They didn't hate replacements, they didn't want to become friends with them because if they did, they would have to watch them get hurt and or die since they were inexperienced and wanting to prove themselves to the veterans that they looked up to
The camp survivors were played by cancer patients undergoing treatment and the actors were kept away from the set until filming so in the scenes where they enter the camp their reactions were genuine. Brilliantly filmed and acted, I both love and hate watching it at the same time. Just like Schindler's List.
I always wondered about the older woman from the house Nix goes into when they get to town. She is wearing a red coat when she is moving bodies. Is that a homage to Schindler's List?
When Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, saw a concentration camp for the first time at Ohrdruf, he was so outraged he had the local townspeople marched at gunpoint through the camp. The local Burgermeister and his wife killed themselves after being shown the camp. He also ordered every reporter and photographer he could find to come and document the conditions at Ohrdruf. He said the he knew that people would try to deny what happened. Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton toured the camp with Eisenhower. Patton, who had the nickname 'Old Blood and Guts", went behind a building, threw up and refused to rejoin the tour.
Patton also wrote in a private letter that the Jews where no better than animals Patton actually agreed with some of the Nazi policies his thoughts where so bad that Eisenhower actually replaced him out of disgust go look it up Patton May have been somewhat a good tactician but morally he was no better than the Nazis.
This is the number one reason to not hide the current horrors committed by the Russians in Ukraine....Russians and their supporters still try to claim that crimes are not being committed even though the video evidence is overwhelming.
Supreme HQ knew about the camps. Everyone knew about them. Hell, the home front in the USA knew about them. My grandparents told me they knew about them. They received letters from their relatives living abroad. And what is sad about it was a good % of the US population knew about but didnt care as they hated Jews just as much as the NAZIs. Especially in the southern states. People forget that a large segment of the US population were huge bigots and racist back then. Even worse than in todays world. Ford of the Ford motor company was a known antisemitic and racist and so was Charles Lindburg. Both were given awards from NAZI Germany before the war.
This episode is the hardest to watch, but, the most important to watch. "If anyone ever tells you the Holocaust didn't happen, or that it wasn't as bad as they say, no, it was worse than they say. What we saw, what these Germans did, it was worse than you can possibly imagine." - Edward "Babe" Heffron
@@douglascampbell9809 It is said in Eastern culture. Not nearly enough in the West. I think sometimes it has to do with American guilt over nuking Japan, and our post-war alliance.
@@timlois No, it's simply that people connect most with those things, good or bad, that are culturally close to them. The U.S. and Germany are both part of Western civilization. To us Japan and China are foreign, "other" places and cultures. And vice versa for Japan snd China regarding Germany and the U.S.
@@barreloffun10 I think we're on the same page. I'm just saying that those in China that lived trough and studied things like The Rape of Nanking and countless other genocidal events in their country during this time certainly remember it. Where as the West might not as much, compared to Nazi genocide in Europe. It's an "other" place to them just like it is to us.
the majority of soldiers had no idea this was going on until they started finding the camps. Have heard there were some rumors but until troops started liberating them there was no direct confirmation this was going on. Several of the actors in the camp scenes were cancer patients they asked to help show a realistic view of just how starved and near death these people were.
@@MetalDetroit That was in the Soviet sector. The only bombing the other allies did was the bombing of Dresden.People say it was a war crime but it was a logistics hub, a throughway for German troops and Bomber Harris wanted to see what one carpet bombing could do to an untouched city. But Churchill knew about the plan for the Jews as early as early 1942. And they knew about einsatzgrüppen.
I love the part at 14:10; Nix barges into her home, destroys probably one of the few pictures she has of her husband left, and then, to add insult to injury, the dog starts barking at Nix, reminding him how his wife got even the dog and how he's an invader. In this case, he's the one that is averting his eyes and looks at the ground in shame. In the later scene at 21:21 , when the civilians are burying the bodies of the prisoners and we see the same woman, she looks up Nixon until their gazes meet and then she's the one that averts her eyes and looks at the ground in shame. Amazing cinematography. The concentration camps remained relatively unknown to the Allies as most of them were inside Germany or on the Eastern side of Europe. There were very few camps on the Western Front for the Americans, Canadians, British, etc, to liberate, so most soldiers were unaware of their existence.
The writers and directors managed to get the audience to ask themselves the all-important question: "Who here committed the worse crime?" without ever stating it explicitly. In a world of ideological extremes, even Good becomes relative.
I don't know anyone who can watch this episode without having their guts ripped out. The lack of basic humanity by some towards others - which even now still dogs humanity - beggars belief, which is why these truths are so important to show, and keep showing. Thanks Trixy, a tough watch.
Most of the soldiers had heard about the camps but seeing them was entirely different.an uncle of mine helped liberate mittlebau Dora camp.40 years later he would still weep when he talked about it.
If you're interested in the German experience of WWII, there is a very good miniseries called Generation War. The show follows a group of friends who are together at the beginning, but they all end up in different places over the course of the war, some are civilians, some military. Lots of people have referred to it as "the German Band of Brothers." The show is all in German, so unless you speak German, you'll need subtitles.
People are "forgetting", "denying", and/or "revising" why we fought WW2, The Holocaust, etc. All of those reasons add to as why a series like this and The Pacific, films like Schindler's List, countless documentaries, and places like Holocaust Museum LA, are needed to keep the truth alive. Thank you for your thoughtful reactions. One more episode to go (and if you are so inclined, then please consider doing a reaction video for We Stand Alone Together, as it is the companion documentary for this award-winning miniseries).
My dad's father went to Europe in the US Army to fight the Germans, and my mother's uncle was a Greek general who fought against them when they invaded. I grew up with constant stories from that generation in my family as to what they experienced. I often worry that the gravity of what happened will be lost on newer generations. It's gratifying to see a young person coming to terms with what took place. It was a black stain on our history as a species and can never be forgotten.
Nixon was an intelligence officer. It was his job to scout around and also to collect and interpret and give information to the commanders of the regiment. He was not technically an active combat officer.
@@TheReDeeMeR1988 You must be a child. Nixon was a respected soldier by his peers and was crucial for their unit. He was on the front lines the whole time and experienced the same things as the other men. Grow up.
When I was growing up in a small town in Scotland in the 1970's, my grandmother's friend's son wandered the streets all day and talked to nobody. He was likely in his late 40s and his hair was snow white. The story was that he had been a normal young guy at the end of the war until his company liberated a concentration camp of some sorts. His name was Ian Graham and his life since 1945 was badly affected by what he saw.
There is absolutely no way to prepare anyone for this episode (especially without spoiling it) Many other reactors have finished this series and there are more to come. For us viewers... we know what's coming and it doesn't get any easier at any time. It never should
As someone who has served, I can confirm that it is too frequently glossed over how difficult it is for wives left behind. Even in peace time when soldiers deploy those prolonged separations are very hard. In wartime they live with the looming specter of death for someone they love day after day, and it frequently breaks them. It is mental torture for all practical purposes. Military wives who can tough it out are special. I think "We Were Soldiers" probably does the best job of capturing this.
We Were Soldiers is fantastic. My most decorated friend was a door gunner for the 1st Air Cav for 3 or 4 tours in Vietnam. He was missing something like 5 medals from his collection at that point. Some of the medals he had multiples. The Army gives out combat air time medals for time in the air under fire. He had something like 10 clusters on that medal. He was an E9 (Sergeant Major) in the reserves in the late 80's so he had something like 25+ years in at that point. Literally the old Sgt that when you see him in dress uniform you see his chest and arm hashes and you think holy sh*t this guy is more decorated and qualified than the unit commander.
