I don't understand why you are comparing this to Nazis. I don't see any parallels between the beliefs. I think that both groups would be offended to be compared to the other, since I am not aware of any overlaps in their beliefs or even methods of operating.
I don't understand why you are comparing this to Nazis. I don't see any parallels between the beliefs. I think that both groups would be offended to be compared to the other, since I am not aware of any overlaps in their beliefs or even methods of operating.
I find it bizarre that you have referred to my comment that way. Have you even tried to think of any parallels between these folks and Nazis? What justification is there for making the comparison.
The Nazis rewarded medical professionals who furthered their ideological aims by being willing to participate in eugenics programs aimed at eliminating "the unfit" or to engage in experiments on human subjects that were harmful to those individuals. The Nuremburg Codes were adopted after WWII in order to prevent physicians and others from engaging in such practices. The Transgender movement creates a reward structure for medical professionals who advance its ideology by subjecting their patients to procedures that destroy the function of healthy vital organs, make them dependent on artificial hormones and which often render them sterile.
And a vastly disproportionate number of test subjects are autistic or gay/lesbian. It actually seems right up the alley of nazis getting rid of undesirable people, even some of the same people.
As noted in my other reply, the Nazi case was not by request so can't really be compared as similar. Also, these practitioners are not trying to get rid of (or even intentionally harm) the children. So it is not comparable as similar.
Actually, to some degree it IS comparable, because most (maybe even all) gender-affirming care is practiced without the FULLY INFORMED consent of the patients. The minors (and their "consenting" parents) are never informed of the inevitable and life-altering risks of the drugs, hormones and surgeries that their (Hippocratic Oath-violating) physicians encourage them to get.
I've addressed this point elsewhere in the thread. I agree it is type of consent that is not fully informed, but is still voluntary, and thus not similar.
Mister Delgado, thanks for your discourse. As far as I know, the Nazi experiments you are referring to were all involuntary. A voluntary request cannot be compared to that. These are self selected individuals, not people being grabbed off the street. Additionally, the advocates claim they are trying to help the individuals. So this cannot be compared ideologically with Nazis. The syphilis experiments on the other hand probably could be, but I make that as a side comment, not to derail the thread.
This presuposes the proposition that mentally ill children are capable of knowingly volunteering. Given the WPATH files discussing how to try and avoid liability for just that issue, it' wrong to assume they have any real understanding of the procedures.
Hey kid, we're gonna pump you full of hormones and cut your genitals up, your bones will be brittle, and you'll never be able to have kids. If we don't do this, you'll kill yourself. - that's not informed consent.
Children are certainly capable of doing things voluntarily and requesting things. I intentionally avoided the word consent and used the word volunteer. I did not make any assumption about children being able to make informed consent. The Nazi medical experiments were not voluntarily, were not requested by the victims, and did not have the alleged goal of helping the victims. Voluntary and involuntary cases should not be considered similar. They are fine to compare, but are ideologically different. These practitioners do not advocate grabbing children and doing it against the requests of the children.
I don't agree with your wording. I would say it is without fully informed consent. If someone says "I am going to inject you with estrogen" and then does it, that is not a lie. So there's no lie about the treatment being given. So the individual still volunteers for the treatment. If it does not give them the solace they seek, that is lack of fully informed consent. If you want to say they were a not fully informed volunteer, that is fine, but they still volunteered. It is like saying someone who did not know what war was really like was not a volunteer (for non-drafted). Or marriage. Or even a date. No, those are all voluntary. (I am excluding forced cases in my examples)
Not really, I just care about truth. I have not enjoyed my interactions with you and wish you would never comment on this substack again, because I found you to make not logically supported statements and to be rude. I could just block you but I wouldn't find that constructive, others would still see your comments. I sought to show you the errors of your ways but evidently you don't want to examine them and improve your comments.
That cannot be compared. That is forced sterilization and experimentation. This is individuals electing with desire for the procedure. The Nazis were also eliminating people, and these practitioners allege to be trying to help people. These are so dissimilar that they are more like opposites than being similar. Both the people undergoing the procedure and the ones doing the procedure have totally different ideologies.
