“God , I hate the Germans!”, said Ike

In another thread “Into Darwin’s Dark Night” discussion emerged regarding the number of Germans killed in the aftermath of WWII. The main points;

—– 1) War is hell, and the Germans probably had it coming to them.

—– 2) The Germans were responsible for more deaths of civilians, by far, than the Russians and, the Germans were more brutal. Again, war is hell, so stop complaining.

—– 3) The number of dead Germans can never be known. Even so, we KNOW that it wasn’t in the millions. It was probably “only” about 500,000.

—– 4) America treated prisoners quite fairly, and rarely killed them, directly or indirectly.

GERMANS HAD IT COMING TO THEM

My mother was born in Yugoslavia. The town’s population was about 25% German. She was a young teenager when the Russians came. They promptly executed almost all the German-speaking men in town, including her father. She and her mother went to a prison camp, where both were repeatedly raped. I suppose a Russian-rape isn’t as brutal as a German-rape, so she should be thankful for that. She witnessed Russian soldiers beat her mother to death right in front of her eyes. I’m pretty sure this thin 5’1” teenager never committed any crime against Jews (she didn’t know any), or any other ethnic group. Yeah, she deserved it, though.

My dad was born in Romania and also lived in a German community that largely vanished into thin air after the war. One day the German army swopped in and forcibly made him a soldier. He was captured by the Russians. He was one of the lucky ones as he survived prison camp. He was never allowed to return home. Never saw his family again – what was left of them. Instead, he was turned over to the British. The Brits sent him to England … basically as a slave laborer (I’ll bet you didn’t know the Brits did that) in a coal mine (near the Scottish border, I believe). He wasn’t even given a rudimentary mask to keep from breathing in all the coal dust. He developed an illness, and the Brits had enough of him in that they didn’t want to waste resources helping him get well. So, they generously gave him barely enough money to get the hell out of their country to Bremerhaven. Germany didn’t have room for him. So he stayed there a few months doing menial work, until he had enough pfennigs to make his way to Austria. But, he was a Nazi soldier (not! very few German soldiers were Nazi’s), so I suppose he also deserved it.

500,000 or 9,000,000?

In 1944, Yugoslavia’s new leader, commie bastard Marshal Josip Broz Tito, issued as one of his very first decrees that Germans were “enemies of the people”. Billions of dollars (in today’s money) were confiscated. Conservative estimates are that 120,000 Germans died just in post-war Yugoslavia.

http://www.ihr.org/other/sunic062002.html

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In 1992, the author of this book  flew to Moscow to visit the newly-opened KGB archives, where he found documented new proof that almost 1,000,000  Germans died …… just in Western prison camps”

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This critically acclaimed book chronicles how that wonderful humanitarian, FDR, impressed 4,000,000 Germans into forced labor …. which so disgusted Gen. Patton that he said …..   “It is amusing to recall that we fought the revolution in defense of the rights of man and the civil war to abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles”. The author estimates 2.5 million ordinary Germans were killed in the post-Reich era.

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According to the intro —- “The first English-speaking writer to gain access to the newly opened KGB archives in Moscow and to recently declassified information from the renowned Hoover Institution in California,“.  The author claims, “9 million Germans died as a result of deliberate Allied starvation and expulsion policies after World War II—one quarter of the country was annexed, and about 15 million people expelled in the largest act of ethnic cleansing the world has ever known.“.

The point of this section is that 500,000 is woefully underestimated and that 9 million is surely a gross exaggeration. The two million figure is the most reasonable and, in fact, the number used in most articles, studies, books, etc.

AMERICAN RIGHTEOUSNESS

As the war in Europe drew to a close, Germans surrendered by the hundreds of thousands.   According to British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, 500,000 Germans surrendered to his 21st Army Group in Northern Germany.  On May 8th, 1945 — shortly after V-E Day — the British-Canadian catch totaled more that 2 million.  A Captain in the British Army described it as such,  …..  “Hungry and frightened, lying in grain fields within fifty feet of us, awaiting the appropriate time to jump up with their hands in the air” Most were quickly released and sent home, or else transferred to the French to help in the post-war work of reconstruction.

The Americans also faced astounding numbers of surrendering German troops: the final tally of prisoners taken by the U.S. army in Europe over 5 million.  But the Americans responded very differently.

Corporal Helmut Liebich’s Story.

Among the early U.S captives was one Corporal Helmut Liebich, who had been working in an anti-aircraft experimental group at Peenemunde on the Baltic.  Liebich was captured by the Americans on April 17, near Gotha in Central Germany. 

Forty-two years later, he recalled vividly that there were no tents in the Gotha camp, just barbed wire fences around a field soon churned to mud.  The prisoners received a small ration of food on the first day but it was then cut in half.  In order to get it, they were forced to run a gauntlet.  Hunched over, they ran between lines of American guards who hit them with sticks as they scurried towards their food. 

On April 27, they were transferred to the U.S. camp at Heidesheim farther wet, where there was no food at all for days, then very little.  Exposed, starved, and thirsty, the men started to die.  Liebich saw between ten and thirty bodies a day being dragged out of his section, B, which at first held around 5,200 men.. He saw one prisoner beat another to death to get his piece of bread.  One night when it rained, Liebich saw the sides of the holes in which they were sheltered, dug in soft sandy earth, collapse on men who were too weak to struggle out.  They smothered before anyone could get to them.  Liebich sat down and wept.  “I could hardly believe men could be so cruel to each other.”

Typhus broke out in Heidesheim about the beginning of May.  Five days after V-E Day, on May 13, Liebich was transferred to another U.S. POW camp, at Bingen-Rudesheim in the Rhineland near Bad Kreuznach, where he was told that the prisoners numbered somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000, all without shelter, food, water, medicine, or sufficient space.

Soon he fell sick with dysentery and typhus.  he was moved again, semiconscious and delirious, in an open-topped railway car with about sixty other prisoners: northwest down the Rhine, with a detour through Holland, where the Dutch stood on bridges to smash stones down on the heads of the prisoners.  Sometimes the American guards fired warning shots near the Dutch to keep them off.  After three nights, his fellow prisoners helped him stagger into the hug camp at Rheinberg, near the border with the Netherlands, again without shelter or food.

When a little food finally did arrive, it was rotten.  In none of the four camps had Leibich seen any shelter for the prisoners.  the death rate in the U.S. Rhineland camps at this point, according to surrviving data from a medical survey, was about thirty per cent per year.  A normal death rate for a civilian population in 1945 was between one and two percent.

One day in June, through hallucinations of his fever, Liebich saw “the Tommies” coming into the camp.  The British had taken over Rheinberg, and that probably saved his life.  At this point, Liebich, who is five-foot-ten, weighed 96.8 ponds.

According to stories told to this day by other ex-prisoners of Rheinberg, the last act of the Americans before the British took over was to bulldoze one section level while there were still men living in their holes in the ground.

http://www.whale.to/b/bacque1.html

HOW ABOUT SOME PICTURES?

Humane American camp, at Sinzig-Remagen, spring, 1945. Printed in a German newspaper.

998,000 prisoners killed in Allied Camps. OOPS!!  I guess American Censorship failed to block this St. Petersburg article.

Author: Stucky

I'm right, you're wrong. Deal with it. View all posts by Stucky