That's stupid cos that means only people who are bad win wars, can never prove yourself good except is to lose a war, but then you are portrayed as evil anyway cos the winners write the history.

He surprised me, cos most modern Germans have a different attitude to most Japanese. The Germans generally understand that the Nazi government was pretty evil & all that flag waving and being proud of your nation leads to trouble : that one race putting itself above others is a bad thing & that the holocaust should never happen again.

He said, "Everyday people in England watch these movies about the WW2 portraying Germans as evil.", Ridiculous, What a nutcase, I guess he must be from some dark corner of East Germany or something.

Atrocities - He claimed the Germans and Japanese are portrayed as evil, cos as losers their atrocities are paraded whilst the atrocities the British and American winners are covered up. There is a morsel of truth in this, but to equate the 2 would be a crime of enormous magnitude. In other wars maybe there have been equal atrocities on both sides, but in this case no : the Germans and Japanese started the wars by invading other countries, in particular Japan was already in other countries as ruthless oppressors. Although Russia colonised other countries after the war the British and Americans didn't. I am sure in 6 years of wars there were small isolated incidences of brutality happened, but these in no way compare with the Jew extermination policies of the German government or the normal ruthless exploitation of POWs by the Japanese.
Is there a case where the winners were seen bad ? i.e. winners Atrocities well known not covered up. Maybe the Soviet atrocities are well known, but by the 50's they were seen as enemies.

He claims Germany is still paying they have to buy the Israelis a new submarine every year. (background check : the Israeli's ordered 3 from Germany. It's not a present. The Israelis are paying, but the Germans are paying for 1/3 of at least one sub. And that could be seen as subsidizing German workers rather than just a guilt payment, also delivery was suspended cos the Germans didn't want the subs to be used for nuclear weapons)

I said you can't possibly be saying the Americans are as bad as the Nazis "look I'm not going to say that the US Government are angels as there's Guantanamo Bay, and sometimes their soldiers behave like cowboys in Iraq. "No, they are evil", they crossed the line.. - How Stupid, is he saying dropping one piece of litter is equivalent to be a psychopathic murderer ?

It was obvious to me that although I think the US causes harm through stupid mistakes he is a subscriber to the theory the US is the root of all evil This is clearly a false dichotomy ie Black and white world magnitude fallacy - "My maths teacher, my local park keeper : He's a Nazi". No he's not : Setting a bit of extra homework is not the same as rounding up everybody of a certain race and seeking to exterminate them. Having this simplistic view of the world is easy, but it is not suitable for making decisions about it.

The real world is complicated and technicolour, so dividing it into simple black and white is a fallacy of magnitude.

Now you can have a conspiracy theory, but for it to have any credence you must have evidence. His evidence is that it was a stupid thing for them to do, so they didn't do it. So that's 2 possible arguments 1. a complicated conspiracy where the US sunk half their own boats or 2. the Japanese were stupid. Rule of science is that the simplest solution is most likely. Actually the normal thinking isn't that the Japanese weren't stupid, but that they already knew America would enter the Pacific war soon. Japan was already suffering sanctions from the Allies for invading Manchuria, so bombing Pearl Harbour was a successful pre-emptive attack, which put the Americans out of actions whilst the Japanese invaded SE Asia.

His argument #3
Every other nation is in the International Court, but it's outside. (which is not actually true China or India won't join either, but why blame them when you can blame America). 105 countries are in 41 have signed up.
I understand the US logic - It knows it's big, it's soldiers make a lot of mistakes, it's people are honest so it would spend a lot of time and money in court. Other nations can afford to be in cos, they have nothing to fear mostly or never have soldiers in other countries or they are totalitarian so they would just block any investigations anyway. The US being open wouldn't block investigations instead it would find itself involved complex costly suits, for things which are usually dealt with in Court Martials. Admittedly the sentences it imposes on it's own soldiers are often seem lenient, but most countries are worse.

-1- Unfairness I'd rather be in the US Justice system than 80% of other countries. Yes Holland, Sweden, would be better, but Russia, China, a tinpot African country, Uzbekistan, North Korea certainly not.

