Too soon to start the kids on Panzer Corps?

[LandMarine47]

I'm sure most of us here would rather be in Stalingrad 1943 than Verdun in 1916.

Seriously? So I have to choose between being thrown into an artillery barrage and machine gun fire or slowly starve and freeze to death, thousands of miles from home? I'd go for Verdun to be honest.

We'll we have different ideas! At least at Stalingrad you had the option to surrender (to soviets that hate your guts) or spend hell after being thrown into an Artillery Barrage and MG fire. Personally I'd rather be at Stalingrad. There at least you had a (small) chance of survival. I don't think there is a WW1 vet who survived the ENTIRE war.

[KeldorKatarn]

You have very strange ideas about what Stalingrad was like...

[LandMarine47]

You have very strange ideas about what Stalingrad was like...

It's just me as we all have different views.

[wargovichr]

Then there's the millions of civilians killed by starvation and disease alone on the Russian Front, the hundreds of thousands killed by fire bombing at Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo not to mention the thousands vaporized or burned by atomic weapons of WWII.
A warning for today that when extreme nationalism and extreme economic crisis overlap very very bad things happen to humans.
History is only a echo away....

[KeldorKatarn]

A warning for today that when extreme nationalism and extreme economic crisis overlap very very bad things happen to humans. History is only a echo away....

Which is unfortunately a development that I see growing in Europe and the US again...

[LandMarine47]

I don't think it's ever gonna stop unless people can feel hate and pride

[bebro]

I find the idea that WW2 was 'ok-ish' pre-42 rather strange. It's not that the "political stuff" came suddenly out of the blue. "Einsatzgruppen"-style mass executions in Poland and Russia resulted in large numbers of civilian deaths before death camps were established.

Overall there can be no doubt that WW2 was worse. Whether one had individually a better chance to survive combat in WW1 or WW2 is another question.

[KeldorKatarn]

The ok-ish was meant as a relative term. Of course WW2 was horrible. But I haven't seen a large war that wasn't yet. vietnam and the attrocities there against civilians, Agent Orange, Napalm...

Iraq and Guantanamo and the Torture camps...

So yeah, tell me one war that wasn't a nightmare.

Of course WW2 immediately started with Einsatzgruppen but before 1942 the war was mainly restricted to the western front and very early eastern front. That was all still very very calm in comparison to what came after 1942. And it wasn't just the Germans that were responsible for incredible attrocities either. So yeah.. Not a big fan of any war. Just about every single war that has been fought in the 20th century and since then could have been avoided and was completely idiotic and barbaric imo.

[KeldorKatarn]

But I really don't like going too much into politics on such stuff. I'm glad this came up in this forum. In any other community the different nationalities would already be calling eachother names...

[LandMarine47]

But I really don't like going too much into politics on such stuff. I'm glad this came up in this forum. In any other community the different nationalities would already be calling eachother names...

So true. They teach this stuff so another Hitler doesn't rise to power...... And that was just Germany! Imagine had he taken control of Britain or the US! WW2 would have had a very different conclusion....

[ThvN]

It all depends on perspective, I guess. I am Dutch, but I have lived in Belgium with Germans under the same roof. So of course the subject came up sometimes, but no 'Don't mention the war' nonsense . The most embarassing thing that happened was Dutch tourists complaining that every shop was closed (on November the 11th... ).

Such a mistake can be expected because The Netherlands were neutral during WW1, but it is telling about how perspective can change someone's view of what's important or not. And general knowledge about history is often over-simplified. Like the inter-war years (1919-1939) being some peaceful affair with some depression tacked onto the end which caused Hitler to gain power, the end. Never mind the very brutal conflicts of that period, in which civilians were targeted as well. For me WW2 actually begins somewhere around 1937, but earlier on the tension was already on the rise (the League of Nations was already falling apart in 1933 due to these international tensions).

But I must say, my early perusal of my fathers army 'literature' (he was a Cold War conscript) often comes in handy to point out the particulars of the equipment shown in the news about today's wars. And of course, even in the future we need experts on ancient military hardware to satisfy the gaming industries' needs. So Kamerer is onto something here.

[LandMarine47]

Damn auto correct.... It misspelled doesn't with does! Whoops
But yes POV is something that does come into play..... I had a British friend who complained everything was closed on the 4th of July...... I know where your sitting!

[KeldorKatarn]

[Moderation: let's keep things civil please]

[PantherII]

WW2 was an 'ok' war until about 1942. Then all the political stuff happened, the death camps started up, the situation in the east got worse, then the uboat war took a turn for the worse and the Ubootwaffe lost a lot of men, then the US involvement was felt and the air war on German civilians started which made things a lot worse. germany tried to counter that with V1 and V2 attacks on civilian targets in Britain, then Stalingrad happened... I think until 1942 the war was pretty ok'ish in terms of losses and cost for the civilians, but after that the war became a lot worse than WW1. Also in terms of what it did to people. The Americans started routing up Japanese in the US, packing them together in camps, the Jewish deathcamps, the kills in the occupied territories in the east... and even after the end of the war, still rapes and murders of German women by allied soldiers who hated german guts by that time... that war really didn't change people for the better at all. WW2 was also a lot worse since it had even worse long term consequences than WW1 did. After all a direct result was the splitting up of three countries, China, Germany and Korea, of which two still last to this day, a over 4 decades long cold war which nearly turned into a war that would have destroyed humanity at several points, and other very difficult long term repercussions that are felt throughout the war across the world.

