[ekianjo]

> The more you learn about the real nature of ww2, you realize that there was no good side in that war. Just two evils fighting each other.

You don't win wars without killing people, and therefore all sides are evil by definition.

The little process of judging "war criminals" after the war is over is just for one's good conscience. If the Allies had lost they would have been judged as war criminals by the victors too.

[wbl]

Where is the American Treblinka, the British Buchenwald? WWII was against genocidal maniacs who starved entire countries and destroyed Yiddish speaking culture.

[calibraxis]

"Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity." (http://www.jewishjournal.com/sacredintentions/item/hitlers_i...)

[pluma]

The Allied involvement in WW2 never was about the holocaust. In fact, the full extent of the holocaust only became apparent after WW2 as Allied soldiers had liberated the concentration camps and discovered the paperwork.

Also don't think that anybody in WW2 cared about the Jews. There are enough stories about Jewish refugees being rejected at borders and sent back to face certain death because nobody believed them or cared about them. Hating Jews was socially acceptable everywhere until the Nazis showed what that kind of thinking can lead to in a modern society (with the technical and political means to actually round up and murder people at scale).

The US only got directly involved in WW2 when it had no other choice (technically, Germany declared war on them after the US declared war on Japan). Britain only declared war on Germany because it had a pact with Poland which Germany invaded -- Germany had already annexed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia at that point.

Heck, Italy and Hungary were allied with Germany for a significant part of the war. Not to mention various countries like Spain and Finland that fought alongside or at least supported Nazi Germany.

WW2 was a world war. It's called that because it involved so many countries that were at war with each other throughout the entire world at once over an extended amount of time. There were many reasons for each individual conflict and WW2 itself is just the aggregate of all of these (with the two major ones of course being the attempted domination of Europe by Nazi Germany and the attempted domination of East Asia by Japan).

It wasn't about ideals or principles. It was about power and territory. And for the Allies it was mostly about survival: a German victory would have meant vassalage for Western Europe and annihilation for most of Eastern Europe (because the Nazis wanted that territory as "lebensraum", i.e. living space, meaning the existing population had to go).

TL;DR: While halting the genocides was a nice side-effect of defeating Germany, the Allies weren't in it to save the Jews.

[wbl]

My grandmother didn't give a damn about that when the Canadians showed up. And Hitler's plans for Poland were comparable to the Shoah: 1/3 dead, 1/3 slaves, 1/3 peasants.

[pluma]

Isn't that basically what I said?

> annihilation for most of Eastern Europe (because the Nazis wanted that territory as "lebensraum", i.e. living space, meaning the existing population had to go)

[iwontreddit]

> Where is the American Treblinka

Where is the axis hiroshima/nagasaki? Where is the axis firebombings of japan and germany?

> the British Buchenwald?

Go look up bengali holocaust where millions of indians were starved to death by the british. It's also funny that you would bring up death camps ( which were invented and pioneered by the british ). The germans modeled their death camps after the british death camps of south africa...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/LizzieVa...

Looks like a holocaust picture right? Wrong. It was from a british concentration camp in south africa during the 2nd boer war.

> WWII was against genocidal maniacs who starved entire countries and destroyed Yiddish speaking culture.

WW2 was about one group of genocidal maniacs fighting against another group of genocidal maniacs for resources/power/wealth.

I don't think the allies ( US, Britain, Soviet Union ), the KINGS of genocide are any better than germany or japan when it came to genocide. As bad as the destruction of yiddish culture may have been, it pales in comparison to what happened to the natives, aborigines, inuit, pacific islanders, africans, siberians, circassians, etc.

As I said, in ww2, it was evil vs evil. Evil won and evil lost. If both sides had somehow lost, then you could argue that the good won.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

[cyberferret]

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

[jonyt]

So you're saying Allied war crimes were in no way comparable to Axis?

[cyberferret]

Not sure if you are addressing this comment to me and my Wikipedia post, or at wbl (who I was responding to).

I am not sure what measure anyone would use to compare war crimes etc., but if you are talking about pure body count, then the number of civilians killed during (a) the Rape of Nanking and (b) the Hiroshima/Nagasaki atomic bombs run about the same...

[vidarh]

The ongoing firebombing campaign against Japanese cities also killed more.

The bombing raids against Tokyo alone almost certainly killed far more than Hiroshima throughout the war.

And it included the most destructive single bombing raid of the entire war. Operation Meetinghouse [1] burned a quarter of Tokyo to the ground in a single night, and may have killed as many as 100,000 - more than is believed to have died in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima (though possibly fewer than the total Hiroshima death toll, depending on which estimates are right).

[1] http://www.wired.com/2011/03/0309incendiary-bombs-kill-10000...

[ekianjo]

How about Stalin and the millions he deported and killed in labor camps? Once he joined the Allies nobody criticized him anymore.

[drumdance]

General Curtis LeMay believed he would've been tried as a war criminal for the fire bombing of Tokyo.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX61.h...

[ekianjo]

Dresden ? Hiroshima ? There are many others.

[MichaelGG]

Does Roosevelt/Churchill's demand for unconditional surrender not count?