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.)

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, 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.” / 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 stu­dios 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 stu­dio executives, Jews are so numerically dominant that calling these businesses Jewish-controlled is little more than a sta­tistical 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, pro­ducers, and to a lesser degree directors are disproportionately Jewish -- one recent study showed the figure as high as 59 per­cent 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