Hellstorm • chapter 2

In almost any war one side can be dishonestly demonized even by a truthful enumeration of its crimes, if the crimes of its adversaries are suppressed. —Irmin Vinson

Excerpted from Thomas Goodrich’s 2010 book

Hellstorm:
The Death of Nazi Germany
(1944-1947)

The Dead and the Dead to Be

As a symbol of the Third Reich, as the most obvious example of Germany’s will to fight on, more bombs had been devoted to Berlin than any other German city and in total tonnage, more explosives were dropped on the capital alone than the Luftwaffe had dumped on all England throughout all the war. The destruction was so complete that one Berliner was heard to quip, “If they want to hit more targets, they’ll have to bring them with them.”

Although nothing could stop the rain of death pouring down on Germany, Adolf Hitler was determined to trade terror for terror. While damage was trifling compared to that of the Reich, it was a boost to German morale when the first “wonder weapons,” or V-rockets, began slamming into England during the summer of 1944.

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“When German soldiers were captured by guerrillas, they were often abominably treated,” one Wehrmacht general recounted. “It was not unusual for the Soviets to torture their prisoners and then hang them up, sometimes with their genitals stuffed in their mouths.” Other Landsers were released, then sent staggering down roads toward their comrades, naked, bloody, eyes gouged from sockets, castrated.

One group which could expect no mercy from the Germans was the communist commissars who traveled with Red Army units. Composed “almost exclusively” of Jews, it was these fanatical political officers, many Germans felt, who were responsible for the massacres and mutilations of captured comrades. Explained one witness, Lieutenant Hand Woltersdorf of the elite SS:

One of our antitank gun crews had defended itself down to the last cartridge, really down to the last cartridge… They then had to surrender. While still alive they had their genitals cut off, their eyes poked out, and their bellies slit open. Russian prisoners to whom we showed this declared that such mutilations took place by order of the commissars. This was the first I heard of such commissars.

With the threat of torture and execution facing them, many idealistic Germans soldiers had an added impetus to fight to the death.

(Typical Landsers)

In the minds of most Landsers, the war in the east was not a contest against the Russian or Slavic race in particular, but a crusade against communism. In the years following World War I, Marxist revolutionaries had nearly toppled the German government. Because most of the leaders were Jews, and because Lenin, Trotsky, and many other Russians revolutionaries were Jewish, the threat to Nazi Germany and Europe seemed clear. Hence, from Adolf Hitler down to the lowliest Landser, the fight in the east became a holy war against “Jewish Bolshevism.”

“The poor, unhappy Russian people,” said one shocked German soldier as he moved further into the Soviet Union. “Its distress is unspeakable and its misery heart-rending.”

“When you see what the Jew has brought about here in Russia, only then you can begin to understand why the Fuhrer began this struggle against Judaism,” another stunned Landser wrote, expressing a sentiment shared by many comrades. “What sort of misfortunes would have been visited upon our Fatherland, if this bestial people had gotten the upper hand?”

Following the devastating German defeat in Stalingrad in 1943, the “upper hand” did indeed pass to the enemy. Supplied by the US with a seemingly inexhaustible amount of goods, from tanks and planes to boots and butter, the resurgent Red Army assumed the offensive. As the heretofore invincible Wehrmacht began its long, slow withdrawal west, a drama as vast and savage as the steppe itself unfolded, the likes of which the modern world has never witnessed.

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Educate yourself about the Holocaust perpetrated on the German people by the Allied forces that the mainstream media has covered up for nearly seventy years.

Hellstorm is still available from the publisher.