The Cultural Impact And Legacy Of World War Two

Feels like ethnic nation state is really making a comeback tho or that it never went away but that the US makeup loomed larger in the international imagination post ww2 and really post Cold War but atm some of the luster has worn off

What suggests to you that it's "making a comeback" now? Seemed much stronger to me during the balkan conflicts.

i find it kinda funny that the original post begs us not to "turn this into another tiresome argument about who really won"

old ilx was always relitigating world war 2

wrt to some of my questions above about holocaust remembrance, i came across this (quite interesting) essay from Tony Judt's "Postwar":

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/10/06/from-the-house-of-the-dead-on-modern-european-memo/

it would be interesting to find the first hollywood film that even mentions it.

... the Holocaust, that is. The Pawnbroker was 1964.

paywalled

first film is addressed on some other thread, I forget what it was but it was contemporaneous w the war iirc

oh wait that was this thread nm

Indeed, I noticed The Pawnbroker hadn't been mentioned.

Sorry I didn't notice it was paywalled (I read it in the book and then had a hunch it was published other places as well).

Judt mentions a terrible sounding American miniseries called "Holocaust" that was then shown in Germany in the 70s or early 80s and caused quite a stir and led to quite a bit of historical reckoning. anyone seen it? it was denounced by the likes of Habermas and Lanzmann as a trivialization of the horrors of the camps.

I *believe* I saw that on PBS as a kid in the 80s - not sure if it's totally the same thing. The two biggest scenes/plot points I remember were a) a little kid (9-10) joining the Resistance, who subsequently gets captured and lined up against a wall and shot by the Nazis and 2) a mother going with her child to one of the gas chambers, attempting to reassure her that it is just a shower.

so my memories of it are harsh and traumatic ones

this must be it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(miniseries)

that's some cast!

Although the miniseries won several awards and received critical acclaim, it was criticized by some, including noted Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, who described it as "untrue and offensive."

lol

The series which was watched by 20 million people, or 50 percent of West Germans, and first brought the matter of the genocide in World War II to widespread public attention in a way that it never was before.[4] After each part of Holocaust was aired, there was a companion show where a panel of historians could answer questions from people phoning in.[4] The historian's panels were overwhelmed with thousands of phone calls from shocked and outraged Germans. The German historian Alf Lüdtke wrote that the historians "could not cope" as they were faced with thousands of angry phone-callers asking how these things could happen.

yeah that's it

I don't remember it being that bad tbh. it was plenty traumatizing for pre-teen me.

xp

I sort of remember it as being the first time anyone had heard of James Woods and Meryl Streep.

Judt mentions a terrible sounding American miniseries called "Holocaust" that was then shown in Germany in the 70s or early 80s and caused quite a stir and led to quite a bit of historical reckoning. anyone seen it? it was denounced by the likes of Habermas and Lanzmann as a trivialization of the horrors of the camps.

We were talking about this upthread.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/local-news/found-paisley-mill-worker-murdered-8831416#-/web/-1473849836564-trackingCode-vgSBQ9QsN9xtxKfRGalwJcsIjrdsKVYPJxCBN1ax3Dg=-articleId-369223054-vv-7ff13765-61dc-4069-8a08-c3ab1ef5da15

This an extraordinary story that I'd never heard of before, a heroic Scottish mill worker who was murdered in Auschwitz for trying to save Hungarian Jewish schoolgirls.

Makes me proud of the old home town ;_;

... how's about tearing down some of those statues of mill owners who got rich by working people to death and put up one of this lady instead, any chance of that Renfrewshire Council?

I've about 1/2 way through Bloodlands and as everyone has said it's great. Black Earth is next for me. and this article in the NYRB from a year ago is quite good:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/09/24/hitlers-world/

I'm not going to link it because it doesn't feel right but the first thing that popped up Googling Jane Haining was a Minecraft video dedicated to her life. It seems serious but I can't wrap my head around it.

upcoming doc based on Mark Harris's book

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JuiCTz6Khw

^^^ did anyone else watch this? I enjoyed it--an interesting new angle. Some incredible footage (particularly of Huston's PTSD film...).

"A Memory of Justice" (running on HBO now) is outstanding. there's a few interesting moments with some mid-70s college students (both German and American) that suggest that the standard good vs evil mythology of the war wasn't quite so set then as it is now.

A good book I'm just half way through is Tooze's The Wages of Destruction. Short version of it so far: Nazi Germany was more akin to Poland + Bulgaria as a backwards agrarian type nation than they cared to admit. Nice autobahns, but only the middle class could afford deposits on the Volkswagon 1000 mark car that was never built (and didn't get their deposits till the mid 60's). The extreme re-armament programs had stressed their economy to a point of collapse before every aggressive move or war of annihilation. The breaking of the Maginot Line and myth of Wehrmacht invincibility was encouraged by incompetent allied generals who knew they had fucked up. The "socialism" of NSDAP was very New Labour and inadequate other than in giganto build projects like the Atlantic wall where colossal amounts of money were being spunked and Bricklayers were earning Doctor's wages!

