World War II in Europe Day by Day
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Don, Interesting map and I enjoyed watching up through mid-Aug ’41. But I wanted to get this off to you and I’ll get back to watching it later. Maybe some day our historical map-makers will take the bold step of at least giving Switzerland and Sweden a new color change. Whatever they’re using to depict the Fascists, they need to give some of the same for those two nations for their shady underhanded double dealings that enabled Berlin to last as long as it had because before the Nazis even invaded Poland, they were broke in terms of the cash the Wehrmacht needed to buy its tanks, guns, ships, subs n’ planes. Hence the looting of art and Herman Goering’s use of his private contacts with Sweden’s arms manufacturers.
Steven,
Where do you find this information?
Have you read copies of Swiss bank records (loan numbers, dates, amounts, interest rates, etc.) of loans to Nazi Germany? If the Swiss made loans to Stalin, would you have hammered them?
But, hey! Detract all you want re: the Swedes. Them S.O.B.’s did nothing (not even send bandages) to help Finland when you-people’s hero Stalin viciously invaded.
Fascinating to watch. It makes me feel stupid, how many things about the war I don’t know. I hadn’t realized how slow the fight up Italy was. And I don’t know anything about Operation Dragoon in the south of France in 1944. Two things really do stand out. First, the line from The Princess Bride. Second, why there was an assassination attempt against Hitler by the military in July 1944.
The Swiss government did collaborate with the Nazis. Trains full of Jews passed through Swiss territory on their way to their deaths. Swiss banks harbored gold stolen by the Nazis. The Swiss banks and government were recalcitrant in returning bank deposits to Holocaust survivors and their next of kin. All of this was shown on a Military History documentary.
Just read something about Operation Dragoon. Interesting. I think the French Resistance had a very good reputation immediately after the war, but decades of stories about French collaboration has tarnished the country’s image. Now there’s a sense that people who claim to have been part of the Resistance must be liars. It’s interesting that our view of history seems to oscillate around what really happened.
People lie. If all the people who claim to have been in the French Resistance really had been then the Germans would’ve had a much harder time. If all the white people who claim to have been at Selma really had been then the crowd would’ve been mostly white. If all the people who claimed to have been at Woodstock really did then the crowd would’ve been bigger than the whole county.
Pinky: “why there was an assassination attempt against Hitler by the military in July 1944.”
See Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a Catholic, who tried to assassinate Hitler to protect the millions of people Hitler would have murdered.