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“…Polish resistance … generated Nazi savagery…” - grossly factually incorrect and a classical “blame the victim” position, perhaps not intentional.The Nazis entered Poland in September 1939 with ready lists of about 60000 Poles to kill. Names and addresses. That was, AFAIK, rather unprecedented, and indeed “savagery”. Similarly like Luftwaffe young pilots, starting the war then with strafing peasant women and children working in the fields. You know, killing the civilians, for the fun of it, way out of any place of a legitimate military action.Savagery was generated before, Hitlerjugend indoctrination and the Nazi notion that relationship between societies is Darwinian.Poles initially did not quite believe what was happening. “Germans are a civilized nation”. My grandfather, a teacher, a native level German speaker by the way, received Fall 1939 a letter from German occupational administration to pack some things and submit to “internment”. He was dutifully waiting with a suitcase at appointed hour in front of his school, for a German truck to pick him up. I stress, no enforcement, simply an administrative directive. Due to a clerical mix-up, another man was collected instead. That family got, six month later, another letter with an offer of sending back, from Dachau KL, for a small fee, the ashes. “Pneumonia”.Polish resistance was waxing in stages. First, some core people were organizing fairly rudimentary underground networks, Fall 1939. Not even really “networks”, just some initial concepts. I always wondered how to present those efforts.On one hand, the initial (Fall 1939) efforts did not result in some massive organizations. Where my family lived, “the effort” meant that a single Polish military colonel, somehow avoiding falling into German hands as a POW, or eternal dendrology studies in the Katyń Forest, roamed the countryside preparing key people (whoever had some “leadership” society position, like my grandfather, a village teacher) to join some-yet-to-be-defined-in-the-future network. Nothing more than talks over a tea in homes which risked sheltering the guy for a night.At this stage, it really looked like a solitary effort of single and far between people, among a sea of shock and society atomization.Simultaneously, the Soviets and the Nazis, no dummies, were hunting out the very same “local leadership” people. The Nazi lists grew, within months, to hundreds of thousands, people deemed necessary by the occupiers to remove, in order for the rest to be pliable. It was that era that the Nazi Gestapo and Soviet NKVD police cooperation probably reached it’s zenith. Like with the tank designs and tests before the war.On the other hand, those seemingly “solitary effort of single and far between people” resulted in some 300+ underground organizations, initially uncoordinated, forming within months across occupied Poland.So, I do not know how to present it, that stage. Nothing much, or a lot?I am similarly uncertain how to write about the Polish society attitudes at the start of the occupation. Our official Polish story is that the whole society, to the last man, was ready to scalp and flay any German they would get their hands on. The (today) whispered reality, as told in undertones to me by many witnesses, is that people were not-that-convinced that further fight has much sense. The opinions “Germans are great managers, let’s see how they will organize things around for us” were not-that-uncommon. I of course commit a grave national blasphemy here. But this is what I heard.On the other hand, that “decapitation drive” by the occupiers was proceeding, succeeding in erasing some 50% of Polish citizens (clergy, teachers, engineers, physicians, lawyers etc) who were supposed to carry, solely, that silly “Polish independence” idea, but that decapitation drive did not appear to have any effect. People with calluses on hands were as much into organizing and leading as those wearing glasses. That story repeated by the way later, our only Nobel Peace Prize winner has, I believe, only seven years of school on his resume.So, I do not know how to characterise the Polish society attitudes, start of the occupation. Certainly mixed. Stereotypes are easy, reality is more complex. Still, one element of the reality was that some 1000 Polish citizens a day, civilians, were shot by the Nazis against some walls across Poland. I exclude here the Holocaust victims, as those got a special treatment. Average for the whole war, gentile citizens, was some 1500/day, but I try to be conservative here.And then the collaboration topic. Sure it existed, as the first death sentence for collaboration I know of near the place my family lived, was already in the first year of the war, and it was already a routine job for the emerging Underground organization. “Routine” in terms of hits, many of which were against common criminals trying to feel the new situation. That collaboration case was about someone a bit eager to get rich, and/or get into German good graces, at the cost for the Jewish Poles around. The guy got shot in broad daylight, a town, with dozens of people witnessing. The ritual was to hold the person frozen as a hare in the headlights, reading him the court sentence, before the final shot. I guess the accidental witnesses around were good, psychologically, to immobilize the condemned. Kinda “nowhere to run” situation.That “nowhere to run” was not universal, but I think fairly common, and this tells something about where the society was, on the “active resistance” versus “total lack of engagement” spectrum. The next scene of the above episode was in the All Saints Day (1940), when at the local cemetery a crowd was praying at a common grave of the fallen nearby (September 1939 campaign) Polish soldiers, while the widow of that collab was having a hysterical crying spell, alone, at the grave of her husband. Life and reality are complex. That microscopic story has a further part, I skip it here, short version is, war sucks big time and destroys people, not only physically.Anyway, what I wanted to point out, Nazi savagery was from day one, but it took Poles some time to coalesce a reasonable Resistance network. So it was more of the other way round, Nazis pretty much forcing the Poles to try to do something about them and counteract the rot the Nazis were oozing.

