The German Holocaust: Germany’s War, Chapter 7: History’s Most Terrifying Peace

The German Holocaust: Germany’s War, Chapter 7: History’s Most Terrifying Peace

February 4, 2020 

The  war propaganda that demonized Germany and made Dwight D. Eisenhower into a war criminal also made mass rapists out of the allied troops at the expense of 2,000,000 German girls and women.  “The Greatest Generation” indeed.

Germany’s War by John Wear: https://www.amazon.com/GERMANYS-WAR-Origins-Aftermath-Atrocities/dp/0982344899/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1CODKQLIYA3ZW&keywords=john+wear+germany%27s+war&qid=1578315223&s=books&sprefix=John+Wear%2Caps%2C169&sr=1-1 

Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allies marked the end of a long nightmare for German citizens and the beginning of an uncertain future. Most Germans assumed that as bad as the coming weeks and months might be, the worst of their death and suffering was behind them. However, although World War II was history’s most catastrophic and destructive war, the death and suffering of Germans increased after the end of the war. What lay ahead for Germany was, as Time magazine later phrased it, “history’s most terrifying peace.”1

Allies Warn Germany of Terrifying Peace

Numerous writers had warned of the terrible consequences that Germans would face if Germany lost the war. In his widely read book Germany Must Perish, Theodore Kaufman wrote:

This time Germany has forced a total war upon the world. As a result, she must be prepared to pay a total penalty. And there is one, and only one, such total penalty: Germany must perish forever! In fact—not in fancy! . . . The goal of world-dominion must be removed from the reach of the German and the only way to accomplish that is to remove the German from the world. . . . There remains then but one mode of ridding the world forever of Germanism—and that is to stem the source from which issue those war-lusted souls, by preventing the people of Germany from ever again reproducing their kind.2

Kaufman concluded that all German men and women should be sterilized to eliminate Germanism and its carriers.3 Many leading American journals such as Time magazine and The Washington Post expressed strong support for this genocidal concept.4

At the Quebec Conference in September 1944 between Roosevelt and Churchill, the Allied leaders announced the adoption of the Morgenthau Plan. Named after the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, the objective of the Morgenthau Plan was to de-industrialize Germany and diminish its people to a pastoral existence once the war was won. The Morgenthau Plan was designed to reduce the military-industrial strength of Germans forever, so that never again could Germany threaten the peace.5 As many proponents of the Morgenthau Plan knew, adoption of this plan would result in the starvation of many millions of the German population.

The leak of the Morgenthau Plan provided Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, with strong arguments for a bitter resistance by the Germans. The horrible prospects of eternal slavery, de-industrialization, exile to Siberia, starvation, the break-up of Germany and even sterilization were portrayed to the German people by their leaders. The fear of the consequence of unconditional surrender greatly bolstered German resistance. The Germans fought even when their country had been cut in half and they had no realistic prospect of winning the war.6

Until the announcement of the Morgenthau Plan, there was a reasonable possibility that Germany might surrender to American and British forces while holding the Russians at bay in the East. This could have shortened the war by months and could have averted the takeover of East Germany by Communist forces. One commentator has noted that a hidden motive behind the Morgenthau Plan was the potential communization of the defeated nation. The best way to drive the German people into the arms of the Soviet Union was for the United States and Great Britain to stand forth as champions of death and misery in Germany.7

The genocidal policy promulgated by the Morgenthau Plan was also the policy of the Soviet Union. Because of the massive death and destruction caused by Germany in the Soviet Union, Germans were guaranteed to receive no mercy should the Red Army win the war. Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet chief propagandist, urged the Soviet soldiers to adopt a policy of total and complete extermination. Ehrenburg stated:

The Germans are not human beings. . . . If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day. . . . If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with your bayonet. . . . If you kill one German, kill another—there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. Do not count days. . . . Count only the number of Germans killed by you. Kill the German—that is your grandmother’s request. Kill the German—that is your child’s prayer. Kill the German—that is your motherland’s loud request. Do not miss. Do not let through. Kill.8

Ehrenburg remained true to his uncompromising line of hatred and revenge as Soviet troops flooded into Germany. On Jan. 30, 1945, Ehrenburg wrote: “The soldiers who are now storming German cities will not forget how the mothers of Leningrad pulled their dead children on sledges. . . . Berlin has not yet paid for the sufferings of Leningrad.”9

Ehrenburg’s calls for revenge were echoed by Soviet generals in orders to their troops as they prepared for the final onslaught of Germany. When Marshal Zhukov issued his orders on the eve of the Soviet offensive in January 1945, he wrote that “we will get our terrible revenge for everything.” The statement issued by Soviet Gen. Ivan Chernyakhovsky to his troops was even more explicit: “There will be no mercy—for no one, just as no mercy was given for us. It is unnecessary to expect that the soldiers of the Red Army will exercise mercy. . . . The land of the fascists must be made into a desert, just like our land that they devastated. The fascists must die, like our soldiers have died.”10

National Socialist propaganda had repeatedly warned of the dire consequences of unconditional surrender to the Allies. As discussed in the previous two chapters, the fate of the German prisoners of war in the West and the German expellees in the East was even worse than what most Germans had expected. Another instance in which National Socialist propaganda had underestimated the threat of unconditional surrender was the treatment of German women by Allied soldiers.

The Rape of German Women

Stalin sought to ease the fears of the Western Allies concerning Soviet atrocities against the German people by issuing the following order to his troops: “Occasionally there is talk that the goal of the Red Army is to annihilate the German people. . . . It would be foolish to equate the German people and the German State with the Hitler clique. The lessons of history tell us that Hitlers come and go, but the German people, the German State, they shall remain.”11

Stalin’s reasonable words were not followed by his troops. In reality, rape of German women was implicitly condoned by Stalin. Stalin asked Yugoslav communist leader Milovan Djilas, “Can’t he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?” The Red Army, most of whose soldiers were sex-starved after four years of fighting, raped wherever it went.12

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then a young captain in the Red Army, describes the entry of his regiment into East Prussia in January 1945: “For three weeks the war had been going on inside Germany and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction.”13 Solzhenitsyn was a committed opponent of such atrocities and vocally opposed the rape of German women. As a consequence, he was arrested and banished to a gulag.

Some of the other Soviet front line troops shared Solzhenitsyn’s attitude toward the proper treatment of German women. Many of these Soviet first echelon troops were more concerned with fighting and survival than with rape and revenge. However, most of the second echelon of Soviet troops were from Asiatic Russia and brought with them attitudes toward conquered people inherited from Genghis Kahn. Other second echelon troops were members of penal battalions or were ex-prisoners from the German concentration camps who had been freed by the Red Army and sent to the front. These soldiers who formed the second wave of troops were regarded even by their comrades as completely merciless.14

The savagery of Soviet soldiers was acknowledged by British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in his Memoirs. Montgomery states: “From their behavior it soon became clear that the Russians, though a fine fighting race, were in fact barbarous Asiatics who had never enjoyed a civilization comparable to that of the rest of Europe. Their approach to every problem was utterly different from ours and their behavior, especially in their treatment of women, was abhorrent to us.”15

Russian soldiers continually raped German women as the Red Army advanced through Silesia and Pomerania towards Berlin. The German women were frequently ganged raped, often again and again on successive nights. A woman interviewed in Schwerin reported that she had “already been raped by ten men today.” A German officer in East Prussia claims to have saved a few dozen women from a villa where “on average they had been raped 60 to 70 times a day.” Another woman in Berlin stated: “Twenty-three soldiers one after the other. I had to be stitched up in a hospital. I never want to have anything to do with any man again.”16

Churches were frequently used by Russian soldiers to rape German women. A priest from Neisse reports:

The girls, women and nuns were raped incessantly for hours on end, the soldiers standing in queues, the officers at the head of the queues, in front of their victims. During the first night many of the nuns and women were raped as many as 50 times. Some of the nuns who resisted with all their strength were shot, others were ill-treated in a dreadful manner until they were too exhausted to offer any resistance. The Russians knocked them down, kicked them, beat them on the head and in the face with the butt-end of their revolvers and rifles, until they finally collapsed and in this unconscious condition became the helpless victims of brutish passion, which was so inhuman as to be inconceivable. The same dreadful scenes were enacted in the hospitals, homes for the aged, and other such institutions. Even nuns who were 70 and 80 years old and were ill and bedridden were raped and ill-treated by these barbarians.17

A letter written by a priest smuggled out of Breslau, Germany on Sept. 3, 1945, states:

In unending succession were girls, women and nuns violated. Not merely in secret, in hidden corners, but in the sight of everybody, even in churches, in the streets and in public places were nuns, women and even eight-year-old girls attacked again and again. Mothers were violated before the eyes of their children; girls in the presence of their brothers; nuns, in the sight of pupils, were outraged again and again to their very death and even as corpses.18

When Russian soldiers “liberated” Danzig they promptly liberated all the women of their virtue and chastity. A Russian soldier told the Danzig women to seek shelter in the Catholic cathedral to protect them from the rapes. After hundreds of women and girls were securely inside, the Russian soldiers entered and “playing the organ and ringing the bells, kept up a foul orgy through the night, raping all the women, some more than 30 times.” A Catholic pastor in Danzig states: “They even violated eight-year-old girls and shot boys who tried to shield their mothers.”19

A pastor from Milzig said of the Soviet soldiers: “There were no limits to the bestiality and licentiousness of these troops. . . . Girls and women were routed out of their hiding places, out of the ditches and thickets where they had sought shelter from the Russian soldiers, and were beaten and raped. Older women who refused to tell the Russians where the younger ones had hidden were likewise beaten and raped.”20

The following is part of an eyewitness account written by a veteran American newspaperman. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans in Paris and later freed by the Russians with whom he traveled as they swept over eastern Germany to Berlin and beyond:

In the district around our internment camp—the territory comprising the towns of Schlawe, Lauenburg, and Buckow and hundreds of larger villages—Red soldiers during the first weeks of their occupation raped every woman 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. Flushed with victory—and often with wine found in the cellars of rich Pomeranian land owners—the Reds searched every house for women, cowing them with pistols or tommy guns, and carried them into their tanks or trucks.