I'm just 5 seconds into the video, but i already feel that lump in my throat for what is yet to come. This episode is about the darkest part of my country's history ... let us all be vigilant so it won't happen again, no matter where!
It's important to note that the picture of the German officer that Nixon drops and cracks the glass is one of a dead man. The black band on the corner of the frame is to symbolize that he had died. Whether he was an officer of the camp or died abroad is not known.
I always get a chuckle when someone is surprised that a spouse/partner would leave their lover while they are in war. It happens a lot more than people realize. Pretty common....
People leave their lover when they go to work on an oil rig too, or spend some time in a jail, or pretty much any reason to leave for an extended period of time.
As a US vet deployed to Iraq, some of the nastiest domestic crap I've seen happened in the military. As a piece of free advice, don't ever get married in the military. You need a special type of person to be a good military spouse and most are not it. There is a reason the local night club in 29 Palms (Club Two Nine) was colocialy renamed to Club One Seven, Two Seven or Three Seven depending on which battalion of 7th Marines was away on float. All the wives would congregate there. I never felt safe going there knowing any woman who might approach me was likely to be the spouse of a deployed marine.
In Capitan Lewis Nixon’s case, his first divorce was caused due to his infidelity with a woman he met during his time stationed in England. I believe episode 5 his character mentioned meeting someone in London.
5:45 Nixon was an intelligence officer before he was demoted. This means that he spent most of the time in rear areas. The closest the producers could safely go with portraying the actual starvation conditions in the camp was by using cancer patients. And not all of said patients lived long enough to see BoB when it was first broadcast.
This episode is timely with Yom Ha'Shoah/ Holocaust Remembrance Day in 10 days. The Mozart/Beethoven mixup at the beginning is significant since Mozart was Austrian, like Hitler. So it's the German people retaking their identity. And the first time many Americans saw Tom Hardy was his bare ass. The French soldiers were executing traitors, Frenchmen who volunteered to fight in the Wehrmacht. The officer executing them is another Tom Hanks cameo. The inmates were played by cancer patients undergoing intensive chemotherapy. Many Holocaust survivors died shortly after being liberated from gastric ruptures due to overeating.
My grandmother told me my uncle was in the first unit to arrived at the Dachau concentration camp. Whenever anyone in the family asked him about it, he would immediately turn and walk away. Until the day he died, he never talked about it. He did talk about losing 2 of his toes to frostbite during the Ardennes counteroffensive, but never a word about the concentration camps.
I had the honor to meet Dick Winters some years ago. I was very familiar with his story and Band of Brothers. Anyway, we were at a military cafe and we had a drink together. My dad was a veteran of WW2 and Korea, and I explained to Dick Winters all he(dad) wanted was to go back to being a civilian again. Dick said my dad was a hero himself and that I had every reason to be proud of him. And Dick said all he wanted after all that fighting was a nice peaceful farm to live on, which was where he was at the time I met him. He certainly deserved it. And Trixy, I love your thoughtful reactions.
As a veteran I am proud to see today’s interest in the military genre of movies. The advances in special effects have presented such an immersive visual effect, those without military experience can get a little idea of the “HARSH REALITY” our military can face. I had the honor to attend a special showing of “Saving Private Ryan” the second week of its theatrical release. The first two rows (floor level and one up) were reserved for WWII veterans & family. Just before the coming attractions showed, approximately 20 people were ushered to their seats. At the end only subdued sniffles and sobs could be herd with NOONE moving to leave. After a brief pause the first of the veterans got up to leave, while the rest of us in attendance gave them ALL a standing ovation as they left. There seems to be a flow-over effect of people watching some older movies; “Full Metal Jacket”, “Platoon”, “M*A*S*H”, “Apocalypse Now” etc. I think these movies are great but need to be viewed with the filter of social commentary for the time they were made. I would like to see reactions to two older movies, based on two of the most decorated war heroes. These movies, though not posing the fantastic special effects of today’s movies, contain just as much interest by the simple act of storytelling. The first is the story of one of the most decorated soldiers of WWI. The main character of the story (Alvin C York) chose actor Gary Cooper to portray him. Released in September 1941, just before America entered WWII, “Sergeant York”. The second story is about the MOST DECORATED soldier of WWII. The movie not only adapted from his autobiography (Audie Murphy) but starred him as well. From October 1955, just over ten years after the end of the war “To Hell and Back”.
Thank you for sticking with this series. All of these episodes are very impactful. This one in particular was among the most emotionally troubling to watch.
My grandfather wasn't a soldier in the European Theatre, he was in the Pacific Theatre. As a kid my brother was fascinated with war and everything involved. But my Pop always shed away from telling anything about it. Only a few stories after constantly asking him what it was really like. He had this saying when people were rude and demanded that he tell them. His reply full of rage at them: "being dead is nothing, dying is a bastard!". Only heard him blast this at a few people, my brother included, I come to understand over the years what he meant. This episode brought back a few of his stories that were from the Japanese perspective rather than Nazi's, but it all had the same affect. We shall never forget the people who stood before and under those acts, and stand up to those who want to do this again.
I have been to the Holocaust War museum in D.C here in the states and we do have that same Train Cart in that museum. If there was one thing I could take from that experience is that I can never forget the smell. I have not been there since 2008 and it still creeps up on me every time I watch anything related to the Holocaust. It is a smell that is so horrible that it is so hard to describe. That my friend is what everyone in this war who have seen these camps can never forget.
It never ceases to amaze me how cruel human beings can be to each other. Years ago in the Bronx Zoo there was a sign outside a room that read, "Inside this room is the most dangerous animal on the face of the earth" and when you walked in you were standing in front of a mirror.
Somehow the line that sticks with me most of all is right at the end, when someone says "[He] should've killed himself three years ago, saved us a lot of trouble." and Nixon says "Yeah he should've... but he didn't."
The "It is just for a short time" line he siad before they had to return into the camp, is probably what the Germans said to the, just before they boarded the trains.
The best way we can honor the troops and the victims is to watch stuff like this . To learn everything we can so we don't ever allow these things to happen again.
I was dreading this moment, when you would inevitably arrive at this episode. I don't think anyone can stomach this, no matter how many times they watch it.
Nixon was in Head Quarters Company, so was not as exposed to front-line action. His responsibilities were to document, transmit orders, file reports, etc. One reason he volunteered to jump in with another outfit 17th Airborne, was to see actual combat. "Three stars" meant he had jumped three times into a combat zone (Normandy, Holland, Rhineland).
when filming this episode, the actors said that they rehearsed their lines while sitting around the table. They weren't shown the camp until it was time to actually to shoot it, because the directors wanted their initial reaction to be genuine. the prisoners were recruited from a nearby cancer hospital to add another layer of realism to the scene.
FYI, the men executing the three German soldiers were wearing French uniforms. They'd seen France occupied by the Nazis for years, so they probably weren't too keen on making nice. Also, the French soldier on the far left is Tom Hanks. No, seriously. Take a look.
The opening scene probably is in Koln (Cologne), a major city that was devastated by Royal Air Force bombing before being captured by the US First Army on 7 March 1945. On the same day, the Americans captured the intact bridge over the Rhine. The second scene takes place a week or so later after the German defences of the Ruhr (the industrial heart of Germany) collapsed in early April. The war in Europe is now only three weeks from its end.
Until I was 5 my family lived in a condo complex with a lot of older Jewish couples. Many had survived the Holocaust and had numbers tattoo’d on their arms which I would see whenever I went to the pool. It’s the reason why to this day I refuse to even consider getting a tattoo.
One of the things I like about this episode is that at the beginning, you get wrapped up in Nix spiraling into self pity and depression, but once they find the camp, his problems are all but forgotten.
