Surely it is not ok to say this..?

[CristinaYang]

I was out with a large group of work colleagues on Friday night. They all seem to be normal, nice people.

We were talking about places in Europe we had visited, and our favourite places. I said my favourite city so far was Berlin. I absolutely loved Berlin. The people were so friendly and welcoming and, I mentioned, that on the walking tours we did I had admired how they didn’t shy away from Germany’s role in the war. I liked the way the dealt with it in terms of their monuments and the way tour guides spoke etc. Granted I was only there a couple of days and I certainly wouldn’t claim to be any kind of expert but I felt it was sensitively and honestly spoken about but there were no attempts at denial or justification. This is a summary of the conversation, a few people chipped in and agreed with me etc.

Anyway one woman then pipes up “I’m sorry, is anyone else just not ok with Germans, even now?!” I was aghast and thought oh dear that’s awkward. I was then even more aghast by the people that nodded in agreement, made comments about relatives killed in concentration camps and how they still “feel weird”, “can’t warm to them” etc.

But how can they blame Germans for that these days? It’s an entirely different generation of people and things have moved on. You can’t blame individuals for it. I realise that may be simplistic but as I said I’m no expert and I don’t want to spout off about things I don’t fully understand.

Drink was taken (not by me, i wasn’t drinking) but no one seemed to be out and out hammered.

Is this a secretly commonly held view these days? I can’t imagine that it is...

"Not ok with Germans" what does she want them to do? Disappear into thin air?

She sounds like an idiot.

I think that the Germans will never really be forgiven for their part in two World Wars. My French friends who came through WWII (children at the time) still hate them a great deal and wear a polite face if meeting them but inside that hatred is still there.

The few Germans I've met were mostly very nice and feel that they can never really escape their history no matter what.

*@poster takeTheRestJustForALaugh
@Morgankitten

"UK concentration camps"

Your stupidity is offensive. Do you know what a concentration camp is?*

Why yes I do as I had family in a German and English camp, maybe do some research before throwing insults around. Uk camps were very real.
‘In June 1940, with a German invasion expected at any moment, Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided to arrest every German and Austrian in the country and send them all to concentration camps. To those who reminded him that many of these people were Jewish refugees, he responded briefly and memorably: “Collar the lot!” Of course, no one wanted to call these new institutions “concentration camps,” so they renamed them “internment camps” to differentiate them from the Nazis’ practice. But these camps also held people indefinitely and without trial because of their nationality, ethnicity, religion and/or political beliefs. While the British camps do not begin to compare to those in Nazi Germany, they were indisputably concentration camps.’

‘During World War I, the United Kingdom used concentration camps to control those they could not or would not bring before the courts: men who had committed no offense besides belonging to the wrong nationality or ethnic group. Among these were Germans and Austrians living in Britain as well as Irish citizens suspected of disloyalty to the crown.’

‘Both during and immediately after the war, concentration camps and slave-labor camps operated throughout the United Kingdom. A year after World War II’s end, British agriculture only functioned thanks to slave labor. In May 1946, while high-ranking SS officers were preparing for trial at Nuremberg, 385,000 enslaved workers were held behind barbed wire across the British Isles; thousands more were arriving every week. At the time, they made up over 25 percent of the land workforce.

The British had been early adopters of these exceedingly useful establishments. During the Second Boer War (1899–1902), they set up a network of camps in which conditions were so grim that over twenty-two thousand children under the age of sixteen died of starvation and disease.’

Go and have a little google, and then you won’t look as stupid you claim I am.

*@takeTheRestJustForALaugh

@Morgan kitten

"UK concentration camps"

Your stupidity is offensive. Do you know what a concentration camp is?*

Why yes I do as I had family in a German and English camp, maybe do some research before throwing insults around. Uk camps were very real.
‘In June 1940, with a German invasion expected at any moment, Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided to arrest every German and Austrian in the country and send them all to concentration camps. To those who reminded him that many of these people were Jewish refugees, he responded briefly and memorably: “Collar the lot!” Of course, no one wanted to call these new institutions “concentration camps,” so they renamed them “internment camps” to differentiate them from the Nazis’ practice. But these camps also held people indefinitely and without trial because of their nationality, ethnicity, religion and/or political beliefs. While the British camps do not begin to compare to those in Nazi Germany, they were indisputably concentration camps.’

‘During World War I, the United Kingdom used concentration camps to control those they could not or would not bring before the courts: men who had committed no offense besides belonging to the wrong nationality or ethnic group. Among these were Germans and Austrians living in Britain as well as Irish citizens suspected of disloyalty to the crown.’

‘Both during and immediately after the war, concentration camps and slave-labor camps operated throughout the United Kingdom. A year after World War II’s end, British agriculture only functioned thanks to slave labor. In May 1946, while high-ranking SS officers were preparing for trial at Nuremberg, 385,000 enslaved workers were held behind barbed wire across the British Isles; thousands more were arriving every week. At the time, they made up over 25 percent of the land workforce.

The British had been early adopters of these exceedingly useful establishments. During the Second Boer War (1899–1902), they set up a network of camps in which conditions were so grim that over twenty-two thousand children under the age of sixteen died of starvation and disease.’

Go and have a little google, and then you won’t look as stupid you claim I am.

"I think there is some dreadful rewriting of history going on in this thread. Which chimes with the current left wing trend to minimise and excuse antisemitism."

Given that the left were one of the pillars of the German resistance, this is a somewhat ironic post. A lot of what you say is actually historically very dubious; there was, in fact, quite a substantial opposition to Nazi rule in Germany, including people who worked inside the regime and subverted it from within. This does not negate the fact that Nazism also had huge popular support.

