When Good Men Do Nothing Trivia Quiz

Answer: Neville Chamberlain

At a meeting in Munich, Germany, an agreement was signed by Britain, France and Italy and Germany, which came to be known as the "Munich Agreement." Chamberlain presented his signature in front of Hitler, who also signed readily, if not eagerly. This may have been an honest, but misguided effort on Chamberlain's part to prevent war between the nations of Britain and Germany again.

Later, when Joachim von Ribbentrop questioned Hitler about the treaty, Hitler's reply essentially amounted to, "Oh, don't take it so seriously. That piece of paper is of no further significance whatever."

When the House of Commons discussed the Munich Agreement on 3 October 1938, Winston Churchill, ever the pragmatist, told the House of Commons, "England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame, and will get war."

Answer: Japan and China

"The Nanking Massacre" or "The Rape of Nanking", as it came to be known, was an atrocity committed by the Japanese on their victims in China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45) which became part of World War II.

The rape not only involved those of a sexual nature, but also included the concept of deliberate debasement and pillage of an entire city.

While not all of the victims of actual physical rape were female, estimates of female rape range from as low as twenty thousand to as high as eighty thousand, according to the author of "The Rape of Nanking", Iris Chang.

The men and children too, were raped, both literally and figuratively. The city suffered greatly at the hands of their enemies, and aside from some distant hand-wringing, little was done to aid them.

Answer: Senator Joseph McCarthy (Wisconsin)

During the Battle of the Bulge, "Kampfgruppe Peiper", led by Sepp Dietrich, under overall command of Joachim Peiper, was responsible for the massacre of 84 American soldiers in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium.

Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was later known as a rabid anti-Communist during his tenure in the US Senate, spoke out during the Dachau trials in 1946 about the actions taken at Malmedy by stating that the Court had not tried the defendants, (German troops) "fairly."

How's that again? Hmmm...
Oh, okay, I guess we got it. Fascism - good. Communism - bad.

Thanks for the quickie political lesson, Joe.

Answer: Manila, Philippines

During World War II Fort Santiago was captured by the Japanese, who inflicted horrific atrocities on the population in and around Manila. It then suffered even more greatly from American and Filipino bombardment, during the defense of the city during the Battle of Manila in February 1945.

By the time the Japanese were driven out, the city was in ruins. This was the second-most destroyed Allied capital city during the war. Only Warsaw, Poland suffered more losses.

Japanese troops looted and burned, and brutally executed, decapitated and abused women, men and children alike. Their victims also included priests, Red Cross personnel, prisoners of war and hospital patients.

The Manila massacre was one of several major war crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army. General Yamashita had ordered all Japanese forces to withdraw from Manila, but a subordinate, Sanji Iwabuchi, decided to stay and fight. General Yamashita was later executed for the actions of the man under his command, who had apparently committed suicide during the operations.

Answer: Maille

On 24 August 1944, the farming commune of Maille, France, found itself under siege by the Waffen SS. The SS was convinced, (possibly correctly), that the village had been supporting French Resistance troops opposed to the Nazis, and in reprisal for the suspected activities they began a massacre against the citizenry.

The following day, some farms were set on fire and a number of residents were killed. About noon, the SS began systematically killing many of the rest. Some of the wounded who pretended to be dead during the assault were later shot as they attempted to escape. (Many of the SS troops were young men in their mid-teens, while the youngest victim of the atrocities was only four months old.)

Many apologies have been issued over the years by various nations accused of war crimes, and this particular instance is no exception. As recently as 2008, the townspeople were still receiving apologies from their former enemies.

Answer: Lieutenant General Takuma Nishimura

A company of Australian, British and Indian soldiers were captured in January 1942 by the Japanese and were kept in a large wooden building in Parit Sulong. On January 22, 1942, they were ordered to assemble near some war-damaged shops, to receive "medical help". With their hands tied with ropes and twine, three machine guns suddenly began firing on them. Those who still showed signs of life were bayoneted to death. Then, with the damaged shops that had stood behind them bulldozed onto their 161 bodies, the whole pile was set ablaze with sixty gallons of gasoline and a torch.

The orders of Lt. Gen. Takuma Nishimura had been to, "Instruct the officer-in-charge to execute all the prisoners by firing squad. Kill them all. The bodies of the prisoners are to be cremated on completion of the execution and all traces of their disposal obliterated."

After the war, after serving only four years of a life sentence mandated by the British courts, Nishimura was being transferred to Tokyo, where he was to complete his sentence. The ship he was on made a stop in Hong Kong, where he was seized by the Australian Military Police and a second trial was held. He was found guilty and hanged on June 11, 1951.

Maybe sometimes, good men DO actually do something, albeit later when they get the chance!

Answer: 670,000

It was a brutal invasion in which mustard gas was used for the first time since the First World War. On February 19 and 20, 1937, Mussolini's Blackshirt Fascists committed a series of particularly senseless massacres on the Ethiopian people.

