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2nd World War Evil Hate Hellstorm Holocaust Thomas Goodrich

Hellstorm • chapter 5

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


Excerpted from Thomas Goodrich’s 2010 book

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



The Devil’s Laughter

Among the great majority of those [civilians] who scrambled onto ships, boats, tugs, barges, and naval craft sailing west, their flight was safe and successful. Not only was the warmth and food aboard ship a God-send, but the realization that they were at last escaping the dreaded Bolsheviks proved the first peace of mind many had known in weeks. As the wretched survivors of the [ship] could aver, however, there often was no escaping the nightmare… even at sea.

Just before one A.M., two torpedoes slammed into the Stuben’s side. Somewhere the ship was burning and people everywhere jumping into the water. As the Stuben’s stern rose high out the water, hundreds leaped overboard, including some who were torn to pieces by the still-turning propellers. Within seven minutes, the ship plunged beneath the waves, swiftly silencing a final mass scream that seemed to arise from a single voice. Of the 3,500 passengers aboard, only Franz Huber and a few hundred more survived. Tragically, for thousands who successfully traversed the treacherous Baltic, American and British bombers were often the first to greet them when their ships docked.

While the slow, dangerous evacuation of women, children and wounded comrades continued [on the still departing docks at the other side], a German Landser remained in the ever-shrinking pockets, ferociously fighting on so that others might live. That most in the enclaves were already doomed, all fighting men understood. “For every thousand persons embarked, some three thousand more arrived from the east.”

Frantic to escape such carnage, desperate civilians fled across the ice of the Frisches Haff, a bay several miles wide separating the mainland from a barrier island, or Nehrung. Along the slender strip of sand that led west towards Danzing, all were hoping to reach safety. Unfortunately, the bitter cold changed to rain just when many treks set out. Recounted one survivor of the perilous journey: “The ice was breaking and at some places we had to drag ourselves with pains through water nearly a foot deep.” Juergen Thorwald describes the long, nightmarish experience of another refugee:

At seven o’clock Russian planes swooped down on them. Some women, silent with a despair beyond all words, circled around holes in the ice that had swallowed a child, a mother, a husband.

Wrote Robert Poensgen, a military dispatch rider:

Russian combat aircraft now arrived in wave after wave, and threw bombs into that unprotected, inextricable mass. This is what hell must be like. It was the worst thing I have ever seen in all my years of active service—and I tell you I had already seen a lot.

“Twice we were attacked by Soviet planes, swooping low and scattering missiles,” remembered Guy Sajer from another road. “Each impact tore long, bloody furrows in the dense mass, and for a moment the wind was tinged with the smell of disemboweled bodies.” “Never had I seen so many bodies,” another witness added as he moved west along the coast.

While the butchery on land was in progress, the slaughter at sea continued. On the morning of April 13, Soviet aircraft pounced upon the refugee-laden Karlsruhe when the little freight fell behind its convoy. Stuck by a bomb and air torpedoes, the ship broke and sank in a matter of minutes. Of the one thousand people aboard, fewer than two hundred were rescued.

Three days later, near midnight, torpedoes fired by a Soviet submarine exploded against the side of the Goya, a large transport carrying 7,000 people. Like the Karlsruhe, the Goya quickly broke and plunged to the bottom in four minutes. Meanwhile, as the Soviets closed for the kill, Konigsberg, Memel, Gotenhafen, Pillau, and other besieged ports began their death dance.

The bloody nightmare which enveloped the Baltic coast was neither more nor less than that which transpired wherever the Soviets occupied German soil. In many places—Silesia, Prussia, Pomerania, the German communities of Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Jugoslavia—the horror had been in progress for weeks. There, ghastly atrocities had abated little, if any, with the passage of time and to some it seemed as though Red soldiers were in a race with one another to see who could destroy, murder and, above all, rape the most. Some women and children were assaulted ten, twenty, even thirty times a night and for a female to be ravished one hundred times a week was not uncommon. Reveals a priest from Klosterbrueck: “I shall never forget the terrible screams of the women and the children.”

Meanwhile, in what remained of the Reich, most Germans still knew surprisingly little of the savage fate befalling their countrymen. Doubters yet attributed the hair-rising reports of genocide to Dr. Goebbels’s propaganda machine. By bits and pieces, however, the truth did emerge. When a small German counterattack temporarily recaptured Neustettin, young soldiers, unaware of the Russian rampage occurring behind the lines, began herding up their prisoners. “Then something unexpected happened,” remembered an astonished Landser.

Several German women ran towards the Russians and stabbed at them with cutlery forks and knives… It was not until I fired a submachine gun into the air that the women drew back, and cursed us for presuming to protect these animals. They urged us to go into the houses and take a look at what they had done there. We did so, a few of us at a time, and we were totally devastated. We had never seen anything like it—utterly, unbelievably monstrous!

Naked, dead women lay in many of the rooms. Swastikas had been cut into their abdomens, in some the intestines bulged out; breasts were cut up, faces beaten to a pulp and swollen puffy. Others had been tied to the furniture by their hands and feet, and massacred. A broomstick protruded from the vagina of one, a besom from that of another…

Having seen the consequences of these bestial atrocities, we were terribly agitated and determined to fight. We knew that the war was past winning; but it was our obligation and sacred duty to fight to the last bullet.


____________________________

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

Hellstorm is still available from the publisher.

Categories
2nd World War Franklin D. Roosevelt Hellstorm Holocaust Joseph Stalin Red terror Third Reich Thomas Goodrich Winston Churchill

Hellstorm • chapter 4

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


Excerpted from Thomas Goodrich’s 2010 book

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



Crescendo of destruction

Roosevelt slapped a crippling embargo on the Reich’s ally, Japan, in hopes of provoking an attack and slipping into the war via the “back door.” When the Japanese, facing slow strangulation, dutifully responded at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, it was Roosevelt dream come true. Later, when his Secretary of Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, proposed a plan to pastorialize Germany upon victory, thereby assuring the death of millions, Roosevelt was its strongest supporter.

