“The Untold Holocaust : Allied Forces treatment of Germans” by Shenali Waduge

Posted on December 22nd, 2013

We are told enough times about the terrible crimes committed by Germans but why is there stoic silence on the crimes committed by the Allied forces (UK, US, FRANCE and SOVIET UNION) on Germans? Germany was defeated in May 1945 with that ended World War 2. What gets conveniently hidden from history’s tell tales are the horrible crimes that covered destruction, looting, starving, rape, ethnic cleansing and mass killing of the vanquished German people. Why were innocent German men, women and children persecuted and thrown out from their centuries’ old homes? If there was ever an example of triumphalism it was seen in the manner the victors ” the US, UK, France and Soviet Union treated the losing nation and its people. There is no other more suitable word to call it other than holocaust and it remains ‘unknown’ or ignored because the perpetrators like to depict themselves as magnanimous victors and not the barbarians they really were. When the story is written by the victor would they include their crimes? They want the Allies to remain Heroes and the Axis to remain the Villains. Now some of the same Victors have written the international human rights laws that do not apply to them as they continue the same crimes.

Expulsion of Germans

The policy set by the ‘Big Three” Allied leaders (US, UK and Soviet Union) under Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were to expunge Germans from their ancient homelands. 14 million Germans were expelled from their homes in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and other Eastern European countries after the war. Only 12 million were able to get to Germany alive. The tragedy of the expulsion of the German civilian population is hardly widely known except amongst Germans and historians. Few in the English-speaking world, even history buffs, know that, as a result of the Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945, millions of Germans lost their 700-year-old homelands in the eastern provinces of Germany and Eastern Europe. The expulsion of Germans from the East, a process that over 2 million did not survive, deserves our attention because of its implications for Europe. “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 …(New York Daily News Oct 1945)

A PROCLAMATION FOR GERMANS IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA

It has been ordered that, effective immediately, all persons of German nationality age 6 years and up shall wear the following sign: A white circle 15 centimeters in diameter upon which a 2 cm thick letter “N” of black linen is sewn t whose edge is 1 cm within the edge of the circle. This sign shall be worn on the left breast. Germans who were members of the NSDAP, the SA, the SS, NS Public Welfare office, NS Women s Association, NSKK, or any other division of the Party, must wear this sign on the back. All Germans are forbidden to ride public transportation, visit public places o fentertainment or parks! All Germans are forbidden to leave their dwellings after 8 P.M. If Russian or Czechoslovakian officers are met or chanced upon in the street or elsewhere, Germans must remove their hats or caps and pass by at an appropriate distance. Store purchases are allowed one hour before closing. The badges must be procured by each German himself in accordance with the prescribed design.

Non-Compliance with the above mentioned order is punishable. Any citizen of different nationality shall also be subject to punishment for aiding, abetting or helping Germans in any manner!

The Captain of the National Guard

Service in the City of Troppau

Deaths of POWs/Civilians

3million Germans died after war ended (2m were women and children 1m were prisoners of war) – British historian Giles MacDonogh in ‘After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation” details how Germans and Austrians were systematically raped and robbed and those Germans who survived were killed in cold blood or deliberately left to die of disease, cold, malnutrition or starvation. The Prisoners of War Temporary Enclosures, or Rheinwiesenlager, were a collection of 19 U.S.-built prisoner of war camps constructed to hold German POWs during the Allied occupation of Germany. These camps held upto 2million prisoners. Estimates of deaths from starvation, exposure and dehydration went upto 10,000. Regardless, these deaths are war crimes under 1929 Geneva Convention but Eisenhower classified the prisoners as Disarmed Enemy Forces to circumvent the treaty ” just as modern USA classifies unlawful combatants. The Allies decided to execute captured POWs. There is also the allegation that the Allies used Germans as human shields forcing them to walk through minefields.

Denying access to International Agencies

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. 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. Michael Walsh. His research exposes allied genocide, enslavement and institutionalized ill treatment of axis prisoners-of-war both during and after World War 11. He says, “the scale of abuse of prisoners-of-war was contrary to the Geneva and other conventions to which Britain and its allies were signatories. 1948, three years after the war’s end, the British Government’s treatment of its foreign prisoners was subject to International Red Cross scrutiny and international condemnation. The IRC threatened to bring the British government before international tribunals for abuse and illegal enslavement.

GERMAN SLAVES HELD IN ALLIED COUNTRIES

United States 140,000 (US Occupation Zone of which 100,000 were held in France,

30,000 in Italy, 14,000 in Belgium.

Great Britain 460,000 German slaves.

The Soviet Union 4,000,000 – 5,000,000 estimated.

France had 680,000 German slaves by August 1946.

Yugoslavia 80,000,

Belgium 48,000,

Czechoslovakia 45,000,

Luxembourg 4,000, Holland 1,300.

Source: International Red Cross

Hatred for Germans

“God , I hate the Germans,” Eisenhower wrote to his wife, Mamie, in September, 1944. Earlier, in front of the British ambassador to Washington, he had said that all the 3,500 or so officers of the German General Staff should be “exterminated.”

The Allies and their concentration camps

Former British Army veteran A.W Perkins of Holland-on-Sea described conditions in the ‘Sennelager’ British concentration camp, which shockingly held, not captured troops but civilians. He recounts;“During the latter half of 1945 I was with British troops guarding suspected Nazi civilians living on starvation rations in a camp called Sennelager. They were frequently beaten and grew as thin as concentration camp victims, scooping handfuls of swill from our waste bins.” The most notorious American camps were the Rheinwiesenlager – the Rhine Meadow Camps – where more than 400,000 prisoners were left to starve out in open in the mud. 10% of them died from hunger, disease and exposure. If captured in smaller groups, even the US Army policy was to slaughter the prisoners where they stood, especially if they were SS. The largest (currently acknowledged) massacres at the hands of the Americans were the murder of 700 troops of the surrendered 8th SS Mountain Division, atrocities carried out against the surrendered SS Westphalia Brigade where most of the German captives were shot through the back of the head, and the machine gunning of three hundred surrendered camp guards at Dachau. By the winter of 1947, it was estimated that 4,160,000 German POWs were still held in ‘work camps’ outside Germany: 750,000 in France, 30,000 in Italy, 460,000 in Britain, 14,000 in Belgium (at one point, 48,000), 4,000 in Luxembourg and 1,300 in Holland (as discussed later, the Soviet Union started with 4,000,000-5,000,000, Yugoslavia had 80,000 and Czechoslovakia 45,000) as well as the USA’s 140,000 in the US Occupation Zone with 100,000 more later also held in France. It is estimated that 700,000 to a million men may have died within the period they spent incarcerated in American and French camps alone from 1945 to 1948.

Read more:

http://www.lankaweb.com/news/ items/2013/12/22/the-untold- holocaust-allied-forces- treatment-of-germans/

sent in by Harriet