Blue, you asked about jumps when winters mentioned Nix had 3 stars on his parachute badge. Jumps here means a combat jump and the paratroops awarded a star to go on the paratrooper wings for each jump. Most guys got 2 stars, for D-Day (France) and Operation Market Garden (Holland). Here Nix was temporarily assigned to another regiment that did a small assault jump in Germany, so he got a third star.
The German soldiers who had been taken to POW camps in the USA had been loaned out to area farmers and industries near the camps under guard and had received very good treatment. Their biggest problem, apparently, was gaining too much weight. After news and film reels of the camps became known in the states, they had a harder time. They were not attacked, but they got very few smiles. Even so many of them emigrated to the states after the war. I knew a few of them in Kansas.
My father was captured in the battle of the bulge and was a POW for 6 + months.By the end of the war, the German guards and the American prisoners were all starving. They shared everything, including care packages. My dad was treated well, but he nearly starved to death.
I think we need to begin thinking about these atrocities, even those ones happening today, as horrible things we are doing to ourselves. It's too easy to externalize these things as something done by or to others, and then it loses some of the impact.
I know for a fact the dude that plays Winter's is British if you can believe it. He was on Homeland and now he is in Billions. When he does interviews his accent his crazy thick.
With the prisoner who saluted, and the soldier saluted back, i think it is because when a soldier salutes, you are supposed to do it for a superior. If you meet a soldier of your rank, you are not expected to salute, but if someone is higher, you better damn well make sure you salute. The civilian saluted, but the soldier saluted back. To me I think this was the soldier basically stating that the civ had been through more than he had, so when he was saluted, he felt the need to show respect and salute back even though the man held no official military rank.
That house's decorations weren't 1990's; they were vintage 1940's, and affluent as well. Really reminds me of my grandparents' house when I was little.
The scene on the bridge with the two boys and the marching people is actually captured Germans soldiers being marched from the front line into captivity behind the lines. On either side of them going further into Germany are American soldiers. They knew what the Germans had been doing with the camps as camps were liberated during the push into Germany. It was common knowledge and more and more of the soldiers became aware of it as they army pushed forward. However, knowing about the camps and what went on there is something entirely different than actually coming across a camp. Normal human beings are naturally repulsed to think another human could be as barbaric as the Nazis who administered and ran the camps. Battle hardened veterans were known to cry like babies when confronted with the sight of the camps.
my fathers journey thru WWII after he helped push the Germans out of France and back into Germany led him to help liberate one of these camps it held 15000 prisoners he said the walking skeletons hit him so hard men weighing 70 to 80 Lbs. and the smell lived with him 20 years later some nights at home he would wake up crying from what he saw. to see my father a big man of 6' 3" tall and 300 lbs crying uncontrollable hits you hard you know he had been thru something horrible
It's interesting that the German woman that Nixon saw in her home and later at the death camp wore red, and the little girl in Schindler's list in the Polish ghetto wore a red coat. That little girl is now in her 30s and she is working to help Ukrainian refugees at the Polish border with Ukraine.
Replacements were too eager to fight and the veterans didn't want to see them hurt or killed. My dad lost a replacement who came from his hometown because he wanted to show how brave he was and devastated him.
In the World at War documentary narrated by Laurence Olivier, I think the British officials knew secretly of the Nazi atrocities when some photos were smuggled and gotten to England. But for the Soviet and American forces who liberated the camps, they were in for a shock, they’d never seen anything like this. The Soviet forces might’ve known for longer though, there being more camps located towards their territory than in the west.
I do love watching your reactions, but this whole series is such a brutal and emotional tearjerker -- even with how good a series it is, and how necessary it is to illustrate the horrors of war -- that I hope you have the opportunity to watch something that makes _you_ feel good sometime soon.
The worst part about the scene where the veterens are shocked by the camp is that most of them had already seen sights worse than a normal civi could imagine. Bodies chewed by artillery, machine guns, and the heavy weight of rolling tanks. Families executed wholesale by both Nazis and rebels. It forced EVEN THOSE MEN to stop and take account of how hellish the world of total war really was. I cant even imagine us facing the modern version of artillery barrage, or one hundred mile flanks
1) The reason why during most of the Wars that the US fought in, a Replacement was arriving because someone you knew and fought alongside of is dead. It really wasn't so much against the Replacement, but about the war in general. Plus, you didn't want to get close to the replacement, since you knew most of them would die at a rate faster than the veterans would. 2) No, they really didn't know since High Command didn't want them to get so angry that they stopped taking prisoners. The French Army guys shooting the prisoners were kinda an example of what happens since they had friends and relatives put into Forced Labor Camps! 3) The SS & Gestapo, along with a number of regular Wehrmacht, continuously rounded up people for the Camps! They had to since the average lifespan of a Concentration Camp prisoner was 6 months!! (Depending on the Camp, some where much shorter, and a few were a bit longer than 6 months!!!)
The thing is that there was a big difference between soldiers depending on which side they were on. The German and Italian soldiers were fighting for the Nazis.The Nazis were/are evil. German soldiers ran the concentration camps. They rounded up Jews and non-whites and gypsies from their homes and shipped them out to die. The shame covers the entire country and it was well deserved. That's one of the points of this episode. Webster screams at the baker, "I suppose you're going to tell me you never smelled the stench!" Indeed. There's a line in an amazing song song "How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?" ruclips.net/video/MMFj8uDubsE/видео.html
The British and American governments definitely "knew" about the final solution, but in most cases dismissed it as exaggeration even though they had been informed from any number of sources, but for the troops on the ground that actually discovered the reality of it, it had to be an unbelievable eye opener.
Actually, among the allies, nobody knew about the holocaust. They knew the nazis had many prisonners working in camps, esecially jews but they didn't know about the life conditions in these camps and they didn't know about death camps. And once they knew about a camp, they had no reason to determine what kind of camp it was. Once it had been established that the facility wasn't used to build weapons (such as the V2, the first missile, capable of hitting London after being fired from Germany), they had no reason to look at such camp rather than to find the places were the nazis had their military factories or their secret weapons test sites. When General Eisenhower learned about this, he said "Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened". Talk about insight... The reason why the prisoners look so horrible is that most of the extras used in this sequences were cancer patients undergoing treatment One last thing : to me there are some sequences, some documentaries, some very realistic movies/TV shows anyone should see. This sequence is one of them.
Yeah the fact that the actors playing the prisoners are in clearly visible precarious health conditions themselves hit me really hard because you can see that many of them are fatally ill and the "suspension of disbelief filter" is completely gone (this is close to how KZ-prisoners would have looked like). On top of that, the courage and strength to probably use all their physical and mental strength remaining to shoot this scene this way and show their own private vulnerability to the world is admirable.
The Allies were told about the camps for years but wouldn't or couldn't believe the reports from resistance members that infiltrated the camps or survivors that escaped. They knew. Keep your revisionist bullshit to yourself. They knew about the camps from the Polish Resistance the moment they were being set up, the Polish had networks of spies and prisoners in the camps gathering information and trying to instigate uprisings. One account of that comes from Witold Pilecki who infiltrated Auschwitz in 1940 and escaped only to be murdered by the Soviets after the war. The Allies didn't acknowledge the camps until 1942, years after they were first getting reports and the UK was listening in to German broadcasts before that speaking about the genocide in Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine in 1941.
@@Nyx_2142 I belie you when it comes to top officers or general commanders (that's why they had order to leave them in the camps, not feed them, etc. 'cause allies commanders had the opportunity to ask for medical advices on what to do with these people) but I can't believe average troopers knew all that.
The killing was organized and done with Teutonic efficiency. And the Allies, while they had heard some evidence from escapees, they did not want to believe such a thing was possible until discoveries like this made it impossible to ignore.
