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Least favorite alt-history story?

monroetempleton said:
I get what you mean, but this is also literally what I mean as well- I just don't think Ellen's arc is especially well developed, and I think the space she consumed should have been taken by our new charecter crop while she's more of a spectre haunting the background.

That said I would note plenty of gay Republicans paled around with Reagan and Atwater- the show's ultimate issue with Ellen's arc (beyond that it just exists) is that it literally just is the Lewinsky Scandal, rather than something about the more fundamental tension of Ellen, a WASP not-Bush, riding the muscle of the GOP while also being a closeted gay woman.
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This is why the coming out plotline wasn't ... good.

It's also weird how the AIDS crisis ... never gets mentioned.
 
TheKennedyMachine said:
It's also weird how the AIDS crisis ... never gets mentioned.
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I haven’t seen the show, but I would posit that maybe Hart handles things better than Reagan did and the later stages of the crisis are averted.

Otherwise, the writers forgot. Indeed bad writing is often just bad writing and I wouldn’t consider there to be a political conspiracy from the writers over it, they probably just forgot to plan properly.
 
Sulemain said:
It might have been a sick attempt at a 'joke'.

The man commanded Hitlers bodyguard. He was well aware of what the SS/Einzetgruppen got up to in North Africa. If he ever had any personal mistaste or disagreement with Hitler, he never let it show.
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Oh, you think Rommel had just been joking? Theoretically he could have, but the "Führer" definitely reacted as if he had been serious and told Rommel that he didn't get what national socialism meant. - And the "führer" also took Blaskowitz' critic serious enough to tell him that the war wasn't won with "methods of the Salvation Army".

About your other claims, esp. the Einsatzgruppen: Citation please.
 
Max Sinister said:
About your other claims, esp. the Einsatzgruppen: Citation please.
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Just to start with, taken from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/erwin-rommel

Even more problematic was his relationship to a proposed Einsatzgruppen Egypt. This unit was to be tasked with murdering the sizeable Jewish population of North Africa and the British mandate of Palestine and to be attached directly to Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Its commander, Walther Rauff, had helped design the gas van. Rauff met with Rommel’s staff in 1942 to prepare for the arrival of the units. No evidence exists to record Rommel’s position on the proposed measure, but he was certainly aware that planning was taking place. While the larger Einsatzgruppen were never deployed, smaller detachments did murder Jews in North Africa.

*Bolding mine.

Then there's this from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/background-and-overview-of-the-einsatzgruppen

A new study by historians Klaus-Michael Mallman and Martin Cueppers says that an Einsatzgruppe was created in 1942 to kill Jews in Palestine. “Einsatzgruppe Egypt” was standing by in Athens, and was prepared to go with General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps to Palestine to kill the roughly half a million Jews that had fled Europe. The mobile killing unit was to be led by SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Walther Rauff.

***

One could go on, but the evidence is overwhelming that Rommel knew about the activities of the Einsatzgruppen in North Africa. What is debatable is whether he approved or simply didn't care provided these activities didn't interfere with his playing at soldiers.

Furthermore, the defence that he didn't know has a problem. If we accept, for the sake of argument, that he didn't know, then he bloody well should have done. The chap in charge really needs to know this sort of stuff, and the word to describe one who doesn't is: "incompetent".
 
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@David Flin : See, that's at least online research done right. It doesn't answer exactly how much he knew, but it's a good start.

It's surprising BTW that the Einsatzgruppe in question was so small - but as stated, they planned to find native "helpers" (and I bet they'd have found them). How many thousand men did Rommel have under his command? If they had actually reached Palestine, and the mass murders of hundred of thousands hadn't stayed in the planning stage, then yes, I guess that every soldier up to Rommel should've known. But so, the actual crimes done in Libya pale in comparison to those done in the "bloodlands" in Eastern Europe, that's how perverted the situation is. (And it might be an explanation for the ignorance about this topic.)

I mean, everyone should know that the German bureaucracy documented everything related to the Holocaust, so certainly it might be possible that somewhere there's a document to prove Rommel's fault.
 
