Hijacked History

[Mercy Now]

 

 
An `Unknown Holocaust’ and the Hijacking of History
An address by Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, delivered at an IHR meeting in Orange County, California, on July 25, 2009. (A report on the meeting is posted here.)

 

We hear a lot about terrible crimes committed by Germans during World War II, but we hear very little about crimes committed against Germans. Germany’s defeat in May 1945, and the end of World War II in Europe, did not bring an end to death and suffering for the vanquished German people. Instead the victorious Allies ushered in a horrible new era of destruction, looting, starvation, rape, “ethnic cleansing,” and mass killing --one that Time magazine called “history’s most terrifying peace.” / 1

Even though this “unknown holocaust” is ignored in our motion pictures and classrooms, and by our political leaders, the facts are well established. Historians are in basic agreement about the scale of the human catastrophe, which has been laid out in a number of detailed books. For example, American historian and jurist Alfred de Zayas, along with other scholars, has established that in the years 1945 to 1950, more than 14 million Germans were expelled or forced to flee from large regions of eastern and central Europe, of whom more than two million were killed or otherwise lost their lives. / 2

One recent and particularly useful overview is a 615-page book, published in 2007, entitled After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation. / 3 In it, British historian Giles MacDonogh details how the ruined and prostrate German Reich (including Austria) was systematically raped and robbed, and how many Germans who survived the war were either killed in cold blood or deliberately left to die of disease, cold, malnutrition or starvation. He explains how some three million Germans died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities -- about two million civilians, mostly women, children and elderly, and about one million prisoners of war.

Some people take the view that, given the wartime misdeeds of the Nazis, some degree of vengeful violence against the defeated Germans was inevitable and perhaps justified. A common response to reports of Allied atrocities is to say that the Germans “deserved what they got.” But however valid that argument might be, the appalling cruelties inflicted on the totally prostrate German people went far beyond any understandable retribution.

Although I’m focusing here on the treatment of Germans , it’s worth keeping in mind that they were not the only victims of postwar Allied brutality. Across central and eastern Europe, the heavy hand of Soviet rule continued to take lives of Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and people of other nationalities.

As Soviet troops advanced into central and eastern Europe during the war’s final months, they imposed a reign of terror, pillage and killing without compare in modern history. The horrors were summarized by George F. Kennan, the acclaimed historian who also served as US ambassador to the Soviet Union. He wrote: / 4

“The disaster that befell this area with the entry of the Soviet forces has no parallel in modern European experience. There were considerable sections of it where, to judge by all existing evidence, scarcely a man, woman or child of the indigenous population was left alive after the initial passage of Soviet forces; and one cannot believe that they all succeeded in fleeing to the West … The Russians … swept the native population clean in a manner that had no parallel since the days of the Asiatic hordes.”

During the last months of the war, the ancient German city of Königsberg in East Prussia held out as a strongly defended urban fortress. After repeated attack and siege by the Red Army, it finally surrendered in early April 1945. Soviet troops then ravished the civilian population. The people were beaten, robbed, killed and, if female, raped. The rape victims included nuns. Even hospital patients were robbed of their possessions. Bunkers and shelters, packed with terrified people huddling inside, were torched with flame-throwers. About 40,000 of the city’s population were killed, or took their own lives to escape the horrors, and the remaining 73,000 Germans were brutally deported. / 5

In a report that appeared in August 1945 in the Washington DC Times-Herald, / 6 an American journalist wrote of what he described as “the state of terror in which women in Russian-occupied eastern Germany were living. All these women, Germans, Polish, Jewish and even Russian girls `freed’ from Nazi slave camps, were dominated by one desperate desire -- to escape from the Red zone “

“In the district around our internment camp … Red soldiers during the first weeks of their occupation raped every women and girl between the ages of 12 and 60. That sounds exaggerated, but it is the simple truth. The only exceptions were girls who managed to remain in hiding in the woods or who had the presence of mind to feign illness - typhoid, dyptheria or some other infectious disease … Husbands and fathers who attempted to protect their women folk were shot down, and girls offering extreme resistance were murdered.”