Hi Blue. This is the most emotionally taxing episode. They recreated a newsreel scene with the opening of the freight car. 'Why We Fight' was borrowed from a movie produced by the United States Army Signal Core directed by Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak (both uncredited) that was released in 1942. Even the most battle hardened troops had difficulties with what they encountered at the concentration, forced labor, and death camps. Growing up I not only read about this but talked to a couple veterans who helped liberated camps. It is true that many people did not know the extent of what was happening to the Jewish people. Many people have asked why the Jewish people allowed themselves to be incarcerated without fighting. The answer lies in 600 years of pogroms. A pogrom was an action committed by Europeans against European Jews for a variety of reasons. Some resulted in a few deaths, but the Jews were eventually restored to society again. In Schindler's list the German SS officer in the opening scene says to the others around the dinner table, "They (the Jews) think they can weather the storm, but this storm is the SS." Perhaps if they had known the Germans were bent on genocide they might have gone down fighting from the start.
It's so surreal to me. I'm German, I understand what most of the prisoners say. I think some come from Yugoslavia (Serbia?). The language of the good, the liberator, the savior, is English and for me it is only my second language. They free MY compatriots, the relatives, the friends, the neighbors, the colleagues, the people you meet on the street every day. The Germans who had a different faith, a different political opinion, who were artists or who had an undesirable sexual orientation. NOTHING CAN MAKE THIS AGAIN...
This episode is a brilliant reminder that a whole lot of people had no idea what exactly was going on in Europe. When Vietnam happened it was the first war that was covered honestly and graphically in the media.
Those are captured German soldiers. As Cart said, they didn't hate replacements, they didn't want to get to know new people as they had already lost brothers in battle. When someone you know dies trying to save a replacement (due to lack of experience) it makes it worse. By the time in this episode the troops were tired, been fighting a long time and were tired of fighting, but as they got deeper into Germany they met more fanatical German's who were fighting harder. It was also the first time they found camps. There were rumors, but no one believed them at the time. Now they know why they are fighting.
The death camps weren't widely known by the public or standard soldiers, However the intelligence of the UK & US forces with recognisance flights (taking photographs from planes) as well as people who escaped from Poland and Germany who passed on what the knew. So Churchill and Roosevelt had some information but were convinced or had details of the number of Jews & minorities being killed or how on an industrial level they were being killed until these camps were found and then Eisenhower was furious which lead him to marching the local people through the camps to see what their leader Hitler had done. The replacements weren't hated it was just too painful to get friendly with a new guy for him to get killed only days or weeks new into their platoon.
A high ranking decorated officer, but not the camp commander. He isn't wearing an SS uniform, insignia on the collar. And the units administering the camps were the notorious SS-Totenkopfverbände (death head units) with the skull insignia on the cap.
My Grandpa Tony liberated a sub-camp of Buchenwald Concentration Camp. He had little sympathy for the "Krauts" before and even less after that. He still calls Germans "Krauts" to this day.
Imagine seeing the horrors of War, then seeing this. "Why We Fight" is a nod to the legendary series made by Frank Capra, it was made while the War was happening. I think it is no coincidence that the German Woman is wearing the stark red coat, as the little girl who dies in Schindler's List. Spielberg is sending a message of both sides of the Holocaust. This is still happening today. That's Tom Hanks, the French executioner @12:53
Why We Fight series is available on RUclips. It was designed to be shown to recruits to explain, well, why we fought. All the men in Easy Company would have seen it.
It’s not that we hate replacements. I just retired from the Army after 20 years. And deployed 7 times. When I hear new guys say “I can’t wait to go to war etc”. It’s frustrating cause war is NOT fun and it’s nothing to be excited about.
Отличный военный сериал от создателей "Спасти Рядового Райна",есть еще сериал «Тихий океан» тоже отлично поставлен.Отражает все действия которые были тогда)
Just to add to, not contradict, what others have said: One reason replacements were resented was trauma bonding among the original paras. Trauma bonding is one of the strongest emotional ties humans can experience; you go through some crazy fucked up shit together and nothing and no one can replicate that. Having a bunch of newbies coming in would have felt almost insulting or humiliating for them; hence ingroup/outgroup. Then when O'keefe sees the camp with the rest of them, he has a trauma bonding moment with them too. War is fucked
This episode pulls you right in. The interviews set you up to see a sort of equivalence between the Allies and the Germans. You see the men of Easy being hardened after their experiences. They displace civilians, they loot property. Nixon vandalizes the store and disrespects the widow to steal booze. You start to get the idea that these guys are just as brutal as the Nazis. The question comes up, “Why are we fighting? Why are we loosing our families?” And then they discover the camps… There is a difference and the camps make it clear.
The camps were starting to be located at this point in the war, by the Russians coming in from the east and the US and other Allies coming in from the west. This episode depicts the liberation of Kaufering, which was one of 11 sub-camps of Dachau.
Imagine combat hardened soldiers with months of time on the front line who had seen death and destruction weeping uncontrollably after finding this horror. Still gut wrenching decades later.
Totally anecdotal but my Mom was a 5 year old in southern Germany... Her home, towards the end of the war, was occupied by American soldiers... They were nothing but kind to her and my Grandmother... Lots of peanut butter and chocolates. Love your content young lady, take care.
They didn't hate replacements, they didn't want to become friends with them because if they did, they would have to watch them get hurt and or die since they were inexperienced and wanting to prove themselves to the veterans that they looked up to
Not to mention that the replacements were constant reminders that soldiers that they had trained with and fought alongside with were now dead
Local cancer patients volunteered to be extras in the camp scenes. Some of them didn't live long enough to see the episode.
Wow, didn't know that. Hope they knew that they did something important here.
The cast were not allowed to see the camp set of the actors playing the prisoners beforehand, to make their shock all the more genuine
Holy shit
@@heffatheanimal2200 they were offered to see it, but they all agreed not to, to make the reaction more genuine.
The camp survivors were played by cancer patients undergoing treatment and the actors were kept away from the set until filming so in the scenes where they enter the camp their reactions were genuine.
Brilliantly filmed and acted, I both love and hate watching it at the same time. Just like Schindler's List.
I always wondered about the older woman from the house Nix goes into when they get to town. She is wearing a red coat when she is moving bodies. Is that a homage to Schindler's List?
@@bobcharles1204 I think so.
When Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, saw a concentration camp for the first time at Ohrdruf, he was so outraged he had the local townspeople marched at gunpoint through the camp. The local Burgermeister and his wife killed themselves after being shown the camp. He also ordered every reporter and photographer he could find to come and document the conditions at Ohrdruf. He said the he knew that people would try to deny what happened. Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton toured the camp with Eisenhower. Patton, who had the nickname 'Old Blood and Guts", went behind a building, threw up and refused to rejoin the tour.
humanity has done fucked up when a man like Patton is throwing up after being shown what happened
Patton also wrote in a private letter that the Jews where no better than animals Patton actually agreed with some of the Nazi policies his thoughts where so bad that Eisenhower actually replaced him out of disgust go look it up Patton May have been somewhat a good tactician but morally he was no better than the Nazis.
I hear even the brutal Soviets where shocked when founding camps in Poland
This is the number one reason to not hide the current horrors committed by the Russians in Ukraine....Russians and their supporters still try to claim that crimes are not being committed even though the video evidence is overwhelming.
Supreme HQ knew about the camps. Everyone knew about them. Hell, the home front in the USA knew about them. My grandparents told me they knew about them. They received letters from their relatives living abroad. And what is sad about it was a good % of the US population knew about but didnt care as they hated Jews just as much as the NAZIs. Especially in the southern states. People forget that a large segment of the US population were huge bigots and racist back then. Even worse than in todays world. Ford of the Ford motor company was a known antisemitic and racist and so was Charles Lindburg. Both were given awards from NAZI Germany before the war.
