The suffering of the German people under post-war Allied occupation after 1945

Discussion in 'History & Past Politicians' started by kazenatsu, May 27, 2018.

  1. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Gruesome Harvest: The Allied Attempt to Exterminate Germany after 1945
    Ralph Franklin Keeling

    [​IMG]

    On May 8, 1945 the shooting ended in Europe. But, shockingly, the war against Germany went on. Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill had decreed that the German people must suffer— - and suffer they did.

    Driven from their homes, looted of their property, decimated by famine and disease, raped, robbed, and enslaved, millions of Germans - —most of them women and children - —bore the brunt of what Time magazine called “history'’s most terrifying peace”.

    Gruesome Harvest was one of the first books in America to sound the alarm against the victor’s' postwar war against the Germans.

    Bristling with contemporary documentation, burning with humanitarian and patriotic outrage, this informed, riveting classic dares to tell the shameful story of how American and Allied policy makers undertook the political, economic, and social destruction of the German people even as they presumed to instruct them in “justice” and “democracy.”

    Today, as the propaganda war against the Germans wears on in the media and academic life, Gruesome Harvest, written in 1947 by a courageous American, when the decimation of the German race was still official U.S.-Allied policy, tells a vital story, one that must not be suppressed or forgotten.

    "If war should come, whichever side may claim ultimate victory, nothing is more certain that victor and vanquished alike would glean a gruesome harvest of human misery and suffering.”–"​
    - Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, July 31, 1939, to the House of Commons.


    American soldiers committed all sorts of atrocities against german prisoners during the occupation after the war, including against women, children, and civilians.

    http://www.rense.com/general46/germ.htm
    http://www.whale.to/b/starvation_of_germans.html


    One former American soldier, Martin Brech, now a Unitarian-Universalist minister, described what he witnessed during the American occupation of Germany:

    In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate enclosure that I did not see until later. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets. Many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. It was a cold, wet spring, and their misery from exposure alone was evident.

    Even more shocking was to see the prisoners throwing grass and weeds into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this to help ease their hunger pains. Quickly they grew emaciated. Dysentery raged, and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches. Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before our eyes. We had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, including no medical assistance. German civilians were not allowed to feed, nor even come near the prisoners.

    Outraged, I protested to my officers and was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from "higher up".

    When I threw this food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, I was caught and threatened with imprisonment. I repeated the "offense", and one officer angrily threatened to shoot me.

    I encountered a captain on a hill above the Rhine shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 caliber pistol. When I asked "Why?" he mumbled, "Target practice," and fired until his pistol was empty. I saw the women running for cover, but, at that distance, couldn't tell if any had been hit. They considered the Germans subhuman and worthy of extermination.

    These prisoners, I found out, were mostly farmers and workingmen, as simple and ignorant as many of our own troops. As time went on, more of them lapsed into a zombie-like state of listlessness, while others tried to escape in a demented or suicidal fashion, running through open fields in broad daylight towards the Rhine to quench their thirst. They were mowed down.

    Some prisoners were as eager for cigarettes as for food, saying they took the edge off their hunger. Accordingly, enterprising "Yankee traders" were acquiring hordes of watches and rings in exchange for handfuls of cigarettes or less. When I began throwing cartons of cigarettes to the prisoners to ruin this trade, I was threatened by rank-and-file G.I.s too.

    Some of our weak and sickly prisoners were marched off by French soldiers to their camp. We were riding on a truck behind this column. Whenever a German prisoner staggered or dropped back, he was hit on the head with a club and killed. The bodies were rolled to the side of the road to be picked up by another truck. For many, this quick death might have been preferable to slow starvation.

    Famine began to spread among the German civilians also. It was a common sight to see German women up to their elbows in our garbage cans looking for something edible -- that is, if they weren't chased away.

    When I interviewed mayors of small towns and villages, I was told that their supply of food had been taken away by "displaced persons" (foreigners who had worked in Germany), who packed the food on trucks and drove away. When I reported this, the response was a shrug. I never saw any Red Cross at the camp or helping civilians, although their coffee and doughnut stands were available everywhere else for us. In the meantime, the Germans had to rely on the sharing of hidden stores until the next harvest.

    Hunger made German women more "available," but despite this, rape was prevalent and often accompanied by additional violence. In particular I remember an eighteen-year old woman who had the side of her faced smashed with a rifle butt, and was then raped by two G.I.s. Even the French complained that the rapes, looting and drunken destructiveness on the part of our troops was excessive. In Le Havre, we had been given booklets warning us that the German soldiers had maintained a high standard of behavior with French civilians who were peaceful, and that we should do the same. In this we failed miserably.

