Hitler Finds Out Ted Kennedy Is Dead

Run time: 03:50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhulzGzcr3g   Posted on YouTube: August 26, 2009 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: August 26, 2009 By DU Member: andyrowe Views on DU: 2559

 
This is my second take on the Downfall meme. A link to the first is in my signature.

This is for Jack, Bobby, and Ted. Viva la universal healthcare!

I started thinking about the political ramifications, and one of the things I thought about was that democrats could use his memory to get the Blue Dogs to play ball on the public option.

TlalocW

Real healthcare reform will be the silver lining in our losing Ted.

It's called "Der Untergang" (The Downfall) and it's an excellent movie about Hitler's last days as told by his personal secretary Traudl Junge who was in the bunker with him. She was able to escape the bunker in a coordinated plan undertaken by four groups of Hitler's staff. Of the four groups, Junge's (who was with three other women secretaries) was the only one to successfully escape.

I own the movie and if I recall correctly, Hitler is instructing his generals to move their armies to cut off the allied advance on Berlin. He's told the armies no longer exist and he goes on a tirade.

And you were right, it was the Russian advance not the allied army.

In the beginning, the Generals tell him about the Russian Advances on the outskirts of Berlin. He then asks them about the "Steiner Offensive" which he had ordered earlier. They tell him that there was no offensive. (Steiner was one of the famous gung-ho (but very capable) Generals, but he neither had men nor material that is worth mentioning. The possibility of an offensive movement against the Russians was part of Hitlers deteriorating mental state, it is the culmination of his giving commands to "ghost armies" or "paper brigades" ..everyone knew the Steiner offensive was pure BS, comparable to the delusional stance Goering had from the beginning.)

When Hitler is told that Steiner didn't attack, he orders all minor minions out, Jodel, Krebs and Keitel stay (as does Goebbels and two others whose name escape me right now) and get to hear the famous Rant about how the German soldiers are cowards and traitors, and then comes a whole part on how despicable the German officers are (they too, traitors, cowards, parvenues and elitist) - he tells them how he never went to a military academy ("to learn to eat with a fork") but still was able to "conquer the whole of Europe" .... all that the officers did was " throw obstacles in his way" - then comes the famous quote where he says that he should have liquidated all the higher officers like Stalin did ...

then comes another general "everyone betrayed me part" and how they betrayed the german people, but they have it coming for them.. they will drown in their own blood...
then he gets all tame and says that the war is lost.... that he won't let the Russians capture him.. and that the officers should "do what they want" ...


I did this with one ear and half a mind so maybe the order is a bit off ... also I did it mostly from memory, so don't sue me if there is some kind of error.

I thought not long before the war ended the German military offered to surrender to the French, UK and US, but wouldn't surrender to the Russians. And the Allies turned them down.

Do you know anything about that? Was it the human rights record of the soviets that made the Germans turn the offer down? And why didn't the Allies take it? I thought they invaded Korea to restrict the ambitions of the USSR (so they wouldn't get the whole of Korea, just the south). And I thought a reason they used the atomic bomb on Japan was fear the same would happen in Japan, with the soviets taking a part of it unless they conquered it quickly.

I also heard at least one general was wanting to take down the soviets right after the Germans went down (when they'd be weak). Do you know anything about that?

So it seems the Allies (minus the Russians) would've been happy to have the whole of Germany surrendered to them instead of split with the Russians. So do you know anything about that or about the politics of the Russians within the allies near the end of the war?

I thought not long before the war ended the German military offered to surrender to the French, UK and US, but wouldn't surrender to the Russians. And the Allies turned them down.

Do you know anything about that? Was it the human rights record of the soviets that made the Germans turn the offer down? And why didn't the Allies take it? I thought they invaded Korea to restrict the ambitions of the USSR (so they wouldn't get the whole of Korea, just the south). And I thought a reason they used the atomic bomb on Japan was fear the same would happen in Japan, with the soviets taking a part of it unless they conquered it quickly.

I also heard at least one general was wanting to take down the soviets right after the Germans went down (when they'd be weak). Do you know anything about that?

