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Hermit
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Acknowledging Genocide
« on: 2008-06-17 12:32:34 » |
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REMEMBERING MODERN HISTORY’S GREATEST CRIME
[ Hermit : I'm not sure I agree on the actual wording of the indictment. There have been plenty of crimes to go around. But we can agree that the murder, by Stalin and Co, of millions was at least amongst the worst crimes of modern history. I would put: Belgium's massacres of the Congolese; Turkeys genocide of the Armenians; Italy's genocide of the Abyssinians; Britain's role in igniting WW II; Roosevelt's forcing Japan into WW II; Axis and Allied bombing of civilians in WW II; China in the purges of the intellectuals; the brutality of both the Americans and the Communists in SE Asia; Britain's submission to terrorism and the UN's role in establishing the state of Israel in the Palestine (and the consequential genocide of the Palestinians); the repeated unnecessary wars between Pakistan, India and Bangladesh; numerous horrible inter-African conflicts with even more horrible civilian consequences; and the American genocide of Iraqis, into, at least, the same class of deliberate crime. ]
Source: EricMargolis.com
Authors: Eric Margolis
Dated: 2008-06-02
Canada will soon make an important contribution to the cause of historical accuracy, human rights, and justice. To coincide with last week’s visit to Ottawa of Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yushchenko, the Canadian government announced it planned to recognize the mostly forgotten 1932-1933 genocide in Ukraine.
Ottawa’s decision was motivated as much by ethnic politics as historic justice: there are 1.1 million Canadians of Ukrainian descent. But Ottawa still deserves kudos for doing the right thing.
For eight decades, the greatest mass murder in modern history has been shamefully covered up or ignored. I have been repeatedly shocked to receive letters from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent saying they had known nothing about the 1930’s genocide, or `Holdomor,’ until reading about it in my columns. Hopefully, more will now know.
From 1932-33, Stalin and henchmen, Lazar Kaganovitch and Vyacheslav Molotov, conducted a merciless campaign to crush resistance by Ukrainian farmers to communism and collectivization. They isolated Ukraine, then cut off all food supplies and seeds. Six to nine million Ukrainians died from the ensuing man-made famine and mass shootings of `anti-State elements’ by secret police execution squads. Cannibalism became common.
Large numbers of Ukrainians were also murdered during the Great Terror of 1936-38 in which an estimated 2 million Soviet citizens were shot and the same number died in Stalin’s concentration camps.
In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, the Soviet penal system reached its zenith: 5.4 million people were prisoners in the gulag. Some 300,000 more Ukrainians were sent to concentration camps under the supervision of Commissar Nikita Khrushchev, and 21,259 were killed in Soviet `pacification’ campaigns and against independence fighters. Other Ukrainian nationalist leaders were assassinated in Western Europe by special Soviet hit teams.
During the same period, Moscow unleashed terror on the tiny Baltic states. From March to May, 1949, 95,000 Lithuanians, 27,000 of them children, were sent to concentration camps. In total, 120,000 Lithuanians, 50,000 Latvians and 30,000 Estonians went to the gulag where the death rate was 51% per annum.
While the Western world rightly commemorates genocide inflicted on Armenians, Europe’s Jews, Cambodians, Rwandans, and Bosnians, it shamefully shut its eyes to the Ukrainian Holdomor because it was conducted by a key wartime ally whom President Franklin Roosevelt hailed as `Uncle Joe.’
Nor has the West ever acknowledged genocide against other peoples of the Soviet Union. In the Caucasus, Stalin sent most of the Chechen and Ingush peoples to the gulag, where 500,000 died. Yet when the children of the survivors fought for independence from Russia, the West branded them `Islamic terrorists.’
Up to three million Muslims of the Soviet Union died at Stalin’s hands, including 1.5 million Kazakhs and Crimean Tatars. Yet no holocaust memorials exist for them.
Nearly 100,000 Moldovans were murdered in a purge conducted by then Commissar Leonid Brezhnev, who would later lead the Soviet Union and be feted by Western leaders. Add to this butcher’s bill Volga Germans, Greeks, Cossacks, Armenians and Poles.
If we keep demanding that Germany and Japan atone for their wartime crimes, is it not time for our governments to finally recognize and atone their alliance with the biggest mass murderer in history, Josef Stalin, a man whose crimes exceeded those of Adolf Hitler by a factor of at least three or four times? Particularly so in the United States, where World War II has become something of a state religion and is endlessly invoked by conservatives and neocons to justify foreign military adventures.
Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill cared to admit they had allied themselves with a greater criminal than Hitler to wage their `Crusade for Freedom,’ nor that the price of this compact with the devil was giving Eastern Europe to the Soviets. In the end, the Allies destroyed a lesser threat, Germany, and in doing so, created a greater one, the nuclear-armed Soviet Union.
Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s alliance with Stalin, whom they knew to be a mass murderer and tyrant, in my view denies the Allies any claim to have been waging a `just’ or `good war.’ When the lingering clouds of wartime propaganda finally dissipate, future historians will likely look back on the western Allies as not much morally superior to Germany or the USSR, though certainly less murderous. [ Hermit : And as I have mentioned previously, the direct complicity of the Allies in loading, at gunpoint, refugees from countries that were handed to Stalin as part of fulfilling the Yalta agreements, into the same railroad cars that had been used by Germany, to ship them back to a near-certain death in Stalin's labor camps is the dirtiest non-secret of WW II. ]
Communists and leftists everywhere joined in covering up Stalin’s crimes. For example, to the end of his life, Jean Paul Sartre kept insisting Stalin’s gulag was a fiction created by western propaganda. The official Communist Party line was that the deaths of millions of Ukrainians was simply an unfortunate natural disaster that also affected other parts of the USSR.
In North America, intense attention to the Jewish Holocaust tended to push all other national historic tragedies into the background or completely eclipse them. The fact that during the 1930’s, many senior officers of Stalin’s Cheka, or secret police, were Jewish, including Kaganovitch, led to ferocious reprisals against Ukraine’s Jews in the following decade. As a result, Ukrainians were permanently branded `anti-Semites;’ their suffering received scant sympathy.
Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky demanded a Nuremburg trial for all the Soviet crimes, but unfortunately this will never happen. Most of the criminals are dead. The Soviet Eichmann, Lazar Kaganovitch, died peacefully in Moscow in 1991; Molotov died in 1986. In fact, not a single Soviet official was ever indicted for the crime committed by the state from the 1920’s to 1953, though many Cheskisti were liquidated during Stalin’s purges.
Canada’s recognition of this historic crime is important for two reasons. First, Canada is one of the world’s most respected nations. Its acknowledgement of the Holdomor will be heard around the globe. Second, nostalgia for Stalin is on the rise in today’s Russia. His memory and politics are being rehabilitated. Russians must to be reminded of his crimes and reign of terror.
In `les abuses de la mémoire,’ the Bulgarian-born French philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, who studied the Jewish Holocaust, wrote: `Life cannot withstand death, but memory is gaining in its struggle against nothingness.’
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Fritz
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Re:Acknowledging Genocide
« Reply #1 on: 2008-06-18 14:14:50 » |
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[Fritz: History seems to seldom be told in its entirety and the slaughter of Eastern Europeans fleeing the Russians is horrific by any standards. The relentless sinking of refugee ship leaving Prussia (now Poland) in 1945 and suppression of these events is unfortunate. Conversations I have had with many from this region have a common thread and that is in spite of what the German had done the Russians were feared far more in that region. Again the West did not play out the 'End Game', which seems to have become a western tradition]
the Wilhelm Gustloff is another example plus all the other refugee ships.
Fritz
.... but then no one expects the Spanish Inquisition
Source: The Independent
Author: By Tony Paterson in Berlin
date: Tuesday, 4 March 2008
Film recalls horror of world's worst maritime disaster
The life jackets on "Hitler's Titantic" were designed to save adult lives, the manufacturers had not thought about children. So when the ship's trainee purser, Heinz Sch�n, bobbed to the surface of the icy Baltic on 30 January 1945 after the German liner Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed by a Russian submarine, he was confronted with a sight he will never forget.
"There was this sea of adult heads floating all around me, but alongside them there were hundreds of children's legs half sticking up in the air. Their heads were under water," Mr Sch�n, now 82, said. "They all drowned. Nobody realised that a child's head is heavier than its legs."
More than 9,000 of the 10,000 passengers and crew drowned or died of exposure after the ship sank. The vessel is often referred to as "Hitler's Titanic" yet the death toll was six times higher than the Titanic's, making it the world's worst maritime disaster. Some 5,000 of the dead were children.
Nazi Germany's responsibility for the Holocaust meant that the plight of the Wilhelm Gustloff remained a taboo subject for decades after the war. There were fears that it would be seen as an attempt to equate German suffering with that of the Jews in Auschwitz. Even the Nobel Prize-winning author G�nter Grass's attempt to address the disaster in his 2002 novel Crab Walk provoked controversy.