-2- Murderers "George Bush, wants to kill muslims", some Indonesian guy told me after being fired up in the Mosque on Friday. Well he's not very good at is he ? For a start there's a couple of million muslims living in the US who enjoy the same legal rights as everyone else. Then there's the Palestinians, Iraquis, and Iranians given political asylum in the US.

The wars : people were killed by bombs at the beginning of the Iraq war maybe some unjustifiable collateral damage, but if Sadam had stayed in power the everyday brutality of his regime would have meant more dead than from American bombings and insurgent killings put together. Today it's the insurgentes killing Muslims not Americans.

Islamic nations wars against each other and internal wars kill many people. There are countless of these usually not thought about cos they don't appear on Western TV screens. The Lebanese civil wars with Hezbollah fighting, Syrian invasions, Hamas vs Fatah in Palestine. (that doesn't excuse the nutty Israeli political machine) , Yemen, Sudan, Chechnia, Pakistan, Kurdish places, Aceh never mind the 2 million killed in the Iran/Iraq wars. One death caused by the US is not good, but other muslims usually their own governments are responsible for 98% or 99% of violent muslim deaths.

Take jailings when a political activist is arrested in Uzbekistan, or Saudi is it "Excuse me sir",..... " ah you say weren't there, OK better release him", ? No more likely "oops he fell down the stairs", the Amnesty figures of deaths in custody in muslim countries are horrendous I imagine tens of thousands each year. But the vast majority of attention goes on a few US injustices. According the BBC prog 2 of the reasons why Guantanamo can’t be closed are 1. that some prisoners won't go back to their own countries for fear of their own police. 2. American law forbids a prisoner being released to a country where he might be tortured. more in the article below

People apply different standards to the US than other countries

- 1 - Other countries are far worse but excuses are made, "yes but they are only developing countries", or "they are muslim states what do you expect".

- 2 -US stuff is more visible, for a number of reasons like convenience of media, more open etc. Something happens in Uzbekistan or Zaire then we don't get to hear about it.

Perspective : Protest against US Injustice, but don't ignore those people unlucky enough to be suffering at the hands of others or their own governments

Klaus went on to rave how every country respects the sovereign law of other countries, but the US doesn't. He seemed to think US law is special that even when US people are in other countries US law supercedes local law.

Not true : in general US law doesn't apply abroad, Texas teenagers are not arrested when they return from drinking in Mexico even though US drink age is 21, nor can citizens be arrested for going to Amsterdam dope cafes.

Exceptions : There are a number of exceptions, some laws are extraterritorial like some, patent laws and the Patriot act which has sections on overseas banks laundering money or processing terrorist funds. So Americans are given different contracts or even refused in foreign banks. Cos even if the bank is complying with local law if it breaks the Patriot Act it maybe prevented from dealing with US banks. 23 countries including US, UK, & Getmany have extraterritorial laws against child sex and sex traffiicking which supercede local laws. These may only apply to the foreigner though and not for example the Thai gangster. 6 countries including Spain and Belgium seem to have human rights laws, which apply to all nationalities and all countries. Finally US law applies to US citizens when local law has broken down, like in a war zone or failed state.

No there are degrees of bad ..... The US is at the incompetent mistake end rather than the black heart.

"It was just some myth made up by those evil Americans/Jews. We in Germany are not free to discuss even My Kamf is banned in Germany, there is only one acceptable line, we Germans are brainwashed" .. Klaus says.
quote"Mein Kampf," or "My Struggle," is banned from sale, but it can be found in libraries for research purposes. The reason goes back to the time when the allies dis-nazi-fied Germany (that's a translation of the word "Entnazifizierung"). Documents, medals, signs, flags, books etc. of people who were in the NSDAP party or worked for the goverment, police, post office, city hall and smilar had to proof that they became "Nazi free". The houses were inspected by the allied forces, documents, books and medals were confiscated. Those laws have never been changed or touched. In my opinion there is no need to ban the book, I tried to read it (in German, my mother tongue). I failed after a few pages. That guy knew how to write a book, that no one wants to read. It is horribly and boring written, and content is something that you need to search for. .

