by John Hamer
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, although the prelate of the Lutheran Evangelical church estimated the number at 5,000.
During World War II, the United States, Britain and Germany broadly complied with the international regulations on the treatment of prisoners of war, as required by the Geneva Convention of 1929 even though Germany did not formally recognise it. 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 strategically reclassifying them in true Orwellian fashion as so-called ‘disarmed enemy forces’ or ‘surrendered enemy personnel.’
Accordingly, British and American authorities denied International Red Cross representatives access to camps holding German prisoners of war. Moreover, any attempt by German civilians to feed the prisoners was punishable by death. Many thousands of German POWs died in American custody, most infamously in the so-called ‘Rhine meadow camps,’ where prisoners were held under appalling conditions, with no shelter or sanitation and inadequate food.
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 labour was contrary to International Red Cross statutes.
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 labour 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 labourers by other countries, the Red Cross reported, included 80,000 in Yugoslavia, and 45,000 in Czechoslovakia.
Both during and after the war, the Allies extensively tortured German prisoners. In one British centre in England, ‘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 and treatment of German prisoners by the British was even more harsh in the British occupation zone of Germany. At the US internment centre 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 the crushing of testicles and kicks to the groin.
Most of the German prisoners of war who died in Allied captivity were held by the Soviets and a much higher proportion 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.) Up to ten 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 labourers in other Allied countries, often for many years. There is no doubt in my mind that all these acts were a not-so-subtle attempt to ethnically cleanse the German nation.
At the Yalta conference in early 1945, the Allied leaders agreed that the Soviets could take Germans as forced labourers, or ‘slave labour’, contrary to common human decency and morality. It is estimated that a further 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 labourers. Of these so-called reparations deportees, 45% perished.
For two years after the end of the fighting, the Germans were victims of a cruel and vindictive occupation policy, one that meant slow starvation of the defeated population. To sustain healthy life, a normal adult needs a minimum of about 1800 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.
In the winter of 1945-46, the Allies forbade 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.
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 publicised 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 wilfully, in the sense that we prefer their death to our own inconvenience.”
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 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’.”
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 petroleum, and set on fire as living torches. 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. In the Czech Republic alone, 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% of them non-combatant, innocent civilians. They were incarcerated in cellars, prisons, and 1,255 concentration camps where typhus was rampant and torture was commonplace. Between 60,000 and 80,000 Germans perished at the hands of the ‘Office of State Security.’
We are ceaselessly and unremittingly reminded, by the thousands of books and documentaries still being produced, of the Third Reich’s wartime concentration camps, but few 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 citizens, many of whom also perished miserably.
For many years we have heard much 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.
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 assumed to be 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, Britain and 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 labour 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.”
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 meant 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 also 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 (Dresden for example) 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 enemy 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 realisation that the economic recovery of Europe as a whole required a prosperous and productive Germany.
Oswald Spenger, the German historian and philosopher, once observed that how a people learn history is via 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 ultimate power, the Elite.
This is 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, documentaries and motion pictures and by our manipulated and controlled political leaders.
The ‘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 Elite 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 victors. In our society, the victors, 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 organised Elite community.
An awareness of ‘real history’ is in itself not enough. It is important to understand the how and why of the systematic falsification 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 and the future of all humankind.
What follows is a summary of an eye-witness testimony to the events leading up to and immediately following, the end of the war in Germany in 1945. These events are never mentioned in either contemporary or present-day literature and are not taught in schools or memorialised in countless films and documentaries ad nauseum, unlike the ‘holocaust’. The question needs to be asked as to why this and many other similar events are conveniently air-brushed from history whilst others are continually alluded to, dramatised and sensationalised.
According to the testimony of a former American GI, in late March or early April 1945 he was sent to guard a camp full of German military and civilian prisoners near Andernach on the River Rhine, one of the infamous ‘Rhine meadows’ camps. He had studied German in high school for four years and so was able to talk to the prisoners, although this was actually strictly forbidden. Gradually however, he was used as an interpreter and asked to try to discover those who had been members of the SS. (He 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. The men had no shelter and no blankets and most had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for use as toilets. 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 did this to help ease their hunger pains but they soon grew very emaciated. Dysentery was rife 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 the eyes of their captors who had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, even refusing them medical assistance.
Outraged, he protested to the 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 himself open to charges. Realising that his protestations were useless, he asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could smuggle out any 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 ‘above’. But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with and would see what he could do.
When he threw this food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, he was caught and threatened with imprisonment. After repeating the offence, one officer angrily threatened to shoot him but he assumed this was a bluff until he encountered a captain on a hill above the camp shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 calibre handgun.
When asked why, he mumbled ‘target practice’ and fired until his pistol was empty. The women ran for cover, but at that distance it was not possible to see if any had been hit. He soon realised he was dealing with cold-blooded killers filled with moralistic hatred
that considered the Germans subhuman and worthy only of extermination; another expression of the downward spiral of racism. Articles in the GI newspaper, Stars and Stripes, played up the German concentration camps, complete with photos of emaciated bodies. This amplified the Americans self-righteous cruelty and made it easier to imitate behaviour they were supposed to have been fighting to bring to an end.
These prisoners were mostly farmers and working men, as simple and ignorant as many of the US troops. As time went by, 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 by machine gun fire.
Some prisoners were as eager for cigarettes as for food, saying they took the edge off their hunger. Accordingly, enterprising GIs were acquiring hordes of watches and rings in exchange for handfuls of cigarettes or less. When he began throwing cartons of cigarettes to the prisoners to ruin this trade, he was threatened by rank-and-file GIs too.
The only bright spot in this gloomy picture came one night when he was on the ‘graveyard shift’ from two to four am. There was a cemetery on the uphill side of this enclosure, not many yards away. His superiors had omitted to give him a flashlight and he had not asked for one, disgusted as he was with the whole situation by that time. It was a fairly bright night and he soon became aware of a prisoner crawling under the wires towards the graveyard. They were supposed to shoot escapees on sight, so he started to get up from the ground to warn him to get back but suddenly noticed another prisoner crawling from the graveyard back to the enclosure. They were risking their lives to get to the graveyard for something.
