Thomas Wictor

I got a message in response to my post “Bigotry can cost you a lot,” about how a German postcard dealer refused to sell to me because I’m an American. As a result, he screwed himself out of hundreds of Euro.

Regarding the Germans, most of the ones that I know who are over 50 or 60 years old do not like the Americans because of the bad experiences of their parents at the end of WW2. It is still traumatic for some of them, thinking of the victims and of the ruins in their own country. I recently read in a book about air attacks on the city of Freiburg. During the whole of WW1, they suffered around 30 deaths because of French airplane bombing, whereas in one single day of 1944 they had over 2000 casualties from British bombers.

Well, they shouldn’t have declared war on us, then. The Japanese attacked us on December 7, 1941, and Hitler declared war on the US on December 11, 1941. We didn’t declare war on Germany; the Germans thought—after their victories over Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Yugoslavia, and their initial success in the invasion of the Soviet Union—that the US would be easily defeated.

After Hitler trounced France in six weeks, Germans were ecstatic. Scenes like this were the norm. And this was after the Nazis had passed over 400 laws to segregate Jews from the rest of German society and strip them of their rights. On the one hand, Germans boasted of how their Jews were the most assimilated in Europe. But when the Nazis adopted the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that prevented Germans from marrying or having sex with Jews, was there a peep out of any of these Germans who we later bombed?

Also, the Germans who hate Americans because of our bombing campaign should be grateful that the Americans didn’t have Einsatzgruppen, the SS death squads who murdered about two million people. Can you imagine if in 1945 Americans arbitrarily decided that people with blond hair and blue eyes had to be killed when we fought our way into Germany? We could’ve done that. But we didn’t. We were merciful.

The parents of the Germans who now hate Americans were not merciful. They loved their Hitler until he started losing. Then they got all sad. When the Nazis bombed British civilians, the Germans didn’t care. As Tim pointed out to me, the Germans used the Spanish Civil War as a laboratory for perfecting the art of terror bombing. It was only when the British and Americans started bombing the Germans back that suddenly strategic bombing became really horrible!

Here’s the thing: We fought the Germans on their terms, and we beat them using their methods. Except for the whole extermination-camp, Einsatzgruppen-thing, of course.

It was not a gentleman’s war. We responded in kind, up to a certain point. And now modern-day Germans hate us because we defended ourselves against their exterminationist war of conquest? Tough shit.

Let’s say we didn’t bomb Germany but instead sat back and let the Soviets subdue Germany with a ground invasion. That means the war would’ve gone on until 1950, and every German woman would’ve been raped five thousand times. Would the anti-American Germans have preferred that? You bitch about American bombing; read up on the Battle of Berlin and then extrapolate that nationwide. Oh, and you sure hotfooted it to the American lines when the Russians were coming, didn’t you?

So we saved you from vengeful Soviets and prevented all of Germany from becoming a Communist hellhole, and now you hate us. Makes perfect sense.

Nothing is more repulsive than self-pity from defeated aggressors. Nobody is stupider than anti-American Germans who didn’t fight in the war or who weren’t even alive when the war was being fought. I don’t believe in “national guilt.” If you didn’t take part in Hitler’s war of conquest and extermination, you have nothing to be ashamed of.

On the other hand, if you hate me because my nation bombed your parents, you need to understand that the only reason we did it was to make you fuckers quit murdering millions and trying to impose a fascist dictatorship on the world. Hitler thought the whole thing was pretty funny. So did his lackeys, and so did your parents.

You stopped laughing when my country was forced to draft millions of young men, put them in aircraft, and send them over to Europe to drop tons of high explosives and incendiaries on your parents’ heads until they gave up. Then we had to occupy you for ten goddamn years—like you were Somalia or some other ungovernable Third World pile of manure—and teach you how to be civilized.

“No, no, no! Armies aren’t for murdering! Bad Germany! Bad!”

We actually had to abolish the state of Prussia. You’re the only nation on the planet that couldn’t be trusted with one of your own states. Unbelievable.

I know it’s fashionable now for Germans to view the US as a vicious, bloodthirsty war-machine. Yes, we’re so vicious and bloodthirsty that when the Iraqis told us to leave, we did, and we’ve been jumping to Hamid Karzai’s tune for twelve years. Ask the Greeks how they fared under German occupation. Or the Dutch. Or the French. Or the Poles. Or the Czechs.

One of my heroes is General William Tecumseh Sherman.

He didn’t mince words.

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.

Germany deserved everything it got in World War II. I don’t blame today’s Germans for what their parents and grandfathers did.

But if you hate me for what my country did to stop the evil that was Nazism, then you’re hopeless. The idea that the Germans were the real victims of World War II is an obscenity. It’s defecating on the graves of the millions who the Nazis murdered. The Germans worked very hard over a period of years to achieve the outcome of their total defeat. Another Sherman quote:

A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences.

So if there’s anyone to blame, you Germans who hate Americans, it’s your own parents and grandparents. They thought the consequences of their actions would be glory, power, domination, and slaves to satisfy their every whim. Instead, the consequences were bombs dropped on them until they surrendered.

They messed with the wrong people.