So it seems the Allies (minus the Russians) would've been happy to have the whole of Germany surrendered to them instead of split with the Russians. So do you know anything about that or about the politics of the Russians within the allies near the end of the war?

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As long as Hitler lived (the end of April 45), there were only informal attempts by germans to get a separate peace (Officers, Party, Statesmen). They were doomed to failure since the allies either didn't believe in the sincerity of the offer or didn't believe that the circles making the proposal had the necessary clout (which was true in most cases) to circumvent or oust Hitler. Another thing was that the US and GB both had reservations about what would happen to Germany if the Officers or some Party minions were to succeed Hitler - especially the British despised this possible outcome ("Rule of the Junkers") more than anything else. Given the impression that Hitler was the all-powerful, almost omniscient leader of Germany, they simply didn't put much attention to minor figures claiming that they could circumvent Hitler for a separate peace and then get rid of him. Even when they trusted their capabilities to do so, they did not trust the intentions of said groups.

Hitler made Admiral Dönitz his successor. Dönitz was sure no angle or a Democrat, but he was a very capable Officer. Many historians believe Hitler chose him over others so that Germany could have a separate peace under the leadership of a relatively "Non-Nazi" (always a question of degrees). But I highly doubt that. By the time Hitler killed himself Goering, Himmler, Bormann and many other figures had already begun to make plans of their own and were mostly betraying Hitler more or less overtly. So there really was no staunch representatives of the Old School Nazis to succeed him - something that led some to the assumption that now there was no obstacle to a separate peace.

Although the Western Allies may have preferred a separate peace with Germany by early 1945 over having the Soviets in Berlin, there was almost no realistic chance of that happening. First of all, the Allies were baffled by Dönitz as the new head of the Reich, and didn't trust the situation - was he a stooge, did he lead a coup or did he simply have luck? They weren't sure how legit the Dönitz succession was, if it was accepted within Germany - but most importantly, by the time Dönitz succeeded Hitler the war was already taking place within Germany and there was no real merit in stopping on the 9.5 yard mark for some kind of dubious peace. (Although many an American and British Officers and Politicians would have preferred to shake hands with the Germans and go on to Moskau.)

The most important reason of all though are the treaties between the Allies. Ever since the Meeting of Tehran in 1943 the Western Allies promised the Russians to open a second front and made a solemn promise NOT TO SIGN A SEPARATE PEACE WITH GERMANY. So in a sense it was a question of honor or better of keeping word in times of need - it would have made beautiful propaganda for the Soviets if the US would have "forgiven" the Germans in order to pick a fight with the Russians. But the promise was mostly the logical outcome of the US and UK's strategy of making the Russians bear most of the work and most of the casualties of the war - it was reasonable to provide the Soviets with material and let their huge manpower take care of the rest.

The general you're thinking of is Patton. He made several statements in the direction of "we're fighting to wrong guys here" and he really cranked that up after the war - he wanted to raise German divisions and march to Moscow with them. (Some people still believe that is the reason for the car "accident" that killed him - indeed that crash came after a series of other suspicious occurrences, but the scarce documentation doesn't really allow one to draw a conclusion). But, popular as Patton and his views may have been with certain circles in America, the people in power in America at that time (the pres, the press, the OSS (pre-CIA), the whole anglo american establishment and most of the traditional left were more or less pro-Soviet at that time. Indeed, there is some evidence that Roosevelt trusted Stalin quite more than he did trust Churchill (there is still some debate on that).

These are some reasons that come to mind why the US didn't implement the strategy of cooperation with Germans against the Soviets earlier than they did. There is some discussion about when the cold war started, extreme early would be the Hiroshima version you mentioned, the extreme late one takes the first blockade of Berlin as the starting date.

Maybe it's better to say the Western Allies SHOULD have been happy to take the offer at that point, not that they WOULD have. But that wasn't a realistic option because of the above mentioned reasons. Needless to say, they more than made up for their anti-Nazi pro -Soviet stance as soon as they realized there was a cold war going on - then they showed that they didn't have scruples to play with the Nazis or to deceive or cheat the Soviets. So in hindsight, one might think it wise to pursue such a strategy from earlier on. although such an interpretations is purely realpolitik and leaves out moral implications (just as the US did after WW2).

