I'm against removing it.

Gents, the history of the war is certainly bloody. I don't at all advocate "just staying on track and admiring modeling skills." I think Jerry is a GREAT modeler, no question about it, and it's a shame he chose to take his ball and go home. I think it's perfectly fine to model Peiper, who commanded one of the most-famous and most-accomplished Waffen SS units. The LAH got all the latest toys and were accomplished fighters.

But Peiper is a polarizing figure at best.

And I'm totally stunned that anyone would justify the barbarity of the Waffen SS in general and Peiper in particular (and Heer German units like Grossdeutschland) by saying they "endured" a lot on the Eastern Front.

Bloody hell, man, that's like the fellow who murdered his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.

The Einsatzgruppen (look them up if you don't know who I mean) and gas vans followed right behind the German front line troops as they advanced through the USSR murdering Jews, Gypsies, and ordinary civilians in a policy that actually diverted military strength away from war to wage war on innocent people. Does the name Babi Yar mean nothing anymore? Please don't equate what happened there with the bombing of Germany's cities. One was done to shorten the war, the other to exterminate whole classes of people who were considered Untermenschen unworthy of life. When I visited Dachau outside Munich, there was a pock-marked wall where camp guards machine-gunned Russian POWs in huge numbers. The Nazis didn't bother to calculate how many were murdered because the Russians weren't considered people.

We model the machines, men and materiel of war. There is a famous quote, possibly apocryphal, from the American Civil War Confederate General Robert E. Lee who confided to a colleague during a particularly bloody Southern victory "It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it."

We can admire the machines of warfare and the modeling skills of those who build them, but let us never lose sight of what the reality of war is.

Keep the thread.

Well russians were killing pows too and they got medals for that. Maybe you will tell us now more on attrocities over palestinians by Israel troops or is it a soft spot, cant be discussed... only denied.