You make a good point about voluntary versus involuntary. Indeed, the fact that people choose to be castrated, have their breasts removed and subject themselves to a lifetime of medicalization, which includes going to the doctor several times a week to have their fake vaginas dilated, all of this makes it even more incomprehensible. But here is a question: can you call something "voluntary" when we are talking sometimes about children and teenagers who are incapable of understanding the consequences? Or even about adults who are being told that they can literally become the other sex?--which is a lie. All they are being given is esthetic surgery. These are patients that are victims of doctors who are making money off them. In which case, to what can you compare these practices if not to medical experiments?
I agree with your point, but is still voluntary. It is not fully informed consent. The distinction between voluntary and involuntary is still important. Doing it involuntarily would be antithetical to these practitioners. Avoiding doing it involuntarily would have been antithetical to the Nazis. It is more like opposites than similar, on this crucial point. Only doing it to those who want it versus not.
Edit: I do agree with this part:
"Or even about adults who are being told that they can literally become the other sex?--which is a lie. All they are being given is esthetic surgery."
I do think that calling it a sex change surgery, treatment etc. should be banned and that there should be other wording. Like... genital cosmetic surgery or some such wording. Similarly, hormone injection rather than hormone therapy for these cases, because it is not clear to me that we should call these injections therapy.
The Nazi comparison does have some merit. The way in which Nazi occupied Poland functioned during WW2 is a great example. No one was forced per se to alienate and victimise the Jewish population. However the Nazi government made it clear through extensive propaganda that the Jewish were unclean and spreading disease and if you were Polish and wanted to be a good citizen under occupation then ratting out your Jewish neighbours and friends was doing yourself and society a big favour. And you would also be financially rewarded in some cases. However if you were the brave minority who decided that this was wrong and you wanted to hide your Jewish friends and neighbours to protect them, you risked your life doing so. Poland was the only occupied nation where you were killed for harbouring Jews. Approximately 30,000 Polish men and women including children were sentenced to death by the Nazis (most of them shot on the spot) for standing up against their occupying regime. No one forced them to take such action.
The analogy here is that transgender health care is similar. No one forces anybody to undergo transgender affirmative care. But in many cases parents are pressured by the health care providers to consent to this care (e.g. „would you rather a dead daughter or a live son?”), societal expectations (i.e. transphobia) or by the child themselves (threat of suicide). The child themselves if they can make a choice independently also is subject to peer pressure, societal expectation and flawed medical authority (e.g. „you were born this way”). Those children who in later life detransition honor the fact that they and their parents took direct part in their decision making however they express anger towards society for propagandising and financially incentivising one view over another and eliminating access to the breadth of alternative options available.
So although there is no direct coercion in both the cases of the Poles under Nazi Germany and the transgender medical system, the tacit manipulation that exists is still wrong. And can lead to good people making poor decisions that they later regret because they think that thought their decision was the right decision at the time. I wouldn’t let transgender medical practitioners get off the hook as easily as suggesting because their not dragging children off the street and castrating them, that they are not doing any harm.
Only the treatment makes mental health worse and suicide rate skyrocket.
The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over thirty years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—documents their lifelong mental unrest. Ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to twenty times that of comparable peers.
20 times comparable peers. Next tell us about how cool WPATH is, when they have people writing pediatric castration "erotica" also writing their guidelines.
Then you are unaware of how the doctors in Germany were quick to jump in with the National Socialists and how stringently they did so. They rushed into the arms of the regime for higher pay and guaranteed positions of authority. This was quite pervasive- to the point that every mass grave you read about had at least one doctor overseeing it.
On a broader ideological level, the regime had no compunction doing whatever they wanted to those they considered less than themselves, and they certainly were not fans of gay people either, considering them subhuman as well. So I have zero doubt, and zero evidence, that the Nazi regime would be against this so-called treatment.
I think you are missing the point. What you are saying is like saying because someone is found eating cake, that it means they will also eat ice-cream. It is not logical. Even if we take for the sake of argument as a given that Nazis were willing to do harmful things to innocents, and take as a given that these treatments are harmful to innocents, there is nothing in the Nazi ideology that I am aware of that suggests they would support doing this. If anything, I think they would view it as unnatural and be against it. They were more against frivolous tattoos than for them, for example. Prisoner number tattoos don't contradict that. Tattoos of blood type, like a medical bracelet, was an exception.
