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Category: Summer, 1945 (book)

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Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (XV)

By the summer of 1945, Germany had become the world’s greatest slave market where sex was the new medium of exchange. While the wolf of hunger might be kept from the door, grim disease was always waiting in the wings.

“As a way of dying it may be worse than starvation, but it will put off dying for months—or even years,” commented an English journalist.

In addition to all the venereal diseases known in the West, German women were infected by a host of new evils, including an insidious strain of Asiatic syphilis. “It is a virulent form of sickness, unknown in this part of the world,” a doctor’s wife explained. “It would be difficult to cure even if we were lucky enough to have any penicillin.”

Another dreaded concern—not only for those who were selling themselves, but for the millions of rape victims—was unwanted pregnancy. Thousands who were if fact pregnant sought and found abortions. Thousands more lived in dreadful suspense. And for those infants who were carried and delivered, their struggle was usually brief.

“The mortality among the small children and infants was very high,” noted one sad woman. “They simply had to starve to death. There was nothing for them… Generally, they did not live to be more than 3 months old—a consolation for those mothers, who had got the child against their will from a Russian… The mother worked all the time and was very seldom able to give the child the breast.”

As the above implied, simply because a mother sold her body to feed a child did not necessarily save her from back-breaking labor. Indeed, with the end of war, Germans old and young were dragooned by the victors for the monumental clean-up and dismantling of the devastated Reich. Sometimes food was given to the workers —“a piece of bread or maybe a bowl of thin, watery soup”— and sometimes not. “We used to start work at six o’clock in the morning and get home again at six in the evening,” said a Silesian woman.” We had to work on Sundays, too, and we were given neither payment nor food for what we did.”

From the blasted capital, Berlin, another female recorded:

Berlin is being cleaned up… All round the hills of rubble, buckets were being passed from hand to hand; we have returned to the days of the Pyramids—except that instead of building we are carrying away… On the embankment German prisoners were slaving away—gray-heads in miserable clothes, presumably ex-Volkssturm. With grunts and groans, they were loading heavy wheels onto freight-cars. They gazed at us imploringly, tried to keep near us. At first I couldn’t understand why. Others did, though, and secretly passed the men a few crusts of bread. This is strictly forbidden, but the Russian guard stared hard in the opposite direction. The men were unshaven, shrunken, with wretched doglike expressions. To me they didn’t look German at all.

“My mother, 72 years of age, had to work outside the town on refuse heaps,” lamented a daughter in Posen. “There the old people were hunted about, and had to sort out bottles and iron, even when it was raining… The work was dirty, and it was impossible for them to change their clothes.”

Understandably, thousands of overworked, underfed victims soon succumbed under such conditions. No job was too low or degrading for the conquered Germans to perform. Well-bred ladies, who in former times were theater-going members of the upper-class, worked side by side with peasants at washtubs, cleaning socks and underclothes of Russian privates. Children and the aged were put to work scrubbing floors and shining boots in the American, British and French Zones.

Some tasks were especially loathsome, as one woman makes clear: “As 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.”

Added another female from the Soviet Zone:

We had to build landing strips, and to break stones… 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.

As this woman and others acknowledge, although sex could be bought for a bit of food, a cigarette or a toothbrush, some victors preferred to take what they wanted, whenever and wherever they pleased. “If they wanted a girl they just came in the field and got her,” recalled Ilse Breyer who worked at planting potatoes.

“Hunger made German women more ‘available’,’’ an American soldier revealed, “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 face smashed with a rifle butt and was then raped by two Gls. Even the French complained that the rapes, looting and drunken destructiveness on the part of our troops was excessive.”

 
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Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (XIV)

CHAPTER 3

OF CRIMES AND CRIMINALS

Even as the physical massacre of Germany was in progress, the spiritual massacre of German womanhood continued without pause.

Although violent, brutal and repeated rapes persisted against defenseless females for years, most Soviet, American, British, and French troops quickly discovered that hunger was a powerful incentive to sexual surrender. Usually, a piece of bread, a little candy or a bar of soap made violent rape unnecessary. In their utterly devastated cities, young girls roamed the streets seeking something to eat and a place to sleep. Having only one thing left in the world to sell, they were not slow to sell it.

“Bacon, eggs, sleep at your home?” winked Russian soldiers over and over again, knowing full well the answer would usually be a two-minute tryst among the rubble. “I continually ran about with cooking utensils, and begged for food…,” admitted one girl. “If I heard in my neighborhood the expression ‘pretty woman,’ I reacted accordingly.’’

Despite General Eisenhower’s edict against fraternization with the despised enemy, no amount of words could slow the US soldier’s sex drive. “Neither army regulations nor the propaganda of hatred in the American press,” noted newswoman, Freda Utley, “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.”

“I felt a bit sick at times about the power I had over that girl,” one troubled British soldier confessed. “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.”

As this young Tommy made clear, desperate German women, many with children to feed, were compelled by hunger to enter a bondage as binding as any in history. With time, some victims, particularly those consorting with officers, not only avoided starvation, but found themselves enjoying luxuries long forgotten.

“By no means could it be said that the major is raping me, revealed one woman. “Am I doing it for bacon, butter, sugar, candles, canned meat? To some extent I’m sure I am. In addition, I like the major and the less he wants from me as a man, the more I like him as a person.”

Unlike the above, relatively few females found such havens. For most, food was used to bait or bribe them into a numbing sexual slavery in which the simple avoidance of starvation was the day-to-day goal. Just as Lali Horstmann was about to sign up for kitchen duty in the Soviet Zone, a job that paid with soup and potatoes, a girl next to her whispered that her sister had volunteered several days before on the same job and had not been seen since. When an old, unattractive woman nearby raised her hand to volunteer, the Red officer in charge ignored her and instead pointed a pistol at a pretty young girl. When the girl refused, several soldiers approached.

“She was in tears as she was brutally shoved forward,” recorded Lali, “followed by others who were protesting helplessly.”

“A Pole discovered me,” acknowledged another girl, “and began to sell me to Russians. He had fixed up a brothel in his cellar for Russian officers. I was fetched by him… I had to go with him, and could not resist. I came into the cellar, in which there were the most depraved carryings on, drinking, smoking and shouting, and I had to participate… I felt like shrieking.”

While many women endured such slavery—if only to eat—others risked their all to escape. Recounted an American journalist:

As our long line of British Army lorries… rolled through the main street of Brahlstorf, the last Russian occupied town, a pretty blond girl darted from the crowd of Germans watching us and made a dash for our truck. Clinging with both hands to the tailboard, she made a desperate effort to climb in. But we were driving too fast and the board was too high. After being dragged several hundred yards she had to let go and fell on the cobblestone street. That scene was a dramatic illustration of the state of terror in which women… were living.

“All these women,” wrote a witness, “Germans, Polish, Jewish and even Russian girls ‘freed’ from Nazi slave camps, were dominated by one desperate desire to escape from the Red zone.”