It was a command economy, with all that entails: fast production of infrastructure and other major engineering projects, but weakness in consumer goods. Like Rome during its expansion, living standards benefited from expropriation from conquered nations (and of course, racial "enemies"). However, I wouldn't call it backwards or poor. Germany was a world leader in chemicals production, and behind only the U.S. in steel. When the Red Army entered East Prussia, the soldiers were amazed by the quality of farmers' houses, and couldn't fathom why Germany would attack a poor country like the Soviet Union.

Prior to WWII, German GDP per capita wasn't quite as high as in the U.S. or UK, but it was close.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/azSk3.png

Maybe "backwards" is pushing it, but outside of the Rhur + other industrialised regions was where most of the population lived in conditions much better than in the USSR but still pretty shit for such a highfalutin world power. And even in the cities some of the new social housing put up by the Nazis had no bathrooms and just basic lighting and no power circuits. Their pharmaceutical giants were world class manufacturers of top grade heroin and tank chocolate crank - no mistake!

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/236248/ap-collaboration-nazis-reporting-news

A paper last year by the German historian Harriet Scharnberg titled “The A and P of Propaganda” and published in Studies in Contemporary History makes the case that beginning in the mid-1930s, the AP’s photo office in Germany made compromise after compromise to keep reporting under Nazi rule, obeying successive orders from the Hitler regime until it ended up as a Nazi information arm in all but name. Remaining in Berlin after its competitors departed in 1935 allowed the AP to serve as a “key channel” for German propaganda, she wrote, an arrangement the New York-based agency was eager to preserve—even if it meant removing all of its Jewish photographers in keeping with Nazi race laws, for example, and even if it meant issuing a statement to the official SS magazine swearing that the photo bureau was pure Aryan.

In the Nazi years, according to Scharnberg, the AP was selling German images in the United States and selling images from the United States in Germany, allowing photographs of American Jews and others to be used in some of the vilest racial propaganda produced by the Nazi state. The AP was, for example, the “leading supplier” of images for a propaganda book called The Jews in the USA, and in third place among suppliers of photos for the book The Subhuman.

Eventually, Scharnberg claimed, the line between the AP’s German photo operation and the Nazi regime effectively ceased to exist—even as the Nazis pursued projects like the concentration camp at Dachau, which opened in 1933, and the “euthanasia” of disabled children, which began in the summer of 1939.

What did the AP decide to cover, and how? Well, the head of AP’s picture service in Berlin went on to be an official Nazi photo censor. If AP photos from the German advance into Poland and Russia offered an image of the war that didn’t show things like the organized murder of tens of thousands of Jews and others behind the lines by the Einsatzgruppen, it was perhaps because the photos were taken by people like Franz Roth—who was, we learn from Scharnberg’s report, simultaneously an “AP photographer, SS-Oberscharführer (senior squad leader) and photojournalist in the SS Propaganda Company (SS-PK).” In his SS role, Roth took propaganda images showing Soviet prisoners as ugly human specimens—and AP, in turn, “received exclusive rights to the propaganda photos,” which were published in newspapers in Atlanta and Los Angeles.

While claiming to be covering Germany, the historian argued, the AP photo operation was, in fact, engaged in an illusion of coverage crafted in partnership with the Nazi regime. Instead of reporting on the reality of life under the regime, the AP—blinded and hobbled by its accommodations and relationships—helped obscure what was actually happening inside Germany and the way the Nazis waged war. The impact at the time is hard to determine, Scharnberg writes: “Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that the intuitive sympathies and antipathies of American newspaper readers were not unaffected, at least in the short-term, by pictures that usually depicted the Germans as triumphant blitzkrieg fighters and their opponents as sullen, sly military failures.”

from a photo gallery called This Guy Found Hitler's Secret French Bunker, 61 snapshots of...not much.

http://www.trend-chaser.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/05/bunker-8.jpg

In this room you can see the ceiling is ripping off and more rust stains located on the wall underneath what appears to be a shelf. What that shelf held, we are unsure but it probably helped contribute to the gore of WWII.