In one incident at Addis Ababa, the capital, a bomb was thrown towards a table around which General Graziani and number of Italian officers were seated. No one was killed, but after a moment or two of silence, one of the officers fired his revolver into a group of civilians who were seated nearby. A massacre ensued with over 300 Ethiopians dead.

Over the next three days at least three thousand Ethiopians were killed by rampaging gangs of Fascist soldiers. During the Italian invasion alone, around 275,000 Ethiopians were killed, many by bombings. According to Ethiopian sources a total of 670,000 Ethiopians lost their lives during the entire occupation period.

For this action and for other atrocities that were committed by Italian troops in Africa and in the Balkans, no Italian was ever prosecuted, and there was never a "Nuremberg-style" trial for any Italian war criminals.

Answer: Paris

A total of 12,884 non-French Jews, 4,051 of whom were children, were rounded up in Paris for deportation to the extermination camps in Poland. For a whole week, they were held in a sports stadium. There they all went without food and with very little water during that time.
(For their convenience however, there were four toilets.)

From there, they were all transferred to camps just outside of Paris. At this point, the Vichy French police separated the children from their parents, and the parents were then transported to Auschwitz to be gassed. The children soon followed.

When the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, among the survivors they found only thirty members of the non-French Jews who were still alive. None of the children survived.

(Not only did the "Vichy" French do nothing to help the victims, they actually aided the invaders of their nation, the Germans, in their endeavors. They voluntarily assisted with the removal of the "undesirables", (Jews), from French territory. Anti-semitic sentiments were running high across Europe, and it was not confined to just Germany. In fact, part of Hitler's popularity was due to his anti-semitic stance, which was merely an extension of an already-existing hatred of Jewish peoples that existed throughout much of the continent.)

Answer: Russia

The dead at Katyn included at least: one admiral, two generals, 17 naval captains, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 3,420 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, and 131 refugees. One female air force officer was among the dead, along with 20 professors, 300 physicians, several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers/journalists and about 200 pilots. There was also a number of Polish Jews killed, including the Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army. More recent estimates have ranged as high as 22,000 people killed.

At first, the Americans believed that the Germans were responsible, but by the end of the war, they had revised their opinion and felt that the Soviets had performed this horrific action. Finally, in 1990, the Soviets admitted to the deed, but never released all documents pertaining to the massacre. However, in 2010 Russia finally released the document showing Stalin's personal approval of Beria's request to carry out the massacre.

Answer: Croatia

The Ustasha's organization in Croatia was fascist and its military was used as an instrument of the Ustasha's Nazi ideology.

The Ustashi Army carried out the worst kinds of genocide against the Serbs, Jews and Romanies. In order to make it possible for only Croats and Muslims to live in the nation, physical destruction and/or expulsion of the Serbs was carried out, along with extermination of the Jews, and almost complete destruction of the Romani ('gypsies').

The mass murder of the Serbs began at the end of April 1941, and it is believed that from April, 1941, to the middle of August, 1942, over 600,000 Serbs were killed in the most unspeakably brutal ways possible. This total was in addition to over 180,000 Serbs who were deported.

The terrors were especially aimed at the Serbian Orthodox Church. Three bishops and most of the priests were murdered by the end of 1941. During the war, 450 Orthodox churches were demolished.

The exact number of Serbs forcibly converted to Catholicism has never been established. Some Croatian Catholic priests also did not hesitate to help in the liquidation of those who resisted "conversion" to Catholicism, telling them, "You Serbs are condemned to death, and you can only escape that sentence by accepting Catholicism."

Father Srecko Peric, of the Gorica Monastery, advocated mass murders with the following words: "Kill all Serbs. And when you finish come here, to Church, and I will confess you and free you from sin."
This resulted in a massacre on 10 August 1941, in which over 5,600 Orthodox Serbs around Livno lost their lives.

Amazingly, the Nazis, who were for a time posted in Croatia, were so horrified at the Ustashi atrocities that they set up a special commission to investigate them. The Orthodox Church of Serbia, in fact, appealed directly to a Nazi general to intervene and stop the Ustashi horrors.

Even Nazi generals were amazed at the horrors of the Jasenovac concentration/extermination camp. General von Horstenau, Hitler's representative in Zagreb, wrote in his personal diary for 1942 that the Ustashi camps were "the epitome of horror", and that "This is one of the most horrible of camps, which can only be compared to Dante's Inferno".

Jasenovac was the largest camp complex in Croatia. It was established in August 1941 and was not dismantled until April 1945. Some six hundred thousand people were murdered there; mostly Serbs, Jews and "gypsies". The number of Jewish victims was between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand, most of whom were murdered there up to August 1942. After that, Croatian Jews were simply deported to Auschwitz for extermination.

Perhaps this is a great example of some "good people" trying to do something, while "not-so-good people" reveled in their own deadly hatreds.