History: vid int-view (50 mins) of James Bacque, author, detailed mass-murder of Germans after WWII

From Kirkus Reviews

OTHER LOSSES: The Shocking Truth Behind the Mass Deaths of Disarmed German Soldiers and Civilians Under General Eisenhower's Command ​

Hardcover – December 31, 1994 [publish date]

Link: https://www.amazon.com/OTHER-LOSSES...8&qid=1471987135&sr=1-1&keywords=james+bacque

Canadian writer Bacque's shocking and controversial account of American mistreatment of four million German WW II POWs.

Centering on American idol Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bacque's indictment strikes to the heart of the American dream, charging us with much the same kind of brutality that so incenses Americans when practiced by foreigners--allowing POWs to die by the tens of thousands from disease and starvation.

In a skillfully organized, meticulously documented brief (86 pages of notes and appendices), Bacque charges Eisenhower not with neglect but with setting policy- -and charges subsequent authorities with a methodical cover-up, including destruction of evidence.

The narrative is strongly detailed, beginning with an old Frenchman, accompanied by Bacque, opening an ancient, dusty box to find--nothing: missing evidence. From there we have a real-life thriller, complete with security forces bullying aged witnesses. Surprises are nonstop, beginning with a damning introduction by respected military historian Ernest F. Fisher, Jr., who speaks of Eisenhower's ``fierce and obsessive hatred of...all things German.''

There follows a jolting indictment of high American figures, starting at the top. The tone is set when Churchill walks out of a Big Three meeting as Roosevelt jokes with Stalin (recent perpetrator of the notorious Katyn Forest massacre) about exterminating prisoners. The point is driven home a thousand ways, most effectively in the knowledgeable analysis of Eisenhower's management style, which allowed subordinates to carry out policy with little paper to back them up.

The general who sends military aircraft to pick up oranges for breakfast while prisoners are starving is especially memorable. Even more so is the repeated British refusal to countenance the US policy in principle and detail. Explosive and deeply iconoclastic, this book is sure to enrage many. Refutations without research as painstaking as Bacque's will lack credence.
 
Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944–1950 Revised Edition​

Link: https://www.amazon.com/Crimes-Merci...4_8?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=E6N0TYV254QJSY6HYZ3X

"Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it."
By G. Miller on September 3, 2002
Format: Hardcover

An extraordinary book. It tells two of the most extraordinary stories of the 20th century simultaneously. Neither has been told before. One is the story of a great hero - Herbert Hoover, not J. Edgar the FBI boss, but a multimillionaire humanitarian whose courage, outspokenness, persistence and dedication saved literally tens of millions of people from starvation after the first world war and then after the second.

And it's the story of why we never hear about this. General Eisenhower, war "hero" and later US president, of whom we have all heard, persued a deliberate policy of preventing available food aid into Germany between 1945-49.

Laws preventing emigration turned the country into a prison. As Bacque revealed in earlier book OTHER LOSSES, millions of disarmed soldiers died in prison camps; further more, Bacque tells the story of the suffering of civilians, dying from starvation.

It is a part of living memory that times were extraordinarily hard, but Bacque's research has enabled an estimate of the scale for the first time: at least 9 million. He has found the documents which trace the decisions leading to this second holocaust, leading back to Eisenhower and his advisors.

It is a courageous act for a man aged more than 70 accuse a war hero and president of being commiting atrocities. Bacques thoughts on collective are thought provocing. It's a sign of the times that a book like this is out of print. By it before it becomes a historical document in itself. Read it and tell people. It's relevant to today.
 
An Awful Revenge: The Eastern Victors’ Concentration Camps after World War II​

John Wear

Link: https://inconvenienthistory.com/11/2/6719

The eastern victors continued to operate many formerly German concentration camps after World War II. Additional camps to intern ethnic Germans were established in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. The existence and operation of these postwar camps is a matter of major historical significance. While the population of the German concentration-camp system had grown to a record peak of 700,000 by the beginning of 1945, the number of Germans incarcerated across Europe in similar camps by the end of 1945 was possibly even higher.[1]

Soviet-Run Camps

The German concentration camps at Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Mühlberg, Fürstenwalde, Liebe-Roze, Bautzen and other locations were taken over by the Russian Gulag Archipelago. The camp at Buchenwald, for example, was transformed into “Special Camp No. 2” and was operated by the Soviet Union until 1950.[2] Conditions at the camps under Soviet control were atrocious. The camps were labeled “special” because the Soviets insisted that the internees be cut off completely from the civilian population.[3] Even Gen. Merkulov, the Soviet official in charge of the concentration camps in Germany, acknowledged the severe lack of order and cleanliness, particularly at Buchenwald.[4]

One former inmate described his five years in the Soviet-run Buchenwald Camp:

People were mere numbers. Their dignity was consciously trampled upon. They were starved without mercy and consumed by tuberculosis until they were skeletons. The annihilation process, which had been well tested over decades, was systematic. The cries and groans of those in pain still echo in my ears whenever the past comes back to me in sleepless nights. We had to watch helplessly as people perished according to plan—like creatures sacrificed to annihilation.

Many nameless people were caught up in the annihilation machinery of the NKVD after the collapse of 1945. They were herded together like cattle after the so-called liberation and vegetated in the many concentration camps. Many were systematically tortured to death. A memorial was built for the dead of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. A figure of death victims was chosen based on fantasy. Intentionally, only the dead of the 1937-1945 period were honored. Why is there no memorial honoring the dead of 1945 to 1950? Countless mass graves were dug around the camp in the postwar period.[5]

While no one can know the exact number of inmates and deaths at Buchenwald, it is reasonably certain a higher percentage of inmates died under Soviet control than under German control. Viktor Suvorov estimates that 28,000 people were imprisoned by the Soviets at Buchenwald from 1945-1950, of whom 7,000 (25%) died. By comparison, he estimates that 250,000 people were imprisoned by the Germans at Buchenwald from 1937 to 1945. Of that number, Suvorov estimates that 50,000 (20%) died. The Soviet-run Buchenwald had a higher estimated death rate than the German-run Buchenwald.[6]

Suvorov’s estimates of deaths at Soviet-run Buchenwald are probably understated. Some sources estimate that at least 13,000 and as many as 21,000 persons died in Soviet-run Buchenwald.[7] Also, a detailed June 1945 U.S. government report on German-run Buchenwald put the total deaths at a lower number of 33,462, of whom more than 20,000 died in the final chaotic months of the war. These total deaths include at least 400 inmates killed in British bombing raids.[8] Thus, the death-rate percentage at the Soviet-run Buchenwald versus the German-run Buchenwald is probably substantially higher than Suvorov’s estimates.

Russian estimates show a total of 122,671 Germans passed through Soviet-run camps in the Soviet Zone after the end of the war. Of this total, 42,889 Germans died, or approximately 35%. The official Soviet statistics probably underestimate the true number of dead in the Soviet-run camps. American military intelligence units and Social Democratic Party groups in the late 1940s and 1950s estimate that a much higher total of 240,000 German prisoners passed through Soviet-run camps. Of these, an estimated 95,643 died, or almost 40%.

In these revisions there were 60,000 prisoners at Sachsenhausen, where 26,143 died; 30,600 prisoners at Buchenwald, where 13,200 did not survive; and 30,000 prisoners at Bautzen, where 16,700 died. These higher death counts are supported by discoveries of numerous mass graves of Germans buried near the Soviet-run camps.[9]

No one has ever been punished for the deaths and mistreatment of German inmates in the postwar Soviet-run camps. The hundreds of thousands of visitors who visit the Buchenwald campsite each year only see museums and memorials dedicated to the “victims of fascism.” There is nothing at Buchenwald to remind visitors of the thousands of Germans who perished miserably in Buchenwald after the war when the camp was run by the Soviet Union.[10]

Polish-Run Camps

Many of the Germans in Poland were also sent to former German concentration camps. In March 1945, the Polish military command declared that the entire German people shared the blame for starting World War II. Over 105,000 Germans were sent to labor camps in Poland before their expulsion from Poland. The Polish authorities soon converted concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Łambinowice (called Lamsdorf by its German occupants) and others into internment and labor camps. In fact, the liberation of the last Jewish inmates at the Auschwitz main camp and the arrival of the first ethnic Germans to Auschwitz were separated by less than two weeks.

When the camps in Poland were finally closed, it is estimated that as many as 50% of the German inmates, mostly women and children, had died from ill-treatment, malnutrition and diseases.[11]

In a confidential report concerning the Polish concentration camps filed with the Foreign Office, R.W.F. Bashford wrote: “[T]he concentration camps were not dismantled, but rather taken over by new owners. Mostly they are run by Polish militia. In Świętochłowice, prisoners who are not starved or whipped to death are made to stand, night after night, in cold water up to their necks, until they perish. In Breslau there are cellars from which, day and night, the screams of victims can be heard.”[12]

Lamsdorf in Upper Silesia was initially built by Germany to house Allied prisoners of war. This camp’s postwar population of 8,064 Germans was decimated through starvation, disease, hard labor and physical mistreatment. A surviving German doctor at Lamsdorf recorded the deaths of 6,488 German inmates in the camp after the war, including 628 children.[13]

A report submitted to the U.S. Senate dated August 28, 1945 reads: “In “Y” [code for a camp, from the original document], Upper Silesia, an evacuation camp has been prepared which holds at present 1,000 people….A great part of the people are suffering from symptoms of starvation; there are cases of tuberculosis and always new cases of typhoid….Two people seriously ill with syphilis have been dealt with in a very simple way: They were shot….Yesterday a woman from “K” [another camp] was shot and a child wounded.”[14]

Zgoda, which had been a satellite camp of Auschwitz during the war, was reopened by the Polish Security Service as a punishment and labor camp. Thousands of Germans in Poland were arrested and sent to Zgoda for labor duties. The prisoners were denied adequate food and medical care, the overcrowded barrack buildings were crawling with lice, and beatings were a common occurrence. The camp director, Salomon Morel, told the prisoners at the gate that he would show them what Auschwitz had meant. A man named Günther Wollny, who had the misfortune of being an inmate in both Auschwitz and Zgoda, later stated, “I’d rather be 10 years in a German camp than one day in a Polish one.”[15]

Sexual Assaults in Polish Camps

A notable element of the postwar Polish camp system was the prevalence of sexual assault as well as ritualized sexual humiliation and punishment suffered by the female inmates. The practice at Jaworzno, as reported by Antoni Białecki of the local Office of Public Security, was to “take ethnically German women at gunpoint home at night and rape them.” The camp functioned as a sexual supermarket for its 170-strong militia guard contingent.