    I realize it is difficult for the average citizen to admit witnessing a crime of this magnitude, especially if implicated himself. Even G.I.s sympathetic to the victims were afraid to complain and get into trouble, they told me. And the danger has not ceased. Since I spoke out a few weeks ago, I have received threatening calls and had my mailbox smashed. ​

    This essay was published in The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1990 (Vol. 10, No. 2), pp. 161-166.


    The Allied prison camps of Sinzig and Remagen, which stretched along the Rhine, would have made Auschwitz and Buchenwald seem like vacation resorts in comparison:

    Few Americans are aware that such infamous camps as Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz stayed in business after the end of the war, only now packed with German captives, many of whom perished miserably.
    "After the Reich: The Brutal History of Allied Occupation", Giles MacDonogh


    Many german prisoners died in American and British captivity, some in horrid holding camps along the Rhine river, with no shelter and very little food. (There were 116,000 held at one time in Sinzig alone) Others, more fortunate, toiled as slave labor in Allied countries, often for years.


    Further reading:

    James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950 (Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1997)
    Ralph Franklin Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies Postwar War Against the German People (IHR, 1992). Originally published in Chicago in 1947
     
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  2. Jazz

    Jazz Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    thank you for the accurate documentation!
    Here is another website and a youtube account of the Rhine-Meadows tragedy...

    http://tapnewswire.com/2017/01/the-mass-killing-of-germans-at-the-end-of-ww2/

    A Canadian Historian has also written a book about it, called "Other Losses"...
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Losses

    And today the Germans have to kiss their enemies behinds and be thankful for being allowed the status of "Vassal"! The following generations get thoroughly brainwashed with the "crimes" of their forefathers. Should anybody protest - off to jail! (Ursula Haverbeck)
    Add the flooding with alien refugees, and the German spirit has been eradicated for good... which has been the ultimate aim.
     
    Last edited: May 27, 2018
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  3. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    delete
     
    Last edited: May 27, 2018
  4. Jazz

    Jazz Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    done!
     
  5. mamooth

    mamooth Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    A lot of historical revisionism. The numbers are just nonsense. A million POWs killed by Eisenhower's death camps? Odd, how only a few people "remember" such a thing, and that there's no physical evidence of it, or any written records of it, even though the corpses would have had to have been stacked for hundreds of miles.

    The US Army put the death toll in prison camps at 15,000, mainly men who were previously wounded and sick. That's out of a population of 1-2 million. A 1% death rate is the best record of any combatant.

    Yeah, things were not pleasant in Germany. There wasn't enough food to go around, but that was true of all of Europe. The Russians went on a raping spree. But the US genocide claims are laughable.

    https://www.amazon.com/Eisenhower-G...iewpnt_lft?filterByStar=positive&pageNumber=1
     
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  6. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Those sound like exactly the same type of arguments used to question the figures in the Holocaust.

    The reality is that most of those people wouldn't want to remember or talk about it.

    And why would you think there'd be physical evidence? Germany was under military occupation at the time. There was no one really there to document the evidence. If dead bodies were found, they could have been from the war, or could have been from starvation, no one would really know.

    As you can get some idea of in the stories, there was a lot of indifference on the part of the military commanders.

    My grandfather, before he died, told about how American soldiers didn't have the resources to take care of all the Japanese prisoners they captured, so the captured prisoners were taken to the beach and told to swim out to sea, and if they managed to survive they would be free. They were then doused with petrol and set ablaze, and they ran into the water and started swimming out.
    When asked "How do you know this?", he gave a cold stare and didn't say anything.

    Obviously this isn't the type of stuff former soldiers normally talk about. There were some horrendous atrocities that went on during and after the war.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2018
  7. Jazz

    Jazz Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Here is some more for you to laugh about...
    https://ymlp.com/zBoXDx
     
  8. mamooth

    mamooth Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Bacque was debunked in my link. And given the claim of one guy is contradicted by the claim of many thousands, who your sources conveniently don't talk about, I'll go with the thousands.

    So, where are the mass graves for those _one million_ dead Germans who were all kept in a small area near the Rhine?

    No trace of them? Fancy that.

    Facts and evidence matter. You've got none.
     
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  9. mamooth

    mamooth Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    There's plentiful physical evidence for the holocaust. There's millions of people confirming the holocaust.

    In contrast, there's no physical evidence confirming your stories, and the testimony of many thousands contradicting your few voices.

    You're just like the holocaust deniers in that respect. (You brought up the holocaust, so the comparison is fair.)
     