Last night, however, more than eight million Germans viewers tuned in to the ZDF channel for a two-part �10m (�7.6m) dramatised TV feature about the sinking. It tells the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a Nazi "Strength through Joy" liner built in the 1930s to give German workers a chance to cruise the world. But by the end of 1944, the ship was being used to accommodate U-boat crews and was moored in the Baltic port of Gotenhafen, now Polish Gdynia.
The ship was a symbol of hope for tens of thousands of German refugees from East Prussia fleeing the invading Red Army in January 1945. Shortly after midday on 30 January, the ship set out for the port of Kiel at the western end of the Baltic with 10,000 people on board. Most were women and children. Hitler had ordered the men to stay behind and fight to the death.
Nine hours later, Wilhelm Gustloff was in its death throes, after being hit three times by torpedoes from the Russian submarine S13, which assumed it was full of troops and a legitimate target.
Mr Sch�*remembers the torpedoes striking the ship and then trying to climb the main gangway to the upper deck. "After a few metres there were just the dead bodies of women and children who had been trampled to death in the panic," he said. On the heavily listing upper deck he ran into a Nazi official who pulled out a pistol and shot his wife and child in the head before turning the weapon on himself. "At that point he ran out of ammunition and had no option but to drop into the sea," he said.
Mr Sch�n, who acted as an adviser to the producers of the TV film, was among the approximately 1,000 survivors who were picked up by two German torpedo boats that were escorting Wilhelm Gustloff. They did not hold a reunion until 1984. Only 55 are still alive.
The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and scores of MPs attended the premiere of the series, but the production still managed to provoke controversy, more than 60 years after the event. Der Spiegel magazine's online site accused the film-makers of failing to mention the Holocaust: "The production makes the outrageous suggestion that a nation of innocents drowned," it said.
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Source: IANTD Expedition the William Gustloff 2004
Date: Cindy on Nov 29, 2004 AD - 10:05 AM
Early in 1945 the end of Nazi Germany was clearly taking shape, the Red Army advanced into East Prussia committing massacres that terrified the civil population; Admiral Karl Doenitz organised the Hannibal Operation, the mass evacuation of the German population from those territories: about three million people then fled to the west looking for safety.
At 12:30 p.m. on 30 January 1945 the cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff sailed from Gotenhafen-Oxhoeft (today's Gdynia) harbour, near by Dantzig (Gdansk), overcrowded from refugees, most women, children and old people. During the chaos about eleven thousand people boarded a ship which was only built for less than two thousand passengers.
Once on board the people felt a false sense of security, as little did they know, that whilst leaving the harbour, the Gustloff was intercepted and was being followed by the soviet submarine S-13 of Captain Alexandr Marinesko. At 9,10 p.m. the first of three torpedoes exploded on the port bow, after about fifty minutes the ship sank, with nearly all its passengers, into the ice-cold water of the Baltic Sea; only 996 survivors were rescued. So tragically finished the ship that was the flagship and the pride of KdF (Kraft durch Freude), the flag carrier of the Third Reich.
The wreck of the Wilhelm Gustloff is all that remains of the greatest tragedy at sea in history, it lies in the international waters off the coast of modern Poland, in the stretch of sea between the shallow basin of the Stolpe-Bank and the Danish island of Bornholm.
This summer an official IANTD (International Association of Nitrox & Technical Divers) explored the wreck, and documented its condition. Eleven IANTD instructors and divers, skilful, not only in trimix and nitrox use, but also in u/w video shooting in adverse conditions, were on this huge historical shipwreck in an underwater environment with restricted visibility, at 2.5 C� temperature and with unfavorable shipping forecast conditions.
The project was planned and organized by the IANTD Training Facility Nautica MareDive team from Verona and supported by the IANTD Training Facility Acquamarina team from Marina di Pisa and by the technical underwater equipment companies Acquamarina � and Dive Rite �.
For the first time nine Italian divers dove and explored the wreck of the ocean cruiser Wilhelm Gustloff, they were: Fabio Ruberti expedition leader, Massimiliano Canossa author and organiser of this expedition, Cesare Balzi safety advisor, Andrea Bolzoni photographer, Leonardo Belloni video operator, Nicola Boninsegna photographer, Diego Geraci video operator, Livio Loniti photographer, Massimiliano Rancan photographer; all divers used Acquamarina � & Dive Rite � diving equipment which gave an excellent account of itself in such extreme environmental conditions.
The video footage will be used in a documentary movie for the Italian TV to inform Italian public of this, the greatest sea disaster almost completely unknown in Italy. The team was completed by land cameraman Alessandro Luria, and light sound technician Marina Billi.