The sexual humiliation of female prisoners in the Polish camp at Potulice had become an institutional practice by the end of 1945. Many of the women were sexually abused and beaten, and some of the punishments resulted in horrific injuries. The sexual exploitation of women in Polish-run camps contrasts to the experience of women in German-run concentration camps. Rape or other forms of sexual mistreatment was an extremely rare occurrence at German concentration camps, and severely punished by the authorities if detected.[16]

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) attempted to send a delegation to investigate the atrocities reported in the Polish camps. It was not until July 17, 1947, when most Germans had either died or had been expelled from the camps, that ICRC officials were finally allowed to inspect a Polish camp. Yet even at this late date there were still a few camps the ICRC was not allowed to investigate.[17]

Jewish journalist John Sack has confirmed the torture, murder and sexual assaults of German prisoners in postwar Polish camps operated by the Office of State Security. Most of the camps were staffed and run by Jews, with help from Poles, Czechs, Russians and concentration-camp survivors. Virtually all of the personnel at these camps were eager to take revenge on the defeated Germans. In three years after the war, Sack estimates that from 60,000 to 80,000 Germans died in the Office’s camps.[18]

Efforts to bring perpetrators in Polish camps to justice were largely unsuccessful. Czesław Gęborski, director of the camp at Lamsdorf, was indicted by the Polish authorities in 1956 for wanton brutality against the German prisoners. Gęborski admitted at his trial that his only goal in taking the job was “to exact revenge” on the Germans. On October 4, 1945, Gęborski ordered his guards to shoot down anyone trying to escape a fire that engulfed one of the barracks buildings; a minimum of 48 prisoners were killed that day. The guards at Lamsdorf also routinely beat the German prisoners and stole from them. German prisoners in Lamsdorf died of hunger and diseases in droves; guards recalled scenes of children begging for scraps of food and crusts of bread. Gęborski was found not guilty despite strong evidence of his criminal acts.[19]

Czech-Run Camps

The Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia was used by Germany during the war to intern many of Germany’s, Austria’s and Czechoslovakia’s most-famous or -talented Jews. On May 24, 1945, the Czech government decided to use the Theresienstadt Camp to imprison 600 Germans from Prague. Within the first few hours of their arrival, between 59 and 70 of these Germans were brutally beaten to death. Two hundred more Germans were reported to have died from torture and beatings within the next few days. The camp commandant, Alois Pruša, took great pleasure in the beatings, and reportedly used at least one of his daughters to assist him in killing the German inmates. Pruša and his assistant told the remaining surviving Germans that they would never leave the camp.[20]

Torture appears to have been the rule in Czech-run Theresienstadt. Guards at Theresienstadt used a variety of instruments for beating and lashing their victims: steel rods sheathed with leather, pipes, rubber truncheons, iron bars and wooden planks. One woman in Theresienstadt observed and still remembers the screams from a female SS member forced to sit astride an SA dagger. Dr. E. Siegel, a Czech-speaking medical doctor working for the ICRC, was also subjected to extensive torture in Theresienstadt. Dr. Siegel thought the guards were ordered from above to commit their acts of torture, because the methods used in all Czech-run camps were broadly similar.[21]

Some of the savagery at Theresienstadt stopped when Pruša was replaced by a Maj. Kálal.[22] However, one secret Soviet report said that the German inmates at Theresienstadt repeatedly begged the Russians to stay at the camp. The report states: “We now see the manifestations of hatred for the Germans. They [the Czechs] don’t kill them, but torment them like livestock. The Czechs look at them like cattle.” The horrible treatment at the hands of the Czechs led to despair and hopelessness among Czechoslovakia’s ethnic Germans. According to Czech statistics, 5,558 ethnic Germans committed suicide in 1946 alone.[23]

Czech author Dr. Hans Guenther Adler, a Jew who was imprisoned during the war in Theresienstadt, confirmed that conditions in Czech-run Theresienstadt were deplorable for Germans. Adler wrote:

Certainly there were those among them who, during the years of occupation, were guilty of some infraction or other, but the majority, among them children and adolescents, were locked up simply because they were German. Just because they were German…? That phrase is frighteningly familiar; one could easily substitute the word “Jew” for “German.” The rags given to the Germans as clothes were smeared with swastikas. They were miserably undernourished, abused….The camp was run by Czechs, yet they did nothing to stop the Russians from going in to rape the captive women….[24]

After the war, the ICRC reported that the sexual abuse of female inmates in Czech-run camps was pervasive and systematic. A foreign observer of one Czech camp noted that the women were “treated like animals. Russian and Czech soldiers come in search of women for purposes which can be imagined. Conditions there for women are definitely more unfavorable than in the German concentration camps, where cases of rape were rare.” In another Czech-run camp, the soldiers would “take away the prettiest girls, who would often disappear without trace.”

Jean Duchosal, secretary general of the ICRC, reported that girls were often raped at the Matejovce Camp in Slovakia, and that beatings were daily occurrences. The same was true of the Czech-run camp of Patrónka. A Prague police report of June 1945 mentioned that Revolutionary Guards were in the habit of “exposing women’s body parts and burning them with lighted cigarettes.”[25]

A common feature of most Czech-run camps was the provision of so little food as to make not merely malnutrition but actual starvation largely a function of the length of incarceration. The Czech government in 1945 and 1946 instituted a policy that there would be no improvement in the food rations provided to ethnic German inmates regardless of the availability of food. For example, despite the fact that malnutrition-related deaths were occurring at a rate of three per day, none of the 4.5 tons of food the ICRC delivered to the Hagibor camp shortly before Christmas 1945 was issued to the inmates. Richard Stokes, the prominent British Parliament member, visited Hagibor in September 1946 and calculated the daily food ration at Hagibor to be “750 calories per day, which is below Belsen level.”[26]

The ICRC found that published regulations regarding the dietary requirements of inmates in Czech-run camps were almost invariably ignored. Pierre W. Mock, head of the ICRC delegation in Bratislava, calculated the daily caloric intake of prisoners at Petržalka I Camp at 664 per person during the third week of October 1945. The daily caloric intake had declined to 512 per person when Mock returned to the Petržalka I Camp in the last week of December 1945. At Nováky, a former German concentration camp, Mock found the milk and bread ration to be woefully inadequate to feed the population of more than 5,000.

An ICRC visitor at the Hradištko camp near Prague was informed by the guard in charge of food distribution that the inadequate food ration issued to the inmates was fixed by law and unchangeable. The guard also told the ICRC visitor that the few Czech children at Hradištko received twice as much food as the German inmates. A social worker attempting to ameliorate the worst elements of the Czechoslovak camp system confidentially advised the British Foreign Office that the Czech government would not permit relief supplies to be distributed to the needy German civilian inmates.[27]

German prisoners at Svidník camp in Czechoslovakia were also forced to clear away mine fields. Strong protests from the ICRC at Bratislava eventually succeeded in having this practice stopped.[28] The ICRC sent a general memorandum to the Prague government on March 14, 1946, stating that its duty was to carry out the German expulsions as humanely as possible. In view of the unsatisfactory condition of the Czech-run camps, the ICRC recommended that provisional internment of Germans in Czechoslovakia end as soon as possible.[29]

Conclusion

The German prisoners in postwar Soviet, Polish and Czech concentration camps were subject to brutal treatment resulting in the loss of many tens of thousands of lives. Their treatment was probably worse than the treatment of prisoners in German-run concentration camps during World War II.

Endnotes

[1] Douglas, R. M., Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012, p. 136.

[2] Suvorov, Viktor, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II, Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008, p. 279.

[3] Naimark, Norman M., The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 377.

[4] Weber, Mark, “Extermination Camps Propaganda Myths,” in Gauss, Ernst (ed.), Dissecting the Holocaust: The Growing Critique of Truth and Memory, Capshaw, Ala.: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2000, p. 299.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Suvorov, Viktor, op. cit., p. 279.

[7] Weber, Mark op. cit., p. 299.

[8] Ibid., p. 298.

[9] Naimark, Norman M, 1995, op. cit., pp. 376, 378.

[10] Weber, Mark, op. cit., p. 299.

[11] Merten, Ulrich, Forgotten Voices: The Expulsion of the Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2012, pp. 9, 65.

[12] Public Record Office, FO 371/46990.

[13] De Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, pp. 125-126.

[14] “Evacuation and Concentration Camps in Silesia” in Congressional Record, Senate, Aug. 2, 1945, Annex A-4778/79.

[15] Lowe, Keith, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012, pp. 135-137.

[16] Douglas, R. M, op. cit., pp. 141-142.

[17] International Committee of the Red Cross, Report of its Activities during the Second World War, Geneva: 1948, Vol. 1, pp. 334 et seq.

[18] Sack, John, An Eye for an Eye, 4th edition, New York: Basic Books, 2000, p. 114.

[19] Naimark, Norman M., Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 130.

[20] MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, pp. 153-154.

[21] Ibid., pp. 154, 157.

[22] Ibid., p. 156.

[23] Naimark, Norman M., , 2001, op. cit., p. 118.

[24] De Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 2nd edition, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 97.

[25] Douglas, R. M., op. cit., pp. 141-142.

[26] Ibid., pp. 144, 151-152.

[27] Ibid., pp. 144, 146.

[28] International Committee of the Red Cross, Reports of Its Activities during the Second World War, Geneva: 1948, Vol. 1, pp. 334, 675f.

[29] De Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, , 1977op. cit., p. 125.


Author(s): John Wear

Title: An Awful Revenge: The Eastern Victors’ Concentration Camps after World War II

Sources: [see above]

Dates: published: 2019-05-13, first posted: 2019-05-14 02:52:01
 
Let's Stop Torturing Germany, #405 with James Bacque​

Guns & Butter / Bonnie Faulkner • June 5, 2019 • 10 Comments • Reply

Link: http://www.unz.com/audio/gunsbutter_lets-stop-torturing-germany-405/

[see site link, above, for recorded int-view w. Bacque]

Int-view is also on Jew-tube, but they might remove it soon--it's at

James Bacque discusses his devastating research into allied war crimes against a defeated Germany in post-World War Two Europe, as detailed in his most famous book, Other Losses; Eisenhower imposes starvation on surrendered German soldiers interned in death camps; official records of German POWs and refugees purged and hidden; eyewitness and survivor accounts of American brutality; the Morgenthau Plan to ravage and grind into dust post-war Germany; Geneva Convention not followed; Soviet KGB archival records of refugees and POWs opened; evidence of war crimes and mass deaths of German prisoners still being suppressed by the governments of Germany, the US, France, Britain and Canada; the real life consequences of a reinterpretation of history.
 
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In 'Eisenhower's Death Camps':
A U.S. Prison Guard Remembers​

Martin Brech

Link: https://www.ihr.org/jhr/v10/v10p161_Brech.html

In October 1944, at age eighteen, I was drafted into the U.S. army. Largely because of the "Battle of the Bulge," my training was cut short, my furlough was halved, and I was sent overseas immediately. Upon arrival in Le Havre, France, we were quickly loaded into box cars and shipped to the front. When we got there, I was suffering increasingly severe symptoms of mononucleosis, and was sent to a hospital in Belgium. Since mononucleosis was then known as the "kissing disease," I mailed a letter of thanks to my girlfriend.

By the time I left the hospital, the outfit I had trained with in Spartanburg, South Carolina, was deep inside Germany, so, despite my protests, I was placed in a "repo depot" (replacement depot). I lost interest in the units to which I was assigned, and don't recall all of them: non-combat units were ridiculed at that time. My separation qualification record states I was mostly with Company C, 14th Infantry Regiment, during my seventeen-month stay in Germany, but I remember being transferred to other outfits also.

In late March or early April 1945, I was sent to guard a POW camp near Andernach along the Rhine. I had four years of high school German, so I was able to talk to the prisoners, although this was forbidden. Gradually, however, I was used as an interpreter and asked to ferret out members of the S.S. (I found none.)

