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Category: Summer, 1945 (book)

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Holocaust Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (V)

by Tom Goodrich

Just as at Dachau, when the American army reached the various German concentration camps with dozens of reporters and camera­men in tow, the viewers were horrified by what they saw. The thousands of dead, emaciated bodies seemed proof of the propaganda they had read about for years; proof that the Nazi regime had indeed been engaged in a deliberate policy of mass murder and extermination of Jews. Certainly, men like the political generals, Eisenhower and Marshall, and the willing propagandists themselves, knew better. But with carefully crafted words, and now with photos and film of bodies, it would be an easy sell to millions in the US, Europe and others around the world.

And so, thus began phase two of the vicious propaganda war against Germany. The first phase had begun with the election of Adolf Hitler and continued down to the war’s end. The second phase would continue from the so-called “peace” and occupation of Germany right through to the present moment. On cue, from their first footfalls into Germany, hate-filled propagandists like the following began the coordinated psychological attack on the occupied Reich, on her people, on every man, woman and child.

“You must expect to atone with toil and sweat for what your children have committed and for what you have failed to prevent,” warned one Allied spokesman on camera as horrified German civilians were forced to parade in penance through the Belsen concentration camp. A place like Belsen was, the man continued, “such a disgrace to the German people that their name must be erased from the list of civilized nations.”

Given the circumstances, the fate of those Germans living near this and other concentration camps was as tragic as it was perhaps predictable. After compelling the people to view the bodies, American and British officers forced men, women and children to dig up with their hands the rotting remains and haul them to burial pits. Wrote a witness at one camp:

All day long, always running, men and women alike, from the death pile to the death pit, with the stringy remains of their victims over their shoulders. When one of them dropped to the ground with exhaustion, he was beaten with a rifle butt. When another stopped for a break, she was kicked until she ran again, or prodded with a bayonet, to the accompaniment of lewd shouts and laughs. When one tried to escape or disobeyed an order, he was shot.

Few victors, from Eisenhower down, seemed to notice, and fewer seemed to care, that conditions similar to Dachau and the other concentration camps existed in cities and towns throughout much of Germany. Because of the almost total paralysis of the Reich’s roads, rivers and rails caused by around-the-clock air attacks, supplies of food, fuel, clothes, and medicine had thinned to a trickle in the devastated German communities and dried up almost entirely at the concentration camps. As a consequence, thousands of camp inmates swiftly succumbed in the final weeks of the war to disease, starvation and neglect. When pressed by a friend if there had indeed been a deliberate policy of extermination, one of the few guards lucky enough to escape another camp protested:

“It wasn’t like that, believe me; it wasn’t like that! I’m maybe the only survivor who can witness to how it really was, but who would believe me!””Is it all a lie?””Yes and no,” he said. “I can only say what I know about our camp. The final weeks were horrible. No more rations came, no more medical supplies. The people got ill, they lost weight, and it kept getting more and more difficult to keep order. Even our own people lost their nerve in this extreme situation. But do you think we would have held out until the end to hand the camp over in an orderly fashion if we had been these murderers?”

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Editor’s note: The footnotes have been omitted in the quotations above. Summer 1945is a book that exposes the atrocities committed by the United States in Japan and Germany. If the reader wants a book by the same author that only talks about the allied atrocities in Germany, obtain a copy of Hellstorm, The Death of Nazi Germany: 1944-1947 (sample chapter: here).

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Dwight D. Eisenhower Evil Franklin D. Roosevelt Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (IV)

by Tom Goodrich

Although cold-blooded and deliberate, the murder of disarmed and helpless German soldiers by the Americans was nothing new; it was a ruthless policy that stretched from the beaches of Normandy all the way through France, Belgium and into Germany. Dachau was only one of thousands of deliberate massacres that had taken place throughout the defeated Reich, on land, on sea and from the air, during the last year of war. If there was any significance at all to the Dachau slaughter, it was that the war, for all intents and purposes, was finally over. As far as any strategic value to the Allied war effort, there was none at Dachau. Nor was there any strategic value to the countless massacres that occurred during the deliberate firebombing of German cities where hundreds of thousands of women and children were burned alive. Nor was there any strategic value to the sinking of numerous refugee ships on the Baltic filled mostly with the very old and the very young. They were, all of them, simply a harvest of hate.