The ex-electrician in me is looking at the rusting steel conduit on the floor and thinking: those Nazi contracted Electricians made sure they did a tidy dog leg, even if it all just fell down after the War!

the end of Dunkirk got me thinking about the never-to-materialize German invasion of England ("Operation Sea Lion" I believe.) What dread that must have been to anticipate. Was the consensus that the lack of a German Navy prevented it? I believe that's Shirer's hypothesis but I'm sure there are more reputable opinions.

probably a combo of a weaker navy and lack of total air superiority to make a massive invasion work

i don't know much about whether or not this made a difference, but the german coastline along the North Sea was pretty minimal, the other half was on the Baltic. They probably couldn't have built an adequate navy, or adequate enough to compete with England. Their U-Boat game was relatively strong but then again how many of those could they have had? this isn't my area of war expertise...i guess it's possible they just didn't have as well-rounded a military as the U.S or the UK. My guess would be that their reputation on the seas at the time was one based on fear and subterfuge more than numbers, as opposed to their ground troops, Panzer divisions, the Luftwaffe, etc.

basically what the mayor said

Iirc from my readings: nobody in the German navy considered Sea Lion a serious prospect. Even during Operation Overlord, where the Allied Forces had much more seaworthy troop carriers (rather than the unfit for purpose industrial barges the Nazis had), the whole operation was hostage to weather forecasts. I think even at the height of his hubris, Hitler knew Sea Lion was unlikely to be a success, but maintained it's seriousness for propaganda purposes.

...as did Churchill

I used to find it amusing that amongst the Einsatzgruppen's UK Black Book list for executions was a Labour MP called Seymour Cocks. But I have grown up a lot since then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book

speaking of Churchill, Galipoli taught alot of folks that amphibious landings are HARD AS HELL to pull off so you had to be really comfortable in your ability to do it before you even make an attempt

was reading David Edgerton's Britain's War Machine earlier. He makes some persuasive arguments that in terms of having the most experts a UK gov has ever had, loads of brilliant engineers, an unparalleled weapons manufacturing industry of its era, superior tech, a hugely superior navy and a global trade network with shitloads of important war resources, the advantages of being vastly more GDP wealthy than Germany with half the domestic population to feed. That basically contrary to that popular Dunkirk/darkest hour narrative, that any lip service to Nazi peril was propagandist, and behind the scenes the UK war cabinet was actually supremely confident of victory. Even after some of the early defeats in the East and N Africa. Maybe bollocks and he does get a bit carried away at times, but he does successfully paint a picture of the mind boggling scale of the BE and its resources, and how it really was very much at odds with the plucky little underdog island nation holding out for dear life type claptrap that Nolan and The Mail and lots of shit politicians seem to find so stimulating.

Also he lays into the "Blairites" Cameron and Miliband for coming out with historically ignorant ww2 cliches!

The empire was mostly far, far from Europe. Britain was very near to Europe. Europe was largely in the hands of the Nazis, who were very well-equipped and operating at high efficiency. The empire did not mobilize for war until very late in the game and was slow to organize when war came. It is true the British government could have removed to Canada and continued the war at a safe remove, but that would have been extremely difficult. If the British government was supremely confident, it was as much a reflection of their consistent underestimation of the Axis as it was on their high estimate of the empire's war-making capacity.

btw, the "plucky little underdog island nation holding out for dear life" storyline was basically cooked up for contemporary US consumption, to counteract a fairly strong distaste for the British empire among Americans, initially to justify the lend-lease program, and after 1941 it blended seamlessly into the general war propaganda. Selling the US on the hardy, resourceful communists under Uncle Joe Stalin as admirable allies was a much harder storyline to put across.

Edgerton is a bit of a Dibnah and his appreciation and love of Engineering (he gets very excited about 30's innovations like Bristol sleeve valves!) is probably much keener than his understanding of social and military history. But I very much appreciate his attempts at cutting through the propagandist cliches with convincing amounts of data and stats. Not sure some of his assertions hold up, but he certainly isn't full of shit!

he also posits that the Luftwaffe were quite haphazard, improvisatory and individualistic (type of traits often attributed to British fighters) whereas the RAF were much better organised and run with what could be described as a cold Teutonic style of efficiency once they found their feet. And Bomber Command started bombing the shit out of German cities well before the Blitz or the Battle of Britain, while Hitler didn't lift the ban on the Luftwaffe operating anywhere but the front line till months later. Although it wasn't like he'd been shy of annihilating civilian populations from the air in Warsaw, Rotterdam, Guernica etc.. up to then tbf.

So...the erasure of Russia and the Eastern front from American accounts of the war is the source of no great mystery...it's obviously a relic of the Cold War and just general jingoism...however, I'd be curious if at any point this was a planned or systematic thing. Were textbooks edited, etc? Was there an actual propaganda campaign to claim the US "won the war against fascism" more or less on its own (with, of course, the help of the plucky British, whose ass we proverbially saved)?

America has to convince itself it's won at least one war since 1898

1898! When the USA stood up to the diseased remnant of the Spanish Empire and stole their lunch money!

But really now, don't you recall how we just crushed it in Grenada in 1983? Those poor bastards never stood a chance!

Doesn't the US have a better claim at deciding WWI than WWII?

I think the saddest lasting cultural impact of WW2, at least at this moment in history, is that baby boomers think they won it.