They kept pushing because they all knew it was about getting as big a chunk of the cake as possible to keep under their power sphere. They knew Russia would take and keep as much as possible.

I know this sounds like bad RW propaganda, but there were many people in the west who still had grand illusions about Joe Stalin and his ghoulish regime even after the war ...

There were two major waves of defection from support for Stalin in the US and the UK, one wave in the 30's after Stalins staged trials against the "traitors" - but even then a considerable portion of intellectuals, statesmen, millionaires, and other groups still were in love with the UDSSR. There's a surprisingly long list of people who were willing to work for the Soviets after even after this first wave - think of the Cambridge Set in the UK (the highest circles), or various OSS agents during and after the war in the US, and, as I mentioned in my post above, there is still a considerable debate on when and on what occasion FDR came around to see Stalin for what he is.
I never really encountered the opinion that there wasn't still substantial support for the UdSSR in the West up to the second wave of defection from Stalinist to Non-communist left in the 50's (after Kruschev's speech and the Korean tragedy) before. I'm still reading about these things and I don't have complete insight, but I think it is fairly well established that there was a certain amount of pro-Soviet attitude in the west. Certainly the American delegations in Tehran, Jalta and Potsdam weren't especially keen on hearing the Brits talk about "going after Joe" ... In Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes" there is the legendary scene how a US official ( I think it was Harriman, the ambassador, or the local cia station chief) goes to visit Stalin to ask him if he really is convinced that the capitalist west is actively plotting the destruction of the UdSSR and how Stalin firmly answers yes - I think Weiner put the story in there to demonstrate how late the realization that Joe was a madman came to be the accepted view within the government.

So, my point is - the Russians did push to get as big a chunk as they could - the Americans certainly didn't. Or at least one can say in retrospect that they didn't do everything to beat the Russians in the run for Germany. There would have been many occasions where it would have been possible to out pace the Russians on a tactical level and there were even strategic possibilities to that end - since we provided several crucial ingredients to their war effort - especially to their mobility.

Seems to me it was not our policy to do anything anti-soviet at least up to the end months of the war, at least when one regards official policy and not the ramblings of MacArthur, Patton or LeMay. To come full circle to the above post of mine, that was IMHO the reason why we didn't consider signing a separate peace with either the various plotters or Dönitz's paper government.

just for you...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkUzfAfwP1A

"Rachel is in no danger of conceiving."

:rofl:

I had cube dogs popping their head up over that one.

-Hoot

I'm confused and intrigued.

Picture a grassland in the American midwest, dotted with the burrows of prairie dogs. Something happens. Several prairie dogs stick their heads up out of their burrows to see what's going on.

Now translate this to a cube farm, i.e., a contemporary office divided into cubicles. One employee who should be preparing the monthly summary (or whatever soul-deadening task is on the agenda for that day) is instead surfing DU. He or she finds this video, watches it, and starts laughing hysterically. Other workers nearby poke their heads above their cubicles to see what's going on. These workers, emulating prairie dogs but doing so from their cubicles, are cube dogs.

I'll have to share that with my cube dogs at work.

I needed that today!

We all need a laugh sometimes.

Thanks so much.

That we finally get health care in this country that is.

:hope:

to many people died in WWII in horrific ways to make anything relating to Hitler funny. and it is especially tasteless when associated with the death of great men like Kennedy.

It was funny the first time, about Palin's resignation, but now they're showing up every week about a different topic.

"to many people died in WWII in horrific ways to make anything relating to Hitler funny."

Some people do have a sense of humor, so that's why they're being made.

Many DUers are familiar with from May 2008, with Hitler as Hillary Clinton being told of Obama's victories.

According to in The New York Times, the earliest parody was on a British soccer match. (It used a different scene from Downfall.)

"the last time this happened they put a man on the moon and cemented human rights"

make him count, make him proud

I hope this vid will help define where the healthcare discussion is at.

Apparently, spoofing this section of Downfall is no longer cool...but I watched the one about Palin 20 times. :)

I don't think I'll ever be able to watch this section of Downfall again without laughing so hard milk comes out of my nose--whether or not I happen to be drinking milk at the time.

What can I say?

Thanks DU!