• Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca
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    38 minutes ago

    Eh… Not really. Dontiz’ orders to the Uboat arm were that the destruction of enemy vessels was not to be hampered by life saving activities. However, there were Kriegsmarine officers that did go out of their way to help crews of merchant vessels they had sunk. Captain Hans Langsdorff of the Graf Spee was one such officer, although he was a skimmer.

  • TyrionBean@lemmy.ml
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    5 hours ago

    Well, it’s not Nazi Germany…but…the USA is definitely headed there. Then again, when the Nazis stopped you in the street, they would at least ask for your papers first. Apparently ICE and BP think that’s too woke or something.

    • just_an_average_joe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      19 minutes ago

      Nazi germany was against white people cuz european jews were/are practically white. That’s why they needed the badges to fully distinguish.

      Today, they just look at the skin color or if they are wearing a hijab or other cues to decide who is an “immigrant” or not

  • cornishon@lemmygrad.ml
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    6 hours ago

    If you read the rest of the tweet by Arnaud, you’ll learn that Nazis later abandoned the practice of rescuing survivors of sinking enemy ships, and it was because Americans are worse war criminals than Nazis:

    The history of this is actually interesting: the Nazis rescued survivors all the way until the so-called Laconia Incident in 1942 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconia_incident).

    The Laconia was a British troopship sunk by U-156, a German U-boat, off the West African coast. Right after the sinking, the Nazis immediately began rescuing over 400 survivors, broadcasting - as was common practice - in plain English their position on open radio channels to all Allied powers nearby, so they wouldn’t get attacked during the rescue.

    That’s when a US B-24 “Liberator” bomber attacked the submarine anyway, even though all the rescued survivors were on its foredeck. The B-24 killed dozens of Laconia’s survivors with bombs and strafing attacks, forcing U-156 to cast into the sea the remaining survivors that she had rescued and crash dive to avoid being destroyed.

    The American B-24 pilots mistakenly reported they had sunk U-156, and were awarded medals for bravery…

    This event completely changed Nazi policy on this matter: Karl Dönitz, commander of the U-boat fleet, issued the “Laconiarefehl” - the Laconia Order - forbidding U-boats from rescuing survivors, because the risk to the submarine was now too high.

    In other words, the Americans during WW2 essentially forced the Nazis to abandon survivors - from the allied side (!) - at sea.

    Dönitz at least had an excuse.

  • Aeri@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    I miss when “worse than Hitler” was something patently untrue that people said when they were being overly dramatic.

    • E_coli42@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      How many killed, tortured, raped, colonized, displaced, etc. by the British and French? British and French during WW2 were arguably much worse than Germany. History just likes to put a lense on Hitler and not Churchill because Churchill oppressed black and brown people whereas Hitler oppressed white people, which is a big no-no in society.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    Reminds me of the old (apocryphal) story of Stalin, FDR, and Churchill debating what to do with the Nazi officers’ corps after their defeat.

    "The German General Staff, [Stalin] said, must be liquidated. The whole force of Hitler’s mighty armies depended upon about 50,000 officers and technicians. If these were rounded up and shot at the end of the war, German military strength would be extirpated.” When Churchill angrily declared he would be no party to such mass retribution, the President quipped that he would act as mediator, and suggested the compromise of shooting only 49,000. In heat, Churchill left the room. Stalin himself fetched him back, assuring him it was all a jest.

    The tendency to treat enemy soldiers as honorable adversaries while foreign civilians are resources to be exploited or speed bumps to be flattened is extremely fascist.

    What separates Hitler and Hegseth isn’t their army’s treatment of survivors of a military operation, but their view of their targets as military or civilian. Hegseth knows he’s targeting civilians and treats them just like a German military commander would treat other civilians.

    • ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml
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      4 hours ago

      Wonder if Churchill would be equally upset if instead of nazis they were the people of one of the races he openly considered inferior, including but not limited to: Black people, arabs, indians, the chinese, the irish and indigenous people.

  • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    7 hours ago

    yeah, but keep in mind that this is only true because the nazis werent sinking soviet submarines in ww2.