I think you’re being a little too literal in your interpretation here. No one here is saying transgender health care providers are actual Nazis and have national socialism as their core philosophy. No one is arguing that national socialism would in fact support transgender care (Nazis were more in favour of eliminating all mental illness, so transgender children would have been in all likelihood killed early).
What people are arguing here is that many of the same psychological tactics used by the National Socialists of Germany can been seen to be used in transgender activism. These are: intense one-sided propaganda, social coercion and manipulation, incentivising of moral corruption, manipulation of human greed and envy, the perception of the pursuit of the common good or advancement of society through the use of evil means.
The Nazis are only one group that have successfully used such means to support their cause, the abortion and euthanasia industry are two contemporary examples that also use such measures that society is very comfortable supporting, despite the direct loss of life it seeks for the most vulnerable in our society.
Yours is one of the few reasonable comments. However, if you look at the other comments, that is not in fact what others are saying. They appear to be just using the word Nazis frivolously as a pejorative. If one said "they used xyz tactic like the Nazis did" then that would be a fair comment. But if one says "they are Nazis" or "they are poets", then the comparison should be something that is defining for what is being compared to. And here, the defining characteristics of Nazis are absent. We might as well say "They are basketball coaches! Because they are telling people what to do!" You have some good comparisons, and I do agree you've made some fair comparisons to Nazis. Enough to fuel an essay, but I don't see anything compelling enough to say it's reasonable to either Nazis or this group to say they are Nazis [and I'm not disagreeing on the grounds that they aren not literal Nazis, I am disagreeing on the grounds that this particular case is not a good simile].
I mean sure. I get you, we shouldn’t use ad hominem for good argumentation. But most people don’t study philosophy, so for most people to say “they are Nazis” carries more nuance than a philosopher would express.
But even philosophers express themselves poorly. One of my favourite philosophers Peter Boghossian consistently calls the transgender movement or woke ideology “religious”. He thinks it’s a good argument because he is an atheist so for him it’s just obvious that by equivocating the two he is making a statement about how irrational behaviour can be found in ideological fundamentalism. Does he seek to tear down his religious ideological travellers, probably not (although he does hate religion with a passion, so maybe). But I always have to take him with a grain of salt when he’s insulting my religion to make his points.
So I don’t worry about language like this. The Nazis even as individuals were bizarre people. Hitler decided to marry his longtime secret girlfriend hours before their suicides. He also shot his dog, for no good reason prior to his own suicide. His close colleague Goebbells killed his entire family in the bunker, including his innocent children who could have survived the war unscathed. Nothing in socialist ideology predicted those actions. People are complex!
For one thing you said, it is the opposite, when someone uses the word Nazi as a frivolous ad hominem attack, that carries less nuance, not more :) I do enjoy some things about that Peter. I don't recall noticing him using that wording, but I agree he should not. He should say religious-like and/or belief system when describing a non-religion. Your position may be to not worry about language like this, my position is that it is important. The term Nazi did not need to be used. If it will be used, it should be used correctly. I am against diluting language and rendering useful words to be no longer understood. The more important the word, the more I think it matters. Regardless of our disagreement, I am glad that you are on this forum.
I agree with you. I am in favor of simile. My issue is it was a bad simile. Admittedly, where the line between similar and dissimilar occurs is subjective, but to me this seemed very much on the bad side and just reducing Nazi to "negative word for those I disagree with"
What would have happened to them? I presume they would not have been sentenced to death. And it’s a bit harsh to judge them based on the crime of their father.
It was Germany, Berlin, capital city, and most inhabitants were Germans, but if they were found to be Goebbels family, by nonGermans, soldiers of an occupying Soviet army, a risk was real.
I don't understand why you are comparing this to Nazis. I don't see any parallels between the beliefs. I think that both groups would be offended to be compared to the other, since I am not aware of any overlaps in their beliefs or even methods of operating.
Well, that has to be the Dumbshit Statement of the Year and it’s only July.
I find it bizarre that you have referred to my comment that way. Have you even tried to think of any parallels between these folks and Nazis? What justification is there for making the comparison.