In 1933, after Adolf Hitler came to power, the World Jewish Congress declared economic warfare against Germany. Well aware of Hitler’s plan to end all Jewish influence in Germany—economically, politically, culturally—influential Jews in Europe and America engaged in a vast anti-German propaganda campaign. The campaign, said organizer Samuel Untermeyer of the United States, was a “holy war… a war that must be waged unremittingly… [against] a veritable hell of cruel and savage beasts.”[1]

As a consequence, Germans responded in kind with a campaign of their own. While citizens were encouraged to shun Jewish businesses, a series of laws were enacted designed to not only drive Jews from the German arts, the media and the professions, but laws were passed to force them entirely from the nation as well. As the economic struggle continued, Jewish journalists, writers, playwrights, and filmmakers from around the globe joined the fray. With the outbreak of war in 1939 and the entry of the United States into the conflict two years later, the war of words reached pathological proportions. Increasingly, as rumors of widespread persecution against Jews under Nazi control spread, the propaganda campaign directed at Hitler and National Socialism devolved swiftly into a fanatical cry of extermination. Nowhere was hatred more intense than among American Jews.

“[A] cancer flourishes in the body of the world and in its mind and soul, and… this cancerous thing is Germany, Germanism, and Germans…,” announced Hollywood script-writer and director, Ben Hecht. “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 Jew—a name that dwarfs him as the tree does the weed at its foot—is an outrageous thing… It is an evil thing.” [2]

“Germany must perish…,” echoed Theodore N. Kaufman in a widely-read book of the same name. “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.”[3]

After years of this and other poisonous propaganda in newspapers, magazines and movies, 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, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt made the demand for extermination official when he endorsed the so-called “Morgenthau Plan.” Named for Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, but actually conceived by the secretary’s top aide, Harry Dexter White—both of whom were Jewish—the program called for the complete destruction of Germany after the victory had been won. In addition to the dismantling or destruction of German industry and the permanent closure of mines, the Morgenthau Plan called for a reduction of the Reich’s land area by one half. As many calculated, and as Roosevelt, Gen. George C. Marshall and other proponent s of the plan well knew, this act guaranteed that roughly two-thirds of the German population, or fifty million people, would soon die of starvation. With the remnant of the population reduced to subsistence farming, and with the shrunken nation totally at the mercy of hostile European neighbors, it was estimated that within two generations Germany would cease to exist. [4]

“Henry, I am with you 100%,” Roosevelt assured his Treasury Secretary. [5]

“They have asked for it…,” snapped Morgenthau when someone expressed shock at the plan. “Why the hell should I worry about what happens to their people?”[6]

“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.[7]

In fact, the American president had even greater plans for those Germans who were not starved to death or otherwise murdered.

“We have got to be tough with Germany and I mean the German people, not just the Nazis,” Roosevelt privately assured Henry Morgenthau. “You either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such a manner so they can’t go on reproducing.”[8]

“The German is a beast,” agreed Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Not only would the top general give the Morgenthau Plan his whole-hearted support, but he would personally do his utmost to kill as many Germans—soldiers and civilians—as he possibly could.[9]

And thus did the murderous Morgenthau Plan become the undeclared, but understood, American policy toward Germany. From the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 to the firebombing of Dresden in 1945, the goal of the British RAF and the US Eighth Air Force was now to kill every man, woman and child in every German city and town. Likewise, from their first footfall into Germany, the goal of the Red Army in the east and the American army in the west was to rape, and often murder, every woman they caught, to kill all the men they captured and to destroy or steal virtually everything German they came in contact with.

