The Ruling Elite

by Deanna Spingola

  An official Red Cross report (ICRC) stated that the main cause of death in Germany’s POW camps was the “chaotic condition of Germany” after the Allied invasion during which the camps received no food supplies.” This caused massive starvation, not due to Germany’s methodical mistreatment of its prisoners. The ICRC explained that the food supplies stopped because the Allies bombed the German transportation system. The ICRC protested against “the barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies.” 1741 That was not the case with Eisenhower’s deadly enclosures. The U.S. military even prohibited the International Committee of the Red Cross from entering the barbed-wired enclosures, as authorized by the Geneva Conventions. The U.S. military, per Eisenhower’s instructions, did not allow prisoners to receive mail or packages. On April 26, 1945, the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) in Washington cabled Eisenhower their approval of the Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEF) status for all German citizens only under United States captivity. By April 30, there were 2,062,865 of these civilian prisoners. 1742

  The British refused to apply the DEF status to the German prisoners under their jurisdiction. 1743 British Army officer Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery said, “The German food-cuts have come to stay; we will keep them at 1,000 calories (per day). The British got 2,800. They gave the inmates of Belsen only 800.” 1744 The minimum adult calorie intake to sustain minimal health is 1,800 to 2,250 for a sedentary individual. The prisoners under Ike’s authority were supposed to get 2,000 calories. However, they received much less than half of that amount. 1745

  According to the Geneva Conventions, all POWs should receive the same rations as the occupying military force, applicable to all prisoners, those who voluntarily surrendered or the hundreds who were rounded up. American soldiers got 4,000 calories per day. The U.S. military housed some Germans, not classed as DEFs, such as scientists and other professionals, in choice locations where they received adequate food and shelter. On May 8, Germany accepted an “unconditional surrender,” as required by the Allies. On May 9, Ike’s headquarters sent a form letter to all of the German cities and towns under SHAEF control warning all citizens, who were also starving, against public gatherings or trying to provide food for the prisoners in the military enclosures. If the U.S. military witnessed any civilian giving food to the prisoners, they would shoot him or her. American military leaders considered feeding a prisoner a crime punishable by death. According to witnesses, guards at the camps shot and killed several women who had attempted to deliver food to prisoners who were probably family members. 1746

  Thousands of ordinary soldiers and citizens perished from dysentery, diarrhea, typhoid fever, tetanus, septicemia—all related to overcrowding, lack of sanitation and malnourishment, in numbers unheard of since the middle ages. Others perished from cardiac disease and pneumonia. Experts attribute about 9.7 to fifteen percent of the deaths to reasons exclusively associated to malnourishment like emaciation, dehydration and sheer exhaustion. Thousands ultimately died, no matter what the Medical Corps Officers wrote, simply because Eisenhower’s military minions incarcerated them in the hellish enclosures where mass burials took place each day. Between May 1 and June 15, 1945, the death rate was eighty times higher than anything they had ever witnessed. 1747 By the end of May, just one month, more people died in Eisenhower’s enclosures than in the bombing of Hiroshima (140,000). Eisenhower, a mass murderer, imposed strict censorship policies after Victory in Europe Day, May 8, more so than when the battles still raged. Newspapers in the United States did not divulge any information about these camps, especially not in The New York Times, which admitted, on May 27, “The American people are being deprived of information to which they are entitled.” 1748

  Eisenhower controlled over 200 barbed-wire enclosures in northwest Europe that incarcerated 5,224,310 by June 1945. The worst of the American temporary enclosures were the Rhine meadow camps such as Bad Kreuznach-Bretzenheim, Remagen-Sinzig, Rheinberg, Heidesheim, Wickrathberg, and Büderich. All of them were overcrowded, putrid and disease-ridden. For instance, the capacity for camp #18 was not to exceed six to eight thousand prisoners. However, there were 32,902 prisoners held there. At least 1,400,000 German prisoners failed to return to their homes following the war. 1749 Author Giles MacDonogh wrote that at least 1.5 million Germans died in those camps due to their ill treatment and starvation. 1750 In contrast, in 1945, the American Red Cross said that ninety-nine percent of the U.S. POWs held in German camps had survived and were soon returning home. 1751