This episode is the hardest to watch, but, the most important to watch. "If anyone ever tells you the Holocaust didn't happen, or that it wasn't as bad as they say, no, it was worse than they say. What we saw, what these Germans did, it was worse than you can possibly imagine." - Edward "Babe" Heffron
The same needs to be said about the Japanese.
@@douglascampbell9809 It is said in Eastern culture. Not nearly enough in the West. I think sometimes it has to do with American guilt over nuking Japan, and our post-war alliance.
@@timlois No, it's simply that people connect most with those things, good or bad, that are culturally close to them. The U.S. and Germany are both part of Western civilization. To us Japan and China are foreign, "other" places and cultures. And vice versa for Japan snd China regarding Germany and the U.S.
@@barreloffun10 I think we're on the same page. I'm just saying that those in China that lived trough and studied things like The Rape of Nanking and countless other genocidal events in their country during this time certainly remember it. Where as the West might not as much, compared to Nazi genocide in Europe. It's an "other" place to them just like it is to us.
@@timlois Yep.
the majority of soldiers had no idea this was going on until they started finding the camps. Have heard there were some rumors but until troops started liberating them there was no direct confirmation this was going on. Several of the actors in the camp scenes were cancer patients they asked to help show a realistic view of just how starved and near death these people were.
High command knew as early as 1942 but chose not to bomb the railroad tracks because they felt ending the war was most important.
That was a young Tom Hardy.
@@anthonyfuqua6988 I’ve heard that, but all railroad tracks were a target because troop movement and supplies were done by train
@@MetalDetroit That was in the Soviet sector. The only bombing the other allies did was the bombing of Dresden.People say it was a war crime but it was a logistics hub, a throughway for German troops and Bomber Harris wanted to see what one carpet bombing could do to an untouched city. But Churchill knew about the plan for the Jews as early as early 1942. And they knew about einsatzgrüppen.
@@anthonyfuqua6988 What are you talking about? The only bombing the allies did was Dresden? You have no clue what you’re talking about.
I love the part at 14:10;
Nix barges into her home, destroys probably one of the few pictures she has of her husband left, and then, to add insult to injury, the dog starts barking at Nix, reminding him how his wife got even the dog and how he's an invader. In this case, he's the one that is averting his eyes and looks at the ground in shame. In the later scene at 21:21 , when the civilians are burying the bodies of the prisoners and we see the same woman, she looks up Nixon until their gazes meet and then she's the one that averts her eyes and looks at the ground in shame. Amazing cinematography.
The concentration camps remained relatively unknown to the Allies as most of them were inside Germany or on the Eastern side of Europe. There were very few camps on the Western Front for the Americans, Canadians, British, etc, to liberate, so most soldiers were unaware of their existence.
Not to mention the red dress, drawing from the red dress kid on schindlers list
The writers and directors managed to get the audience to ask themselves the all-important question: "Who here committed the worse crime?" without ever stating it explicitly.
In a world of ideological extremes, even Good becomes relative.
I don't know anyone who can watch this episode without having their guts ripped out. The lack of basic humanity by some towards others - which even now still dogs humanity - beggars belief, which is why these truths are so important to show, and keep showing. Thanks Trixy, a tough watch.
That's what happens when you dehumanise group's of people.
I don’t know why I keep watching reactions to this! It devastates me every time. The crying is cathartic I suppose..
Every time I see it.
Even after all these years whenever I rewatch Band of Brothers I choke on my tears watching episode 9.
When I see this scene I get furious 😡and 😢 sad all at once
Most of the soldiers had heard about the camps but seeing them was entirely different.an uncle of mine helped liberate mittlebau Dora camp.40 years later he would still weep when he talked about it.
If you're interested in the German experience of WWII, there is a very good miniseries called Generation War. The show follows a group of friends who are together at the beginning, but they all end up in different places over the course of the war, some are civilians, some military. Lots of people have referred to it as "the German Band of Brothers." The show is all in German, so unless you speak German, you'll need subtitles.
People are "forgetting", "denying", and/or "revising" why we fought WW2, The Holocaust, etc. All of those reasons add to as why a series like this and The Pacific, films like Schindler's List, countless documentaries, and places like Holocaust Museum LA, are needed to keep the truth alive.
Thank you for your thoughtful reactions. One more episode to go (and if you are so inclined, then please consider doing a reaction video for We Stand Alone Together, as it is the companion documentary for this award-winning miniseries).
My dad's father went to Europe in the US Army to fight the Germans, and my mother's uncle was a Greek general who fought against them when they invaded. I grew up with constant stories from that generation in my family as to what they experienced. I often worry that the gravity of what happened will be lost on newer generations. It's gratifying to see a young person coming to terms with what took place. It was a black stain on our history as a species and can never be forgotten.
Nixon was an intelligence officer. It was his job to scout around and also to collect and interpret and give information to the commanders of the regiment. He was not technically an active combat officer.
The lowest respect I have for him from this series.
@@TheReDeeMeR1988 ? Why?
@@jacobbond997 He didn't do anything.
He didn't fire a single bullet.
I have more respect for the one who shot a single bullet and killed a kraut.
That just shows your ignorance about military then.
@@TheReDeeMeR1988 You must be a child. Nixon was a respected soldier by his peers and was crucial for their unit. He was on the front lines the whole time and experienced the same things as the other men. Grow up.
When I was growing up in a small town in Scotland in the 1970's, my grandmother's friend's son wandered the streets all day and talked to nobody. He was likely in his late 40s and his hair was snow white. The story was that he had been a normal young guy at the end of the war until his company liberated a concentration camp of some sorts. His name was Ian Graham and his life since 1945 was badly affected by what he saw.
There is absolutely no way to prepare anyone for this episode (especially without spoiling it)
Many other reactors have finished this series and there are more to come. For us viewers... we know what's coming and it doesn't get any easier at any time. It never should
I've watched this series dozens of times. I've seen many, many reaction videos. Still, this episode has me in tears every time.
Same here
As someone who has served, I can confirm that it is too frequently glossed over how difficult it is for wives left behind. Even in peace time when soldiers deploy those prolonged separations are very hard. In wartime they live with the looming specter of death for someone they love day after day, and it frequently breaks them. It is mental torture for all practical purposes. Military wives who can tough it out are special. I think "We Were Soldiers" probably does the best job of capturing this.
We Were Soldiers is fantastic.
My most decorated friend was a door gunner for the 1st Air Cav for 3 or 4 tours in Vietnam.
He was missing something like 5 medals from his collection at that point.
Some of the medals he had multiples.
The Army gives out combat air time medals for time in the air under fire. He had something like 10 clusters on that medal.
He was an E9 (Sergeant Major) in the reserves in the late 80's so he had something like 25+ years in at that point.
Literally the old Sgt that when you see him in dress uniform you see his chest and arm hashes and you think holy sh*t this guy is more decorated and qualified than the unit commander.
I'm just 5 seconds into the video, but i already feel that lump in my throat for what is yet to come. This episode is about the darkest part of my country's history ... let us all be vigilant so it won't happen again, no matter where!
It's important to note that the picture of the German officer that Nixon drops and cracks the glass is one of a dead man. The black band on the corner of the frame is to symbolize that he had died. Whether he was an officer of the camp or died abroad is not known.
I always get a chuckle when someone is surprised that a spouse/partner would leave their lover while they are in war. It happens a lot more than people realize. Pretty common....
People leave their lover when they go to work on an oil rig too, or spend some time in a jail, or pretty much any reason to leave for an extended period of time.
In real life Nixon was cheating on her according too Winters throughout the War.