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NOTES

[1] New York Times, August 7, 1933; Ralph Grandinetti, “Germany’s Plan to Resettle Jews in Madagascar,” The Barnes Review 4, no. 3 (May/June 1998), 26.

[2] Ben Hecht, A Guide for the Bedeviled (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 120, 115, 130, 144, 155, 156.

[3] Theodore N. Kaufman, Germany Must Perish! (Newark, N.J.: Argyle Press, 1941), 6, 7, 28, 86.

[4] Russell D. Buhite, Decisions at Yalta (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1986), 25; Eugene Davidson, The Death and Life of Germany (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1959), 6.

[5] “War Crimes: USA,” Lt. Col. Gordon “Jack” Mohr, AUS Ret., LINK

[6] Buhite,Yalta, 23.

[7] Diary of Henry Morgenthau, entry for March 20, 1945.

[8] “David Irving’s Introduction to the Morgenthau Plan,” The Morgenthau Plan, LINK

[9] Thomas Goodrich, Hellstorm—The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947 (Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010), 167.

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Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (III)

Of all the graphic photos I have viewed in my years of research, the most horrific is not the smoldering bodies at Dresden after the fire­ storm, not the German women and children flattened by Soviet tanks on a snowy road in East Prussia, but that of the bodies at Dachau. No, not the bodies; not the emaciated concentration camp inmates who died not from a deliberate policy of extermination—as we have been told for decades now by the victors—not those, not those who had succumbed in the late stages of the war to typhus, diphtheria, dysentery, starvation, and neglect. No, the bodies I speak of were German bodies, German soldiers. And the photo is graphic not merely for the obvious; the photo is hideous more for what is not actually seen, than what is. There is a crushing, paralyzing oppression in the gray tones of the image; there is an overwhelming sense of evil in the very air; there is a terrifying embodiment of hate and malice in the forms of the Americans as they mechanically, and with utter detachment, go about their inhuman business.

As US forces swept through Bavaria toward Munich in late April, 1945, most German guards at the concentration camp near Dachau wisely fled. To maintain control and arrange for an orderly transfer of the 32,000 prisoners to the approaching Allies, and despite signs at the gate warning, “No entrance-typhus epidemic,” several hundred German soldiers obeyed when they were ordered to the prison.

When American units reached the camp the following day, the GIs were horrified by what they saw. Outside the prison were rail cars brim full with diseased and starved corpses. Inside the camp, wrote a witness, were found “a room piled high with naked and emaciated corpses… Since all the many bodies were in various stages of decomposition, the stench of death was overpowering.”

Unhinged by the nightmare surrounding them, conditioned by years of vicious anti-German propaganda, the troops turned their fury on the now disarmed German soldiers. While one group of over three hundred were led away to a walled enclosure, other Germans were murdered in the guard towers, in the barracks, or they were chased through the streets. All were soon caught and many were deliberately wounded in the legs, then turned over to camp inmates who first tortured, then tore limb from limb the helpless men and boys.

A German guard came running toward us. We grabbed him and were standing there talking to him when… [a GI] came up with a tommy-gun. He grabbed the prisoner, whirled him around and said, “There you are you son-of -a-bitch!” The man was only about three feet from us, but the soldier cut him down with his sub-machine gun. I shouted at him, “what did you do that for, he was a prisoner?” He looked at me and screamed “Gotta kill em, gotta kill em.” When I saw the look in his eyes and the machine gun waving in the air, I said to my men, “Let him go.” [1] 

While the tortures and murders were in progress, 350 German soldiers were lined up against a wall, two machine-guns were planted, then the Americans opened fire. Those yet alive when the fusillade ended, including the three young men still standing, were forced to wait amid the bloody carnage while the machine-guns were reloaded.

___________

[1] Howard Buechner, Dachau—The Hour of the Avenger(Metarie, Louisiana: Thunderbird Press, 1986), 75-76.

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Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (II)

Prologue:
Germany must perish

It is a cool, overcast day. It is an April day so typical in southern Germany, not quite winter, not quite spring.

