Ah, there is the point in history I'm looking for. '68 / Rudi Dutschke and the APO.
Many, many thanks!
Any Germans old enough to remember this who can throw in their recollections is greatly appreciated.
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Ah, there is the point in history I'm looking for. '68 / Rudi Dutschke and the APO.
Many, many thanks!
Any Germans old enough to remember this who can throw in their recollections is greatly appreciated.
I am interested in the process of change and I refuse to look at items as if they are in silos segregated from all other events - it is a study of how rival political organizations interact for their mutual benefit. For example, how does the Mafia use the Police for its own ends? How does an organization that lives in the shadows move from point A to point B. This applies to a wide variety of intelligence organizations, police departments, and criminal organizations such as La Cosa Nostra and the South American Drug Cartels - because invariably these organizations will be found to be directly interacting with one another.
CIA and the Drug Cartels sounds far fetched to you, but the point where they intersect is easy to demonstrate and is the impetus that lead me down this path into South America where I found this trove of Nazis in the first place. My intellectual interest in the Nazi party is well known, and while I am far more familiar with its ascendancy I am equally interested in the post-war endgame.
What is very evident is the 'open secret' of Nazi collaboration in the West whose end result is the fall of the Soviet Union. @Victor1234 did me a great service showing me this in films, which is usually a great way to take a populations temperature on a certain topic. In America, on TV the 'Carol Burnett Show' was wildly popular during the Seventies and after, and the very first piece of sketch comedy they ever did was this cafe in Argentina run by Nazis where Hitler (Tim Conway) was the busboy using but one example of many.
But the deep, dark part of this really goes untold. No one wants to talk about the money. And, yes @JodelDiplom , give me time, i'll write your treatise and ask you to attack with the full fury of your reserves to help me hone it further. But I'm not unwrapping it half-baked.
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We agree on this point absolutely. But it is incredibly helpful being able to see through the eyes of the individual to whom you are speaking in order to align the conversation using the terminology they understand. And that is my goal, to see through another's eyes in order to improve my own vision.
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Well, i dont think anyone active from this time is on this forum, dont think many 65+ are here.
A biography i really liked is Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof, The Biography
Finally a book looking at an important women from that time, shows well how people getting aware at this time and then pushed/sliding into terrorism
There rae a lot of forty-year old plus members here who have memories going back deep into time I find lurking about this forum. I am frequently amazed when one asks a question the unexpected direction the answer might arrive - you, for example.
I am vaguely aware of the Baader/Meinhof group and RAF, but in your opinion how to they correlate to this point? The reactionary youth rejecting the establishment they could clearly identify with as . . . what was your term, 'clerical fascists'? . . . filling mid-level government positions? A pattern easy to replicate in America and Britain with the youth cultures of that point in time of the last Sixties that mirror the rejection of the Vietnam War following Kennedy's assassination.
And women as a political influence is easily revealed if you know what you are looking for. Hitler's supporters were largely female, including @Graf Zeppelin 's grandmother back before they revealed their fangs and the Party was a lot of smiles, flag waving and road building. Kennedy beats Nixon because women find him charming (and the Mafia found Joe Kennedy's money irresistible). The Anti-War protests of the Sixties are largely women.
And where the women go, men follow for reasons as old as time itself.
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You asked, where are all the nazis gone.
The youth in 68 found out, they never left. Who was the police beating them up? Who are the judges, who convicted them? Then you see a parlament, who changes the constitution for the notstandsgesetze (still active in constitution btw), laws who are compared by some to hitlers ermächtigungsgesetz. Fearing that step by step germany gets rearmed, seeing no represention for themself some decided to use violence. All in the name that germany dont turn nazi again.
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Sounds like the 68 movement everywhere... How much was actually a reaction to Nazis rather than the old school burgeoise it was elsewhere.
It is laughable to say that largely women were the anti-war protesters in the US during Vietnam. The vast majority were rich college kids who had deferments from the draft due to being students. Nazi collaberation with the West to bring the downfall of the Soviet Union is laughable as well. The Soviet Union went broke trying to keep up with the US in the arms department.
