Well, it’s not Nazi Germany…but…the USA is definitely headed there. Then again, when the Nazis stopped you in the street, they would at least ask for your papers first. Apparently ICE and BP think that’s too woke or something.
If you read the rest of the tweet by Arnaud, you’ll learn that Nazis later abandoned the practice of rescuing survivors of sinking enemy ships, and it was because Americans are worse war criminals than Nazis:
The history of this is actually interesting: the Nazis rescued survivors all the way until the so-called Laconia Incident in 1942 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconia_incident).
The Laconia was a British troopship sunk by U-156, a German U-boat, off the West African coast. Right after the sinking, the Nazis immediately began rescuing over 400 survivors, broadcasting - as was common practice - in plain English their position on open radio channels to all Allied powers nearby, so they wouldn’t get attacked during the rescue.
That’s when a US B-24 “Liberator” bomber attacked the submarine anyway, even though all the rescued survivors were on its foredeck. The B-24 killed dozens of Laconia’s survivors with bombs and strafing attacks, forcing U-156 to cast into the sea the remaining survivors that she had rescued and crash dive to avoid being destroyed.
The American B-24 pilots mistakenly reported they had sunk U-156, and were awarded medals for bravery…
This event completely changed Nazi policy on this matter: Karl Dönitz, commander of the U-boat fleet, issued the “Laconiarefehl” - the Laconia Order - forbidding U-boats from rescuing survivors, because the risk to the submarine was now too high.
In other words, the Americans during WW2 essentially forced the Nazis to abandon survivors - from the allied side (!) - at sea.
Dönitz at least had an excuse.
I miss when “worse than Hitler” was something patently untrue that people said when they were being overly dramatic.
Say what you want about Hitler, but at least he killed Hitler.
If reports of Donald’s diet are correct, he’s also the one who is killing Donald.
I would prefer it be lead poisoning.
Lmao you’re not wrong!
Reminds me of the old (apocryphal) story of Stalin, FDR, and Churchill debating what to do with the Nazi officers’ corps after their defeat.
"The German General Staff, [Stalin] said, must be liquidated. The whole force of Hitler’s mighty armies depended upon about 50,000 officers and technicians. If these were rounded up and shot at the end of the war, German military strength would be extirpated.” When Churchill angrily declared he would be no party to such mass retribution, the President quipped that he would act as mediator, and suggested the compromise of shooting only 49,000. In heat, Churchill left the room. Stalin himself fetched him back, assuring him it was all a jest.
The tendency to treat enemy soldiers as honorable adversaries while foreign civilians are resources to be exploited or speed bumps to be flattened is extremely fascist.
What separates Hitler and Hegseth isn’t their army’s treatment of survivors of a military operation, but their view of their targets as military or civilian. Hegseth knows he’s targeting civilians and treats them just like a German military commander would treat other civilians.
This is very misleading. As a rule, yes, the Kriegsmarine probably tried to rescue Western survivors most of the time, but it is indisputable that the Kriegsmarine also committed many atrocities both at sea and on land.
“Nazis were good” isn’t the point of this post
I’m not the point of this post either.
In fact, I’m not the point of anything.
Worse than Nazi Germany?
… though even for radical Nazis, American approaches like the “one-drop” rule seemed to go too far.
yeah, but keep in mind that this is only true because the nazis werent sinking soviet submarines in ww2.
fair enough, anyway, you probably cant really rescue anyone from a sinking submarine, but did the germans rescue soviet sailors when they sank soviet ships? there must’ve been a little bit of that too
I found one exception:
[T]he only proven survivors were the two sailors sent along to row the boats, Nikolai Sjirokov and Mikail Klimov. They were captured by [Axis] authorities at the end of March, freezing and starving. During the subsequent investigation in the vicinity of the landing site, the [Axis] found human bones, body parts and even a human head. What remained of the bodies could not be identified, and exactly how they died could not be established. Sjirokov and Klimov would eventually be brought to Oslo, where they were presented as cannibals in a press conference[.]
The Axis was a little less courteous when it came to the hospital ship Armenia.