They stand painfully, unbearably alone against a gray wall, under a gray Bavarian sky. Two of the three have their arms held high, facing the camera. The arms of these two are raised in such a way as to suggest that they have either been held in that position for a very long time or that they are now simply arms resigned to their fate. The other soldier has folded his arms quietly over his stomach. Perhaps he is sick. Perhaps he is wounded. Perhaps, like the others, he too simply does not care any longer.

They are all young; perhaps 17, or younger. At their feet, laying in piles up and down the line, there lay the others. Some are dead. Some, agonizing in their own blood, are yet alive. Others, no doubt, are uninjured but there they lay, unmoving, feigning death, eyes shut tight, brains pounding hard, minds screaming loud, “Why? Why? Why?” The machine-gun facing those on the ground and those yet standing is now being reloaded.

The three boys still standing are terrified. In all likelihood, one or all have lost control from fear and have urinated on themselves. Hearts are beating three times their normal rate. The pounding throb in each boy’s temples is so loud that it drowns out all other sound. Each face is pale. Each body is weak. Each mind is lost. Each boy is trying to make sense of it all. Such a thing as this cannot be happening. It is all a mistake. It surely is but a dream. Surely it is a nightmare from which they will soon awaken. Those soldiers facing them are Americans. They, like Germans, do not do such things. Each boy perhaps has a cousin or an uncle in America. They would not do such a thing.

Or perhaps the boys are beyond all this. Perhaps they know; know it is not a dream, but really happening to them. Perhaps they look to the left, then to the right, then down to their feet to see the red blood pouring in streams from those once their friends, their classmates, their cousins, even their brothers. Perhaps, as others about to die, perhaps their lives are already passing rapidly before their eyes—back to their childhoods, back to their teachers, back to their families, their pets, their girlfriends, back to the day when one of them nearly drowned in the lake and a British tourist saved him; or back to the pretty farm now turning from winter gray to spring green, the sweet­ smelling apple orchard now in bloom, the orchard he loved so much, just as his parents had, just as his grandparents had, just as their parents had.

Or perhaps the young men imagine that it was a miracle; when all else were shot by the machine-gun and died, God had sent them a miracle; a message from heaven that they would live. What else could have saved them when so many hundreds had died? Who else but God could have spared them?

We will never know what the boys were thinking as they stood alone in a sea of the dead. In a moment, the machine-gun will be reloaded and the Americans, laughing, shouting, staring at the young men with eyes of sadistic hate will then shoot them down.

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Evil Hate Summer, 1945 (book)

1945 (I)

Foreword

This book is about crime and the evil things evil men do. This book is about words and hate and the powerful price of propaganda. This book is about the savage, no-quarter war waged against Japan during the summer of 1945 and it is about the equally savage no quarter “peace” waged against Germany during that same summer, 1945. There is no attempt herein to recite the numerous atrocities attributed to the Germans and Japanese by the victorious powers. Certainly, some of these crimes were true; equally certain, many of these crimes were not. Such is winning and losing. Such is war.

To most modern readers, the “unique” guilt attributed to the Axis powers in starting World War II as well as their supposed barbaric behavior in prosecuting it are too well known to repeat. For those who wish to learn more of the victor’s version of the war, a simple trip to the book store or library, or the viewing of virtually any feature-length movie or documentary film will offer up the Allied account of the war. This book is, instead, devoted to the inhuman treatment and savage atrocities directed at the losers of the war by the winners, both during and after that war. This book is about the evil things evil men do.

Just as my previous book on Allied war crimes during and after World War II in Europe—Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947—illustrated how deadly propaganda can be, especially when the intended target audience for such propaganda are eighteen­year-olds with weapons in their hands, so too does this book attempt to illustrate how vicious words fired by experts are far more deadly than bombs and bullets for, unlike bombs and bullets which kill only once, words kill again and again and again. Simply, Japanese and German propaganda never came close to matching Allied propaganda in pure hate; Japanese and German propaganda never had the dripping venom and murderous malice that American and British propaganda had then, and, for the most part, still has now.

