A question about World War 2 and the current era...

[steve2470]

I have done a lot of reading about the military history of World War 2, and NEVER do I see any references to the Germans torturing American soldiers. Is this correct ? Yes, I know there was the Malmedy massacre in 1944, but aside from that, I have never read any accounts of Americans or any other soldiers being tortured.

Is this correct ? If this is correct, this makes the current regime look.... beyond despicable.

[Turbineguy]

1. Mauthausen

[steve2470]

2. contrasting

Was the torture there of civilians and troops ? I'm obviously trying to contrast the Nazis and the Bush regime.

[Turbineguy]

4. There were mostly Russian POW's

but some American as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauthausen-Gusen_concentration_camp

[MnFats]

3. they were treated poorly but torture, I believe was rate EXCEPT

if you got sent to a work camp and couldn't work, you were liable to get killed.
same with u.s. soldiers who happened to be Jewish. they were invariably killed -- either right away or after they'd been worked to walking skeletons.

but i am told that "Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. tells a fairly accurate story.....Vonnegut himself was a prisoner and made to work in a factory that produced prenatal vitamins...he writes f taking a big wooden stirring spoon and licking the syrupy stuff off....he said it delighted every cell in his body. there were beatings but infrquently...

the Japanese on the other hand routinely beat the living hell out of prisoners, many were beaten to death, some were beheaded......
they were starved to death, too.

read of the Bataan death march and the rape of Nankin by Japanese troops...
truly horrifying....


my father was a captain the army and whenever I hear this torture talk I can feel the earth rumble from him spinning in his grave.
the man treated every single personl including every single Japanese, with respect and dignity. He was proud of his service but he would be SO ashamed to see this country become one that countenances torture...

[steve2470]

5. comparison

I'm confident someone has made the contrast I was looking for. If we routinely torture suspects and the Nazis did not *routinely* do so, that would make us *worse*, by my logic, than the Nazis.

[Turbineguy]

6. A relative of mine

was killed in a Japanese POW camp. My Great-Uncle and his Wife spent the war in Japanese camps (including one in Formosa) and my Father was in a Nazi POW camp in Poland. He was liberated by the Russians.

My Father:

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

7. We were treated well, as were the Brits. (The Russians POWs were often just lined up and shot.)

[applegrove]

8. The SS regularly murdered soldiers. And then there was the Holocaust.

I'm not sure that regular german soldiers could handle torture and murder and persecution - so that is why Hitler created elite squads.

[Breeze54]

9. WWII torture of American POW's was covered up.

"Remembering Those We Left Behind"

http://www.aiipowmia.com/sea/douglassremember.html

"Prisoners were tortured by the thousands. Even worse was the use of prisoners in medical
experiments -- for example, the development of assassination techniques and work with chemical
and biological agents -- that had begun at least by 1928. In the late 1940s U.S. intelligence
knew that Russia deliberately built chemical and biological warfare laboratories near prisons
and GULAG facilities to be near a supply of human guinea pigs. There was also intelligence on
the shipment of American POWs to facilities where these experiments were conducted during and
following World War II."

[Bitwit1234]

10. I don't know about torture but this is the truth

My friend was in the Pacific..Palalou. He said there was a lot of fighting and the Japanese were entrenched in caves, where they could pop off the Marines. He said they had a detail of the most seasoned Marines and they went cave to cave with those torch things. The Japanese would holler they were going to surrender and it didn't make any difference they burned them all out of the caves. But he said it didn't bother them because they would hear the Marines they captured yelling and screaming sometimes all night and would find them the next day all cut to pieces.