The Fallen of World War II - Well Worth Watching!

[AmateisGal]

This is an interactive video that shows the civilian and military casualties of World War II. It's staggering to behold.

[video=vimeo;128373915]https://vimeo.com/128373915[/video]

https://vimeo.com/128373915

 

[Stearmen]

I am really disappointed that no one has commented on the video! It really does put things in perspective, especially when you consider, his staggering numbers are probably on the low side!

 

[scotrace]

TheFallen of WWII - WELL worth the watch.

https://vimeo.com/128373915

This puts the deaths of the war in perspective. The USSR losses are horrifying. A brilliantly produced short film. Watch it.

Think of the numbers of people who are not alive today, because the people who would have been their parents and grandparents were slaughtered.

 

[scotrace]

This is so extraordinary! I'm moving it to the Observation Bar where it will hopefully get a lot of attention.

(I started a thread of my own, having missed the original by AmateisGal- merged)

 

[Fading Fast]

Quite engaging, scary, hopefully, depressing and encouraging. Very well done.

I was pretty familiar with the WWII numbers before the video and had an intuitive feel that the post WWII period - on a pure numbers basis - would look much better, but seeing it this way really brought the point home.

With a sincere attempt to stay apolitical, something good (by well-intentioned planning, happenstance or the failure of evil intent) has happened since WWII. Of course the risks are still there and - as highlighted in the video - it says little about the future, but it is nice to see the low post-WWII numbers.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I can't view the video -- my computer won't play most current videos -- but I'm in favor of everything and anything that underlines just how much blood was shed in the war and just how many noncombatant lives were lost. Never forget that every single one of those people, regardless of their ideology or their nationality, was a human being just like you.

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

This was a wonderfully well-produced film. A+.

I have a few quibbles, though. First, the writer/narrator's loose way of using "Nazi" and "German" as synonyms. While there certainly were military units which were undeniably "Nazi" (e.g. S.S.), there were undoubtedly millions of conscripts in the Wehrmacht units who were not Nazis, and likely were cowed social democrats and others who had no Nazi sympathies. I'm not saying they were all Dietrich Bonhoeffers, but like most poor schmoes who get killed in uniform, they weren't ideologues, just ordinary men caught up in huge events.

Second, with respect to Soviet military deaths. According to this film, the number was somewhere between 8 and 14 million. Later, he does mention that roughly 20 millions were killed in Stalin's terror. Between Hiltler and Stalin, for the people of the Soviet Union, it was "heads you lose, tails you lose."

 

[LizzieMaine]

Hitler's plan for the USSR was even more horrific than what actually happened -- for starters, he wanted to slaughter between fifty and sixty percent of the total Russian population. That's about eighty million people, with the rest to be enslaved for the glory of the greater Reich. Add in the Nazi plans for the other SSRs, which would have slaughtered another seventy million people, and it's evident that even Stalin at his worst had never contemplated anything like that. The Russians knew the Nazis considered them "untermensch," subhuman creatures worthy only of death or enslavement -- and they knew they were fighting not just for their nation, but for their survival as a people.

 

[Fading Fast]

It seems that in today's assessment, Hitler and Nazis have become equivalent with evil - absolutely, positively no argument here - but Stalin and Mao seem, IMHO, to deserve the same assessment, but at least in the general public's view, aren't seen that way.

 

[Redshoes51]

"First, the writer/narrator's loose way of using "Nazi" and "German" as synonyms. While there certainly were military units which were undeniably "Nazi" (e.g. S.S.), there were undoubtedly millions of conscripts in the Wehrmacht units who were not Nazis, and likely were cowed social democrats and others who had no Nazi sympathies."

Agreed... I was watching some special yesterday on the Normandy Invasion... and how some American soldiers were captured and put into a ditch... the Germans were ordered to shoot them... it seems that when the firing started, all of the shots were intentionally fired so as to miss the Americans. Evidently, these soldiers disagreed with the murder of the soldiers.

The commentator went on to say that had the captors been Waffen SS... the American soldiers would have died.

~shoes~

 

[ChiTownScion]

It seems that in today's assessment, Hitler and Nazis have become equivalent with evil - absolutely, positively no argument here - but Stalin and Mao seem, IMHO, to deserve the same assessment, but at least in the general public's view, aren't seen that way.

It's an apples and oranges comparison, at best. The total number who died as result of Stalin's policies has never been documented to the extent that Hitler's atrocities were documented. Moreover, while ethnic groups were singled out for deportation under Stalin, it was never based upon the premeditated scapegoating predicated solely upon race that Hitler & Co. practiced. And as far as Mao: his worst excesses pale in comparison to the atrocities committed by the Japanese against the Chinese people- a policy likewise predicated upon race.

But such a comparison overlooks the most obvious reason for the moral depravity of Hitler. Germany was a nation of culture with a tradition of tolerance of its Jewish citizens. It had the highest level of education among its citizens of any nation in the world. It was an advanced industrialized nation, as modern and sophisticated as any. It was also a cultured nation, the nation of Beethoven, Bach, Schiller and Goethe. German Jews had served with honor for Germany in the First World War. The Jews of Germany were not a ghettoized subclass: in fact, they were patriotic and an integral part of society. What Hitler and the Nazis did was not merely genocide and unspeakable atrocities: it was the systematic betrayal of those who were in fact more German than Hitler and many of his followers.

For good reason, the term, Holocaust, is applied to one, and only one, historical reality.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It seems that in today's assessment, Hitler and Nazis have become equivalent with evil - absolutely, positively no argument here - but Stalin and Mao seem, IMHO, to deserve the same assessment, but at least in the general public's view, aren't seen that way.

