Donald Trump continues to kill it in the Anime/Nazi fanboy demographic

Re: nazi chic etc.

It’s important not to assume that just because something has a particular resonance on one part of the world, it had the same eleswhere. For USians and Europeans, WW2 is associated with certain things. In other parts of the world, like the old Indo-China, what was going on on Europe and parts of the Pacific, wasn’t especially relevant. Like on China, WW2 was just really a continuation of a campaign that had been going on for decades. Hitler may then be seen as just some a sort of generic historical figure. We wouldn’t think anything particularly odd about some wonderful dressing up as Alexander or Genghis Khan, but that would be the height of bad taste in say Afghanistan or parts of China. We can feature Cossacks in romantic advertising campaigns, not so much in parts of Russia.

Even the parties to a war may see it differently. For Americans, Pearl Harbour is obviously a significant event. It meant so little to the Japanese that it was only given the go ahead to stop Yamamato from sulking. Any even then on the understanding that the operation did not distract from the “primary aims” of the Japanese war effort (ie taking Singapore, Borneo etc)

If were talking about Nazi uniforms, has anyone mentioned Hugo Boss yet?

ETA: @ falconer

You’ll probably be aware that during Overlord most allied troops first aim was to snaffle a German gun to replace their own, especially with sub machine guns (which was responsible for a number of blue on blue incidents when people were confused by their distinctive sounds)

@Ohlmann:
Apologies if you know the story already, but it’s worth the telling.

The people of Paris have never been fond of tyrants, and in 1944 when the British and American armies got closer they rose up against the Germans: first in a general strike and then in two separate simultaneous insurgencies, one led by the police and one by the Communist party. General von Choltitz, the garrison commander, had tried to rule with as soft a hand as possible and so didn’t immediately respond with violence. Hitler screamed at him for this and gave him strict orders to destroy the city, kill the inhabitants and then defend the rubble against the advancing Americans.

Instead of obeying this order, von Choltitz did the opposite: he surrendered his command to the Gaullists, and his 17,000 soldiers became prisoners of the French rather than of the Americans. It would be unkind, although not entirely false, to describe this as the first great French victory over the Germans in the entire war.

Famously, Hitler telephoned him directly and asked “is Paris burning?”, to which he replied “Paris is French.”

There are three theories as to why this was the case.

The French say that von Choltitz had been a fairly reasonable man and had grown to love the city; and as a result felt closer to the Parisians than to Hitler. Certainly, he was treated very well in captivity and De Gaulle asked for him to be given clemency afterwards, which supports this theory.

The Germans (including the von Choltitz family) say that it was rather that he realised the futility of the gesture and wished to spare the lives of his soldiers; added to which he didn’t want the von Choltitz family name to go down in the history books as the destroyer of Paris.

Both these theories are supported by the fact that von Choltitz had done his time on the Eastern Front and knew very well what an order to “destroy the city and defend the rubble” would actually look like if it were put into practise. As a result, his willingness to do anything to avert that eventuality seems pretty reasonable.

The Swedish point out that their ambassador in Paris, the great Raoul Nordling, persuaded von Choltitz to surrender in exchange for Swedish diplomatic protection of his family. Several films have been made based on this theory; whether true or not, Nordling was known to have got on well with von Choltitz and had acted as an intermediary in the negotiation in prisoner releases before.

@Alan: Oh, they worked all right, but more parts means more things to break. Their reputations may have been a bit overblown, is all I’m saying.

@EJ: fascinating! I’m reading Kershaw’s biography of Hitler atm but would like to pick up a book more general about WWII. I mean, I have already exhausted the Finnish-related books on the subject. (Yes, we were allied with the Nazis, blah blah Russia we lost.)

@Ohlman

Actually, the Russian tanks were majority home-built. They did import tanks from the US, but when you’re at war there is no such thing as too many tanks. They were roughly equivalent by quality, though apparently the elite units did like calling dibs on Shermans. Not sure if that’s a general trend or if it had to do with the relative availability of variants with upgraded guns. But the main US contribution in Russia was actually logistical, providing transport capacity to keep the tanks supplied so Russian factories could focus on making tanks rather than trucks.

The US’s tendency towards cheap but low-quality is also somewhat exaggerated; their biggest problem was that they had planned on fighting heavy tanks using tank destroyers. Everyone had some at the time; they tended to be more lightly armored but extremely well-armed, meant to fire from ambush. The US tank destroyers carried very heavy guns and the variants built after being unpleasantly surprised by just how tough later German heavy tanks got were quite capable of killing Tigers at substantial range, but due to assorted deployment issues they often wound up sending Shermans up against Tigers. British forces retrofitted some of the ones they got through lend-lease with a heavy anti-tank gun and those performed admirably.

There’s this running joke in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books that in certain political circles, military success is measured by how many people you get killed – preferably on the other side but that’s optional.

WRT why we don’t hear much about Hitler being a pedophile: I assume it’s because most of the ink spilled about Hitler has been by military historians, who really only care about the marching-and-killing-people parts of the story. Or more generally, historians don’t care much about women’s history.

“Machen Amerika Great” is not a proper sentence. It’s not only mixing up two languages, but also lacking a subject.

The German word for one sense of ‘great’ (as in ‘Great Britain’) would be ‘groß’, i.e. ‘gross’ – a much more appropriate term!

@Alan

Who can forget Hitlers personal physician who prescribed him amphetamines and drugs that you can only buy today from a shady man at a gas station.

Well, considering being against Hitler is transphobic, I would be careful when using him as a way to put people down. Sex reassignment surgeries began in 1930s Germany and Mendel’s discoveries in medicine were invaluable when it comes to that subject in particular. It’s very possible that without Hitler, we wouldn’t have a decent way to change a person’s sex, so dissing him is transphobic.

Not to mention that you’re also dissing job benefits, cafeterias at your workplace and paid vacations. So, who in their right mind would be against Hitler? Sure he killed a bunch of Jews, but if the Jew Netanyahu is to be trusted – which if you don’t what are you a Nazi – is because the Muslims told him. His original plan was to export them back to Israel, but Muslims were like “Oh, hell no. We don’t want them here, you have to kill them, m8. 360 noscope them and throw them in the gas chambers”

Let some liberal retard now act as if I meant that seriously. Or as if I used liberal as an insult in that sentence.

Childless single men who masturbate to anime, indeed. I just don’t understand why you’d wank to bug-eyed caricatures of women instead of, y’know, porn. It’s not like it’s difficult to find or anything.