In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate enclosure that I did not see until later. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets. Many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. It was a cold, wet spring, and their misery from exposure alone was evident.

Even more shocking was to see the prisoners throwing grass and weeds into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this to help ease their hunger pains. Quickly they grew emaciated. Dysentery raged, and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches. Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before our eyes. We had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, including no medical assistance.

Outraged, I protested to my officers and was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from "higher up." No officer would dare do this to 50,000 men if he felt that it was "out of line," leaving him open to charges. Realizing my protests were useless, I asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could slip me some extra food for the prisoners. He too said they were under strict orders to severely ration the prisoners' food, and that these orders came from "higher up." But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with, and would sneak me some.

When I threw this food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, I was caught and threatened with imprisonment. I repeated the "offense," and one officer angrily threatened to shoot me. I assumed this was a bluff until I encountered a captain on a hill above the Rhine shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 caliber pistol. When I asked, "Why?," he mumbled, "Target practice," and fired until his pistol was empty. I saw the women running for cover, but, at that distance, couldn't tell if any had been hit.

This is when I realized I was dealing with cold-blooded killers filled with moralistic hatred. They considered the Germans subhuman and worthy of extermination; another expression of the downward spiral of racism. Articles in the G.I. newspaper, Stars and Stripes, played up the German concentration camps, complete with photos of emaciated bodies. This amplified our self-righteous cruelty, and made it easier to imitate behavior we were supposed to oppose. Also, I think, soldiers not exposed to combat were trying to prove how tough they were by taking it out on the prisoners and civilians.

These prisoners, I found out, were mostly farmers and workingmen, as simple and ignorant as many of our own troops. As time went on, more of them lapsed into a zombie-like state of listlessness, while others tried to escape in a demented or suicidal fashion, running through open fields in broad daylight towards the Rhine to quench their thirst. They were mowed down.

Some prisoners were as eager for cigarettes as for food, saying they took the edge off their hunger. Accordingly, enterprising G.I. "Yankee traders" were acquiring hordes of watches and rings in exchange for handfuls of cigarettes or less. When I began throwing cartons of cigarettes to the prisoners to ruin this trade, I was threatened by rank-and-file G.I.s too.

The only bright spot in this gloomy picture came one night when. I was put on the "graveyard shift," from two to four a.m. Actually, there was a graveyard on the uphill side of this enclosure, not many yards away. My superiors had forgotten to give me a flashlight and I hadn't bothered to ask for one, disgusted as I was with the whole situation by that time. It was a fairly bright night and I soon became aware of a prisoner crawling under the wires towards the graveyard. We were supposed to shoot escapees on sight, so I started to get up from the ground to warn him to get back. Suddenly I noticed another prisoner crawling from the graveyard back to the enclosure. They were risking their lives to get to the graveyard for something. I had to investigate.

When I entered the gloom of this shrubby, tree-shaded cemetery, I felt completely vulnerable, but somehow curiosity kept me moving. Despite my caution, I tripped over the legs of someone in a prone position. Whipping my rifle around while stumbling and trying to regain composure of mind and body, I soon was relieved I hadn't reflexively fired. The figure sat up. Gradually, I could see the beautiful but terror-stricken face of a woman with a picnic basket nearby. German civilians were not allowed to feed, nor even come near the prisoners, so I quickly assured her I approved of what she was doing, not to be afraid, and that I would leave the graveyard to get out of the way.

I did so immediately and sat down, leaning against a tree at the edge of the cemetery to be inconspicuous and not frighten the prisoners. I imagined then, and still do now, what it would be like to meet a beautiful woman with a picnic basket under those conditions as a prisoner. I have never forgotten her face.

Eventually, more prisoners crawled back to the enclosure. I saw they were dragging food to their comrades, and could only admire their courage and devotion.

On May 8, V.E. Day [1945], I decided to celebrate with some prisoners I was guarding who were baking bread the other prisoners occasionally received. This group had all the bread they could eat, and shared the jovial mood generated by the end of the war. We all thought we were going home soon, a pathetic hope on their part. We were in what was to become the French zone [of occupation], where I soon would witness the brutality of the French soldiers when we transferred our prisoners to them for their slave labor camps.

On this day, however, we were happy.

As a gesture of friendliness, I emptied my rifle and stood it in the corner, even allowing them to play with it at their request. This thoroughly "broke the ice," and soon we were singing songs we taught each other, or that I had learned in high school German class ("Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen"). Out of gratitude, they baked me a special small loaf of sweet bread, the only possible present they had left to offer. I stuffed it in my "Eisenhower jacket," and snuck it back to my barracks, eating it when I had privacy. I have never tasted more delicious bread, nor felt a deeper sense of communion while eating it. I believe a cosmic sense of Christ (the Oneness of all Being) revealed its normally hidden presence to me on that occasion, influencing my later decision to major in philosophy and religion.

Shortly afterwards, some of our weak and sickly prisoners were marched off by French soldiers to their camp. We were riding on a truck behind this column. Temporarily, it slowed down and dropped back, perhaps because the driver was as shocked as I was. Whenever a German prisoner staggered or dropped back, he was hit on the head with a club and killed. The bodies were rolled to the side of the road to be picked up by another truck. For many, this quick death might have been preferable to slow starvation in our "killing fields."

When I finally saw the German women held in a separate enclosure, I asked why we were holding them prisoner. I was told they were "camp followers," selected as breeding stock for the S.S. to create a super-race. I spoke to some, and must say I never met a more spirited or attractive group of women. I certainly didn't think they deserved imprisonment.

More and more I was used as an interpreter, and was able to prevent some particularly unfortunate arrests. One somewhat amusing incident involved an old farmer who was being dragged away by several M.P.s. I was told he had a "fancy Nazi medal," which they showed me. Fortunately, I had a chart identifying such medals. He'd been awarded it for having five children! Perhaps his wife was somewhat relieved to get him "off her back," but I didn't think one of our death camps was a fair punishment for his contribution to Germany. The M.P.s agreed and released him to continue his "dirty work."

Famine began to spread among the German civilians also. It was a common sight to see German women up to their elbows in our garbage cans looking for something edible -- that is, if they weren't chased away.

When I interviewed mayors of small towns and villages, I was told that their supply of food had been taken away by "displaced persons" (foreigners who had worked in Germany), who packed the food on trucks and drove away. When I reported this, the response was a shrug. I never saw any Red Cross at the camp or helping civilians, although their coffee and doughnut stands were available everywhere else for us. In the meantime, the Germans had to rely on the sharing of hidden stores until the next harvest.

Hunger made German women more "available," but despite this, rape was prevalent and often accompanied by additional violence. In particular I remember an eighteen-year old woman who had the side of her faced smashed with a rifle butt, and was then raped by two G.I.s. Even the French complained that the rapes, looting and drunken destructiveness on the part of our troops was excessive. In Le Havre, we'd been given booklets warning us that the German soldiers had maintained a high standard of behavior with French civilians who were peaceful, and that we should do the same. In this we failed miserably.

"So what?" some would say. "The enemy's atrocities were worse than ours." It is true that I experienced only the end of the war, when we were already the victors. The German opportunity for atrocities had faded, while ours was at hand. But two wrongs don't make a right. Rather than copying our enemy's crimes, we should aim once and for all to break the cycle of hatred and vengeance that has plagued and distorted human history. This is why I am speaking out now, 45 years after the crime. We can never prevent individual war crimes, but we can, if enough of us speak out, influence government policy. We can reject government propaganda that depicts our enemies as subhuman and encourages the kind of outrages I witnessed. We can protest the bombing of civilian targets, which still goes on today. And we can refuse ever to condone our government's murder of unarmed and defeated prisoners of war.

I realize it's difficult for the average citizen to admit witnessing a crime of this magnitude, especially if implicated himself. Even G.I.s sympathetic to the victims were afraid to complain and get into trouble, they told me. And the danger has not ceased. Since I spoke out a few weeks ago, I have received threatening calls and had my mailbox smashed. But its been worth it. Writing about these atrocities has been a catharsis of feelings suppressed too long, a liberation, that perhaps will remind other witnesses that "the truth will make us free, have no fear." We may even learn a supreme lesson from all this: only love can conquer all.


About the author

Martin Brech lives in Mahopac, New York. When he wrote this memoir essay in 1990, he was an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Brech holds a master's degree in theology from Columbia University, and is a Unitarian-Universalist minister.

This essay was published in The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1990 (Vol. 10, No. 2), pp. 161-166. (Revised, updated: Nov. 2008)


For Further Reading

James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950 (Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1997)

James Bacque, Other Losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II (Toronto: Stoddart, 1989)

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Nemesis at Postsdam (Lincoln, Neb.: 1990)

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Eastern European Germans, 1944-1950 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994)

John Dietrich, The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (New York: Algora, 2002)

Ralph Franklin Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies' Postwar War Against the German People (IHR, 1992). Originally published in Chicago in 1947.

Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007)

John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Story of Jews Who Sought Revenge for the Holocaust (2000)

Mark Weber, "New Book Details Mass Killings and Brutal Mistreatment of Germans at the End of World War Two" (Summer 2007)
( http://www.ihr.org/other/afterthereich072007.html )
 
Herald of the Victors’ Shame: James Bacque, 1929-2019​

John Wear

Link: https://inconvenienthistory.com/11/4/6915

James Bacque died peacefully on September 13, 2019, surrounded by his family after suffering multiple strokes. His wife Elisabeth says James was lucid and listening to the end, and that his sense of humor never failed him.

Bacque had a long literary career as a journalist, an editor and a publisher. His first books were novels followed by short stories, history, a biography, essays and a play. His final novel Our Fathers’ War portrays World War II from both sides of the conflict.

While researching a book about Raoul Laporterie, a French Resistance hero, Bacque interviewed a former German soldier who had become a friend of Laporterie. Laporterie had taken this man, Hans Goertz, and one other, out of a French prison camp in 1946 to give them work as tailors in his chain of stores. Goertz declared that “Laporterie saved my life, because 25% of the men in that camp died in one month.” What had they died of? “Starvation, dysentery, disease.”

Checking as far as possible the records of the camps where Goertz had been confined, Bacque found that it had been one of a group of three in a system of 1,600, all equally bad, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross reports in the French army archives at Vincennes, Paris. Soon Bacque came upon the first hard evidence of mass deaths in U.S.-controlled camps. This evidence was found in army reports under the bland heading “Other Losses.”

In the spring of 1987, Bacque and Dr. Ernest F. Fischer, Jr., a retired colonel in the U.S. Army and a distinguished army historian, met in Washington, D.C. They worked together over the following months in the National Archives and in the George C. Marshall Foundation in Lexington, Virginia, piecing together the evidence they uncovered. In the United States National Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue, Bacque found the documents with the heading Weekly Prisoner of War and Disarmed Enemy Forces Report. In each report was the heading "Other Losses," which resembled the statistics he had seen in France.

Bacque reviewed these reports with Col. Philip S. Lauben, who had been chief of the German Affairs Branch of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force in charge of prisoner transfers and repatriation. Bacque and Lauben went over the headings in the reports one by one until they got to the heading Other Losses. Lauben said, “It means deaths and escapes.” When Bacque asked how many escapes, Lauben answered “Very, very minor.” Bacque later learned that the escapes were less than one-tenth of 1%.[1]

Bacque wrote that because some prisoner documents were deceptive when made, and because many records were destroyed in the 1950s or hidden in euphemisms, the number of dead will always be in dispute. However, there is no question that enormous numbers of men of all ages, plus some women and children, died of starvation, exposure, unsanitary conditions and disease in American and French prisoner-of-war (POW) camps in Germany and France starting in April 1945.

