stroopwafel said:
When they carpet bombed Dresden how many German townsfolk didn't detest Hitler? Same for the Wehrmacht; most were just conscripted schmucks who would be shot if they deserted. I agree the nazi leadership and ideology was pure evil and it's easy to argue Germany deserved everything it got but a military strategy intended to inflict as many casualties as possible isn't anything less of an atrocity. Was Dresden really necessary? Was Hiroshima really necessary? Also just because Hitler is arguably the worst doesn't make Stalin or Mao any less guilty of genocide and mass displacement.
Here's the ticket: You don't need to be a Nazi to help or acquiesce to their plans, you just need to remain passive and not resist when they get to power.
No one in Germany could pretend as if they didn't know that the Nazis wanted to murder all Jewish people and start a war of conquest to eliminate the USSR, kill its population and take all their land. They knew this because Hitler wrote a book about it, then forced everyone to own it and talked about these plans constantly. I am not saying that every person in Germany in 1932 to 1945 was pure evil, but they all enabled the Nazi regime to start a world war, the Holocaust and Generalplan Ost. By not resisting the Nazi regime they became culpable, in the same way that you become culpable if your buddy presses a gun into your hand and tells you to help him rob a bank and you go along with it. So every person who took up arms for the Nazis, no matter how unwilling, naive or indifferent they were aided the Nazi cause. We can lament the people who did resist and still died due to Allied or Soviet warfare. But the average German who kept going to work to make war materials, who sent their sons and fathers to serve in the Wehrmacht and who never tried to stop the Nazis are just as culpable as those that volunteered for the SS and fought willingly.
As for the culpability of the Western Allies: They were forced into a 'Total War', a war which the aggressor intended to end only once everyone bowed to their rule and allowed them to murder hundreds of millions of people and enslave tens of millions more in peace. No one at the time could know how much pressure and destruction it would take for Germany to buckle under the pressure and lose the war, but they knew the consequences of losing to Germany. So they employed tactics that are technically legal under the laws of war but are dubious in terms of morality (strategic bombings), but they did so because they had to strike at Germany in some fashion and the idea of destroying the means of production to hinder the war effort is sound strategically. Would you have preferred that the Western Allies were so meek and timid that they'd have pulled their punches and, potentially, allowed Germany to win the war? The moral difference in what the Axis did and the Allies did is still that the Axis are the aggressors and did all they could to hurt their enemies in order to establish dominance. The Allies did what they had to do to stop Germany as quickly as possible, to prevent genocides and suffering on a level that boggles the mind. If that meant that culpable German civilians were killed or maimed, that was the price to be paid to stop the depopulation of all of Eastern Europe through industrial genocide.
Whether Stalin or Mao are guilty of other crimes against humanity is also beside the point, because in the particular circumstances of WW2 they were the victims of foreign aggression. That means that whatever they did to fight of German and Japanese attempts to commit genocide on an unprecedented scale on their people is pretty much inherently justified, because failure would mean hundreds of millions dead. In the particular discussion about world war 2, Mao (though Chiang Kai-Shek is probably more worthy of praise for defending China) and Stalin and their armies are big damn heroes for fighting off the Nazis and Japanese. That doesn't mean that Stalin and Mao aren't monsters because of what they did before and after the war, but they have some solid moral justification for being ruthless assholes during WW2.
