LankaWeb – The Untold Holocaust : Allied Forces treatment of Germans
The Untold Holocaust : Allied Forces treatment of Germans
Posted on December 22nd, 2013
Shenali D Waduge
We are told enough times about the terrible crimes committed by Germans but why is there stoic silence on the crimes committed by the Allied forces (UK, US, FRANCE and SOVIET UNION) on Germans? Germany was defeated in May 1945 with that ended World War 2. What gets conveniently hidden from history’s tell tales are the horrible crimes that covered destruction, looting, starving, rape, ethnic cleansing and mass killing of the vanquished German people. Why were innocent German men, women and children persecuted and thrown out from their centuries’ old homes? If there was ever an example of triumphalism it was seen in the manner the victors – the US, UK, France and Soviet Union treated the losing nation and its people. There is no other more suitable word to call it other than holocaust and it remains ‘unknown’ or ignored because the perpetrators like to depict themselves as magnanimous victors and not the barbarians they really were. When the story is written by the victor would they include their crimes? They want the Allies to remain Heroes and the Axis to remain the Villains. Now some of the same Victors have written the international human rights laws that do not apply to them as they continue the same crimes.
Expulsion of Germans
The policy set by the ‘Big Three” Allied leaders (US, UK and Soviet Union) under Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were to expunge Germans from their ancient homelands.
14 million Germans were expelled from their homes in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and other Eastern European countries after the war. Only 12 million were able to get to Germany alive. The tragedy of the expulsion of the German civilian population is hardly widely known except amongst Germans and historians.
Few in the English-speaking world, even history buffs, know that, as a result of the Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945, millions of Germans lost their 700-year-old homelands in the eastern provinces of Germany and Eastern Europe. The expulsion of Germans from the East, a process that over 2 million did not survive, deserves our attention because of its implications for Europe.
“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 …(New York Daily News Oct 1945)
A PROCLAMATION FOR GERMANS IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA
It has been ordered that, effective immediately, all persons of German nationality age 6 years and up shall wear the following sign:
A white circle 15 centimeters in diameter upon which a 2 cm thick letter “N” of black linen is sewn t whose edge is 1 cm within the edge of the circle. This sign shall be worn on the left breast. Germans who were members of the NSDAP, the SA, the SS, NS Public Welfare office, NS Women s Association, NSKK, or any other division of the Party, must wear this sign on the back.
All Germans are forbidden to ride public transportation, visit public places o fentertainment or parks!
All Germans are forbidden to leave their dwellings after 8 P.M.
If Russian or Czechoslovakian officers are met or chanced upon in the street or elsewhere, Germans must remove their hats or caps and pass by at an appropriate distance.
Store purchases are allowed one hour before closing.
The badges must be procured by each German himself in accordance with the prescribed design.
Non-Compliance with the above mentioned order is punishable.
Any citizen of different nationality shall also be subject to punishment for aiding, abetting or helping Germans in any manner!
The Captain of the National Guard
Service in the City of Troppau
Deaths of POWs/Civilians
3million Germans died after war ended (2m were women and children 1m were prisoners of war) – British historian Giles MacDonogh in ‘After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation” details how Germans and Austrians were systematically raped and robbed and those Germans who survived were killed in cold blood or deliberately left to die of disease, cold, malnutrition or starvation.
The Prisoners of War Temporary Enclosures, or Rheinwiesenlager, were a collection of 19 U.S.-built prisoner of war camps constructed to hold German POWs during the Allied occupation of Germany. These camps held upto 2million prisoners. Estimates of deaths from starvation, exposure and dehydration went upto 10,000. Regardless, these deaths are war crimes under 1929 Geneva Convention but Eisenhower classified the prisoners as Disarmed Enemy Forces to circumvent the treaty – just as modern USA classifies unlawful combatants.
The Allies decided to execute captured POWs. There is also the allegation that the Allies used Germans as human shields forcing them to walk through minefields.
Denying access to International Agencies
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. 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.
Michael Walsh. His research exposes allied genocide, enslavement and institutionalized ill treatment of axis prisoners-of-war both during and after World War 11. He says, “the scale of abuse of prisoners-of-war was contrary to the Geneva and other conventions to which Britain and its allies were signatories.
1948, three years after the war’s end, the British Government’s treatment of its foreign prisoners was subject to International Red Cross scrutiny and international condemnation. The IRC threatened to bring the British government before international tribunals for abuse and illegal enslavement.
