As a German, I would like to post a few lines here after the closing. So please bear with me.
I am not a practising intellectual, but my history lessons are based on high school, graduation, university courses and many watched documentaries-albeit a tiny bit rusty.
So in fact I had to look up this pilot again-the name of course rang a bell.
There is no reason whatsoever to glorify someone like him. He was a notorious fashist.
Not because that man was uncapable, as a soldier that is. Or talented as pilot. That has nothing to do with the point. He was a decorated ace.
But because in my world it takes far more than military skills and badass attitude to be regarded as hero. And what is so heroic about killing hundreds of humans anyway, somehow I am sick of all this heroism attitude, be it Allied pilots or Axis ones. If heroism means praise their raw actions. If someone shits their pants and goes to war because he thinks it is his duty, that is a hero as for overcoming his fear or dealing with his fear. His actions may still be wrong though.
Rudel was a NAZI of the
incurable type.
I read accounts of the era, watched tons and tons of documentaries until I could not see them anymore because the entire mindset engraved into the German population's collective propaganda ruled perception
was dark.
And profitted to some harder degree from its ill-advised search for revenge or better: Redemption after WWI. Many people forget how brutally Germany was humiliated after WWI, not only hurt in pride but economically down. There was a big void after WWI. That is no excuse but a fact nevertheless.
And what could be held as a bad excuse for most of the population until the early years of the war (or better, until 1938), being dumb, following a jackass yet brilliant demagogue and that the information about the full scale murders against Jewish people was held back initially, this did not count for the higher ranked officers and-frankly, not for anyone once WWII had started and ran at scale, from a certain date onward.
People knew or suspected and the fanatic Nazis supported, actively or passively.
I am sure Cgagan could tell more about it, most people knew or assumed what was going on.
The
Luftwaffe high brass officers
knew. The Luftwaffe was also highly Nazi infected.
Unlike e.g. the Reichsmarine (Navy) with many former old school offciers, NCOs and sailors.
My granddad was such an NCO BTW, a submariner/ ironclad offcer. His words about Hitler were quoted as "the maniac". He got almost killed, but his superior pulled him out of a suicide mission. But way off topic here.
In the population, many of the formerly "stupid fuck sheeps" were simply to scared to speak up because they knew damn well, one wrong word reported to the wrong kind of SS person-and you were off to concentration camp. That was a fact.
So...if someone who was as close to Hitler as Rudel, not only keeps on supporting the NAZI's propaganda full scale
in the war, but does so well after WWII and
openly supports their ideas and old heroes, this man has no place in my hall of fame.
You can respect his pilot skills if you have to, but do so offline please and not on a global forum, where it is almost
sure that this credit will be misunderstood (if not intended) or understood as sympathy for what I think of as the darkest hours of the past 1000 years of what would later become the German nation.
We had far better men, great philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Lessing, Fichte, poets and natural scientists like Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and great componists like Ludwig van Beethoven.
Not all of the WWII era was shame as for what Germans did.
We had officers with balls who stood up, civilians who did so, and many who hated the guts out of NAZIs but where to afraid to rebell.
The soldiers who fought for their home, and took part on these brutal, never seen battles of unseen dimensions, did so either because they were forced to do so or simply wanted to defend their nation. Ill-advised, but valliant maybe.
But the cause was not just, and whatever you want to say about any of the Allied nations and their actions today, in WWII
they fought for a good reason.
So, yes, this thread
had to be closed as it glorified one of those flyers symbolic for the few war propaganda figures immune to realisation..of to which degree Germany seriously had lost noblesse.
As the nation of thinkers and poets had become a nation of brutes, that is, for the rest of the world.
Nothing glorious about that. So I am happy we live in 2014.
So, if you want to admire this pilot mentioned here, do so not here, like my team mates wrote.
Sends the definately wrong message to our Russian mates, Polish, French, Norwegian, Finnish, Netherland's forum fellows- to basically all of Europe's other nation's friends.
Thanks
Thorsten aka Tom2
Author
Topic: Hans-Ulrich Rudel - The STUKA Ace! (Read 5352 times)
