How I worship and admire the indomitable Nazi pilots who gave their all for the glory of the Third Reich Fatherland. Another uplifting paean for Hitler's Heroes by Rob.

To the Chocolate Soldier: I have no doubt that you have stated the cold facts, but it's easy to see where your heart is. Pardon me, but those guys were my enemies, and mine to kill.

It's just a topic to me. I don't write about mundane daily life things. To my credit, I have written about Allied aircraft and raids too. I also write about technology and anything that is controversial. Nothing is off limits. You should know that by now...

Bad men prevail because better men suspend their moral judgement and follow their orders. That is the history of mankind. Or not so kind. Security code FAU (Fuerza Aerea Uruguaya), a long-time post WWII operator of the P-51 Mustang, before they sold them to Bolivia, who later traded them to some Canadian collectors for T-33's.

@Rob: Baloney! You are neither disinterested nor even-handed. You are a Germanophile who will take any opportunity to point out the superior innovative genius of Germans, including Nazis. That also includes the egregious observation that the German stuffed bear preceded the Teddy Bear! It is more than unseemly that you should praise the gallantry of men, who Patrick has observed suspended their moral judgment and "vas chust following orders." Blame it all on Hitler and Goebbels. To its credit, Germany has enacted a mea culpa for its genocide of civilians in its law which makes it a crime to deny the Holocaust, and its many memorials to its guilt and its victims. Yet, during the PLO slaughter of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics, the vaunted German security forces were fumbling and ineffective. For all your acculturation into American pop song, commercial jingles, etc., you are still a blood German with a particular fondness for the glory days of the Third Reich. You are not a fully assimilated American, though this is your native land.

Amen, AAF. If any country should have to overcome collective guilt, it's Germany. Concentration camps in Germany were much more numerous than originally thought, and housed as few as 10 slave laborers in populated areas. The German civilians looked the other way, as they did near the extermination camps where the smell of burning flesh and the smoke and ashes went unremarked. Hail to the brave Luftwaffe for fighting to the death for that degenerate regime. Praise to the members of the High Command who attempted to assassinate Hitler.

Ok, I kept it civil, but gloves off now. The US and European Colonial Overlords have nothing to say about the evils of Nazi Germany. The Europeans conquered many nations and people all over the world centuries before and treated them like vermin in their own lands, worked them to death, denied them basic rights and Britain had slavery too. Australian settlers (read British prison thugs) killed Abos for sport and stole their children for Christian conversion until the 1970s. The US practiced chattle slavery for hundreds of years in an African Holocaust and treated them as personal property working them to death on plantations for life. Then there's US attempted genocide of the 500 Native American nations. The good old USA butchered them and stole their lands, forbid their customs and religions. In WW2 there was Japanese-American internment while German POWs sent here had more rights than minorities! In modern times, the US propped up Saddam against Iran then turned on him in the war on terror. There's Gitmo torture, illegal detainment, abduction and imprisonment in foreign classified camps outside the US and murder by drone of tens of thousands of innocents with millions displaced. So don't any of you moralists preach to me. You are the same charlatans that gave the Native Americans fire water, small pox bllankets, and trinkets for land while thumping the Bible. WW2 US and Britain also knew of the death camps and made no attempts to bomb the rail lines nor liberate them prior to 1945 using commandos. Th USAAF also spared strategic targets of scientific interest by order of the US Government and the US Army rescued Nazi scientists on lists. Von Braun was a Captain in the SS and his rockets killed tens of thousands. He was not prosecuted. Neither were the Dachau murderers due to space medicine science needed by NACA. You people don't know history nor want to acknowledge Allied war crimes. In 1945 on the West Front US, British, British Commonwealth, French, French Colonial and other guerilla fighters raped German women just as the Soviets were doing in the east with 2.2 million raped and murdered. The USSR killed 2 million German troops postwar marched back to the USSR for forced 10 year labor. All hard facts you ignore, you so-called "civilized" swine. Btw, both Britain and the US were as Antisemitic as the Soviets and controlled and refused Jewish refugees from Hitler's Reich pre and postwar!!! Britain turned back the Exodus 47 ship at Palestine to France which refused them then shipped back to Germany to be greeted by German hecklers. The French and others stole Jewish property and when survivors returned, they had to fight to get their own stuff back!!! US did the same with Japanese-American property. And let's not forget about the KKK, civil rights murders and abuses of the 1960s and so on continuing today.

Btw AAF, Hitler was Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" in the late 1930s and the old Pledge of Allegiance to the US flag was stiff right arm salute just like the Nazis! The Founding Fathers were also occult Freemasons and many owned slaves !!! How's your patiotic flag waving now?

