I've spent a couple of days watching the end of WWII in Europe...

[TreasonousBastard]

especially the death camps.

I've known about them for years, of course, but each time I see a bit more, I am outraged and can't understand how people can do this. Even Eisenhower, as the war was dying down, was shocked at what he saw at Birkenau. Allied troops were outraged as they put down their weapons of war and helped the Red Cross. Some stormed SS redoubts and killed even Germans surrendering. Others married survivors of the camps

During all of this, as I see the stomach-turning torture and destruction, I wonder if the pseudo-Nazis these days have any idea what they are talking about...

And then there's Putin.

[tikka]

1. Most likely the pseudo-Nazis do and probably don't care.

They would participate just like the real nazis.

[FrankChurchDem]

2. What series are you watching?

Thanks.

[3Hotdogs]

3. Soldiers marrying survivors - that was new information to me.

Was that immediately after the war, or sometime later?

[COL Mustard]

4. Had to be later

Enlisted men needed the CO's permission to marry (up until the 1960s if memory serves), and the CO wouldn't give permission in the middle of a war. Also the survivors wouldn't have been able to do very much physically. They were usually sent to DP camps to recover. Maybe they were reunited with occupation troops at the DP camps, but that would have been hard too.

[BlackSkimmer]

7. I never knew that either.

Most survivors were far from thinking of romance after being released from those horrible places,

[bucolic_frolic]

5. Liebensraum

Like overpopulated rats in a maze. The dominant seek to eliminate the weak in a resource grab, then pass the plunder up to their leaders.

History goes in cycles, and repeats.

[SpamWyzer]

6. From wiki

Lebensraum (German pronunciation: [ˈleːbənsˌʁaʊm] (listen), living space) is a German concept of settler colonialism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901,[2] Lebensraum became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in World War I (1914–1918), as the core element of the Septemberprogramm of territorial expansion.

[FakeNoose]

9. Lebensraum is how they justified invading neighboring countries, because German was spoken there

The German Nazis felt comfortable taking over Austria (which welcomed them for the most part) as well as Czechoslovakia and Poland. They practically walked right into the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and they met a little resistance in France, but not much. To the Nazi-Germans, Lebensraum meant "Let's take over every country that has German-speaking people, because it might as well be ours anyway."

It's also the reason why they felt comfortable with Italy as their ally, since most of northern Italy was also German-speaking at that time.

Needless to say, that's not how they think now, but it was true in the 1930's and 40's. It's probably very close to Putin's thinking nowadays.