Pow

Yes Frank, it is ironic that this conversation is going on at this special time of the year. The plug needs to be pulled and our attention focused on peace.
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah
Max

Not genealogy related Frank? Then perhaps we best designate the 30 Years War as off limits also. There were a lot of innocent heads that were lost in that one too. To read some of the details of that conflict - lots of religion involved in that baby - might make your hair stand on end to boot. Or the Franco-Prussian War my kin fought in. My silly G-Grandfather actually <<left>> America to go back and serve in the German Army. Pointless of course. Should WWI be taboo also? The Wars of Succession? The Napoleonic campaigns? Oops, there goes most of the historical backdrops of our Germanic ancestors in this genealogical quest we have all chosen to undertake. How nice it would be if we could just erase all these warlike episodes and chapters away I suppose. Only, what do you then have? Half the picture? At best?

Allow me to state that we Americans are much more sanctimonious -- I'm sure you know that! We started our great campaign in the East and didn't stop until we planted our stars and stripes on Western shores, pushing everybody - and I mean everybody - out of the way in the process. By then we had -- you know -- a BIG country, mostly Indian and buffalo free into the bargain! That same mighty monument and beacon of freedom the world marvels at -- was now thousands of miles wide! Only excuse the lack of gusto on the part of the indigenous population that happened to have their tents planted here first. When we decided a little more 'living space' would be nice, we lowered the guns to the Mexicans to our south and added California, Texas and the rest of the southwestern states at their behest. (behest always sounds nicer than expense, wouldn't you agree?). Now they're trying to reclaim them back - silly bastards - in their own form of invasion!

News Flash! It wasn't just deer and rabbits we cleared out. Now thanks to my warlike Anglo ancestors, I have a nice little abode in Southern California to call my place in the sun. For generations my family has done quite well here too. They say it was once filled with the teepees of Paula and Pauma tribes. Yet I've encountered few around me who shed many tears over their loss and our gain. The same gain, by the way, everyone else chipping in their two cents about their ancestors from their cozy dens around the country is indebted to in the Land of the Free.

At this very moment countrymen of mine are being shot up - albeit in small bits and pieces - over in a foreign land that many might argue we have no business in being. Kind of like Nazis I suppose. But we term better, you know, we call ours FREEDOM FIGHTERS. Like the great Crusades of the past you could argue, but what did they get us?. Or maybe I should cite the US Cavalry as it pushed ever westward in the mother of all land grabs for acquisitioned territory. Why leave part of the west for the Injuns when we could have it all? See, we always do it for much more righteous reasons (even our history books say so!).

If the torture and slaughter of unarmed, surrendered soldiers we were speaking of wasn't a holocaust in its own right, what pray tell was it? Do you have a more fitting word? 1.5 million [MILLION] Russian prisoners were repatriated from the camps of their captors in the Third Reich, in spite of all that "Nazi beastliness". It doesn't bother you, or give pause for thought, that none of the such worked the other way around? Or that these Soviet Russian prisoners, once freed from German captivity, were placed in trucks and shipped on orders of Stalin to Siberian gulags themselves. All of them! Were the Marxist Soviets possibly as hell bent as Hitler painted them to be?

The "Nazi war against Russia" you term it. Do you believe truly that Stalin and the Communist Red Army would have been content with only the Karelia in Finland, after swallowing up all of Armenia, Estonia, Latvia and Eastern Poland in their recent spheres of conquest? No chance at all that they might try pushing further west at some point with the rapid militarization they had been undertaking before Hitler was even in power, perhaps as far as Germany or Austria, as the Mongols did once before? You do remember Frank that the Soviet Union - "Russia" as you now call it - was once on a relentless quest for world hegemony? It was constituted as part of their very creed in the revolution of the proletariat. The same Communist ilk we as Americans conveniently jumped in bed with!

However if I recall right, no one at any point was discussing the in and outs of the campaigns of the Third Reich, or even the politics of it. We were simply discussing the fate of missing and unaccounted soldiers - by the hundreds of thousands - from 50 years ago, many of whom - I presume this won't come as news to you - are no doubt part of the family trees of members of this list. My own kin shot down a few to boot, so why should I have a say or care? They're all very proud of shooting at their ancient kin. So that makes this thread merely pointless, eh? Or bitter? Interesting how one sees things one way, and others another. I for one will never join you in your opinion though.

One last point if I might. I hear the word holocaust bandied about so often here in America - it's in the mass media seemingly everywhere, in the news, on TV, in the movies, in the schools - that it has lost much of its edge on me. Maybe it's overkill, maybe it's the one-sidedness of it, but 60 years into the running, it's a mantra that is regurgitated stronger than ever. It actually has gotten to the point that it grates on my nerves. Maybe I've just become evil. But rarely if ever is any other side of the story mentioned -- or allowed to be mentioned! And that's the part that really gets me. It's a form of censorship, albeit in a smug, egalitarian way. In Germany, it's flat out a crime to speak as such. I for one find that very queer. Kind of like all that old Nazi book burning stuff, only in reverse form. But we have plenty of it too, though many folks pretend it's not so - or simply refuse to see it [like what is and ISN'T allowed to be published].

Very well then. Let's kill the thread. Pointless like you say. Bitter. In the name of PEACE let's keep history selective and judiciously pruned. Only excuse me for not joining you in lighting a candle here at Christmas and turning my eyes upward. I'll instead light one for those same forgotten soldiers of the Reich we were lamenting and who were serving their country as ordered but with eyes wide open and fixed straight forward (a bit fitting in that so many were lost in snowy tombs around Stalingrad over the holidays). And if I get drunk enough on eggnog and rum, maybe I'll light an additional one for the Pauma tribe in gratitude for the place I now call home.

FINI. Jb

PS. Max personally I couldn't give a damn what time of year it is. Nor could all those frozen and forgotten soldiers that many obviously prefer to sweep from their sights. This thread was not predetermined, it just happen to have come up when a few listers mentioned family members who were victims of it. Yes, too bad it wasn't another month! Sorry if it sounds like I was on some silly rant or crusade-- which by now of course it has most surely become! BUT ENOUGH THEN.