""The average German soldier, sailor, and airman were in the exact same position as their counterparts in any other armed forces in that war. Their concerns were to do their duty as best they could, as any soldier does, to watch out for the lives of the other guys in their unit, and to stay alive for another 24 hours, and to somehow to get through the damned war in one piece.

Your dehumanizing of them is just as inhuman as the WWII Nazi propagandists' dehumanizing of other people was.""


I'm sorry McG, but I really feel that you would have trouble selling that idea to the very few Russian peasants who remained alive after operation "Barbarossa" passed through, and the number who didn't remain alive suggests that it was more than a few "diehard Nazis" who carried out THOSE CRIMES.

At that point in the war, your ordinary German soldiers were pretty much inured to the sight of atrocities being perpetrated, and many simply joined in without too much compunction.


""They had orders NOT to bomb London, and they did their very best to obey those orders as long as those orders stood.""

That is really immaterial, LH, and I suspect you know it. It's a Straw Man argument, for HOW were those who gave the order to retaliate supposed to know that it was an ERROR? It was an attack for all that they knew to the contrary.

If it waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, few of us would ask "Is it perhaps a drunken dog with laryngitis?".

Don T.