Monday, August 14, 2017

Thomas Goodrich: Hellstorm - The Death of Nazi Germany 1944 to 1947

Thomas Goodrich is an historian and very right wing, but he is complex, he's a tree-hugger, an animal rights activist, and a vegetarian. He has written a book called Hellstorm, The Death of Nazi Germany 1944 to 1947 and it is terrifying.

Paul Craig Roberts got me thinking about this again because he is reading David Irvin's book Nuremberg (1996), and like me, he is discovering that the world is not as it seems. I was your typical liberal and fully absorbed the narrative of WW2, yep, there was nothing was more evil than the Nazis. But I'm inquisitive and I started reading stuff, and then seeing stuff on the internet which startled me. Could the Allies have been as equally evil as the Nazis? As you all know from the stuff I put out here and what Tom Hickey puts out, my world view has been up-side-down and I don't feel safe anymore - the good guys are Dr No too.

Paul Craig Roberts is a complex guy as well, but we seem to have quite a lot in common. I sent him some Mercy for animals YouTube films and a few months later he posted a similar thing on his site. I sent him a link to the film Hellstorm yesterday which a number of other people sent too and he posted it on his site today. I told PCR that Hitler and his right wing regime was so evil that the liberals would not criticize Churchill for his war crimes, so this only leaves some sections of the right.

From PCR's site:

Not much of this documentary has to be true in order to reach the conclusion that what the Americans, British, and above all the Soviets did to Germans during the war and in the war’s final days and, worse, after the war, dwarfs in its inhumanity and illegality everything the Nazis did. More Germans died during the two years after the war than died in fighting the Americans and British during the war. Mass exterminations of Germans and systematic rape of German females as young as eight years old were going on during the Nuremberg trials. What happened to Germans fit the program for the genocide of Germany advocated by the Jewish US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morganthau.

Now the thing is, as the atrocities are so bad I started to doubt if it was true too and so I did a search on Thomas Goodrich to see if he was considered to be a conspiracy theorist before posting anything here and I came upon a BBC documentary about what the allies did to the Germans after the WW2 - and so it is true.  I have posted a link to the BBC documentary below.

Hellstorm is made by Kyle Hunt who seems to be very right wing and so you have to hold your nose at the occasionally conspiracy stuff so typical of the of the some of the right. But forget about the way it is dramatized, just look at the content.

Also, I have posted an interview of Thomas Goodrich by Jim  Rizoli the two seem almost liberal. I'm going to write to Thomas Goodrich about his book.

In Hellstorm you will see how depraved and evil mankind can be, and apparently what the US did to North Korea was even worse. Thomas Goodrich wrote the book to inform people because he wanted to help make sure nothing like this ever happens again.


                                                                    Hellstorm


                                              Jim Kyle interviews Thomas Goodrich


                                                          The BBC Documentary

20 comments:

Calgacus said...

Could the Allies have been as equally evil as the Nazis?

They could have been. But they weren't.

what the Americans, British, and above all the Soviets did to Germans during the war and in the war’s final days and, worse, after the war, dwarfs in its inhumanity and illegality everything the Nazis did.

Yeah, right. Lunacy & innumeracy.

The West fought WWII over control of colonies..

Funny how, unlike WWI, where the victors divvied up the losers' colonies, WWII was followed by an immense decolonization of most of the planet.


Anonymous said...

The essence of humanity is kindness. I know what happens on the outside; but I also know what happens on the inside. We look at everything in this world through the eyes of fear; never through the clear eyes of our inner nature: - You are what you practice

Detroit Dan said...

Well said, Calcagus.

hog said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
hog said...

"very right wing, but he is complex, he's a tree-hugger, an animal rights activist, and a vegetarian."

this isn't uncommon. in fact these positions originated from conservatism, before they somehow ended up in the liberal left worldview during the undermining of progressivism.

John said...

Calgacus: "Funny how, unlike WWI, where the victors divvied up the losers' colonies, WWII was followed by an immense decolonization of most of the planet."

But not by design, which is the key standard. The war left the major European powers a total wreck. They were incapable of keeping their empires. France even had to ask the US to take control of its Asian colonies, particularly Vietnam. France did fight an extremely vicious war in Algeria, murdering more than a million civilians, in an effort to keep some of its empire, thus putting paid to the ludicrous idea that the decolonization was somehow intentional, given that the war itself was an imperial one. It also shows that France in particular learned nothing from the war, like how countries don't like being invaded and occupied by another country, although in France's case there was almost no opposition the Nazis and almost everybody collaborated with Hitler and his psychopathic goons, as was the case throughout Europe.