Husbands and fathers who attempted to protect their women folk were shot down and girls offering extreme resistance were murdered.

Some weeks after the invasion, Red “political commissions” began a tour of the countryside ostensibly in search of members of the Nazi party. In every village the women were told to report for examination of papers to these commissions, which looked them over and detained those with sex appeal. The youngest and prettiest were taken by the officers and the rest left to the mercy of the privates.

This reign of terror lasted as long as I was with the Reds in Pomerania. Several girls whom I had known during my captivity committed suicide. Others died after having been raped by 10 soldiers in succession. . . .Whenever possible, girls attach themselves to liberated Anglo-American or French prisoners of war for protection against the Russians. Curiously, the Reds seemed to have a special code of honor in this respect—they will take an Allied prisoner’s watch but won’t touch his girl.21

When a German counterattack temporarily recaptured the town of Neustettin, a German soldier describes what he saw in houses where Russian soldiers had raped German women:

Naked, dead women lay in many of the rooms. Swastikas had been cut into their abdomens, in some the intestines bulged out, breasts were cut up, faces beaten to a pulp and swollen puffy. Others had been tied to the furniture by their hands and feet, and massacred. A broomstick protruded from the vagina of one, a besom from that of another. . . .

The mothers had had to witness how their 10 and 12-year-old daughters were raped by some 20 men; the daughters in turn saw their mothers being raped, even their grandmothers. Women who tried to resist were brutally tortured to death.

There was no mercy. . . .

The women we liberated were in a state almost impossible to describe. . . . Their faces had a confused, vacant look. Some were beyond speaking to, ran up and down and moaned the same sentences over and over again. Having seen the consequences of these bestial atrocities, we were terribly agitated and determined to fight. We knew the war was past winning; but it was our obligation and sacred duty to fight to the last bullet.22

One mother of two small children in the Upper Silesian town of Steinau described her ordeal at the hands of the Red Army: “A young Russian with a pistol in his hand came to fetch me. I have to admit that I was so frightened (and not just of the pistol) that I could not hold my bladder. This didn’t disturb him in the least. You got used to it soon enough and realized there was no point putting up a fight.” The woman later went with her heavily pregnant sister to see a Russian doctor, believing that the doctor would be a civilized man. The two women were raped by the doctor and a lieutenant. The fact that the woman was menstruating was no disincentive to her rape.23

German women frequently took steps to make their appearance unattractive to Soviet soldiers. The German women sometimes covered themselves with ashes to make themselves look old, painted on red spots to feign disease, or hobbled around on crutches to appear disabled. One woman in East Pomerania took the precaution of removing her false front tooth to make herself look older. Such precautions rarely worked, and the rape victims ranged in age from tiny children to great-grandmothers. Some German women kept their small children by them at all times, and sometimes these children provided a disincentive against the Russian attacks.24

The Russian rapes caused many German women to commit suicide. The preferred form of suicide was poison, and most Berlin women seem to have been provided with poison before the Red Army arrived. Even when Berlin women were not driven so far as to take their own lives, the rapes inevitably caused disease and unwanted babies. A high percentage of women became infected with venereal disease. Since antibiotics were often unaffordable, eventually the Russians decided to treat the local population themselves. Abortion was a common occurrence, and many abortions were performed without anesthetic. Despite the high incidence of abortion, it is estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 “Russian babies” were born to German women.25

The Soviet soldiers were not the only ones who raped German women. The French Senegalese and Moroccan troops were notorious for committing rape. Police records of Stuttgart show that 1,198 German women were raped by French troops during the French occupation. Dr. Karl Hartenstein, prelate of the Evangelical church in the city, estimated a higher number of 5,000 rape victims in Stuttgart. In the town of Vaihingen, with a population of 12,000, 500 cases of rape were reported. So it went in other German cities and towns occupied by French troops.26

Charles Lindbergh was told by an Army officer that there were over 6,000 cases of rape reported in Stuttgart and that the Germans were crying for the Americans to come in and replace the French. Lindbergh writes: “I had been told that in French-occupied territory it was required that a list of the occupants of every building, together with their ages, be posted outside, on the door, and that both the Senegalese and the French soldiers, drunk at night, would go from door to door until they found girls’ names listed of any age they wished to rape. As we drove through Stuttgart we saw that each main door of the habitable buildings contained such a list—white sheets of paper tacked onto the panel—a column of names, a column of birth dates. And most of the women of Stuttgart show in their faces that they have gone through hell.”27

In Germany as a whole it is estimated that approximately 2 million German women were raped in the aftermath of the Second World War. This represents more rapes against a defeated enemy than any other war in history.28

The arrival of the Red Army in Austria was also accompanied by sexual violence on a large scale. Stalin informed his troops that Austrians had been the first victims of German aggression, and he stipulated that Soviet troops were to behave correctly toward Austrians. However, the Soviet NKVD in Austria admitted that “there have been cases of excesses by individual members of units of the Red Army against the local population.” In the Steiermark, for example, thousands of women sought medical help after being raped by Soviet soldiers. In the city of Graz more than 600 cases of rape were reported to police—a number which is probably only a fraction of the total sexual assaults that occurred in the city.29 In Vienna 87,000 women were reported by doctors and clinics to have been raped.30

While a large percentage of American troops deported themselves properly, the record of American troops as a whole in regard to German women is hardly exemplary. Rape charges in the U.S. Army rose to 402 in March and 501 in April 1945, as a result of slackening military resistance.31 Altogether 487 American soldiers in Germany were tried for rapes allegedly committed in March and April 1945.32

One reason there were fewer reports of rape by American soldiers is that desperately hungry German women would have consensual sex in exchange for food or cigarettes. Despite Eisenhower’s edict against fraternization with Germans, no orders from above could slow the American soldier’s desire to have sex with German women. American newswoman Freda Utley states, “Neither army regulations nor the propaganda of hatred in the American press could prevent American soldiers from liking and associating with German women, who although they were driven by hunger to become prostitutes, preserved a certain innate decency.”33

American soldiers would offer a basket of food or other presents in order to have sex with the unconditionally surrendered women of Germany. The Christian Century reported on Dec. 5, 1945: “The American provost marshal, Lt. Col. Gerald F. Beane, said that rape represents no problem to the military police because ‘a bit of food, a bar of chocolate or a bar of soap seems to make rape unnecessary.’ Think that over if you want to understand what the situation is in Germany.”34

After a visit to the American zone, Dr. George N. Schuster, President of Hunter College, stated: “You have said it all when you say that Europe is now a place where woman has lost her perennial fight for decency because the indecent alone live. Except for those who can establish contacts with members of the armed forces, Germans can get nothing from soap to shoes.”35

L.F. Filewood stated in the Oct. 5, 1945, issue of the Weekly Review in London: “Young girls, unattached, wander about and freely offer themselves, for food or bed. . . . Very simply they have one thing left to sell, and they sell it. . . . As a way of dying it may be worse than starvation, but it will put off dying for months—or even years.”36

German women, many with children to feed, were often forced to become slaves to Allied soldiers in order to survive. A British soldier acknowledged: “I felt a bit sick at times about the power I had over the girl. If I gave her a three-penny bar of chocolate she nearly went crazy. She was just like my slave. She darned my socks and mended things for me. There was no question of marriage. She knew that was not possible.”37

By contrast, the German army behaved very correctly toward the people of occupied territories whose governments were signatories of The Hague and Geneva Conventions. Rape by German soldiers in these territories was strictly forbidden. This has been confirmed by numerous sources and is beyond dispute. For example, after a tour of inspection in which he visited areas where the Germans had been in occupation for four years, Frederick C. Crawford stated in his “Report From the War Front”: “The Germans tried to be careful in their dealings with the people. . . . We were told that if a citizen attended strictly to business and took no political or underground action against the occupying army, he was treated with correctness.”38

Starvation of The Germans

Capt. Albert R. Behnke, a U.S. Navy medical doctor, stated in regard to Germany: “From 1945 to the middle of 1948 one saw the probable collapse, disintegration and destruction of a whole nation. . . . Germany was subject to physical and psychic trauma unparalleled in history.” Behnke concluded that the Germans under the Allies had fared much worse than the Dutch under the Germans, and for far longer.39

