LAUGHING BUT CRYING INSIDE

I do want to add something important to this, which is that the original post is by @antarcticconfessions who has a lot of valuable informative posts on the German Antarctic expeditions and is aware of the nature of the expeditions. In the pinned there’s a useful guide to identifying German expedition artifacts like these too, encouraging you to learn more about the expedition to determine your thoughts on it!

I’d also like to add that Never interacting with media about them is not necessarily a good rule (in my mind!) because the point of continually dissecting Nazi actions for the past 80 years is the idea that if we forget what they did, we’ll repeat it—so it’s important not to never talk about it but to say hey they did these terrible things and it’s part of history, but we don’t need to do that ever again.

Polar exploration is inherently filled with terrible white men! And blorbo-ifying them without acknowledging “hey these guys were truly awful people in many cases, and did terrible things no matter what their time-specific justification was”is the real problem—engaging with the stories in the first place isn’t.

I do recommend you read more about the expeditions so you know what happened and why they’re harmful, the same as I recommend you read about the real Franklin expedition. You don’t need to engage with history that makes you uncomfortable but you do need to know it did happen.

Anyway - thank you to both posters [(Ant)Arctic Confessions and ephraimwaite] for talking about this aspect of Polar Exploration history and encouraging everyone to reflect on it 🙏

considering OP specifically did not tag the account and obviously does not wish to interact with them, you should have written out the url without tagging.

etiquette suggestions aside. have you read the pinned post on that blog?

does this honestly read like “hey these guys were truly awful people in many cases, and did terrible things no matter what their time-specific justification was” to you? really? it’s not even cited. but even without a clear source, the motivation is extremely clear: to excuse the German military’s participation in Nazi atrocities. that sentence is quite straightforwardly a blanket excuse for anyone who didn’t conscientiously object; that is, a blanket excuse for being an armed tool of the Nazi regime and all that may have entailed.

the penguin gifset in question is very obviously not framed as educational. in the screenshot, you can clearly see that it is, in your words, blorbo-ifying these men without acknowledging anything else about them. it is also intentionally vague about the source of those gifs: “yeah the gifs are from the 1938/1939 expedition” is in the tags, but the text of the post mentions nothing about 1930s German military operations. the focus is on woobifying Nazis and spreading cutesy gifs of Nazis to an unfamiliar audience without providing context.

and before anyone starts on the distinction between the card-carrying NDSAP members or SS officers and “regular” officers of the German military, please click on the link in ephraimwaite’s original post and familiarize yourself with the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, the various forms it takes, and the realities of the extent of German atrocities during the Holocaust and the German military’s participation in said atrocities. furthermore, when we talk about these explorers, we are not talking about random people who happened to live in Germany during the Nazi regime. we are talking about willing, enthusiastic collaborators who were devoted enough to be chosen for a secretive military operation designed by Göring and Hitler for the specific purpose of securing Nazi Germany’s economic independence so that they could wage the war they wanted to wage.

I have yet to see any post from the blog you tagged which lays out the explicit context ephraimwaites laid out above, the “what happened and why it’s harmful” context you requested:

beyond these other red flags, there are no resources related to the experiences of conscientious objectors on that blog’s resource list and certainly no resources related to any of the primary victims of the Holocaust.

“don’t engage with these posts” is not the same as “don’t read anything, ever.” we are all, indeed, reading about and engaging with various forms of media about terrible men — not all of whom were white, to be clear — but we are not all sharing cutesy gifsets of Nazis on a mission designed to support Nazi Germany’s ultimate goals without labeling those gifsets in ways that allow everyone online to choose whether or not to engage with such content. the vast majority of polar content on this site is about expeditions between 1845 - 1928 (Franklin through Amundsen). if you see a cute gifset saying “no matter what expedition it is, explorers turn into children meeting penguins” from a blog called ‘antarcticconfessions’ on your dash, reblogged from a mutual who reblogged it from their mutual and so on and so forth, you probably don’t stop to ask, “which expedition is this?” you probably just hit reblog and go aww penguins :) which is understandable. and which is why OP made this post reminding everyone to check the sources of things they’re reblogging while getting familiar with polar exploration: you might assume a gifset carries one type of historical baggage — the British empire circa 1919, for example, if the user assumed the gif was from South, or perhaps early 20th century American or Norwegian imperialism in other cases — but there were other expeditions later, and there are posts about those which do not use the word Nazi to describe 1938 Germany. and that’s just assuming the person reblogging even has any familiarity with polar history! the screenshotted post has over 22 thousand notes. I simply do not believe that all 22,000+ people clicked all the way back to the source of the post, saw the tags mentioning 1938/1939 Germany, investigated the list of expedition members and their individual levels of participation in the Nazi regime, and decided to reblog the post as a representation of how they know that the Nazis happened because we all need to know that they happened. I don’t believe you believe that, either. and ephraimwaites clearly feels, based on the way that post and other similar posts have been received on this website, that people are not being fully informed on the context of those gifs.

to give you further context, here is how the gifs are being presented by antarcticconfessions to Twitter users beginning to research Antarctic history:

in your own words, you encourage looking into these expeditions to know why they were harmful. the PSA above provides such context.

the post you linked to does not. I encourage you to reconsider the tone in that document and whose viewpoints and experiences are prioritized.

my response to a now-deleted reply:

hope this helps contextualize why this PSA was made. it was not to be mean or discourage anyone from learning new information of their own accord.