As a US vet deployed to Iraq, some of the nastiest domestic crap I've seen happened in the military. As a piece of free advice, don't ever get married in the military. You need a special type of person to be a good military spouse and most are not it. There is a reason the local night club in 29 Palms (Club Two Nine) was colocialy renamed to Club One Seven, Two Seven or Three Seven depending on which battalion of 7th Marines was away on float. All the wives would congregate there. I never felt safe going there knowing any woman who might approach me was likely to be the spouse of a deployed marine.
Breakup letters to soldiers are common they are called "Dear John" letters.
In Capitan Lewis Nixon’s case, his first divorce was caused due to his infidelity with a woman he met during his time stationed in England. I believe episode 5 his character mentioned meeting someone in London.
"So much blood and death. No one knows it more than these guys." Uh wait about 10 more minutes...
5:45 Nixon was an intelligence officer before he was demoted. This means that he spent most of the time in rear areas.
The closest the producers could safely go with portraying the actual starvation conditions in the camp was by using cancer patients. And not all of said patients lived long enough to see BoB when it was first broadcast.
@12:18 “Oh, they’re people” 🤣😂 Yes, ordinary people in uniform and marching in step😂🤣
This episode is timely with Yom Ha'Shoah/ Holocaust Remembrance Day in 10 days.
The Mozart/Beethoven mixup at the beginning is significant since Mozart was Austrian, like Hitler. So it's the German people retaking their identity.
And the first time many Americans saw Tom Hardy was his bare ass.
The French soldiers were executing traitors, Frenchmen who volunteered to fight in the Wehrmacht. The officer executing them is another Tom Hanks cameo.
The inmates were played by cancer patients undergoing intensive chemotherapy.
Many Holocaust survivors died shortly after being liberated from gastric ruptures due to overeating.
In one Easy memoir, the executed soldiers were German boys who were not old enough to shave.
My grandmother told me my uncle was in the first unit to arrived at the Dachau concentration camp. Whenever anyone in the family asked him about it, he would immediately turn and walk away. Until the day he died, he never talked about it. He did talk about losing 2 of his toes to frostbite during the Ardennes counteroffensive, but never a word about the concentration camps.
I had the honor to meet Dick Winters some years ago. I was very familiar with his story and Band of Brothers. Anyway, we were at a military cafe and we had a drink together. My dad was a veteran of WW2 and Korea, and I explained to Dick Winters all he(dad) wanted was to go back to being a civilian again. Dick said my dad was a hero himself and that I had every reason to be proud of him. And Dick said all he wanted after all that fighting was a nice peaceful farm to live on, which was where he was at the time I met him. He certainly deserved it. And Trixy, I love your thoughtful reactions.
As a veteran I am proud to see today’s interest in the military genre of movies. The advances in special effects have presented such an immersive visual effect, those without military experience can get a little idea of the “HARSH REALITY” our military can face. I had the honor to attend a special showing of “Saving Private Ryan” the second week of its theatrical release. The first two rows (floor level and one up) were reserved for WWII veterans & family. Just before the coming attractions showed, approximately 20 people were ushered to their seats. At the end only subdued sniffles and sobs could be herd with NOONE moving to leave. After a brief pause the first of the veterans got up to leave, while the rest of us in attendance gave them ALL a standing ovation as they left. There seems to be a flow-over effect of people watching some older movies; “Full Metal Jacket”, “Platoon”, “M*A*S*H”, “Apocalypse Now” etc. I think these movies are great but need to be viewed with the filter of social commentary for the time they were made.
I would like to see reactions to two older movies, based on two of the most decorated war heroes. These movies, though not posing the fantastic special effects of today’s movies, contain just as much interest by the simple act of storytelling.
The first is the story of one of the most decorated soldiers of WWI. The main character of the story (Alvin C York) chose actor Gary Cooper to portray him. Released in September 1941, just before America entered WWII, “Sergeant York”.
The second story is about the MOST DECORATED soldier of WWII. The movie not only adapted from his autobiography (Audie Murphy) but starred him as well. From October 1955, just over ten years after the end of the war “To Hell and Back”.
Thank you for sticking with this series. All of these episodes are very impactful. This one in particular was among the most emotionally troubling to watch.
Haven't even viewed this upload yet, but I've been waiting for you to react to this particular episode. Devastating. I sense tears coming.
My grandfather wasn't a soldier in the European Theatre, he was in the Pacific Theatre. As a kid my brother was fascinated with war and everything involved. But my Pop always shed away from telling anything about it. Only a few stories after constantly asking him what it was really like. He had this saying when people were rude and demanded that he tell them. His reply full of rage at them: "being dead is nothing, dying is a bastard!". Only heard him blast this at a few people, my brother included, I come to understand over the years what he meant. This episode brought back a few of his stories that were from the Japanese perspective rather than Nazi's, but it all had the same affect. We shall never forget the people who stood before and under those acts, and stand up to those who want to do this again.
I have been to the Holocaust War museum in D.C here in the states and we do have that same Train Cart in that museum. If there was one thing I could take from that experience is that I can never forget the smell. I have not been there since 2008 and it still creeps up on me every time I watch anything related to the Holocaust. It is a smell that is so horrible that it is so hard to describe. That my friend is what everyone in this war who have seen these camps can never forget.
I think the implication at 19:00 is that prisoner who salutes Luz was a German soldier, but was sent here because he was Jewish.
It never ceases to amaze me how cruel human beings can be to each other. Years ago in the Bronx Zoo there was a sign outside a room that read, "Inside this room is the most dangerous animal on the face of the earth" and when you walked in you were standing in front of a mirror.
The guy who asks “did you sit on your bayonet?” is a young Michael Fassbender.
Somehow the line that sticks with me most of all is right at the end, when someone says "[He] should've killed himself three years ago, saved us a lot of trouble." and Nixon says "Yeah he should've... but he didn't."
The "It is just for a short time" line he siad before they had to return into the camp, is probably what the Germans said to the, just before they boarded the trains.
I always watch every reactor specially for this episode. Will check it out later where I can cry along at home. 6,000,000…. Never forget
The best way we can honor the troops and the victims is to watch stuff like this . To learn everything we can so we don't ever allow these things to happen again.
I was dreading this moment, when you would inevitably arrive at this episode. I don't think anyone can stomach this, no matter how many times they watch it.
The camp was Kaufering IV, a sub camp of Dachau. It was actually liberated by a different unit, Easy Company arrived the day after.
Nixon was in Head Quarters Company, so was not as exposed to front-line action. His responsibilities were to document, transmit orders, file reports, etc. One reason he volunteered to jump in with another outfit 17th Airborne, was to see actual combat. "Three stars" meant he had jumped three times into a combat zone (Normandy, Holland, Rhineland).
I really love your compassion for humankind. You have a good and pure heart. Don’t change please.
when filming this episode, the actors said that they rehearsed their lines while sitting around the table. They weren't shown the camp until it was time to actually to shoot it, because the directors wanted their initial reaction to be genuine. the prisoners were recruited from a nearby cancer hospital to add another layer of realism to the scene.
FYI, the men executing the three German soldiers were wearing French uniforms. They'd seen France occupied by the Nazis for years, so they probably weren't too keen on making nice. Also, the French soldier on the far left is Tom Hanks. No, seriously. Take a look.
Today I learned! That's cool, Thanks Sam!
This is another good German Veteran memoir on YT "German Soldier Remembers WW2 | Memoirs Of WWII #15".
4:45 "I've never seen this lad before, have I?" Girl, that's baby Tom Hardy!