“I would like to see the Germans on the breadline for 50 years,” the president admitted in private.

♣

In early February 1945, leaders of the three most powerful nations on earth assembled a final time at Yalta in the Soviet Crimea. Despite the obvious dissimilarities of the men, intellectual as well as physical, each shared a characteristic with the other that shrank into insignificance all outer contradictions—all three harbored a inveterate hatred of not only Adolf Hitler and Nazism, but Germans and Germany.

At a meeting with Churchill at Casablanca in 1943, Roosevelt declared that nothing short of “unconditional surrender” would be accepted from Germany. Thus, by removing any possible latitude Hitler might have had for negotiation, the American president’s pronouncement insured that not only would Germany fight to the death, but it also guaranteed that hundreds of thousands of Allied airmen and soldiers would perish as well. Additionally, that such a protracted war would enable the Red Army to reach and no doubt enslave much of Europe seemed a foregone conclusion.

When Soviet forces invaded Poland in 1939, one of Stalin’s first moves was to round up and execute upwards of 15,000 army officers and intellectuals, thereby removing in one stroke much potential opposition. Well aware of his past, nervous about the impact his future acts in Europe would have upon a squeamish British public, desperate to hold an unnatural alliance together, Churchill’s government tried mightily to cover for the bloody behavior of their communist ally. Ran a secret memo of the British Department of Intelligence to high-ranking civil servants and opinion-molders in the press:

We cannot reform the Bolsheviks but we can do our best to save them—and ourselves—from the consequences of their acts. The disclosures of the past quarter of a century will render mere denials unconvincing. The only alternative to denial is to distract the public attention from the whole subject. Experience has shown that the best distraction is atrocity propaganda directed at the enemy… Your cooperation is therefore earnestly sought to distract public attention from the doings of the Red Army by your wholehearted support of various charges against the Germans… which have been and will be put into circulation by the Ministry.

Let anyone doubt Stalin’s intentions once his legions gained control of Germany, the reality was made crystal clear at the Teheran Conference in 1943. Lifting his glass of vodka for the “umpteenth toast,” the communist leader suddenly announced, “I propose a salute to the swiftest possible justice for all of Germany’s war criminals—justice before a firing squad. I drink to our unity in dispatching them as fast as we capture them, all of them, and there must be at least 50,000 of them.” When Churchill, well into his cups, angrily protested—“The British people will never stand for such mass murder without a proper trial!”—Stalin smiled, his eyes twinkled and overall he seemed “hugely tickled.”

“Perhaps,” the American president interrupted, “we could say that instead of summarily executing 50,000 we should settle on a smaller number. Shall we say 49,500?”

Despite Stalin’s well-earned reputation as the greatest mass murderer in history, Franklin Roosevelt was a staunch supporter and admirer of the dictator and defended him at every turn. In an effort to put a friendly, folksy face on the Russian premier and convince Americans that he was a “magnificent” and “gallant” ally, Roosevelt began referring to Stalin as “Uncle Joe.”

“He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humor,” explained the president of the American public. “I believe he is representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people—very well indeed.”

The eyes of the world were now upon Yalta, said the prime minister, and what the “Big Three” accomplished during talks over the next few days would affect mankind for a hundred years.

Another subject Stalin was explicit about at Yalta concerned the return of over two million Soviet citizens who had either fled to Germany to avoid persecution at home or who had joined the enemy to fight against communism. Again, to this demand Roosevelt promised his complete cooperation. But of course, the main topic of discussion at Yalta was the fate of their mutual enemy, or, as Churchill grimly phrased it, “The future of Germany, if she had any.”

Once victory was complete, the three leaders agreed that the former Third Reich would be carved up like the evening’s meal and her people marched off as slaves to the Soviet Union. Although Roosevelt had solemnly announced earlier that “the united Nations do not traffic in human slavery,” when Stalin proposed the plan, the president called it “a healthy idea.”

Another subject broached at Yalta, albeit a seemingly minor one, was Stalin’s request for the massive bombing of eastern Germany to smooth the way for the Red Army’s final sweep across the Reich. Eager to demonstrate to his ally that Britain, and especially the RAF, was yet a force to be reckoned with, Churchill quickly agreed.

When the Yalta talks were finally concluded on February 11, the three Allied leaders signed a joint statement for press release, then bid each other a fond adieu.


____________________________

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

Hellstorm is still available from the publisher.

____________________________


My 2 cents:

As described by Solzhenitsyn:

In Yalta Churchill and Roosevelt had signed the agreement to repatriate all Soviet citizens, and especially the military, without specifying whether the repatriation was to be voluntary or enforced: How could any people on earth not be willing to return to their homes? The nearsightedness of the West was condensed in what was written at Yalta.

The English turned over the Soviet army command a Cossack corps of forty to forty-five thousand men which had fought its way to Austria from Yugoslavia. The extradition was carried out with perfidy which is characteristic of British diplomatic tradition. The Cossacks did not grow suspicious when they were asked to turn in their weapons, on the grounds that this was necessary in order to standardize their equipment. On May 28… [Solzhenitsyn describes in this paragraph of his Gulag Archipelago how the Allied forces extradited these Russian people, against their will, to Stalin.]

They could not even shoot or stab themselves to death, since all their weapons had been taken away. Some jumped off the high viaduct into the river or onto the stones. The hearts of the British were not troubled, nor were their democratic minds. British tanks and soldiers arrived. The British soldiers started beating them with rifle butts and clubs, grabbing them and throwing them into the trucks, including the wounded, as if they were packages. Entire families sought death by throwing themselves into the river. Meanwhile, the British units in the neighborhood pursued and shot at the fugitives. (The cemetery where the people who were shot or trampled to death and buried still exists in Lienz.)