Bacque estimated in his book, aptly titled Other Losses, that German POW deaths undoubtedly number over 790,000, almost certainly over 900,000, and quite likely over a million. The prisoners’ deaths were knowingly caused by army officers who had sufficient resources to keep these German POWs alive. Relief organizations such as the Red Cross that attempted to help prisoners in the American camps were refused permission by the Army.[2]

James Bacque wrote that the response he received following the original publication of Other Losses was amazing. Bacque stated: “Most gratifying has been the huge response from thousands of ex-prisoners who have written to me, or telephoned, sent faxes or e-mail, or even called at my door, to thank me for telling a story they feared would die with them. They continue to send me diaries, letters, Tagebücher, self-published books, typescripts of memoirs, in three or four languages, along with photographs, maps, drawings, paintings and even a few artifacts.”[3]

However, Bacque also sustained vociferous criticism from establishment historians and the mass media after the publication of Other Losses. Bacque was never intimidated by such criticism, and later found corroborating evidence in the Soviet archives. Bacque wrote: “Among all of the many editors, writers, TV producers and professors all over Europe and North America who have furiously denounced the author of Other Losses since 1989, not one has ever commented on his subsequent amazing discoveries in the Soviet archives.”[4]

James Bacque ended Other Losses with an appeal for open-mindedness and understanding. Bacque wrote: “Surely it is time for the guesswork and the lying to stop. Surely it is time to take seriously what the eye-witnesses on both sides are trying to tell us about our history. All over the Western world, savage atrocities against the Armenians, the Ukrainians and the Jews are known. Only the atrocities against the Germans are denied. Are Germans not people in our eyes?”[5]

Bacque later expanded on his historical work with the book Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation 1944-1950. He wrote that the Allies were able to conceal their murderous policies toward the Germans since they controlled everything of consequence in Germany. The statistics of German deaths after the war were all under Allied control, and there was no independent German government to dispute the Allied figures. The U.S. Military Governor reports were designed to reflect favorably on the Allied postwar treatment of Germany. These U.S. reports, which have been widely used to determine Westerners’ view of Germany’s postwar history, showed figures indicating no large number of Germans died in the three Western zones from 1945 to 1950.[6]

German deaths after the war can be divided into three groups of people. The first group is the German POWs in both Europe and the Soviet Union. The second group is the Germans forcibly expelled from Eastern and Central Europe, and the third group is the Germans already residing in Germany. While no one will ever know how many Germans died from 1945 to 1950 as a result of the Allies’ policies, it is certain that the deaths far exceed most traditional estimates. The great majority of these deaths were caused by the lethal policies imposed by the four victorious Allies after the war.[7]

Bacque estimated that a minimum of 1.5 million German POWs, 2.1 million German expellees, and 5.7 million German residents died needlessly after the war. This minimum estimate of 9.3 million German deaths is far more than the number of Germans who died during World War II. Millions of these Germans slowly starved to death while the Allies withheld available food. The majority of these postwar dead Germans were women, children and very old men. Their deaths have never been honestly reported by the Allies, the German government or most historians.[8]

The world owes James Bacque a huge debt of gratitude for his outstanding and groundbreaking research into this painful, controversial and underreported period of history. Bacque’s friend, American historian Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, writes: “We owe James Bacque our recognition for his courage to raise new and uncomfortable questions. We thank him for the answers he proposes. Let the debate begin.”[9]


Notes

[1] Bacque, James, Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II, 3rd edition, Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2011, pp. lxv-lxvi.

[2] Ibid., pp. lxvi-lxvii.

[3] Ibid., p. xxiii.

[4] Ibid., pp. lxii-lxiii.

[5] Ibid., p. 196.

[6] Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, pp. 107-109.

[7] Ibid., p. 108.

[8] Ibid., p. 124.

[9] Ibid., p. xxii.
 
Yalta and the Death of the ‘Good War’​

by James Bovard

Link: http://jimbovard.com/blog/2020/02/17/yalta-and-the-death-of-the-good-war/

FDR’s complicity in Stalin’s post-WWII bloodletting started a trend of lies and hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy.

This month marks the 75th anniversary of the infamous meeting at Yalta of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and President Franklin Roosevelt. Yalta has become a synonym for the abandonment of oppressed people and helped inspire the 1952 Republican campaign theme “20 years of treason.” It is time now to recall and recognize the lessons of that betrayal.

FDR painted World War II as a crusade for democracy, hailing Stalin as a partner in liberation. From 1942 through 1945, the U.S. government consistently deceived the public about the character of the Soviet Union. Roosevelt praised Soviet Russia as one of the “freedom-loving Nations” and stressed that Stalin is “thoroughly conversant with the provisions of our Constitution.” Harold Ickes, one of FDR’s top aides, proclaimed that communism was “the antithesis of Nazism” because it was based on “belief in the control of the government, including the economic system, by the people themselves.” (Shades of Bernie Sanders!)

The fact that the Soviet regime had been the most oppressive government in the world during the 1930s was irrelevant so far as FDR was concerned. As Georgetown University professor Derek Leebaert, author of Magic and Mayhem, observed, “FDR remarked that most of what he knew about the world came from his stamp collection.”

Yalta was preceded by years of pro-Soviet propaganda by the U.S. government and its media lackeys. In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR denounced those Americans with “such suspicious souls—who feared that I have made ‘commitments’ for the future which might pledge this Nation to secret treaties” at the summit of Allied leaders in Tehran the previous month. This helped set the two-tiered attack that dominated much of post-war American foreign policy—denouncing cynics and betraying foreigners whom the U.S. government claimed to champion. Never mind that Soviet spies had already infiltrated Washington, including the FDR White House.

Prior to the Yalta conference, FDR reportedly confided to his ambassador, William Bullitt, how he felt about Stalin: “I think if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” Stalin wanted assurances from FDR and Churchill that millions of Soviet citizens who had been captured during the war by the Germans or who had abandoned the Soviet Union would be forcibly returned. After the war ended, Operation Keelhaul forcibly sent two million Soviets to certain death or long-term imprisonment. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called Operation Keelhaul “the last secret” of World War II. It was covered up or ignored by Western media until the 1970s.

On March 1, 1945, FDR gave a speech to Congress on the glorious results of Yalta. His final spiel on Capitol Hill was one of the biggest cons of his career. A few weeks earlier, in the final communique from Yalta, FDR had declared, along with Churchill and Stalin, that “a new situation has been created in Poland as a result of her complete liberation by the Red Army.” Liberation? Tell it to the Marines. FDR then declared to Congress, “The decision with respect to the boundaries of Poland was, frankly, a compromise…. It will include, in the new, strong Poland, quite a large slice of what now is called Germany.” FDR agreed with Stalin at Yalta to move the border of the Soviet Union far to the west—thereby effectively conscripting 11 million Poles into Soviet citizenship.

Poland was “compensated” with a huge swath of Germany, a simple cartographic change that spurred vast human carnage. As author R.M. Douglas noted in his 2012 book Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War, the result was

the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians – the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16 -were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland.

At least half a million died as a result. George Orwell denounced the “relocation” as an “enormous crime” that was “equivalent to transplanting the entire population of Australia.” Philosopher Bertrand Russell protested: “Are mass deportations crimes when committed by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace?”

FDR signed these death warrants at Yalta. Freda Utley, the mother of TAC publisher Jon Utley, did some of the first and best reporting on the vast suffering ensuing from the German expulsions. (The U.S. government approved similar brutal mass forcible transfers in the former Yugoslavia during the Clinton administration.)

FDR boasted to Congress, “As the Allied armies have marched to military victory, they have liberated people whose liberties had been crushed by the Nazis for four long years.” At that point, FDR and the State Department knew this was a total lie for areas that had fallen under the control of the Red Army. Roosevelt also claimed that the deal at Yalta was “the most hopeful agreement possible for a free, independent, and prosperous Polish people.” Yet he betrayed the exiled Polish government in London and signed off on Soviet-style “elections” with no international observers—effectively giving Stalin unlimited sway over Poland’s rulers.

Any illusions about Soviet benevolence towards Poland should have been banished when the Red Army massacred the Polish officer corps at Katyn Forest—an atrocity, according to documents since released by the National Archives, that the U.S. government assiduously covered up (and blamed on the Nazis).

In a private conversation at Yalta, FDR assured Stalin that he was feeling “more bloodthirsty” than when they’d previously met. Immediately after the Yalta conference concluded, the British and American air forces turned Dresden into an inferno, killing up to 50,000 civilians. The Associated Press reported that “Allied air bosses” had engaged in the “deliberate terror bombing of great German population centers as ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.” Ravaging Dresden was intended to “‘add immeasurably’ to FDR’s strength in negotiating with the Russians at the postwar peace table,” as Thomas Fleming noted in The New Dealers’ War.

FDR told Congress that the Yalta Agreement “spells the end of the system of unilateral action and exclusive alliance and spheres of influence.” By the time he died the following month, FDR knew that democracy was doomed in any turf conquered by the Red Army. Yet the sham had been immensely politically profitable for Roosevelt and his successors kept up much of the charade.

American government secrecy and propaganda efforts did their best to continue portraying World War II as the triumph of good over evil. Yet if Americans had been told in early 1945 of the barbarities that Yalta had approved of regarding captured Soviet soldiers and the brutal mass transfer of German women and children, they would have been aghast. War correspondent Ernie Pyle offered a far more honest assessment: “The war gets so complicated and confused in my mind; on especially sad days it’s almost impossible to believe that anything is worth such mass slaughter and misery.”

In the decades after Yalta, presidents have continued to invoke lofty goals to justify U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. In each case, massive secrecy and perennial lies have been necessary to maintain a facade of benevolence. Americans have still not seen the secret files behind the harebrained, contradictory interventions in Syria from the George W. Bush administration onwards. The only certainty is that, if we ever learn the full truth, plenty of politicians and other government officials will be revealed to have been bigger scoundrels than was ever suspected.

“Presidents have lied so much to us about foreign policy that they’ve established almost a common-law right to do so,” George Washington University history professor Leo Ribuffo observed in 1998. On the 75th anniversary of Yalta, Americans have no reason to presume that presidents, top government officials, or much of the media are more trustworthy now than they were during the final years of the “Good War.”
 
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.)

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

[see vid on this subject at https://archive.org/details/BBC1945TheSavagePeaceAtrocitiesAgainstGermans ]

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

Both during and after the war, the Allies tortured German prisoners. In one British center in England, called “the London Cage,” German prisoners were subjected to systematic ill-treatment, including starvation and beatings. The brutality continued for several years after the end of the war. Treatment of German prisoners by the British was even more harsh in the British occupation zone of Germany. / 15 At the US internment center at Schwäbisch Hall in southwest Germany, prisoners awaiting trial by American military courts were subjected to severe and systematic torture, including long stretches in solitary confinement, extremes of heat and cold, deprivation of sleep and food, and severe beatings, including kicks to the groin. / 16

Most of the German prisoners of war who died in Allied captivity were held by the Soviets, and a much higher portion of German POWs died in Soviet custody than perished in British and American captivity. (For example, of the 90,000 Germans who surrendered at Stalingrad, only 5,000 ever returned to their homeland.) More than five years after the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of German prisoners were still being held in the Soviet Union. Other German prisoners perished after the end of the war in Yugoslavia, Poland and other countries. In Yugoslavia alone, authorities of the Communist regime killed as many as 80,000 Germans. German prisoners toiled as slave labor in other Allied countries, often for years.

