This is a rant i’ve been meaning to write, and since im fucking bored ill right it now. I read this article about the Second Battle Group in the Times Online, let me just put it here for all you guys to read…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2327844.ece
It was shocking, but poorely reported, he lumps David Irving, the Holocaust denying retard in with re-enactors, this is what re-enactors do, especially the second battle group. However, he then goes on to try and capture the racist thoughts of a chap named Swallow. Now, i can understand why he did, to make the links between historical re-enactment and 21st century more tangible to the reader, I mean why would anyone want to dress up as the LAH and shoot people at the weekend, oh they must all be racists…That Doesnt Wash I’m Affraid. Glen Swallow is a small minority (in a large community of normal re-enactors), however his thoughts arent just the thoughts of re-enactors, remember the Conservative MP who made similar comments, or the people you hear down the Pub, the people you hear on the Bus….Rascism isnt confined to the mock battlefields of the countryside, its everywhere….This reporter tries to localise the problem and make it seem that all these people, who have a hobby, embody the problem with Multicultural Britain or society on a whole. Its Bad Journalism! And loaded with Bias!
Its easy targets and scapegoating, aside from that remember that the Allies werent as nice to prisoners either, most post concentration camp liberations were usually accompained by US Soldiers gunning down the SS guards, other stories of massacres date back to Sicily in 1943, before retribution was even needed. As a historian i would like to cronical these events later in my studies.
This was one that caught my eye;
“Ironically, Nuremberg fell on Hitler’s birthday (the 20th). About two hundred SS grenadiers belonging to the I Battalion, 38th SS Regiment, were eventually captured by the 42nd Infantry Division. The fate of these men had been shrouded in mystery for many years. Eyewitnesses to what happened to these men were not forthcoming. Eventually, shortly after the war, some citizens of that city directed Red Cross officials to what turned out to be a mass grave which yielded two hundred bodies, all in Waffen-SS uniforms. The grave was located just west of the city. Nothing was done to identify these men or how they came to be there until 1976, when the remains of one of the corpses was positively identified as that of SS-Hauptsturmführer Kukula, the commander of I Battalion, 38th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment. Further autopsies on the other bodies soon followed, showing that many of the men in that grave had been beated to death this blunt instruments (possibly rifle butts). Most had been shot at very close range, suggesting that a massacre had taken place.”
