You know you're in trouble when you start a sentence with "as bad as the Nazis were." Another sure sign you're headed in the wrong direction is when you must stipulate from the outset that you don't know what you're talking about, as in "I'm no military historian, but..." Today Christopher Orr, the New Republic's online movie critic, managed both tricks in just one paragraph:
I am no military historian, but it's my understanding that many armed conflicts that we might consider pre-civilized concluded with just this kind of slaughter (and pillage, enslavement, etc.), and that the widespread recognition of civilized rules of war has saved literally countless lives. As bad as the Nazis were, I think it's unequivocally a good thing that we were not forced to depopulate Germany. The reason we weren't was that Germany surrendered, and the reason Germany surrendered was its well-placed faith that we wouldn't depopulate (or torture, enslave, etc.) the nation anyway.
Did the Germans surrender because of a "well-placed faith that we wouldn't depopulate (or torture, enslave, etc.) the nation anyway"? That certainly doesn't jibe with my understanding of the end of the Second World War. Berlin fell on April 30, 1945, after Soviet troops captured the Reichstag and Hitler committed suicide. It was another week before Jodl and Doenitz made the German surrender official. Orr is making some larger, convoluted point that decency and adherence to the rules of war incentivize surrender and saves lives in the process, but the Germans had no reason to think that the Soviet Union would be merciful in victory -- and obviously it wasn't. Orr must be thinking of the Morgenthau Plan, but the fact that the U.S. was considering a de-industrialized Germany as one possible post-war outcome meant that the Germans could not have had any such "well-placed faith" in Allied benevolence. The Germans surrendered because the war was over -- and the Russians tortured and enslaved them by the thousands anyway.
Surely there is a movie that could help Orr better familiarize himself with this history. Downfall, perhaps?
