Indeed. As the inventors of the concentration camp and the perpetrators of massacres around the world, we Brits are not really in a position to be holier-than-thou. However, unlike the Germans, who are taught at school about exactly what their country did in the past, the British have mostly still to come to terms with their past actions.
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Post World War 2 - peoples views of Germany?
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75A
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And by all accounts present ones as well - SAS in the Middle East.
Gloster
Established Member
One of the problems that this country has is that it is constantly harking back to the war. We can well argue that it was our finest hour, but since then the country has been declining in influence of just about every type. So we have to pretend we are still as respected and feared as we were in 1945, and bolster our self-esteem by constant references to how we defeated the Krauts after the Frogs threw up their hands. This seeps into the consciousness of all who meet it, so that the overweight football drunk thinks that being British in itself makes him better than everybody and causes him to look down on any foreigner. This is not pride in your country and what it does, but an empty belief that ‘I’m British‘ (more often just ‘I’m English’) gives you a right to do what you want as all this lot were Nazis and we saved everybody.
looking at the thread title, I would say that my parents who grew up during the war (and whose older siblings served in it) came out very active internationalists, with the the '50s and '60s determination that it should not happen again. I learnt German at school and went on a language exchange in the '60s, our guest was probably more cultured than we were!
I believe that the appalling French losses in the 1st WW coloured their attitude when it came to risking the same again a generation later. Who can say how we would have reacted in those circumstances with a similar history?
I believe that the appalling French losses in the 1st WW coloured their attitude when it came to risking the same again a generation later. Who can say how we would have reacted in those circumstances with a similar history?
Ashley Hill
Established Member
Many young Germans post war wanted to rid themselves of the stigma of being associated with Nazi Germany. Their parents had fought in the war and they wanted to disassociate themselves from it. Some looked towards England or USA culture for inspiration.
I doubt Ted Heath personally ordered such things.
But if your point is, are us Brits free from blame, then the answer is no.
I do know that, sadly, there were a good number of "ordinary German people" that did indeed willingly participate in those monstrous acts, probably because they were essentially the yobs, thugs and simply general bullies of the population. It does not mean however that all Germans went along with it.
But take any nationality and sadly you will find a significant minority who are bullies, yobs and thugs, who given half a chance will enact their vicious fantasies.
I say it again - it doesn't mean all, or a majority of, Germans supported the Nazis. If 33% voted for the Nazis, 67% did not.
So once again, I contend that it was incorrect to blame "Germans" en masse for the monstrous atrocities carried out by Hitler and the Nazis.
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There were undoubtably many dark episodes in the history of the British Empire.
However I don’t think there’s anything that remotely compares to the 5 year industrial killing of 6 million people by the bullet, bayonet and gas chamber. People selected mostly by their race, people who had no army to threaten or attack the perpetrators, no land or resources to take and use. Killing that was based on crazed conspiracy theories concocted by a god like figure who‘s created a death cult.
i can just about believe that some older person living a remote croft type existence may have not known what was going on within wartime Germany. Everyone else though, everyone that lived in German towns and cities and socialised, everyone that read newspapers or listened to the radio, everyone that had family in the Wehrmacht, they were all totally aware of what was going on.
I meant that Brexit at least partly stemmed from distrust of "foreigners" en masse ("they're taking our jobs", etc) - but yes, let's not go there. I doubt either of us will change position on this any time soon!
Busaholic
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When I took over the running of a bookshop in Cornwall in 1988 I inherited a customer who had been incarcerated in the notorious Changi prison camp and had become one of four prisoners who not only survived the experience but had smuggled out drawings, knowing that if caught they'd have been executed. One of them was Ronald Searle, the creator of St. Trinian's. When one day a Japanese woman came into the shop while he was sitting there (he was considerably disabled) he could not have been more charming to her, never giving a hint as to his experiences. I thought it showed great tolerance and forgiveness on his part, but he was such an admirable, uncomplaining man who'd seen the worst of humanity but hadn't allowed it to destroy his spirit, only his body.