Diving on a shipwreck like Wilhelm Gustloff is an exceptional event, not only because of its huge size (25.848 tons, more then 208m. length), but also for the great historical value and the enormous human tragedy that this wreck represents. To learn more visit: IANTD EXPEDITION �WILHELM GUSTLOFF� 2004
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Hermit
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Re:Acknowledging Genocide
« Reply #2 on: 2008-06-18 20:15:40 » |
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As I said, it is a non-secret.
Rummel's excellent democide site deals with the deaths, although he merely ascribes them to Stalin, ignoring western complicity and assistance, which suits his perspective that democracies don't (usually) engage in major democide.
But here is a bit more of the story. First a German perspective with well supported numbers, followed by what I think is a very compelling academic precis on the impact of the Yalta agreement and the undoubted illegality of the Allied actions. I have presented this material without comment or much in the way of emphasis, as I think the combination speaks for itself and stands on its own merit; but I will, of course, respond to any questions or comments (except from our troll).
Source: http://www.exulanten.com/murder.html
"Since the end of the war about 3,000,000 people, mostly women and children and overaged men, have been killed in eastern Germany and south-eastern Europe; about 15,000,000 people have been deported or had to flee from their homesteads and are on the road. About 25 per cent of these people, over 3,000,000 have died. About 4,000,000 men and women have been deported to eastern Europe and Russia as slaves. It seems that the elimination of the German population of eastern Europe - at least 15,000,000 people - was planned in accordance with decisions made at Yalta."
Sen. Homer Capehart, in a speech before U.S. Senate, Feb. 5, 1946.
Source: http://www.exulanten.com/murder.html
Of the nearly 2.4 million East Prussians, more than 1.9 million soon joined by ethnic Germans from central Poland, fled westward under bad conditions. 173,000 people remained, most of them in what is now the Polish part of East Prussia. Only since 1989, have they again identified themselves as Germans. A very low estimate of 75,000 German children were killed by Allied bombs during the war. Thousands more found themselves abandoned, orphaned, raped or kidnapped. The fate of many thousands more children was never learned. Many starved to death when international charitable aid to Germany after the war was banned for one year, then restricted for more than another year. When it was permitted, it came too late for millions of people, thousands of whom were children. For months in parts of Germany, the ration set by the occupying Allies was an
insufficient 400 calories per day.
Source: http://www.exulanten.com/scream.html
In much of Germany it was often around 1,000, and officially for more than two years it was never more than 1,550. The number of murdered Germans, for the most part civilian: women, infants and children, as well as the elderly was a minimum of 9,300,000 and a maximum of 15,700,000. In one horrible situation, some ten thousand German children under five died in Danish camps after "liberation." Between February 11 and May 5, about 250,000 German women, children and elderly refugees from East Prussia, Pomerania and the Baltic provinces fled from the Soviet Army across the Baltic Sea, a third of them under 15 years old. They were interned as enemies in hundreds of camps in Denmark, placed behind barbed wire and guarded by heavily armed overseers. Denied medical care and proper nourishment they starved or died from resulting disease.
After millions of Germans from East Prussia and other Baltic areas fled from the Red Army, those left behind were forcibly expelled from 1945 to 1947 in the Polish or Lithuanian areas. The entire situation produced a population of around 25,000 orphaned or abandoned children who sometimes roved in gangs for comfort, support and survival throughout East Prussia and eastern Poland. Today, they are referred to as "Wolfskinder" or Wolf children. Some of these children were actually from the Ruhr area and had been sent to East Prussia for safety from the intense bombing in the west. Approximately 2,000 to 3,000 of these children were captured and sent to Russian internment camps where many soon died of starvation, exploitation and disease.
Sometimes local farmers took them in, but often they were worked as slaves and poorly treated, especially in Polish areas. There were about 5,000 in Lithuania alone who went begging in search of food and work. The "Nazi children" were strictly forbidden to speak German, lest there be repercussions against the hosting families or employers, therefore they suppressed their language and even their names and pretended to be citizens of the Soviet Union with Lithuanian nationality. At the beginning of the 1950s, about 1,000 of the "wolf children" were sent to communist East Germany.