It was not long after the fall of the Soviet Union where one could see the results. Soviet era subs sinking at their piers both in Polyarny, Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk. We already know that Soviet era interceptors had engines that could not handle their max speeds without having to be rebuilt due to inferior metals used.
Stalin didn't trust anyone. The Cold War started even before the end of the war in Europe. This was seen with him and his dealing with Roosevelt in relation to Poland. Stalin wanted a big buffer between him and Germany, or at least what would become West Germany. Even after the war, famous generals were sent to show trials when their fame grew more than Stalin's (or at least one did).
At least in school, complete history isn't taught and much of it is glossed over, and claims about people are generally out there. One needs to read books from different sources to at least get a better understanding. For those of us in the US, much has been learned since the Soviet Union fell and all those archives were to become available to historians and give us books such as David Glantz's Stalingrad triology or David Stahel's books on the war in the east.
It was not long after the fall of the Soviet Union where one could see the results. Soviet era subs sinking at their piers both in Polyarny, Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk. We already know that Soviet era interceptors had engines that could not handle their max speeds without having to be rebuilt due to inferior metals used.
Stalin didn't trust anyone. The Cold War started even before the end of the war in Europe. This was seen with him and his dealing with Roosevelt in relation to Poland. Stalin wanted a big buffer between him and Germany, or at least what would become West Germany. Even after the war, famous generals were sent to show trials when their fame grew more than Stalin's (or at least one did).
At least in school, complete history isn't taught and much of it is glossed over, and claims about people are generally out there. One needs to read books from different sources to at least get a better understanding. For those of us in the US, much has been learned since the Soviet Union fell and all those archives were to become available to historians and give us books such as David Glantz's Stalingrad triology or David Stahel's books on the war in the east.
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Yes, that is my question as well. In America you have anti-authoritarians such as Jim Morrison freely throwing around Fascist labels at warmongers such as his own father- an admiral running air ops for the US navy in Vietnam. In Germany, your oppressor might have actually been a Nazi to hear this side of it.
That is not true, it was also an American political choice to begin the Cold War. Yes, Stalin was paranoid, but he did not launch the Cold War out of personal paranoia, and would have been very interested in maintaining the ties with the United States. Of course that the Soviet Union wanted to secure their borders, just as the US wanted to contain the countries going Communist, even if this meant meddling in foreign countries and directly influencing elections. Securing your borders is not the same thing as wanting to confront the US, especially when you have a country to rebuild. Ideally Stalin wanted a neutral Germany, so speaking about West Germany is anachronistic.
Also you seem to muddle up things here. You confuse foreign policy with domestic policy. The great Stalinist trials are not related to the approach towards the US, and they happen in the Eastern bloc after Sovietisation and Stalinisation, not during Yalta. As for the reign of terror internal to the Soviet Union prior to that, it is not an indication of how the USSR wanted to pursue ties with the US. Getting rid of generals is thus not a foreign policy statement. I don't know if you intended to claim it was, but since you jump from one to the other with no transition it is what comes out of your paragraph.
One can see how Stalin, and what was to become East Germany, viewed the West with the issues that led up to the closing of the border from Allied controlled Germany to them and which resulted in the Berlin Airlift as closing the border kept supply vehicles from West Berlin.
Roosevelt knew that Stalin was not going to allow eastern European countries a free reign in their own destiny as evidenced by his and Churchill's dealing with Stalin over Poland. He was right though he didn't get to see it.
As far as the difference between Soviet internal and external policy is that it shows how Stalin viewed everything. He was deeply distrustful of those around him and those he had put into roles of leadership as well as those in other countries. The purges prior to the war are a great example of it. He distrusted the western Allies due to them not opening a western front on the European continent before they did. He was also fearful that the western Allies would not let the Red Army take Berlin. The only difference is that after the war, he could not target western leaders.
Sure, but that is at a later stage, after many tensions and confrontations. Prior to that point things could have gone differently. So you can't use this in the argument about Stalin's approach towards Poland or dealing with Roosevelt.
Roosevelt could not predict what was going to happen to Germany later on though.
