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Remembered Today:

Souveniers taken from the dead in time of war


Beau Geste

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The War Memorial in Poperinghe,Belgium comes to My Mind in so much as Included on the WW1 Roll of Honour,are the Names of Many Civilians from the Town who were either Murdered or Deported as Hostages,Slave Labour in Germany from whence They never returned,and again More Civilian Names on the WW2 Roll of Honour.I am sure their must be many such War Memorials containing similar Civilian Lists.

Thanks Russ,

I've been to Pop many times, staying twice in Talbot House (that was a real privilege) but I'm ashamed to say that I can't remember studying the war memorial there. I've put it in my diary as a MUST on my next visit to The Salient.

Yes, I don't think there's any doubt at all that since the middle of the 19th century, Germany has been the "Klingons"of the international system.

Best wishes,

Harry

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The War Memorial is Situated Opposite the Tourist Information Office,on the Corner directly adjacent to the Church.Also there is a Large Addenda Panel on the Wall next to the Memorial which contains even more Civilian names !!!.

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Yes, I don't think there's any doubt at all that since the middle of the 19th century, Germany has been the "Klingons"of the international system.

Harry

With respect to today's date=23 Jan 2008, please explain your Klingons theory, with special emphasis on time frames 1919 -1933 and from 1945 until today

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With respect to today's date=23 Jan 2008, please explain your Klingons theory, with special emphasis on time frames 1919 -1933 and from 1945 until today

Fair comment Egbert, sloppy wording on my part but I'm sure you know what I meant.

There have been sufficient references in previous postings to German atrocities in both world wars to warrant the label I used.

Incidentally, a tiny "money spider" accompanied your posting but I guess you know that.

Kind regards,

Harry

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excuse my insufficient English: what's a money spider please?

OK Egbert, you've had your fun. Look it up in an English colloquial dictionary.

Harry

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Thank you healdav. Obviously you have an advantage that few of us possess. Where are you based incidentally?

I hope you are reading this Bob !

Best wishes,

Harry

I'm in Luxembourg.

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excuse my insufficient English: what's a money spider please?

Quote:-

Of the 620 species of spider in Britain, about 250 of them are classified as Linyphiidae, the majority of them being known as "Money Spiders". For the most part they are about 2 mm in length but there are one or two which are half this size. Most have uniformly black bodies and brownish legs. Popular superstitions associate these spiders with wealth, hence people are not as prone to killing them. Adult money spiders are widespread throughout Britain in the late summer and early autumn. A common species of money spider spin hammock -like webs, which are often seen close to ground level on garden plants, long grass, gorse or other vegetation.

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Ayup, Harry - welcome back, mate.

A mate of mine once caught a dose of crabs, but daren't kill 'em in case they were money spiders. So he signed on the dole instead, and claimed for his nippers.

Cheers - salesie.

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QUOTE (Phil_B @ Jan 23 2008, 01:35 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Quote:-

Of the 620 species of spider in Britain, about 250 of them are classified as Linyphiidae, the majority of them being known as "Money Spiders". For the most part they are about 2 mm in length but there are one or two which are half this size. Most have uniformly black bodies and brownish legs. Popular superstitions associate these spiders with wealth, hence people are not as prone to killing them. Adult money spiders are widespread throughout Britain in the late summer and early autumn. A common species of money spider spin hammock -like webs, which are often seen close to ground level on garden plants, long grass, gorse or other vegetation.

Thanks Phil,

The breadth of knowledge on the Forum is spellbinding.

You say that they are often found on garden plants, long grass, gorse or other vegetation but you don't mention forum postings. I guess the one on Egberts msgs must be some other species then, perhaps a tarrantula !

Best wishes,

Harry

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Ayup, Harry - welcome back, mate.

A mate of mine once caught a dose of crabs, but daren't kill 'em in case they were money spiders. So he signed on the dole instead, and claimed for his nippers.

Cheers - salesie.

I love it !

Thanks for your welcome

Harry

The War Memorial is Situated Opposite the Tourist Information Office,on the Corner directly adjacent to the Church.Also there is a Large Addenda Panel on the Wall next to the Memorial which contains even more Civilian names !!!.

Cheers mate !

Harry

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I was invaded by German Crabs when i was stationed at Minden,very resilient Annoying Little Sods They were too !!!.

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I was invaded by German Crabs when i was stationed at Minden,very resilient Annoying Little Sods They were too !!!.

I know the feeling Russ,

I had the same experience but these crabs were Cameronians if my memory serves me right. I was playing soccer for an Army X1 against a team from BAOR at Minden. Three or four of their team were Cams, bantams in size but salt water alligators in temperament. I've only recently lost the scars. I heard later that someone had told them I was "Rupert" so they decided to leave their mark on me.

Incidentally, this thread runs the risk of being mistaken for a Skindles Club topic.

Can we now please get back to the subject we're supposed to be looking at.

Kind regards,

Harry

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Thanx Phil now I got it.

Ah, there you are Egbert! I thought we'd lost you.