Source: http://www.exulanten.com/murder.html
Two Allied air raids were carried out on the old city of Königsberg on August 26/27 and August 29/30, 1944 based on disinformation from Churchill that it was a "a modernised heavily defended fortress." In reality, he knowingly paved the way for the Red Army. 90% of the city of Kant was absolutely destroyed and it burned for several days. The entire historic city center, including the cathedral, the castle, all churches of the old city, the old and the new universities and the old shipping quarter were lost. After the Red Army captured Königsberg under General Chernyakhovsky, approximately 50,000 citizens who did not escape in time were dead and 90,000 German military prisoners were taken, almost none of whom were never heard from again. Only about 50,000 citizens out of Königsberg's prewar population of 316,000 remained.
The Red Army immediately began methodically erasing any trace of former German history and presence. In January and February of 1945, the "evacuation" of surviving German began, including those who had returned to reunite with their families. Most of the surviving German population of East Prussia was expelled at that time with many people deported to the Gulag as slaves, and others held as virtual prisoners until 1949, during which time many died of disease and starvation. These last remaining German residents were expelled in a more detailed ethnic cleansing of 1949-50.
Source: http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/yugoslav-hist1.htm Accessed 2008-06-18
Cited Source: http://www.dalmatia.net/croatia/mcadams/bleiburg_and_yalta1.htm Accessed 1999-05-06
Yalta and The Bleiburg Tragedy
Chapter from the book Od Bleiburga do Naših Dana
YALTA AND THE BLEIBURG TRAGEDY
C Michael McAdams / Home Page
University of San Francisco, California USA
Condensed from the chapter with the same title in:
Od Bleiburga do Naših Dana
Jozo Marovic, Editor
Zagreb: Školska Kniga, 1995
Presented at the International Symposium for Investigation of the Bleiburg Tragedy Zagreb, Croatia and Bleiburg, Austria
May 17 and 18, 1994
We are approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the Yalta Conference which shaped the post-war world and forever changed the history of Croatia and a dozen other nations. In February of 1995 we will have had a half century to reflect on the tragedy of the so-called "Great Powers" dividing up the world and forcing hundreds of thousands seeking freedom to be returned to their captive nations against their will. And yet, in this half century, what have we really learned and how have we gone about the study of forced repatria-tion?
The subject of forced repatriation of hundreds of thousands of human beings at the end of the Second World War is so multifaceted that it presents an array of problems for those who would study it. Unlike the study of the Jewish Holocaust, now considered a single interdisciplinary field, post-war repatriation is still seen primarily in the limited context of the nations involved. There is no field of "Repatriation Studies" and each exploration must rely on a single discipline, such as History or Political Science, to explore a single aspect without really considering the whole. While a multi-disciplinary approach is warranted, History can perhaps best focus on cause and effect. Forced repatriation did not "just happen." While there were many causes, the instrument of implementation, indeed of legalization, was the Yalta Agreement. The effects of repatriation were likewise many and varied, but this brief overview seeks to explore a single effect of the whole: The forced repatriation of Croatians to Yugoslavia in and around the village of Bleiburg, Austria and the events that followed over the next two years.
Next Spring will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. It is perhaps of interest to look back a decade at how the fortieth anniversary was marked in 1985 to observe how much things have changed in a decade and how some things never change. The Soviet Union noted the fortieth anniversary of World War II as the great victory over Fascism in the "Great Patriotic War" which "liberated" half of Europe into the Commu-nist fold. A decade later, the Soviet Union no longer exists and Communism is on its death bed. The Western Allies remembered those who fell in battle and who served their country and they will do so again next year. But NATO, the true successor to the wartime Western Alliance, will no longer have as its primary mission the containment of Commu-nism. West Germany remembered her dead a decade ago and the horror of Hitlerism never to be repeated while East Germany honored the Soviets for their liberation while claiming that Hitlerism still lived in the West. Next year a united Germany will grapple with how to mark this anniversary as a member of NATO and with rising nationalism and Fascism arising primarily from the former Communist east. Japan remembered her dead in 1985, especially those who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the unwilling ushers into the nuclear age. But Japan did so unbowed. In the past decade, the Japanese government has formally apologized to many of the victims, both people and states, of Japanese aggression. Finally, throughout the world ten years ago, Jews and Gentiles alike painfully noted the liberation of the concentration camps and vowed that such a Holocaust would never happen again. Next year we will again remember these victims but with the knowledge that "ethnic cleansing" has again taken place in the heart of Europe while the so-called "Great Powers" stood silent.
