History

The Vietnamese communists won their long, hard, cruel, bloody war thirty years ago today. The United States suffered its most humiliating defeat. Hundreds of thousands of Americans had fought, and tens of thousands of Americans had died, for a failed cause. These Americans had been ordered to kill, and they had killed millions in that same failed cause. They had been betrayed by their government and their commanders and by the people who supported their enemies, and by those who shunned them or despised them upon their return.

The Cold War, a real war, a war we could have lost, was at its nadir.

I remember the day. I was 12. My mother cried. The American leftists on TV cheered and put their fists in the air. They were smug. This was their victory, too.

The fall of Saigon is not an event in the distant past. It is not yet history. It was yesterday. It is part of now.

I tried repeatedly over the last few days to type up a coherent and thoughtful and analytic post on this topic. But after three tries I am giving up. All I do is type an angry rambling rant and elevate my pulse rate.

It is bad to hate. But as I contemplate this day, and what it meant, and how and why it happened, and those who want it to happen again, that is the only emotion I feel.

On April 25, 1945 “[t]he 1st Belarussian Front [Zhukov] … linked up with the 1st Ukrainian Front [Koniev] troops northwest of Potsdam, having completed the encirclement of Berlin.” The lid on the kessel was slammed closed. The same day, the desperate and hopeless relief attack by III Panzerkorps under Steiner, which Hitler was dreaming would save him, ground to a halt 50 miles from Berlin. The days of successful German offensives were long over.

The final offensive had begun on 16 April. “Zhukov’s 1st Byelorussian Front attacked at 05.00 on the 16th April and Koniev’s 1st Ukrainian Front at 06.15.” Stalin had set the two commanders in a race to Berlin. The Soviets had ten thousand cannon, one for every four meters of front, 6,300 tanks and 8,500 aircraft committed to the attack. Still, because the Soviets had failed to correctly identify the dug-in and camouflaged defensive line along the Seelowe heights, the Germans were able, for a time, to halt the juggernaut. The end was not in doubt, because the Soviets were willing to pay the blood-price to take Berlin street by street, house by house, room by room. The Soviets lost 300,000 men in the battle, roughly what the United States lost in the entire war. Upon winning, the Red Army troops subjected the conquered population to a reign of rape and brutality reminiscent of the Mongols — and similar to what the Germans had inflicted on the Soviet peoples when the boot was on the other foot.

Meanwhile, on the same day, April 25, 1945 American troops from Ninth Army and the Soviet 1st Ukrainian Front famously joined hands at Torgau on the Elbe, 100 miles Southwest of Berlin. Germany was being carved into pieces.

And on April 25 German U-boats sink 5 Allied supply ships in the English Channel.

The Germans did not give up when they were clearly beaten. They kept killing people long after there was any hope of victory. They did not do a rational cost-benefit analysis. They were good at fighting, it was what they knew how to do, and they believed their own racist lies about their supposed superiority. The only way they could be stopped was by battering them to the ground, so that anyone who was conscious would see it was over, so that they were so crushed that they were rendered physically incapable of killing anymore. That is what it took to achieve victory. No half-measures would have worked with these people. That is how it is sometimes.

As to the Soviets, we can and should recognize and respect the extraordinary achievement of the soldiers of the Red Army, without unduly glorifying them, without making excuses for their crimes, and with no illusions about the evil of the regime they served and saved. There is too little recognition of what they accomplished, in the face of a murderous, even psychotic enemy, ruled by a regime almost as bad. We in the West should be grateful that they did so much of the hard work to defeat the Third Reich, a fact the Cold War and a history seen through Western and German eyes did too much to obscure. Recent scholarship, especially that of David M. Glantz (e.g. here and books available on Amazon) and the appearance of memoirs (e.g. here, and this and this) are doing much to change this, to create a more balanced view, and to fill in the details of a vast and too little understood part of the Second World War.

(Sources: Here and here and here and here and here.)

He turns up in Lex’s post, if only in a quote and by first name: Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s chief architect, first given the job to of turning Berlin into the ‘world capital’ Germania and later also Minister of Armaments after his predecessor’s mysterious death (possibly arranged by Hitler himself), had been the only major defendant at the Nuremberg War Criminal Tribunal to plead guilty for the Third Reich’s crimes. He admitted that he shared in the overall responsibility for what had been perpetrated by Nazi Germany, but denied knowledge of the Holocaust. At the time his knowledge or direct involvement couldn’t be proven, so the different verdicts of the American, British, French and Soviet judges saved him from going to the gallows as he would have deserved; he received a 20-year prison sentence, for supplying slave labor to the German armaments industry, instead.

I recently saw this documentary that supplied a lot of interesting information that I hadn’t previously been aware of. The most important part is that Albert Speer was the driving force behind the deportation of Jews out of Berlin at the earliest possible date, for he wanted their appartments for Berliners who had had to move because their houses had been destroyed during the construction work for Germania. The concentration camp Natzweiler was also specially constructed for Albert Speer; the prisoners were mostly members of the Dutch resistance movement and were forced to work in a quarry to supply marble, also for the planned world capital. If the prosecutors had been able to produce these facts during the trial Speer would have been hanged.

It also was interesting to know how much Hitler’s direct underlings were engaging in intrigues against each other. To be separated from him for any length of time meant to be in mortal danger, for Hitler was susceptible to whisperings about disloyal acts and even outright treason perpetrated by the absent person. Speer himself was relatively safe in this regard, for he had a special relationship with Hitler that bordered on friendship, but when he fell sick he was entrusted to SS Chief Heinrich Himmler’s personal physician, who promptly began to treat Speer to death. His condition worsened steadily, until he caught on to what was happening and escaped the good doctor’s care; soon afterwards he experienced a miraculously swift recovery.

Speer served his full sentence in Spandau Prison, run by the Allies. Had he been put in a German prison he undoubtedly would have been released at the earliest possible time. The German judges and prosecutors who came to office during the Nazi era would have seen to that; as it was they managed to drag their feet until the ’70s as far as less-well-known Nazi officials and SS officers and war criminals in general were concerned.

Despite his guilt, his memoirs based on carefully selective memory and his faux-sincere confession at the Nuremberg trial helped him to acquire his reputation as the ‘Good Nazi’. Not that all that many people wanted to know any better, both inside and outside of Germany. His aristocratic background and personal charm saw to that. It can’t be said with absolute certainty, but it seems that Speer wasn’t so much a Nazi as a opportunist without any scruples who was prepared to do anything that furthered his career.

1974

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Damascus Gate, Old City of Jerusalem (c. 1939)

I came across this one while scanning some family photos and thought it would be nice to share it.

UPDATE: Here are some views of the same place in other years:

1879

1940 (Note the URL.)

1964

1992

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