Genealogy /
If your ancestors were in the "Wehrmacht"... [217]
You know...I learned much about this in the last years since it became my hobby.
I firmly believe now that the Nazis didn't care one yota for the lost (to us lost that is) territories or the people. It was to them just a welcomed means to gather votes and support.
Hitler would had sold Danzig to Poland for a treaty, he never cared for the Danziger. For them the idea of conquest, domination was much more important than the grievances of the Germans.
As I see it now, the Nazis USED the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles to come to power and to plummet Europe into the abyss.
I've read a very interesting analysis about the much vaunted Nazi-economy...it was an eye opener. All what the Nazis in Germany "achieved" wasn't because of superior leading it was because they were permanently at war and could import all that stuff, not to mention cheap laborers. The Nazi state could never had made any peace, they wouldn't had survived peace. They needed WAR!
But the point is, at that time nobody could possible know it. Most, if not all, believed in the beginning it was for a good, justified end...and as the war did go on....and more hellish by the day...there were not much options left.
PS: I came to translate the "Blitzkrieg" with "Wutkrieg", it wasn't only a new military tactic which let Germans overran so many countries so quickly..there was alot of rage behind it!
The whole first part of WWII was one big vengeance for Germans, and yes, they were brutal.
(So was the vengeance on the Germans as the table turned)But then, it was a race war in the East...and even today once peaceful neighbours kill each other for just belonging to the "wrong" race, the wrong ethnie, the wrong tribe...(Balkan, Africa)
In this regard WWII wasn't something special...
As you can see from the Western front, if the war is "just a war", not seen as a live and death struggle between deadly enemies, different races, it stayed fairly civil.