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. / 17

For two years after the end of the fighting, Germans were victims of a cruel and vindictive occupation policy, one that meant slow starvation of the defeated population. To sustain life, a normal adult needs a minimum of about 2,000 calories per day. But in March and February 1946, the daily intake per person in the British and American occupation zones of Germany was between one thousand and fifteen hundred calories. / 18

In the winter of 1945-46, the Allies forbid anyone outside the country to send food parcels to the starving Germans. The Allied authorities also rejected requests by the International Red Cross to bring in provisions to alleviate the suffering. / 19

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.” / 20

Another person who protested was 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’.” / 21

As the war was ending in what is now the Czech Republic, hysterical mobs brutally assaulted ethnic Germans, members of a minority group whose ancestors had lived there for centuries. In Prague, German soldiers were rounded up, disarmed, tied to stakes, doused with gasoline, and set on fire as living torches. / 22 In some cities and towns in what is now the Czech Republic, every German over the age of six was forced to wear on his clothing, sewn on his left breast, a large white circle six inches in diameter with the black letter N, which is the first letter of the Czech word for German. Germans were also banned from all parks, places of public entertainment, and public transportation, and not allowed to leave their homes after eight in the evening. Later all these people were expelled, along with the entire ethnic German population of what is now the Czech Republic. / 23 In the territory of what is now the Czech Republic, a quarter of a million ethnic Germans were killed.

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, pris*ons, 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.” / 24

We are ceaselessly reminded of the Third Reich’s wartime concentration camps. But few Americans are aware that such infamous camps as Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz were kept in operation after the end of the war, only now packed with German captives, many of whom perished miserably.

For many years we’ve heard a lot about so-called Nazi art theft. But however large the scale of confiscation of art by Germans in World War II, it was dwarfed by the massive theft of art works and other objects of cultural value by the Allies. The Soviets alone looted some two and half million art objects, including 800,000 paintings. In addition, many paintings, statues, and other priceless art works were destroyed by the Allies. / 25

In the war’s aftermath, the victors put many German military and political leaders to death or sentenced them to lengthy prison terms after much-publicized trials in which the Allies were both prosecutor and judge. The best-known of these trials was before the so-called “International Military Tribunal” at Nuremberg, where officials of the four Allied powers were both the prosecutors and the judges.

Justice -- as opposed to vengeance -- is a standard that is applied impartially. But in the aftermath of World War II, the victorious powers imposed standards of "justice" that applied only to the vanquished. The governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, and other member states of the so-called “United Nations,” held Germans to a standard that they categorically refused to respect themselves.

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.” / 26

Germans were executed or imprisoned for policies that the Allies themselves were carrying out, sometimes on a far greater scale. German military and political leaders were put to death on the basis of a hypocritical double standard, which means that these executions were essentially acts of judicial murder dressed up with the trappings and forms of legality. If the standards of the Nuremberg Tribunal had been applied impartially, many American, Soviet and other Allied military and political leaders would have been hanged.

An awareness of how the defeated Germans were treated by the victors helps in understanding why Germans continued to fight during the final months of the war with a determination, tenacity and willingness to sacrifice that has few parallels in history, even as their cities were being smashed into ruins under relentless bombing, and even as defeat against numerically superior enemy forces seemed inevitable.

Two years after the end of the war, American and British policy toward the defeated Germans changed. The US and British governments began to treat the Germans as potential allies, rather than as vanquished subjects, and to appeal for their support. This shift in policy was not prompted by an awakening of humanitarian spirit. Instead, it was motivated by American and British fear of Soviet Russian expansion, and by the realization that the economic recovery of Europe as a whole required a prosperous and productive Germany.

Oswald Spenger, the great German historian and philosopher, once observed that how a people learns history is its form of political education. In every society, including our own, how people learn and understand history is determined by those who control political and cultural life, including the educational system and the mass media. How people understand the past -- and how they view the world and themselves as members of society -- is set by the agenda of those who hold power.

That’s why, in our society, death and suffering during and after World War II of non-Jews -- Poles, Russians and others, and especially Germans -- is all but ignored, and why, instead, more than six decades after the end of the war, Jewish death and suffering -- above all, what is known as “the Holocaust” -- is given such prominent attention, year after year, in our classrooms and motion pictures, and by our political leaders.

What I’m calling here an “unknown holocaust” of non-Jews is essentially ignored not because the facts are disputed or unknown, but rather because this reality does not fit well with the Judeo-centric view of history that is all but obligatory in our society, a view of the past that reflects the Jewish-Zionist hold on our cultural and educational life.

This means that it is not enough simply to “establish the facts.” It is important to understand, identify, and counter the power that controls what we see, hear and read -- in our classrooms, our periodicals, and in our motion pictures -- and which determines how we view history, our world and ourselves -- not just the history of what is called “the Holocaust,” but the history and background of World War II, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Middle East turmoil, and much, much more.

History, as the old saying goes, is written by the winners. In our society, the “winners,” that is, the most important single group that sets our perspective on the past through its grip on the media, and on our cultural life, is the organized Jewish community .

This reality is hardly a secret. Michael Medved, a well-known Jewish author and film critic, has acknowledged: “It makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture … Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie stu*dios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names.” / 27

One person who has carefully studied this subject is Jonathan J. Goldberg, editor of the influential Jewish community weekly Forward. In his 1996 book, Jewish Power, Goldberg wrote: / 28

“In a few key sectors of the media, notably among Hollywood stu*dio executives, Jews are so numerically dominant that calling these businesses Jewish-controlled is little more than a sta*tistical observation …

“Hollywood at the end of the twentieth century is still an industry with a pronounced ethnic tinge. Virtually all the senior executives at the major studios are Jews. Writers, pro*ducers, and to a lesser degree directors are disproportionately Jewish -- one recent study showed the figure as high as 59 per*cent among top-grossing films.

“The combined weight of so many Jews in one of America’s most lucrative and important industries gives the Jews of Hollywood a great deal of political power. They are a major source of money for Democratic candidates.”

A writer for the Los Angeles Times, Joel Stein, boldly declared in December 2008, in a column for the influential daily paper: “As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood … I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.” / 29

Thirty seven years ago, two of the most powerful men in our country, indeed, in the world, frankly discussed this matter in a private conversation that should be much better known. It was in 1972, in the oval office of the White House. President Richard Nixon and the Rev. Billy Graham -- the nation’s best-known and most influential Christian evangelist -- were alone. These were not just prominent and influential men. They were shrewd and astute individuals who had accomplished much in their lives, and who had thought a lot about what they had observed and experienced over the years.

We know about this one-on-one conversation, and exactly what the two men said to each other, because Nixon had arranged for all conversations in his office to be secretly recorded. He regarded these recordings as his personal property, but he was later forced by court order to give them up. It wasn’t until thirty years later -- in 2002 -- that this conversation was finally made public. / 30

Here’s how their talk went. Graham said: “This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.” The President responded by saying: “You believe that?,” “Yes, sir,” said Graham. “Oh, boy,” Nixon replied, “So do I. I can’t ever say that, but I believe it.”

Now consider for a moment what this means, for America and the world, and for us today. Here’s the most powerful political personality in the United States, indeed the most powerful man in the world, and the most influential religious figure in the US, in agreement about the Jewish hold on our media. They didn’t talk about the Jewish role in the media, or even Jewish domination of the media. They spoke about a Jewish “stranglehold” on our media.

For everyone who cares about our nation and the world, it’s worth asking and answering two questions. First, were Nixon and Graham right? Were they correct in what they said that day about what they called the Jewish “stranglehold” on the media? And, second, if they were right, what does that say about America and our society?

Two of the most influential men in our country were so afraid of the intimidating power of the organized Jewish community that they felt unable even to mention publicly this “stranglehold” -- that’s the term Graham used -- on our media, a “stranglehold” that they regarded as so harmful that unless it is broken, America, again, their words, is “going down the drain.” What a telling commentary on the corruption and perversion of our national life! If Nixon and Graham were right, is it not important, indeed, imperative, to clearly and forthrightly address the reality of this hold on our media?

What has brought us together here this evening is, first and foremost, our interest in real history -- our passion for a clearer understanding of the past free of “politically correct” orthodoxy and stricture. But an awareness of “real history” is not enough. It is important to understand the how and why of the systematic distortion of history in our society, and the power behind that distortion. Understanding and countering that power is a critically important task, not merely for the sake of historical truth in the abstract, but for the sake of our nation and humankind.


Notes

1.Time magazine issue of Oct. 15, 1945.

2.Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). See also: Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Eastern European Germans, 1944-1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans From the East (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska, 1989. 3rd rev. ed.)

3.Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007). See also the review of this book by Mark Weber, “New Book Details Mass Killings and Brutal Mistreatment of Germans at the End of World War Two.” (IHR: 2007).
( http://www.ihr.org/other/afterthereich072007.html )

On this subject, see also: Douglas Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945-1949 (New York: Crown, 1985); Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (New York: Harper, 2009); Freda Utley, The High Cost of Vengeance (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1949); James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation 1944-1950 (Little, Brown: 1997).

4.George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950 (Boston: 1967), p. 265. Also quoted in: A.-M. de Zayas, The German Expellees (1993), p. 62.

5.G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 47-50.

6.Ralph Franklin Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War Against the German People (IHR, 1992), pp. 59-60. (In the original edition, published in Chicago in 1947, pp. 55-56.). Also mentioned, in part, in: Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004), p. 479.

7.R. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest (1992), pp.15-16.

8.R. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest (1992), p. 15.
9.R. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest (1992), p. 61. See also: R. Bessel, Germany
1945 (2009), pp. 116-117; Max Hastings, Armageddon (2004), pp. 428-431; G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 78-79.

10.Günter Bischoff and Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower and the German POWs (Louisiana State University Press, 1992), pp. 9-10 (incl. n. 24), 58-64, 147 (n. 33), 178.

11.G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 392-395. See also: James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies (1997), pp. 41-45.

12.G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 396-399; G. Bischoff and S. Ambrose, Eisenhower and the German POWs (1992), pp. 165, 169, 170

13.R. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest (1992), pp. 27-28 (or pp. 26-27 of the 1947 edition)

14.R. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest (1992), p. 26.

15.“Secrets of the London Cage,” The Guardian (London), Nov. 12, 2005
( http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/nov/12/secondworldwar.world ); G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 412- 413. F. Utley, The High Cost of Vengeance (1949), pp. 185-201.

16.G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 400, 406.

17.A.-M. de Zayas, The German Expellees (1993), p. 113.

18.G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 362-363; G. Bischoff and S. Ambrose, Eisenhower and the German POWs (1992), pp. 12, 106, 109.

19.G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), p. 362.

20.G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 362-365.

