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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29499 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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When, if ever, is it appropriate to provide an apologetic defense of Nazi Germany?

Darryl Cooper, host of the widely acclaimed Martyr Made podcast, recently did a 2+ hour interview with Tucker Carlson. Darryl Cooper is known for two things. One: being meticulously empathetic with regards to the plight of the disaffected groups that are the subject of his 30-hour long history podcasts, bringing out the vivid details that form the background milieu for poorly-understood events like Jonestown. And two: his unhinged Twitter takes.

As one can imagine, jimmies were rustled. The most common line of attack was “Tucker Carlson platforms Nazi apologetics.” In a literal sense this is true. Cooper gives the German perspective on Winston Churchill. One might make the obvious point that Germany started the war by invading Poland, but the Soviet Union also invaded Poland. Yet the Western allies did not declare war on Stalin. This AskHistorians thread (no haven for Nazi apologetics!) is enlightening. What masqueraded as a mutual defense treaty was actually an anti-German treaty. Britain really was out to get them.

Once we dig deep enough, the real reason World War II started was to preserve Anglo hegemony over Europe, the exact same reason that Britain joined World War I. Post-hoc rationalizations are just that, post-hoc. It certainly isn’t irrelevant when studying World War II that the holocaust happened, but that isn’t part of the causal chain of events the way many seem to believe.

I want to emphasize that I personally like Anglo-American hegemony. Churchill’s aggressive stance towards Germany is good for me and for the vast majority of the people reading this, but in order to understand history (or current events for that matter) one has to understand the people who do not like Anglo-American hegemony. I do not know where on the doll Anglo imperialism touched him, but I do not believe that Darryl Cooper says the things that he does out of hate for his fellow man.

Ok, admittedly I listed to this podcast in the background while crunching for work. So I may have missed something...

But, I never heard holocaust denial? Everyone is saying he denied the holocaust, or acted like the mass slaughter of jews was a logistical error. When I listen to the podcast, I thought he was only referring to slavic POW's captured during Operation Barbarossa? And this was consistent with everything I ever read about it. Analysis about how the German's themselves went in under provisioned, and found themselves freezing and starving when the offensive didn't take only 6 months. I believe the designer notes for A Victory Denied or No Retreat cover the topic similarly in what those game designers learned when researching the invasion of Soviet Russia. It was a shit show, and a lot of POWs died of starvation and exposure, right along with their German captors. Obviously the POWs got the worse end of it, obviously there was a level of "these aren't our people" fueled neglect or cruelty. And to a degree Darryl Cooper didn't linger on the same litany of horrors popularized in Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that we are so used to, instead playing the contrarian. Maybe this can be viewed as downplaying, or minimizing, but then again that flips back to his thesis that WW2 history is quasi-religious. The over reaction to his contrarian claims or attitude was profound. And the people just repeating "Holocaust denier!" was amazing.

[I'll caveat that this is just from a quick browse: I absolutely don't find Cooper interesting enough to read at length.]

If you trust this transcript:

Germany, look, they put themselves into a position, and Adolf Hitler is chiefly responsible for this, but his whole regime is responsible for it, that when they went into the east in 1941, they launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners and so forth that they were going to have to handle. They went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead. There you have letters as early as July, August, 1941, from commandants of these makeshift camps that they're setting up for these millions of people who were surrendering or people they're rounding up. So its two months after, a month or two after Barbarossa was launched, and they're writing back to the high command in Berlin saying, we cant feed these people.

We don't have the food to feed these people. And one of them actually says, rather than wait for them all to slowly starve this winter, wouldn't it be more humane to just finish them off quickly now? And so this is like two months into the invasion. Right? And my view on this, I argue with my zionist interlocutors about this all the time with regard to the current war in Gaza. Look, man, maybe you, as the Germans, you felt like you had to invade to the east. Maybe you thought that Stalin was such a threat or that if he launched a surprise attack and seized the oil fields in Romania, that you would now not have the fuel to actually respond and you'd be crippled and all of Europe would be under threat. And whatever it was, whatever it was, that, like, maybe you thought you had to do that, but at the end of the day, you launched that war with no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war that were going to come under your control, and millions of people died because of that. You can look at it and say, well, yeah.

I don't think it's a SecureSignals level thing -- he does recognize the whole 'and then the Germans started 'humanely killing' them' -- but it's definitely not limited to prisoners of war, and it's pretty heavily in contradiction with the Standard History Generalplan Ost where Einsatzgruppen were already a policy in Poland back when the USSR and Nazis were allies, and simply brought East.

The whole "oh the Germans just didn't have any plans for all the prisoners they were going take" is something I might believe from someone who knows literally nothing about WWII, but if you have any sort of passing interest you know about things like the Commissar Order, the Einsatzgruppen, the Barbarossa Decree, Generalplan Ost etc. If you have slightly more interest you would know about army- or unit-specific examples like the Severity Order.

The Germans absolutely had a plan for the millions of captives they were going to take. That plan was death.

"The German planning staffs had reckoned on capturing and thus having to feed up to two million prisoners within the first eight weeks of the war."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan#Starvation_in_other_German-occupied_territories

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