 
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Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (XIII)

Although forced to the shadows by growing public opprobrium, the “brutal and vicious” Morgenthau Plan for Germany was never actually abandoned by Franklin Roosevelt. Indeed, until his death in April, 1945, the American president had secretly favored the “Carthaginian” approach for the conquered Reich. When Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, met with Soviet strongman, Josef Stalin, and the new British prime minister, Clement Attlee, outside of Berlin at Potsdam in the summer, 1945, most of the teeth in Morgenthau’s murderous scheme remained on the table. With the signature of the “Big Three,” the plan went into effect.

“It is not the intention of the Allies,” argued the joint declaration, “to destroy or enslave the German people.” Virtually word for word, a similar declaration was directed at Japan, then on the verge of total collapse. Despite such solemn pronouncements meant to mollify a watching world, it soon became abundantly clear, first to the Germans, then to the Japanese, that the victors came not as peace­minded “liberators,” as propagandists were wont to declare, but as conquerors fully as ruthless, vengeful and greedy as any who ever won a war.

The plundering of Germany by the Soviet Union first began when the Red Army penetrated East Prussia in late 1944. With war’s end the following year, Stalin’s methodical looting in the Russian Occupation Zone now became prodigious. Steel mills, grain mills, lumber mills, sugar and oil refineries, chemical plants, optical works, shoe factories, and other heavy industries were taken apart down to the last nut and bolt and sent east to the Soviet Union where they were reassembled. Those factories allowed to remain in Germany were to operate solely for the benefit of Moscow.

Electric and steam locomotives, their rolling stock, and even the tracks they ran on were likewise sent east. While the Soviet government pillaged on a massive scale, the common Red soldier was even more meticulous.

“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.,” itemized one woman from eastern Germany. “They destroyed what they could not take away… 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.”

Like millions of other refugees, Regina Shelton managed her way home at the end of the war. Also like millions of other refugees, the woman was warned of the utter devastation she would find in the wake of the Soviets.

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… Above all, the nauseating stench that emanates from the largest and totally wrecked living room! Spoiled contents oozes from splintered canning jars, garbage of indefinable origin is mixed with unmistakable human excrement, and dried stain of urine discolors crumpled paper and rags.

Americans were not far behind their communist counterparts and what was not wantonly destroyed, was pilfered as “souvenirs.”

“We ‘liberated’ German property,” winked one GI. “The Russians simply stole it.”

Unlike its Soviet ally which had been bled white by nearly thirty years of Marxism, the United States had no need for German plants and factories. The Reich’s hoard of treasure, however, was another matter. Billions of dollars in gold, silver and currency, as well as priceless paintings, sculptures and other art works were plucked from their hiding places in caves, tunnels and salt mines and shipped across the Atlantic. Additionally, and of far greater damage to Germany’s future, was the “mental dismantling” of the Reich. Tons of secret documents revealing Germany’s tremendous organizational talent in business and industry were simply stolen, not only by the Americans, but by the French and British. Hundreds of the greatest scientists in the world were likewise “encouraged” to immigrate by the victors. As one US Government agency quietly admitted, “Operation Paper-Clip” was the first time in history wherein conquerors had attempted to drain dry the creative power of an entire nation.

“The real gain in reparations of this war,” Life magazine openly confessed, was not in factories, treasure or artwork, but “in the German brains and in the German research results.”

While the Soviet Union came up short on German scientists and technicians simply because most had wisely fled and surrendered to the West, Russia suffered no shortage of slave labor. Added to the mil­ lions of native dissidents, repatriated refugees and Wehrmacht prisoners toiling in the gulags, were millions of German civilians snatched from the Reich. As was commonly the case, those who were destined to spend years or their entire lives in slavery were given mere minutes to make ready. In cities, towns and villages, posters suddenly appeared announcing that all able-bodied men and women were to assemble in their local square at a given time or face arrest and execution.

“The screaming, wailing and howling in the square will haunt me the rest of my life,” remembered one horrified female. “Mercilessly the women were herded together in rows of four. Mothers had to leave tiny children behind. I thanked God from the bottom of my heart that my boy had died in Berlin shortly after birth… The wretched victims [were] then set in motion to the crack of Russian whips.”

For those forced east on foot, the trek became little better than a death march. Thousands dropped dead in their tracks from hunger, thirst, disease, and abuse. “It took all of our remaining strength to stay in the middle of the extremely slow-moving herds being driven east,” said Wolfgang Kasak. “We kept hearing the submachine guns when­ ever a straggler was shot… I will never forget… the shooting of a 15-year old boy right before my very eyes. He simply couldn’t walk anymore, so a Russian soldier took potshots at him. The boy was still alive when some officer came over and fired his gun into the boy’s ear.”

“One young girl jumped from a bridge into the water, the guards shot wildly at her, and I saw her sink,” recalled Anna Schwartz. “A young man, who had heart-disease, jumped into the Vistula. He was also shot… Thirst was such a torture, and we were so tired.”

Those who traveled by rail to Siberia fared even worse. With standing room only, small, filthy freight cars were commonly crammed with over one hundred people each. After a suffocating trip of 20 or 30 days, with starvation, thirst, beatings, and rape every mile of the way, fully one third to one half of the passengers were dead when the trains reached their termini. And of those who stepped down, all, thought one viewer, more resembled “walking corpses” than living humans.

“Now the dying really began…,” as Anna Schwartz recollected.

The huts, in which we were quartered, were full of filth and vermin, swarms of bugs overwhelmed us, and we destroyed as much of this vermin as we could. We lay on bare boards so close together, that, if we wanted to turn round, we had to wake our neighbors to the right and left of us, in order that we all turned round at the same time. The sick people lay amongst us, groaning and in delirium… Typhoid and dysentery raged and very many died, but death meant rather release than terror to them. The dead were brought into a cellar, and when this was full up to the top, it was emptied. Meanwhile the rats had eaten from the corpses, and these very quickly decayed… Also the wolves satisfied their hunger.

While Anna’s camp worked on a railroad and was driven day-in, day-out “like a herd of draught animals,” and while others toiled in fields, factories, bogs, and lumber camps, thousands more were relegated to the mines.

“We sometimes had to remain as much as 16 hours down in the pit,” recounted Ilse Lau. “When we had finally finished our work by summoning up our last strength, we were not allowed to go up in the lift, but had to climb up the ladders (450 feet). We were often near to desperation. We were never able to sleep enough, and we were always hungry.”

At one large coal camp, fifteen to twenty-five people died every day. Each night the corpses were carried out and dumped without ceremony into a mass grave.

Despite the never-ending nightmare, Christians still gathered for a few minutes on each Sunday to renew their faith.

“Often a commissar came and shouted out: ‘That won’t help you!’” remembered Gertrude Schulz. But it did.

Just as faith in the Almighty was often the thin divide which separated those who lived from those who died, so too did simple acts of kindness offer strength and rays of hope in an otherwise crushing gloom. As Wolfgang Kasak and his comrades stood dying of thirst one day, a Russian woman appeared with buckets of water.

