he hated Nazism, but he was drafted and those who refused the draft were sent to concentration camps. Thus he had no choice but to go to the front against the soviets, where he sabatoged his platoons machine gun Then surrendered without resistance.
This is a True story according to his diary.
@7DeadlyFetishes this is the correct thing to do when drafted into an imperial war
my granddad just pretended not to be able to shoot and spent several years playing poker and smoking when the British government wanted him to occupy a colony
This story highlights to me why it’s important to plant what ideas we can in people’s heads now before things get too crazy. Militaries rely heavily on unit cohesion to operate effectively. If enough people have doubts about what they are doing and are willing to act on those doubts, it could very well lead to acts like this and/or further spread of rebellion through the ranks. You don’t even need a majority of troops becoming committed leftists or anything like that. You just need enough people refusing to go along to the point where their unit as a whole can no longer function.
Bingo. Current communist strategies on the question of the modern soldier don't revolve around attempting to organize soldier councils and committing outright mutiny. The conditions that lead to those decisions do not match the conditions of today. The drawn pool of the soldiery is too shallow and concentrated for any socialist seeds to sprout.
Therefore the next best goal, knowing that it is impossible to win a plurality of the soldiers to the workers side is to outright undermine the martial unity that they are indoctrinated with through their training. Tearing down the illusion of legitimacy that the government weaves into its martial projects through education and agitprop to ensure that all but the most blindly zealous soldier knows they're not fighting for any of the American ideals that they were told from birth that soldiers sacrifice themselves to defend then having organizations disseminate the necessary information for troops to know their legal protections and rights to either not participate in whatever unjust imperial project uncle Sam wants to spend their blood on or outright leave the military without having to risk the legal backlash that comes from desertion.
Therefore the next best goal, knowing that it is impossible to win a plurality of the soldiers to the workers side is to outright undermine the martial unity that they are indoctrinated with through their training. Tearing down the illusion of legitimacy that the government weaves into its martial projects through education and agitprop to ensure that all but the most blindly zealous soldier knows they’re not fighting for any of the American ideals that they were told from birth that soldiers sacrifice themselves to defend then having organizations disseminate the necessary information for troops to know their legal protections and rights to either not participate in whatever unjust imperial project uncle Sam wants to spend their blood on or outright leave the military without having to risk the legal backlash that comes from desertion.
:this:
My thoughts exactly. This is absolutely the way to go imo:
- Severely undermine the image of the US and what it represents to ordinary people
- Use this to actively harm military recruitment efforts, especially on social media
- Provide tools and info for active duty troops to push back against the command structure and to assist in getting themselves discharged if possible
Related, I had an idea for a vehicle for this. A tiktok/youtube called something like "USA Facts" that gives quick but thorough overviews of various US/CIA atrocities. You could also throw in additional material designed with soldiers or prospective soldiers as the target audience, talking about unlawful medical experiments on soldiers, high suicide rates in the military, chronic homelessness with veterans, politicians' plans to gut the VA, etc. with the general message of "recruiters are full of shit and your government doesn't give a fuck about you so joining is a terrible idea". If possible, it would be nice to be able to manipulate the algorithm so that the content shows up alongside "patriotic" and recruitment bullshit. Dunno if this is good idea or not but I'd love to hear feedback if anyone has any.
I think this is one of the best damn ideas I’ve seen on this site
I'd love to do something like this, but I have zero video editing skills and probably not a great grip on social media use/opsec. I could definitely do research on topics and come up with a good outline of the content for each, though.
I don't use tiktok, but I love imagining a viral "troll a military recruiter" tiktok challenge, where people film themselves talking shit to recruiters lol
According to Russia Beyond
The number of Wehrmacht soldiers who came over to the Soviet side during the war did not exceed several hundred
(Though that means individuals who switched to the correct side, towards the end of the war there were some situations in which some soldiers fought the NSDAP party soldiers - i.e. Gestapo and SS)
You don't happen to have his diary on hand and are willing to photograph or transcribe it?
Unfortunately not, it's in my mom's possession and to put it mildly we don't talk anymore. Wish I did have it though
This is very relevant for research btw. cause there is not much physical evidence about the inner thoughts of those that switched to the red army that isn't in Russian archives which are underfunded for the research gains they could deliver.
i think my great uncle was a nazi. it has not been expressly stated, but he was cut out of my family sometime during ww2. either that or my entire family is nazis and he was a cool dude.
If you can speak German:
https://www.deutschlandfunknova.de/beitrag/familiengeschichte-und-ns-zeit-name-und-geburtsdatum-reichen-aus
If not I could translate for you a bit. Basically if you got their full name and date (plus location) of birth there is a good chance you might find out what of the two options is more likely true.
holy shit. i never expected to get an answer to this question, and honestly, I'm not sure if I want an answer. but I'll do some digging later. thank you.
I'm still unsure. I know nothing about him, not his name or date of birth. Only one who would is my dad, and he's reserved about this stuff. If he'd give me his name I would just ask him if he was a nazi or not. I'll ask my sister if she knows anything.
there was one guy who spent the whole war trying to defect to the soviet union and ended up accidentally becoming Hitler's bodyguard. In a happy ending at the fall of Berlin his brother in the red army found him and he finally got to leave.
He was promoted to Hitler's bodyguard because he tried to surrender to a red army battalion but they were out of ammo and misunderstanding him surrendered, then an SS battalion found them and thought he had gone above and beyond and captured the entire battalion on purpose
he was Jewish as well so was deathly afraid of people noticing he was circumcised. Because he looked like the Nazi ideal man they wanted him to have kids with an aryan woman.
The aryan woman they pared him with was a committed Nazi but her parents weren't and realised he was Jewish so he had to constantly avoid being ahem intimate with her with various excuses so she wouldn't notice he was circumcised which was something her parents helped him with.
Dude, that's incredible. Hard to even imagine. Chance makes some really weird fuckin shit happen sometimes.
What's their name? The movie Europa Europa has this but I don't think that's biographical
My grandfather was too young to serve, but he sure drank the cool aid and it's coming out to the forefront with the senility.
Was curious and did some googling, this came up, an article about Germans fighting for the USSR
where he sabatoged his platoons machine gun Then surrendered without resistance.
:rat-salute:
Yeh I don't really get the arguments of Nazi soldiers just "doing what they were told" like sure for some they were probably more heavily monitored or feared being caught for sabotage/etc but for a lot of the average troop, put in the bare minimum and surrender without a fight. If they put you to run a concentration camp, minimize all forms of abuse that you're able to. Being forced to doesn't forgive going above and beyond, just the bare minimum needed to survive.
Never heard that before but if true then all of those fuckers are completely unforgivable unless they can show evidence they were threatened to volunteer.
No the Nazis were very accommodating to transfer requests out as they only wanted true believers running the camps
Which makes a lot of sense. You can't have people with empathy running the concentration camps, there would be far too much sabotage.
So yeah, obviously fuck every single concentration camp staff.
My understanding is that most war refusers weren't treated particularly harshly. Like the idea that you'd be shot on the spot if you refused to do warcrimes just is not true.