  Information about these camps never appeared in any newspaper, anywhere, then or now. The U.S. Government sponsored, subsidized and sanitized history books, protecting its participation in the total destruction of Germany and many of its non-combatant people. Willy Brandt, the American puppet Chancellor (1969-1974) of the Federal Republic of Germany, through the West German Foreign Office, provided a long-term cover-up of American atrocities in Germany. 1752 The United States maintained a strong presence in West Germany. In 1976, West Germany, one of six nations, helped found the Group of Six (G6).

  Martin Brech, from Mahopac, New York, was an 18-year-old Private First Class in Company C of the Fourteenth Infantry. In 1990, when he revealed his story after decades of silence, he was a Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Mercy College in New York. In 1945, his superiors assigned him as a guard and interpreter at Eisenhower’s death camp at Andernach, along the Rhine River. Brech relates that the United States detained about 50,000 prisoners of various ages just at Andernach, on the Rhine River in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany in an open field, enclosed by barbed wire. They kept women in separate open-air enclosures. The prisoners had no coats, blankets or any visible shelter. They were compelled to sleep on the ground, often muddy, wet and cold. They used a trench for human waste. Rations consisted of a thin watery soup to which the emaciated prisoners added grass and weeds to ease their hunger pains. Prisoners weakened by persistent dysentery often lay in their own excrement. The U.S. military had sufficient food and medical supplies. Brech, sympathetic to the inhumane suffering of the German prisoners, was outraged at the indifference of the camp guards. He questioned his superior officers and they told him that they were under strict orders from “higher up,” obviously referring to Eisenhower. 1753

  The majority of the guards did not share Brech’s compassion for the prisoners. Most, because of pervasive propaganda, viewed the Germans as subhuman that deserved whatever they imposed upon them, even a torturous death. The U.S. Government had produced massive amounts of indoctrinating, anti-German propaganda for the troops. Guards had read the racist articles in publications such as the Stars and Stripes, a G.I. newspaper filled with reports and graphic photos about the German concentration camps. This inflamed some kind of self-righteous indignation that eased their own perpetration of the very same behavior they vehemently denounced. The prisoners were mostly civilians, farmers and workingmen, many of whom languished into a lethargic state of listlessness. Some prisoners, in a desperate suicidal hopelessness attempted to escape, by climbing the barbwire, knowing the guards would immediately shoot them. 1754

  On May 8, 1945, the war’s end U.S. soldiers expected to be going home. However, that was not the case, for now the occupation began. Camp Andernach, referred to as a “killing field,” was now part of the French zone. The U.S. military transferred German prisoners formerly under its jurisdiction to the French military authorities. The military force-marched the prisoners to another camp. Those who could not keep up the pace and fell behind were bludgeoned and rolled to the side of the road where their bodies were later collected by a truck. 1755 By the end of 1946, the U.S. military had emptied most of its camps. The French continued to hold prisoners until 1949. Between 1947 and 1950, the U.S. Government destroyed the majority of the incriminating records regarding the United States prison camps. The Germans maintain that more than 1,700,000 soldiers who were determined as living at the end of the war, May 8, never returned home. The Allies refute all responsibility for t
he atrocities committed against the German prisoners but are quick to blame the Soviets for all inhumane abuses within all of the camps. 1756

  According to the Congressional record of January 29, 1946, Ike said, “While I and my subordinates believe that stern justice should be meted out to war criminals by proper legal procedure, we would never condone inhumane or un-American practices upon the helpless, which is one of the crimes for which those war criminals must now stand trial.”1757

  On September 27, 1948, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City awarded Eisenhower an honorary humanities degree. What an incredible hypocrisy! The audience, probably the majority of which was Jewish, applauded his efforts in ending the German terror and honored him for his military accomplishments and for the high moral standards that he demonstrated, and for his “statesmanship, tolerance and humaneness.” They congratulated him as “a soldier of intellectual integrity with a love for peace and his fellow man… a beloved counselor of our people in peace as in war.” In his acceptance speech, he acknowledged his conviction of what Americans believe in, regardless of “race or creed.” He said, “Our Army fights to defend our way of life, freedom for each of us to worship God in his own way.” He said that ancient Jewish leaders “gave birth to the doctrines that the American Army fought to defend.” He concluded, “All the world is the seed of Abraham.”1758

