I was looking back this week at a collection of lithographs on flimsy paper published in December 1918 - almost a century ago - by a Belgian artist who had been confined along with French and British soldiers in a German POW camp. Turning the fragile leaves, one is immediately struck by the extent to which these German WWI POW camps were a rehearsal for the concentration camps of the NSDAP era. The brutality, the wire, the watch towers, the starvation, the random shooting of prisoners and, yes, the punishment beatings are all there - a prototype for Dachau, Belsen and Theresienstadt.
Here is a lithograph titled 'der Schlag'. It is, no doubt, illustrative of the sort of punishment beating that this 'modern' German Chief Official would like to administer to Britain. With Selmayr, Europe has regressed one hundred years.
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| Martin Selmayr attends to the UK? |
Postscript - additional image
18 comments:
I didn't know that. A brief Wiki glance tells me of the 1929 Geneva Convention on POWs, but were there no prior agreed standards of behaviour towards them?
Any more POW images from that artist?
Perhaps a little unfair towards the Kaiser's Germany, Raed, although perhaps not so unfair towards Selmayr. As shocking as that litho is to our modern sensibilities, such corporal punishment (the clue is perhaps in the etymology?) was common practice throughout Europe for minor infractions at that time. Most German Police stations had a specially made 'bench' or 'horse' for just such occasions and I suspect British ones too. Civilian prisoners in British jails were commonly flogged and Winston Churchill famously referred to the 'lash'.
I'd lay money that British POW camps at the time used Punishment beatings to keep order.
Sackerson - I only scanned 2. The other one now posted
Jack - I'd love to publish the whole thing. It's not a single action of brutality that shocks but the cold efficiency and thorough unfeelingness of the application of brutality - as if to cattle, or pigs - that is captured.
Is that 2nd litho what you meant by your 'random shootings' comment because what it depicts clearly wasn't a random shooting. Again, are you suggesting that German POWs charging such a, quite laughable, fence of a British camp would have, merely, been given a severe ticking off by the fence guard?
hat shocks but the cold efficiency and thorough unfeelingness of the application of brutality
What i see in the pictures so far is a praise worthy restraint and a following of whatever 'guidelines' were imposed upon such things at the time as might be expected from well trained soldiers and I'm sure British guards behaved no differently. I suspect the cap of the soldier 'supervising' the beating marks him as an NCO? The tawse looks of a size and material commonly found at that time in schools- ie the beating was painful and humiliating but unlikely to do any permanent or serious damage....which is why the guy getting beaten isn't tied nor strapped down but merely restrained. It could be a scene from any public school of the era.
I also seem to recall vaguely reading that 'charging the wire' in some POW camp or the other was -even in WW2- the common way of 'ending things'?
This has been Germany’s project all along with the connivance of UK governments and civil servants as demonstrated by the fact that we pay £20bn/gross ($15bn/year loss of control, £10bn/year net) into the EU and in return we have a trading deficit of £80bn/year and massive immigration.
The Germans cheat wherever possible :
- Hidden subsidies to their companies by paying them for “research” etc.
- Sanctions breaking with Nordstream 2 and selling generators to Crimea.
- Breaking Euro rules on trade and budget surpluses.
- Not paying their way on NATO.
- Allowing the diesel emissions testing fraud to take place with impunity.
- Etc.
The UK needs to understand that whatever damage the EU/Germans can do to the UK when it is outside of the EU it is nothing compared to the damage it can continue to do to the UK when a member of the EU and subject to all their rules, laws and regulations.
Our lot are very good at excluding people they don't like from our country; eg. Lauren Southern; I hope that they will also introduce such exclusion orders against the likes of Mr Selmayer because he/ their presence in our country is not conducive to the public good.
To stay on point--Selmare isn't beating anybody--apart from the ongoing and well-earned hiding and humiliation being dished out to the Fish Faced Cow herself.
We go under WTO rules--no more inaccurate NO DEAL remainiac crap--and it will be the EU and their buddies who are going to get the good hiding.
Corp Tax down to 5%
VAT abolished
Bonfire of Regs.
Don't bother saying that our scum won't like or allow that. The benefit of OUT is that we then only have to fight them. Just our scum. Not 28 sets of pricks ( minus EE and now Italy God Bless'em) with the Brussels filth on top like shite icing on a rancid cake.
Buck up Radders.
We must leave. We have to leave. There can be now wavering now. Brussels (proxy for Germany) has played its hand and shown us what they really think and what they really want to happen. We simply cannot be subjected to this any more.
Media, media, media.
Let's put this squarely where it belongs. The Government may be lying to us but the MEDIA have (supposedly) a duty to inform and expose such goings-on.
We need a sustained campaign to expose the MEDIA as the root cause of the misinformation and the misdirection. Their bias is well known, they betrayals equally so - so why are the STILL getting away with it?