"some of the guards houses were right in front of the supposed gas chambers", "it doesn't make sense that they were using precious resources to exterminate people.",

- That last part something doesn't have to make sense to be true and anyway it does make sense. They have millions of enemy inside German territory, so to control them they put them in camps, but even in camps they have to feed them and guard them so they turned the camps into death factories.

OK I don't agree with the idea the principle of a Holocaust denial law, but my understanding is it doesn't prevent anyone asking questions, it just prevents actual denial. Sure there might be questions as to the actual numbers especially the way the non-jewish people are often left unmentioned. I told him there would be books or internet pages that deal with denial claims in the same way they deal with moon landings faked idea. Sure enough I found one. www.nizkor.org

Seems to me the level of uncertainty about the holocaust happening is about the same as me being in the Trueman show and all the other people being actors and the buildings being cardboard cutouts. It would be one hell of a conspiracy ! all those fake witbesses, photos, arranging for people to have fake tattoos, fake testimonies like Anne Franks diary, all those prison guards made to give fake confessions.

To be fair in Germany during the war it didn’t appear in the German media and all the camps were situated outside Germany's pre-war borders, nor was soap made from the bodies like one British POW suggested. 3m were killed in Poland

The 5.7m Jewish deaths is the total calculated from prewar figures, some people would have died at workcamps, in transport, marches, shootings so total exterminated is not sure. And there was an issue at one camp where is seems the ovens seemed to be new or not well used. Still everywhere you look there mountains of evidence graves and bodies etc. Goebbels Diary was discovered after the war, it mentions on many occasions the camps.

He argued the case that many Germans were exterminated in Soviet controlled area after the war. Firstly that in no way discredits the Holocaust story, secondly it cannot be dismissed out of hand. The East unlike the west was a totalitarian regime where things were easier to hide and repress. The motive ? vengeance. Families searching for lost relatives .. he says they killed everyone so no searchers . The locations cleaned up. Someone would have passed the stories to Allied spies. Surely it's of interest to modern historians if it were true why would anyone except the Russians suppress it.

I checked surprisingly Yes it is true. Estimates on Neo Nazi sites said 3 million rightwing site, other sites were usually 0.5m some said 1m source, souce 2 also wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_during_and_after_WWII has some details.
Wow it's not suppressed it's just that it's not shouted at like the Holocaust.

In the era of lawlessness after the end of the war there were many atrocities against ethnic Germans, especially in Poland. Some of these attacks were as horrific as the Nazis. Usually non government though at least one rogue council. Polish and other governments may have expelled 15m + Germans and some of deaths happened in this process. There was a lot of animosity to the Germans who had enjoyed priviliges during the war. People took over their houses. Certainly Russion soldiers raped many German women and in the end they were ordered to stay on base in order to control this. Some Germans were interned in the old concentration camps and there is evidence that 1 or 2 Jews worked in the camps and took viscious vengeance against Germans.

This was made famous in a book called An Eye for an Eye by John Sack. quote : To listen to Lola, hundreds of Jews were operating in all of Poland and Poland-administered Germany. Their leaders were Jewish generals in Warsaw, to listen to Lola. Their mission was to hunt for SS, Nazis, and Nazi collaborators, to punish them and, if appropriate, kill them, and in this way to take revenge against the Jew-killers of Germany. Or so Lola said.

The problem with this book is that it is a novel it mixes fact with fiction. Most reviewers said the magnitude expressed in the book and the premise that gangs of Jews went around exterminating Germans was not true. negative view quote : "one is left with a thin eighty pages of narrative of the sort that I have exposed here. The book is only a congeries of anecdotes-- many of them dubious and farfetched, and also uncheckable, since they are based almost completely on personal interviews--about the deeds of merely a handful of people. (It is important to note that neither Lola, the book's main protagonist, nor her guards, however much they beat prisoners, ever killed. The deaths in Lola's camp, like most of the German deaths, and the deaths of Germans that occurred in American internment camps after the war, were due to outbreaks of typhus and other diseases.)