Much of what shaped the post-War world is directly linked to a single word: Yalta. The word first entered the world's common vocabulary on February 13, 1945, when it was reported that a historic meeting had taken place in the Crimea from the fourth through the eleventh of that month at a place called Yalta. At the time it was called the Crimea conference and it is perhaps best to refer to the conference itself by that name since today Yalta has come to mean much more than a place where Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met with their foreign ministers and chiefs-of-staff. Yalta has come to mean the partitioning of Germany, the Nuernberg Trials and the division of Europe between democracy and totalitarianism. Yalta meant the partition of Poland despite the fact that it was supposed to be the partitioning of Poland that started the Second World War. Yalta sacrificed the proud nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and the agreement ratified the Soviet annexation of Rumanian, Slovak and Finnish lands.
By signing the Yalta Agreement, Roosevelt and Churchill became co-signatories of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. Yalta became synonymous with great power politics and colonialism: three kings dividing up the world without regard to the wishes of the peoples of every nation. The cavalier manner with which the future of nations was decided was best described by Winston Churchill in his book The Second World War: Triumph & Tragedy: "Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans...how would it do for you to have 90% predominance in Rumania, for us to have 90% in Greece, and go 50/50 in Yugo-slavia?" He then wrote the equation on a half sheet of paper and handed it to Stalin.
Churchill pushed the list to Stalin who made a large check-mark on it with a blue pencil. Churchill then said "Might it not be thought cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper."
The Atlantic Charter, for which hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen had died was thus disposed of at Yalta. The words of the Atlantic Charter promis-ed that "All peoples have a right to choose their own forms of government; those forcibly deprived of the right should have it restored." Such lofty words were not to apply to any of the captive nations of the USSR or eastern Europe. These millions of people could not have known, nor would they have believed, that their ancient nations and homelands were dispatched with the flick of a blue pencil.
In a half century it would seem that every aspect of this tragedy would have been explored in detail by historians, political scientists and politicians. Surely, after a half century, there could be no questions unanswered and no factual data unexplored. And indeed there has been some very good scholarly research into this earth changing event.
Some of the blame has been laid at the feet of Stalin, although only in passing. He perhaps deserves the least blame if only because he was open and honest in his motives and did most for his own political interests. We now know that Roosevelt was nearly on his death bed at Yalta, but history tends to forgive those who die in power, as it seldom does for those who die in exile or shame. Roosevelt remains a hero to much of America. Winston Churchill will forever be protected by history as the bulldog who saved Britain. Each of the three had his advisors and aids at his side. Howard MacMillan was hired by Britain to re-shape the Mediterranean in the imperial mold, but stayed on to run the shop. Alger Hiss, Roosevelt's own in-house communist, became something of a folk hero to America's liberal elite. And Brea, Stalin's Chief of Secret Police has taken the ups and downs of historical revisionism with the political mood in Russia.
History has been written and the blame has been put at any number of deserving feet. Yet through it all, one aspect of Yalta has been given little attention by scholarly and popular writers alike. The subject is the planned, pre-ordained murder of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in the months and years after World War II. The victims of Yalta died at the hands of Stalin and his surrogates, but only with the cooperation and active participation of the Western Allies: the United States and Great Britain.
Each nation has its own name for this holocaust. For Croatia the name is the Bleiburg Tragedy after the small Austrian village from which thousands began their long march back into a new Communist Yugoslavia. The American military code-named it Operation Keelhaul from the ancient punishment of keelhauling wayward sailors who were dragged under the keel of a moving ship at the end a rope. By whatever name, this was without question one of the most shameful episodes of the Second World War if only because it occurred after the War ended. The Bleiburg tragedy was murder which began when the legal killing called warfare ended.
In 1945 there was some international law on the subject of forced repatria-tion. In brief, the concept was not acceptable under any international guidelines. The Hague Conven-tions of 1899 and 1907 treat it only by exclusion and by making it clear that prisoners-of-war must be treated humanely. The Geneva Accords of 1929 also did not recognize the concept of forced repatriation. The 1949 Geneva Accords prohibit forced repatriations "during hostilities." Still the wording is vague. Dozens of treaties between the USSR and neighboring states did explicitly prohibit the forced return of any individual against his or her will.
The "Yalta Agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States," later Britain and France, "Concerning Liberated Prisoners of War and Civilians" was signed on February 11, 1945 by U.S. Major General John R. Dene and Soviet Lt. General Gryzlov. This agreement called upon the United States and the Soviet Union to take joint action regarding Soviet and American nationals in the war zone. There were, of course, few American nationals, civilian or military, in Eastern Europe in the final days of World War II. In part, the Agreement read:
"All Soviet citizens liberated by forces operating under United States command ...will, without delay after their liberation, be separated from enemy prisoners of war and will be maintained separately from them in concentration camps until they have been handed over to the Soviet authorities..."1
The Agreement also provided for Soviet control of the camps and "...the right to appoint the internal administration and set-up the internal discipline and management in accor-dance with the military prosecute the laws of their country."
