[ANON POST] A variety of ridiculous WWII-related questionS

[orange_fell]

I seem to have a strange plotbunny that won't leave me alone and requires me to write several background incidents based on things I know nothing about. Can you help me, little_details?

Setting: Germany during WWII, but of the wildly unrealistic, over-the-top variety. Think Inglorious Basterds where rule-of-cool outweighs what actually happened.

Comments

[anonymous]

Cool, thanks! The Italian campaign might work pretty well, given that I'm somewhat basing the rescue bit on Operation Begonia-Jonquil.

Was there a lot of a movement for individual officers? As in, could he have been in both the Philippines or Papua New Guinea and then transferred to Europe?

[anonymous]

Is your character a KPD-member? Or just a sympathizer?

In the only part I've written thus far, he's a teenager in 1933 and committed to the extent that teenagers are committed to political causes. Which is to say that they let him sell papers and get into fights with the Hitler Youth, but he's much more interested in hanging out in cabarets and writing poetry. He manages to avoid the huge crackdown when the Nazis come to power by virtue of just not important enough for anyone to notice.

Thanks for the prison suggestions-a prison breakout seems much more plausible than a concentration-camp breakout, and probably far less offensive. I'll definitely check out those books!

[marycatelli]

At which point I think of They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer. One Nazi he interviewed for this book was a former Social Democrat who joined the Nazi party because his past might lead to his dismissal, and it helped cover up.

[irreparable]

(I am Australian and a researcher by trade, so that's my basis for some of my answer. :D

[alextiefling]

As to the badness of the Dresden bombings, I'd recommend the relevant chapter in another Richard J Evans book, Telling Lies About Hitler. He makes it clear that while it was appalling, the badness of Dresden has been played up (especially by the far right) in order to present a false moral equivalence between the two sides.

Also, the bombing of Dresden took place in early 1945 (which is part of the controversy - Allied boots were well on the ground in mainland Europe by then), so it doesn't make sense to use it for the back-story of characters active in 1943.

[irreparable]

The firebombing of Hamburg by the RAF and USAF (Operation Gomorrha) happened in July 1943, though. Are 80,000-odd dead and burned civilians bad enough for your purposes, OP?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_War_II

[irreparable]

Oh wow. Thanks a gazillion! I'd found the first site already but the rest are new to me.

Dresden's too late for my purposes, which is a pity because that's the one I've read about in great detail.

[houseboatonstyx]

I think you could get some good perspective on background, and maybe specific details, by reading the thrillers of Manning Coles, especially the first one, A TOAST TO TOMORROW.

Aiui, 'Coles' is the pen name of a team of writers, one of whom was really a British spy in that period. The first book takes the Brit, Tommy Hambledon, from the period of WWI to near WWII, living in Germany as a 'mole'. Iirc the later books take him through WWII and further.

Very light and readable, too!

[rosinarowantree]

I think I learned all I know about the growth of the Nazi Party from A Toast to Tomorrow - and more from Green Hazard.

[houseboatonstyx]

Eeee! Sounds very much up my alley in general.

[anonymous]

That would totally work. Yeah, I need him to make contact with the Brits pre-arrest and be valuable enough to risk a stupid mission on. So having intel that turned out to be correct but wasn't listened to would be a cool twist.