The Nazis rewarded medical professionals who furthered their ideological aims by being willing to participate in eugenics programs aimed at eliminating "the unfit" or to engage in experiments on human subjects that were harmful to those individuals. The Nuremburg Codes were adopted after WWII in order to prevent physicians and others from engaging in such practices. The Transgender movement creates a reward structure for medical professionals who advance its ideology by subjecting their patients to procedures that destroy the function of healthy vital organs, make them dependent on artificial hormones and which often render them sterile.
And a vastly disproportionate number of test subjects are autistic or gay/lesbian. It actually seems right up the alley of nazis getting rid of undesirable people, even some of the same people.
As noted in my other reply, the Nazi case was not by request so can't really be compared as similar. Also, these practitioners are not trying to get rid of (or even intentionally harm) the children. So it is not comparable as similar.
"...not trying to get rid of..." Isn't sterilizing a type of getting rid of?
The condition we are talking about is not a hereditable trait. Though I imagine genetics may make someone more susceptible.
Actually, to some degree it IS comparable, because most (maybe even all) gender-affirming care is practiced without the FULLY INFORMED consent of the patients. The minors (and their "consenting" parents) are never informed of the inevitable and life-altering risks of the drugs, hormones and surgeries that their (Hippocratic Oath-violating) physicians encourage them to get.
I've addressed this point elsewhere in the thread. I agree it is type of consent that is not fully informed, but is still voluntary, and thus not similar.
Mister Delgado, thanks for your discourse. As far as I know, the Nazi experiments you are referring to were all involuntary. A voluntary request cannot be compared to that. These are self selected individuals, not people being grabbed off the street. Additionally, the advocates claim they are trying to help the individuals. So this cannot be compared ideologically with Nazis. The syphilis experiments on the other hand probably could be, but I make that as a side comment, not to derail the thread.
This presuposes the proposition that mentally ill children are capable of knowingly volunteering. Given the WPATH files discussing how to try and avoid liability for just that issue, it' wrong to assume they have any real understanding of the procedures.
Hey kid, we're gonna pump you full of hormones and cut your genitals up, your bones will be brittle, and you'll never be able to have kids. If we don't do this, you'll kill yourself. - that's not informed consent.
Children are certainly capable of doing things voluntarily and requesting things. I intentionally avoided the word consent and used the word volunteer. I did not make any assumption about children being able to make informed consent. The Nazi medical experiments were not voluntarily, were not requested by the victims, and did not have the alleged goal of helping the victims. Voluntary and involuntary cases should not be considered similar. They are fine to compare, but are ideologically different. These practitioners do not advocate grabbing children and doing it against the requests of the children.
Volunteering based on lies is not truly voluntary.
I don't agree with your wording. I would say it is without fully informed consent. If someone says "I am going to inject you with estrogen" and then does it, that is not a lie. So there's no lie about the treatment being given. So the individual still volunteers for the treatment. If it does not give them the solace they seek, that is lack of fully informed consent. If you want to say they were a not fully informed volunteer, that is fine, but they still volunteered. It is like saying someone who did not know what war was really like was not a volunteer (for non-drafted). Or marriage. Or even a date. No, those are all voluntary. (I am excluding forced cases in my examples)
In as diplomatically a way as possible, are you truly that stupid? People lost jobs, careers, homes and businesses unless they got the shot.
And, please, waste no time with your response.
Exactly which shot are you talking about? It sounds like you are talking about Covid19 vaccinations which are totally irrelevant.
Ok, we all get it, you need someone to play back & forth with. No thanks.
Not really, I just care about truth. I have not enjoyed my interactions with you and wish you would never comment on this substack again, because I found you to make not logically supported statements and to be rude. I could just block you but I wouldn't find that constructive, others would still see your comments. I sought to show you the errors of your ways but evidently you don't want to examine them and improve your comments.
😂
You are just showing more of your rude character. It is fine. Others will see it and know it is rude.
I find it bizarre you find it bizarre.
You have got to read "The Nazi Doctors"
That cannot be compared. That is forced sterilization and experimentation. This is individuals electing with desire for the procedure. The Nazis were also eliminating people, and these practitioners allege to be trying to help people. These are so dissimilar that they are more like opposites than being similar. Both the people undergoing the procedure and the ones doing the procedure have totally different ideologies.