Still, there was no reference to "forced" repatriation in the Agreement although it was implied. The entire agreement was designed to meet Soviet needs and the method of repatriation was left up to the Soviet Union. But the Yalta Agreement did not invent forced repatriation, it simply formalized existing policy. Documents from September 1944 on set a clear direction of action against "...any national of the United Nations who is believed to have committed offenses against his national law in support of the German war effort." Since the act of surrender was a criminal act in the USSR, all prisoners-of-war were criminals subject to the death penalty. These words also applied to any person living on the territory of Yugoslavia who did not support the Partisans during the War. On September 16, 1944, U.S. Political Officer Alexander Kirk sent a cable to U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull which noted that an agreement had been reached between the Soviets and the British for repatriation of Soviet citizens held as prisoners-of-war "...irrespective of whether the individuals desire to return to Russia or not. Statements will not be taken from Soviet nationals in the future as to their willingness to return to their native country." Kirk further noted that "MacMillan is apparently receiving instruc-tions to this effect from the (British) Foreign Office."
Unable to believe this obvious violation of international law, U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Averell Harriman wired Hull on September 24, 1944 demanding an explanation how the British government reached its decision. Kirk then met with MacMillan who justified the action by noting that "Since these men will no longer be treated as prisoners, the Geneva Conventions will no longer apply."
All such conversations were "top secret" at the time. Even the text of the Yalta Agree-ment on Repatriation was not released until March 1946. The fact that the agreements were reached only with the Soviets means little. They were equally enforced by each of Stalin's proteges, including Josip Tito before the Tito-Stalin split.
The results of this policy of the West, giving Stalin all he demanded while asking virtually nothing in return, are of such magnitude that they defy comprehension. Nine hundred thousand to one million followers of Russian Liberation Army General Andrei Vlasov were among the first to be forcibly returned. The leadership was executed and the others were sent into the vast system of hard labor camps made famous by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as the "Gulag Archipelago." The next victims were over three thousand Cossack officers at Lienz. Then tens of thousand of officers and men from every nation in Europe who had served their country in wartime. Finally, millions of civilian refugees fleeing the promise of a new Workers' Paradise under Stalin, Tito, Hoxha and a dozen others, were also victims of Yalta.
To Croatians, the tragedy began at the small village of Bleiburg in Southern Carenthia, Austria. Bleiburg is a model for all the forced repatriations in post-war Europe. These post-war massacres of Croatians are almost unknown outside the Croatian com-munity despite the fact that the Bleiburg-Maribor massacres have been documented in such works as Operation Slaughterhouse by John Prcela and Stanko Guldescu, In Tito's Death Marches and Extermination Camps by Joseph Heÿimoviÿ, Operation Keelhaul by Julius Epstein, Bleiburg by Vinko Nikoliÿ, and perhaps best known, The Minister and the Massacres by Count Nikolai Tolstoy. That these massacres occurred is irrefutable. Only the number of deaths and the depth of American and British duplicity are in question.
The story of Bleiburg began in early 1945 as it became clear that Germany would lose the War. As the German Army retreated toward the Austrian border, the Red Army advanced, and the Partisans began their con-solidation of power, anarchy prevailed in what was Yugo-slavia. A dozen or more nationalist movements and ethnic militias attempted to salvage various parts of Yugoslavia. Most nationalists, Croatian, Slovenian and Serbian alike, were anti-Communist and all had visions of the Western Allies welcoming them into the coming battle against Communism. Croatians especially cherished the totally unsup-ported notion that Anglo-American intervention would save an independent Croatian state.
As in every other part of eastern Europe, armies, governments, and civilian populations began moving toward the Western lines. Some were pushed before the retreating Ger-mans, others followed in their wake. Many traveled in small bands, armed or unarmed, while others were well organized into mass movements of people and equipment. Along the trek north they fought the Partisans and ÿetniks. Many surrendered, others fought to the death.
The retreating Germans, usually without bothering to inform their erstwhile allies, took with them much of the material support needed by the Croatian armed forces. Despite conditions, several Croatian generals wanted to defend the city of Zagreb from the Partisan advance and fight to the finish if necessary. The Partisans made it clear that the city, swollen to twice its size with refugees, would be destroyed if they met resistance. A final meeting of the Croatian government was held on April 30, 1945 at which the decision was made to abandon Zagreb and retreat into Austria.
