[Christer Bergström]

When I asked Alfred Grislawski how he reacted when he learned that his friend Ernst Süss had been gunned to death by an American fighter as he hung in his parachute straps, Grislawski answered calmly:

"Es war Krieg, Herr Bergström" - It was war, Mr. Bergström.

Of course a German serviceman who spotted enemy ships would report that. What else? Hide what he had seen and thus enable the enemy to get stronger, which would lead to more of this German guy's fellow countrymen getting killed. Of course he was a German patriot and wanted to save German lives!

And of course the Englishmen understood that - because they acted in the same way. So of course they tried to shoot down those aircraft. Because they were British patriots and wanted to save British lives.

And of course the Germans were very upset because the British shot down their Seenotflugzeuge - that meant that more German pilots would drown in the Channel!

The really terrible thing is war.

And regarding all those accounts which try to pose the "own" side as snow white and which tell us that only the enemy played dirty tricks - that's the hypocrisy which is an organic part of patriotism. Why can't we find any photographs of US troops abusing red cross marked vehicles in US unit histories? Because they are US unit histories. . . I find it rather pathetic to see people pointing out such things and innocently believing that the "own" side never committed such acts of abuse.

To clear any possible misunderstanding, I of course am biased toward the Allied side when it comes to WW II, and I am grateful that the Nazi rule was totally crushed. The extermination camps and the massive scale of deliberate mass executions of people in the conquered territories in the east was a dark spot in Europe's history which ended through the Allied victory. One may say that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in wars conducted by the USA, the UK, France and the USSR after the war, or in political persecutions supported by either of those states, but that pales in comparison with the terrible crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime.

Okay, with that said, allow me to state that all countries committed "atrocities" of the kind which are described in this thread, all armies slaughtered POWs and civilians. That's part of war. The dream of a "clean war" is utterly silly and has nothing in common with reality.