“The guards drove the woman away,” Kasak said. “But she kept on bringing water, bucket after bucket, to the places where no Russians were standing guard. I know now the Russian soldiers closed one eye and took a long time in following their orders to keep the woman from giving us something to drink.”

Siegfried Losch, a youth who had become a recruit, soldier, veteran, deserter, prisoner, and slave before he had seen his eighteenth year, was hard at work one Sunday morning when an old grandmother approached. Judging by her clothes, she was very poor. Judging by her limp she was crippled. Indeed, thought Losch, the old woman looked like the witch from Hansel and Gretl. But the grandmother’s face was different.

The face emanated… warmth as only a mother who has suffered much can give. Here was the true example of mother Russia: Having suffered under the Soviet regime, the war, having possibly lost one or more of her loved ones… She probably was walking toward her church. When she was near me, she stopped and gave me some small coins… Then she made a cross over me with tears in her eyes and walked on. I gave her a “spasibo” (thank you!) and continued my work. But for the rest of the day I was a different person, because somebody cared, somebody let her soul speak to me.

Precious as such miracles might be, they were but cruel reminders of a world that was no more. “We were eternally hungry,” recalled Erich Gerhardt. “Treatment by the Russian guards was almost always very bad. We were simply walking skeletons… From the first to the last day our life was a ceaseless suffering, a dying and lamentation. The Russian guards mercilessly pushed the very weakest people forward with their rifle-butts, when they could hardly move. When the guards used their rifle-butts, they made use of the words, ‘You lazy rascal.’ I was already so weak, that I wanted to be killed on the spot by the blows.”

“We were always hungry and cold, and covered with vermin,” echoed a fellow slave. “I used to pray to God to let me at least die in my native country.”

Cruelly, had this man’s prayers been answered and had he been allowed to return to Germany, the odds were good indeed that he would have died in his homeland… and sooner than he imagined. Unbeknownst to these wretched slaves dreaming of home, the situation in the former Reich differed little, if any, from that of Siberia. Indeed, in many cases, “life” in the defeated nation was vastly worse.

 
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Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (XII)

Meanwhile, to the west, the Americans were engaged in their own version of sexual conquest. Soon after they stormed ashore on D-Day, June, 1944, the worst elements in the US Army were allowed virtual free reign to rob, rape and kill.

“Reports that disciplinary conditions in the army are becoming bad,” General Eisenhower’s personal driver and mistress, Kay Summersby, candidly recorded. “Many cases of rape, murder, and pillage are causing complaints by the French, Dutch, etc.”

Expecting an army of heroic liberators, the Europeans were naturally surprised and shocked at the lack of discipline among the Allied forces, especially that of the Americans. Drunkenness, theft, wanton destruction of public and private property, casual sex on streets and in parks, but above all, violent sexual assault—many French soon referred to the American occupation as a “regime of terror… imposed by bandits in uniform.”

Historian, Mary Louise Roberts, poignantly recounts one such incident:

The handsome American soldier was Elisabeth’s tenth client that evening. Working her trade on the top floor of a dingy apartment block in Paris, she felt that she had seen them all.

For the past four years, the men had been Germans, and now, since the city had been liberated in August, 1944, they were Americans. It made little difference.

Elisabeth held out three fingers of her hand to indicate the price of her body—three hundred francs.

“Too much,” said the soldier.

Elisabeth sighted. She had seen that before as well. Wearily, she kept the three fingers held up, almost as an insult.

There was no negotiation—three hundred was little enough as it was.

“Two hundred,” the soldier insisted.

“Non,” said Elisabeth. “Three hundred or nothing.”

The soldier approached her, hate in his eyes. Elisabeth glowered back, starting to feel scared.

“In that case,” said the soldier, “it will be nothing.”

The soldier then placed his huge hands around Elisabeth’s neck and started to squeeze. She struggled as hard as she could, lashing out, but it was in vain.

After a minute or so she slumped down, her lifeless body falling on to the stained sheets. The soldier then calmly removed his trousers and had sex with her. For nothing.

Afterwards, he went through Elisabeth’s belongings and stole her cash and jewelry. He then went round the block, found another prostitute and took her to dinner and the movies.

For the GI, it had been a swell evening. Paris was just as they said it was.

“The French now grumble that the Americans are a more drunken and disorderly lot than the Germans and hope to see the day when they are liberated from the Americans,” admitted one US general in disgust. “I am informed the Germans did not loot either residences, stores, or museums. In fact the people claimed that they were meticulously treated by the Army of Occupation.”

After raping and robbing their way across France and Belgium, the US Army reacted much like the Soviets once they crossed into Nazi Germany in early 1945. Imagining the Americans to be much like the disciplined and well-behaved Wehrmacht, many German women, young and old, actually greeted the invaders euphorically as the long­sought symbol that the war was finally over and peace was at hand. Unfortunately, most found out too late, just as the boys at Dachau discovered, that these were not the Americans of their imaginations.

“We were crazy with happiness when the Americans came…,” lamented one woman, “[but] what [they] did here was quite a disappointment that hit our family pretty hard.”

“After the fighting moved on to German soil, there was a good deal of rape by combat troops and those immediately following them,” offered Australian journalist, Osmar White, a war correspondent traveling with the Americans. Soon after entering towns and villages the rapes began. Indoors or out, night or day, on park benches, against walls, on shop floors, the sexual attacks continued as the American conquerors laid claim to the conquered. Often going house to house in search of victims, some rapists initially claimed that they were looking for weapons, or food, or German soldiers in hiding. All too quickly their true purpose was made clear. In one German town, a group of six GIs found an attractive mother and her teenage daughter home alone. In the struggle to drag the victims upstairs, the females escaped out the door and hid in a neighbor’s closet. Finding their hiding place, the soldiers immediately threw the mother and daughter onto beds and one after another took turns raping the females, even as the daughter cried out, “Mama, Mama.”

At the Bavarian village of Ramsau, revealed one priest, “eight girls and women [were] raped, some of them in front of their parents.” In other villages, “heavily drunken” US soldiers helped themselves to the females. After raping one woman, a GI bragged that he had “liberated” her. In an apparent attempt to make the job easier for their men, some US officers required all homes to state the names and ages of their inhabitants and then nail the lists to their doors.

“The results of this decree are not difficult to imagine…,” a priest from one town answered. “Seventeen girls or women… were brought to the hospital, having been sexually abused once or several times.”

Rather than use their authority to punish the criminals and thereby stop most of the sexual attacks, American officers, much like their Soviet counterparts, seemed utterly indifferent to the crime, preferring instead to either ignore it entirely or blame the victims. Instead of arresting black soldiers for a massive number of rapes, the victims themselves were blamed because they “smiled” at the negroes while begging food. US Lieutenant General Edwin Lee Clarke went even further. “German women are creating a feeling of great insecurity among our soldiers by untrue charges of rape…,” announced Clarke. “These tactics might be part of a German plan.”