But even that was only the beginning. During all of 1946 and 1947 the Western allies, faithful to Stalin, continued to turn over to him Soviet citizens, former soldiers as well as civilians. It did not really matter who they were as long as the West could get rid of this human confusion as quickly as possible. People were extradited from Austria, Germany, France, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, from the American occupation zones, and from the territory of the United States as well.

It goes without saying that most of the deportees died in the Soviet Gulag. So who was the real monster, the three Allied leaders or the German chancellor?

Categories
2nd World War Alexandr Solzhenitsyn Hellstorm Holocaust Mongols Thomas Goodrich

Hellstorm • chapter 3

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


Excerpted from Thomas Goodrich’s 2010 book

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



Between Fire and Ice

With the remnants of the German army in headlong flight, hordes of Red soldiers swarmed through the breach and poured into Greater Germany. As word of the Russian breakthrough spread, millions of Germans in their path hastily packed and fled into the freezing weather.

Already bitterly cold, several days after the exodus began the temperature plunged below zero. As a result, little children and infants dropped by the thousands. “It was terribly cold, and the wind was like ice,” said one young mother, “the snow was falling and nothing warm to eat, no milk and nothing. I tried to give Gabi the breast, behind a house, but she didn’t take it because everything was so cold. Many women tried that, and some froze their breasts.” When Gabi died, the distraught woman continued to cradle the tiny corpse until her own arm eventually froze. “I couldn’t carry her more after she was dead. I couldn’t stand it any more,” the mother sobbed. “I wrapped her up well and put her deep in the snow beside the road… Thousands of women put their dead in the ditches by the roadside where they wouldn’t be hurt by automobiles or farm wagons.”

Hideous as conditions were, the treks pressed steadily west, away from the terror looming somewhere behind. Although millions were on the roads in full flight, millions more remained at their farms, villages and towns. They did not really believe that the Russians were as cruel and inhuman as they were reputed to be, but hoped to win over the latter by welcoming them and being hospitable.

♣

“The Mongols are coming… You go quick. Go quick.”

Composed largely of Mongols, Kulaks, Kazakhs, Kalmuks, and other Asians, as well as convicts and communists, these men who formed the second wave of troops [the first were Slavs] were regarded, even by their own comrades, as utterly merciless. Terrified by the news, many Germans did attempt to flee and move in the wake of the first Soviet wave. Most, however, found themselves trapped and could do little more than hide young girls and once again pray that their worst fears were unfounded. After a wait of sometimes days, but normally only hours, the dreaded second wave arrived.

While flames shot up from different corners of the towns and gunfire erupted as citizens were murdered in the streets, the invaders soon began kicking in door homes, shops and churches. A frightened boy recalled, “Right next to me poor defenseless women were being ravished in the presence of their children.” Said another victim, “The women were raped, not once or twice but ten, twenty, thirty and hundred times, and it was all the same to the Russians whether they raped mere children or old women. The youngest victim in the row houses where we lived was ten years of age.” Mothers were raped in the presence of their children; girls were raped in front of their brothers. While many upright Russian officers courageously stepped in and risked their own lives to stop the murders and rapes, their efforts were little more than a drop of water to a forest fire.

“All of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot,” admitted Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “This was almost a combat distinction.”

When the Russians eventually tired of looting, robbing, murdering, and ill-treating the women and girls, “they set fire to a considerable part of the village and razed it to the ground,” said a survivor of Schoenwald, the small community that had dismissed rumors of Russian ruthlessness and opted to welcome them instead.

♣

While those who remained endured unspeakable fates, Germans who fled with treks also suffered. “What surprised us most was the way they traveled,” recalled a British POW, who, along with thousands of other Allied prisoners, was being marched west away from the advancing Soviets.

It was so cold that even in day-time any drink mixed with cold water froze solid before it was possible to carry it to one’s mouth. At night men and women could keep alive only by huddling together in a wagon… Those who fell asleep in the snow were dead within a few minutes.

Given the chaotic conditions, and with freezing refuges clogging the way, many treks were quickly overhauled by the Russians. Some Soviet tanks refused to leave the roads and crashed straight through the columns, squashing all in their path. After heavy traffic, the victims—men, women, children, and animals—were eventually as flat as cardboard.

As a rule, those who fled by train fared best. Speed did not always guarantee escape, however. Russian aircraft routinely strafed and bombed the cars from above and tanks cut the rails from below. When the Soviets suddenly captured the town of Allenstein, they forced the stationmaster to signal the “all clear” to refugee trains still arriving from the east. As one unsuspecting train after another steamed into Allenstein, the Russians first slaughtered any men found on board, then passed their time raping carload after carload of females.

♣

Meanwhile, the red tide moved closer. In countless German cities and towns the pattern repeated itself, as the diary of a Catholic priest from Klosterbrueck reveals:

January 21st 1945. Strange to say, the population intends to remain here, and is not afraid of the Russians. The reports that in one village they rapped all the women and abducted all the men and took them away to work somewhere must surely have been exaggerated.

January 25th. They told us that whole families had been shot by the Russians. Girls who had refused to allow themselves to be raped, and parents who had sought to protect their children, had been shot on the spot.

January 27th. We priests were allowed out of the chapel for half an hour today in order to bury Margarethe in the yard. Poor girl, it is a good thing you were dead and so did not know what the Russians did to your body!

“In every village and town they entered,” wrote one who spoke with soldiers, “the German troops came upon scenes of horror: slain boys, People’s Army men drenched with gasoline and burned—and sometimes survivors to tell the tale of the outrages.”