GERMAN SLAVES HELD IN ALLIED COUNTRIES
United States 140,000 (US Occupation Zone of which 100,000 were held in France,
30,000 in Italy, 14,000 in Belgium.
Great Britain 460,000 German slaves.
The Soviet Union 4,000,000 – 5,000,000 estimated.
France had 680,000 German slaves by August 1946.
Yugoslavia 80,000,
Belgium 48,000,
Czechoslovakia 45,000,
Luxembourg 4,000, Holland 1,300.
Source: International Red Cross
Hatred for Germans
“God , I hate the Germans,” Eisenhower wrote to his wife, Mamie, in September, 1944. Earlier, in front of the British ambassador to Washington, he had said that all the 3,500 or so officers of the German General Staff should be “exterminated.”
The Allies and their concentration camps
Former British Army veteran A.W Perkins of Holland-on-Sea described conditions in the ‘Sennelager’ British concentration camp, which shockingly held, not captured troops but civilians. He recounts;“During the latter half of 1945 I was with British troops guarding suspected Nazi civilians living on starvation rations in a camp called Sennelager. They were frequently beaten and grew as thin as concentration camp victims, scooping handfuls of swill from our waste bins.”
The most notorious American camps were the Rheinwiesenlager – the Rhine Meadow Camps – where more than 400,000 prisoners were left to starve out in open in the mud. 10% of them died from hunger, disease and exposure.
If captured in smaller groups, even the US Army policy was to slaughter the prisoners where they stood, especially if they were SS. The largest (currently acknowledged) massacres at the hands of the Americans were the murder of 700 troops of the surrendered 8th SS Mountain Division, atrocities carried out against the surrendered SS Westphalia Brigade where most of the German captives were shot through the back of the head, and the machine gunning of three hundred surrendered camp guards at Dachau.
By the winter of 1947, it was estimated that 4,160,000 German POWs were still held in ‘work camps’ outside Germany: 750,000 in France, 30,000 in Italy, 460,000 in Britain, 14,000 in Belgium (at one point, 48,000), 4,000 in Luxembourg and 1,300 in Holland (as discussed later, the Soviet Union started with 4,000,000-5,000,000, Yugoslavia had 80,000 and Czechoslovakia 45,000) as well as the USA’s 140,000 in the US Occupation Zone with 100,000 more later also held in France. It is estimated that 700,000 to a million men may have died within the period they spent incarcerated in American and French camps alone from 1945 to 1948.
In Poland, the so-called “Office of State Security,” an agency of the country’s new Soviet-controlled government, imposed its own brutal form of “de-Nazification.” Its agents raided German homes, rounding up some 200,000 men, women, children and infants — 99 percent of them non-combatant, innocent civilians. They were incarcerated in cellars, prisons, and 1,255 concentration camps where typhus was rampant and torture was commonplace. Between 60,000 and 80,000 Germans perished at the hands of the “Office of State Security.”
Torture
We have heard of The Cage by Gordon Weiss, but The Cage in Kensington Palace Gardens was where a set of cells and rooms were used to hold and interrogate captures members of the Schutzstaffel and Gestapo. Everything from starvation and sleep deprivation to brutal beatings was practiced within its walls. to extract information and, in some cases, confessions. This was certainly a war crime but no one was ever prosecuted and the British Government turned a blind eye despite complaints arguing it was justifiable given the situation.
Kocevski Rog Massacre – May 1945, systematic murder of members of the repatriated Slovene Home Guard and their families by Allied Yugoslave Partisans – 12,000 thrown into pits, caves and crevices sealed using explosives. No one persecuted for this.
Allied Mass Murder
There was also an alleged mass murder of as many as 48 surrendered German prisoners who were captured on April 15, 1945 at Jungholzhausen. An eyewitness stated: “The Americans forced the Germans to walk in front of them with raised hands in groups of four. Then they shot the prisoners in their heads from behind.” The bodies were loaded onto a truck and taken away. The matter is still under investigation.
German city of Konigsberg in East Prussia surrendered in early April 1945 – the people were beaten, robbed even hospital patients, killed, raped even nuns, About 40,000 of the city’s population were killed or took their own lives while the remaining 73,000 Germans were deported.
Allied Slave Labor
At the Yalta conference in early 1945, the “Big Three” Allied leaders agreed that the Soviets could take Germans as forced laborers, or “slave labor.” It is estimated that 874,000 German civilians were abducted to the Soviet Union. These were in addition to the millions of prisoners of war who were held by the Soviets as forced laborers. Of these so-called reparations deportees, nearly half — 45 percent — perished.