As with the Soviets, the Americans seemed to have no age limit and an elderly woman of 65, or older, could expect to be raped just as could a child of seven, or younger. There were other similarities. Revealed an Allied official:

German women were more frequently injured, beaten unconscious, abused more frequently in front of husbands or relatives and more frequently penetrated orally or anally by Gls than by the British or French.

“Americans look on the German women as loot, just like cameras and Lugers,” confessed a reporter for a New York newspaper.

“[W]e too are considered an army of rapists,” admitted a US sergeant matter-of-factly.

Added a writer for Time magazine succinctly: “Many a sane American family would recoil in horror if they knew how “Our Boys” conduct themselves… over here.

And the duty of concealing from the American public these crimes their husbands and sons were committing in Europe—and later, in Japan—was the job of the Office of War Information. Issuing its unequivocal marching orders to a small army of journalists following along with American troops, the OWI simply perfected a Soviet style censorship on all news and information destined for the US. “The rules for correspondents [were both]… imposed and self-imposed,” explained the American writer, John Steinbeck, about how he and other reporters hid the truth:

There were no cowards [or rapists or murderers] in the American Army, and of all the brave men the private in the infantry was the bravest and noblest… A second convention held that we had no cruel or ambitious or ignorant commanders… We were all a part of the War Effort. We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it. Gradually it became a part of all of us that the truth about anything was automatically secret and that to trifle with it was to interfere with the War Effort. By this I don’t mean that the correspondents were liars… [but] it is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies. We felt responsible to what was called the home front. There was a general feeling that unless the home front was carefully protected from the whole account of what war was like, it might panic. Also, we felt we had to protect the armed services from criticism, or they might retire to their tents to sulk like Achilles.

Thus, in effect, each “reporter” was expected to ignore or deny the looting, rape and murder committed by the Americans and exaggerate or invent the war crimes committed by the Germans; to dutifully deify their friends in the one breath and viciously vilify their enemy in the next. In essence, a corp of conscientious, diligent newsmen during times of peace had been transformed into an obedient herd of propagandists during times of war.

While some upright American officers, like their Russian counterparts, tried manfully to control the scourge of rape in their units, most did not. For German women, the baffling contradictions in each army was itself a source of nonstop terror and stress. Near Berlin, when a family encountered their first Soviets at war’s end they were naturally paralyzed with fear, fully expecting a riot of robbery and rape to envelop them. Surprisingly, the Russians were very polite and left without harming anything or anyone, including the family’s females. When the Americans later arrived, however, one of the daughters was raped so brutally that years later she still had not recovered.

Although sexual assaults by French troops in Germany were fewer than other allies, perhaps only because there were fewer French troops to begin with, not so the African colonials under their command—Moroccans, Senegalese and others who raped on a massive scale. Just as with their American and Soviet allies, the French commanders seemed indifferent to the fate of German civilians, especially women. Indeed, many French officers seemed to gloat in their power and allowed their black troops to run wild, robbing, raping, and murdering. “In the next few nights,” boasted one French sergeant, “no woman will go untouched.” When Senegalese troops reached Stuttgart in southwest Germany, they herded thousands of women, and a number of men, into the subway then raped and sodomized them all at their leisure.

While the British were far and away the most disciplined and correct of all Allied forces, that army too had its criminal element. “I didn’t go out and chase my chaps away from the women,” laughed one junior officer. “I didn’t have time. I was doing it myself!”

And thus, in the east, in the west, in their thousands, in their tens of thousands, in their hundreds of thousands, perhaps in their millions, the sexual assaults and spiritual slaughter of German females continued long after the war was declared over.

“I was panic-stricken. I was always afraid that everybody could see it in me. I was insecure in myself. I felt so empty,” confessed one young victim expressing the emotional chaos and confusion of countless others. “I wanted to do away with myself and kept crying. My mother would not let me go anywhere alone, not even to the toilet.”

“Is this the peace we yearned for so long?” cried Elsbeth Losch from a town near Dresden. “When will all this have an end?”

 
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Note of the Editor: Here you can request an item of the ‘Hellstorm Holocaust’ package (the biggest secret in modern history: the Allied genocide of Germans after 1945), and here you can order Tom Goodrich’s other books.

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Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (XI)

By mid-May, 1945, the Allied conquerors had laid claim to virtually all of what was once the Third Reich—the Americans, British and French in the west, the Soviets in the east. Behind the Red Army lines, the final pockets of resistance also surrendered.

At the Courland enclave on the Baltic, over two hundred thousand German soldiers and Latvian volunteers laid down their arms, then joined the defenders of Berlin on the long, one-way march to Siberia. After seventy days of desperate, heroic struggle, the besieged garrison of Breslau also lowered its flag and these men too began their Siberian death march. And also after surrender, the already haggard females of Breslau began pondering “whether life had not been sweeter during the worst days of the siege.” Remembered one girl:

Rape began almost immediately and there was a viciousness in the acts as if we women were being punished for Breslau having resisted for so long… Let me say that I was young, pretty, plump and fairly inexperienced. A succession of Ivans gave me over the next week or two a lifetime of experience. Luckily very few of their rapes lasted more than a minute. With many it was just a matter of seconds before they collapsed gasping. What kept me sane was that almost from the very first one I felt only a contempt for these bullying and smelly peasants who could not act gently towards a woman, and who had about as much sexual technique as a rabbit.

“For four years [Propaganda Minister, Joseph] Goebbels kept telling us that the Russians were rapists, that they would violate, murder, rob and pillage us,” explained one woman. “Such propaganda did not shock us and we looked forward to being liberated by the Allies… We could not bear it when Goebbels turned out to be right.”

“Red soldiers during the first weeks of their occupation raped every women and girl between the ages of 2 and 60. That sounds exaggerated, but it is the simple truth…,” a stunned American reporter revealed. “Husbands and fathers who attempted to protect their women folk were shot down, and girls offering extreme resistance were murdered.”

Although frantic females tried numerous stratagems to stop the attacks, nothing they did seemed to slow, much less halt, the Soviet sexual assaults-not age, not looks, not illness, nothing.

“A young Russian with a pistol in his hand came to fetch me,” a mother of two small children reminisced. “I have to admit that I was so frightened (and not just of the pistol) that I could not hold my bladder. That didn’t disturb him in the least.” When this same woman later went with her sister to see a Soviet military physician, far from helping the females, the doctor and another officer raped them both. The young mother herself was on her menstrual cycle; her sister was in the late stages of pregnancy.

Far from being sanctuaries, houses of worship were some of the first stops for the Red Army. In addition to the mass rape of females who sought shelter in churches and cathedrals, nuns likewise suffered the same. In one Silesian city alone, Soviet soldiers brutally raped nearly two hundred Catholic sisters leaving sixty-six pregnant nuns in their wake.

Although German women were naturally their favorite targets, virtually any female in the path of the communist army would do. Thousands of women of all nationalities held in German and Polish labor camps were not merely liberated when the Soviets arrived.

“I waited for the Red Army for days and nights,” admitted one Russian female. “I waited for my liberation, but now our soldiers treat us far worse than the Germans did. They do terrible things to us.”