Hundreds of thousands massacred, hundreds of thousands raped, millions already enslaved—but this was nothing. Worse was to come.


____________________________

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

Hellstorm is still available from the publisher.

Categories
2nd World War Berlin Hellstorm Holocaust Third Reich Thomas Goodrich

Hellstorm • chapter 2

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


Excerpted from Thomas Goodrich’s 2010 book

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



The Dead and the Dead to Be

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

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

♣

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

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

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

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

(Typical Landsers)

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

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

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

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

____________________________

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

Hellstorm is still available from the publisher.

Categories
2nd World War Hate Hellstorm Holocaust Thomas Goodrich Winston Churchill

Hellstorm • chapter 1


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


Excerpted from Thomas Goodrich’s 2010 book

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



Hell from Above

The next night, RAF bombers returned. In addition to the normal payload of high explosives, the British sent down tons of phosphorous bombs to accelerate fires. The resulting conflagration ignited a “fire storm.” Hurricane-force winds created by the intense heat and subsequent updraft uprooted trees, ripped roofs from buildings and sucked screaming victims back to the inferno. Some who escaped the 150 mph winds in the streets became mired in melting asphalt and quickly burst into flames. Those who threw themselves into the city’s canals died of thermal radiation to the lungs, then, as they floated on the water’s surface, they too ignited. In the center of the Holocaust, temperatures reached 1,500 degrees and when the great mass of flames joined they rose to a height of three miles. The hellish drama below was not lost on those above.

“As I looked down, it was as if I was looking into what I imagined to be an active volcano,” said one horrified British crewman.

The attack against Hamburg continued unabated for another week. Finally, there was nothing left to destroy. Aptly dubbed by the Allies “Operation Gomorrah,” the raids had been a cold and calculated attempt to scorch Hamburg and its people from the face of earth. The plan succeeded. With thirteen square miles of total destruction, Hamburg, for all intents and purposes, had ceased to exist. Helmut Wilkens witnessed scenes in his burning neighborhood. “Screams came from under tons of burning debris. In every direction I looked trapped people begging to be freed.”

And then, after hours, even days, of death, screams, tears, and occasionally miracles, something often occurred that many thought impossible—the sirens sounded again. For many incredulous victims of the first raids, the sound seemed—and often was—the end of the world. As was the case with the attacks against Hamburg, Berlin, Nuremberg, Darmstadt, Cologne, and other German cities, after first blasting a targeted town to splinters, the British and the American bombers soon returned in hopes of catching survivors and rescuers in the open and igniting with the fire bombs all that remained.

“People who got phosphorus on them presented a fearful sight,” recalled Rosa Todt. “Their skin was bright red, water dripping out of the pores of their skin, their ears and nose; their whole face was a nauseating mask.”

With every fiery step, a new nightmare appeared. “I struggled to run against the wind in the middle of the street,” wrote nineteen-year-old Kate Hoffmeister. “We couldn’t go across because the asphalt had melted. There were people on the roadway, some already dead, some still lying alive but stuck in the asphalt. They were on their hands and knees screaming.” Herbert Brecht: “There was a soldier in uniform near me with a lot of medals. He tried to take his own life with a knife… The screams of burning and dying people are unforgettable.”

Like the badly burned Brecht, some miraculously survived the Holocaust, reaching safety in rivers, canals and parks. [Brecht on an elderly man]: “He could only say, ‘Child! Child!…’ The air was hardly breathable and my injuries hurt hellishly. Dead lay everywhere. Most were naked because their clothes had been burnt away. All had become shrunken, really small, because of the heat… I saw a burnt-out tramcar in which naked bodies were lying on top of each other. The glass of the windows had melted.” Anne-Lies Schmidt noted as she searched for her parents in a section of Hamburg: “Everything seemed to have melted… Women and children were so charred as to be unrecognizable… Their brains tumbled from their burst temples and their insides spilled from the soft parts of the ribs… The smallest children lay like fried eels on the pavement. Even in death, they showed signs of how they must have suffered—their hands and arms stretched out as if to protect themselves from that pitiless heat.” Otto Muller relates:

I was going through the burning streets when I suddenly saw a young girl. Her face was black with soot except for two streams of tears which were running down her face. She was dragging her little dead brother behind her; the right side of her face was already scraped smooth. She had been wandering around aimlessly for three days and two nights.

While Arthur Harris was the man planning and implementing the bombing campaign, and did so with undisguised glee, Winston Churchill was the individual responsible for its onset and, ultimately, its outcome.

The fiery massacres continued. Operating under the promise that “bombing something in Germany is better than bombing nothing,” Allied warplanes returned to old targets again and again. Explained a chronicler from the heavily bombed city of Kassel:

Three hundred times the people of Kassel ran terrified to their air-raid shelters as giant British and American planes dropped their bombs.

“German cities… will be subjected to an ordeal the like of which has never been experienced by a country in continuity, severity and magnitude,” vowed Churchill. “To achieve this end there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go.”


____________________________

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

Hellstorm is still available from the publisher.

Categories
2nd World War Evil Franklin D. Roosevelt Hate Hellstorm Holocaust Mainstream media Thomas Goodrich

Hellstorm • prologue

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


Excerpted from Thomas Goodrich’s 2010 book

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



Prologue

For six hundred years East Prussia had served as the frontier outpost of Germany…

By mid-October 1944, the Soviet Army had finally reached the Reich’s border. And yet, as was the case at Nemmersdorf, there was no panic.

Thus it was, that on the night of October 20, as Nemmersdorf and other communities nearest the front slept in imagined security, the unthinkable occurred. After punching a hole through the German line, the Red Army suddenly burst into the Reich.

“They tortured civilians in many villages,” reported one German officer, “nailed some on barn doors and shot many others.”