While the victors, to this day, vilify and condemn the Germans and Japanese for their treatment of American POWs, never mentioned is that at least the Germans and Japanese took prisoners. Few, very few, German and Japanese soldiers survived actual combat to reach an American POW camp. While the victors, to this day, assail again and again the Germans for crimes against Jews or attack the Japanese for crimes against the Chinese, seldom does one hear about the crimes against the Germans or the crimes against the Japanese, of the deliberate firebombing of millions of German and Japanese women and children, of the wholesale rape of countless women and children, of the utter and abject subservience that both nations even today still find themselves locked in.

Finally, it is the most fervent hope of the author that after finishing Hellstorm and this, its companion study, Summer, 1945, that the reader will not simply set the volumes down and return to a life of indifference and apathy. It is the author’s greatest wish that each reader will instead work with others to ensure that never again—not in our name, not in our time, not in our world—will we ever allow such evil propaganda such as was used in World War II to ever repeat itself; that no matter who it may next be directed at, be it Germans, Japanese, Iranians, North Koreans, or Israelis, we will not ever again allow such vicious, sadistic, and evil words to be used to either create a war or create a “peace.” As the past has proved, such reckless, murderous words reap reckless, murderous harvests of innocent and guilty alike. Unless we all work to throttle evil men and their evil words and evil deeds, then soon, very soon, that evil will almost certainly be directed at us and those we love.

Thomas Goodrich
Sarasota, Florida

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About the author

Tom Goodrich is a professional writer who lived on the Gulf Coast of Florida while writing Summer, 1945: Germany, Japan and the Harvest of Hate (The Palm Press, Siesta Key, Florida, 2018).

His biological father was a United States Marine during the Pacific War, 1941-1945, and his adoptive father served in the US Air Force in Europe during World War II. Visit the author at thomasgoodrich.com.

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Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

Summer, 1945

by Tom Goodrich

As we’ve come to appreciate with each passing year, World War Two was the most evil manifestation in human history. No other conflict even comes close in matching that war for its vast and unspeakable crimes. Mass murder of surrendering soldiers, mass starvation of helpless civilians, mass rape of women and children, assembly-line style torture in the tens of thousands, uprooting and expulsion of millions to certain death, the deliberate destruction of ancient cultures—these atrocities and many more add annually to World War Two’s menu of beastly war crimes.

Also, with each passing year, it becomes clearer and clearer that virtually all the major crimes of the Second World War were committed by the Allied powers. Additionally, almost all these crimes took place toward the end of the war. Why is this? Why were these terrible atrocities not only committed by the victors but why did almost all occur at the end of the war? Simple. Late in the war the Allies knew they would win and they thus knew that there was little risk of war crimes trials. The victors—with the Americans in the lead—knew that they could unleash their sadism against a hated, helpless enemy with utter impunity, and they did.

The following is a description of just one such major war crime as listed above. The account comes from my recent book, Summer, 1945: Germany, Japan and the Harvest of Hate. To this day, relatively little is actually known of this great atrocity. And this, of course, is because war criminals not only plan their crimes expertly, but they cover them up expertly, as well.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Note of the Editor: The sample chapter can already be read on Counter-Currents Publishing, here.

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Evil Summer, 1945 (book)

book review

A book review by Thor Magnusson:

Sometimes a book comes along that changes the way we think. Sometimes a book comes along that changes the way we act. Sometimes a book comes along that changes the way we think and the way we act. Such a book was Hellstorm–The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947.

That masterpiece by Thomas Goodrich changed forever not only how we would view World War Two, but it changed how we would view the world itself. For the first time since it happened, because of one bold and breath-taking book, the scales fell from our eyes and we were finally able to see free and unfettered what the abomination called World War Two was really all about.