Though to be honest said lady may well not even have been born by 1945.
Cuts both ways with Japan of course - remember the Allies wronged them in dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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Gloster
Established Member
Always a difficult one. My father, as a civil engineer, had no illusions about the horrors of the atomic bomb. But, as someone who would have been one of those who would have fought the Japanese and who had a brother who had fought in Burma, he had no illusions about what a horrific experience that would have been. And there is no mileage in the argument that the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilians: many of those fighting really wanted to be civilians, but had been forced into the forces, while civilians were producing the engines of war.
It’s easy to concentrate on the Western bits of WW2.
The Japanese had been in China since 1937 and behaved appallingly. August 1945 there were still over a million Japanese troops deployed in China. It wasn’t just the home islands to be considered it was the Japanese forces on the Asian mainland also.
The Japanese had been in China since 1937 and behaved appallingly. August 1945 there were still over a million Japanese troops deployed in China. It wasn’t just the home islands to be considered it was the Japanese forces on the Asian mainland also.
Humans can be strange; and often far from rational. @Busaholic's acquaintance was, it would seem, indeed a forgiving, and beyond-decent, person -- maybe to the point that he would have acted with kindness toward someone Japanese whom he knew to have committed World War II atrocities -- logic as to who "could have", and who manifestly "couldn't have", playing no part. I remember reading about a Dutch guy who had been, at a very young age, interned by the Japanese as an enemy citizen, in what is now Indonesia, in World War II -- his experiences had been terrible, and he had atavistically loathed everyone and everything Japanese ever since. Long post-war: the firm for which he worked in a fairly high management position, sometimes entertained in the course of business, Japanese representatives of undertakings in that country. The Dutch gentleman concerned, found -- consequent on his wartime experiences -- any potential contact with anybody Japanese, intolerable. His employers understood his situation, and "spared" him accordingly. The guy experienced strong regret and remorse over this -- he "knew with his head" that any Japanese visitors-on-business would have been born well after the war, so not guilty of any horrific deeds therein; but what he "felt with his gut" was stronger, and for him unsuppressable. One would reckon -- individuals and their reactions, greatly differ.
This thread strikes a chord with me, by reason of a recent visit of mine to relatives. They're a couple -- a few years older than me (they both born 1943, me 1948) -- he's the "blood relation" to me. In conversation with his wife, "things German" came up by chance -- initially, about nothing historical. It emerged that to a large extent she is still, as it were -- after more than three-quarters of a century -- fighting World War II (at whose very end she was at most, twenty months old
). She went into quite a diatribe of hatred against Germans and anything-and-everything German; a conversational interlude, and then she went, unprompted, on to Japan -- even stronger hate, because of Japanese doings against Allied folk in that war -- I felt an implication that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not one-hundredth of what that filth truly deserved.After the German-related rant, I asked her whether these feelings on her part would extend to any individual Germans whom she might encounter. She acknowledged that she had been acquainted with a German girl, whom she found very nice and likeable. This lady, my relation-by-marriage, is in fact in many ways a lovely person -- individual quirks, and people are often weird -- lady concerned, is rather an attention-seeker: tends "in leisure hours" to spout extreme and belligerent stuff, but is in real-life matters extremely kind and caring, in deed as well as word. There strikes me as another widespread oddity of the human race: that with nations or groups other than one's own, which are widely disliked / despised / feared / shunned by one's own bunch (including by oneself) -- this sentiment is rather in the abstract; with individual members of the disliked / despised - etc. crowd whom one happens to encounter: it's more than likely that one will rate them as likeable and "surprisingly human" (while regarding them as exceptions). Admittedly there are some extreme situations, e.g "WWII, us, and Japan", which can weigh against that tendency.
If you look at it from a purely intellectual, logical point of view, you are probably right. If you were able to look at it from the point of view of people who had just come through a terrible war between nation states, and experienced things I hope you have not experienced, you might understand why many people were not so forgiving of the defeated people as a whole.