As a German I can certainly say WW2 was worse. Since I can feel the hatred a lot of people still have for Germans to this day. And even if it isn't hatred, most people abroad still have that WW2 picture of Germans in their head. Not easy. Not to mention that pretty much no major city in germany has any older buildings in large concentration left since all that was bombed to the ground. So a lot of architecture is lost forever. Cologne, Frankfurt, Dresden and a lot of other cities are completely new cities nowaday, not one of them looks the way it looked before WW2.

I guess that is also a reason why a lot of Germans that I know only shook their head after 911. As horrible as it was, a lot of people felt that the American reaction to, quote "One building being lost" was a little exaggerated considering Germany once lost every major city it had completely. So yeah... from a European perspective I'd definitely say, by the end of the war WW2 was definitely by far the worse. both in terms of human loss and long term consequences.

When operation barbarossa launched the war stopped being "ok", if one could say that it was ok before that.
After 41 only your worse imagination put limits on how both sides killed eachother.

As for buildings lost in world war 2. Germany got off easy. They recieved financial support for rebuilding after world war 2, same with Japan. England for example got a loan, that they didnt finish paying 50 years later. Soviet union got nothing, they were left with their own rebuild. And they had suffered more damage than Germany did. West of Moscow there was hardly anything left.

[KeldorKatarn]

Easy huh. There wasn't a single major german city still standing. There's wasn't hardly anything left, there was literally not anything left.

[huertgenwald]

SU got nothing except plundering eastern europe and especially the eastern parts of germany (former GDR), dismanteling all remnands of industry ?!

[PantherII]

Easy huh. There wasn't a single major german city still standing. There's wasn't hardly anything left, there was literally not anything left.

That pretty much sums up every place in Europe where the Germans had been, including Germany.

[huertgenwald]

As far as i remember the british and american bombardments of french cities since '44 were
much more "effective" than anything the Luftwaffe ever "achieved" there...
And as far as i know the Luftwaffe "only" erased Coventry, Rotterdam and one city i can't remember right now
in contrast to allied AF annihilating virtually EVERY noticable german city.

[LandMarine47]

the most infamous raid was probably the Dredsen Raid.... so much irreplaceable culture and history lost in a single night. Allied commanders saw what they did claiming the Germans had lots of arms in the city. Instead innocent people were killed. I bet they killed more PEOPLE than SOLDIERS

[KeldorKatarn]

Since when do you drop fire bombs on soliders. Since when do you build test cities in the US with materials informers told you are being used most in German households so they burn better. Since when do you bomb in two waves, first fire, then explosives several minutes later to disrupt the fire departments help to make sure everybody burns real good.

I'm not going to say Germany didn't do horribly things in eastern europe but saying the Germans rased every city they've been to is just a big fat lie. what has been done in the allied bombing campaign to germany is just as huge a war crime as hiroshima and nagasaki was and nobody should tell me the US wouldn't have dropped a nuclear bomb in the middle of dresden or nuremberg if the war had still been going on. Those were war crimes against nothing but civilians. Yes russia and Poland sufferend a lot, especially from the holocaust. That doesn't make flattening every german city and purposely trying to kill as many civilians as possible all nice an peachy.

Germany has done a lot of work to educate about the holocaust, to pay their dues and make sure stuff like that never happens again. Every German is very much aware what has been done in German name back then. I wish some of the victorious nations would reflect a bit more about the things they have done. I rarerly see any british or american be appologetic about these bombing raids or the atomic bombs. (Maybe then stuff like napalm, Agent Orange, torture camps in iraq and guantanamo concentration camps would not have happened you know) The majority still seems to think that "had to be done" to end the war. Especially in Germany's case it's already accepted historial fact that these raids did nothing but strengthening the regime and made a surrender even less likely and possibly dragged out the war an entire year. When your regime's propaganda tells you that the allies want to destroy Germany and all Germans completely, so there's no possibility for a peace, then such crap is much easier to believe when you experience stuff like Dresden, get information about stuff like a Morgenthau plan, comments that the Germans might have to be sterilized and hear in the news that the only peace considered would be an "unconditional surrender", something I cannot understand to this day since it dragged out the war for at least one more unnecessary year which gave the USSR time enough to completely occupy eastern europe and cause the misery of soviet occupation behind the iron curtain for 40 years.
This incredible hate for everything German I can still feel to this day, no matter where I go. And I've never understood that. The holocaust alone doesn't explain that.Neither does it explain why Germany is still being used as the default nazi enemy in media no matter where you look, even in science fiction for crying out loud, over half a century after that war ended.Pretty sick if you ask me.