At devastated Dresden, Chemnitz and other cities in eastern Germany that now for the first time experienced Soviet occupation, the situation was the same. Encouraged by the Jewish propagandist, Ilya Ehrenburg, Soviet soldiers were not merely encouraged to rape and kill all Germans they encountered, they were all but ordered to do it; it was the Red soldier’s “patriotic duty,” insisted Stalin’s murderous mouthpiece.

“Kill them all, men, old men, children and the women, after you have amused yourself with them!” demanded Ehrenburg. “Kill. Nothing in Germany is guiltless, neither the living nor the yet unborn… Break the racial pride of the German women. Take her as your legitimate booty. Kill, you brave soldiers of the victorious Soviet Army.”

Although front-line troops-Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians committed their share of savage atrocities, it was the rear echelon—Mongolians, and other Asiatics—that were responsible for perhaps not just the greatest number of crimes but also the greatest degree of crimes. To most Germans, however, all were known simply as “Russians,” or “Ivans.”

“There were no limits to the bestiality and licentiousness of these troops…,” remembered a pastor from Milzig. “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.”

When groups of fleeing refugees were overtaken by the Soviets the rapes and murders took on a massive, mechanical quality.

Typically, all captured females—old, young, sick, pregnant, mothers and their children included—were forced to lie by the sides of roads while the laughing Soviet soldiers lined up, then lowered their trousers. One after another, the attacks continued. Generally, as more passing troops arrived, the lines got longer, not shorter. Those females who lost consciousness from blood loss were dragged to the side or rolled into a ditch. Any mother who tried to save her daughter was automatically shot. Even those soldiers who would have otherwise avoided such sadistic crimes were compelled, “without exception,” to join in by “grinning officers” who stood at the head of each line.

Like the case above, whenever possible commissars made certain that German men—fathers, husbands, priests, soldiers—were forced to watch the rape of German women be it inside homes, schools, churches, in parks, on sidewalks, or by the roadsides.

With machine guns trained on them, one large group of surrendering German soldiers, including the famous air ace, Erich Hartmann, were forced to look on as a mob of drunken Soviets threw captured women and girls to the ground, tore off their clothes, then, amid howls and laughter, began their violent sexual attacks.

A young German woman, mother of a twelve-year-old girl, knelt at the feet of one Soviet and begged that he and the others take her, not the child. Ignoring her tearful pleas the man strode away, a mocking grin on his face. “Damned fascist pig!” yelled a soldier nearby as he kicked the mother in the face then shot and killed her. With that the killer dragged the dead woman’s daughter behind a nearby tank. He was joined by others and for half an hour only the screams of the little girl and laughter of the men was heard. Then, their hate and lust sated , the rapists finally withdrew. Completely naked and unable to stand, the bloodied child crawled slowly back to her dead mother. An hour later the sobbing little girl at last stopped crying and joined her mother in death.

At the same time as the above was transpiring, eight- and nine­ year-old children were also being raped and sodomized repeatedly by the Soviets. Mothers who tried to protect their daughters were beaten unconscious and dragged to the side where they themselves were savagely raped and killed.

“Kill! Kill!” urged the blood-thirsty propagandist , Ilya Ehrenburg. “In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn but is evil!… Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women… Kill! As you storm onward, kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army.”

“Fear is always present,” young Regina Shelton admitted. “It flares into panic at tales of atrocities—mutilated nude bodies tossed by the wayside—a woman nailed spread-eagle to a cart and gang-raped while bleeding to death from her wounds-horrible diseases spread to their victims by sex-drunken Mongolians.” Those frustrated rapists too drunk to physically conclude their act instead used the bottle they were drinking from to symbolically continue the savagery with even more hideous damage done to the victim.

Certainly, not every soldier in the Soviet army was a drunken, sadistic monster. Some officers protected helpless German victims. Other upright soldiers placed their own lives on the line to defend the defenseless. A few, like the poet, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, were haunted for the rest of their lives by the things they had seen… and haunted by the things they had perhaps even done:

Twenty-two Hoeringstrasse. It’s not been burned, just looted, rifled. A moaning by the walls, half muffled: the mother’s wounded, half alive. The little daughter’s on the mattress, dead. How many have been on it? A platoon, a company perhaps? A girl’s been turned into a woman, a woman turned into a corpse… The mother begs, “Soldier, kill me!”

No, not all Soviet soldiers were child-killing rapists… but enough were. Ilya Ehrenburg:

Break the racial pride of the German women. Take her as your legitimate booty. Kill, you brave soldiers of the victorious Soviet Army.

 
______________

Note of the Editor: Here you can request an item of the ‘Hellstorm Holocaust’ package (the biggest secret in modern history: the Allied genocide of Germans after 1945), and here you can order Tom Goodrich’s other books.

Categories
Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (X)

Editor’s note: American neonazis, white nationalists, alt-righters, race realists and southern nationalists in the US must be truly demented for failing to mention the following atrocities on their blogsites and webzines. There are some isolated exceptions of course. But how come Jews are smart enough to place their Shoah as their most popular story when supposed pro-Aryans don’t speak out about the Holocaust of Germans?

Sometimes I wish that all right-wing and racist sites die while only The West’s Darkest Hour prevails…

 

______ 卐 ______

 

While the brutal mistreatment and murder of German military men was in progress, elsewhere, in neighboring countries, but especially Czechoslovakia, a horror unimaginable was transpiring. On May 5, when rumors swept through Prague that US forces were only a short distance away, the citizens of the Czech capital rose up against Nazi occupation. Before the day was out most of the German garrison had been isolated and surrounded.

Meanwhile, the roundup of German civilians in the city, including many refugees, began. Years of pent hatred for the German minority in their midst now finally had a free hand among the population. As men, women and children were marched through the streets, large crowds of Czechs were waiting. Amid a shower of rocks, bricks, kicks, and blows, the Germans were forced to run a terrifying gauntlet to the prison. Men in the mob grabbed fleeing women and girls and dragged them aside. Some were raped in the streets, others had their heads shaved and swastikas were painted on their bare backs and breasts.

“Woe, woe, woe, thrice woe to the Germans…” threatened the revenge-minded Czech president, Edvard Benes, as he returned from exile.” We have decided… that we have to liquidate the German problem in our republic once and for all.” Unfortunately, many Czechs eagerly embraced Benes’ words at their literal worst.

When the fighting in Czechoslovakia finally ended a few days later, the mob then turned its attention to the thousands of captives locked in prisons. “Several trucks loaded with German wounded and medical personnel drove into the [prison] court,” records a young journalist, Jurgen Thorwald. “The wounded, the nurses, the doctors had just climbed from their vehicles when suddenly a band of insurgents appeared from the street and pounced upon them. They tore away their crutches, canes, and bandages, knocked them to the ground, and with clubs, poles, and hammers hit them until the Germans lay still.”

“So began a day as evil as any known to history,” muttered Thorwald.