Different times. The Manchester Guardian's take on Hiroshima:
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
I don't doubt either that those were terrible events in terms of numbers of casualties, or that many Japanese may well feel that way about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But at the same time, I would draw some moral distinction between on the one hand killing lots of people at a distance, in the genuine belief that doing so is necessary in order to end the war and thereby save other lives, and on the other hand deliberately mistreating and torturing civilians and prisoners of war, often doing so for your own pleasure, and where you can clearly see that you are inflicting unnecessary suffering on specific individual human beings under your control, and where you have the ability to cease causing them suffering with no impact on the wider war but choose not to.
DerekC
Established Member
The point of thinking about what happened in Germany between 1934 or so and 1945 isn't to work out who knew and who didn't. It's to remember that in the first part of the 20th Century there was in many ways precious little to choose between Germany and England. Germany was a country with deep cultural traditions and a lot of common history with the rest of Europe. It's to understand that it is possible for thinking, civilised people just like us to be misled and lied to and taken over, so that even if we don't participate in the evil that happens as a consequence, we look the other way and la-la quietly to ourselves and so are guilty too. I had a lot of contact with Germany twenty years or so ago, sixty years after the war ended. My boss from Kiel told me his view that Germany was still in shock and still thinking hard about making sure that it couldn't happen again. The pity is that here, we still think of it as something that happened to "them", so we don't think very much about the lessons for us.
In the aftermath, the allies set about denazification, the aim to remove rooted Nazi culture from the German States, not exactly succesful, the 1970s and 1980s brought into the light a good number of newly deceased politicians and officials with unacceptable connections to the Nazi regime, those politicians and officials had continued to wield high power while their Nazi backgrounds had been hidden until their death.
Post WW2 denazification plan
Post WW2 denazification plan
richa2002
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I think this is what is called a luxury belief if you have been fortunate enough not to have bombs rained down upon you in the middle of the night. Xenophobia is the least of your worries when you face death and destruction on a nightly basis. Yes, it may not be logically correct to display hate for the peoples of a nation in response to a government's action but I would be very interested to see if you would keep such a cool head in the circumstances. Must we really accept the population of Germany were completely helpless in the face of the nazis too?
deltic
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The owners of the engineering company my father worked at banned Japanese cars from their car park untill at least the 1970s as one of their sons had been a Japanese POW.
Psychologists have had a field day with this sort of thing for years. And many of their conclusions have been how malleable groups of people are when someone in "authority" tells them to do something unpleasant, and reassures them it's OK to do so. Look up the Milgram Experiment. It's scary.
On a lighter note, a TV programme once set up a hidden camera on a person they'd hired to wear a reflective jacket with no ID to enforce a "fast walking lane" on a pavement, and the vast majority of people followed the silly instructions shouted without question.
On a lighter note, a TV programme once set up a hidden camera on a person they'd hired to wear a reflective jacket with no ID to enforce a "fast walking lane" on a pavement, and the vast majority of people followed the silly instructions shouted without question.
Falcon1200
Established Member
Absolutely not; Using atomic bombs against Japan was a dreadful thing to have to do but it ended the war far sooner, and with far less overall loss of life, both Allied and Japanese, than would otherwise have been the case.
I would never wish to diminish the horrors of the Shoah. But over its 2 centuries of existence, the sheer numbers killed by the Empire dwarf it: some historians suggest that at least 50 million people died as a result of British policies between 1891 and 1920 in India alone (this is a lower bound, with upper bound ranging as high as 165 million excess deaths). (1). Similarly, the treatment of the Kikuyu in Kenya was every bit as barbaric as anything inflicted on the Jews, and was an attack specifically on a particular group based on an ideology of racial superiority.(2)
We are really not so different from our German cousins, except that we happened to come out on top in the struggle for power, and so have not been made to take a close look at ourselves.
1. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians
2. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/18/uncovering-truth-british-empire-caroline-elkins-mau-mau
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GatwickDepress
Established Member
Indeed. The alternatives would have been a long-term blockade or an invasion, both of which would have seen far greater losses of life, plus the suffering of those in other Asian countries occupied by the Japanese would be prolonged. The Japanese High Command were aware they had lost the war, but were not prepared to surrender on Allied terms - what exactly they wanted is still debated, but it's believed the Japanese wanted something akin to the Treaty of Versailles or simple territorial concessions, not an unconditional surrender - and were fully prepared to make a bloody stand at the proposed invasion point of southern Kyūshū.
Despite how horrendous their effects were, I fully believe using the atomic bombs were instrumental in Japan's surrender. The Soviet declaration of war seemed to be a factor too, as it came as a massive shock to the government.
Gloster
Established Member
Exactly. Over several centuries we have gone to other people’s countries, nicked them, killed or enslaved the inhabitants and exploited the resources. To do this the cannon-fodder who do the work have had it dinned into them that the other people are much lesser people than us because they speak in a funny way, worship other gods, eat funny foods, have strange habits, dress differently, look different, etc., etc. Continuing hostility to Germans (and others) is merely the result of the latest turn of this history.
DustyBin
Established Member
I’m really not convinced that this is the case anymore. There will always be a small minority of “overweight football drunks” who behave in such a manner, but to claim they characterise the country as a whole is inaccurate (and rather ironic given the subject of this thread!). A lot of people I know born after say the mid 90s are frankly incognisant of WWII; it’s ancient history in their minds!
History will of course always influence the national psyche to a certain extent - and we have a lot of history, much of which involves warring with the rest of the continent - but we’re not unique in this regard.
A somewhat controversial statement! @Falcon1200 has covered it above, but it really isn’t black and white. To unleash such appalling destructive power is never going to feel like the “right” thing to do, but there’s a very good argument that it was the least-worst option under the circumstances.
Back on topic, in light of current global events it appears that the Germans, with considerable encouragement from ourselves and the rest of Europe, are finally moving on from their “difficult” past. About time too in my opinion!
DynamicSpirit
Established Member
Well yes, if there was any continuing hostility to Germans today, that would be shocking. But I don't see any such hostility. A number of people in this thread have pointed out that hostility to Germans/Japanese on the part of people who suffered during WWII was understandable. But that is referring to historical hostility by a generation very few of whom will still be alive today, not to any ongoing current hostility. I don't see any ongoing hostility to Germans in this thread, nor have I ever encountered any such hostility in my life - certainly not since the 1970s.
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I wonder what proportion of the British population you think fits that ludicrous stereotype.
Spamcan81
Member
Good post. It's generally believed that far more lives were saved by dropping the bombs than were killed by them.
No, I do not believe that. There were plenty of ordinary people who saw the chance for economic betterment and/or power that took advantage. I do not subscribe to this narrative that the ordinary people were blameless. There were just too many involved for that to be true.
You may well be right, but Germany stands out in having given half ( or more like the full )chance to them.
Yes, lets not go there in this thread. Our trust of foreigners should go as far as their trust in us, described as Perfidious Albion.I meant that Brexit at least partly stemmed from distrust of "foreigners" en masse ("they're taking our jobs", etc) - but yes, let's not go there. I doubt either of us will change position on this any time soon!
That is certainly an opinion. Not one that I share in the slightest. (see post #54)
I would never suggest that their has not been dark episodes in our Colonial past. However, both articles are stretching things more than a bit (as recognised in some of the comment), and there is little to compare with the horrors of the German regime before and during the second world war.
Continuing hostility is likely to be only with those very few who are still alive today who were directly affected, and possibly some other in the generation immediately afterward who were indirectly affected.
The Germans have been forgiven, but we must not forget what they have been capable of, nor cover it up. The German people and culture may well be similar to us, but there are subtle differences and we would be fools not to recognise this and act accordingly. Being hostile to them now is not included in this recognition or acting accordingly!