21.A.-M. de Zayas, The German Expellees (1993), p. 108.

22.A.-M. de Zayas, The German Expellees (1993), p. 85.

23.A.-M. de Zayas, The German Expellees (1993), pp. 86-92.

24.John Sack, An Eye For An Eye (2000. Fourth, revised and updated edition);
See also: “Behind An Eye for an Eye, an IHR Conference address by John Sack, May 2000. ( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v20/v20n1p-9_Sack.html )

25.G. MacDonogh, After the Reich (2007), pp. 38, 382, 386 , 389.

26.Jackson letter to Truman, Oct. 12, 1945. State Department files. Quoted in: R. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (1983), p. 68. Also quoted in: M. Weber, “The Nuremberg Trials and the Holocaust,” The Journal of Historical Review (Vol. 12, No. 2), Summer 1992. ( http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p167_Webera.html )

27.M. Medved, “Is Hollywood Too Jewish?,” Moment, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1996), p. 37. Also quoted in: M. Weber, “A Straight Look at the Jewish Lobby”
( http://www.ihr.org/leaflets/jewishlobby.shtml )

28.Jonathan Jeremy Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Addison-Wesley, 1996), pp. 280, 287-288. See also pp. 39-40, 290-291.

29.J. Stein, “How Jewish Is Hollywood?,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 19, 2008.
( http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-stein19-2008dec19,0,4676183.column )

30.“Nixon, Billy Graham Make Derogatory Comments About Jews on Tapes,” Chicago Tribune, March 1, 2002 (or Feb. 28, 2002)
( http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/02/02/Graham_Nixon.html ); “Billy Graham Apologizes for ’72 Remarks,” Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2002. “Graham Regrets Jewish Slur,” BBC News, March 2, 2002. ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1850077.stm ). The conversation apparently took place on Feb. 1, 1972.
 
Revisiting the 'Good War’s' Aftermath​

Emerging Truth in an Ocean of Myth
Review of After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, by Giles MacDonogh (Basic Books, 2007)

Reviewed by Dwight D. Murphey

Link: http://ihr.org/other/MurpheyAfterthereich

Professor Murphey

Those who honestly chronicle human events, present or past, are a rare and honorable breed. We should certainly ennoble them within the pantheon of our earthly gods. As we do so, we will no doubt include those who, not out of alienation against the West or the United States or its people but out of a thirst for truth, are bringing to light the awful events that followed in the wake of World War II (as well as the enormities that were committed as part of the way in which the war was fought against civilian populations, although that is a subject we won’t be exploring here).

That war has been known among Americans as “the good war,” and those who fought it as “the greatest generation.” But now, slowly, we are hit by the realities so commonplace to a complex human existence: there was much that was not good, and along with the self-sacrifice and high intentions there was much that was venal and brutal. These realities are coming to the surface because there are some scholars, at least, who are aware that an ocean of wartime propaganda spawns a myth that continues for several decades and who have a commitment to truth that overrides the many inducements to conform to the myth.

This article began as a simple review of Giles MacDonogh’s book that is identified above. His book is largely of the myth-breaking sort I have just praised. Because, however, there is valuable additional material that I am loath to leave unmentioned, I have expanded it to include other information and authors, although leaving it primarily a review of After the Reich.

MacDonogh’s is a puzzling book, both brave and craven, mostly (but not entirely) worthy of the high praise we must give to incorruptible scholars. As we have noted, the American public has long thought of the Allied effort in World War II as a “great crusade” that pitted good and decency against Nazi evil. Even after all these years, it is likely that the last thing the public wants to learn is that vast and unspeakable wrongs were committed by both the Western Allies and the Soviet Union during the war and its aftermath. It flies in the face of that reluctance for MacDonogh to tell “the brutal history” at great length.

That willingness is commendable for its intellectual bravery. In light of it, it is puzzling that even as he does so he puts a gloss over that history, in effect continuing in part a cover-up of historic proportions that has been fixed in place by the overhang of wartime propaganda for almost two-thirds of a century. The great value of his book thus cannot be found in its completeness or its strict candor, but rather in its providing something of a bridge – albeit quite an extensive one – that can start conscientious readers toward further study of an immensely important subject.

For this article, it will be valuable to begin by summarizing the history MacDonogh relates (and to add somewhat to it). It is only after doing this that we will discuss what MacDonogh obscures. All of this will then lead to some concluding reflections.

In his Preface, MacDonogh says his purpose is to “expose the victorious Allies in their treatment of the enemy at peace, for in most cases it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death but women, children and old men.” Although this suggests the tone of the book will be one of outrage, the narrative is in the main informative rather than polemical. MacDonogh’s scholarly background includes several books of German and French history and biography (as well as four books on wine).

The expulsions (today called “ethnic cleansing”)

At the end of the war, MacDonogh tells us, “as many as 16.5 million Germans were driven from their homes.” Of those, 9.3 million were expelled from the eastern portion of Germany, which was made a part of Poland. (Both the eastern and western boundaries of Poland were drastically shifted westward by agreement of the allies, with Poland taking an important part of Germany and the Soviet Union taking eastern Poland.) The other 7.2 million were forced from their ancestral homes in Central Europe where they had lived for generations.

This mass expulsion was settled upon in the Potsdam Agreement in mid-1945, although the Agreement did make it explicit that the ethnic cleansing was to take place “in the most humane manner possible.” Churchill was among those who supported it as conducive “to lasting peace.”

In fact, the process was so inhumane that it amounted to one of history’s great atrocities. MacDonogh reports that “some two and a quarter million would die during the expulsions.” This is at the lower end of such estimates, which range from 2.1 million to 6.0 million, if we take only the expellees into account. Konrad Adenauer, very much a friend of the West, found himself able to say that among those expelled “six million Germans … are dead, gone.” / 1 We will be seeing MacDonogh’s account of the starvation and exposure to extreme cold to which the post-war population of Germany was subject, and it is worth mentioning at this point (even though it goes beyond the expulsions) that the historian James Bacque says that “the comparison of the censuses has shown us that some 5.7 million people disappeared inside Germany between October 1946 [a year and a half after the war ended] and September 1950 ...” / 2

What MacDonogh calls “the greatest maritime tragedy of all time” occurred when the ship the Wilhelm Gustloff, carrying Germans from Danzig in January 1945, was sunk with “anything up to 9,000 people … many of them children.” In mid-1946, “pictures show some of the 586,000 Bohemian Germans packed in box cars like sardines.” At another point MacDonogh tells how “the refugees were often packed so tightly that they could not move to defecate and emerged from the trucks covered with excrement. Many were dead on arrival.” (This calls to mind the scenes described so vividly in Volume I of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.) In Silesia, “streams of civilians were forced from their homes at gunpoint.” A priest estimated that a quarter of the German population of one Lower Silesian town killed itself, as entire families committed suicide together.

The condition of the German population: Starvation and extreme cold

Germans refer to 1947 as Hungerjahr, the “year of hunger,” but MacDonogh says that “even by the winter of 1948 the situation had not been remedied.” People ate dogs, cats, rats, frogs, snails, nettles, acorns, dandelion roots and wild mushrooms in a feverish effort to survive. In 1946, the calories provided in the U.S. Zone of Germany dropped to 1,313 by March 18 from the mere 1,550 provided earlier. Victor Gollancz, a British and Jewish author and publisher, objected that “we are starving the Germans.” / 3 This is similar to the statement made by Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana in a speech to the U. S. Senate on February 5, 1946: “For nine months now this administration has been carrying on a deliberate policy of mass starvation ...” / 4

MacDonogh tells us that the Red Cross, Quakers, Mennonites and others wanted to bring in food, but “in the winter of 1945 donations were returned with the recommendation that they be used in other war-torn parts of Europe.” In the American zone of Berlin, “it was American policy that nothing should be given away and everything should be thrown away. So those German women who worked for the Americans were fantastically well fed, but could take nothing home to their families or children.” Bacque says “foreign relief agencies were prevented from sending food from abroad; Red Cross food trains were sent back to Switzerland; all foreign governments were denied permission to send food to German civilians; fertilizer production was sharply reduced … The fishing fleet was kept in port while people starved.” / 5

Under the Russian occupation of East Prussia, MacDonogh sees “striking similarities” to Stalin’s “deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian kulaks in the early 1930s.” As in the Ukraine, “cases of cannibalism were reported, with people eating the flesh of their dead children.”

The suffering from extreme cold mixed with the starvation to create misery and a heavy death toll. Even though the winter in 1945-6 was a normal one, “the terrible lack of coal and food was acutely felt.” Abnormally cold winters struck in 1946-7 (“possibly the coldest in living memory”) and 1948-9. In Berlin alone, 60,000 people were thought to have died within the first ten months after the end of the war; and “the following winter killed off an estimated 12,000 more.” People lived in holes among the ruins, and “some Germans – particularly refugees from the east – were virtually naked.”

In his book Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War Against The German People, Ralph Franklin Keeling cites a quote from a “noted German pastor”: “Thousands of bodies are hanging from trees in the woods around Berlin and nobody bothers to cut them down. Thousands of corpses are carried into the sea by the Oder and Elbe Rivers – one doesn’t notice it any longer. Thousands and thousands are starving in the highways … Children roam the highways alone ...” / 6 In his The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace, Alfred-Maurice de Zayas told how in Yugoslavia Marshal Tito used camps as extermination centers to starve Germans. / 7

Mass rape – to which one must add the “voluntary sex” obtained from starving women.

The onslaught of rape by invading Russian forces is, of course, infamous. In the Russian zone of Austria, “rape was part of daily life until 1947 and many women were riddled with VD and had no means to cure it.” MacDonogh tells us that “conservative estimates place the number of Berlin women raped at 20,000.” When the British arrived in Berlin, “officers later recalled the shock of seeing the lakes in the prosperous west filled with the corpses of women who had committed suicide after being raped.” The age of the victim made little difference, with those raped ranging from 12 to 75. Nurses and nuns were among the victims (some as many as fifty times). “The Russians were particularly hard on the nobles, setting fire to their manor houses and raping or killing the inhabitants.” Although “most of the unwanted Russian children were aborted,” MacDonogh says “it is estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 ‘Russian babies’ survived.” The Russians raped wherever they went, so that it wasn’t just German women who were raped, but also women of Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia even though it was on the same side.

There was an official policy against rape, but it was so commonly ignored that “it was only in 1949 that Russian soldiers were presented with any real deterrent.” Until then, “they were egged on by [Ilya] Ehrenburg and other Soviet propagandists who saw rape as an expression of hatred.”

Although there was a “widespread incidence of rape by American soldiers,” there was an enforced military policy against it, with “a number of American servicemen executed” for it. Criminal charges brought for rape “rose steadily” during the final months of the war, but declined sharply thereafter. What did continue was arguably almost as bad: the sexual exploitation of starving women who “voluntarily” sold sexual services for food. In Gruesome Harvest, Keeling quotes from an article in the Christian Century for December 5, 1945: “The American provost marshal … said that rape represents no problem for the military police because ‘a bit of food, a bar of chocolate, or a bar of soap seems to make rape unnecessary’.” / 8 The extent of this is shown by the figure MacDonogh provides of an “estimated 94,000 Besatzungskinder or ‘occupation children’ [who] were born in the American zone.” He says that in 1945-6 “many female children resorted to prostitution to survive. Boys, too, performed a service for Allied soldiers.”

