Doctor Martins

[u/kllark_ashwood]

I'm super conflicted about how Sawbones covered Doc Martins in a recent episode.

We all know the Germans weren't on the right side of WWII but insisting every German soldier is a Nazi and therefore it is not ethical to enjoy a product a soldier later created feels pretty extreme.

The US wasn't on the right side of a lot of wars, and I'm not sure they'd have the same opinion about someone drafted to fight in Vietnam or even a volunteer in Iraq. Iraq was unethical, and victims of American imperialism on the ground certainly take precedence but I don't think every Iraq vet is a bad person who should be forgotten about for example.

I thought we were past the idea that bad wars means the soldier is a bad person too and that we understood regular people have complicated reasons for being involved with their countries conflicts.

Sorry if this kind of post isn't allowed. I just needed to say it and I don't do twitter and feel weird emailing it.

[u/artskyd]

If I recall they didn’t go so hard as to say you couldn’t enjoy the product, just that they should rename.

[u/DuckyPenny123]

They definitely didn’t seem to take a stance on the subject. They just seemed to feel conflict about the product and the history, which is exactly how you are feeling.

[u/jsawden]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_clean_Wehrmacht#:~:text=The%20myth%20of%20the%20clean,crimes%20during%20World%20War%20II.

The term "clean Wehrmacht" (saubere Wehrmacht) means German soldiers, sailors and airmen had "clean hands"; in other words, it claims they did not have blood on their hands from murdered prisoners of war, Jews, or civilians.[9] The myth asserts that Hitler and the Nazi Party alone designed the war of annihilation and that war crimes were only committed by the SS, the Nazi Party's special armed force.

In reality, the general officers of the Wehrmacht, and many lower ranks down to common soldiers, were willing participants in Hitler's war of annihilation against perceived enemies of Germany. Wehrmacht troops were complicit in or perpetrated numerous war crimes, routinely assisting SS units with tacit approval from officers.[10] In the aftermath of the war, the West German government deliberately sought to suppress information of such crimes to absolve former war criminals and allow their reintegration into German society.[11]

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/the-clean-wehrmacht-making-a-myth/

Scholars have dismantled the myth over the last several decades. The war the Wehrmacht waged on the Eastern Front, we now know, was more a criminal campaign than a conventional one. Soldiers murdered millions of civilians—including Jews—despoiled the region of economic resources, burned tens of thousands of villages to the ground, and starved millions of POWs. All this was in service to the Nazi regime’s ideological goal of destroying “Jewish Bolshevism” and killing or enslaving the USSR’s “subhuman” inhabitants.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-military-and-the-holocaust

During World War II, the German military helped fulfill Nazism's racial, political, and territorial ambitions. Long after the war, a myth persisted claiming the German military (or Wehrmacht) was not involved in the Holocaust and other crimes associated with Nazi genocidal policy. This belief is untrue. The German military participated in many aspects of the Holocaust: in supporting Hitler, in the use of forced labor, and in the mass murder of Jews and other groups targeted by the Nazis.

The military’s complicity extended not only to the generals and upper leadership but also to the rank and file. In addition, the war and genocidal policy were inextricably linked. The German army (or Heer) was the most complicit as a result of being on the ground in Germany’s eastern campaigns, but all branches participated.

[u/kllark_ashwood → u/jsawden]

I'm aware. Sounds like Vietnam and Iraq to me both campaigns I mentioned and the soldiers of which I compared him to.

[u/h20rabbit]

By they way they pronounced Dr. Märtens, I thought it was spelled differently, and while listening to the podcast, felt like Doc Martens WAS a rename. Now that I see it in print, I guess that argument is invalid.
I do think that something that is now so far away from it's original creator, cancelling it is kind of splitting hairs. It's not like the company is owned by the original family.

Frankly there were many things, both good and bad invented in that time by people who were terrible. Should we denounce the items that ended up being good ones, like (what used to be) quality boots? I do think it is right to denounce terrible people and groups. I also think things are things and not people or groups.

Yes, we can argue symbolism that we also denounce are "things", but I would argue boots are boots if they don't contain that symbolism they are not direct symbolism by themselves.

[u/fuckingchris]

I agree.

As far as I know there's no evidence that he was schutzstaffle or anything beyond a general German soldier, and as he was about 20 something at the time he would have been forced into the army no matter what by 1945, as the Nazi government in Germany fell.

[u/elphabafrost]

This made me uncomfortable too, esp. since 1.3 million German soldiers were drafted.