanism can invoke to legitimatize itself. These are:
(1) Political might. Of course, Tannenberg recalls the glories of the Teutonic Knights and the House of Hapsburg, and, also of course, he neglects to discuss the periods of decline of German power. It is assumed, it would seem, that the curve of German political development had always risen, a conception which is obviously contrary to history.
(2) The flood of German emigration, to which the United States bears witness more than any other country.
(3) German colonial expansion, with the right of historic priority conferred upon it by the Hanseatic League.
(4) Linguistic dominance. The principle of a sort of linguistic superiority over Holland and the Scandinavian countries is advanced.
(5) Numbers. The rights of a population which increases like that of Germany are continually invoked both by the economic and political writers of Germany; this argument recurs throughout Tannenberg's book
I will only focus on
2) in order to condense something that would take chapters to explain. Germans emigrating to the America also brought along their attitudes, I think that is a fair assessment. Those attitudes filtered into the ruling class of many countries to which they arrived, United States being one where this influence was strong in particular.
Then we have the royal connections of the German royal families to the British and other countries in Western Europe monarchies. This is nicely camouflaged in UK today with the name
"Windsor".
The
House of Windsor is the reigning
royal house of the
United Kingdom and the other
Commonwealth realms. In 1901, a line of the
House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (itself a cadet branch of the
House of Wettin) succeeded the
House of Hanover to the
British monarchy with the accession of
King Edward VII, son of
Queen Victoria and
Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. In 1917, the name of the British royal house was changed from the
German Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the English
Windsor because of
anti-German sentiment in the
United Kingdom during
World War I.
[1] There have been four British monarchs of the House of Windsor since then:
George V,
Edward VIII,
George VI, and
Elizabeth II.
The
House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (
/ˌsæks ˌkoʊbɜːɡ ... ˈɡɒθə, -tə/;
[1] German:
Haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha) is a
European Royal House. It takes its name from its oldest domain, the
Ernestine duchy of
Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, but its members later sat on the thrones of the
United Kingdom,
Belgium,
Portugal,
Bulgaria, and
Mexico.
Slavs have no such STRONG connections. There are royal connection but nowhere west do we see a Slavic pince or king ruling over a western kingdom. Reverse however is true. Conclusion. Slavs, you are not in The Club.
OK, in case of Russia, yes Catherine the Great was German, but I would argue that the rest of the Russian royals and the Russian people were considered "Not In The Club". This attitude toward Slavs would have filtered down the social ladder all the way to the university where new political elit is minted. This then is propaged throughout society through education, books, movies etc.
It can be seen quite easily if you know what you are looking for in movie at times. Hollywood in particular knows how to do this very subtilty and very well depending on the "political season".
"Who is Lebowski ?
"A lazy drinking bum."
This subconscious manipulation of attitudes is not limited to Slavs. Arabs, Mexicans, ... get it also.
The Image of the Slav in U.S. History and in Immigration Policy
Author(s): Joseph S. Roucek
BY A SERIES OF discriminatory immigration laws, culminating in the Quota Act of 1924, the Slav was assigned to the category of "inferior" nations and "races." How did this attitude come about? It was the result of a rather strange combination of forces produced by labor, industrialists, farmers, exuberant nationalists, racists, and intellectuals (like historians and sociologists). These influences converged to produce both the ideology out of which the legislation was fabricated and the pressure that brought about its enactment.
That immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe,particularly from the Balkans,were inherently inferior was one racist assumption.
THIS ANTAGONISTIC ATTITUDE toward the Slavs cannot be isolated from the misconceptions and misapprehension, in general, of the role played by Central-Eastern-Balkan Europe in world history. The general framework for the attitude can be found in the background, training,and attitudes of the
dominant American and English historians who, before World War II, had treated this area as a sort of terra incognita. In America,from one point of view, this was due to the traditions in historical scholarship. Most of the founders of the graduate history departments in American universities either received their training in Germany or came eventually under the spell of the German historical schools. The influence of Ranke was, in this respect,quite important. His insistence on the study of the past "as it actually and peculiarly was" did much to establish the later differentiation between history as an ideographic specialty concerned with "facts of succession"and historical sociology as a monothetic specialty analyzing"facts of repetition." But of importance to us is that Ranke maintained in his earliest writings that the Germanic and Romance nations alone form a cultural unit having a common history to be identified with the history of Europe. And owing to the influence of German scholarship, stresses Halecki, "the whole part of Europe east of Germany herself, including of course Poland, used to be disregarded even in French or English studies of universal history.
"background" = "Family and environment in which the person grew up"
I highly doubt that this attitude about Slavs is dead today in the upper/ruling classes.
I once watched a long discussion by a professor who taught at a leading German University, a sociologist if I recall correctly. When the discussion ended about the changes that occured in Germany after reunification, he was asked about the attitudes that Germans hold about people who lived in countries that Germany occupied during WW II. He said that many older generation Germans had feelings of guilt (which Allies forced into the education system) but that this attitude is not to be found in the younger generations. He said that when he quizzed his students how they felt, he basicly received a message that feeling sorry about what happened is done for them. That was then and now is different. When asked how they view Slavs as compared to themselves, he heard generalization along the lines that Germans are more intelligent and organized where as in the East the people are less intelligent and not as advance as their country. Basicly, Slavs are disorganized and not very smart.
I am convinced that Putin has been fighting this attitude since he became President of Russia, Slavs are not equals to the intelligent and enlightened West. This was seen in all actions by US, Britain, France, Germany etc... the past 20 years. Now Putin is squared off fighting against the forces these people planted in Ukraine and on his door step.
Using nice words like "colleagues", "friends" has ended because they in reality were not the truth.