Not enough bloggers are making this their specific issue and getting people to talk about it - are 'you' scared of being closed down because of it? Are 'you' part of the problem?
Fake news is itself being used by the fake media to falsely claim their legitimacy - making it out to be a conspiracy theory when the truth is quite the opposite.
Let's have more exposure of the MSM as the CRIMINALS they are.
Mr Ketch.
German atrocities in WW1, especially in Belgium are well documented. And have been for around a hundred years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_Belgium
Treatment of prisoner sis similarly well documented. Actually more so as the number of missing in WW1 is a huge figure on the battlefield. But camp records were kept by all sides. And the German meticulousness for bureaucracy ensured their records of dead by disease. Starvation. Illness. etc were well recorded. And are available on most army records sites.
Though nothing like on the scale that the second war brought, mistreatment and murder was common enough to be noted, drawn and recorded.
POW camps have usually had officers unsuitable for front line duties.
So second rate commandants were common in all armies.
The worst excesses I can think of, excluding the Ottomans where records are much less prevalent and cruelty and callousness a way of life, and education very poor, was in the united states civil war.
At Andersonville prison 13,000 union soldiers died from malnutrition and disease.
There are few similar records for allied prison camps. None I can recall at all from WW2.
@ Bill Quango, not quite sure of your point. Why bring , as you say documented, horrific war crime(s) against civilians to the discussion (I should imagine the civilian Belgian artist was imprisoned for being an 'enemy combatant'/5th columnist?)? Up until the modern era ALL sides in ALL wars considered civilians as 'fair game'-one only has to think of Kitchener's orders regarding Boer civilians.
My point was that Raed's lithos show nothing particularly out the 'ordinary' for any side's pre-convention- POW camps unless you know and can show that punishment beatings were not administered nor 'escapees' liable to be fired upon in British camps?
IN marked contrast to British POW camps in WW2 for Germans, until very recently you could find a old man named 'Hans' or 'Eric' or something similar in every Norfolk village whose father had been a POW. Infact it was not uncommon at the tail end of the war to hear villagers contrasting GIs unfavourably with 'their' German POWs.
It sounds as if the system would have produced the man, regardless of whether he previously existed, in the same way that the entrails of the USSR produced Putin.
Jack - with the greatest respect, I think you're missing the point. Whether or not allied POW camps in WWI were similar is not the issue - I'm suggesting that the difference is that whereas the UK advanced, moved on, Germany revived the model in the 1930s for political dissidents, habitual criminals, gays, catholic priests, 'anti social' elements and so on. They were fighting another war, against democratic freedom, and their enemies were all who opposed them. Thus the KZ camps, in which energy output was scientifically calculeted to exceed calorific intake by a few hundred KCals per day.
For the UK, POW camps were places to keep captured troops securely. For Germany, they were a useful blueprint for methods of future social control.
Leopards don't change their spots so easily, perhaps.
Churchill was speaking (with black humour) of the past 'traditions' of the Royal Navy - 'rum, sodomy, and the lash' - not referring to any present practice in the British police, armed forces or WWI POW camps. He made the deliberately dismissive remark in 1913 when as Navy Secretary he was having an argument with admirals.
There is no evidence whatsoever that any British police station had a 'punishment bench' for extra-judicial birchings or beatings. Knowing something of the early 20c pre-Nazi German legal codes I would be equally disbelieving if the same claim were made of German police stations. German military treatment of Belgians was certainly notoriously harsh - but allied claims of mistreatment are often difficult to discern, given the large amounts of black propaganda we rather effectively produced to beef up morale on the Home Front.
Ah, but then Jack K's 'view' is never knowingly differentiated or even basically accurate. And mixing up WWI, where POWs were members of the regular army, with the Boer War - where concentration camps were used to isolate non-uniformed guerillas who were seen to be using concealed arms and masquerading as civilians - is a piece of misleading anti-history.
I've heard Selmayr talking: he is pathetically poorly-spoken: what they call in German 'Ein kleiner Null' - a Zero. He and Barnier would have no power at all if it were not handed over on a plate it by our weak and compliant negotiators. Appeasement is a weak instinct of wealthy political elites, and it never works, as we saw in the 1930s.
Get rid of Robbins and May* and Hammond, junk Raab, and tell Brussels to eff off. Then go firmly to WTO in March 2019, and continue inexorably on that course: eventually the 27 will demand an FTA. Maybe it will take years, or until Barnier and Selmayr, Juncker and Merkel have been replaced, or maybe the EU and/or the euro will collapse first.
Their problem, not ours. Are we mice, or are we men?
Selmayr's Nazi grandfather would be so proud of him.
It seems to me that Jack Ketch has a rather unhealthy fascination with Germany and Germans. I prefer my mother's view that Germany let down European civilisation. And a period of silence from Germany and its fellow travelers will be most welcome - preferably lasting at least a century.
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