birch23 said:
Halibutt I really think we should close this discussion,I have a feeling it bores people.von dem Bach will not leave the file because he was freed of any accusation and a main witness for the Allieds in Nuremberg.I have said before that I don't like the guy and what he did,but I will faithfully stick to the pattern we have laid out.
I seriously suspect that the main reason for your specific disgust against von dem Bach is because he was the general who killed off Bor-Komorowski's uprising.Why don't you look at it this way,as a German General he could hardly have Rebels taking over Warsaw...right?.Why don't you vent your anger to the real guilty in Bor-Komorowski's defeat..Soviet and England.Nothing could please the Soviet more than the Germans killed off a possible resistance to a commie Poland.That was why the waited on the other side of the river.And nothing could please the British more,than a democratic movement was crushed by the Germans because that way they would not have to answer unpleasant questions about the percentage deal with Soviet where Poland had long been sold off completely to Soviet.That is where you should vent your anger,von dem Bach did his job,no matter how unpleasant a guy he was.
Enough.
Listen, it's not about my personal feelings towards Warsaw Uprising. I know its' background really well and don't have any problems with finding the responsibles for the failure. Nor is it about my personal feelings towards German generals at all and the german officers corps who took part in any war against my country. Whatever happens - war is their job and, however cruel it is, it's understandable.
However, some of the officers did more than just a war. Call me a child or call me an idealist - I don't care - I believe that there is a difference between a war and a mass murder. Killing enemy soldiers - even with gas or nuclear bombs - is a war. Organizing mass executions of civilians and prisoners of war after they surrendered - that's not a war. That's murder. Want to call it with a different word?
Sorry for strong language, but I don't give a shit about those five German commies von dem Bach killed personally. Nor do I care about the single SA member he killed because of personal reasons. What I do care is the 300.000 of civilians killed in mass executions in Warsaw. Not soldiers, not even partisans or 'bandits' as they were called by German propaganda. Women, children, men of all ages and proffesions. Defenceless civilians.
On every corner of the street in Warsaw there are
small stone tabelets with a simple cross, date and number of shot, burned alive or hanged. Thirty here, fifty there, 250.000 altogether. If von dem Bach ordered to send them to concentration camps they would've had at least a slight chance of survival. He didn't. It was his choice, his decisions to continue with the policy of exterminating the whole city. It had nothing to do with Kremlin or Downing Street.
One of the places where the most civilians were killed (approx. 5.000 in one place), the tannery on Okopowa street, was just 800 metres away from von dem Bachs HQ. Yet he's innocent, he didn't know. He only commanded his troops, what they did was not his business, right? Or perhaps it was Churchill who ordered them shot and their bodies burned? There's an original of one of the reports Reinefarth sent to his supperior, von dem Bach, in which the earlier state that he has "more prisoners than ammo to kill them" and if he was to fulfil his orders, von dem Bach had to send him reinforcements. According to the Nazi German law (contrary to the Polish) a person is responsible if he or she directly ordered a crime or did not interfere. But von dem Bach apparently was not aware of that, right?
Also, whom should I blame for approximately 500.000 civilians in mass graves in Belarus? And the thousands of Poles sent from Silesia to Auschwitz in 1940? London and Moscow again? Was it Roosevelt who decided that the best way to destroy the partisans in Belarus is by killing all the civilians there? Or was it Stalin? I guess not.
I always refrain myself from
pro personam arguments so I'll only say that I'm heavily disappointed with you. Apparently for you von dem Bach is just a general who did the very same job as Montgomerry, Patton, Zhukov, Kutrzeba or Gørtz. If I were one of them, I'd be offended by such comparison. Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be some difference between Slobodan Milosevic and Margaret Thatcher. And it's not the gender I'm speaking of.
You state that you want to "faithfully stick to the pattern we have laid out". So, why don't you? Either we accept people who have never been sentenced by an independent jury for war crimes and commanded divisions on the front - in this case both Hitler and von dem Bach are in. Or we take into consideration the crimes they commited - and erase them. Either -- or, you can't be "a little pregnant". Of course there is a third option - that some murderers are better than the others. However, the last choice is even more offensive to me.
Anyway, the Paradox policy was not to include the bad things the Germans did during WWII in HoI. There are no mentions of death camps, ethnic cleansing, forced labour or ghettos in the game. Consistently, nobody ever argued that we should include gen. Gottlob Berger or gen. Odilo Globocnik on the leaders' list. I'd say we stick to it. Nothing more, nothing less.