You make a good point about voluntary versus involuntary. Indeed, the fact that people choose to be castrated, have their breasts removed and subject themselves to a lifetime of medicalization, which includes going to the doctor several times a week to have their fake vaginas dilated, all of this makes it even more incomprehensible. But here is a question: can you call something "voluntary" when we are talking sometimes about children and teenagers who are incapable of understanding the consequences? Or even about adults who are being told that they can literally become the other sex?--which is a lie. All they are being given is esthetic surgery. These are patients that are victims of doctors who are making money off them. In which case, to what can you compare these practices if not to medical experiments?
I agree with your point, but is still voluntary. It is not fully informed consent. The distinction between voluntary and involuntary is still important. Doing it involuntarily would be antithetical to these practitioners. Avoiding doing it involuntarily would have been antithetical to the Nazis. It is more like opposites than similar, on this crucial point. Only doing it to those who want it versus not.
Edit: I do agree with this part:
"Or even about adults who are being told that they can literally become the other sex?--which is a lie. All they are being given is esthetic surgery."
I do think that calling it a sex change surgery, treatment etc. should be banned and that there should be other wording. Like... genital cosmetic surgery or some such wording. Similarly, hormone injection rather than hormone therapy for these cases, because it is not clear to me that we should call these injections therapy.
The Nazi comparison does have some merit. The way in which Nazi occupied Poland functioned during WW2 is a great example. No one was forced per se to alienate and victimise the Jewish population. However the Nazi government made it clear through extensive propaganda that the Jewish were unclean and spreading disease and if you were Polish and wanted to be a good citizen under occupation then ratting out your Jewish neighbours and friends was doing yourself and society a big favour. And you would also be financially rewarded in some cases. However if you were the brave minority who decided that this was wrong and you wanted to hide your Jewish friends and neighbours to protect them, you risked your life doing so. Poland was the only occupied nation where you were killed for harbouring Jews. Approximately 30,000 Polish men and women including children were sentenced to death by the Nazis (most of them shot on the spot) for standing up against their occupying regime. No one forced them to take such action.
The analogy here is that transgender health care is similar. No one forces anybody to undergo transgender affirmative care. But in many cases parents are pressured by the health care providers to consent to this care (e.g. „would you rather a dead daughter or a live son?”), societal expectations (i.e. transphobia) or by the child themselves (threat of suicide). The child themselves if they can make a choice independently also is subject to peer pressure, societal expectation and flawed medical authority (e.g. „you were born this way”). Those children who in later life detransition honor the fact that they and their parents took direct part in their decision making however they express anger towards society for propagandising and financially incentivising one view over another and eliminating access to the breadth of alternative options available.
So although there is no direct coercion in both the cases of the Poles under Nazi Germany and the transgender medical system, the tacit manipulation that exists is still wrong. And can lead to good people making poor decisions that they later regret because they think that thought their decision was the right decision at the time. I wouldn’t let transgender medical practitioners get off the hook as easily as suggesting because their not dragging children off the street and castrating them, that they are not doing any harm.
The proposal of "do this or die" is by definition not voluntary.
I agree, I would argue that all transgender persons are subject to this exact stress without being directly coerced.
Only the treatment makes mental health worse and suicide rate skyrocket.
The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over thirty years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—documents their lifelong mental unrest. Ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to twenty times that of comparable peers.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885
20 times comparable peers. Next tell us about how cool WPATH is, when they have people writing pediatric castration "erotica" also writing their guidelines.
Then you are unaware of how the doctors in Germany were quick to jump in with the National Socialists and how stringently they did so. They rushed into the arms of the regime for higher pay and guaranteed positions of authority. This was quite pervasive- to the point that every mass grave you read about had at least one doctor overseeing it.
On a broader ideological level, the regime had no compunction doing whatever they wanted to those they considered less than themselves, and they certainly were not fans of gay people either, considering them subhuman as well. So I have zero doubt, and zero evidence, that the Nazi regime would be against this so-called treatment.
I think you are missing the point. What you are saying is like saying because someone is found eating cake, that it means they will also eat ice-cream. It is not logical. Even if we take for the sake of argument as a given that Nazis were willing to do harmful things to innocents, and take as a given that these treatments are harmful to innocents, there is nothing in the Nazi ideology that I am aware of that suggests they would support doing this. If anything, I think they would view it as unnatural and be against it. They were more against frivolous tattoos than for them, for example. Prisoner number tattoos don't contradict that. Tattoos of blood type, like a medical bracelet, was an exception.