Added another horrified witness:

In the farmyard down the road stood a cart, to which four naked women were nailed through their hands in a cruciform position… Beyond stood a barn and to each of its two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands, in a crucified posture. In the dwellings we found a total of seventy-two women, including children, and one old man, 74, all dead… all murdered in a bestial manner, except only a few who had holes in their necks. Some babies had their heads bashed in. In one room we found a woman, 84 years old, sitting on a sofa… half of whose head had been sheared off with an ax or a spade.

“Every female, including girls as young as eight, had been raped,” noted another viewer.

Old men who had feebly tried to protect their wives, daughters and granddaughters, were themselves knocked down, sawed in half or chopped to bits. A group of over fifty French POWs and Polish workers who had instinctively stepped in to protect the people were likewise castrated and killed. Lt. Amberger continues:

Neither in Nemmersdorf nor in the other places did I find a single living German civilian.

Staggered by the enormity of the crime, German authorities requested that neutral investigations and medical personnel from Spain, Sweden and Switzerland view the sickening carnage close up. When the visitors filed their reports, however, and when word finally reached the outside world, there was only silence. By the winter of 1944, the vicious propaganda war waged against Germany had been won. By that late stage few individuals beyond the Reich’s borders were concerned about brained German babies or crucified German women.

With the outbreak of the war in 1939 [ed. Note: before the first reports of 1942 on the Jewish Holocaust] nowhere was hatred more intense than among American Jews. Wrote Hollywood script writer and director, Ben Hecht:

A cancer flourishes in the body of the world and in its mind and soul, and this cancerous thing is Germany, Germanism, and Germans… That this most clumsy of all human tribes—this leaden-hearted German—should dare to pronounce judgment on his superiors, dare to outlaw from the world the name of the Jew—a name that dwarfs him as the tree does the weed at its foot—is an outrageous thing. It is an evil thing.

“Germany must perish,” echoed Theodore N. Kaufmann in a widely-read book of the same name.

And the only way to accomplish that is to remove the German from the world… There remains then but one mode of ridding the world forever of Germanism—and that is to stem the source from which issue those war-lusted souls, by preventing the people of Germany from ever again reproducing their kind.

To implement his plan, Kaufman recommended that when the war was successfully concluded all German men and women should be sterilized.

Far from being shocked by such a genocidal scheme, leading American journals were thrilled by the concept.

“A Sensational Idea!” cheered Time magazine.

“A provocative theory,” echoed the Washington Post.

While many in America and Great Britain could understand and even commiserate with Jewish emotions, many more were initially aghast by the flaming rhetoric and the murderous cries for extermination of innocent and guilty alike. Nevertheless, the sheer weight and persistence of the propaganda, both subtle and overt, in film, radio, books, magazines, and newspapers, gradually worked its way into the thoughts and attitudes of the public mainstream. Eventually, in the minds of a sizable percentage of Americans and Britons, little distinction was drawn between killing a Nazi soldier and killing a German child.

On September 15, 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt made the demand for extermination official when he endorsed the so-called “Morgenthau Plan.” Named for Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasure, Henry Morgenthau, but actually conceived by the secretary’s top aide, Harry Dexter White—both of whom were Jewish.

“You don’t want the Germans to starve?” Roosevelt’s incredulous son-in-law asked the president in private.

“Why not?” replied Roosevelt without batting an eye.

Most Germans actually knew little of thoughts such as the above. Most Germans were yet living under the illusion that the war still had rules. Few could bring themselves to believe that the horror at Nemmersdorf was anything other than an aberration; that the butchery was only a bloody mistake destined never to be repeated. Unbeknownst to those in Prussian and other German regions facing east, the nightmare of Nemmersdorf would soon prove only the faintest foretaste of what was ahead.

____________________________

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

Hellstorm is still available from the publisher.

Categories
Amerindians Axiology Blacks Christendom Demography Ethnic cleansing Miscegenation Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Iberians’ gross blunder

Half a year ago the admin of a Catholic, counter-Jihad website in Spain commented in this blog.

Mexico’s backwardness has been the result of its governments after independence, which has been mostly in the hands of whites. Its historical demise is due to the fact that the whites are not breeding, as it is the case, unfortunately, of so many white nationalists.

I quote this friend because his Catholic views reflect exactly the ideology that ruined this part of the American continent: blaming the few whites in charge of a nation consisting of a sea of brown people and sparing the Catholic, Universal ethics that caused the non-white population explosion in the first place.

Arthur Kemp’s March of the Titans is a comprehensive book about the odyssey of the white race, presently available only in printed format. After a long transcontinental research Kemp concludes that colonization is only successful when the colonizers ensure that they demographically replace the native population. “Anything less than that will cause the colonial experiment to fail.” Kemp demonstrates his thesis not only through the paradigm of his native Rhodesia, but of every other geographical entity that had been conquered by whites in the last millennia only to be re-conquered by the natives after overwhelming the white conquerors demographically.

William Pierce had reached identical conclusions in Who We Are: ethnic cleansing is the only way to succeed, and, as he hinted in other texts, to do that we must abandon Christian meta-ethics altogether.

Over the boards I’ve said it many times and will say it again: Pace my Christian friends, the price to save the West is to give up Christian axiology, and its secular offshoots, that presently are infecting our minds and our sense of decency.
 

* * *

 
Excerpted from the 22nd article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:

The native Amerinds found by the Spaniards in the West Indies were, like those of the mainland, of Mongoloid derivation, being the descendants of Mongoloid peoples who had begun crossing the Bering Strait from Siberia to North America some 12,000 years ago and had then gradually propagated throughout the empty North and South American continents and the adjacent islands.

Since the Spaniards’ entire purpose in the New World was economic exploitation, not the propagation of their own race, they did not deliberately liquidate the native population. In some areas, however, that was the inadvertent effect of the Spanish conquest. The Indians were not constitutionally suited to the unremitting slave labor in the gold and silver mines and on the sugar plantations which was forced on them by their new masters, and they died like flies under the Spanish yoke.

