Well, it’s not Nazi Germany…but…the USA is definitely headed there. Then again, when the Nazis stopped you in the street, they would at least ask for your papers first. Apparently ICE and BP think that’s too woke or something.
If you read the rest of the tweet by Arnaud, you’ll learn that Nazis later abandoned the practice of rescuing survivors of sinking enemy ships, and it was because Americans are worse war criminals than Nazis:
The history of this is actually interesting: the Nazis rescued survivors all the way until the so-called Laconia Incident in 1942 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconia_incident).
The Laconia was a British troopship sunk by U-156, a German U-boat, off the West African coast. Right after the sinking, the Nazis immediately began rescuing over 400 survivors, broadcasting - as was common practice - in plain English their position on open radio channels to all Allied powers nearby, so they wouldn’t get attacked during the rescue.
That’s when a US B-24 “Liberator” bomber attacked the submarine anyway, even though all the rescued survivors were on its foredeck. The B-24 killed dozens of Laconia’s survivors with bombs and strafing attacks, forcing U-156 to cast into the sea the remaining survivors that she had rescued and crash dive to avoid being destroyed.
The American B-24 pilots mistakenly reported they had sunk U-156, and were awarded medals for bravery…
This event completely changed Nazi policy on this matter: Karl Dönitz, commander of the U-boat fleet, issued the “Laconiarefehl” - the Laconia Order - forbidding U-boats from rescuing survivors, because the risk to the submarine was now too high.
In other words, the Americans during WW2 essentially forced the Nazis to abandon survivors - from the allied side (!) - at sea.
Dönitz at least had an excuse.
In WW2 in the western front. How was the treatment of, say, Baltic fleet soviet sailors, hmmmmmmmm?
Worse than Nazi Germany?
… though even for radical Nazis, American approaches like the “one-drop” rule seemed to go too far.
Reminds me of the old (apocryphal) story of Stalin, FDR, and Churchill debating what to do with the Nazi officers’ corps after their defeat.
"The German General Staff, [Stalin] said, must be liquidated. The whole force of Hitler’s mighty armies depended upon about 50,000 officers and technicians. If these were rounded up and shot at the end of the war, German military strength would be extirpated.” When Churchill angrily declared he would be no party to such mass retribution, the President quipped that he would act as mediator, and suggested the compromise of shooting only 49,000. In heat, Churchill left the room. Stalin himself fetched him back, assuring him it was all a jest.
The tendency to treat enemy soldiers as honorable adversaries while foreign civilians are resources to be exploited or speed bumps to be flattened is extremely fascist.
What separates Hitler and Hegseth isn’t their army’s treatment of survivors of a military operation, but their view of their targets as military or civilian. Hegseth knows he’s targeting civilians and treats them just like a German military commander would treat other civilians.
Stalin would gleefully have shot all 50,000, and some bystanders if there was ammo left over.
I mean, I wish that were actually true.
One of the bleakest turns of the post-war Eastern Bloc was the speed at which they re-incorporated ex-Nazi officers into the Stasi. I’d have to dig it up, but there’s a whole line about a German describing his career as roughly “First I worked for the monarchy to suppress fascism, then I worked for the fascists to suppress communism, then I worked for the communists to suppress capitalism, and now that the communists lost I’m old enough to retire.”