I'm no apologist for the German civilian population of the WWI era; my last name is German, but my German ancestor migrated to the US in 1870, probably to escape the rise of German militarism .... But there are a couple of statements that needs to be answered. German civilians did not look away from the death camps, as they were all located in Poland, hundreds of miles away and five of them -- Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Belzec -- were all state secrets known only to the SS and the Nazi party higher ups. Morever, the existence of a death camp inside Auschwitz (Birkenau) was also a state secret. As a matter of fact, the camps themselves were set up in secret because the Nazis couldn't find a few thousand German soldiers who were willing to machine gun women and children ...... Finally, the appalling condition of concentration camps inside Germany that the Allies discovered in April 1945 was caused by the complete breakdowm of the entire system, as inmates from camps in Poland and East Germany flooded into camps like Belsen .... This is not to excuse the German people who came to worship Hitler as God-like, especially after the stunning victory over France in 1940, but their culpability is not as obvious as some remarks here would make it appear

Well put CML... it's not like any German citizen near a death-work camp (especially if tied to war production) could just go up the street to complain to the SS about a foul smell in the air!!! What bugs me the most is that the US and Britain both knew of the camps and never bombed the rail lines which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Europe and the USSR were already Antisemitic before Hitler came to power and the US and Britain blocked Jewish iimmigration pre and postwar. Britain also tipped off the Nazis when they learned their weapons to communist guerillas were going to be used to fight western democracy postwar!!! How's that?

If everybody else commits evil acts, why can't I?

You can, if your conscience permits. But to do it on a grand scale, you will likely need help. That is the first prerequisite of leadership: followers.

@Logician Mankind IS evil!!! From recorded history until now. Flip on a news channel! Your logic is unsound. Evil is a condition of man from birth.

My comment "If everybody else commits evil acts, why can't I?" is an ironic rebuke to Rob's well-worn mitigation of German World War 2 atrocities. Everyone's favorite country does it, he writes as some warped defense of Nazi Germany: Britain and the U.S. did not bomb rail lines leading to major concentration camps; the U.S. practiced slavery, committed genocide against Native Americans, etc., etc.

The fact is that each evil stands alone and is to be condemned categorically and never repeated.

There are two things that appall me: 1) Rob consistently portrays Nazi henchmen in a heroic light, as in this parody, or he proudly stresses the innovative scientific genius resident in the Third Reich and the productivity of its war machine, which is matched only by his own obsessive productivity re "parodies." He calls 'em as he sees 'em, he explains. Bunk! I explain. 2) The Nazis set up a unique Henry Ford-like death machine to eliminate innocent peoples they considered non-human. At least the Native Americans got to scalp some whites and, after Pearl Harbor, there was an explainable, if wrong, reaction towards Japanese-Americans. Try as he may, Rob cannot quite muster examples of mass murder of the scale and industrial efficiency as that perpetrated by Nazi Germany. But, admittedly, here I quibble about the means of genocide.

Historian: I am not a student of the human mind, and you probably aren't, either. If Evil is a condition of Man at birth, so is Goodness. If that were not true, the words "Evil" and "Goodness" would not exist.

Seven million Ukrainians died in Stalin's artificial famine of the 1930s. That was well before WW2 and was systematically carried out. The Turks also killed one million Armenians in the 20th century. German system was just more efficient. Btw, you left out US chattel slavery conveniently, the African holocaust for hundreds of years. All you are doing is playing American apologist for the same evils and barbarity. Btw, being a Luftwaffe pilot in service is not equal to the SS on the ground. Since my family is on both sides of the Atlantic, I have the right to take pride on both sides. Borders don't mean much to me for birth. One's blood is stronger. And I agree that your logic is unsound as mankind's greatest lessons are that man doesn't learn from history and is so condemned to repeat it. In the 21st century nothing has changed. ISIS are the new IslamoNazis marching forth in the ME and they should be engaged on the ground by all civilized nations of power and utterly destroyed by all means necessary. Air strikes have killed less than ISIS' monthly worldwide recruitment! You Sir are the Chamberlain of 2015!!!

At long last, sir, have you no decency? You babble on about genocide while news has come that Barney, sweet Barney, is dead! Take my umbrella, insert it where the sun never shines, and open slowly.

What about the Cultural Revolution? My honorable intellectual father was sent to a re-education collective farm where he was forced to feed a pig in his blue pajamas. Why the pig was wearing my father's blue pajamas I'll never know.