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)
Prologue
For six hundred years East Prussia had served as the frontier outpost of Germany…
By mid-October 1944, the Soviet Army had finally reached the Reich’s border. And yet, as was the case at Nemmersdorf, there was no panic.
Thus it was, that on the night of October 20, as Nemmersdorf and other communities nearest the front slept in imagined security, the unthinkable occurred. After punching a hole through the German line, the Red Army suddenly burst into the Reich.
“They tortured civilians in many villages,” reported one German officer, “nailed some on barn doors and shot many others.”
Added another horrified witness:
In the farmyard down the road stood a cart, to which four naked women were nailed through their hands in a cruciform position… Beyond stood a barn and to each of its two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands, in a crucified posture. In the dwellings we found a total of seventy-two women, including children, and one old man, 74, all dead… all murdered in a bestial manner, except only a few who had holes in their necks. Some babies had their heads bashed in. In one room we found a woman, 84 years old, sitting on a sofa… half of whose head had been sheared off with an ax or a spade.
“Every female, including girls as young as eight, had been raped,” noted another viewer.
Old men who had feebly tried to protect their wives, daughters and granddaughters, were themselves knocked down, sawed in half or chopped to bits. A group of over fifty French POWs and Polish workers who had instinctively stepped in to protect the people were likewise castrated and killed. Lt. Amberger continues:
Neither in Nemmersdorf nor in the other places did I find a single living German civilian.
Staggered by the enormity of the crime, German authorities requested that neutral investigations and medical personnel from Spain, Sweden and Switzerland view the sickening carnage close up. When the visitors filed their reports, however, and when word finally reached the outside world, there was only silence. By the winter of 1944, the vicious propaganda war waged against Germany had been won. By that late stage few individuals beyond the Reich’s borders were concerned about brained German babies or crucified German women.
With the outbreak of the war in 1939 [ed. Note: before the first reports of 1942 on the Jewish Holocaust] nowhere was hatred more intense than among American Jews. Wrote Hollywood script writer and director, Ben Hecht:
A cancer flourishes in the body of the world and in its mind and soul, and this cancerous thing is Germany, Germanism, and Germans… That this most clumsy of all human tribes—this leaden-hearted German—should dare to pronounce judgment on his superiors, dare to outlaw from the world the name of the Jew—a name that dwarfs him as the tree does the weed at its foot—is an outrageous thing. It is an evil thing.
“Germany must perish,” echoed Theodore N. Kaufmann in a widely-read book of the same name.
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.
To implement his plan, Kaufman recommended that when the war was successfully concluded all German men and women should be sterilized.
Far from being shocked by such a genocidal scheme, leading American journals were thrilled by the concept.
“A Sensational Idea!” cheered Time magazine.
“A provocative theory,” echoed the Washington Post.
While many in America and Great Britain could understand and even commiserate with Jewish emotions, many more were initially aghast by the flaming rhetoric and the murderous cries for extermination of innocent and guilty alike. Nevertheless, the sheer weight and persistence of the propaganda, both subtle and overt, in film, radio, books, magazines, and newspapers, gradually worked its way into the thoughts and attitudes of the public mainstream. Eventually, in the minds of a sizable percentage of Americans and Britons, little distinction was drawn between killing a Nazi soldier and killing a German child.
On September 15, 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt made the demand for extermination official when he endorsed the so-called “Morgenthau Plan.” Named for Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasure, Henry Morgenthau, but actually conceived by the secretary’s top aide, Harry Dexter White—both of whom were Jewish.
“You don’t want the Germans to starve?” Roosevelt’s incredulous son-in-law asked the president in private.
“Why not?” replied Roosevelt without batting an eye.
Most Germans actually knew little of thoughts such as the above. Most Germans were yet living under the illusion that the war still had rules. Few could bring themselves to believe that the horror at Nemmersdorf was anything other than an aberration; that the butchery was only a bloody mistake destined never to be repeated. Unbeknownst to those in Prussian and other German regions facing east, the nightmare of Nemmersdorf would soon prove only the faintest foretaste of what was ahead.
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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.