Belgium soon to ban the German pension given to Belgian Waffen-SS

[Chris Boonzaier]

It's for another thread.

But you mentioned an official Belgium police policy, are you sure it was "official." Most occupied countries didn't have the balls to resist German authority when they did it was unofficial.

If I remember right the Belgian police were officially only allowed to carry out regular policework, maybe one of our belgian members can say for sure.

[Don D.]

Certainly not an apologist. I believe every war criminal should get what's coming to them. I just don't believe in exacting revenge by people who had no skin in the game.

Now I see Pocahontas is talking about reparations for native Americans. Perhaps Italy will pay fro what the Romans did?

[101combatvet]

If I remember right the Belgian police were officially only allowed to carry out regular policework, maybe one of our belgian members can say for sure.

I think the problem was that for the Germans rounding up Jews it was considered official police work. After the war, I'm sure those that helped the occupiers would deny it and claim membership with the resistance because we all know that everyone was a member of the resistance.

[chrischa]

No, but if you live in occupied country X ... and you see the occupying nation is executing your countrymen as hostages if anyone attacks them, deports your countrymen for slave labor, deports and gasses your countrymen if they are jews ... and you join their army or SS... I think you deserve a bullet.


Are you equating serving in the gulf with joining the Nazis?



Plenty of Germans managed to serve in the German forces and remain honorable people... that is not the question here...


And before anyone comes up with the line "They joined to fight communists...." .... People were collaborating with the Nazis before Russia was invaded...



And while Belgian police were officially forbidden to help deport the Belgian jews... the Algemeene-SS Vlaanderen was quite keen to help.

Hello Chris

No, I’m certainly not comparing gulf war belligerents to nazi Germany. I was trying to balance the generalisation.

My point about over simplifying was the knowledge we have now wasn’t the common knowledge during the war.

I get your points but please don’t accuse me of starting any ‘lines’. I’m cool on that level.

[Chris Boonzaier]

Certainly not an apologist. I believe every war criminal should get what's coming to them. I just don't believe in exacting revenge by people who had no skin in the game.

Now I see Pocahontas is talking about reparations for native Americans. Perhaps Italy will pay fro what the Romans did?

I think as long as there are living victims, the guys that did the dirty deeds should be held accountable.


As the guys who did the dirty deeds were mostly of military age, and the victims were often children... that would mean the bad guys are in the cross hairs until the last bad guy is buried.


Check out the news reports of the ISIS brides wanting to return to Germany/US/UK ... and the way the people are furious at traitors wanting to return.... If we get so emotional about some demented traitor chick who spend 2 years blowing ISIS dudes... how can we not feel something similar for traitors who joined the SS ?



For me I dont need skin in the game... but I do support the victims :-)

[101combatvet]

Now I see Pocahontas is talking about reparations for native Americans.

Trying to appease them for stealing their identity. Should work for the fools.

[Chris Boonzaier]

I think the problem was that for the Germans rounding up Jews it was considered official police work. After the war, I'm sure those that helped the occupiers would deny it and claim membership with the resistance because we all know that everyone was a member of the resistance.

I am going out on a limb here, but I think the Belgians limited it to traditional police work.


as for the Resistance thing... I am sure the real resistance folks knew who was one of theirs and who was not ;-)

[101combatvet]

I think as long as there are living victims, the guys that did the dirty deeds should be held accountable.


As the guys who did the dirty deeds were mostly of military age, and the victims were often children... that would mean the bad guys are in the cross hairs until the last bad guy is buried.


Check out the news reports of the ISIS brides wanting to return to Germany/US/UK ... and the way the people are furious at traitors wanting to return.... If we get so emotional about some demented traitor chick who spend 2 years blowing ISIS dudes... how can we not feel something similar for traitors who joined the SS ?



For me I dont need skin in the game... but I do support the victims :-)

The problem is that not all SS members committed atrocities, being a member of the unit doesn't count as being a war criminal. If someone is identified as committing a war crime they should be prosecuted, that goes for anyone including resistance members that murdered German prisoners.

[101combatvet]

I am going out on a limb here, but I think the Belgians limited it to traditional police work.


as for the Resistance thing... I am sure the real resistance folks knew who was one of theirs and who was not ;-)

Perhaps they did, I guess it depends on how they define resistance.