That feint on the left flank designed to avert attention from the uncivilised behaviour of German troops at Dinant, Louvain and elsewhere in WW1 and the horrors of the concentration camp ethos of WW2 has obviously, only afforded you a temporary respite. Do you , like our American friend , insist that all of this was Allied propaganda?

Lets get back to basics shall we.

Harry

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In a recent posting on a Skindles thread that I introduced about a week ago ("Qualifications to become a mod") Siege Gunner was kind enough to say "compliments incidentally to our thread starter for his attentive shepherding of his own threads."

Harry, you seem to have exchanged your sheepdog for a pit bull terrier and I am therefore obliged to withdraw my earlier compliments.

Mick

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Let's not antagonize our German and German-American Pals. I don't agree with everything Bob says but I won't flame him.

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Yeah we had better not Skindilise this Thread otherwise We will get the Usual Suspects making a Guest Appearance. :D..Back to The Meandering Thread.I feel sure that not all of the German Army were WILLING participants,but,if you are in the Situation where You are Ordered to take part in a War Crime,what was the Alternatives open to You ?

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One wonders what the soldier`s reactions were to a/ Shooting an enemy soldier in action b/ Shooting one of his own company convicted of a capital crime and c/ Shooting a citizen of an occupied country when ordered to do so? To what extent might c/ come into the same category as the flyer dropping bombs on enemy cities - officially a military necessity whose end is claimed to justify the means? I`ve known several men who`ve dropped very large bombs on German cities and none expressed any moral qualms at the time even though they were good family men who loved their kids and pets.

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Harry, you seem to have exchanged your sheepdog for a pit bull terrier and I am therefore obliged to withdraw my earlier compliments.

Mick

I really am sorry you feel that way Mick. The last thing I want to do is to offend people but these things did happen and when people close their eyes to the fact, then it really is important to open up a discussion. I am NOT suggesting that Germany today is the same Germany that existed between the 1860s and 1918 or between the middle thirties and 1945 but these things did happen and to pretend otherwise is of no value to anyone. This is a Forum that is surely intended to look into and analyse things that occurred in The Great War. The things, I and others, have drawn attention to did happen during this period . That is historical fact and when someone, not Egbert I admit, will not accept that fact it is only right to confront that person with the evidence. Sometimes it will be necessary to go outside the parameters of the original discussion to make one's point. That's what some of us have done in this case. If we've offended you in the process I really do apologise but I would like to assure you that the motive behind it was valid.

One of the questions that I posed was whether or not Germans were in some way different, whether we could have followed a similar route as they did if we had been enmeshed in the same sort of fear based controls that they were during the Hitler regime, or whether there is something in the German psyche that sets them apart, makes them different in some way. This is an area that is surely worth considering

I could be wrong but I really do feel these are valid questions and deserve an answer. Avoiding issues because they seem unfair or unkind is tantamount to avoiding an issue of real importance. Wasn't it Edmund Burke who said that "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" That happened in the periods I mentioned . We simply add to the problem if, today, we pretend that these things never happened.

Kindest regards,

Harry

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Let's not antagonize our German and German-American Pals. I don't agree with everything Bob says but I won't flame him.

OK Pete, fair point. If you as well feel we are going down the wrong route I'm not prepared to argue.

We'll call it a day !

Harry

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It seems to me that no one is being flamed here - only fair questions asked of certain members regarding their views on important issues.

Is not denial of this sort the worst denial of all? Is it not robbing the dead of war in time of peace - robbing them of their true and rightful place in history?

Cheers - salesie.

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I have been following the rather extraordinary 30-odd posts of the last few days. I had a court date yesterday afternoon, and could not participate, and now I am hesitant to do so, but am tempted to do so at great length, which I think that I will come to regret. So I will slip into this a bit, and perhaps even ask what others feel that I should respond to. Perhaps I will make a brief statement on what I believe, and perhaps only list two or three topics that I am tempted to address. The bulk of this thread has been very interesting and useful, truly deserving the designation of a "Classic Thread". My comments only relate to the portion of the thread that verged into "the Belgian Question".

I have been repeatedly treated to assertions that I am a "denier" on the events, in particular the death of civilians during the invasion of Belgium, the so-called "Rape of Belgium". I deny that I deny anything. (Boy, is that a silly phrase!) It is apparent that a good number of Belgian civilians died. I have not studied the matter systematically, but a Pal posted a quote from a German official who supposedly admitted that 6000 died, while I have seen an extimate of 6500 in a very anti-German source. I have no independent information or study, but this sort of range seems to be consistant with my sketchy readings in this area. It seems that some people have an odd definition of "denier", or perhaps automatically switch into attack mode when they see that I have posted, without bothering to read what I have written.

Topics I am considering:

1. The absolute lack of scholarly method or intellectual honesty in so many of the posts. For example, the posting of lurid atrocity accounts, without attribution, but suggestions that they were from a post-war judicial process. When repeatedly asked for a source, it took days for it to be admitted that it was from a war-time propaganda piece, ground out by an academic who spent the whole war grinding out a series of such books, published in multiple countries and languages. A most cursury reading of the posted passages made it clear that at least some of the posts were fabricated and untrue, including the familiar and complex "incenderary tablet" hoax, which already has been exploded. The complete reliance on a few war-time products of the massive Belgian-UK-French propaganda effort. The total reliance on such "sources" is equivilent to writing a history of the US effort in WW II based soley on a collection of Captain America super-hero comic books, or a definative history of the German occupation of France in WW II based soley on the back issues of the Nazi publication Der Sturmer.