Normal adult Germans in the American and British zones were rationed only 1,550 calories per day. The average official calorie ration for Germans in the French zone was only 1,400 per day. The actual calories received in the American, British, and French zones were often far less than these official amounts, and it was well known that these official ration amounts were not enough to maintain a healthy population. Herbert Hoover told President Truman that “the 1,550 ration is wholly incapable of supporting health.”40 Hoover estimated that 2,200 calories per day “is a minimum in a nation for healthy human beings.”41

The destruction of the German infrastructure during the war had made it inevitable that some Germans would starve to death before roads, rails, canals, and bridges could be restored. However, even when much of the German infrastructure had been repaired, the Allies deliberately withheld food from Germany. Continuing the policy of their predecessors, U.S. President Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee allowed the spirit of Henry Morgenthau and the Yalta Conference to dictate their policies toward Germany. The result was that millions of Germans were doomed to slow death by starvation.42

The Allies had studied German food production during the war, so they knew what to expect once Germany was defeated. The Allies knew that to strip off the rich farmlands of the east and give them to the Poles and Russians deprived Germany of over 25% of her arable land. Germans also starved in the east in 1945 because the Russians confiscated so much food and virtually all the factories. The French forced famine in their zone by the seizure of food and housing. The famine in France went on for years.43

The danger of hunger and starvation was slow to abate throughout Germany. The famine that began in Germany in 1945 spread over all of occupied Germany and continued into 1948. This famine was camouflaged as much as possible by the Allied armies and governments.44

Many Germans were prepared to see the Allies as liberating angels at first, but they soon realized that the Allies were adopting policies designed to hurt Germany’s recovery. The drastic reduction of fertilizer production under the Morgenthau Plan, for example, hurt Germany’s capacity to grow her own food. The use of German prisoners as slave labor in Allied countries subtracted from the labor force needed to bring in the reduced harvest. German prisoners who worked as slave laborers in the United Kingdom and France were horrified upon arriving home to find their families starving.45

Unable to feed themselves adequately from home production, the Germans tried desperately to increase production for export. However, the Germans were seriously hampered by the Allied reparation policy, which prevented them from exporting goods to increase the shrunken German food supply. The Allies had decided to take huge reparations amounting to at least 20 billion dollars. Even as late as 1949, 268 factories were removed from Germany in whole or in part. The reduction in exports for food insured that the German people would keep on starving.46

The Allies not only prevented the ICRC from distributing food to German POWs, but they also refused requests by the ICRC to bring provisions into Germany for civilians. In the winter of 1945, ICRC donations to Germany were returned with the recommendation that the donations be used in other parts of war-torn Europe. The return of ICRC donations was made even for Irish and Swiss contributions that had been specifically raised to benefit Germany. It was not until March 1946 that ICRC donations were permitted to reach the American zone in Germany.47

The Allies also prevented various private relief agencies from providing food to German civilians. For example, the Swiss Relief Fund started a charity to feed a meal once a day to a thousand Bavarian children for two months. The U.S. zone occupation authorities decided that this aid should not be accepted. One Quaker attempting to provide relief to Germans said, “The U.S. Army made it difficult for relief.” In the United Kingdom in October 1945, “even the concept of voluntary aid via food parcels from Britain’s civilians was anathema to Whitehall.” Such aid to Germany was strictly forbidden.48

The Allies adopted additional policies that caused starvation in Germany. Food production and food imports came under specific attack when the German fishing fleet was prevented from going to sea for a year. The Allies also used false accounting to not credit the value of some German exports to the German account, making it impossible for Germans to earn foreign currency to buy food. Simply stated, many valuable goods were stolen from Germans beyond the reparations agreed upon by the Allies.49

The German people put up a brave struggle for existence despite the harsh conditions. Malcolm Muir, publisher of Business Week, stated after a five-week tour of Europe, including Germany: “The Germans are making every effort to help themselves. . . . It is not unusual to see a milch cow hitched to a plow, a woman leading the cow and a small boy guiding the plow.” However, despite the best efforts of German farmers, the food situation became critical and then catastrophic.50

An official of the food branch of the American Military Government made the following report concerning the conditions in Germany:

The greatest famine catastrophe of recent centuries is upon us in central Europe. Our Government is letting down our military government in the food deliveries it promised, although what Generals Clay, Draper, and Hester asked for and were promised was the barest minimum for survival of the people. We will be forced to reduce the rations from 1,550 calories to 1,000 or less calories.

The few buds of democracy will be burned out in the agony of death of the aged, the women, and the children.

The British and we are going on record as the ones who let the Germans starve. The Russians will release at the height of the famine substantial food stores they have locked up (300,000 to 400,000 tons of sugar, large quantities of potatoes).

Aside from the inhumanity involved, it is so criminally stupid to give such a performance of incredible fumbling before the eyes of the world. It makes all the many hard-working officers of the Office of Military Government, Food and Agricultural Branch, ashamed.51

American journalist and radio broadcaster Dorothy Thompson wrote:

The children of Europe are starving. Six years of war, indescribable destruction, and the lunatic policies which have added to the disintegration inherited from the collapse of the Nazi regime have done their work. Germany, and with it Europe, is skidding into the abyss.

The facts are at last being revealed through what has amounted to a conspiracy of silence here. . . . This war was fought by the West in the name of Christian civilization, the Four Freedoms, and the dignity of man against those who were perpetrating crimes against humanity. But policies which must inevitably result in the postwar extermination of tens of thousands of children are also “crimes against humanity.”52

The desperation of the German population for food was observed by Kathryn Hulme, the deputy director of one of Bavaria’s many displaced persons camps. She wrote about the scramble for Red Cross packages at the Wildflecken camp: “It is hard to believe that some shiny little tins of meat paste and sardines could almost start a riot in the camp, that bags of Lipton’s tea and tins of Varrington House coffee and bars of vitaminized chocolate could drive men almost insane with desire. But this is so. This is as much a part of the destruction of Europe as are those gaunt ruins of Frankfurt. Only this is the ruin of the human soul. It is a thousand times more painful to see.”53

One survey in the American zone concluded that 60% of the Germans were living on a diet that would lead to disease and malnutrition. By October 1945, random weighing of German adults revealed a falloff of body weight of 13-15%. Children, pregnant women, and the elderly suffered the most. Their diets were lacking sufficient protein and vitamins, and cases of rickets were common among German infants.54

The German Central Administration of Health reported the deadly effects of malnutrition:

The people hunger . . . They are emaciated to the bone. Their clothes hang loose on their bodies, the lower extremities are like the bones of a skeleton, their hands shake as though with palsy, the muscles of the arms are withered, the skin lies in folds, and is without elasticity, the joints spring out as though broken.

The weight of the women of average height and build has fallen way below 110 pounds. Often women of child-bearing age weigh no more than 65 pounds. The number of still-born children is approaching the number of those born alive, and an increasing proportion of these die in a few days. Even if they come into the world of normal weight, they start immediately to lose weight and die shortly. Very often the mothers cannot stand the loss of blood in childbirth and perish. Infant mortality has reached the horrifying height of 90%.55

The German people starved while the Americans around them lived in luxury. American historian Ralph Franklin Keeling wrote:

While the Germans around them starve, wear rags, and live in hovels, the American aristocrats live in often unaccustomed ease and luxury. Their wives must be specially marked to protect them from licentious advances; they live in the finest homes from which they drove the Germans; they swagger about in fine liveries and gorge themselves on diets three times as great as they allow the Germans, and allow “displaced persons” diets twice as great. When we tell the Germans their low rations are necessary because food is so short, they naturally either think we are lying to them or regard us as inhuman for taking the lion’s share of the short supplies while they and their children starve.56

George Keenan was also outraged by the disparity in living conditions between the Germans and Americans in Germany. Kennan states:

Each time I had come away with a sense of sheer horror at the spectacle of this horde of my compatriots and their dependents camping in luxury amid the ruins of a shattered national community, ignorant of the past, oblivious to the abundant evidences of tragedy all around them, inhabiting the same sequestered villas that the Gestapo and SS had just abandoned, and enjoying the same privileges, flaunting their silly supermarket luxuries in the face of a veritable ocean of deprivation, hunger and wretchedness, setting an example of empty materialism and cultural poverty before a people desperately in need of spiritual and intellectual guidance.57

U.S. Senators & British Humanitarians Protest Policies

Some informed political leaders spoke out against the Allied policy of mass starvation of the German people. In an address before the U.S. Senate on Feb. 5, 1946, Sen. Homer E. Capehart of Indiana said in part:

The fact can no longer be suppressed, namely, the fact that it has been and continues to be, the deliberate policy of a confidential and conspirational clique within the policy-making circles of this government to draw and quarter a nation now reduced to abject misery.

In this process this clique, like a pack of hyenas struggling over the bloody entrails of a corpse, and inspired by a sadistic and fanatical hatred, are determined to destroy the German nation and the German people, no matter what the consequences.