We don't disagree here, Stalin was paranoid. That being said he was also capable of conducting foreign policy and and negotiate for his country. He was aware of the fact that the Soviet Union could not match the US and needed to secure its borders,
What confrontations led to the closing of the border? Trucks with supplies for West Berlin would not be such typically, unless that they didn't want those in the Soviet zone to see the plethora of supplies headed east while they had little or nothing. The Berlin Airlift would still show such as the amount of aircraft flying over would increase.
Sure he could. Dealing with Stalin wasn't easy. Seeing that Stalin wanted Poland and was not going to give it up was evidence of what would later transpire in Germany later.
I'm not sure I read your post correctly. Are you saying a different kind of relationship between allies and soviets would have been possible after the end of the war, had only Stalin himself been more trusting? The way your describe it ("the way he viewed anything") it sounds like you are describing him as a person with whom not just trust based relationships were impossible, but also different, more transactional, relationships could not be had?
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Neither the UK and US nor the Soviet Union trusted each other in Berlin, ir Germany for that matter. After the bizone in 1947, the monetary reform agreement for the three French, British and American zones and the project to constitute a government there meant Germany got cut in two. The Soviet occupation zone, including their part of Berlin, was excluded from this, with the excuse of the economy being socialised. This was denounced by the USSR as a violation of the Potsdam Agreement, since it questioned the unity of Germany.
No, you can't project later events upon earlier dealings. Neither Roosevelt nor Stalin wanted or defended Germany being split in two in 1945. As stated above, Potsdam even formally excluded this. What Roosevelt could already see was that Stalin was paranoid, however. Keeping the borders, including Poland, secure, was a part of the Soviet foreign policy objectives.
Poland was right on the soviet border though, and the soviets knew they had commited way too many atrocities in Poland in 1939-1941 to hope for anything other than utmost hostility from a non communist polish government. It was not a facet of Stalin's personal paranoia that he would not under any circumstances give up his firm control over Poland, it was rational soviet foreign policy at that point.
The motivations behind his policy on Germany were likely different. He didn't allow the east German communists to proclaim their own government until after the western powers had allowed the west German leaders to proclaim their own government. Stalin's real motivations may remain unknown but many things, including his 1952 note to the western powers ("Stalin note") and traditional Russian political views of Germany, indicate that he was actually willing to trade "his" chunk of Germany in exchange for a neutral status of a unified Germany (in which the communist party would stand for elections).
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Is there anything which contradicts this reading of Stalin's vision? To my knowledge this interpretation is pretty uncontroversial.
His otherwise treacherous and paranoid ways.
There are no publicly available archival records that give any kind of insight into the decision making within Stalin's leadership in those years so even if there's no substantial evidence that contradicts this reading, there's also very little substantial evidence that supports it.
Even now, when the dust has long since settled on the issue, German historians are still uncertain of whether Stalin was serious with his 1952 proposal or not. At the time it was mostly denounced, of course, but today I think historians would be willing to sell their grandmother for any kind of insight into soviet archives on this matter. The first historian who manages to put together a substantiated claim that Stalin was serious, would have his hypothetical book on the matter become a sensation. 40 years of west German political dogma, turned to ash and dust? A 70 year old divisive question, settled for real by historical research? He'd become as famous as Fischer or Nolte.
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Maybe, but doubtful. His dealings with Roosevelt, Churchill and Truman were typically for his benefit, without a doubt. His distrust, or rather paranoia, lead to those dealings. One needs to remember that even after the German invasion in 1940. Due to the fact that he believed Germany would not attack, he didn't want to do anything for several days even after they did. That showed Stalin that he could not trust other world leaders and that carried over even late in the war and after the western Allies did open a second front.
Roosevelt had to be aware of the Soviets push into the Balkans and installation of friendly communist governments as that was happening after Yalta. Truman would know of this as well and quite possibly led to more tensions at Potsdam. And while Potsdam did push to keep Germany broken up, it was seen that letting western part of Germany cooperate economically was best to help the country move forward. Stalin didn't like it. Keep in mind that he didn't trust the western powers and that letting the 3 sections do that did lead to a divided Germany.
The weastern powers had seen signs that the Soviets were operating to their own tune and how they wanted things to be as early as Tehran. Things went downhill from there at each conference.