Should Old Veterans Forgive Their Former Enemies?

[sapper]

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[angie999]

I don't think that the perpetrators of Oradour and many other atrocities can ever be forgiven, but I also don't think that we can expect every German of the wartime generation to share in the collective guilt either.

And above all, we must never forget.

[Wise1]

It opens up the whole issue of who was guilty? Who would you forgive? The individual SS men and women carried out the orders to do what they did, they got the orders from someone else and so leads you back to the man in charge so are you forgiving Hitler? Or is it simply easy to say that the SS men and women did the dirty work and nobody forced them to do it, after all how could any human being kill women and children in such a horrific way.

I dont think its that simple and its a question that will be continued to ask for a long time to come.

It leads to far too many avenues of possibility when you get right down to it. However the decision to forgive anyone for their actions in life lies with each and every one of us and the reasons for forgiving should not because the many think its the right thing to do, it should be because you know its the right thing to do.

[sapper]

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[Gotthard Heinrici]

I think its very much an individual thing and is not open to generalisations, sapper. As Angie said should the perpetrators of atrocities ever be forgiven? I dont think so. It could also be said of the German Veterans against the Russians or indeed the Russians against the Germans. In the case of combat veterans there is the common bond of "being in action" which seems to have brought former enemies together. But its a difficult one to call

[BrianP]

I still visit my old neighbor from time to time, who was in the Navy on the U.S.S. Mississippi. He, for one, has not forgiven the Japanese. Recently, he was invited to attend a conference at the D-Day Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. Also attending were German, British, Japanese, Russian, and other veterans from various countries. He told me that he wasn't orginally planning to go, but decided to because it might be his last time to "slap a Jap."

My wife's grandmother was a concentration camp survivor. After the war, she distrusted any and all Germans, which was ironic because she was German herself. She immigrated to Australia and said she was no longer a German. From that time on, she hated anything and everything related to Germany. She probably wouldn't have like me because of my German ancestory, even though my family had been in America since before the Civil War!

I guess it is up to the individual.

[spidge]

Originally posted by sapper@Jul 26 2005, 02:57 AM
Knowing the dreadful things that the SS got up to. The murder of innocent men, women and little children. Such as at "Orador sur glan" where they murdered the men. put the women and children in the church, and burned them alive...Then burnt the town down, Should I forgive these men? after 60 years plus?

If I do, will the screams of those women and children, as they were being burned alive be heard somewhere out there in space, echo even louder?

What do you think?
Sapper

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I can only relate the experiences of my father in North Africa. He did not hate the Italians however he had no respect for them. (The old tank saying - One forward and four reverse)

He had respect for the Afrika Corps as they fought hard and "fair".

Although he never fought the Japanese, as he was wounded at Tobruk, his mates did in New Guinea and many others spent time in Changi and were never the same again. He could not forgive them for that.

He did say to me once: "You cannot respect a man who doesn't respect his own life or that of his foe". The saying for a lot of these guys to their mates when they were going to New Guinea was "Give the Jap what he wants....a quick death with no mercy"

[angie999]

Several years after the war, the French did put some of the perpatrators of the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane on trial, including several young Alsacians who had been drafted into the SS.

Noticably, the French enthusaism for revenge had, by that time, subsided. Compared to the Germans on trial, the Alsacians got off quite lightly and the Germans themselves were treated much more leinently than they would have been in the immediate aftermath of the war. On the other hand, several officers of 2 SS Panzer, who were still either missing in action or gone to ground, were sentenced to death in absentia.

[sapper]

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[Kiwiwriter]

I don't know. It depends on the man and the battle.

I've met British convoy escort crews, members of the "Johnnie Walker Old Boys' Association," who have reunions with their "opponents" in the U-Boats.

On the other hand, Charles Hazlitt Upham, VC and Bar, would not allow anyone driving a German or Japanese car onto his farm near Christchurch. And when Japanese cherry trees were planted on Memorial Avenue -- named in honor of WW2 warriors who died in battle -- over protests from the local branch of the Returned Services' Association, the RSA chopped all four down. They were not replaced.

British and Australian POWs who went to Kanchanaburi for a 50th anniversary ceremony at the cemetery on the Kwai were asked if they wanted to meet their former guards, having lunch at a nearby table. The ex-POWs said that if one of the guards came near them, he'd get a boot up his backside. The ex-guards sensibly stayed away.

Some can forgive. Some cannot. Some can be forgiven. Some cannot. There are no hard and fast rules on this subject. It is a subject for each individual and his or her own conscience.

My own conscience is muddled. I have rarely, if ever, been forgiven for far lesser deeds and misdeeds than butchering whole villages and populations, but I have been expected to grant absolution to those who have harmed me, as if they did nothing at all. I find the term to be just a politician's word, to be used when a politician gets caught in a wringer of his own making, and he seeks a path of least resistance away from accountability and responsibility for his actions. And to me, accountability and responsibility are two-thirds of everything. The third is "gravitas."