At Potsdam the representatives of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics solemnly signed the following declaration of principles and purposes: “It is not the intention of the Allies to destroy or enslave the German people.”

Mr. President, the cynical and savage repudiation of these solemn declarations which has resulted in a major catastrophe, cannot be explained in terms of ignorance or incompetence. This repudiation, not only of the Potsdam Declaration, but also of every law of God and men, has been deliberately engineered with such a malevolent cunning, and with such diabolical skill, that the American people themselves have been caught in an international death trap.

For nine months now this administration has been carrying on a deliberate policy of mass starvation without any distinction between the innocent and helpless and the guilty alike.

The first issue has been and continues to be purely humanitarian. This vicious clique within this administration that has been responsible for the policies and practices which have made a madhouse of central Europe has not only betrayed our American principles, but they have betrayed the GIs who have suffered and died, and they continue to betray the American GIs who have to continue their dirty work for them.

The second issue that is involved is the effect this tragedy in Germany has already had on the other European countries. Those who have been responsible for this deliberate destruction of the German state and this criminal mass starvation of the German people have been so zealous in their hatred that all other interests and concerns have been subordinated to this one obsession of revenge. In order to accomplish this it mattered not if the liberated countries in Europe suffered and starved. To this point this clique of conspirators has addressed themselves: “Germany is to be destroyed. What happens to other countries of Europe in the process is of secondary importance.”

Sen. Capehart’s remarks were interspersed with a mass of supporting evidence.58

In an address to the U.S. Senate on Dec. 3, 1945, Sen. James Eastland of Mississippi told of the great difficulty he had encountered in gaining access to the official report on conditions in Germany. Sen. Eastland stated in his speech:

There appears to be a conspiracy of silence to conceal from our people the true picture of conditions in Europe, to secrete from us the fact regarding conditions of the continent and information as to our policies toward the German people. . . . Are the real facts withheld because our policies are so cruel that the American people would not endorse them?

What have we to hide, Mr. President? Why should these facts be withheld from the people of the United States? There cannot possibly be any valid reason for secrecy. Are we following a policy of vindictive hatred, a policy which would not be endorsed by the American people as a whole if they knew true conditions?

Mr. President, I should be less than honest if I did not state frankly that the picture is so much worse, so much more confused, than the American people suspect, that I do not know of any source that is capable of producing the complete factual account of the true situation into which our policies have taken the American people. The truth is that the nations of central, southern, and eastern Europe are adrift on a flood of anarchy and chaos.59

Sen. William Langer of North Dakota stated in the U.S. Senate:

History already records that a savage minority of bloody bitter-enders within this government forced the acceptance of the brutal Morgenthau Plan upon the present administration. I ask, Mr. President, why in God’s name did the administration accept it? . . . Recent developments have merely confirmed scores of earlier charges that this addlepated and vicious Morgenthau Plan had torn Europe in two and left half of Germany incorporated in the ever-expanding sphere of influence of an oriental totalitarian conspiracy. By continuing a policy which keeps Germany divided against itself, we are dividing the world against itself and turning loose across the face of Europe a power and an enslaving and degrading cruelty surpassing that of Hitler’s.60

Sen. Langer’s speech was warmly applauded by the Senate.

The Senate approved a resolution proposed by Sen. Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska to establish a group with a budget to study and report in detail the conditions in Germany. Wherry stated: “Terrifying reports are filtering through the British, French and American occupied zones, and even more gruesome reports from the Russian occupied zone, revealing a horrifying picture of deliberate and wholesale starvation.” Wherry criticized the Truman administration for doing nothing despite the pleas for intercession to prevent a major tragedy. Wherry also questioned Governor Lehman, in charge of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), who admitted that the UN aid was not going to the starving Germans. Finally, Wherry said, “The truth is that there are thousands upon thousands of tons of military rations in our surplus stock piles that have been spoiling right in the midst of starving populations.”61

Sen. Langer received new information which caused him to speak in the Senate on March 29, 1946, as follows:

[We] are caught in what has now unfolded as a savage and fanatical plot to destroy the German people by visiting on them a punishment in kind for the atrocities of their leaders. Not only have the leaders of this plot permitted the whole world situation to get . . . out of hand . . . but their determination to destroy the German people and the German Nation, no matter what the consequences to our own moral principles, to our leadership in world affairs, to our Christian faith, to our allies, or to the whole future peace of the world, has become a world scandal. . . . We have all seen the grim pictures of the piled-up bodies uncovered by the American and British armies, and our hearts have been wrung with pity at the sight of such emaciation—reducing adults and even little children to mere skeletons. Yet now, to our utter horror, we discover that our own policies have merely spread those same conditions even more widely . . . among our former enemies.62

British intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell and Victor Gollancz also worked to publicize the suffering and mass starvation of the German people. Gollancz objected to the contrast he saw between the accommodations and food in the British officers’ mess and the miserable, half-starved hovels outside. In March 1946 the average calories per day in the British zone had fluctuated between 1,050 and 1,591. British authorities in Germany were proposing to cut the rations back to 1,000 calories per day. Gollancz pointed out that the inmates at Bergen-Belsen toward the end of the war had only 800 calories per day, which was not much less than the British proposal.63

Gollancz made a six-week tour of the British zone in October and November 1946. In January 1947 Gollancz published the book In Darkest Germany to document what he saw on this trip. Assisted by a photographer, Gollancz included numerous pictures to allay skepticism of the veracity of his reports. The pictures show Gollancz standing behind naked boys suffering from malnutrition; or holding a fully worn and unusable child’s shoe; or comforting a crippled, half-starved adult in his hovel. The point was to show that Gollancz had seen these things with his own eyes and had not merely accepted other people’s reports. Gollancz also wrote to a newspaper editor: “Youth [in Germany] is being poisoned and re-nazified: we have all but lost the peace.”64

Starvation Policies End

Despite the efforts of U.S. senators and British humanitarians, the Allied starvation policies continued through 1946 and into 1947. A group of German doctors reported in 1947 that the actual daily calorie ration issued for three months in the Ruhr section of the British zone averaged only 800 per person. Dr. Gustav Stolper, a member of the Hoover Commission fact-finding team, reported that the ration in both the British and American zones for “a long time in 1946 and 1947 dropped to between 700 and 1,200 calories per day.”65

U.S. Secretary of War Robert Patterson wrote to U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall concerning the famine in Germany in 1947: “[Our] occupation has no chance of success if these [famine] conditions continue. This state of affairs has been foreseen, and I have urged repeatedly that priority be recognized for food shipments to Germany. The basis for the priority is the prevention of famine in the U.S.-UK zones of Germany.”66

Germany still operated under the Morgenthau Plan and the Potsdam Agreement. These two programs shared a crucial conceptual flaw: central to both schemes was the paradoxical policy of transforming Germany into an agricultural economy while at the same time depriving Germany of her most valuable agricultural regions and displacing the population of these regions into rump Germany. These policies made it impossible for Germany to feed her population. Germany would have to industrialize to be able to export something to buy a minimum diet for her people. By taking away a quarter of Germany’s arable land, the Allies created a situation in which Germany’s existence would necessarily be even more dependent on industrialization than before the war.67

The economic disruptions caused by Germany’s zonal partition also hurt the German economy. The Soviet zone oriented itself more and more toward the East and continued to extract maximum reparations out of its zone. The French zone stagnated because of France’s unwillingness to cooperate in any all-German program until the question of the Saar was solved in France’s favor. France also feared a revival of Germany’s economic strength.68

What finally led the Western Allies to a revision of their occupation policy in Germany was the fear of a Communist takeover of Europe. The Western Allies feared that if Germany remained Europe’s slum, social unrest would force it into the Communist camp and the rest of Europe would follow. The anti-Communists in Poland had already been forced out of power, with only a few anti-Communists escaping to safety. Similar undemocratic developments were subverting Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Communist parties in France and Italy were gaining strength and had caused several general strikes. Europe was ripe for a Communist takeover, and the Western Allies realized that something needed to be done to stop it.69

The threat of a Communist takeover in Europe had long been recognized by Allied leaders. French Marshal Alphonse Juin stated to Gen. George Patton at a dinner in Paris in August 1945: “It is indeed unfortunate that the English and Americans have destroyed the only sound country in Europe—and I do not mean France—therefore the road is now open for the advent of Russian communism.”70

Patton himself had warned of the danger of Russian communism resulting from the destruction of Germany. Patton stated, “What we are doing is to utterly destroy the only semi-modern state in Europe so that Russia can swallow the whole.”71

After the unsuccessful Moscow meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in March 1947, the Western Allies realized the necessity of setting a new course independent of the Soviet Union. George F. Kennan observed, “It was plain that the Soviet leaders had a political interest in seeing the economies of the Western European peoples fail under anything other than communist leadership.” With total economic disintegration in Europe imminent, a new plan was needed to shore up the ailing European economies.72

The European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan, was originally envisaged by U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall to promote the economic recovery of Europe on both sides of the iron curtain. However, the Soviet Union took steps to prevent any of the Eastern European countries from participating in the Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union organized a rival program for recovery in Eastern Europe known as the Molotov Plan. The Soviet-dominated Cominform urged Communists everywhere to help defeat the Marshall Plan, which it described as an instrument for “world domination by American imperialism.”73