Not so much that as the tendency, whenever the Soviet death toll during WWII is mentioned, to say "yeah, well Stalin..." And I've noticed it's almost always Americans -- especially Americans raised during the Cold War -- who have this automatic reaction.

By whatever gague you use, the fate of the Soviet people, had Hitler won, would have been far worse than anything they actually experienced. It's no denial of Stalin's sins to point this out. And it's no slight against the rest of the Allies to point out that without the Grand Alliance, Hitler *would* have won.

 

[Fading Fast]

Hitler sealed his fate with the invasion of Russia and I have great sympathy and respect for what the average Russian soldier and civilian went through in WWII. I grew up, first, only knowing the USSR as "the enemy," but educated myself overtime to reality. And because of that, I agree with all of your points - Soviets would have been worse off, the US shorthand for "it's Stalin" is inaccurate and it is hard to see an Allied victory without Germany tying up / losing all those resources on the Eastern Front.

 

[AmateisGal]

This was a wonderfully well-produced film. A+.

I have a few quibbles, though. First, the writer/narrator's loose way of using "Nazi" and "German" as synonyms. While there certainly were military units which were undeniably "Nazi" (e.g. S.S.), there were undoubtedly millions of conscripts in the Wehrmacht units who were not Nazis, and likely were cowed social democrats and others who had no Nazi sympathies. I'm not saying they were all Dietrich Bonhoeffers, but like most poor schmoes who get killed in uniform, they weren't ideologues, just ordinary men caught up in huge events.

I had an issue with that, as well, calling all the Germans "Nazis." Of course, during the war, that's what the media did, too - they didn't make a distinction between a Nazi and a regular German soldier. In my research for the POW camps here in America, there was most definitely a huge ideological divide between anti-Nazis and Nazis within the camps themselves. The German army was composed of many different nationalities and ethnicities, too; almost all of the conquered Eastern European nations had men serving in the German army. This, as you can imagine, led to a lot of problems in the camps. But there was still a hierarchy within the camps themselves, and the camp spokesmen (a POW who was elected to speak to the US Army on behalf of the POWs) was usually a Nazi. And the Americans liked it that way because the Nazis kept things nice and orderly. Of course, this backfired on them when word got out about all the shenanigans going on in camps - kangaroo courts, forced suicides, beatings, etc. Segregating Nazi from anti-Nazi became the first tool of choice, but that wasn't the best option, either. Eventually, the US Army started the re-education, or "de-Nazification" program.

 

[scotrace]

Lizzie, I hope you can seek out a machine that will allow you to watch the video. I think it's very well produced, timed, and presented, with full use of current animation capabilities to make the numbers very real.

When the narrator allows silence for the endless climbing of the bar representing Soviet deaths-- it's chilling. I recently finished reading No Ordinary Time, and Stalin's constant calls for the Allies to open a second major front to relieve pressure in the USSR is more easily understood in the context of the slaughter that was happening in his backyard.

 

[MisterCairo]

"First, the writer/narrator's loose way of using "Nazi" and "German" as synonyms. While there certainly were military units which were undeniably "Nazi" (e.g. S.S.), there were undoubtedly millions of conscripts in the Wehrmacht units who were not Nazis, and likely were cowed social democrats and others who had no Nazi sympathies."

Agreed... I was watching some special yesterday on the Normandy Invasion... and how some American soldiers were captured and put into a ditch... the Germans were ordered to shoot them... it seems that when the firing started, all of the shots were intentionally fired so as to miss the Americans. Evidently, these soldiers disagreed with the murder of the soldiers.

The commentator went on to say that had the captors been Waffen SS... the American soldiers would have died.

~shoes~

With certainty. The Canadian Army suffered such reprisal casualties, with Kurt Meyer being well-known in Canadian military history circles. He was court martialled for war crimes by the Canadian Army after the war, sentenced to death, had that commuted to life in prison, served five years in a New Brunswick prison (a suitably named Canadian province to hold a German!), later released and going into business - supplying a Canadian army mess in Germany.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Meyer

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

to say "yeah, well Stalin..." And I've noticed it's almost always Americans -- especially Americans raised during the Cold War -- who have this automatic reaction.

I make no apologies for being among the "automatic" Cold War generation.

I don't know what is more frightening, the systematic, well-planned, and announced plans of the Nazis to eliminate those they considered to be sub-human, or the Kafkaesque capriciousness and arbitrariness of Stalin's terror. Both resulted in 10's of millions of murders and battle deaths. As for the possible additional scores of millions the Nazis planned to kill as compared to the 10's of millions Stalin actually murdered, who knows how many more millions he would have killed had he not been interrupted by Hitler's invasion?

The slaughter of the Polish officer corps in the Katyn Forrest may have been a foretaste of that.

"... and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

-- Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

-- Lord Acton

 

[Foxer55]

ChiTownScion,

For good reason, the term, Holocaust, is applied to one, and only one, historical reality.

And cannot be compared to, related to, or substituted for other tragedies.

 

[LizzieMaine]

And again, I merely point out, without any apology whatsoever, that without the millions of Soviet citizens who gave their lives to stop Hitler, Hitler would not have been stopped. Whether it's politically expeditious for the West to admit it or not, the survival of our civilization was bought, to a very great extent, with their blood. And I honor their sacrifice, unconditionally, as much as I do the sacrfices of any other Allied power.

 

[Blackthorn]

One of the most interesting pictures of that time.