I wonder how English people on this thread who are claiming it's ok to dislike the Germans would feel if they were told that large numbers of eg Scottish or Irish people hate them. Would you think 'yes that's fair too'?

No, it's always 'don't have such a chip on your shoulder' or 'the past is in the past' or 'we're all mates now though'.

@ghostyslovesheets
Please see my post above, several died in UK camps

MorganKitten, as somebody whose grandmother was in a UK internment camp, you’re being misleading. In the main they were a short term measure for Jewish people while their status was decided and they were in the main quite pleasant. There was a story recently about Scottish inmates returning to the village they remembered so fondly as the villagers had been so kind and treated them as one of their own.

And yes, in wartime it is sometimes necessary to hold enemy combatants.

History is taught very simplistically these days (maybe it always was).

For example, all those who complain about 'immigrants' and proudly protest their 'Britishness' should have been taught that 'Britain' (which was just another landmass back then, and joined to the continent) was completely empty at one point. Everyone is an immigrant, if you go far enough back.

Thisisthefirststep I don’t think most British people give two hoots whether Scottish or Irish people like them- although it’s obviously this dismissiveness that contributes to the hate in the first place.

it wasn’t that long ago that 6 million Jewish people were systematically murdered

I find this figure being quoted slightly irritating, as it implies the non-Jewish victims matter less.

Taking into account all of the victims of persecution, the Nazis systematically killed an estimated six million Jews and an additional 11 million people during the war. Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition, including Soviet civilian deaths, would produce a death toll of 17 million

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims

whisky, half of this thread is people claiming Germans didn’t support the Nazis. Most of them did to some degree. And resistance in Germany was hugely limited and not widespread. It was limited and sporadic. There was no organisation or wider network. In fact the most famous example (white rose) was just a bunch of kids giving out pamphlets.

Nazi Germany ran a number of different types of camp, and their structure varied over time, with organisations changes occurring as the regime reorganised itself. Amongst these, there were labour camps, where forced labour was performed under terrible conditions, PoW camps, transit camps (for temporarily confining people), and extermination camps, which were the organisational hub of the Holocaust, designed to facilitate genocide.

While I think it's right to question internment camps in the UK, the conditions there were not the same as those of the labour camps and certainly anything like those of the terrible extermination camps.

@ghostyslovesheets

Not in British WW2 internment camps, but the British invented concentration camps.

Read about the camps Afrikaner women and children were sent to by the British during the Boer War, and the tens of thousands of them who died of disease and famine there.

@whiskyowl

The concentration camps run by the British during the Boer War were terrible though.

Tens of thousands of Afrikaner women and children died of disease and famine.

The holocoustt was was intended to exterminate Jews, to be the final solution . No one is denying that others were killed, but that wasn’t the aim of the Nazis originally. They wanted to exterminate Jews. As the war progressed the opportunity was taken to use this method to deal with others. But you’re being disingenuous to pretend people only discuss Jews because they’re more worthy

Erm, you do realise German does not = Nazi? Right? Many Germans were killed by nazis too

That's glossing over the huge amount of collusion, and how do you think the Nazis gained power in the first place?

The woman was a dick. But the amount of simplification here is pretty bad here.

Bundlesmads - one reason it was limited and sporadic is that it was made up of disparate groups. It is actually very difficult to unite different strands of protest in peacetime in a democracy, let alone under an increasingly tight fascist regime where there are strict and severe penalties for subversion. People were having to work under incredibly challenging conditions and lacked the kind of automatic principle of unification that resistance to occupation tends to provide. The view that AJP Taylor expressed, years ago, that there was no German resistance has now been seriously revised; several historians have also pointed out that there is a kind of investment for many Germans in the idea that there was 'no choice' for people and that this actually belies the multiplicity of ways that people found to subvert the regime. So while there might not have been a central network for these reasons, there were a large number of people involved in resistance in various different kinds of ways - not just named, organised movements, but refusals to work etc.

So it was by no means the case that all Germans uniformly supported the Nazi regime. Tragically, however, plenty did, and not always out of fear alone.

While there are several things that the German government has done in recent years that I really am not ok with I really don’t hold WWII against them. Most of the people involved are long dead.

i lost a relative in the camps i dont hate all germans most of them are utterly ashamed of what happened

hate the nazis hate hitler but dont genralise

I'm pleased that today's German people are not to be held responsible for Hitler's atrocities. Can those of us (white) people who live in a major port city stop feeling guilty for and apologising for the slave trade?

Deadwood - Yes, undoubtedly. I am not an apologist for the British colonial legacy here! There were many wrongs, many atrocities committed by many governments in the twentieth century. I am not sure it is respectful really to compare them as if there is a competition for 'the worse' and 'the least' crime against humanity; every death causes an infinity of pain to loved ones. Placing blame at the door of mid-century Germany should not mean neglecting our own wrongdoings; it is possible to acknowledge both.

user ""Except they, and those who joined in (it wasn't just Germans), get to swan about in beautiful houses, fancy cars, exotic holidays and boss the rest of us untermenschen about."

??? please can you explain this to me?

But you’re being disingenuous to pretend people only discuss Jews because they’re more worthy

I don't believe people quoting the 6 million figure think Jewish deaths were more important. They're doing it because it's a cultural meme and they don't know the wider messier detail. But the effect of doing it is to ignore the others.

If, to make a point in the context of a thread like this one, people are going to quote x million y systematically killed by the Nazis, why is it better that they say 6 million Jews rather than 13 million people?

(Assuming 13 is the right number, other numbers are available.)

sprinkles well, the Scottish are British, for starters...

I know they don't care. That's exactly my point. They don't care but are perfectly happy to talk about how awful everyone else is.