The UK came to the stomach churning conclusion that its own jewel in the crown, India, could not be kept, despite protestations from high figures. Like France, the UK attempted to keep some of its former empire, albeit with more success than France, although eventually even the mighty British empire was, like the French empire, essentially dissolved and incorporated into the US sphere, which is essentially the whole world except for China and Russia, but with others now joining them.

Other than that, I agree with the criticisms of the alleged parallels of the Allies with the Nazis. Extremely horrible crimes happened after WWII, and it's good that this history is now available to the broader public, but the Allies, as bad as they were during the war, the Nazis were in an entirely different league. The Allies crimes AFTER the war puts paid to their alleged nobility, but that does not distract from the fact that the Nazis had to be defeated. The Nazis could have been defeated in other ways, even without war prior to 1939, and many of the war decisions were ghastly, stupid, criminal and counterproductive, but to say that the Allies were worse than the Nazis is ludicrous at best.

Tom Hickey said...

One narrative is that the Western colonialists got liberal religion and freed their colonies as inconsistent with liberalism. Another view is that the cost became too high to maintain the former colonies and colonial empires.

The historical facts show that there were a lot of factors involved. At that point in the historical dialectic that period of history had played itself out and was replaced by a new period.

However, colonialism and the imperialism on which it was based did not just disappear. The historical dialectic is historical, that is, path dependent. Rather colonialism and the imperialism were replaced by neo-imperialism and neocolonialism. Neoliberalism goes hand in hand with neo-imperialism and neocolonialism.

Tom Hickey said...

Other than that, I agree with the criticisms of the alleged parallels of the Allies with the Nazis. Extremely horrible crimes happened after WWII, and it's good that this history is now available to the broader public, but the Allies, as bad as they were during the war, the Nazis were in an entirely different league.

Actually, like most history, the facts are nuance. Almost everyone under Nazi Germany was technically a Nazi since it was necessary to participate in society and in some cases to stay alive. Most "Nazis" were pretty much ordinary people and they rebuilt Germany after WWII.

The people that committed the atrocities were largely the Gestapo and the SS (Hitler's punitive enforcers). It only takes a small percentage of a population to keep an entire population in line through force. This was true of Japan under the rule of the shoguns where the samurai were the enforcers, for example. Some Japanese were at least as cruel as the real Nazis in Europe.

This is not some aberration historically but rather pretty much the rule, and things have actually been getting better over time according to Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Brutishness has recede with civilization and now only a minority of a population is brutish. It is possible for this minority either to take over a population through brutishness, or be enlisted to do so by demagoguery or as mercenaries. There is also an issue of mob psychology, and that can be exploited too.

Brutishness is also an exploitable issue by an opposition, which uses exaggeration to propagandize. This is a typical tactic of liberalism, for instance, and it leads to some of the paradoxes of liberalism.

Dan Lynch said...

Things changed, for better and worse, after FDR died and Churchill lost his job, but during the war the aging FDR deferred to Churchill on military strategy.

Stalin, and to a lesser extent FDR, advocated going for the jugular in Europe, but Churchill was content to let the Nazis bleed Russia for as long as possible, while the West focused on fighting for colonies.

Then at the close of the war Churchill wanted to unite with the Nazi army to defeat Russia.

Many Nazis were allowed to remain in power in West Germany after the war, and Nazi scientists were allowed to immigrate to the U.S.. Truman supported the Nazi resistance in post-war Ukraine.

These are not opinions, they are facts.

Tom Hickey said...

Looking back, I would say that perhaps the most historically consequential event at the time was the replacement of Henry Wallace with Harry Truman on the VP ticket at the beginning of FDR's fourth term (1944). While it is impossible to know how Wallace would have governed, and he could have turned out to be an Obama, we know what Truman did and we are still living with the consequences, which could take the US down or turn it into an illiberal state.

Detroit Dan said...

Good discussion. Thanks Tom and all.

Speaking of Ukraine, it seems that N Korea got their long range missle from Ukraine after the coup that ousted Russia. The regime change in Ukraine seems to have backfired on U.S.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/world/asia/north-korea-missiles-ukraine-factory.html

Kaivey said...