Swept forever into a dark, dirty corner was the filth and disease of seventy years of Jewish propaganda, seventy years of Jewish lies about the so-called “Good War” and the so-called “Greatest Generation,” seventy years of Jewish mendacity about who was bad and who was good. Suddenly, overnight, replacing those lies was an honest, impartial, unbiased, but driving, relentless, and utterly merciless account of the fate that befell Germany in 1945.

As incredible as Hellstorm was, is, and will always remain, we now know it was only half the story. While the bloody obscenity that was World War Two was being acted out against a largely helpless German population by as evil a cast of creatures as ever haunted any hell anywhere, a similar horror show was taking place on the far side of the globe. And what is revealed in Tom Goodrich’s latest book, Summer, 1945–Germany, Japan and the Harvest of Hate, is a story so savage and sadistic as to numb the senses.

While some of the events described in Summer, 1945 will be familiar to readers of Hellstorm, many will not. Clearly, the author did a vast amount of new research for this new book since much material is previously unknown, especially regarding the contributions of the “Greatest Generation” to its already ghastly list of war crimes against Germany. In fact, what was previously revealed about the Americans in Hellstorm, horrific as it was at the time, was only the faintest foretaste of what was to come in Summer, 1945. For example…

Massive, monstrous, staggering as was the scale of Red Army rape in Germany, it now seems clear that the Americans were not far behind, if behind they were at all. Simply put: No one in control cared. Far from trying to halt the nonstop sexual attacks that their men committed against helpless German females, US officers, like Soviet officers, either ignored them, laughed at them, or actively encouraged them. Upon entering their communities, American officers forced Germans to write the age and sex of all occupants in their homes, then ordered the lists nailed to doors.

“The results are not difficult to imagine,” said one horrified priest from a village where women and children were soon staggering to the local hospital after the predictable sexual assaults commenced. Some US generals even blamed the victims themselves for their own gang rape when they dared leave their homes to beg for food. Lt. General Edwin Clarke went further when he announced that the thousands of rape reports in his area were nothing more than a conspiracy by die-hard Nazis to belittle and embarrass his well-behaved and totally innocent troops.

Clarke apparently believed that the hundreds of thousands of beaten, bruised and bleeding women and children were all liars with self-inflicted sex wounds. Also, to drive home German defeat, it was noted that GIs were being ordered by their “political officers” to make the gang rapes as public as possible. Although such brutal attacks were already common on streets and sidewalks, in schools and shops, an audience of family members was the preferred crowd for gang rape. Forcing German men to watch was also favored by the Americans, just as it was by their communist comrades.

Another hideous American war crime, a despicable act of hate and savagery, was the cold-blooded murder of SS and Wehrmacht soldiers the moment they surrendered their weapons. “You will not accept the surrender of any German SS,” announced one American general, demonstrating his commitment to barbarity and a criminal contempt for the Geneva Convention. By the tens of thousands these German soldiers, some of the best fighters the world had ever seen, were shown no mercy by the cowardly US murderers. In one massacre alone over seven hundred SS men were murdered in a matter of minutes; in another massacre, five hundred died, and so on.

“The Americans forced the Germans to walk in front of them with raised hands,” said an eyewitness regarding one group of fifty. “Then they shot the prisoners in their heads from behind.”

Additionally, the unbelievably sick and sadistic torture camps operated by the US Army and European Jews in Germany and Poland was on a psychopathic scale beyond belief. Well over a hundred thousand German men, women and even children suffered brutal deaths in these nightmarish torture pens. One might have imagined, and one would have certainly hoped, that after Hellstorm nothing more could have possibly been added to this perfectly hellish script of torture—victims buried alive, women forced to lay with and kiss rotting corpses–but one would have imagined wrong.

Those few who survived these demonic camps where dying was a thing to be postponed, not hurried, could no longer be called human. Of virtually all German men and boys who somehow survived to reach home, it was noticed all had their reproductive organs destroyed beyond repair.