In accord with policy set by the “Big Three” Allied leaders of the US, Britain and the Soviet Union -- Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin -- millions of Germans were expunged from their ancient homelands in central and eastern Europe.

In October 1945, a New York Daily News report from occupied Berlin told readers: / 7

“In the windswept courtyard of the Stettiner Bahnof [rail station], a cohort of German refugees, part of 12 million to 19 million dispossessed in East Prussia and Silesia, sat in groups under a driving rain and told the story of their miserable pilgrimage, during which more than 25 percent died by the roadside, and the remainder were so starved they scarcely had strength to walk …

“A nurse from Stettin, a young, good-looking blond, told how her father had been stabbed to death by Russian soldiers who, after raping her mother and sister, tried to break into her own room. She escaped and hid in a haystack with four other women for four days …

“On the train to Berlin she was pillaged once by Russian troops and twice by Poles. Women who resisted were shot dead, she said, and on one occasion she saw a guard take an infant by the legs and crush its skull against a post because the child cried while the guard was raping its mother.

“An old peasant from Silesia said ... victims were robbed of everything they had, even their shoes. Infants were robbed of their swaddling clothes so that they froze to death. All the healthy girls and women, even those 65 years of age, were raped in the train and then robbed, the peasant said.”

In November 1945 an item in the Chicago Tribune told readers: / 8

“Nine hundred and nine men, women and children dragged themselves and their luggage from a Russian railway train at Lehrter station [in Berlin] today, after eleven days travelling in boxcars from Poland. Red Army soldiers lifted 91 corpses from the train, while relatives shrieked and sobbed as their bodies were piled in American lend-lease trucks and driven off for internment in a pit near a concentration camp.

“The refugee train was like a macabre Noah’s ark. Every car was packed with Germans … the families carry all their earthly belongings in sacks, bags and tin trunks ... Nursing infants suffer the most, as their mothers are unable to feed them, and frequently go insane as they watch offspring slowly die before their eyes. Today four screaming, violently insane mothers were bound with rope to prevent them from clawing other passengers."

Although most of the millions of German girls and women who were ravished by Allied soldiers were raped by Red Army troops, Soviet soldiers were not the only perpetrators. During the French occupation of Stuttgart, a large city in southwest Germany, police records show that 1,198 women and eight men were raped, mostly by French troops from Morocco in north Africa, although the prelate of the Lutheran Evangelical church estimated the number at 5,000. / 9

During World War II, the United States, Britain and Germany generally complied with the international regulations on the treatment of prisoners of war, as required by the Geneva accord of 1929. But at the end of the fighting in Europe, the US and British authorities scrapped the Geneva convention. In violation of solemn international obligations and Red Cross rules, the American and British authorities stripped millions of captured German soldiers of their status, and their rights, as prisoners of war by reclassifying them as so-called “Disarmed Enemy Forces” or “Surrendered Enemy Personnel.” / 10

Accordingly, British and American authorities denied access by International Red Cross representatives to camps holding German prisoners of war. Moreover, any attempt by German civilians to feed the prisoners was punishable by death. / 11 Many thousands of German PoWs died in American custody, most infamously in the so-called “Rhine meadow camps,” where prisoners were held under appalling conditions, with no shelter and very little food. / 12

In April 1946, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) protested that the United States, Britain and France, nearly a year after the end of fighting, were violating International Red Cross agreements they had solemnly pledged to uphold. The Red Cross pointed out, for example, that the American transfer of German prisoners of war to French and British authorities for forced labor was contrary to International Red Cross statutes. / 13

Another report by the International Committee of the Red Cross in August 1946 stated that the US government, through its military branch in the US zone of occupation in Germany, was exacting forced labor from 284,000 captives, of whom 140,000 were in the US occupation zone, 100,000 in France, 30,000 in Italy, and 14,000 in Belgium . Holdings of German prisoners or slave laborers by other countries, the Red Cross reported, included 80,000 in Yugoslavia, and 45,000 in Czechoslovakia. / 14

http://www.ihr.org/other/july09weber.html