Allied Mass Rape
Mass rape of Italian women by the French Colonial soldiers in 1944 with about 60,000 Italian women from ages 11 to 85 raped in May 1944.
Allied bombed Italy’s Monte Cassino’s sixth-century abbey into ruins. According to an Italian eye-witness, “……the brutally inclined Goumiers (Moroccans)had the lowest moral values of anyone associated with war in the European theater. They raped women, they raped men, and when they got through with them, they raped animals.”http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1998/feb/19/pizza-mans-atrocity-hunt/ The Americasn general who took the decision to unleash the Moroccan troops was General Mark Clark of the American Fifth Army. The mass rape left many of the Italian women with venereal diseases. Their husbands and lovers were in turn infected. This led to a epidemic in that area of Italy in early 1950s. The International Red Cross wanted to help but the Italian government refused any aid because it did not want to strain relations with France by raking up the issue again.
Alphonse Juin, Marshal of France, in 1942 who commanded the French corps of “fighting France” in North Africa, before the May battle had said in front of his soldiers: “Soldiers, you are not fighting for the freedom of their land. This time, I say to you: if you win the battle, then you get the best in the world of women and wine. But not a single German should not stay alive. I say this and I will keep the promise. Fifty hours after the victory you will be absolutely free to do whatever you want. Nobody will punish you for whatever you do.”
The Soviet Army alone is said to be responsible for the rape of 2million women and children and deaths of 240000 people.
The US is said to be responsible for over 11,000 rapes.
Very few persons in Britain or the United States spoke out against the Allied policy. Victor Gollancz, an English-Jewish writer and publisher, toured the British occupation zone of northern Germany for six weeks in late 1946. He publicized the death and malnutrition he found there, which he said was a consequence of Allied policy. He wrote: “The plain fact is … we are starving the Germans. And we are starving them, not deliberately in the sense that we definitely want them to die, but willfully, in the sense that we prefer their death to our own inconvenience.”
Bertrand Russell, the noted philosopher and Nobel Prize recipient. In a letter published in a London newspaper in October 1945, he wrote: “In eastern Europe now mass deportations are being carried out by our allies on an unprecedented scale, and an apparently deliberate attempt is being made to exterminate many millions of Germans, not by gas, but by depriving them of their homes and of food, leaving them to die by slow and agonizing starvation. This is not done as an act of war, but as a part of a deliberate policy of ‘peace’.”
History is written by the victor. Allies are thus painted the Heroes, totally erasing from history the gory crimes committed by them. If a crime is a crime, the crimes of the Axis cannot be any worse than the Allies. Murder remains a murder. Justifying such actions is totally wrong.
Immediately after war there was NO RECONCILIATION – NO FORGIVENANCE and NO AMNESTY. The victors put German military, Germany political leaders and German civilians on trial and the Allies became both prosecutor and judge. When the perpetrators turn prosecutor and judge there is little relief for the losers. It was vengeance all the way. Their standards of ‘justice’ applied only to the vanquished. The United Nations of the Allies completely omitted from justice their own injustices.
Robert Jackson, the chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1945-46, privately acknowledged in a letter to President Truman, that the Allies “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of [German] prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them [for forced labor in France]. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.”.
What needs to be clearly understood from the handful of examples given above is that the history that many are told of is not the real history. We also need to understand that it is these same perpetrators who have written the laws that we are now told to follow while they themselves remain omitted from persecution of any kind – no persecution for the crimes done in the past and no persecution for crimes committed in the present. What kind of legal system are we allowing to take place?
Alternately, if we are said to have a new balance in leadership in countries like China and Russia what type of reaction are they offering in terms of taking stock of the dangers that this new trend of world order aligned to the handful who control the West are now slowly putting into place that will bring the entire world order under them? The currently laws and systems being deviously designed using Third World human rights abuse as an excuse is well on its way to ensuring that the entire world systems are concentrated under a handful of the very people who have engineered every war and conflict that has unfolded. None of the world’s conflicts started on its own. They were all engineered to concentrate power and profit on a handful of people. Unfortunately, we fail to see that even the perpetrators were actually victims because they themselves were used as part of the unfolding new world order and these same nations continue to be used for they are best placed to push the new plans into place.
Unless China and Russia realize the dangers lurking in our midst we are likely to see far more deaths and destruction than what the real history records of World War 2 has depicted.
If the standards of the Nuremberg Tribunal had been applied impartially, many American, British, Soviet and other Allied military and political leaders would have been and should have been hanged.
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