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  10. Jazz

    Jazz Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    It is forbidden to dig for the mass graves. Just like it is forbidden to deny or even question the holocaust.
    Germany is still under occupation and the German Leadership has to follow the rules of the US, at least until 2099.
    What you say doesn't matter - I know what I know from a reliable source!!!!!
     
  11. Moi621

    Moi621 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    This does not compute considering
    Churchill's reasons for his opposition to the Morgenthau Plan.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan


    Moi :oldman:
    History not HERstory.
     
  12. Jazz

    Jazz Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Churchill didn't want to be tied to a corpse (Germany)!
     
  13. Moi621

    Moi621 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Please read what I quoted from upload #1.
    And my reply.
    Can't have both sides. Churchill, did and did not.

    Too bad about the Morgenthau Plan not accepted.
    Churchill sold the allies that it would cause catastrophic suffering, which just wasn't true.

    Meanwhile, "we" were feeding them.
    Meager calories but that's what there was, not because the allies wanted them to suffer.
    European food production took how long to recover from the war?
    Not just the production but the distribution too.
     
  14. Denizen

    Denizen Well-Known Member

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    It certainly demonstrates crimes against humanity by the US and other allies against German POWs.

    I can't recall reading of any charges against Americans for murder of German POWs after WW2.

    German POW death rate of 30% per year is horrific. The USA military destroyed their records to prevent exposure of the crimes.

    Even the post-war German government covered up the atrocities and obstructed and prevented the excavation of the mass graves of German POWs.

    http://www.exulanten.com/germanPOWs.html

     
    Last edited: Jun 2, 2018
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  15. Denizen

    Denizen Well-Known Member

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    The US Army also took photographs of their atrocities against the Germans.

    The US National Archives is also accused Lt. Colonel Felix L. Sparks of a coverup of a war crime in the photo. Sparks was there as a commander:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_L._Sparks

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_war_crimes_during_World_War_II

    [​IMG]
     
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  16. Jazz

    Jazz Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yes, I have read about this Dachau shooting, too. Don't you wonder, why the German SS Guards stayed and waited for the Allies to arrive? It is said, they felt perfectly innocent of any crime. They just wanted to hand over the camp to the Allies and surrender. If they were guilty of murdering and gassing inmates, they would have left and disappeared before the Allies arrived!
    These SS soldiers were lucky to be shot without torture. Others were locked into cattle cars and left standing for weeks without any water, food or sanitation and their skeletons were used in photographs to prove the Germans starved their camp inmates.

    I have to find that link again.
     
  17. Jazz

    Jazz Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Why then did the Americans refuse the food packages from the Red Cross and had them send it back? Or they threatened to shoot German civilians if they brought food to the fence.
    You have no idea of what it was like to be a German prisoner in 1945.
    Take a look and read here:

    http://www.hist-chron.com/eu/D/1945...holes-1million-victims-bodies-in-Belgium.html
     
  18. Moi621

    Moi621 Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yup, it is tough being the good guy.

    My favorites are the Nazi survivors of Stalingrad
    not making it back to Germany for some ten years in the mid fifties.
    While the history program seems to sympathize with the Hun,
    they don't mention what percentage of Soviet soldier POW's made it "home".
    Hint: Closer to zero

    No tears from Moi.
    Considering atrocities happened as a matter of Nazi policy
    I wouldn't get upset over incidences that were NOT :flagus: policy.

    Next thing y'know someone is gonna write a book outlining
    how sweet the Nazis were and how they were provoked into war.
     
  19. Jazz

    Jazz Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Here it is, albeit in German:

    [​IMG]

    That I can believe.
    Here it is in English:
    upload_2018-6-2_15-43-12.png

    WOW, they won't let me post that link.
    Please, why don't you put the name Heinz Kilanowski into a search engine and see what you get. Then try to post it here in the thread.
     
    Last edited: Jun 2, 2018
  20. Jazz

    Jazz Well-Known Member Past Donor

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  21. Jazz

    Jazz Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Here it is, albeit in German:

    [​IMG]

    That I can believe.
    Here it is in English:
    View attachment 69623
     
  22. Jazz

    Jazz Well-Known Member Past Donor

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  23. Swede Hansen

    Swede Hansen Banned at Members Request

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    Christ what nonsense
     
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  24. Jazz

    Jazz Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Out of what sort of mole hole are you creeping?
     
  25. ThirdTerm

    ThirdTerm Well-Known Member

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    These SS guards were shot at the Dachau concentration camp because refused to surrender. The number killed was around 35–50. I think they chose to die honorably rather than surrendering to the Americans. The people of the GDR suffered most from the Soviet rule, which must have been as bad as living in North Korea. We used to call them East Germans.

     
    Last edited: Jun 3, 2018

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