Rommel being ignorant of the Einsatzgruppen planned activities in North Africa is literally incredible.

The leader of the group, Rauff, met with Rommel's staff to prepare for the arrival of the group. Is it credible that Rommel's staff didn't mention to Rommel that there was a group arriving that planned to kill half a million people in the area that Rommel had overall responsibility for? That it planned to take labour and resources - both in desperately short supply for the army - to do this?

It beggars belief that Rommel wasn't aware of what was being planned. The only thing in doubt was whether he approved or if he didn't care.

Given the logistical issues he faced with the army, it seems unlikely to me that he didn't care (the resources were needed to fight the British* rather than devoted to the industrial murder of civilians in rear areas), but that's my assessment from common sense.

Max Sinister said:
But so, the actual crimes done in Libya pale in comparison to those done in the "bloodlands" in Eastern Europe, that's how perverted the situation is.
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Mainly because the British* weren't beaten to allow this, and that the British* advanced too quickly to allow the plan to be put into operation. I'm not sure the German forces in North Africa get a pass because they didn't get the chance to start their genocide.

Given that Rommel was happy to use slave labour to construct the Atlantic Wall, that he was complicit in war crimes in the Battle of France, that he was head of Hitler's bodyguard and who shamelessly used his connection with Hitler to get personal advancement, I find it a bit of a stretch to try and excuse him from stuff he bloody well should have known about, and would have been an incompetent not to have known about.



* British includes South African, West African, French, Indian, Australian, New Zealand ...
 
Those SS men would have wanted to use Rommels soldiers to carry out the killings or support their efforts as was standard practice. Rommel would at very least have been told their logistical requirements.



Actually there you have it, Rommel didn't know about the holocaust because by the time they mentioned the mass murder he'd already zoned out of the conversation about logistics and quipped absent mindedly about it all working out.
 
Max Sinister said:
@David Flin : See, that's at least online research done right. It doesn't answer exactly how much he knew, but it's a good start.

It's surprising BTW that the Einsatzgruppe in question was so small - but as stated, they planned to find native "helpers" (and I bet they'd have found them). How many thousand men did Rommel have under his command? If they had actually reached Palestine, and the mass murders of hundred of thousands hadn't stayed in the planning stage, then yes, I guess that every soldier up to Rommel should've known. But so, the actual crimes done in Libya pale in comparison to those done in the "bloodlands" in Eastern Europe, that's how perverted the situation is. (And it might be an explanation for the ignorance about this topic.)

I mean, everyone should know that the German bureaucracy documented everything related to the Holocaust, so certainly it might be possible that somewhere there's a document to prove Rommel's fault.
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It's simple fucking logic mate. He was a high ranking military officer and part of Hitlers inner circle. Its not so much he knew- it's more that he couldn't not know.

Command Responsibility leaves Rommel at fault.
 
Charles EP M. said:
Every time Rommel's complicity comes up, I remember he's hanging out with the Doctor in a 2014 comic strip because the Noble General With Clean Hands myth has embedded deep.
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Seeing as the Doctor is a former war criminal who got away with it, maybe he has a soft spot for fascist adjacent generals who look the other way when discussing potential war crimes?
 
Matt said:
Seeing as the Doctor is a former war criminal who got away with it, maybe he has a soft spot for fascist adjacent generals who look the other way when discussing potential war crimes?
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Didn't the Timelords literally have a clean Heer evil SS propaganda thing going when they created the Master to do their warcrimes deniably? Or has that been altered.
 
The Doctor also likes to humble brag about all the awful shit he did during the war to stop another one…
 
Charles EP M. said:
Doctor Who: Contra Vice 1, starring Colin Baker with Lachele Carl as a new CIA companion, Robert Picardo playing a recasting on Bill Filer from the Axos story, and a surprise reveal that one of the Val Verde locals is actually the War Chief in disguise.
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Nah, this would be the War Chief.
Bennett-Commando-Vernon-Wells.jpg
 
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