The Marshall Plan withstood the Soviet challenge. For the period from April 3, 1948 to June 30, 1952, the Marshall Plan gave 3.176 billion dollars to the United Kingdom, 2.706 billion to France, and 1.474 billion to Italy. Only 1.389 billion went to Western Germany, of which Germany later repaid approximately 1 billion. However, the German economy was helped the most by the aid. One commentator has described the effect of the Marshall Plan on Western Germany:

The effects had been prodigious, equaled in no other European country, although Germany got only a relatively small portion of Marshall Plan aid. Europe received in all $20 billion from the United States; in 1954 the figures per capita had amounted to $39 for Germany as against $72 for France, $77 for England, $33 for Italy and $104 for Austria. But in Germany the help came at precisely the right time, when the accumulated pressures for both physical and psychological reconstruction had reached a bursting point.74

The effect of the Marshall Plan in Germany was almost magical. The German economy was plainly reviving within months; within a year it was expanding faster than any other economy in Europe; and within a decade Germany was close to the richest country in Europe. The growth of Germany’s economy put an end to the starvation of the German people. According to Gen. Maurice Pope, who in 1948 was with the Canadian Military Mission in Germany, “conditions improved overnight . . . [soon] the modest corner grocery store was displaying delicacies of all kinds and at quite reasonable prices.”75

The Plundering and Destruction of Germany

The devastation of Germany by total warfare cast serious doubt on Germany’s postwar ability to survive. Never before in history had a nation’s life-sustaining resources been so thoroughly demolished. Returning from victory in Europe, Gen. Omar Bradley stated, “I can tell you that Germany has been destroyed utterly and completely.76

Despite soothing words by Allied leaders at Yalta and Potsdam, it soon became evident to the German people that the Allies did not arrive as liberators. Instead, the Allies arrived as conquerors as vengeful, greedy, and ruthless as any who had ever won a war. The plundering and destruction of Germany continued after the end of World War II.

The Red Army began the plundering of Europe as soon as it entered Germany in 1944. The Soviet looting in the Russian zone became prodigious after the end of the war. Factories, refineries, processing mills, and other heavy industries were taken apart and sent east to the Soviet Union to be reassembled. All secondary rail lines, electric and steam locomotives and their rolling stock were sent to the Soviet Union. The plants that were left in Germany were operated by Germans solely for the benefit of the Soviet Union.77

The Red Army soldiers joined the Soviet government in pillaging Germany on a massive scale. A woman from Silesia wrote:

The Russians systematically cleared out everything that was for them of value, such as all sewing machines, pianos, grand-pianos, baths, water taps, electric plants, beds, mattresses, carpets, etc. They destroyed what they could not take away with them. Trucks often stood for days in the rain, with the most valuable carpets and articles of furniture in them, until everything was completely spoiled and ruined. . . .

If fuel was required, then whole woods were generally felled, or window-frames and doors were torn out of the empty houses, broken up on the spot, and immediately used for making fire. The Russians and Poles even used the staircases and banisters as fire-wood. In the course of time, even the roofs of houses were removed and used for heating. . . . Empty houses, open, without window-panes, overgrown with weeds and filth, rats and mice in uncanny numbers, unharvested fields, land which had been fertile, now completely overgrown with weeds and lying fallow. Not in a single village did one see a cow, a horse or a pig. . . . The Russians had taken everything away to the east, or used it up.78

The Russians destroyed most of what was not looted. A German woman describes what she saw when she found her way home at the end of the war:

We have been warned by others who have witnessed signs of Russian occupancy to expect bedlam and to abandon our hopeless mission altogether. Thus we expect the worst, but our idea of the worst has not prepared us sufficiently for reality. Shocked to the point of collapse, we survey a battlefield—heaps of refuse through which broken pieces of furniture rise like cliffs; stench gags us, almost driving us to retreat. Ragged remnants of clothes, crushed dishes, books, pictures torn from frames—rubble in every room. We can’t look into the dining room because it is locked. Above all, the nauseating stench that emanates from the largest and totally wrecked living room! Spoiled contents ooze from splintered canning jars, garbage of indefinable origin is mixed with unmistakable human excrement, and dried stain of urine discolors crumpled paper and rags. We wade into the dump with care and poke at some of all but unrecognizable belongings. Overcoming our revulsion, we penetrate to the lower layers and discover unharmed books, loose photographs, bundles of old letters, odd pieces of silverware, an occasional unbroken dish.79

Soviet soldiers were awed by the abundance of material goods in Germany. The great number of automobiles, tractors, motorcycles, bicycles, stoves, radios and other common goods were beyond the comprehension of many Soviet soldiers. One Russian soldier commented that there was more to be taken out of one house in Germany than in a typical village in the Soviet Union. Another Soviet soldier admitted: “All of us, officers and men, saw the riches and prosperity of a capitalist country and couldn’t believe our eyes. We had never believed there could be such an abundance of goods.” This German material abundance was either looted or destroyed by the Red Army.80

Even in its ruined state Berlin was the picture of sophistication for the Russians. The Russians stole all of the bicycles they could find. Gramophones, wristwatches, light bulbs, and cigarette lighters were not only new to most Russian soldiers, but prized possessions to be collected. They also confiscated any liquor they could lay their hands on. Anything the Red Army did not steal they destroyed, including valuable antiques, musical instruments, and elegant clothes.81

American soldiers also stole from the German people and let German children go hungry. American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh wrote:

At home our papers carry articles about how we “liberate” oppressed countries and peoples. Here, our soldiers use the word “liberate” to describe the method of obtaining loot. Anything taken from an enemy home or person is “liberated” in the language of the G.I. Leica cameras are “liberated” (probably the most desired item); guns, food, art. Anything taken without being paid for is “liberated.” A soldier who rapes a German woman has “liberated” her. . . .

German children look in through the window. We have more food than we need, but regulations prevent giving it to them. It is difficult to look at them. I feel ashamed, of myself, of my people, as I eat and watch those children. They are not to blame for the war. They are hungry children. What right have we to stuff ourselves while they look on—well-fed men eating, leaving unwanted food on plates, while hungry children look on? . . . There is an abundance of food in the American Army, and few men seem to care how hungry the German children are outside the door.82

Reporter William Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News was shocked by the vandalism and looting of American troops. Stoneman, who was stationed with the U.S. 3rd Army, wrote in May 1945:

I have been impressed by the careless manner in which the booty has been handled and the way in which great stocks of foodstuffs have been left to the reckless inroads of looters. . . .

Millions of dollars worth of rare things varying from intricate Zeiss lenses to butter and cheese and costly automobiles are being destroyed because the Army has not organized a system for the recovery of valuable enemy material.

Frontline troops are rough and ready about enemy property. They naturally take what they find if it looks interesting, and, because they are in the frontlines, nobody says anything. . . .

But what front-line troops take is nothing compared to the damage caused by wanton vandalism of some of the following troops. They seem to ruin everything, including the simplest personal belongings of the people in whose houses they are billeted.83

American Provost Marshal Lt. Col. Gerald F. Beane was assigned to deal with crimes committed by American soldiers. In an official report released in Berlin in late 1945, Beane stated that larceny and robbery were the crimes most frequently committed by our soldiers. The Chicago Tribune commented on his report:

As to crimes committed against property, the explanation is fairly obvious. No effective steps were taken to discourage looting by the invading armies during the war. Officers and men alike committed this crime and for much the most part went unpunished. It was tolerated under some such euphemism as souvenir collecting. The habit of stealing, once formed, is difficult to break. The fault, of course, lies with the high command which permitted the abuse. Col. Beane’s pronouncement suggests that the army is tardily seeking to correct its error.84

Foreign workers and displaced persons also frequently plundered German property after the end of the war. Germans stood in fear as foreign workers “passed through the country looting, robbing and murdering.” Allied soldiers often looked on as foreign workers plundered German shops—something made easier when curfews were imposed on Germans but not on foreign workers. Displaced persons in Munich, who comprised 4% of the population, were held responsible for three quarters of the crimes committed in the city. A priest in Goerlitz wrote how after the war ended hordes of foreign workers had left the city littered with the debris from their looting.85

Theft in Germany after the war was not confined to petty larceny. Whole governments were involved in robbing Germany of anything of value. One Soviet priority was the seizure of important works of art found in Berlin and throughout Germany. This was a fully planned operation, with the art works stolen by Soviet troops originally planned to be exhibited in a huge museum of war trophies. As world opinion changed against the Soviets after the war, they chose to conceal the art works in special closed galleries throughout the Soviet Union. Many of the paintings remain hidden to this day.86

The British royal family also confiscated its share of German booty. For example, Hermann Goering’s yacht, the Karin II, ended up in the hands of the British royal family.87 The British royal family commissioned Anthony Blunt, a Soviet spy, to travel to Hanover to take possession of the German Crown Jewels. Although the jewels later had to be returned to their rightful owners, some jewels were never returned.88