In the street, crowds were waiting for those who were marched out of their prisons… [T]hey had come equipped with everything their aroused passions might desire, from hot pitch to garden shears… They… grabbed Germans—and not only SS men—drenched them with gasoline, strung them up with their feet uppermost, set them on fire, and watched their agony, prolonged by the fact that in their position the rising heat and smoke did not suffocate them. They… tied German men and women together with barbed wire, shot into the bundles, and rolled them down into the Moldau River… They beat every German until he lay still on the ground, forced naked women to remove the barricades, cut the tendons of their heels, and laughed at their writhing. Others they kicked to death.

At a local hospital, ten of the youngest and prettiest Red Cross nurses were ordered into the street as were ten injured German soldiers. As they were marched toward a public square all were ordered to sing the German National Anthem. Those who did not sing loud enough were kicked and punched. Finally, when the column halted amid a huge, shouting mob, the patients and nurses were ordered to undress. When the nurses refused, they were slapped and knocked to the ground. “Undress or die!” screamed the leader of the gang. When all were finally nude, the girls—each hiding her face in shame—were lined up opposite the soldiers, then ordered to tear off the genitals of each man. No one moved at this horrific command. “Rip it off! Rip it off!” shouted the sadistic leader as the crowd thereupon clapped and shouted in unison. When the girls still refused all were either killed or beaten unconscious with rifle butts.

Elsewhere six young Germans were ordered to haul away several bodies that had been hung upside down, the teeth of each kicked out, then all set on fire with gasoline. Surrounded by a howling crowd the young men quickly did as ordered.

“The faces were mutilated beyond recognition…,” recounted one of the Germans, “the mouths just bloody holes. The roasted skin stuck to our hands. We had to carry them… and drag them when we could no longer carry… When we had put the bodies down we were forced to kiss them on the mouth. We were told, ‘They’re your brothers, now kiss them!’… No matter how revolting it was, staying alive was more important, and so we squeezed our lips together and pressed them into the bloody ooze that represented their mouths.”

As he struggled to escape the city a German soldier disguised as a priest saw sights that seemed scripted in hell. On one street the man encountered a young mother kneeling, sobbing uncontrollably. In the woman’s arms was her dead child, eyes gouged out, a knife still stuck in his tiny stomach. It was clear from the mother’s torn clothing and mangled hair that she had fought furiously to save her child. Horrified, the soldier urged the woman to leave before another mob approached and killed her.

“But that’s what I want!” the mother cried out. “I don’t want to go on living without my little Peter!

On another street, the disguised soldier saw a shouting mob bind several German women with rope to a poster pillar. Their seven children were then stuffed into the gutter drain at their feet. Soon, while others were spitting on them and tearing fistfuls on hair from the victims, an older Czech woman ran up and poured gasoline over the mothers as well as into the gutter. Laughing hysterically, another woman quickly appeared with a flaming newspaper. In a sudden fiery blast, the screaming victims were lost in a ball of orange flames. With a final act of desperation, one of the mothers managed to break free of the rope. Falling to her stomach like a living torch, with super-human strength the dying woman yanked the heavy grating off the gutter and reached into the mass of screaming children. In a moment, however, the mother was dead, as were the other women and children. With that, the mob danced around the pillar, shouting and laughing deliriously.

When the same witness reached the city’s central square it was evident that an orgy of blood and hate was in progress. Hanging dead from every lamppost lining the streets was a German soldier, most of whom had been dragged from hospital beds. In the center of the square a large crowd danced and shouted as two men held a totally naked German girl. With both breasts pierced by large safety pins that displayed Iron Cross medals, a bar bearing a swastika flag was stabbed into the screaming girl’s navel. Nearby, a naked mother lay motionless beside her trampled child. The woman had been beaten to death and a gaping head wound revealed her brain as it oozed out.

Elsewhere in the square, five Germans were pulled from a truck. The hands of the men were tied while the other end of the rope was fastened to the hitch of the vehicle. A young Czech thereupon climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. When the truck pulled away, the shouting crowd fell into a wild frenzy of hatred. For a few moments the captives were able keep up with the slow-moving vehicle. The more the driver gained speed, however, the more it became impossible for the men to keep their feet. One after another the victims fell, then all were jerked and dragged along at ever-increasing speed. After only a few rounds of the square, the Germans were mangled beyond recognition. When the truck finally stopped the victims were simply raw lumps of blood, flesh and filth.

Ultimately, the terrified soldier-clad-as-priest managed to escape the Prague slaughter pen, one of the few Germans to do so.

Meanwhile, at the huge sports stadium, thousands of Germans were herded onto the field to provide amusement for a laughing, shouting audience. “Before our very eyes… [they] were tortured to death in every conceivable way,” remembered Josefine Waimann. “Most deeply branded on my memory is the pregnant woman whose belly… uniformed Czechs slashed open, ripped out the fetus and then, howling with glee, stuffed a dachshund into the torn womb of the woman, who was screaming dreadfully… The slaughter happening in the arena before our very eyes was like that in ancient Rome.”

The horror born at Prague soon spread to the rest of Czechoslovakia, particularly the Sudetenland, where Germans had lived for over seven centuries.

At Aussig on the Elbe River, an estimated 2,000 Germans were murdered when Czech militiamen drove them en mass into the river. “Women were thrown into the Elbe along with their babies in their prams,” wrote a witness, “and the soldiers then used them for target practice, shooting at the women until they no longer surfaced.” In another town, a farmer was nailed to his barn door upside down. Sharpened wooden matches were shoved under his fingernails, then lit.

[See clip on Post-war murder of Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia here.]

When a train carrying Germans fleeing the purge was stopped by Czech soldiers at Prerau, the people were ordered off and told to begin digging a huge trench. At midnight, when the hole was deemed wide enough and deep enough, the soldiers murdered every man, woman and child and rolled them into the mass grave. The oldest victims were in their eighties, the youngest, eight months.

Soon after the Red Army reached Czechoslovakia, Soviet commissars—Jewish political officers who traveled with the Red Army to ensure that soldiers exhibited proper “communist zeal”—added their own brand of sadism to the murderous mix. Torture pens were set up where the entertainment went on for days. In one basement German men and women were not only raped and beaten but were held down while a garden hose was shoved up their rectums and turned on to its maximum. In another pen, Germans were forced to crawl on their knees, give the Nazi salute and kiss photographs of Adolf Hitler that dripped with fresh sputum. Others were compelled to drink urine out of buckets. Some had their heads submerged in toilets filled with excrement, then were ordered to sing the German national anthem. Few survived such ordeals, of course, and perhaps even fewer hoped to.

“Take everything from the Germans,” demanded Czech president, Edvard Benes, “leave them only a handkerchief to sob into!”

“You may kill Germans, it’s no sin,” cried a priest to a village mob. At Bilina, stated a chronicler

…men and women were rounded up in the market square, had to strip naked and were made to walk single-file while being beaten by the population with whips and canes. Then… the men had to crawl on all fours, like dogs, one behind the other, during which they were beaten until they lost control of their bowels; each had to lick the excrement off the one in front of him. This torture continued until many of them had been beaten to death… What was done to the women there simply cannot be described, the sadistic monstrousness of it is simply too great for words.