I think you’re being a little too literal in your interpretation here. No one here is saying transgender health care providers are actual Nazis and have national socialism as their core philosophy. No one is arguing that national socialism would in fact support transgender care (Nazis were more in favour of eliminating all mental illness, so transgender children would have been in all likelihood killed early).
What people are arguing here is that many of the same psychological tactics used by the National Socialists of Germany can been seen to be used in transgender activism. These are: intense one-sided propaganda, social coercion and manipulation, incentivising of moral corruption, manipulation of human greed and envy, the perception of the pursuit of the common good or advancement of society through the use of evil means.
The Nazis are only one group that have successfully used such means to support their cause, the abortion and euthanasia industry are two contemporary examples that also use such measures that society is very comfortable supporting, despite the direct loss of life it seeks for the most vulnerable in our society.
Yours is one of the few reasonable comments. However, if you look at the other comments, that is not in fact what others are saying. They appear to be just using the word Nazis frivolously as a pejorative. If one said "they used xyz tactic like the Nazis did" then that would be a fair comment. But if one says "they are Nazis" or "they are poets", then the comparison should be something that is defining for what is being compared to. And here, the defining characteristics of Nazis are absent. We might as well say "They are basketball coaches! Because they are telling people what to do!" You have some good comparisons, and I do agree you've made some fair comparisons to Nazis. Enough to fuel an essay, but I don't see anything compelling enough to say it's reasonable to either Nazis or this group to say they are Nazis [and I'm not disagreeing on the grounds that they aren not literal Nazis, I am disagreeing on the grounds that this particular case is not a good simile].
I mean sure. I get you, we shouldn’t use ad hominem for good argumentation. But most people don’t study philosophy, so for most people to say “they are Nazis” carries more nuance than a philosopher would express.
But even philosophers express themselves poorly. One of my favourite philosophers Peter Boghossian consistently calls the transgender movement or woke ideology “religious”. He thinks it’s a good argument because he is an atheist so for him it’s just obvious that by equivocating the two he is making a statement about how irrational behaviour can be found in ideological fundamentalism. Does he seek to tear down his religious ideological travellers, probably not (although he does hate religion with a passion, so maybe). But I always have to take him with a grain of salt when he’s insulting my religion to make his points.
So I don’t worry about language like this. The Nazis even as individuals were bizarre people. Hitler decided to marry his longtime secret girlfriend hours before their suicides. He also shot his dog, for no good reason prior to his own suicide. His close colleague Goebbells killed his entire family in the bunker, including his innocent children who could have survived the war unscathed. Nothing in socialist ideology predicted those actions. People are complex!
For one thing you said, it is the opposite, when someone uses the word Nazi as a frivolous ad hominem attack, that carries less nuance, not more :) I do enjoy some things about that Peter. I don't recall noticing him using that wording, but I agree he should not. He should say religious-like and/or belief system when describing a non-religion. Your position may be to not worry about language like this, my position is that it is important. The term Nazi did not need to be used. If it will be used, it should be used correctly. I am against diluting language and rendering useful words to be no longer understood. The more important the word, the more I think it matters. Regardless of our disagreement, I am glad that you are on this forum.
I sort of agree but I also agree there should be room for creativity and poetics as well as stringent logic.
I agree with you. I am in favor of simile. My issue is it was a bad simile. Admittedly, where the line between similar and dissimilar occurs is subjective, but to me this seemed very much on the bad side and just reducing Nazi to "negative word for those I disagree with"
Agree with almost everything. However, I do have doubts that Goebbels children would have survived unscathed.
What would have happened to them? I presume they would not have been sentenced to death. And it’s a bit harsh to judge them based on the crime of their father.
Just as a reminder, no German woman has ever been formally sentenced to rape, however thousands were raped.
Mob rules in major defeat. Doxxing is dangerous.
It was Germany, Berlin, capital city, and most inhabitants were Germans, but if they were found to be Goebbels family, by nonGermans, soldiers of an occupying Soviet army, a risk was real.