While the United States did not take German plants and factories, it did take its share of German treasure. Billions of dollars in gold, silver, currency, priceless paintings and art works were stolen from their hiding places in caves, tunnels, and salt mines throughout Germany and shipped to the United States.89

The Plundering of German Brains and Labor

Germany also experienced “mental dismantling” in that hundreds of German scientists were compelled to immigrate by the victors. One U.S. government agency quietly admitted that Operation Paperclip was the first time in history where conquerors had attempted to confiscate the inventive power of a nation. Life magazine added that the real gain in reparations of this war was not in the confiscated factories, gold, or artworks, but in the German brains and the German research results.90

The Soviets also attempted to abduct or tempt away scientists and technicians who might be useful to them. The Nobel Prize-winning German physicist Gustav Hertz was taken to the Soviet Union to help them develop nuclear weapons. On Oct. 21, 1945, a large number of skilled German workers, technicians and scientists were sent to the Soviet Union by train. The Western Allies made a weak protest, which the Russians simply ignored.91

Millions of Germans were also sent to the Soviet Union to be used as slave labor. The following report was published on June 29, 1945:

German prisoners in Russian hands are estimated to number from 4 to 5 million. When Berlin and Breslau surrendered, the long grey-green columns of prisoners were marched east downcast and fearful . . . toward huge depots near Leningrad, Moscow, Minsk, Stalingrad, Kiev, Kharkov, and Sevastopol. All fit men had to march some 22 miles a day. Those physically handicapped went in handcarts or carts pulled by spare beasts. . . . They will be made to rebuild the Russian towns and villages which they destroyed. They will not return home until the work is completed.92

Some crippled and ailing Germans who survived the Russian slave labor camps were returned to Berlin where they were interviewed by American correspondents. German Red Cross women on Sept. 10, 1946, met a 20-car trainload of returning forced laborers from the Soviet Union. A professional nurse told their story:

They had been in the train almost a week traveling about 60 miles from Frankfurt-on-Oder. There had been deaths from starvation, not from starvation just during the ride, but from the hardships of the trip after months of malnutrition in Russian labor camps. Almost all of the 800 or 900 in the train were sick or crippled. You might say they were all invalids. With 40 to 50 packed in each of those little boxcars, the sick had to sleep beside the dead on their homeward journey. I did not count them but I am sure we removed more than 25 corpses. Others had to be taken to hospitals. I asked several of the men whether the Russian guards or doctors had done anything on the trip to care for the sick. They said “No.”

I met only one alert, healthy man in the lot and I have seen him since. He was just a kid of 17. The boy told me that prisoners leaving Russian camps for Germany are searched to prevent any from smuggling mail for their comrades. Therefore, when one of them has been diagnosed as a hopeless invalid, in anticipation of discharge he will memorize the names and addresses of relatives to whom he can report for his fellow prisoners. He said only prisoners in special favor are able to mail postcards to their nearest of kin. This kid of 17 has memorized 80 names and addresses in Berlin of relatives of his prison friends. He found the buildings at most of the addresses in rubble, with the present whereabouts of the former occupants unknown, but he visited all 80 addresses in his first six days in Berlin.93

If prisoners released by the Russians as unfit for further forced labor happened to recuperate, they were generally sent back to the Soviet Union for more slave labor. Able-bodied Germans released in the British or American zones and returned to their homes in the Soviet zone were also typically sent to the Soviet Union for slave labor. The slightest disobedience in Russian camps was penalized by such heavy work that a third of the disobeyers died within three weeks from exhaustion. German prisoners being turned over to the Russians often committed suicide or tried to incapacitate themselves in order to avoid being sent to the Soviet slave labor camps.94

According to the ICRC, France had 680,000 former German soldiers slaving for her in August 1946. Of this number, 475,000 had been captured by the United States and turned over to the French for forced labor. After 320,000 German prisoners had been delivered, the French returned 2,474 of them to the United States because they were severely malnourished and unfit for work. Associated press photographer Henry Griffin, who had taken pictures of the corpses piled in Buchenwald and Dachau, said of these returned Germans: “The only difference I can see between these men and those corpses is that here they are still breathing.”95

The ICRC reported that in August 1946 Great Britain was using 460,000 Germans as slave laborers; the United States 284,000; Yugoslavia 80,000; Belgium 48,000; Czechoslovakia 45,000; Luxembourg 4,000; and Holland 1,300. Keeping such large numbers of Germans away from their families was a direct attack against the German home and family. The ICRC condemned the Allied slave labor system:

The United States, Britain, and France, nearly a year after peace, are violating International Red Cross agreements they solemnly signed in 1929.

Investigation at Geneva headquarters today disclosed that the transfer of German war prisoners captured by the American army to French and British authorities for forced labor is nowhere permitted in the statutes of the International Red Cross, which is the highest authority on the subject in the world.

Although thousands of the former German soldiers are being used in the hazardous work of clearing mine fields, sweeping sea mines, destroying surplus ammunition and razing shattered buildings, the Geneva Convention expressly forbids employing prisoners “in any dangerous labor or in the transport of any material used in warfare. . . .”

“The American delivery of German prisoners to the French and British for forced labor already is being cited by the Russians as justification for them to retain German army captives for as long as they are able to work,” an International Red Cross official admitted. “The bartering of captured enemy soldiers by the victors throws the world back to the dark ages—when feudal barons raided adjoining duchies to replenish their human livestock.”96

Women, children, and the aged were also required by the Allies to perform forced labor. No job was too loathsome or degrading for the conquered Germans to perform. Some work assignments were especially unpleasant, as one woman makes clear: “[A]s a result of the war damage . . . the toilets were stopped up and filthy. This filth we had to clear away with our hands, without any utensils to do so. The excrement was brought into the yard, shoveled into carts, which we had to bring to refuse pits. The awful part was that we got dirtied by the excrement which spurted up, but we could not clean ourselves.”97

Another German woman from the Soviet zone added:

We had to build landing strips, and to break stones. In snow and rain, from six in the morning until nine at night, we were working along the roads. Any Russian who felt like it took us aside. In the morning and at night we received cold water and a piece of bread, and at noon soup of crushed, unpeeled potatoes, without salt. At night we slept on the floors of farmhouses or stables, dead tired, huddled together. But we woke up every so often, when a moaning and whimpering in the pitch-black room announced the presence of one of the guards.98

As this woman and others make clear, German women could be raped even when performing forced labor for the Allies. As one German woman who worked at planting potatoes said, “If they wanted a girl they just came in the field and got her.”99

Denazification of Germans

Denazification was an Allied program instigated after the war to punish National Socialist party members and to remove them from public and semi-public office.

Hypocritically disregarding the horrendous crimes they committed against the Germans, the Allies determined that the National Socialist party was so criminal that it had to be extinguished.

German leaders in all walks of life had found it necessary or expedient to join the National Socialist party or one or more of its affiliated organizations once it took control of Germany. Membership in the National Socialist party expanded rapidly immediately preceding and during the war. Party and nation became so closely identified during the war that to join was to display patriotism; to refuse membership was to invite penalization for disloyalty. The Allied program of denazification set out to ruin the lives of millions of Germans simply because the Allies thought that Germans who joined the National Socialist party had made a political mistake.100

The denazification decrees authorized in the Potsdam Agreement were inconsistent with the Potsdam declaration that “discrimination on the grounds of . . . political opinion shall be abolished.” Potsdam permanently dissolved the National Socialist party and its affiliated organizations and institutions. The Potsdam Agreement commanded that “Nazi leaders, influential Nazi supporters and high officials of Nazi organizations and institutions . . . shall be arrested and interned” and that all lesser Nazis “shall be removed from public and semi-public office and former positions of responsibility in private undertakings.”101

The chief instrument of denazification was a 12-page questionnaire consisting of 133 questions. As many as 13 million of these questionnaires were printed and handed out either to Germans with questionable pasts or to those seeking employment. While many of the Germans found the questions absurd and comical, the questionnaire still had to be properly completed and returned before a German could return to normal life. A German had to properly complete the form with its “sometimes stupid questions” in order to survive. Otherwise he was out of work and deprived of ration tickets. If he was not careful, he could also be arrested and declared a war criminal.102

The Americans were hell-bent on purging National Socialist party members from German politics. The Americans led the way with denazification, trying 169,282 cases, while the Russians and French tried a total of 18,328 and 17,353 cases, respectively. The British showed less interest in denazification, trying only 2,296 cases in their zone. The Allied denazification process was flawed because there were too many cases and the witnesses were unreliable. The witnesses knew they would be under the microscope themselves, so the most important thing for them was to deny any wrongdoing on their part.103

The high number of arrests and tough denazification policy created serious obstacles for the smooth running of postwar Germany. As one American major reported in July 1945, “great difficulty has been encountered in finding competent and politically clean personnel from Civil Administration.” Wholesale dismissals as a result of denazification made it difficult for cities and towns throughout Germany to carry on business in an orderly manner. The gaps left by the dismissals were particularly large in the German public school system. In the American zone 65% of all primary school teachers were removed, and most of the remaining teachers were approaching retirement.104