“When I passed through Czechoslovakia after the collapse,” one German soldier recalled,” I saw severed human heads lining window sills, and in one butcher’s shop naked corpses were hanging from the meat hooks.”

When the fury had finally spent itself in Czechoslovakia, over 200,000 people had been butchered. Similar purges of German minorities occurred in Hungary, Yugoslavia and elsewhere when men, women and children, by the hundreds of thousands, were massacred in cold blood. The slaughter throughout Europe was not confined to ethnic Germans alone. Following the Allied occupation of France, over one hundred thousand French citizens were murdered by their communist countrymen because of collaboration with the Germans or other anti-communist activities. Similar, though smaller, reckonings took place in Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway.

Categories
Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (IX)

Reading the below passages makes me think that the dark hour that the United States is currently suffering is the perfect punishment for the sin they committed in the 1940s: an Aryan sin so astronomical that it reaches Pluto. The punishment for having committed it is nothing less than the extinction of the founding stock of the US—and the rest of the whites around the world, as other whites are also reluctant to question the current narrative about the Second World War.

Many white nationalists also sin, to the point of ethnic suicide, because unlike Goodrich they are not even able to recognise what their ancestors did (when Richard Spencer, for example, has commented something on the subject in his recent YouTube interviews?).

Mark my words: if the white race is extinguished, let it be clear that it was due not only to the propaganda of the media at the hands of Jews, but to the fact that in the present century the dreadfully named ‘white nationalists’ hardly speak about the Hellstorm Holocaust in their forums.

Here we see again why the retrocognitive visions of a Bran under the Heart Tree, although this time seeing what really happened in WW2, could help to save the white man. But unlike the Stark family who in the TV series listened to Bran, in real life even nationalists are uninterested in Goodrich’s retrocognitive visions:

 

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It is amazing to observe how brave and firm some men become when all danger is past. I have noticed on fields of battle brave men never insult the captured or mutilate the dead; but cowards and laggard s always do. —US Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman

While the Allied occupation of Germany was in progress, the cold­blooded murder of Nazi Party members, German SS troops and other anti-communists was in full swing. Unaware of the vicious propaganda aimed at them in America, when proud SS units surrendered to the US Army they naively assumed that they would be accorded their rights under the Geneva Convention and respected by fellow soldiers as the unsurpassed fighters that they certainly were. Instead, moments after giving up their weapons thousands were simply beaten bloody, then slaughtered where they stood. No less than seven hundred troops of the 8th SS Mountain Division were massacred by the Americans soon after surrender. Likewise, members of the SS Westphalia Brigade were marched a short distance then shot in the back of the head. Elsewhere, other SS units fared no better for the unwritten but understood orders from above were “no members of the SS shall be taken prisoner.”

“The Americans forced the Germans to walk in front of them with raised hands in groups of four,” recounted an eyewitness on the fate of another fifty surrendered soldiers near Jungholzhausen. “Then they shot the prisoners in their heads from behind.”

After shooting them and smashing their skulls with rifle butts, the US 7th Army threw another two hundred SS men into a mass grave.

Reveals one American soldier of another massacre:

As we were going up the hill out of town… some of our boys were lining up German prisoners in the fields on both sides of the road. They must have been 25 or 30 German boys in each group. Machine guns were being set up. These boys were to be machine gunned and murdered. We were committing the same crimes we were now accusing the Japs and Germans of doing. The terrible significance of what was going on did not occur to me at the time. After the killing and confusion of that morning the idea of killing some more Krauts didn’t particularly bother me… I turned my back on the scene and walked on up the hill.

“Those who were able stood at the window, and told those of us who were lying down what was going on.” So wrote Lt. Hans Woltersdorf. At that moment, the young officer was himself recovering in a German military hospital when US forces arrived. Outside, a motorcycle with a sidecar had just pulled up carrying an officer and two men of the Waffen-SS. When the Americans disarmed them, the two soldiers were allowed to proceed on foot but the officer and others were led away. Soon, Waltersdorf and the other patients heard a loud burst of submachine gun fire.

“Did you see that? They shot the lieutenant! Did you see that? They’re shooting all the Waffen-SS officers!” shouted the men at the window.

Horrified, but thinking quickly, several patients raced down to the hospital office, destroyed all the SS medical files they could find, then replaced them with records from the regular German Wehrmacht. After locating a number of army uniforms for the SS men to wear, the soldiers could only hope and pray that their efforts were rewarded. Unfortunately, such stratagems seldom succeeded since SS soldiers had their blood-type tattooed under the left arm.

“Again and again,” continues Waltersdorf, “Americans invaded the place and gathered up groups of people who had to strip to the waist and raise their left arm. Then we saw some of them being shoved on to trucks with rifle butts.”

When French forces under Jacques-Philippe Leclerc captured a dozen French SS near Karlstein, the general sarcastically asked one of the young soldiers why he was wearing a German uniform.

“You look very smart in your American uniform, General,” replied the boy.

In a rage, Leclerc ordered the captives shot.

“All refused to have their eyes bandaged,” a priest on the scene noted, “and all bravely fell crying ‘Vive la France!“‘

Although SS troops were routinely slaughtered upon surrender, anyone wearing a German uniform was considered extremely fortunate if he was merely punched, kicked, then marched to the rear.

“Before they could be properly put in jail,” records a witness when a group of little boys were marched past, “American GIs… fell on them and beat them bloody, just because they had German uniforms.”

Categories
Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (VIII)

by Tom Goodrich

Chapter 1:
The hour zero

The long gray column stretched east for mile upon muddy mile. Like a wounded animal searching for a quiet place to die, the line moved slowly, painfully, yet steadily. Limping and dragging, staggering and stumbling, the once-mighty German Wehrmacht was now bound for slavery and death. In a stand-up club and claw fight to the finish, a contest between Adolf Hitler and European nationalism versus Josef Stalin and International Communism, the latter, with the power and weight of the United States and the British Empire behind him, had come off victorious. Now, just as the ragged, starving old men and boys in gray were marching east to oblivion, much of the Europe they were leaving was also passing into its own oblivion; for years to come the once bright and beautiful continent would know little else than darkness, degradation, death, and despair.

Above, black as a funeral, the brooding clouds of dejection and defeat. Below, littering the muddy road to Siberia, tattered bits of burnt clothing, broken strips of boot leather, dirty brown bandages, and puddles of blood, fresh, wet and dark. Ahead, years of back-breaking, mind-killing work in mines, bogs and forests and for almost all, the end—a frozen, unmarked grave. Behind, thousands of dead comrades, thousands of dead friends, thousands of dead family members—men, women, children, pets—buried beneath the rubble of a place that no longer resembled anything of this world. Behind, Berlin, the last battle of the war.

“The capital of the Third Reich is a heap of gaunt, burned-out, flame-seared buildings,” reported one of the first Allied correspondents to reach Berlin. “It is a desert of a hundred thousand dunes made up of brick and powdered masonry… It is impossible to exaggerate in describing the destruction… Downtown Berlin looks like nothing man could have contrived… I did not see a single building where you could have set up a business of even selling apples.”