But horrific as the so-called “peace” in Germany was, perhaps the greatest revelations for readers of Summer, 1945 come in the war chapters devoted to Japan. From the first page forward we readers, especially we Americans readers raised on the mythology of the “Dirty Jap,” will find our world of make believe turned upside down and inside out. Winners do write the history. And never was this more apt and terribly illustrated than in the case of America’s victory over Japan.

With the possible exception of the so-called Jewish “Holocaust,” one of the greatest lies to emerge from WWII and survive for over seventy years in tact, is the one we have been told over and over ever since December 7, 1941, viz., that the Japanese soldier was a mindless, murderous automaton, that he would never surrender, that he would always fight to the death, that he “lived to die” for the Emperor, that suicide was his second nature, and so on. There is no truth to any of these fairy-tales. Such a revelation as I have just stated here should not have come as any great surprise to anyone when they think about it, but it did come as a great shock to me and it will to everyone else, I am sure. When one has been told a “truth” such as this about the “robotic” Japanese soldier, a truth told for so many years from so many sources, one simply believes it as totally, completely and mindlessly as they believe in the Jewish Holocaust or that night follows day. After reading a few pages of Summer, 1945, however, it will be very clear to everyone that never was there a greater falsehood.

While reading what the opposing sides thought, in their own words, it is quickly clear that emotionally there was no appreciable difference between what a Japanese eighteen-year-old wanted and what an American eighteen-year-old wanted. First and foremost, both wanted to live. Both wanted to survive the war so that each might return home and marry that girl they loved so much, to have kids, to get a good job, to buy a car, to raise a small garden, to play in the backyard with pets. The problem for the Japanese was that Americans were taking no prisoners. From the very first battle on Guadalcanal when frightened young Japanese began walking forward with their hands held high to surrender muttering the only English word they knew, “Mercy, mercy,” US Marines began mowing them down… all of them, not just an isolated few here and there… all of them. In countless testimonies, it is readily apparent that Japanese soldiers in hopeless situations would have gladly surrendered, by the thousands, if only they could. The hatred was so great, however, and the propaganda so virulent following President Franklin Roosevelt’s orchestrated attack at Pearl Harbor that American soldiers, sailors and airmen were simply taking no prisoners, nor did the folks back home or their commanders want them to.

“You will take no prisoners, you will kill every yellow son-of-a-bitch, and that’s it,” yelled a marine colonel as he and his men were about to land on one island.

Thus, the manufactured belief after Pearl Harbor that the Japanese always fought to the death and never surrendered worked perfectly into the deep desire of Americans to kill the “sneaky Japs,” kill them all. And so, with no option now but to fight fanatically to the death, the Japanese did. And thus, it was a case where propaganda became a self-fulfilling truth.

Added to the merciless murder of helpless enemy soldiers was the torture and mutilation the Americans inflicted on those who were merely wounded. Ears, noses, fingers, toes, and other body parts were cut off the dead and dying for souvenirs; heads were hacked off and their “cured” skulls then sold to sailors or sent home to friends and family members; even Roosevelt received a letter opener carved from a Japanese arm bone.

“This is the sort of gift I like to get,” beamed the US president proudly.

The few Japanese who were in fact saved for interrogation were kept alive only as long as their information was useful, then they too were shot, bayoneted or pushed from flying aircraft.

Another falsehood that has existed as fact for the past seventy years is that the US military conducted itself properly during the occupation of Japan and helped the defeated nation gently back to its feet during peace. Again, nothing could be further from the truth. From the day they arrived, the Americans took ruthless control of what little remained of the destroyed nation. Women, children and the elderly were thrown into the streets and forced to shift among the ruins as best they could. At every available opportunity, Japanese men suffered humiliation and degradation and many were slapped, kicked and beaten in public “for fun.” All Japanese were treated like third-class citizens for years. Starvation stalked the land even before the conquerors arrived but though the Americans had a surplus to draw from food was denied to the people, just as it was in Germany. As a result, it is likely that millions perished during the first years of occupation. It was noticed that starving children were smaller in 1946 than they were in 1936.