An enormous toll was also taken by smallpox, a disease endemic among the Europeans but one to which the Amerinds, isolated as they had been for thousands of years, had no natural immunity. It virtually depopulated the Caribbean islands and then wreaked havoc among the mainland Indians. (The Indian revenge was syphilis, a New World disease entirely new to the Europeans—at least, in the new and virulent form in which it existed among the Amerinds.)
 

Beginning of the Black Tide

Because of the inadequacy of the Indians as a local labor force, the Spaniards almost immediately began importing Negro slaves from West Africa. The latter belong to a race ideally suited to the plantation labor of that era. The Blacks were first used in the West Indies, then on the Brazilian mainland. Approximately a million of them were imported in the period 1550-1650, and by the latter date they had completely replaced the Amerind natives as a slave labor force on the Caribbean islands.

(Spanish-English translation of the painting footnote: Spaniard, Mestizo, Indian)

Approximately 150,000 Spaniards and Portuguese had migrated to the New World by the middle of the 17th century, and natural increase had raised their number to about 400,000. They ruled over about 9,000,000 Indians—and a growing population of mestizos (Indian-White mixed breeds), Blacks, mulattos, and Indian-Black mixed breeds. Only on the island of Cuba was there anything approaching a truly White Spanish or Portuguese community.
 

Northerners Arrive

From the beginning of the 17th century, however, Northern Europeans—English, French, and Dutch—began seriously contesting the Iberians’ claims on the New World. By 1650 nearly 50,000 English (and a few thousand French and Dutch) immigrants were settled on Caribbean land wrested away from the Spaniards, and another 50,000 had landed in North America.

In sharp contrast to the Spanish and Portuguese colonists, the great bulk of the Northern Europeans came to the New World not to exploit non-White labor and make money, but to settle and work the land themselves, in all-White communities. Thus, colonialism acquired two quite distinct meanings in the 17th and 18th centuries: a strictly economic meaning, which applied to all the Southern European and some of the Northern European colonies; and a racial meaning, which applied almost exclusively to the colonies of the Northerners.
 

The Pollution of the South

Today the only countries in South America which are substantially White are Uruguay (nearly 100 per cent), Argentina (between 80 and 90 per cent), and Chile (approximately 50 per cent).
 

Women and Plows

Most of the Northern Europeans who came to the New World had quite different motives than did the Spanish and Portuguese. Most of the latter came only to make money, and relatively few brought their women with them; from the beginning miscegenation was common in the areas controlled by the Iberians.

The Northerners, on the other hand, came for the land and the opportunity for a new life on a new frontier. They brought their women and their plows with them, and for the most part, they did their own labor. They saw in the Indians no opportunity for economic exploitation, but only a danger to their families. Until missionaries began making Christians of the Indians and taking their side against the Whites, the latter just pushed them aside, took their land, and formed all-White communities of farmers, craftsmen, and tradesmen, as they had in Europe.

Categories
Catholic Church Henry VIII Martin Luther Racial studies Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Saxon revenge

Excerpted from the 22nd article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


With the close of the Viking Age in the latter half of the 11th century, we left the prehistoric period, with all its pagan vigor, behind us in the previous installment and entered an era described more or less fully by contemporary written accounts. Our aim here, in accord with the purpose of this entire series, is to select from the wealth of historical material covering the events of the last 900 years that which is especially pertinent to racial developments, rather than to political, religious, economic, artistic, scientific, or other cultural aspects of life—keeping always in mind, of course, that, in the final analysis, race and culture are inseparable.

We have already noted, however briefly, the racial developments in Iberia through the 15th century (installment 19) and in Eastern Europe through the 17th century (installment 20). Most of what follows will be concerned with the North and the West of Europe: more specifically, with the people of that region and their expansion over the globe.

The Black Death

For five centuries after the abandonment of the settlements in North America, Europe staggered along under the burden of a number of problems: battling Moors, Turks, and Mongols on its southern and eastern frontiers and often well inside those frontiers; yielding up the last of its spiritual and mental freedom and settling into a straitjacket of superstition and orthodoxy, as the Christian Church tightened its grip on all of Europe; succumbing to the Black Death by the tens of millions, as this dread scourge swept over the land in the 14th century and killed every fourth European. In addition to these problems imported into Europe from Asia, the Europeans were no slouches at generating problems of their own, and territorial and dynastic warfare continued to take their toll throughout the Middle Ages.

White Productivity

By the beginning of the 15th century, however, the indomitable spirit of the White race was clearly making gains on several fronts: material, intellectual, and spiritual. On the first of these, European energy and inventiveness had kept up a slow but steady increase in productivity, both in agriculture and in the crafts, so that, despite the ravages of war and plague, the accumulation of wealth in all social strata had resulted in an average standard of living vastly higher than in any Asian land.

Explosion in Knowledge

And it was only in Europe that this wit and will were manifested. Some of the earlier developments in the printing craft had come from Asia—ink and paper, for example—but the explosion in knowledge resulting from Gutenberg’s work was confined almost entirely to our own European ancestors. By the end of the 15th century 1,000 new titles per year were being produced by Europe’s book printers. By 1815 the number had climbed to 20,000 per year.

In contrast, Turkish Constantinople, Asia’s wealthiest city, did not even bother to acquire its first printing press until 1726. By 1815 the grand total of all the books published in Constantinople in the preceding 89 years was only 63 titles, and the going rate was in the neighborhood of one new title per year.