  Eisenhower was president of Columbia University (1948-1953) prior to becoming president. Not only was he Baruch’s man in Europe, he was also Baruch’s man in the White House. Morgan and Rockefeller and numerous CFR members also backed him in the presidential election in 1952. After his nomination, he told the President of the United Synagogue of America, “The Jewish people could not have a better friend than me… I grew up believing that Jews were the chosen people and that they gave us the high ethical and moral principles of our civilization.”1759

  General Patton, a Credible Witness

  Roosevelt delivered Poland and China to the Communists during negotiations at the Yalta Conference, February 4-11, 1945. Churchill, Stalin and FDR determined the fate of millions of people without their consent. FDR and Churchill abandoned Eastern Europe to the Marxist. General George S. Patton’s superiors prevented him from marching his troops into eastern Germany, specifically Berlin, or into Prague or into the Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, or Yugoslav territories. The negotiators for France, Britain and America surrendered thousands of vulnerable people to the Soviet Red Army. The so-called “liberators” plundered, raped, and exploited those countries while slaughtering millions. The victors concocted subjective histories of their warfare and apportioned the spoils of their choreographed mass murders.1760

  Military abandonment of defenseless civilians occurred in Europe during World War II as reported in American newspapers. On April 22, 1945, Drew Pearson, an ADL “mouthpiece,” with close connections to the Israeli lobby,1761 and a journalist for the Washington Post, wrote, “Though it may get official denial the real fact is that American advance patrols on Friday, April 13th, one day after President Roosevelt’s death, were in Potsdam, which is to Berlin what the Bronx is to New York City, but the next day withdrew from the Berlin suburbs to the River Elbe about 50 miles south. This withdrawal was ordered largely because of a previous agreement with the Russians that they were to occupy Berlin and because of their insistence that the agreement be kept.” He surmised that FDR had arranged this at Yalta.1762 Pearson, “a devoted friend of Israel,” would later create false news, “deliberate disinformation,” regarding the JFK assassination while “shielding any Israeli involvement.” Meanwhile, in his columns, he targeted Jim Garrison and James Forrestal, who opposed the Israeli lobby, suggested to Truman that he evaluate the Arab position. Michael Collins Piper wrote, “Walter Winchell and other opinion-makers supported his position.”1763

  General George S. Patton

  General Patton, very popular in America and the most skilled military leader opposed the Morgenthau Plan and had many intense arguments about its vicious policies with Eisenhower. In order to stifle him, Eisenhower removed General Patton from his military responsibility as head of the Third Army and appointed him as the bureaucratic governor of occupied Bavaria. It also appeared that certain people wanted to permanently silence his opposition. Patton recognized that he was a marked man, a fear he shared with his daughter. In fact, there had already been numerous attempts on his life. On April 21, 1945, American pilots targeted his plane and shot at it. They later asserted that they thought it was a German plane but luckily, he escaped injury. There was no conceivable way that the pilots could have mistaken his distinctive plane. On May 3, some assassins attacked his jeep during which he suffered minor injuries. 1764

  General Patton interacted with the Germans assuming and believing that now that the war was over, the Germans should resume their civilian lives and rebuild their devastated war-torn country. Soviet leaders, with their doctrine, jeopardized western civilization as they threatened a worldwide revolution. The U.S. Government allied with Stalin, whose economic policies and food confiscation led to the famine that caused the starvation deaths, called the Holodomor, of up to seven million Ukrainian citizens during the winter of 1932-1933. Nationalism had emerged in Ukraine, as it had in Germany, and the Ukrainian citizens developed a national consciousness, which concerned Stalin who viewed this fidelity for their nation as a conflict with their loyalty to the Soviet State.