2. The question of the moral responsibility for civilian deaths in war, and the question of how, if at all, does the circumstances of those deaths affect moral responsibility. My excessively intelligent wife feels that the study of military history as it relates to moral responsibility is silly, that all war is criminal, all participation in war is criminal. The question that does the responsibility of every of the 6000-odd civilian deaths in Belgium lie on the Germans, since they illegially invaded Belgium, or should each death be evaluated on the circumstances, on the actions, if any, of the dead civilians; if they fired on uniformed troops, etc. In other words, the question of if any possible franc-tiratuer (sp?) activity makes a difference.

3. The posts of the last two days have ranged all over the temporal map from the mid 1800s to, seemingly, 2008, or at least to 1945. Given this scope established by these posts, and in relation to question #2 above, I would want to raise the second obsession in my life today, the illegal invasion of Iraq. I follow the Brit media about 3 hours a day; I watch 25 minutes of BBC news TV a day, I listen to about 2 hours of BBC news radio a day, and I read the Guardian every day, and excerpts from the Observer. (I read about 2 German news articles a month.) I recently heard several reports on the BBC about a recent British study of civilian deaths in Iraq, which used survey techniques that I am familiar with, methods whose output that I frequently used in my former professional work. Using an unusually large sample size that gve a statistical error range of 2.4%, the study found that, up to mid-2007, 1,200,000 civilians have died in Iraq. This is consistent with an earlier study by leading US acadenics. Both studies had internal sub-totals that allow one to roughly allocate these deaths to the probable "agents of demise", and very roughly it seems that the deaths can be attributed to the "insurgents" and the Coalition Forces in about 50-50 proportions.

This raises the following questions: Are the Bush and Blair officials responsible for about 600,000 deaths? Are they responsible for all 1,200,000 deaths? Are they excused from responsiblity for the deaths of people in bed-sheets firing AK-47s at Coalition troops? Additionally, should the blame spread further to the American and the British people?

The extent to which many of the posts simply reflect deep and instinctive anti-German bias? (Let me assert that I am an intellectual libertarian, and feel that one should have the right to dislike people, or groups of people, even though a lot of that stuff is personally repugnant to me.) As I said, I read the Guardian, and about a year ago it had a series of articles which asserted that there is a German phobia in the UK which is unique in its strength in western Europe, and has even had diplomatic repercussions. To be fair, if I were a Brit (I am quite a bit English, but not British), and conservative, patriotic, interested in the military; in other words, fitting the profile of many of the Pals, I would have many reasons to be grumpy, and some of those could easily be focused on Germany, and perhaps on Germans. IMHO, a lot of things simply work better in Germany than in the UK. The UK has a slightly greater average per-capita income, but also, I believe, much greater income inequality, so most Germans probably simply "live better" than most Brits. I have very good "street smarts" and I sense a lot of physical fear on the streets of London. (Personally, I have become a nasty old **** in the US, and usually quite legally carry a tiny aluminum handgun that is loaded with very powerful Police Combat loads, firing an enormous soft lead slug whose use in the military would be a war crime. Alarmingly, my resultant street cockiness bleeds over to times that I am not armed, including visiting your fair land, which may land me in big trouble some day.) Little Germany is the world's leading exporter, even exceeding the US and China in absolute terms, and has eaten the UK's lunch in this area. Additionally, they, and the US and now China, own almost the entire UK auto industry; for example, after BMW kept Rolls Royce on life support for about 20 years, they and VW have taken it over and rejuvinated RR and Bentley; I know Brits who are really p****d about that. There are lots of things to keep Brits grumpy. The realization that, for the third time in 100 years, Germany has pulled past the UK in many ways, raises doubts about who keeps winning the various wars. Were I a Brit, as well as English, I probably would have a bad attitude towards Germany and possibly Germans in general.

But how much of this belongs overtly in the Forum?

Should any of this be discussed? Perhaps in the Skittles area?

With Warmest Regards,

Bob Lembke

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Nice one, Bob - one paragraph grudgingly admitting some atrocities in Belgium (maybe), but no real detail. Then five paragraphs of excuses to deflect attention away from the nub of the matter.

If nothing else, Bob, your consistency in espousing your "faith in German kultur" deserves admiration (albeit grudgingly and incredulously, and with more than a little humour).

Cheers - salesie.

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I prefer it when GWF Pals can agree to disagree with each other without being disagreeable about it.

In another thread some weeks back someone made the point that many of the Germans who joined GWF shortly after these forums were established stopped coming here because they were repeatedly confronted by people on the subject of German war guilt.

Egbert deserves a medal for his substantial contributions to GWF--see his Grandfather's Trunk and Wahn PoW Camp threads--and Bob Lembke is probably the world's expert on German flamethrower operations during the Great War.

Let's all play nice, no kicking below the belt.

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