Churchill chose working class areas because people lived more closely together there and that meant they could kill more of them. But in the film you see how that then went back for the survivors over and over again. People who escaped to the parks got shot at too, and you see in the film the fighter planes chasing up the roads to shoot people that escaped and those who managed to get to the boats had their boats sunk. It has got have been the worst war crime ever, apart from what happened when the allies went in after the war to commit even more genocide.

Dan Lynch said...

@Detroit Dan, I have no first hand knowledge of NK's weapons but MofA seems to think the Ukraine story is propaganda keep the cold war against Russia going.

NY Times: ...the possibility that a large Russian missile enterprise, Energomash, which has strong ties to the Ukrainian complex, had a role in the transfer of the RD-250 engine technology to North Korea. He said leftover RD-250 engines might also be stored in Russian warehouses.

... the fact that the powerful engines did get to North Korea, despite a raft of United Nations sanctions, suggests a broad intelligence failure


Conclusion: Russia is the bad guy and we must spend even more money on spying.

Detroit Dan said...

The overall thrust of the Times article pointed to Ukraine more than Russia as being responsible for transferring missile technology to N Korea.

But since Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was removed from power in 2014, the state-owned factory, known as Yuzhmash, has fallen on hard times. The Russians canceled upgrades of their nuclear fleet. The factory is underused, awash in unpaid bills and low morale. Experts believe it is the most likely source of the engines that in July powered the two ICBM tests, which were the first to suggest that North Korea has the range, if not necessarily the accuracy or warhead technology, to threaten American cities.

“It’s likely that these engines came from Ukraine — probably illicitly,” Mr. Elleman said in an interview. “The big question is how many they have and whether the Ukrainians are helping them now. I’m very worried.”

Broll The American said...

This film is the most blatant piece of Nazi propaganda I've ever seen.

Jefferson said...

a reddit review: The Documentary HELLSTORM (self.badhistory)

Could the Allies have been as equally evil as the Nazis?
Kaivey, how many Jews were murdered in Nazis concentration camps?

Tom Hickey said...

how many Jews were murdered in Nazis concentration camps?

Does it really matter who was the worst in terms of either egregious behavior or the amount of damage? Both sides should be judged independently.

There is little doubt that the Allies wrecked a lot of the damage in the wind down WWII against non-strategic targets and civilians punitively for revenge. This has been brushed under the rug along with the genocides of native populations under colonialism.

Broll The American said...

There is little doubt that the Allies wrecked a lot of the damage in the wind down WWII
The German's don't get to start a WORLD WAR and then complain their enemies aren't fair to them when their own initial aggression backfires on them. This movie tried to paint German civilians as sympathetic by just wanting to go on with their lives by going to the theater, for example. Such luxuries weren't afforded to people in a great number of nations once the war started. All who fought on the Allied side suffered loses and human nature dictates that people tend to seek punitive revenge when you try to kill them. Don't start wars if you don't want people to come and try to kill you.

Tom Hickey said...

That is no absolution for war crimes.

Calgacus said...

Detroit Dan: Thanks

John:But not by design, which is the key standard.

The speed and extent of decolonization surprised everyone. But it was to some degree intended by FDR & UN planners as in the institution of the United Nations Trusteeship Council as a principal organ of the United Nations.

David Ryan, Victor Pungong, The United States & Decolonization_ Power & Freedom, Macmillan (2000) p. xv
"But it was Franklin Roosevelt who made decolonization (a word he would not have recognized) part of American foreign policy. He believed adamantly that colonialism fomented violence and revolution, making it the greatest single threat to immediate postwar peace. Churchill and the British, as well as the French mumbled and rumbled about FDR’s malign influence on their relationships with their empires, but that was a self-deception. Hitler, the Japanese, and even Vladimir Lenin were more important stimulants. Yet Roosevelt’s advocacy of decolonization did inspire and galvanize nationalism in the colonial world (as many of these essays demonstrate). He alone among the Big Three – Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin – believed that the end of colonial empires was near, although even FDR never expected it to come as swiftly as it did. He placed great-power cooperation ahead of decolonization, believing his European allies had perhaps thirty years in which to educate the ‘natives’ and prepare their colonies for independence."

Episode 78: The U.S. and Decolonization after World War II summarizes things, with good quotes like FDR's 1941 statement to Churchill: "I can’t believe we can fight aware against fascist slavery and at the same time not work to free people all over the world in a backward colonial policy."

Churchill famously said in 1942: "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." But he knew ever more that that was precisely what he was to do. After all, he signed the Atlantic Charter and subsequent commitments.