I was just watching Chelsea Handler tracing her roots through...

[TreasonousBastard]

her German father. She knew her mother was Jewish, but had no idea if her father was s Nazi, or just caught up in things. Turns out he was basically a draftee and with little or no Nazi feelings.

But what really got to me was his treatment as a POW. After the Depression and months on the Russian front, he was miraculously transferred to the South of France where his unit surrendered to Allied troops. He ended up at a POW camp in Iowa where he had a great time, possibly what convinced him to bring his wife over here and start fresh.

Reminded me of another German I met in Bad Kreuznach who stayed in Germany but told me of the beautiful US West he enjoyed. I thought he came over on a tour, but was surprised when he said he was a POW.

Yes, America was once great. What happened?

[Torchlight]

1. The Good War by Studs Terkel

is a great little oral history about WW2 by its participants: from Britain, America, Russia and Germany, he interviews soldiers, POWs, Rosie the Riveters, et. al.

One great interview was with an Italian solider in an American POW camp in Georgia. He went on and on about the falling in love with the land around him. He fell in love with a local, petitioned to stay after the war, and eventually married her and became a town mayor in the mid-sixties.

These days, our most exciting stories in my neck of the woods seem to gravitate around the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and Hunstsville state pen by the very people we should hold to the highest of standards.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Studs Terkel was always one of my heroes

[Wounded Bear]

3. As I understand it, many of the POWs from the ETO had work furloughs...

to work in local businesses on good behavior.

[BlackSkimmer]

4. My mother knew a German POW when she was growing up in Wales.

His name was Gunther, and he was from Munich. He wanted to marry her, but at 18, she had no intentions of doing that just yet.

Her whole family adored him, except for my grandmother who used to say, in her inimitable Welsh way, "When he turns sideways, he looks like a Nazi." OF course he wasn't a Nazi, just a young man caught up in war. I still have his picture somewhere. Very good-looking.

Years and years later, my parents visited him and his wife in Munich.

Neither had hard feelings from the war, which is why those here who talk about wars long past, as though they were there, just make me chuckle.

[Samrob]

5. Those POWs were living it up, having a great time while our black and brown service men who fought

and helped win the war were coming home segregated schools and public transportation, lynching, KKK burning crosses on their lawns if they had one, denial of rights to vote, red-lining by banks, and inferior educational systems.

Knowing history harbors the inconvenient truths that so many want to deny, cover up, or make almost criminal. It's why the anti-woke movement is fighting so hard to stop reading, science, history and education in general.

STILL WE RISE!!

[Behind the Aegis]

6. Not to mention all the GLB service members who fought only to be dishonorably discharged.

Of course, some were even imprisoned after the war for their "homosexual behavior" and lost all military benefits. They fought like everyone else and then were made to hide in the shadows.

[Sky Jewels]

7. Yep. And when the service men came home, most women were kicked out of the factories

and other workplaces and told to get back in the kitchen and start making babies.

[TreasonousBastard]

8. I was never under the illusion that we were pure as the driven..

snow back then.

But, as bad as things got, we never stooped to the levels of einsatzgrupen or the medical experiments of both the Germans and the Japanese. Or the human wave attacks of the Soviets.

We were not as good as we could be, but we were good for the times