All sides were pretty comparably equipped.
Nope, Germany and Austria were badly equipped compared to the Entente. You can read this up pretty much anywhere.
and the Germans being the first to use chlorine gas in 1915. As opposed to tear gas or irritant, the chlorine gas was designed to kill, not to simply disable the enemy.
Well, it always depends on how you look at it, if you want to say "who started it".
The French were also the first to use weaponized gas specifically developed for killing (Phosgen). The way the Germans used the chlorine gas was comparably primitive.
Anyway, it depends on how you look at it. The French were the first to use gas, then Germans used gas, then the French used more gas, then the Germans used deadlier gas, then the French used even deadlier gas.
WW1 was a terrible war and neither side was being kind to their enemy.
Different groups naturally ended up on the "wrong" side of various borders.
Marburg was purely German and is now Slovenia. It was still mostly German until the partisans massacred everyone at the end of WW2.
Then they destroyed everything that the Germans build there and now they are asking our money again (through the EU) to rebuild what they destroyed and plundered. Personally I would not give them a cent.
I agree that 28,000 civilians killed in Dresden seems too low. I always heard over 100,000. Not a nice thing to do, but it was "total war."
There were more than 320,000 apartments destroyed in Dresden, which at the time was full of fugitives too. 28,000 deaths is a mathematical impossibility.
Not sure exactly what you're talking about here. The only time an attempted coup against Hitler came fully out in the open and almost succeeded was in July 1944, with Stauffenberg's attempt. It was crushed by the Nazis before it had a chance to consolidate any power. What exactly could the Allies do? Drop a couple of parachute divisions into Berlin on 24hrs notice? Large-scale military operations inevitably take at least weeks to plan.
Tensions were high - it was war, after all. If Stauffenberg had succeeded in getting control over a large part of the German armed forces, and they'd appointed someone like Rommel Chancellor, the allies might have decided to change their approach. But it would have taken a couple of weeks to work out the diplomatic niceties. They would still have demanded German surrender, but they conceivably would not have handed half of Europe over to the Russians - but instead occupied it themselves.
As I said, the problem was that the allies did not want a peace treaty with Germany, even if Hitler was gone and "a priest was to become German councelor". They wanted unconditional surrender and rumors like the Morgenthau plan did not help.
These things were responsible for the conspirators not finding the support in the Wehrmacht and the WaffenSS that they would have needed in order to succeed. The assassination attempt was only a last way out, a high risk gamble to take down Hitler. Had the British proposed a fair peace negociation for the case that Hitler was removed from power, the Germans would have revolted much earlier. Instead the assholes Roachevelt and Churchill kept insisting on "unconditional surrender". With the Morgenthau plan looming over the German people, to many just would rather fight until the bitter end. Sloagans like "wade in the blood of the German women" posted by the red army were not helping either.
And as others have said, under Truman and Eisenhower the U.S. did its best to help West Germany and the rest of western Europe
Truman was a good man, Eisenhower was an asshole and strong supporter of the Morgenthau plan. He wanted to "erase Germany from the map".
Not a nice guy.
I admit I don't know much about the part of Styria you're talking about - is it now in Slovenia or Italy?
Marburg (now Maribor) where my grandmother used to live is now part of Slovenia.
Also, Britain and France were democracies.
The British are a constitutional monarchy, not a democracy!
The French did not have to declare war on Germany, neither did the British. They wanted to wage war against us!
Also, Belgium, which Germany had invaded, was a democracy.
Belgium was and still is a kingdom, you know?
Both Britain and Belgium are not full democracies and at the time, the monarchs still had more power.
The invasion of Belgium by the Germans was simply them getting ahead of the French. It was a necessity.
Also, one has to say that even if the two countries were to be called democracies, one can not speak nicely about how they treated people in their colonies until long after WW2 (read Belgian Congo). Being a democracy does not automatically mean that you are a good guy.
Anyway, the whole democracy thing is a lame excuse.
Germany had an elected governmental assembly, but the Kaiser and the Chancellor could overrule it. It was easy to portray Germany as an imperialist tyranny, and an aggressor against democracy. If you look at war posters from the time, some of them clearly portray things that way.
Hillarious!, see above!
You are right about the ethnic cleansing and other terrible things commited by the Russians after WW2. Anticipation of this is why the German tactics at the end of the war was to resist the Russians more than the western allies.