Others who reached Berlin when the bombs stopped falling were likewise stunned by the almost total destruction. Block after block, mile after mile, as far as eyes could see and as far as legs could walk. There was no end to the ruins, ruins that once were one of the most gorgeous and glittering capitals on earth. But even more staggering to those who first viewed Berlin after the war was the total disbelief that anything calling itself “human” could still exist amid such utter ruin.

“Seeing them you almost hope that they are not human,” admitted a visitor.

But, and almost miraculously, there were humans yet living in Berlin. When the guns finally fell silent on May 8, 1945, these tattered and starved survivors crept from their cracks and caves, trying to flee: a nightmare, they knew not where.

“We clamber over bomb craters,” describes one woman trying to escape. “We squeeze through tangled barbed wire and hastily constructed barricades of furniture. It was with sofas that our army tried to block the Russian advance!… One could laugh if it didn’t rather make one feel like crying.”

Tanks riddled with holes block the way. A pitiful sight, pointing their muzzles toward the sky… Burned-out buildings left and right… Behind a projection in a wall sits an old man. A pipe in his right hand, a lighter in his left . He is sitting in the sun, completely motionless. Why is he sitting so still? Why doesn’t he move at all? A fly is crawling across his face. Green, fat, shiny. Now it crawls into his eyes. The eyes… Oh God have mercy! Something slimy is dripping onto his cheeks…

At last the water tower looms up in the distance. We are at the cemetery. The gate to the mortuary is wide open… Bodies, nothing but bodies. Laid out on the floor. Row after row, body after body. Children are among them, adults and some very old people. Brought here from who knows where. That draws the final line under five years of war. Children filling mortuaries and old men decomposing behind walls.

What had taken the German race over two millennia to build, had taken its enemy a mere handful of years to destroy. When the fighting, finally ended, the Great German Reich, which had been one of the most modern industrial giants in the world, lay totally, thoroughly and almost hopelessly, demolished. Germany, mused an American newsman drifting through the rubble, resembled nothing so much as it resembled “the face of the moon.”

At Germany’s second largest city, Hamburg, what Philip Dark found likewise staggered the senses. It was, thought the soldier, “a city devastated beyond all comprehension. It was more than appalling. As far as the eye could see, square mile after square mile of empty shells of buildings with twisted girders scarecrowed in the air…”

And what Leonard Mosley saw when he reached Hanover epitomized the condition of all German cities at war’s end. Hanover, typed the British reporter, “looked like a wound in the earth rather than a city. As we came nearer, I looked for the familiar signs that I used too know, but… I could not recognize [them] anywhere… The city was a gigantic open sore.”

Just as in Berlin, to the shock and surprise of not only Dark and Mosley, but to the survivors as well, life actually existed among and under the seemingly sterile rock piles. Like cave-dwellers from the beginning of time, men, women and children slept, whispered, suffered, starved, cried, and died below the tons of jagged concrete, broken pipes and twisted metal.

Other than being utterly destroyed, another feature shared by Hanover, Hamburg, Berlin, and every other German city was the nauseating stench that hung over them like a pall. “[E]verywhere,” remembered a witness, “came the putrid smell of decaying flesh to remind the living that thousands of bodies still remained beneath the funeral pyres of rubble.”

“I’d often seen it described as ‘a sweetish smell’—but I find the word ‘sweetish’ imprecise and inadequate,” one survivor scribbled in her diary. “It strikes me not so much a smell as something solid, tangible, something too thick to be inhaled. It takes one’s breath away and repels, thrusts one back, as though with fists.”

By their own tally of firebombing casualties, the British estimated that they had killed upwards of half a million German civilians. That some sources from the Dresden raid alone set the toll there at 300,000—400,000 dead would suggest that the British figures were absurdly­ and perhaps deliberately—low. Whatever the accurate figure, the facts are that few German families survived the war intact. Those who did not lose a father, a brother, a sister, a mother—or all the above—were by far the exception to the rule. In many towns and villages the dead quite literally outnumbered the living. For some, the hours and days following the final collapse was simply too much. Unwilling to live any longer in a world of death, misery and alien chaos, countless numbers took the ultimate step.

“Thousands of bodies are hanging in the trees in the woods around Berlin and nobody bothers to cut them down,” a German pastor remarked. “Thousands of corpses are carried into the sea by the Oder and Elbe Rivers—one doesn’t notice it any longer.”

Nor did one notice any longer the thousands of black and bloating bodies laying in the German countryside, on farms, in pastures, along fields, by roads, in ditches, the bodies of gray old men and fresh-faced boys of the Volkssturm, or militia, the pathetic last line of defense; disarmed, beaten, then murdered in cold blood by the same American army that murdered the boys at Dachau, murdered as they desperately tried to surrender, to somehow survive a war that was already over.

For Germany, May 8, 1945 became known as “The Hour Zero”—the end of a nightmare and the beginning of a dark, uncertain future. Most assumed, no doubt, that awful though the coming weeks and months would be, the worst was nevertheless behind them. It seemed to these dazed and damaged people that nothing the future had to offer could match what they had suffered through in the past.

But these people were wrong. The worst yet lay ahead. Though most of the shooting and bombing had indeed stopped, the war against Germany would continue unabated, forever if necessary, until the last German was dead. World War II was by far history’s most terrifying war, but what still lay ahead would prove, as Time magazine later phrased it, “History’s most terrifying peace.”

Categories
Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (VII)

Finally, the two machine-guns were reloaded and the order to fire was given. In a moment, as the bullets tore into them, the young Germans standing fell upon the bodies below. Perhaps all three were killed outright; or perhaps, in yet another miracle, perhaps the three were merely wounded and feigned death.

Certain it was that among all the wounded soldiers, their lips prayed silently, under their breath, “Please, dear God, oh, please… please do not let this happen.”

In a short while, newly freed concentration camp prisoners in their striped clothing were handed pistols and ordered by the Americans to go among the stacks of bodies and finish the job. Thus, as .45 caliber slugs mechanically blew open the skulls of all German soldiers, dead and living alike, any miracles at Dachau officially ended.

“We shot everything that moved,” one GI bragged.

“We got all the bastards,” gloated another.

In Henry Morgenthau’s world, there was no room for “miracles”—Germany must perish and all Germans must die.
 

Categories
Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (VI)

The Dachau Massacre was a relatively small affair as numbers go and it might have remained little more than a footnote in World War II history but for one thing: Dachau was symbolic. The cold-blooded murders occurred after the war was won by the Allies and the peace, for all intents and purposes, should have been declared.

The evil turned loose that gray day at Dachau was a terrible harbinger of what was to come; it was a clear and unmistakable announcement to the world that the war and bloodshed would continue. Dachau was also grisly proof that what had been the world’s worst war would now transition into the world’s worst peace, or, as Henry Morgenthau demanded, a “peace of punishment.”