Additionally, just as in Germany, rape reared its filthy head in “peace.” From the moment American troops came ashore on Saipan and Okinawa—two Japanese islands with large civilian populations–rape of females, and sometimes rape of males, began. And just as in Germany following its surrender, the violent sexual assaults in Japan continued unabated for years. No one in power, from General Douglas MacArthur down, was concerned in the least about the despicable, plague-like crime. Indeed, MacArthur was much more concerned with censoring the news of rape from the outside world than stopping rape in Japan itself. It is estimated that over a million Japanese women and children were raped after the war.

There are many other shocking revelations that might be lifted from this blistering book but then, after all, this is only a review of the book and not the book itself. Readers will have to discover the rest of this startling, riveting read for themselves. Truly, Summer, 1945 is aptly subtitled, “the harvest of hate.”

In closing, a few final thoughts on the author himself. Anyone who has read anything by Tom Goodrich knows that he is a passionate man who writes with great power, strength and scope. It is a trademark that sets him apart from others. But his books also reveal the inner-writer; a writer within who displays a large heart and soul. One senses early in a book that Goodrich actually cares about his subjects. There is, of course, the larger focus of each book, the “big picture,” but Goodrich never loses touch with the small, the fragile, the seeming insignificant, the all-but-forgotten.

A touching example is offered in Summer, 1945 when a Japanese adolescent, whose face has been melted beyond recognition by the atomic blast at Hiroshima, makes plans to kill herself rather than be chained for the remainder of her life to the face of a monster. Just as the child is about to commit the final act, she overhears in the next room her anguished father quietly discussing his daughter with her mother. Sadly agreeing that the child’s face is indeed hideous beyond belief, the man then states with both pain and love in each word that he loves his girl so much that her life, not her looks, is all that matters to him. Stunned, never imagining that anyone could ever love her again with such a terrifying face, the words of love were startling to the child, so startling that she suddenly realized that although death would indeed release her from a life of pain and shame, such a selfish act would only add to the heartbreak of her father. The girl matures to womanhood when she decides then and there to accept her fate, deal with her problems herself, and simply be thankful for the love that still blesses her life when so many others are now bereft of all.

Generally, to reach an honest and accurate understanding of an event such as World War Two, one must be so dedicated to the truth that they are prepared to plow through days, weeks, months, and years of dry, sterile material filled with tedious facts, figures and stats. Few of us have the time, patience or stamina for such research. Thankfully, there are those like Tom Goodrich who do have what it takes for the long haul. Ultimately, it is the “long haul” that delivers the details of history from which comes what we know as truth. Without our history, without our truth, we are nothing as a people.

That’s why our enemy is so determined to hide or distort our history; it is also why people like Tom Goodrich are so determined to retrieve our history. Discovering the truth of our history, even after decades of propaganda and lies, is what will ultimately set us free. These two books—Summer, 1945 and Hellstorm–have gone a very long way toward setting us free. And this is what makes Thomas Goodrich’s writing style so special. Almost in spite of ourselves, we sense the truth in his words. We, the readers, are drawn into a Goodrich book before we hardly know it. Truth is like that, like a strong magnet. A day or two later, when one emerges from the book—one “emerges” from a Tom Goodrich book, they never “finish” something that stays with them forever—they feel like they are different people; they have been to places that they never knew existed; they have gone to worlds that they were not supposed to go; they have gained knowledge and understanding that they were never meant to gain. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an uncanny writing ability. We call it genius.

Summer, 1945—Germany, Japan and the Harvest of Hate has already taken its place with Hellstorm as one of the all-time most memorable and important books ever written, not just on World War Two, but on history in general. If that sounds biased, that’s because it is. We White Nationalists are extremely fortunate to have one of the world’s finest and most dedicated historians fighting on our side. People like Thomas Goodrich are why we are winning and why our victory is just a matter of time.