Keeling, writing for the 1947 publication of his book (which explains his use of the present tense), said there was “an upsurge in venereal diseases which has reached epidemic proportions,” and went on to say that “a large proportion of the contamination has originated with colored American troops which we have stationed in great numbers in Germany and among whom the rate of venereal infection is many times greater than among white troops.” In July 1946, he says, the annual rate of infection for white soldiers was 19 percent, for black troops 77.1 percent. He reiterated the point we are making here when he pointed to “the close connection between the venereal disease rate and availability of food.” / 9

If MacDonogh mentions rape by British soldiers, it has escaped me. He does tell, however, of rape by Poles, the French, Tito’s partisans, and displaced persons. In Danzig, “the Poles behaved as badly as the Russians … It was the Poles who liberated the town of Teschen in the north [of Czechoslovakia] on 10 May. For five days they raped, looted, torched and killed.” He writes of “French soldiers’ behaviour in Stuttgart, where perhaps 3,000 women and eight men were raped,” says “a further 500 women [were] raped in Vaihingen,” and reports “three days of killing, plunder, arson and rape” in Freundenstadt. Of the displaced persons, he says that “there were around two million POWs and forced labourers from Russia who had formed into gangs and robbed and raped all over central Europe.”


Treatment of the prisoners of war

In all, there were approximately eleven million German prisoners of war. One and a half million of these never returned home. MacDonogh expresses an appropriate outrage here: “To treat them with so little care that a million and a half died was scandalous.”

The Red Cross had no role vis a vis those held by the Russians, since the Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention. MacDonogh says the Russians made no distinction between German civilians and prisoners of war, although we know that a KGB report does sort them out for deaths and other purposes. At war’s end, they held approximately four to five million within Russia (and here, again, the KGB archives are worth consulting, as historian James Bacque has done; they show a figure of 2,389,560). Large numbers were held for over ten years, being sent back to Germany only after Konrad Adenauer’s visit to Moscow in 1956. Nevertheless, in 1979 – 34 years after the end of the war! – “there were believed to be 72,000 prisoners still alive in – chiefly Russian – custody.” Some 90,000 German soldiers were captured at Stalingrad, but only 5,000 made it home.

The Americans made a distinction between the 4.2 million soldiers captured during the war, who were entitled to the shelter and subsistence called for by the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and the 3.4 million captured in the West at its end. MacDonogh says the latter were classified as “Surrendered Enemy Persons” (SEPs) or as “Disarmed Enemy Persons” (DEPs), and were denied the protections of the Conventions. He doesn’t give a total figure for those who died in American custody, saying “it is not clear how many German soldiers died of starvation.” He tells, however, of several situations: “The most notorious American POW camps were the so-called Rheinwiesenlager.” Here, the Americans allowed “anything up to 40,000 German soldiers to die from hunger and neglect in the muddy flats of the Rhine.” He says “any attempt to feed the prisoners by the German civilian population was punishable by death.” Although the Red Cross was empowered to inspect, “the barbed wire surrounding the SEPs and DEPs was impenetrable.” Elsewhere, at “the Pioneers’ Barracks in Worms … there were 30,000-40,000 prisoners sitting in the courtyard, jostling for space. With no protection from the rain they froze.” The prisoners were starved at Langwasser, and at a “notorious camp” at Zuffenhausen where “for months lunch was turnip soup, with half a potato for dinner.”

It would be a mistake to think that a world food shortage caused the United States to be unable to feed its prisoners. Bacque writes that “Captain Lee Berwick of the 424th Infantry who commanded the guard towers at Camp Bretzenheim … told me, ‘Food was piled up all round the camp fence.’ Prisoners there saw crates piled up ‘as high as bungalows’.” / 10

What MacDonogh tells us about Britain’s treatment of German POWs seems conflicting. It had 391,880 prisoners working in Britain in 1946, and a total of 600 camps there in 1948. He says “the regime was not so hard, and in terms of percentages the number of men who died in British custody is strikingly low compared to the other Allies.” Elsewhere, however, he tells how “the British could evade [the Geneva Convention’s stipulation] … that they provide 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day,” so that “for most of the time levels fell below 1,500 calories.” The British had a camp in Belgium that “was meant to be particularly grueling.” There, “conditions for the 130,000 prisoners were reported to be ‘not much better than Belsen’… When the camp was inspected in April 1947 there were found to be just four functioning lightbulbs … there was no fuel, no straw mattresses and no food apart from ‘water soup’,”

A Reuters report in December 2005 adds an important dimension: “Britain ran a secret prison in Germany for two years after the end of World War II where inmates including Nazi party members were tortured and starved to death, the Guardian says. Citing Foreign Office files that were opened after a request under the Freedom of Information Act, the newspaper says Britain had held men and woman [sic] at a prison in Bad Nenndorf until July 1947 … ‘Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture and murder their wives and children were considered “perfectly proper” on the grounds that such threats were never carried out,’ the paper reports.” / 11

The French wanted German labor to help rebuild the country, and for this purpose the British and Americans transferred about a million German soldiers to them. MacDonogh says “their treatment was particularly brutal.” Not long after the war, according to the Red Cross, 200,000 of the prisoners were starving. We are told of a camp “in the Sarthe [where] prisoners had to survive on 900 calories a day.”


The stripping of the German economy

Allied leaders disagreed among themselves about the Morgenthau Plan to strip Germany bare of industrial assets and turn it into an agrarian country. The opposition of some and hesitation of others did not, however, prevent a de facto implementation of the plan. By the time the confiscation was ended, Germany was largely bereft of productive assets.

MacDonogh says that under the Russians “Berlin lost around 85 percent of its industrial capacity.” Every machine was taken from Vienna. The ships were taken from the Danube, and “one Soviet priority was the seizure of any important works of art found in the capital [Vienna]. This was a fully planned operation.” But “worse than the full-scale removal of the industrial base of the land was the abduction of men and women to develop industry in the Soviet Union.”

Under the Americans, the dismantling of industrial sites continued until General Lucius Clay stopped it a year after war’s end. Until Clay acted, Clause 6 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Order 1067 embodied the Morgenthau Plan. MacDonogh says that where “American official theft was carried out on a massive scale” was in “seizing scientists and scientific equipment.”

The British took much for themselves and passed other industrial property on to “client states” such as Greece and Yugoslavia. The British royal family received Goering’s yacht, and the British zone of Germany was stripped of “plants that might later offer competition with British industries.” MacDonogh says “the British … had their own brand of organized theft in [something called] T-Force, which sought to glean any industrial wizardry ...”

For their part, the French asserted “the right to plunder.” “The French … made no bones about pocketing a chlorine business in Rheinfelden, a viscose business in Rottweil, the Preussag mines or the chemicals groups Rhodia,” … and much more.

If the Plan had been fully implemented over a longer period of time, the effects would have been calamitous. Keeling, in Gruesome Harvest, says that by seeking “the permanent destruction of Germany’s industrial heartland” it would have had as an “ineluctable consequence … the death through starvation and disease of millions and tens of millions of Germans.” / 12

The forced repatriation of Russians to Stalin

MacDonogh’s book limits itself to the Allied occupation, but there are, of course, many other aspects of the aftermath of the war that deserve mention, although here we will limit ourselves to just one of them. (MacDonogh does give some details about it.) It is the Allied repatriation of captured Russians to the Soviet Union. In The Secret Betrayal, Nikolai Tolstoy tells how between 1943 and 1947, a total of 2,272,000 Russians were returned. The Soviets harvested 2,946,000 more from the parts of Europe taken by the Red Army. Those sent to the Soviet Union by the Western democracies included thousands of people who were Tsarist emigres and had never lived under the Soviet regime.

Tolstoy says that even though there were many who did want to return to Russia (while many others desperately did not, and were sent back, in effect, kicking and screaming), they were uniformly brutalized, executed, raped or made into slaves. Some of the repatriates were Russians who had volunteered to fight for Germany against the Soviet Union and who were led by General Vlasov. Some were Cossacks, many of whom were not even Soviet citizens. The violent repatriations began in August 1945. Tolstoy recounts how deception, clubbings, bayonets, and even threats from a flame-throwing tank were employed to force the removal. / 13

Victors’ justice

When the war was over, there was a consensus among the Allies’ leaders that the top Nazis should be put to death. Some wanted immediate execution, others “a drumhead court martial.” There was an odd virtue in the insistence by the British on following “legal forms,” which is what was decided upon. The result was a series of trials with the trappings of normal judicial proceedings, but that were actually a travesty from the point of view of the “rule of law,” lacking both the spirit and particulars of “due process.” In two chapters, MacDonogh gives an account of the main Nuremberg trial and of the series of trials that continued for years afterwards. Among these, the Americans conducted several trials in Nuremberg after the main one; thousands of cases were brought before “denazification courts”; the German courts, after they were operational, continued the process; and of course we know of Israel’s trial and execution of Eichmann.

There are many reasons to call it “victors’ justice.” For it to have been otherwise, a truly impartial tribunal would have had to have been convened (if such a thing had been possible in the aftermath of a world war), and war crimes committed by all sides prosecuted. But, of course, we know that such impartial justice was not in contemplation. In the Nuremberg indictment, the Nazis were charged with the mass killing of the Polish officer corps at the Katyn Forest, a charge that was discretely (and with great intellectual and “judicial” dishonesty) overlooked in the final judgment after it became clear to all that the Soviet Union had done the killing. / 14 Another of the many possible examples would be that Nazi deportations were charged as both a war crime and a crime against humanity at Nuremberg. By contrast, no one was ever “brought to justice” for the Allies’ expulsion of the millions of Germans from their ancestral homes in central Europe.


A source readers will find instructive

Because of the credibility of its source, the account given by U.S. Air Force Major (retired) Arthur D. Jacobs in his book The Prison Called Hohenasperg will be useful to readers as they absorb (and assess) the information contained in MacDonogh’s book and those of the other authors referred to here. It is valuable as a story both of American brutality and American compassion.

Jacobs spent 22 years in the Air Force, retiring in 1973, and then became a member of the faculty at Arizona State University for another twenty years. His book tells the following personal story: His German parents emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1928 and 1929. They had two sons born in Brooklyn (who were hence U.S. citizens), one of them Arthur Jacobs. The boys lived their early years in Brooklyn, attending elementary school. The family was taken and held for some time at Ellis Island near the end of the war, and was then interned for seven months at the Crystal City Internment Camp in Texas, where they were well treated. They were “voluntarily repatriated” to Germany (after being threatened with deportation) in October 1945, several months after Germany’s surrender.

When they arrived in Germany, Jacobs’ mother was sent to one camp, the father and two sons to another. The latter reached an internment camp in Hohenasperg after a 92-hour journey locked inside a boxcar in freezing weather with mostly women and children, fed only bread and water, and “without heat, without blankets, and without toilets, except for an open, stinking bucket.” Jacobs himself was twelve, and turned thirteen during his week at Hohenasperg before he was sent to another camp at Ludwigsburg. At the Hohenasperg prison, he was placed under strict discipline as a prisoner, and guards threatened him repeatedly with hanging if he disobeyed.