Saxon Revenge

Even on the spiritual front there was progress. The Church, grown soft, corrupt, and overconfident in the centuries since the Saxons and the Vikings had been forced to the baptismal font, was spoiling for an upset by the end of the 15th century. It had laid the basis for its own downfall, and early in the following century its monopoly in matters of the spirit was dealt two lethal blows, first by Martin Luther in Germany (1517), and, a little over a decade later, by King Henry VIII in England.

It is one of history’s sweetest ironies that Martin Luther was a Saxon and King Henry was the descendant of Norman Vikings.

Categories
Christendom Individualism Racial studies Rape of the Sabine Women Real men Vikings Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Vikings and Christianity (3)

Excerpted from the 21st article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


The Vikings’ fighting spirit had been sapped by Christianity, but an even larger factor in their demise was their inability to keep in check their quarrels among themselves, combine their forces against outsiders, and thus match the growing power of kings in more unified lands than their own. Excessive individualism took its final toll.

Ever since the close of the Viking Age men in whose veins Viking blood still runs have dreamed of the freedom and the challenge and the glory of those bygone days. Perhaps nowhere is this better expressed than in a stanza from an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer:

What has become of the steed?
What has become of the warrior?
What has become of the seats of banquet?
Where are the joys of the hall?
Oh, for the bright cup!
Oh, for the mail-clad warrior!
Oh, for the glory of the prince!
How that time has passed away
And grown dark under the cover of night,
As if it had never been.



Semites and Vikings: No Love Lost

One would expect to find a spiritual difference between a race bred a hundred generations in the marketplace, where survival depended primarily on a glib tongue and an eye for a bargain, and a race shaped by the killing winters of the North, accustomed to combat and hardship. This difference—the difference between the Jewish spirit and the White spirit—is manifested in the world around us in a thousand ways.

Perhaps nowhere has the contrast between the natural, healthy, adventurous spirit of our race and the spirit of the Jew been more sharply drawn, however, than in a couple of recent issues of the student newspaper published on the Los Angeles campus of California State College. In the first issue was printed a poem by Dr. Peter Peel, who teaches history there. The second issue contained a response to the poem from a Jew at the same college.

Here is the poem, which was titled Goetterdaemmerung:

When Spring lightly touches
With hand green and golden
The mountains and fjords,
Then shouts the sea rover,
“A-viking! A-viking!”

The hammers are busy
On weapon and harness.
Then flashes the broad blade
In every sea hamlet.
The dragon ships, thirsty
For bounding blue water,
Leap down to the seashore.

And Olaf of Norway
And Erik of Gotland
And Thorwald the Mighty,
Whose grandsire was Wotan,
Stand fast on the poop deck
With golden hair streaming,
With spear brightly glinting,
With eye fierce and blazing,
Sail out on the swan’s bath—
The grey widow-maker—
For England or Iceland,
Byzantium, Vinland,
Far land or ancient
And ripe for the plunder,
The burning of roof-trees,
The seizing of women,
The tooting of treasure,
The flowing of red blood,
And wine for the victors.

Ah, whence fled those great days,
The days of our fathers,
The days of the valiant,
Of gods and of heroes,
Or fair maids and foul dwarfs,
And lindworms and dragons,
Of Beowulf, Dietrich,
Strong Harald, grim Hagen,
Wolfhart and Siegfried,
The greathearts, the mighty?

Yea loathsome today is
The seed of their strong loins—
The petty, the small, the clod and
the crawler.

The music has gone from the souls of our people.
The thunder has vanished away with Valhalla.
Now meekness and weakness
And womanly virtues
Have shackled, degraded
And shamefully softened
The sons of our fathers,
The sons of the mighty.

And now have we traded
The lightning of storm gods,
The arms of Valkyries,
The halls of Valhalla,
The kiss of wish maidens,
For wings and a nightshirt,
A harp and a halo,
A psalmbook and psalter?
Oh, no, my Lord Bishop!

Hark, grey Galilean,
The Wolf Age is coming,
The great fimbul winter,
When all sick things perish.

A few days after this poem appeared, the following letter [by R.A. Klein] headed “Bloodthirsty Sickness,” showed up on the editorial page of the student newspaper. The poem about the Vikings in the Nov. 25 issue by Peter H. Pee had real soul and beauty—the soul and the beauty of the bloodthirsty.

Let it speak for itself. [Klein wrote:]

“With golden hair streaming, With spear brightly glinting, With eye fierce and blazing… And ripe for the plunder, The burning of roof-trees, The seizing of women, The looting of treasure, The flowing of red blood, And wine for the victors.”

Murder! rape! loot, plunder blood and wine—the wanton destruction of the productive by bloodthirsty savages. And what do these vicious predator-warriors denounce?

“Now meekness and weakness And womanly virtues Have shackled, degraded And shamefully softened The sons of our fathers, The sons of the mighty.”

Yes, how could one be more degraded in the eyes of these savages than to become like those inferior creatures called women.

Beware you women, blacks, Latins and other lesser creatures. The Blond Beast “With golden hair streaming” and warm, red blood dripping from his mighty sword shall rise again. Beware you weak and sick of all races for “The Wolf Age is coming… When all sick things perish.”

Meanwhile, I wait for the day when this bloodthirsty sickness of the Blond Beast shall perish forever from the face of the earth.

Categories
Christendom Racial studies Vikings Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Vikings and Christianity (2)

Excerpted from the 21st article of William Pierce’s “Who We Are: a Series of Articles on the History of the White Race”:


Karl’s savagery reached a peak in the tenth year of the evangelism: in 782, at Verden on the Aller, with the blessing of the Church, he had 4,500 Saxon nobles beheaded. Twelve years later, in 794, he introduced a policy under which every third Saxon was uprooted from his land and forced to resettle among Franks or other Christianized tribes.