[Edward]

Total BS, even the part about your 70 Confederate relatives. Did you get that count from Ancestry? However, it is true that people have turned Confederate symbols into objects of hate the Confederate battle flag is one. By that logic, you can call the US flag a symbol of hate as well since slavery pre-dates the Confederacy and was legal until 1865.

Hey, nothing wrong with Ancestry. By the way, the SCV, OSB, and DCV also use them for those seeking membership. You have heard of those organizations before I take it?

No, it's not BS. Sorry to disappoint you...yet again. Genealogy has been a hobby for a for very long time. Actually it’s 70+ family relatives. Yes, some of them are from many families who married in. I have the unit muster rolls from service with the ANV, and AOT. There filed pension records with the state after the war, and even a few copies taken from old daguerreotype’s from there war time service wearing gray frock coats, and shell jackets.

I’ll leave you with this:

There is a reason why some Confederates are honored and others are not. That reason also has nothing to do with bravery, honor, or battlefield heroics. It does, however, have everything to do with post-Civil War politics.

The Southern landscape is not littered with monuments to General William Mahone, for example. An able divisional commander, Mahone had the kind of military career that Confederate apologists cheered, filled with military prowess and battlefield heroism. Active in Virginia politics after the war, he served as a U.S. senator in the 1880s.

Yet he has been virtually erased from the Confederate past because he did not serve the needs of Jim Crow’s architects and its subsequent defenders. If Confederate propagandists found Mahone’s military career unblemished, they could not say the same about his postwar political career.

Mahone was criticized and defamed because he organized and led a successful interracial political alliance that threatened the stranglehold white conservatives held on the post-Reconstruction-era South. Though short-lived, Mahone’s coalition promoted the advancement and protection of black political and civil rights. For those sins he was written out of Confederate memorializing.

Indeed, the politics of forgetting proved as crucial as the politics of remembering. To create a usable past—one that saw Jim Crow as a logical outgrowth of the post-Reconstruction period—white supremacists had to wipe clean much of the historical record.

Not all monuments depicted Confederate soldiers. Some honored white conservatives who died after the Civil War defending white supremacy.

Such a monument was erected in 1920 to memorialize the 1873 Colfax Massacre (then called “riot”) during which some 150 African American men were murdered. The massacre occurred when a coalition group of Democrats and conservative Republicans who had defected from their party refused to accept Louisiana’s election returns of 1872.

Rumors of violence had circulated for weeks before the massacre. Freedmen occupied the Colfax Courthouse, using it as a garrison. The surrounding served as their training ground. Armed whites threatened to retake the Courthouse. The standoff lasted three weeks. Then, on Easter Sunday 1873, the white men attacked. The former slaves surrendered, but many were later shot in the backs of their heads.

In 1920, at the height of Confederate monument-building, a plaque was put up to commemorate the “Colfax Riot.” It read: “Erected to the memory of the heroes, Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for white supremacy April 13, 1873.”

In 1950, a new marker was erected. Although the wording was changed, the sentiment remained: “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot, in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” By claiming that Reconstruction-era government was illegitimate, the 1950 marker championed conservative white rule.

[chrischa]

The problem is that not all SS members committed atrocities, being a member of the unit doesn't count as being a war criminal. If someone is identified as committing a war crime they should be prosecuted, that goes for anyone including resistance members that murdered German prisoners.

Hello

That’s the point I’m making. The Nuremberg trials did class the SS, SD and W-SS as a criminal organisation. In total. It was a court ruling, who are we to disagree?

But, because of investigation on the allied side, unit logs, historical investigations, etc we know following the trials some elements committed more crimes, some less and some were known to have no criminal reputation based on facts.

We know years after the war, there cannot be a blanket statement about the SS.

The guys at the Nuremberg rally in the cool black uniform controlling crowds? They took it off afterwards and made bread until 1945. The guy next to him at the rally shot Jews in the back of the head.

Not the same.

[101combatvet]

Hey, nothing wrong with Ancestry. By the way, the SCV, OSB, and DCV also use them for those seeking membership. You have heard of those organizations before I take it?

No, it's not BS. Sorry to disappoint you...yet again. Genealogy has been a hobby for a for very long time. Actually it’s 70+ family relatives. Yes, some of them are from many families who married in. I have the unit muster rolls from service with the ANV, and AOT. There filed pension records with the state after the war, and even a few copies taken from old daguerreotype’s from there war time service wearing gray frock coats, and shell jackets.