The opening scene probably is in Koln (Cologne), a major city that was devastated by Royal Air Force bombing before being captured by the US First Army on 7 March 1945. On the same day, the Americans captured the intact bridge over the Rhine. The second scene takes place a week or so later after the German defences of the Ruhr (the industrial heart of Germany) collapsed in early April. The war in Europe is now only three weeks from its end.
Hahaha the way he stood up naked... I'd say LT Spears got a double salute
Until I was 5 my family lived in a condo complex with a lot of older Jewish couples. Many had survived the Holocaust and had numbers tattoo’d on their arms which I would see whenever I went to the pool. It’s the reason why to this day I refuse to even consider getting a tattoo.
One of the things I like about this episode is that at the beginning, you get wrapped up in Nix spiraling into self pity and depression, but once they find the camp, his problems are all but forgotten.
I visited Belsen when stationed in Germany. It's true, no birds sing there. Still affects me to this day.
Blue, you asked about jumps when winters mentioned Nix had 3 stars on his parachute badge. Jumps here means a combat jump and the paratroops awarded a star to go on the paratrooper wings for each jump. Most guys got 2 stars, for D-Day (France) and Operation Market Garden (Holland). Here Nix was temporarily assigned to another regiment that did a small assault jump in Germany, so he got a third star.
The German soldiers who had been taken to POW camps in the USA had been loaned out to area farmers and industries near the camps under guard and had received very good treatment. Their biggest problem, apparently, was gaining too much weight. After news and film reels of the camps became known in the states, they had a harder time. They were not attacked, but they got very few smiles. Even so many of them emigrated to the states after the war. I knew a few of them in Kansas.
My father was captured in the battle of the bulge and was a POW for 6 + months.By the end of the war, the German guards and the American prisoners were all starving. They shared everything, including care packages. My dad was treated well, but he nearly starved to death.
I think we need to begin thinking about these atrocities, even those ones happening today, as horrible things we are doing to ourselves. It's too easy to externalize these things as something done by or to others, and then it loses some of the impact.
5:30 He was always in Battalion or Regimental Headquarters and not in command of a platoon, so he had no need to shoot at anyone.
Since episode 1, I was both anticipating and dreading this episode reaction. I knew it was going to hurt. 😭💜🙏
I know for a fact the dude that plays Winter's is British if you can believe it. He was on Homeland and now he is in Billions. When he does interviews his accent his crazy thick.
And after 80 years history repeats itself again today in Europe .
4:32 - Tom Hardy
7:22 - Michael Fassbender
With the prisoner who saluted, and the soldier saluted back, i think it is because when a soldier salutes, you are supposed to do it for a superior. If you meet a soldier of your rank, you are not expected to salute, but if someone is higher, you better damn well make sure you salute. The civilian saluted, but the soldier saluted back. To me I think this was the soldier basically stating that the civ had been through more than he had, so when he was saluted, he felt the need to show respect and salute back even though the man held no official military rank.
That house's decorations weren't 1990's; they were vintage 1940's, and affluent as well. Really reminds me of my grandparents' house when I was little.
The scene on the bridge with the two boys and the marching people is actually captured Germans soldiers being marched from the front line into captivity behind the lines. On either side of them going further into Germany are American soldiers.
They knew what the Germans had been doing with the camps as camps were liberated during the push into Germany. It was common knowledge and more and more of the soldiers became aware of it as they army pushed forward. However, knowing about the camps and what went on there is something entirely different than actually coming across a camp. Normal human beings are naturally repulsed to think another human could be as barbaric as the Nazis who administered and ran the camps. Battle hardened veterans were known to cry like babies when confronted with the sight of the camps.
my fathers journey thru WWII after he helped push the Germans out of France and back into Germany led him to help liberate one of these camps it held 15000 prisoners he said the walking skeletons hit him so hard men weighing 70 to 80 Lbs. and the smell lived with him 20 years later some nights at home he would wake up crying from what he saw. to see my father a big man of 6' 3" tall and 300 lbs crying uncontrollable hits you hard you know he had been thru something horrible
It's interesting that the German woman that Nixon saw in her home and later at the death camp wore red, and the little girl in Schindler's list in the Polish ghetto wore a red coat. That little girl is now in her 30s and she is working to help Ukrainian refugees at the Polish border with Ukraine.
Replacements were too eager to fight and the veterans didn't want to see them hurt or killed. My dad lost a replacement who came from his hometown because he wanted to show how brave he was and devastated him.
In the World at War documentary narrated by Laurence Olivier, I think the British officials knew secretly of the Nazi atrocities when some photos were smuggled and gotten to England.
But for the Soviet and American forces who liberated the camps, they were in for a shock, they’d never seen anything like this.
The Soviet forces might’ve known for longer though, there being more camps located towards their territory than in the west.
If the British knew, then all the allies knew.
I do love watching your reactions, but this whole series is such a brutal and emotional tearjerker -- even with how good a series it is, and how necessary it is to illustrate the horrors of war -- that I hope you have the opportunity to watch something that makes _you_ feel good sometime soon.
The worst part about the scene where the veterens are shocked by the camp is that most of them had already seen sights worse than a normal civi could imagine. Bodies chewed by artillery, machine guns, and the heavy weight of rolling tanks. Families executed wholesale by both Nazis and rebels. It forced EVEN THOSE MEN to stop and take account of how hellish the world of total war really was. I cant even imagine us facing the modern version of artillery barrage, or one hundred mile flanks
1) The reason why during most of the Wars that the US fought in, a Replacement was arriving because someone you knew and fought alongside of is dead.
It really wasn't so much against the Replacement, but about the war in general. Plus, you didn't want to get close to the replacement, since you knew most of them would die at a rate faster than the veterans would.
2) No, they really didn't know since High Command didn't want them to get so angry that they stopped taking prisoners. The French Army guys shooting the prisoners were kinda an example of what happens since they had friends and relatives put into Forced Labor Camps!
3) The SS & Gestapo, along with a number of regular Wehrmacht, continuously rounded up people for the Camps! They had to since the average lifespan of a Concentration Camp prisoner was 6 months!! (Depending on the Camp, some where much shorter, and a few were a bit longer than 6 months!!!)
Tragic and so true this needs to be kept alive for our history
The thing is that there was a big difference between soldiers depending on which side they were on. The German and Italian soldiers were fighting for the Nazis.The Nazis were/are evil. German soldiers ran the concentration camps. They rounded up Jews and non-whites and gypsies from their homes and shipped them out to die. The shame covers the entire country and it was well deserved.
That's one of the points of this episode. Webster screams at the baker, "I suppose you're going to tell me you never smelled the stench!" Indeed.
There's a line in an amazing song song "How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?"
ruclips.net/video/MMFj8uDubsE/видео.html
The British and American governments definitely "knew" about the final solution, but in most cases dismissed it as exaggeration even though they had been informed from any number of sources, but for the troops on the ground that actually discovered the reality of it, it had to be an unbelievable eye opener.
Actually, among the allies, nobody knew about the holocaust. They knew the nazis had many prisonners working in camps, esecially jews but they didn't know about the life conditions in these camps and they didn't know about death camps. And once they knew about a camp, they had no reason to determine what kind of camp it was. Once it had been established that the facility wasn't used to build weapons (such as the V2, the first missile, capable of hitting London after being fired from Germany), they had no reason to look at such camp rather than to find the places were the nazis had their military factories or their secret weapons test sites.
When General Eisenhower learned about this, he said "Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened". Talk about insight...
The reason why the prisoners look so horrible is that most of the extras used in this sequences were cancer patients undergoing treatment
One last thing : to me there are some sequences, some documentaries, some very realistic movies/TV shows anyone should see. This sequence is one of them.