Poland : quote CONCLUSION Over a million Ethnic Germans and Reich Germans in or from the new post-war Polish territories likely died, 1945-1948. They were killed directly, or died from starvation, disease, exposure, in concentration camps, or during or because of their deportation to Germany. Since these deaths were outright murder, or because conditions were forced on these people that would likely result in their deaths, this was democide. How many died will never be known, and it is even doubtful that we can come within several hundred thousand of the true total. As I often point out, the most thoroughly studied figures for the Holocaust, and with scholarly access to the relevant official archives, the best estimates of Jewish deaths still differ by as much as 41 percent.38. This is to say that such democide surely took place, but experts and scholars can legitimately disagree as to the number.

Czechoslovakia quote " 2,232,544 people were transferred to Germany: two-thirds of them to the American sector, and one-third to the Soviet sector (note: not all of the transferred were actual Germans, the number includes the non-German members of mixed families and renegades). Only about 244,000 Germans were allowed to remain in Czechoslovakia. Many German refugees from Czechoslovakia are represented by the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft.

I think it's very important to get PERSPECTIVE - 2 wrongs don't make a right, The attacks on Germans were terrible, but the holocaust is a much worse deed

1. it was unprovoked
2. it was done officials by a government not a few crazy individuals
3. it went on for years
4. The people persecuting the Germans were of unsound mind, having experienced hardship or persecution in the war themselves
5. The Nazi's plan was a systematic plan to exterminate Jews. The attacks against Germans weren't the same.
6. magnitude - 5.7 million is a bigger number than 1m not only that it reperesents a high proportion of all Jews wheras a small fraction of Germans were attacked.

Anecdotal evidence in perspective : Anecdotal evidence is provoking, but it doesn't stand up against real statistical evidence. A mass murder can't go and say "well one of my victims used to beat his dog occaisionally, so he's as bad as me"

perspective of generational time : As well a perspective of numbers we need to get perspective of time you can't put the sins of the grandfathers onto the Grandsons, Nazis onto modern Germans, Slave owners onto present day whites, crusaders onto present day Christians, Romans onto Italiens.

It certainly wasn't a cover up. They allowed him access and allowed him to interview military staff freely, although they were sometimes carelful in their answers not to trap themselves.

Why does Guantanamo Bay prison exist ? I think it's possible that the US Justice system is in such a mess with too many legal loopholes etc, that in the interests of National Security they decided to be outside it. i.e. A legal minefield.
They feel they need to do 2 things which are outside US law.
1 - Interr people cos they might be a threat
2 - Hold people without trial, because they believe it not safe to release the evidence
3- could you add it might be easier to torture people ? which is supposed to be against US law anyway

It may well be a better place than 90% of the terrorist prisons in the world, but - it sets an outrageous example to other countries as it overturns the legal norms of habeus corpus ie holding people without charging them.

It's obvious it has an number of non devious advantages over a mainland location. You are not going to have a crowd of protesters outside the gate or news copters flying overhead etc.

There was talk about closing the camp and moving remaining prisoners to a mainland military jail. -

reasons why Guantanamo can’t be closed
1. that some prisoners won't go back to their own countries for fear of their own police and no 3rd country will take them yet. the number quoted was 70
2. American law forbids a prisoner being released to a country where he might be tortured.

2 other reasons
- prisoners who they cannot bring to trial cos they don't want to reveal the evidence
- prisoners who they cannot charge, but they think they are dangerous. So they are interred.

They talked to the wife of one prisoner I think in Tunisia , who was suffering more now he is an Tunisian jail, cos the police come and threaten her and he's been tortured. threaten to rape his wife and daughter

I think they mentioned they can no longer release prisoners to Russia cos former GB prisoners have been tortured. I think there was one country, where a returned prisoner had died in jail.

Has anyone died in Guantanamo ? 4 suicides though the US didn't release the corpses for independent examination. 3 died at the same time a discussion ..quote : "nine detainees have died in U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan alone." Not good, but not exactly a holocaust. Remember 200,00 people die prematurely every day on this planet