The many problems that arose as a result of the denazification process caused Gen. George Patton, at that point Military Governor of Bavaria, to call for a less rigorous approach. He claimed that trained staff were being removed from their administrative posts and replaced with less experienced and less capable personnel. Patton asserted: “It is no more possible for a man to be a civil servant in Germany and not to have paid lip service to Nazism than it is for a man to be a postmaster in America and not have paid at least lip service to the Democratic Party or Republican Party when it is in power.”105 Patton was transferred after his views surfaced in the New York Times. Gen. Eisenhower stuck to a tough denazification program.106

For millions of Germans the worst part of the denazification process came after the questionnaire had been completed. After reviewing the questionnaire, Allied intelligence officers would frequently visit German homes for additional examinations and interrogations. Many of these intelligence officers were Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi persecution in the late 1930s with old scores to settle. The additional interrogations were often structured to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible, and often resulted in internment or even death.107

The interrogations in the Russian zone were typically brutal and inhumane. A German physician reports his experience of the interrogations at a Russian camp:

The cellars of all the barracks are crammed with people, about 4,000 men and women, many of whom are interrogated every night by the NKVD officials. The purpose of these interrogations is not to worm out of the people what they knew—which would be uninteresting anyway—but to extort from them special statements. The methods resorted to are extremely primitive: people are beaten up until they confess to having been members of the Nazi Party. But the result is almost the opposite of what most of the people probably expect, that is, that those who hadn’t been party members would come off better. The authorities simply assume that, basically, everybody has belonged to the Party. Many people die during and after these interrogations, while others, who admit at once their party membership, are treated more leniently.108

Even well-known anti-Nazis such as Freddy and Lali Horstmann encountered problems in the Russian zone. Lali records that after the war Russian officers unexpectedly visited their home and searched its contents. Her husband Freddy was taken to the headquarters of the NKVD to be asked a few questions about his work in the Foreign Office. Lali was told that she could not accompany her husband to the interrogation. The officers repeatedly told Lali that she had nothing to fear. Lali states that she never saw her husband again.109

Many Germans also reported abuse in the American zone. Anna Fest registered with the Americans shortly after the end of the war. Fest said that six weeks later members of the American occupation forces came in a car to her home, told her to pack a few things, and be ready in half an hour. Fest stated: “Then it started. Such a feeling of helplessness, when three or four heavily armed military police stand in front of you. You just panic. I cried terribly. My mother was completely beside herself and said, ‘You can’t do this. She registered just as she was supposed to do.’ Then she said, ‘If only you’d gone somewhere else and had hidden.’ But I consider that senseless, because I did not feel guilty.”110

Fest said she never was told why she was arrested and received nothing in writing. “That was the way it went with everyone, with no reason given.” Fest was moved to several different installations in the weeks following her arrest before being taken to an internment camp in Ludwigsburg to stand trial. She was interrogated in the meantime, and spoke of “very, very bad experiences.”

Fest said she was taken to a small hut with two officers and a couple of German shepherd dogs inside. One officer screamed accusations and questions at her. If Fest did not answer “as he wished, he kicked me in the back and the other hit me” with his fist. The door of the hut was left open so that German men standing outside waiting to be questioned had to see and hear it all. “That must have been terrible for them,” Fest reminisced. “When I went outside, several of them stood there with tears running down their cheeks. What could they have done? They could do nothing.”111

Fest had a nervous breakdown shortly after a stay in Dachau. When she recovered she was sent back to the camp at Ludwigsburg to await trial. Fest was eventually acquitted and released on Aug. 28, 1947. She had been a prisoner of the Allies for more than two years.112

Ernst von Salomon was arrested and thrown into an internment camp north of Munich with his Jewish girl friend and other prisoners. The men were promptly beaten and the women raped by the military police while an excited audience of American GIs watched through the window. Von Salomon had his teeth knocked out during his beating. When he picked himself off the floor, his face pouring with blood, von Salomon gasped to an officer, “You are no gentleman.” The attackers roared with laughter at this remark. “No, no, no! We are Mississippi boys!” the officer proudly responded.113

Von Salomon was imprisoned for 18 months in the camp without any charge against him or any interrogation being conducted. When he was finally released he was so emaciated that he looked like a skeleton. Other inmates have confirmed von Salomon’s description of the American internment camps. For example, Karl Blessing, later President of the Bundesbank, reported that he had been treated in exactly the same way.114

While denazification efforts were less stringent in the British zone, the British issued directives to their soldiers to keep Germans in their place. One postwar pamphlet issued to British troops reads:

Do play your part as a representative of a conquering power and keep the Germans in their place. Give orders—don’t beg the question. Display cold, correct, dignified curtness and aloofness. Don’t try to be kind—it will be regarded as weakness. Drop heavily on any attempt to take charge or other forms of insolence. Don’t be too ready to listen to stories from attractive women—they may be acting under orders. Don’t show any aversion to another war if Germany does not learn her lesson this time.115

The Jewish Brigade, which was part of the British Eighth Army, also murdered many disarmed and defenseless German officers as part of the Allied denazification program. The Jewish Brigade was established not to fight in the war, but to follow behind the British army and kill senior German officers who were typically not guilty of anything except having served in defense of their country. Morris Beckman states in his book The Jewish Brigade: “These were the first post-war executions of selected top Nazis. There were several dozen revenge squads operating; the highest estimate of executions was 1,500. The exact figure will never be known.”116

The Allied program of denazification was in practice a program of vengeance against Germany that created hard feelings toward the Allies. Even many Germans who had never joined the National Socialist party resented denazification. Some Germans after the war repeated the following joke: A man comes into a police station and tells the officer that he wishes to register as a Nazi. The policeman replies that he should have done that a year and a half ago. The man tells the policeman, “Eighteen months ago I wasn’t a Nazi!”117

The so-called denazification of Germany was in reality a determined attempt to remove all vestiges of pride in Germans toward their own nation and culture. The program was hypocritically administered by the Allies with a total disregard for justice. Hans Schmidt states in regard to denazification:

If one takes away from a nation and people their sovereignty, their independence; their right to self-determination; their right for justice and truth; their right for an independent, impartial and fair judiciary; their right to be governed by persons (politicians or princelings) that have always the best interests of their own country in mind; their right to retain their own culture; their self-esteem, and even their own currency; their right to defend their blood lines, and finally, their identity, then this folk and nation is condemned to annihilation from this earth.118

Review of History’s Most Terrifying Peace

The Allied postwar treatment of Germany probably resulted in more German deaths than occurred during the Second World War. While the exact number of casualties will never be known, the number of German military and civilian deaths during World War II is probably at most 6.5 million.119 The total number of German postwar deaths from 1945 to 1950 almost certainly exceeds this figure.

The Allies were able to conceal their murderous policies toward the Germans since they controlled everything of consequence in Germany. The statistics of German deaths after the war were all under the control of the Allies. There was no independent German government to dispute the Allied figures. The U.S. Military Governor reports were designed to reflect favorably on the Allied postwar treatment of Germany, and have been widely used ever since to determine our view of Germany’s postwar history. These reports showed figures indicating no large number of Germans died either among the expellees or among the resident Germans of the three Western zones from 1945 to 1950.120

German deaths after the war can be divided into three groups of people. The first group is the German POWs in both Europe and the Soviet Union. The second group is the German expellees, and the third group is the Germans already residing in Germany. While no one will ever know how many Germans died from 1945 to 1950, it is certain that the deaths far exceed most traditional estimates. The great majority of these deaths were caused by the lethal policies imposed by the Allies on Germany after the war.

As documented in Chapter Five, a conservative estimate of German deaths in the Allied POW camps is 1.5 million. This includes over 517,000 POW deaths in the Soviet Union, 100,000 POW deaths in Yugoslavia, Poland and other countries, with the remaining POW deaths in U.S. and French camps. The Germans who died in these Allied POW camps suffered miserably from exposure, disease, and slow starvation.

This well-documented Allied atrocity is still denied by most historians today.

As discussed in Chapter Six, probably a minimum of 2.1 million German expellees died in what was supposed to be an “orderly and humane” transfer. The estimate of 2.1 million German expellee deaths is acknowledged to be valid by most traditional historians. Notable authorities have estimated a much higher number of German expellee deaths.121 For example, Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of West Germany, estimated that 6 million German expellees died. Adenauer states:

According to American figures a total of 13.3 million Germans were expelled from the Eastern parts of Germany, from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and so on. 7.3 million [German expellees] arrived in the Eastern zone and the three Western zones, most of these in the latter. Six million Germans have vanished from the earth. They are dead, gone. Most of the 7.3 million who stayed alive are women, children, and old people.122

An estimated 5.7 million Germans already residing in Germany died from the starvation policies implemented by the Allies. James Bacque details how this 5.7 million death total is calculated:

The population of all occupied Germany in October 1946 was 65,000,000, according to the census prepared under the ACC. The returning prisoners who were added to the population in the period October 1946-September 1950 numbered 2,600,000 (rounded), according to records in the archives of the four principal Allies. Births according to the official German statistical agency, Statistisches Bundesamt, added another 4,176,430 newcomers to Germany. The expellees arriving totaled 6,000,000. Thus the total population in 1950 before losses would have been 77,776,430, according to the Allies themselves. Deaths officially recorded in the period 1946-50 were 3,235,539, according to the UN Yearbook and the German government. Emigration was about 600,000, according to the German government. Thus the population found should have been 73,940,891. But the census of 1950 done by the German government under Allied supervision found only 68,230,796. There was a shortage of 5,710,095 people, according to the official Allied figures (rounded to 5,700,000).123

Bacque’s calculations have been confirmed by Dr. Anthony B. Miller, who is a world-famous epidemiologist and Head of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics at the University of Toronto. Miller read the whole work, including the documents, and checked the statistics, which he says “confirms the validity of [Bacque’s] calculations.” Miller states: “These deaths appear to have resulted, directly or indirectly, from the semi-starvation food rations that were all that were available to the majority of the German population during this time period.”124

The sum of 1.5 million German POWs, 2.1 million German expellees, and 5.7 million German residents equals the minimum estimate of 9.3 million Germans who died needlessly after the war. This is far more Germans than died during the Second World War. Millions of these Germans slowly starved to death while the Allies withheld available food. The majority of these postwar dead Germans were women, children and very old men. Their deaths have never been honestly reported by the Allies, the German government, or most historians.