I’ll leave you with this:

There is a reason why some Confederates are honored and others are not. That reason also has nothing to do with bravery, honor, or battlefield heroics. It does, however, have everything to do with post-Civil War politics.

The Southern landscape is not littered with monuments to General William Mahone, for example. An able divisional commander, Mahone had the kind of military career that Confederate apologists cheered, filled with military prowess and battlefield heroism. Active in Virginia politics after the war, he served as a U.S. senator in the 1880s.

Yet he has been virtually erased from the Confederate past because he did not serve the needs of Jim Crow’s architects and its subsequent defenders. If Confederate propagandists found Mahone’s military career unblemished, they could not say the same about his postwar political career.

Mahone was criticized and defamed because he organized and led a successful interracial political alliance that threatened the stranglehold white conservatives held on the post-Reconstruction-era South. Though short-lived, Mahone’s coalition promoted the advancement and protection of black political and civil rights. For those sins he was written out of Confederate memorializing.

Indeed, the politics of forgetting proved as crucial as the politics of remembering. To create a usable past—one that saw Jim Crow as a logical outgrowth of the post-Reconstruction period—white supremacists had to wipe clean much of the historical record.

Not all monuments depicted Confederate soldiers. Some honored white conservatives who died after the Civil War defending white supremacy.

Such a monument was erected in 1920 to memorialize the 1873 Colfax Massacre (then called “riot”) during which some 150 African American men were murdered. The massacre occurred when a coalition group of Democrats and conservative Republicans who had defected from their party refused to accept Louisiana’s election returns of 1872.

Rumors of violence had circulated for weeks before the massacre. Freedmen occupied the Colfax Courthouse, using it as a garrison. The surrounding served as their training ground. Armed whites threatened to retake the Courthouse. The standoff lasted three weeks. Then, on Easter Sunday 1873, the white men attacked. The former slaves surrendered, but many were later shot in the backs of their heads.

In 1920, at the height of Confederate monument-building, a plaque was put up to commemorate the “Colfax Riot.” It read: “Erected to the memory of the heroes, Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for white supremacy April 13, 1873.”

In 1950, a new marker was erected. Although the wording was changed, the sentiment remained: “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot, in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” By claiming that Reconstruction-era government was illegitimate, the 1950 marker championed conservative white rule.

Sorry, I stopped reading once you mentioned Mahone. Mahone doesn't deserve a statue, but if you think he does don't put it on Culp's Hill place it where he was loafing during the attack.

[chrischa]

I think as long as there are living victims, the guys that did the dirty deeds should be held accountable.


As the guys who did the dirty deeds were mostly of military age, and the victims were often children... that would mean the bad guys are in the cross hairs until the last bad guy is buried.


Check out the news reports of the ISIS brides wanting to return to Germany/US/UK ... and the way the people are furious at traitors wanting to return.... If we get so emotional about some demented traitor chick who spend 2 years blowing ISIS dudes... how can we not feel something similar for traitors who joined the SS ?



For me I dont need skin in the game... but I do support the victims :-)

Hello Chris

You keep comparing situations to ISIS. A political belief doesn’t compare to a mass religion.
The SS was different to the NSDAP. Different ideals.

I also think your ages are off. I think more adults were murdered than children.

Your last point. Who decides the victims? You?

[Edward]

Sorry, I stopped reading once you mentioned Mahone. Mahone doesn't deserve a statue, but if you think he does don't put it on Culp's Hill place it where he was loafing during the attack.

You should actually read the entire previous message and learn the real reason why rather than ignoring it. His prior military service had nothing to do with it.

As for Gettysburg The "Seven Days Pox" took over many of the Confederate commanders at Gettysburg. Apparently many of the Confederate high command did not develop an immunity to this strange ailment after the Seven Days.

[VtwinVince]

Chris, we're all entitled to our opinions, it's just that some of us do not look at history through a black-and-white morality filter, which apparently you do. I would not be so quick to judge whole groups of people based on present perceptions. And no, I'm not using the example of MacDonald's statue as some sort of crutch, I'm merely pointing out that in a world where we are facing serious problems, the current crop of so-called leaders can't find any more worthy activity than tearing down historical monuments.