  Patton kept a diary and wrote letters on a regular basis, many of which his family allowed to be published as The Patton Papers (1974). In early May 1945, Patton wrote in his diary, “Information was obtained over the radio last night of the unconditional surrender of all troops in Italy and southern Austria.” In a letter to his wife, Beatrice, dated May 3, he wrote, “the German Armies in Italy surrendered… Those in front of me will quit today or tomorrow…” On May 6, he wrote, “The halt line through Pilsen is mandatory… Eisenhower does not wish at this late date to have any international complications. It seems to me that a great nation as America should let the other people worry about the complications. Personally, I would go to the line of the Moldau River (in the Czech Republic) and tell the Russians that is where I intended to stop. Bradley also directed us to discontinue our advance east along the Danube… I doubt the wisdom of this.” He wrote, “An alleged 100,000 White Russians are attempting to surrender to us. These people have fought for the Germans against the Russians and are in a pitiable state.” 1765 He was referring to Operation Keelhaul, August 14, 1946 to May 9, 1947, during which the Allies would repatriate these soldiers who would do anything not to return to the USSR and certain torture and death.

  On May 7, 1945, just before Germany surrendered, Patton had a conference in Austria with Robert Patterson, who would become the Secretary of War on September 27, was a special advisor to Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. Patton was gravely concerned over the Soviet’s failure to respect the demarcation lines separating the Soviet and U.S. occupation zones. Additionally, he opposed the planned immediate partial demobilization of the U.S. Army. 1766 Patterson, when questioned by the FBI, vouched for the reputation and trustworthiness of Nathan Silvermaster, a known Soviet spy. 1767

  Patton told Patterson, “Let’s keep our boots polished, bayonets sharpened, and present a picture of force and strength to the Red Army. This is the only language they understand and respect.” He replied, “Oh, George, you have been so close to this thing so long, you have lost sight of the big picture.” 1768 Patton understood perfectly, he said, regarding the Soviets, “. . . if you wanted Moscow I could give it to you. They lived off the land coming down. There is insufficient (food) left for them to maintain themselves going back. Let’s not give them time to build up their supplies. If we do, then… we have had a victory over the Germans and disarmed them, but we have failed in the liberation of Europe; we have lost the war!”1769

  On May 8, 1945, Eisenhower was outraged when he discovered that General Patton,
against the Morgenthau Plan, had released a half million German POWs in Bavaria. He also allowed 4,500 Russian POWs to escape. Patton did not trust the Soviets who he knew would seize large portions of Eastern Europe, and then brutalize, and plunder the citizens. He had no animosities towards the Germans and opposed using them as slave labor in France and Britain. He also opposed the punitive occupation described in the formal directive, JCS1067/6. He felt that America should unite with Germany and fight the Soviets. Consequently, Eisenhower relieved Patton of his duties and ordered his return to the United States. Patton, though loyal as a military leader, was anxious to retire so he could openly express his opinions about America’s “soft on Communism” attitude.1770

  Eisenhower and General Georgy Zhukov toured the Soviet Union together after their combined victory over Germany. Zhukov, a Soviet war hero and the supreme Military Commander of the Soviet Occupation Zone in Germany, also became its Military Governor on June 10, 1945. Stalin, paranoid and suspicious of Zhukov, replaced him with Vasily Sokolovsky on April 10, 1946. Patton was against the de-Nazification program and against everything that the United States was doing to the Germans. Eisenhower had gone to Moscow with his good “friend,” Zhukov, the “hero of Berlin,” who led the Red Army through Eastern Europe to conquer and occupy Berlin where Red Army soldiers raped thousands of females. Zhukov, greatly feared by other Soviet military personnel, presided over the meeting when representatives of the three armed services of the OKW, Wilhelm Keitel, Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, and Hans-Jürgen Stumpff, signed the official Instrument of Surrender in Berlin. When Ike returned from Moscow, at the end of September, he relieved Patton of his duty as Occupation Governor of Bavaria and sent him to Frankfurt, “into the relatively unprotected area of Bad Nauheim. Ike also withdrew all of Patton’s body guards.1771