The camp at Ludwigsburg was in effect a holding center pending release. It is informative that Jacobs tells us of the meager diet: “At breakfast we received one glass of ‘gray’ milk and one slice of black bread. There was no lunch meal.” At supper, “each person received one bowl of soup ... , mostly water flavored by bouillon. There were no second helpings … I always had hunger pangs.” While he and his brother were at Ludwigsburg, they were forced to watch films of German death camps.

The mother, father and brothers were released from their respective camps in mid-March 1946, and went to live with Jacobs’ grandparents in the British Zone. They weren’t welcomed by Germans they met, because “we were four more mouths to feed.” Jacobs saw that “Germany was war-torn and starving.” He was befriended by an American soldier, who got him a job with Graves Registration. He lost his job when the soldier was transferred, and it became a struggle to “live through this starvation period – the winter of 1946-1947.” After much knocking about, he got another job with the American Army, this time in a motor pool. An American woman took an interest in him who knew of a ranch couple in southwest Kansas who would bring them to America to live with them. Accordingly, Jacobs and his brother left for the United States in October 1947. They had been in Germany for 21 months. It was eleven years before Jacobs saw his parents again. He went on, as we have said, to become a career officer in the U.S. Air Force. After obtaining his MBA at Arizona State University, he became an industrial engineer and later a member of the ASU faculty.

If MacDonogh wrote all that we have reported (and more) from his book, how can it be said that in important ways he continued the cover-up of such horrors, a cover-up that since 1945 has consigned them to a memory hole? This brings us to the book’s deficiencies, which are of such a nature as to give readers a lessened realization of the extent of the atrocities and of who was responsible for them.

Most egregious is MacDonogh’s treatment of the work of Canadian historian James Bacque, author of Other Losses and Crimes and Mercies. When he refers to the first of these books, he says that Bacque “claimed the French and Americans had killed a million POWs,” a claim that “was called a work of ‘monstrous speculation’ and was dismissed by an American historian as an ‘absurd thesis’.” According to MacDonogh, “it has since been proved that Bacque misinterpreted the words ‘other losses’ on Allied charts to mean ‘deaths’...” Accordingly, he speaks of “Bacque’s red herring.” So greatly does he dismiss Bacque that in a section on “Further Reading” at the end of the book, MacDonogh apparently forgets about Bacque entirely, saying that “on the treatment of POWs there is nothing in English, and the leading American expert – Arthur L. Smith – publishes in German.”

I thought it fair to ask Bacque what his response is to MacDonogh’s dismissal. Bacque replied that “the word speculation describes my critics well, because it is they who have not been in all the relevant archives and who have not interviewed the thousands of survivors who have written to newspapers, TV journalists and other authors about their near-death experiences in the camps of the Americans, French and Russians.” Far from admitting that he had misinterpreted the category of “Other Losses,” Bacque says that “the meaning of the term … was explained to me by Colonel Philip S. Lauben, United States Army, who was in charge of movements of prisoners for SHAEF in 1945. I have the interview on tape and Lauben’s signature on a letter confirming this. Lauben has never denied what he told me.” Lauben later told the BBC that he was “mistaken,” but the likelihood of a mistake is slight since he was a responsible officer on the ground and saw both the camps and the reports.

The difference between MacDonogh’s and Bacque’s treatment of the subject of German prisoners of war in American hands is apparent when we compare the attention each gives to the cutting off of food. MacDonogh reports in one sentence that “any attempt to feed the prisoners by the German civilian population was punishable by death.” This is astounding in itself and certainly deserves explication. Bacque tells us considerably more: “General Eisenhower sent out an ‘urgent courier’ throughout the huge area that he commanded, making it a crime punishable by death for German civilians to feed prisoners. It was even a death-penalty crime to gather food together in one place to take it to prisoners.” He says “the order was sent in German to the provincial governments, ordering them to distribute it immediately to local governments. Copies of the orders were discovered recently in several villages near the Rhine ...” On pages 42-3 of Crimes and Mercies, Bacque publishes a German and an English copy of a letter dated May 9, 1945, by which district officials were notified of the prohibition.

Bacque provides evidence such as that of Professor Martin Brech of Mahopac, NY, who was a guard at the U.S. camp at Aldernach in Germany. Brech said that “he fed some loaves of bread through the wire, and was told by his superior officer, ‘Don’t feed them. It is our policy that these men not be fed’.” “Later, at night, Brech sneaked some more food into the camp, and the officer told him, ‘If you do that again, you’ll be shot’.”

Thus, we find in Bacque a much sharper description and attribution of responsibility than we do in MacDonogh. In light of the immense detail given in MacDonogh’s book, this would be forgivable were it not for his attempt to blot out the work of a major scholar who has studied the subject exhaustively.

A similar cutting-short diminishes a reader’s comprehension of other important subjects, which MacDonogh touches on so briefly that the reader is hardly able to form a full mental picture. For example, MacDonogh tells how in the execution of Joachim von Ribbentrop at Nuremberg “the hangman botched the execution and the rope throttled the former foreign minister for twenty minutes before he expired.” In his book Nuremberg: The Last Battle, historian David Irving tells considerably more, including the fact that the gallows had been designed in a way that allowed the trapdoor to swing back and smash “every bone” in the faces of Keitel, Jodl and Frick. He says that Goering’s body (after Goering had committed suicide by taking poison) “was dragged into the execution chamber … [where] the army doctors [made] frantic attempts to revive him so that he could be hanged.”

There are a number of places at which MacDonogh half-tells about something important, only to leave it incomplete. We’ve already noted his mention of “30,000-40,000 prisoners sitting in the courtyard [at the Pioneers’ Barracks in Worms] … With no protection against the rain they froze.” We are left to guess the consequences of their freezing. At another place, he reports that “the Americans maintained camps for up to 1.5 million … Nazis or members of the SS.” That is his only mention of those camps, which one might suppose were even more punitive than the others. Was MacDonogh too overloaded with other detail to pursue such matters further? Did he deliberately refrain from exploring certain things? Or was the failure due a scatter-gun recital of fragmentary details?

A reader will need to assess the degree to which After the Reich is a work of scholarship as distinguished from a narrative for popular reading. MacDonogh includes many pages of endnotes, citing a large number of sources. Very occasionally, he speaks critically of a given source. But for the most part he accepts whatever a given source has to tell. The book would profit greatly from a bibliographical essay in which he would evaluate the principal sources, sharing with the reader a careful analysis of the evidentiary basis for his narrative. An example of where a critical evaluation is essential comes with his reference, say, to Ilse Koch’s “lampshades and trophies made from human skin and organs,” which MacDonogh says the psychologist Saul Padover claims to have been shown. We need to know what MacDonogh would conclude if MacDonogh were to consider the counter-evidence that calls the lampshade collection a “legend.” The same holds true for MacDonogh’s many citations to Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews. There is a vast scholarly literature questioning every aspect of the Holocaust. One would never know that that literature exists from reading MacDonogh, who either doesn’t know of it or finds it prudent, as so many do, not to mention it.

Notwithstanding the book’s limitations, After the Reich accomplishes much when it provides another link in the chain of disclosures that, over time, are providing conscientious readers with a more complete understanding of modern history.

The fact that, at the time of the events and for so many decades thereafter, enormities of the greatest importance have been scrubbed clean by propaganda suggests implications far beyond the events themselves. The British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli observed that “all great events have been distorted, most of the important causes concealed,” and went on to say that “If the history of England is ever written by one who has the knowledge and the courage, the world would be astonished.” / 15 The implications suggest profound questions, which we would be remiss not to mention:

How is it that a certain version of reality can, on so many subjects, hold almost total sway, while the voices of millions and of a good many serious scholars are marginalized into nothingness? (Fortunately, so far as Bacque’s work is concerned, it is available in twelve languages in 13 countries, even though it has long been unavailable in the United States.)

Do we really know the truth about much of anything? Or are countless subjects veiled in a miasma of omission and distortion?

Where are our academic historians? Most historians like to give us pleasing myths, which is something expected of them and for which they are rewarded with medals, prizes and high sales.

How pervasive is a cravenness that will put almost anything ahead of a search for truth? Does mankind care very deeply about truth?

To what extent is a society or an age “democratic” if its citizens’ minds are filled with phantoms, so that most of the judgments they make are either vacuous or manipulated?

And to what extent is it “democratic” if those citizens don’t even have a vital say in decisions of the gravest importance? It is significant that Keeling says that “the people of no nation in modern history, including ourselves, have ever enjoyed an important voice in the making of the great decisions either of going to war or of framing the peace arrangements.” / 16


Notes

1. Adenauer is quoted in James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company [Canada] Limited, 1997), p. 119. Readers may wish also to consult Theodore Schieder, ed., The Expulsion of the German Population from the Territories East of the Oder-Neisse-Line (Bonn: Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims, 1958). Alfred-Maurice de Zayas is the author of three additional books on this subject: The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986); A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-50 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); and Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans from the East (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).

2. J. Bacque, Crimes and Mercies, p. 128.

3. See two books by Victor Gollancz on the treatment of refugees: Our Threatened Values and In Darkest Germany.

4. Capehart is quoted in Ralph Franklin Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War Against The German People (Institute for Historical Review edition, 1992), p. 64. This book was first published in 1947 by the Institute of American Economics in Chicago.

5. J. Bacque, Crimes and Mercies, p. 91.

6. R. F. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, p. 64.

7. A. de Zayas, The German Expellees, p. 97.

8. R. F. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, p. 64.

9. R. F. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, p. 62, 63.

10. J. Bacque, “A Truth So Terrible,” Abuse Your Illusions. Article sent to me by the author.

11. “Britain Ran Torture Camp After WWII: Report,” Reuters, ABC (Australia), Dec. 17, 2005. ( https://www.abc.net.au/news/2005-12-18/britain-ran-torture-camp-after-wwii-report/763646 ) See also: “Britain's Secret Torture Center: Interrogation Camp in Postwar Germany,” The Guardian (Britain), Dec. 17, 2005. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/dec/17/secondworldwar.topstories3)

12. R. F. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, p. VI.

13. Nikolai Tolstoy, The Secret Betrayal (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1977), pp. 371, 24, 315, 40, 183, 242, 343. Readers will do well to read, as well, Julius Epstein, Operation Keelhaul: The Story of Forced Repatriation from 1944 to the Present (Old Greenwich, Conn.: 1973), and Nicholas Bethell, The Last Secret: Forcible Repatriation to Russia 1944-7 (London, 1974).

14. See the discussion of the Katyn Forest killings in J. Bacque, Crimes and Mercies, pp. 74-5, 135.

15. Disraeli is quoted in R. F. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, p. 135.

16. R. F. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, p. 134.


About the Author

Dwight D. Murphey (born in 1934) is a retired lawyer and professor of business law at Wichita State University. Murphey studied political science at the University of Colorado, graduating in 1954. After service with the US Marine Corps for two years, he did graduate studies in business at New York University, 1956-1957, including classes and seminar of the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. He then attended law school at the University of Denver, graduating magna cum laude in 1959. After practicing law in Colorado, 1959-1966, and an unsuccessful campaign for a judicial position, he joined the faculty of Wichita State University in 1967. He retired in 2003. Murphey is the author of nine professionally published books, four self-published books, and numerous essays, reviews and other shorter writings
 
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