Captain America: Civil WarSteve Rogers and Bucky Barnes think that Helmut Zemo's plan is to unleash more Winter Soldiers and topple various governments throughout the world. Tony Stark discovers that Zemo framed Bucky and travels to Siberia to help them and make a truce. Even after fighting each other over the Sokovia Accords, it looks like Steve and Tony will stop Zemo and fight the Winter Soldiers.Instead, Zemo already killed them and had no interest in using them. Steve thinks Zemo wanted revenge for what happened in Sokovia. Zemo admits that his home country already had problems long before Ultron came. He simply wants revenge for losing his family. Instead of killing the Avengers, he wanted to tear them apart and have them fight amongst themselves. When he shows footage that Bucky killed Tony's parents, Tony becomes furious that Steve hid the truth and proceeds to fight both of them. While he destroys Bucky's arm, Steve disables his armor and leaves his shield behind when Tony says he is not worthy of it. We are used to heroes in the MCU defeating the antagonist. There was no true winner in the Civil War.The most surprising thing about this ending is that even though Zemo is unable to kill himself and Everett Ross thinks he wasted time and effort, Zemo simply asks "Did it?". This was the first time where a villain had succeeded over the heroes. The consequences of this ending carry over to Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, where the Civil War becomes one of the leading causes in Thanos succeeding.Edit: I also realized one more detail about this movie. Zemo never once gets into a fight with any of the main heroes in this movie. In most MCU movies, the protagonist or hero group always have some kind of final battle with the main antagonist of the movie. As mentioned earlier, the final fight is not Tony, Steve, and Bucky vs. Zemo and the Winter Soldiers, but Tony vs. Steve and Bucky. When T’Challa confronts Zemo about his actions, he easily prevents Zemo from committing suicide and puts him into a hold that restrains Zemo until he can be turned over to Everett Ross. T’Challa didn’t have a fight with Zemo where they exchange blows until one person is defeated.

He might have attempted to bring his vision of Welthauptstadt Germania to fruition. When the Nazi’s claimed a thousand year reich, they certainly intended on seeing it through. Hitler was so confident (or delusional) during the war that he had his prized architect Albert Speer draw up plans for what Berlin would look like in the years to come. Models were even made. Massive buildings, imposing all the horrific order and cleanliness typical of Nazi design.The Arc de Triomphe in Paris could have fit beneath the arch depicted at the center of this model, just to give a sense of scale. Big.Hitler saw Berlin as the capital of the world, plain and simple. However, Berlin is not built on the most stable ground. As such, his great plans likely would have ended in embarrassment. In order to test the soil under the city to see if it could sustain the enormous weight of the proposed buildings, an extremely heavy concrete cylinder was placed within the city. It is known as the Schwerbelastungskörper.If the cylinder did not sink into the soil, they could proceed with the plans for Welthauptstadt Germania as envisioned. But, the cylinder did sink. It happened slowly and steadily. Even if Hitler had managed to find a way to victory in WWII, his ego would continue to hinder any realistic functioning state. His Welthauptstadt Germania would sink to new lows, literally and figuratively.Undoubtedly, Hitler had a lot more on his agenda. History has outlined the seemingly limitless cruelty of his vision. Yet, the man had failings beyond morality. He could not reconcile his inflated vision of himself and Nazi Germany with (for lack of a better adjective) concrete reality. Had there been a Nazi victory in WWII, the German state would likely have slipped further and further into dysfunction eventually leading to collapse. Again, there are many reasons for this, most more complex than what I’ve described. Still, the lasting symbol of a big dumb cylinder of concrete too heavy for its own city’s soil speaks volumes about where Hitler’s head was at.