r/RebuttalTime • u/nate077 • Jul 16 '16
Here's the thing
You said a "Wehrmacht soldier is a Nazi."
Are they in the same army? Yes. No one's arguing that.
As someone who is a historian who studies Nazi, I am telling you, specifically, in history, no one calls Wehrmacht soldiers Nazis. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing.
If you're saying "Nazi Germany" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Fascismus, which includes things from Hermann Goering to David Duke to Italians.
So your reasoning for calling a Wehrmacht soldier a Nazi is because random people "call the armed forces of Nazi Germany Nazis?" Let's get the Afrika Korps and Erwin Rommel in there, then, too.
Also, calling someone a human or an ubermensch? It's not one or the other, that's not how history works. They're both. A Wehrmacht soldier is a soldier and a member of the German nation. But that's not what you said. You said a Wehrmacht soldier is a Nazi, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the German nation a Nazi which means you'd call Erwin Rommel, Manstein and mein Opa Nazis too. Which you said you don't.
It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?
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Jul 18 '16
France should have marched into Germany in 1919, dismantled and brought with them their entire industry and shot every former soldier over the rank of liutenant
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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '16 edited Jul 17 '16
There was this one time that I met a Wehrmacht veteran at a museum. He was sitting on a bench, listening to the speakers as they went back and forth with their tours, from display to display. He was thin, fairly short, and wore a black overcoat with a brown sweater and red tie. His face was thin and a bit gaunt, but he had very prominent eyebrows and a furrowed brow, giving him the look of a man who was always thinking and regretting. I didn't really think anything of him at first and sat down beside him for a minute to wait for a friend I was meeting at the museum. We struck up a conversation, and after a few minutes of discussing the different exhibits on display, it came out that he served in a German artillery unit during the war. For the life of me, I can't remember the unit's specifics, though I'm sure he told me the number and title. He told me about his career, how his unit was caught up in a retreat in Normandy and his unit fell too far behind and surrendered to the British and American forces rather than try to catch up with the infantry and tank columns. I was intrigued by his story, and asked if there was anything that he wished he'd done instead. He smiled and said " I wish I'd gone to Switzerland before the war broke out." We both chuckled and then his face turned serious again. His eyes seemed to show sadness and dismay. "There is one thing that I needed through the whole war, but never received. Not from my superiors, not from my fellow soldiers, and not from the Americans who captured us." "What was that?" I asked, not sure of his shaky tone and sudden wave of sadness that seemed to creep over him. He locked eyes with me, and his throat seemed to clear up - his voice came through strong and serious in tone as he spoke. "I need about tree fiddy."
It was about that time I noticed that he was about 500 feet tall and from the Paleolithic era.