The German dead do not tell the entire story of the tragedy that was inflicted on Germany after World War II. Millions of German women who had been repeatedly raped had to bear the physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives. Millions of German expellees who lost all of their real estate and most of their personal property were never compensated by the Allies. Instead, they had to live in abject poverty in Germany after the expulsion from their homes. Millions of other Germans had their property stolen or destroyed by Allied soldiers. The Allied postwar treatment of Germany is surely one of the most brutal, criminal, and unreported tragedies in world history.

The few historians who acknowledge the Allied atrocities against Germany usually excuse them on the ground of the ferocious hatred aroused by the race crimes of Hitler.125 In the next three chapters we will examine the crimes, both real and alleged, committed by Germany during the war. We will also examine some additional crimes committed by the Allies during and after World War II.

CHAPTER NOTES:

1 Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, p. XII.

2 Kaufman, Theodore N., Germany Must Perish! Newark, NJ: Argyle Press, 1941, pp. 6-7, 28, 86.

3 Ibid., pp. 88-89.

4 Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010, pp. 7-8.

5 Morgenthau, Henry C., Germany is Our Problem, New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1945.

6 Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, p. 28.

7 Kubek, Anthony, “The Morgenthau Plan and the Problem of Policy Perversion,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 9, No. 3, Fall 1989, pp. 289, 294.

8 De Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, pp. 65-66.

9 Quoted in Bessel, Richard, Germany 1945: From War to Peace, London: Harper Perennial, 2010, p. 151.

10 Ibid.

11 De Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 2nd edition, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p. 41.

12 MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, pp. 25-26.

13 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Vol. 1), New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 21.

14 Botting, Douglas, From the Ruins of the Reich—Germany, 1945-1949, New York: Crown Publishers, 1985, p. 68.

15 De Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, pp. 71-72.

16 Lowe, Keith, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012, p. 54.

17 Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010, p. 84.

18 Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War Against the German People, Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, p. 58.

19 Ibid.

20 Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010, p. 237.

21 Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, pp. 59-60.

22 Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010, p. 159.

23 MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, p. 57.

24 Ibid., p. 52.

25 Ibid., pp. 99, 102.

26 Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, pp. 57, 61.

27 Lindbergh, Charles, The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1970, pp. 945, 967-968.

28 Lowe, Keith, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012, pp. 51, 55.

29 Bessel, Richard, Germany 1945: From War to Peace, London: Harper Perennial, 2010, pp. 154-155.

30 Lowe, Keith, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012, p. 55.

31 MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, p. 240.

32 Bessel, Richard, Germany 1945: From War to Peace, London: Harper Perennial, 2010, p. 161.

33 Utley, Freda, The High Cost of Vengeance, Chicago: Regenery, 1949, p. 17.

34 Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, p. 64.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 Botting, Douglas, From the Ruins of the Reich—Germany, 1945-1949, New York: Crown Publishers, 1985, p. 294.

38 Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, pp. 64-65.

39 Behnke, Capt. Albert R., USN, MC, “Physiological and Psychological Factors in Individual and Group Survival,” June 1958 (Behnke Papers, Box 1, HIA). Quoted in Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, p. 89.

40 Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, pp. 89-90.

41 Chicago Daily Tribune, Oct. 10, 1945.

42 Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010, p. 287.

43 Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, pp. 90-91.

44 Ibid., p. 93.

45 Ibid., p. 92.

46 Ibid., pp. 91-92..

47 MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, p. 362.

48 Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, pp. 157-158.

49 Ibid., p. 149.

50 Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, pp. 67-68.

51 Ibid., pp. 70-71. From Congressional Record, March 29, 1946, pp. 2858-2859.

52 Ibid., pp. 73-74. From Congressional Record, Dec. 4, 1945, p. 11561.

53 Hitchcock, William I., The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe, New York: Free Press, 2008, p. 277.

54 Ibid., pp. 206-207.

55 Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, pp. 71-72.

56 Ibid., p. 101.

57 Botting, Douglas, From the Ruins of the Reich—Germany, 1945-1949, New York: Crown Publishers, 1985, p. 215.

58 Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, pp. 75-76.

59 Ibid., p. 76.

60 Langer, William, Congressional Record of the Senate, March 29, 1946. Quoted in Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, p. 30.

61 Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, pp. 31-32.

62 Ibid., p. 38.

63 MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, pp. 253, 363.

64 Ibid., pp. 364-365.

65 Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, pp. 110, 210.

66 Ibid., p. 125.

67 De Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, pp. 134-135.

68 Ibid., p. 139.

69 Ibid., p. 136.

70 Bacque, James, Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II, 1944-1950, 3rd edition, Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2011, pp. 172-173.

71 Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010, p. 321.

72 De Zayas, Alfred-Maurice, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, pp. 136-137.

73 Ibid., p. 137.

74 Ibid., pp. 139-140.

75 Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, p. 163.

76 Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, p. 1.

77 Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010, p. 280.

78 Ibid., pp. 280-281.

79 Shelton, Regina Maria, To Lose a War—Memories of a German Girl, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982, p. 138.

80 Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010, pp. 152-154.

81 MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, pp. 96-98.

82 Lindbergh, Charles, The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1970, pp. 953, 960-961, 989-990.

83 Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, pp. 42-43.

84 Ibid., pp. 43-44. Quoted from Chicago Sunday Tribune, Nov. 18, 1945, p. 22.

85 Bessel, Richard, Germany 1945: From War to Peace, London: Harper Perennial, 2010, pp. 165-166.

86 MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, p. 381.

87 Ibid.

88 Walsh, Michael, The Battle for Europe: Hidden Truths about the Second World War, East Sussex, United Kingdom: The Historical Review Press, 2012, p. 93.

89 Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010, p. 282.

90 Ibid.

91 MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, p. 391.

92 Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, pp. 19-20.

93 Ibid., pp. 20-21.

94 Ibid., pp. 21-22.

95 Ibid., pp. 22-24.

96 Ibid., pp. 25-28.

97 Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010, pp. 297-298.

98 Ibid., p. 298.

99 Ibid.

100 Keeling, Ralph Franklin, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War against the German People, Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1992, pp. 31-32.

101 Ibid., p. 32.

102 MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, pp. 344-348.

103 Ibid., pp. 344, 351, 355.

104 Bessel, Richard, Germany 1945: From War to Peace, London: Harper Perennial, 2010, pp. 194-195.

105 Blumenson, Martin, (ed.), The Patton Papers, 1940-1945, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1974, p. 738.

106 Bessel, Richard, Germany 1945: From War to Peace, London: Harper Perennial, 2010, p. 196.

107 Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010, pp. 299-303.

108 Von Lehndorff, Hans Graf, Token of a Covenant—Diary of an East Prussian Surgeon, 1945-47, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1964, p. 127.

109 Horstmann, Lali, We Chose to Stay, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954, pp. 198-200.

110 Owings, Alison, Frauen—German Women Recall the Third Reich, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994, p. 334.

111 Ibid., pp. 334-336.

112 Ibid., pp. 337-338.

113 Botting, Douglas, From the Ruins of the Reich—Germany, 1945-1949, New York: Crown Publishers, 1985, p. 263.

114 Ibid., pp. 263-264.

115 Ibid., p. 206.

116 Beckman Morris, The Jewish Brigade: An Army with Two Masters, 1944-45, Rockville Centre, NY: Sarpedon, 1998, p. xiii.

117 MacDonogh, Giles, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, New York: Basic Books, 2007, p. 350.

118 Schmidt, Hans, Hitler Boys in America: Re-Education Exposed, Pensacola, FL: Hans Schmidt Publications, 2003, pp. 26, 48.

119 Bessel, Richard, Germany 1945: From War to Peace, London: Harper Perennial, 2010, p. 388.

120 Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, pp. 107-109.

121 Ibid., p. 124.

122 Adenauer, Konrad, Memoirs, 1945-1953, translated by Beate Ruhm von Oppen, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1966, p. 148.

123 Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, pp. 115-116.

124 Ibid., pp. xvii-xviii.

125 Ibid., p. 127.