What Did We Gain From The Genocides of WW2?

[Edi]

Most everyone usually agrees that WW2 as a whole and the actions of the Nazis in particular were not a good thing. But was anything gained from those horrors? In a word, yes. Medical knowledge would be but a fraction of what it is today without the horrible human experiments conducted by the Nazis and the Japanese, because after all, no moral person would conduct such experiments on another human being. The level of medical care we take for granted came at the cost of millions of innocent lives. Something to think about the next time you have to go to a doctor.

As a side note, everyone is always talking about how the Nazis and their genocide of Jews was the worst imaginable thing to have been done. The Japanese are rarely mentioned in the same breath, if at all, and the Nazis were amateurs compared to them. Check the link, it's to a discussion over at the History section of the Heavengames forums. Should be a real eye-opener. Was for me at least.

http://www.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/foru ... 4565,0,all

Edi

[Mr Bean]

I find the whole thing Ironic, and ignore the Japanise because Stalin and Mao both killed more people in each of thier countrys than Germany and Japan did put togther and times two

[starfury]

I find the whole thing Ironic, and ignore the Japanise because Stalin and Mao both killed more people in each of thier countrys than Germany and Japan did put togther and times two

true, but the nature of japanese atroctcies was far greater then those of Germany and Russia. Remeber the infamous "Rape of nanking" in 1937, no other dictator had so many killed in that short peroid of time. they killed fro sport as well, no other dictatorship did that.

the U.S bombing of Japan with atomic bombs combined didn't kill as much as this one act.

[Stravo]

We learned two very important things:

How horrible and utterly evil mankind can be. Industrilaized death, experiments, destruction of entire civilian populations....

How heroic mankind can be. We saw young men and women marching off to confront the evil that theratened to swallow up the world, with no hope of victory in sight and they held together and won, THEN rebuilt the lands of their former enemies.

The duality of man...nothing can be more inspiring and terrifying all at the same time.

[Captain Cyran]

Personally I think we learned that some people don't learn from War *Cough*Isreal*Cough*

[VilliageIdiot]

I find the whole thing Ironic, and ignore the Japanise because Stalin and Mao both killed more people in each of thier countrys than Germany and Japan did put togther and times two

Do you have the statistics handy? Because this is the first time I've heard of such a claim, so I'd like to know where the numbers come from. Thanks in advance.

[Guest]

On one hand, wartime always speeds up the development of new technologies, which does benefit mankind in the long run.

On the other hand, we learned nothing that we wouldn't have learned anyway - even if it'd have taken a few years longer.

The one thing we did learn that is perhaps the most important was the destructive potential of nuclear weapons. I wonder if everyone would be so terrified of using them if Hiroshima had never happened.

[Next of Kin]

By Village Idiot:

Do you have the statistics handy? Because this is the first time I've heard of such a claim, so I'd like to know where the numbers come from. Thanks in advance.

Stalin:
From 1934 to 1938 -- 7,000,000 people
source: BBC

http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/modern/s ... alihtm.htm

Mao:
I'm having difficuly finding an exact number. Some sources say 35 million , others say 15 million.

[Sea Skimmer]

No accurate records exist of how many Stalin killed. Most information is based off of comparisons of the last Czar era census to the late 1920's Soviet ones. Adjustments are made for the number of people who should have been born but were not because their potential parents were killed.

Such can give you numbers from five to over twenty seven million. Personally I've seen more support for 20 odd million killed then anything else. But where never going to know.

WW2 brought us advancements in almost every field of technology that would have taken at least a decade, in the case of nuclear power likely longer, to achieve without the war.

[VilliageIdiot]

Thanks to Next of Kin and Sea Skimmer for the statistics and the reference.

Adjustments are made for the number of people who should have been born but were not because their potential parents were killed.

Was the same adjustment made when calculating the deaths caused by Hitler's genocide and the Japanese Rape of Nanking?

[Enforcer Talen]

I am unsure the concentration camps did much for medical knowledge - some of the experiments were mind bogglingly stupid. for example, they took a prisoner and put him in iceberg flavoured water for several hours, then had camp prostitutes 'revive' him - to see how to get luftwaffe pilots healthier after high ceiling flying.

what they found, not unsuprisingly, was that one girl warmed him better then two, and blankets and a warm room better then a girl.

not as if we hadn't been using that idea for 6 thousand yrs or anything.

[Sea Skimmer]

Thanks to Next of Kin and Sea Skimmer for the statistics and the reference.

Adjustments are made for the number of people who should have been born but were not because their potential parents were killed.

Was the same adjustment made when calculating the deaths caused by Hitler's genocide and the Japanese Rape of Nanking?

The adjustment mind you is not to count the unborn as being KILLED by Stalin, but to avoid doing just that.

Its not necessary to do this because allot of first hand data can be found for the Holocaust, most from captured German records, and to a lesser extent Nanking. Ironically, a lot of the information's comes from the Nazi Consulate in the city. The Japanese where not willing to enter its grounds, or restrict the movement of personal from it who had Nazi armbands. As a result a lot of wounded where saved through the efforts of its staff, and allot of data got gathered first hand.

However, estimates on the number killed in the rape of Nanking vary by tens of thousands. Suffice to say though, over 100,000 where killed and every IJA solider present should have been shot for war crimes.

[lgot]

We did not learnt anything from the Genocides. There is no such "Medical advancements" done in the fields which you could not develop in peace somewhere in the same time. We all know already how much ignorance can kill and how much war can make "heroic" myths.
If we have more wisdow after the war what is happening in Israel would not be happening right now.

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

Didn't the s base some of their research, such as research on twins, on pseudoscience?

[VilliageIdiot]

The adjustment mind you is not to count the unborn as being KILLED by Stalin, but to avoid doing just that.

Thanks for the clear up.

[Icehawk]

We did not learnt anything from the Genocides. There is no such "Medical advancements" done in the fields which you could not develop in peace somewhere in the same time.

Actually we did. I saw a documentary a while back and one of the experiments conducted by German scientists consisted of body resistence to extreme temperatures. Perticularily on how much the human body and organs can tolerate in freezing cold water and about hypothermia and such. We learned a great deal from those experiments. We could not have learned so much if human subjects were not used.

[lgot]

Its a failure. We still learning much more than they ever did, since like someone pointed , much of their experiments are a waste, because they basead it in "pseudoscience". We could have learned all they did, which was not big, because one of the problem of decande of the Nazis are that Hitler, the crazy lunatic, stopped working with science and development to follow his arianism stupidy.
We could have learned all that in the same time with other methods.