Fairly early in this campaign, in 777, one of the most prominent of the Saxon chieftains, Widukind, took shelter among the Danes and appealed to their king, Sigfred, for assistance against the Franks. Although the Danes were wary of becoming involved in a full-scale war against the formidable Karl, they and the other Northern peoples were put on their guard, and they became increasingly indignant over the Frankish suppression of the Saxons’ religion.

Karl’s brutal campaign against the Saxons undoubtedly helped raise a certain consciousness in the North of the spiritual and cultural differences which separated Scandinavia from those lands which had fallen under the yoke of the Christian Church.


Special Treatment

One manifestation of this consciousness was the erection of the Danevirke, an extensive system of defensive earthworks across the neck of the Danish peninsula, begun in 808.

Another was the special treatment which the Vikings customarily meted out to the Christian monks and priests who fell into their hands. The monasteries and churches, with their troves of treasure mulcted from superstitious citizens seeking to buy their way into heaven, were tempting targets to the raiders from the North anyway, but the element of revenge must have made them even more tempting, and it was for good reason that throughout the ninth century the daily prayer of every pious cleric was: A furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine! (“From the fury of the Northmen deliver us, Lord!”).


Genetic Effects of Monkery

Another interesting eugenic contrast between North and South is provided by the Christian practice of clerical celibacy. Although there were many periods during the Middle Ages in which violations were commonplace, as early as the fourth century the Church began insisting on total celibacy for the higher clergy. With the growing incidence of monasticism after the sixth century, a greatly increased portion of the population of Christian Europe was subjected to the rule of celibacy.

In the Middle Ages the clerical life was not, as is often the case today, simply a refuge for those who could succeed at nothing else; it was usually the only route to scholarship—and often the only route to literacy as well—and it attracted many able and intelligent men, whose genes were then lost to their race. For a thousand years, until the Reformation, there was a selective draining away of Christian Europe’s intellectual vitality.


A Mighty Hive

The high birthrate among the most active and energetic elements of the population in the Northern countries led to land-hunger and the drive for external conquests. In the words of 17th-century English statesman and writer Sir William Temple: “Each of these countries was like a mighty hive, which, by the vigor of propagation and health of climate, growing too full of people, threw out some new swarm at certain periods of time that took wing and sought out some new abode, expelling or subduing the old inhabitants and seating themselves in their rooms.” This state of affairs also held long before the Viking Age, of course.

In addition to the generalized effects of a high birthrate, two other consequences of polygyny which bore on the rise of Viking as a way of life were the large numbers of second, third, fourth, and later sons in the families of Norse landholders—sons left without inheritance and without land, unless they could wrest it away from someone else—and a shortage of women.

The most popular way to solve the latter problem was to go on a raid and carry off women from Ireland, England, or France, although there was also a heavy traffic in Slav slave girls from the Rus realms. The Hrafnsmál tells of life in Harald Fairhair’s court: “Glorious is their way of life, those warriors who play chess in Harald’s court. They are made rich with money and fine swords, with metal of Hunaland and girls from the east.”


Victory at Hafrsfjord

The political consolidation which began taking place in Scandinavia in the ninth century served as an especially strong impetus to Viking colonizers. As mentioned earlier, the Vikings were extremely individualistic, extremely resentful of any encroachments on their freedom of action. After Harald Fairhair won a great sea victory at Hafrsfjord over the Viking chieftains of western Norway in 872, many of them left Norway with their households and their followers and settled in Iceland and the smaller islands of the North Atlantic rather than submit to Harald’s rule.

A century later, political consolidation having been achieved, Scandinavian monarchs began to realize the policy advantages in bringing their people into the same religious camp as their neighbors to the south. The first to take the step was Denmark’s Harald Bluetooth, son of King Gorm the Old. In 965, 15 years after Gorm’s death, Harald allowed himself to be baptized, and then he undertook the forcible conversion of the rest of the Danes: a move which did not sit well with many and led to further emigration and turmoil in the North. It also led eventually to Harald’s deposition and banishment.


The Viking Way to Immortality

The heroic ethos, the core of the Viking attitude toward life, of which the high value placed on fidelity is but one aspect, is probably stated best in the oft-repeated lines from Grettir’s saga:

Cattle die, and kinsmen die,
And so one dies oneself.
One thing I know that never dies:
The fame of a dead man’s deeds.

To the Viking immortality was not gained by being baptized, going to Mass every Sunday, and being openhanded when the collection plate came around; the only way he knew to overcome the annihilation which awaits every man in the grave was to live his life in such a way that other men would remember him and esteem his memory. The individual consciousness must die, but the consciousness of the community, the tribe, and the race lives on; and, to the extent that the individual has entered that collective consciousness, he becomes immortal.


The Last Viking

The coming of Christianity to the Viking world eventually meant the end of that world, but it did not change the Viking ethos immediately, as is evidenced by the life of a man who was certainly one of the most remarkable of all the Vikings, and the last of the truly great ones: Harald Sigurdsson, who, after he became king of Norway, was also known as Harald Hardraada (Hard Ruler) and Harald the Ruthless.

His deeds are the subject of one of the most fascinating of the Viking sagas (King Harald’s Saga), which we would be inclined to dismiss as an unusually imaginative work of heroic fiction, were it not solidly confirmed by the historical record.


Christian Terror

Olaf, like Denmark’s Harald Bluetooth before him, was deposed and chased out of his country after attempting to impose Christianity on his countrymen against their will. For two years Olaf had waged a campaign of Christian terror, burning the farms of all Norwegians who would not bow to the Church of Rome. Many of the stubborn traditionalists who fell into his hands he maimed or blinded.

Finally his subjects revolted, and he was forced to flee to Russia. When he returned with an army, including his half-brother Harald, in 1030 he was defeated and killed, and the wounded, 15- year-old Harald became a fugitive.

Olaf, despised by the Norwegians, was immediately made a saint by the Church, and today he is the patron saint of Norwegian Christians.