Yeah the fact that the actors playing the prisoners are in clearly visible precarious health conditions themselves hit me really hard because you can see that many of them are fatally ill and the "suspension of disbelief filter" is completely gone (this is close to how KZ-prisoners would have looked like). On top of that, the courage and strength to probably use all their physical and mental strength remaining to shoot this scene this way and show their own private vulnerability to the world is admirable.
The Allies were told about the camps for years but wouldn't or couldn't believe the reports from resistance members that infiltrated the camps or survivors that escaped. They knew. Keep your revisionist bullshit to yourself. They knew about the camps from the Polish Resistance the moment they were being set up, the Polish had networks of spies and prisoners in the camps gathering information and trying to instigate uprisings. One account of that comes from Witold Pilecki who infiltrated Auschwitz in 1940 and escaped only to be murdered by the Soviets after the war. The Allies didn't acknowledge the camps until 1942, years after they were first getting reports and the UK was listening in to German broadcasts before that speaking about the genocide in Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine in 1941.
@@Nyx_2142 I belie you when it comes to top officers or general commanders (that's why they had order to leave them in the camps, not feed them, etc. 'cause allies commanders had the opportunity to ask for medical advices on what to do with these people) but I can't believe average troopers knew all that.
The killing was organized and done with Teutonic efficiency. And the Allies, while they had heard some evidence from escapees, they did not want to believe such a thing was possible until discoveries like this made it impossible to ignore.
Hi Blue. This is the most emotionally taxing episode. They recreated a newsreel scene with the opening of the freight car.
'Why We Fight' was borrowed from a movie produced by the United States Army Signal Core directed by Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak (both uncredited) that was released in 1942.
Even the most battle hardened troops had difficulties with what they encountered at the concentration, forced labor, and death camps. Growing up I not only read about this but talked to a couple veterans who helped liberated camps.
It is true that many people did not know the extent of what was happening to the Jewish people. Many people have asked why the Jewish people allowed themselves to be incarcerated without fighting. The answer lies in 600 years of pogroms. A pogrom was an action committed by Europeans against European Jews for a variety of reasons. Some resulted in a few deaths, but the Jews were eventually restored to society again.
In Schindler's list the German SS officer in the opening scene says to the others around the dinner table, "They (the Jews) think they can weather the storm, but this storm is the SS." Perhaps if they had known the Germans were bent on genocide they might have gone down fighting from the start.
It's so surreal to me. I'm German, I understand what most of the prisoners say. I think some come from Yugoslavia (Serbia?). The language of the good, the liberator, the savior, is English and for me it is only my second language. They free MY compatriots, the relatives, the friends, the neighbors, the colleagues, the people you meet on the street every day. The Germans who had a different faith, a different political opinion, who were artists or who had an undesirable sexual orientation.
NOTHING CAN MAKE THIS AGAIN...
This episode is a brilliant reminder that a whole lot of people had no idea what exactly was going on in Europe.
When Vietnam happened it was the first war that was covered honestly and graphically in the media.
The column of "people" were some of the 300,000 Germans who Private Janovec (Tom Hardy) mentioned had surrendered.
Those are captured German soldiers. As Cart said, they didn't hate replacements, they didn't want to get to know new people as they had already lost brothers in battle. When someone you know dies trying to save a replacement (due to lack of experience) it makes it worse. By the time in this episode the troops were tired, been fighting a long time and were tired of fighting, but as they got deeper into Germany they met more fanatical German's who were fighting harder. It was also the first time they found camps. There were rumors, but no one believed them at the time. Now they know why they are fighting.
The death camps weren't widely known by the public or standard soldiers, However the intelligence of the UK & US forces with recognisance flights (taking photographs from planes) as well as people who escaped from Poland and Germany who passed on what the knew. So Churchill and Roosevelt had some information but were convinced or had details of the number of Jews & minorities being killed or how on an industrial level they were being killed until these camps were found and then Eisenhower was furious which lead him to marching the local people through the camps to see what their leader Hitler had done.
The replacements weren't hated it was just too painful to get friendly with a new guy for him to get killed only days or weeks new into their platoon.
Oh my gosh blue that was really ruff to watch 😭 seeing all those people just suffer
Many Americans knew the Nazis hated non Aryans but they didn't know the camps existed until later.
I am sure, the woman from the house, her husband was the camp commander, if not, he was certainly a high ranking officer
A high ranking decorated officer, but not the camp commander. He isn't wearing an SS uniform, insignia on the collar. And the units administering the camps were the notorious SS-Totenkopfverbände (death head units) with the skull insignia on the cap.
My Grandpa Tony liberated a sub-camp of Buchenwald Concentration Camp. He had little sympathy for the "Krauts" before and even less after that. He still calls Germans "Krauts" to this day.
Imagine seeing the horrors of War, then seeing this. "Why We Fight" is a nod to the legendary series made by Frank Capra, it was made while the War was happening. I think it is no coincidence that the German Woman is wearing the stark red coat, as the little girl who dies in Schindler's List. Spielberg is sending a message of both sides of the Holocaust. This is still happening today.
That's Tom Hanks, the French executioner @12:53
Why We Fight series is available on RUclips. It was designed to be shown to recruits to explain, well, why we fought. All the men in Easy Company would have seen it.
That lad you've never seen...is Tom Hardy in one of his early roles....he appears in the last 2 episodes :)
Ironically you won''t see more of him than you do in this one
It’s not that we hate replacements. I just retired from the Army after 20 years. And deployed 7 times. When I hear new guys say “I can’t wait to go to war etc”. It’s frustrating cause war is NOT fun and it’s nothing to be excited about.
Nixon was actually having an affair, hence why Winters doesn't actually seem too sympathetic to Nix there 😂
True, back in Ep. 5, Crossroads, Nix tells Winters he was going back to England on leave to meet a young lady.
Webster isn't treated like a replacement because he's a Taccoa man - he just got shot in Holland so he wasn't in the show again until episode 8.
Отличный военный сериал от создателей "Спасти Рядового Райна",есть еще сериал «Тихий океан» тоже отлично поставлен.Отражает все действия которые были тогда)
Blue should not be watching these heartbreaking shows alone. 😭❤
Just to add to, not contradict, what others have said: One reason replacements were resented was trauma bonding among the original paras. Trauma bonding is one of the strongest emotional ties humans can experience; you go through some crazy fucked up shit together and nothing and no one can replicate that. Having a bunch of newbies coming in would have felt almost insulting or humiliating for them; hence ingroup/outgroup. Then when O'keefe sees the camp with the rest of them, he has a trauma bonding moment with them too. War is fucked
This episode ripped through my guts. Watching you react to this atrocity made me think we must never be allowed to forget.
This episode pulls you right in. The interviews set you up to see a sort of equivalence between the Allies and the Germans. You see the men of Easy being hardened after their experiences. They displace civilians, they loot property. Nixon vandalizes the store and disrespects the widow to steal booze. You start to get the idea that these guys are just as brutal as the Nazis. The question comes up, “Why are we fighting? Why are we loosing our families?”
And then they discover the camps… There is a difference and the camps make it clear.
The camps were starting to be located at this point in the war, by the Russians coming in from the east and the US and other Allies coming in from the west. This episode depicts the liberation of Kaufering, which was one of 11 sub-camps of Dachau.
Imagine combat hardened soldiers with months of time on the front line who had seen death and destruction weeping uncontrollably after finding this horror. Still gut wrenching decades later.
Puts that whole war into perspective!
Totally anecdotal but my Mom was a 5 year old in southern Germany... Her home, towards the end of the war, was occupied by American soldiers... They were nothing but kind to her and my Grandmother... Lots of peanut butter and chocolates. Love your content young lady, take care.
The most heartbreaking episode of the whole show.
😢The soldiers didn’t know, but the generals knew and Roosevelt knew and Churchill knew.