Still quite naive concerning Allied intentions, many Croatian officers hoped that the still sizable Croatian Army would be allowed to surrender to the British to fight again against the Russians. Since both Croatia and Britain were signatories to the Geneva Conventions, it was felt that at worst the Croatians would be treated as prisoners of war.
The exodus from Zagreb began on May 1st. Some 200,000 civilians were flanked by almost as many soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Croatian armed forces. The Arch-bishop-Metropolitan Aloysius Stepinac took charge of the govern-ment for the few hours between the departure of Croatian officials and the arrival of the Partisan Army. State Minister Vranÿiÿ was dispatched to Italy as a peace emissary to the Allies and several high-ranking English-speaking officers headed the main column toward Austria.
The retreat was well ordered and the protecting flank armies insured that all of the civilians arrived safely at the Austrian border by May 7. A number of military units remained behind to fight delaying actions as late as May 12. Still other units, known as Crusaders fled into the hills and fought sporadic guerilla actions until 1948.
The huge column finally came to rest in a small valley near the Austrian village of Bleiburg, where they arrived on May 14th and 15th. Believing in the sense of fair play and justice for which the British had made themselves known, the Croatians surrendered to the British with the promise that they would not be forced back into Yugoslavia.
The leaders had no way of knowing that their peace emissary, Dr. Vranÿiÿ, had traveled as far as Forli, Italy by plane and car under a white flag only to be stopped short of his goal. At Forli, Vranÿiÿ and Naval Captain Vrkljan, who spoke fluent English, were detained by one Captain Douglas of British Field Security who was more interested in their diplomatic grade Mercedes-Benz automobile than their mission to see Field Marshal Alexander in Caserta. He held the emissaries incommunicado until May 20 when he had them thrown into a prisoner of war camp and confiscated the automobile.
In the belief that their envoys had made some arrangement with the British, the multitude of humanity set up camp in the valley to await the outcome of negotiations. One of the first groups to arrive at British head-quarters was a contin-gent of 130 members of the Croatian government headed by President Nikola Mandiÿ. All were told that they would be transferred to Italy as soon as possible by British Military Police. All were then loaded into a train and returned to the Partisans. It was the intent of the British to turn over all Croatians, as well as Serbs and Slovenes, to the Communists from whom they had fled.
When the Croatian military leaders realized that they had led hundreds of thousands into a trap, some committed suicide on the spot. The British extradited at first hundreds, then thousands of Croatians. Some were shot at the border, while others joined the infamous "Death Marches" which took them deeper into the new People's Republic for liquidation. They were forced back, some in trains, some on foot, to the waiting arms of Tito's Partisans. On May 16, 1945, the killing began. It would not end for two years.
The survivors of the initial atrocities were organized into forced marches by the 7th Brigade of the 17th Partisan Division. The Croatians called them the "Death Marches." Tens of thousands of men, women and children were marched, hands tied with wire, through the villages and towns of southern Austria and Slovenia. On their southward trek toward the camps, they were starved, beaten, raped and ridiculed. Those who did not march were shot and dumped into shallow graves or caves. Wounded and ill Croatian soldiers and civilians in hospitals and field camps were loaded onto wagons and sent toward the camps with the southbound sea of humanity. Many would not survive. Those who did live would spend as much as a decade in concentration camps, labor battalions and prisons. Finally, the government of Yugoslavia plowed over Croatian military cemeteries and attempted to erase all traces of the Bleiburg massacres. As late as 1974 graves were removed to block investigation of the tragedy. 2 The total number of people liquidated may never be known. Despite the scholarship and masses of documents proving the contrary, the Yugoslav government denied that the Bleiburg-Maribor massacres or any subsequent liquidation of anti-Communists occurred. As late as 1976 special teams were active in Slovenia and southern Austria cover-ing up evidence of the crimes. The American and British govern-ments, implicated in the forced repatriation that led to the slaughter, also sought to cover-up or at least ignore the crimes.
Unlike Lidece, or Hiroshima, or Dresden, the tragedy of Bleiburg was not a single event, but hundreds of events over a long period of time. And, unlike Hiroshima or Dresden, Bleiburg was not an act of war. It was an act of post-war retribution. The initial killings near the Austro-Yugoslav border were followed by the execution of members of the Croatian government. There were massacres at other sites. Some, like Kamnik involved a few thousand deaths. Others, like Maribor, saw over 40,000 die.
To debate whether the suffering of the Croatians at Bleiburg and beyond surpassed that of the Cossacks, Russians, Ukrainians or the millions of others of all nations during and after World War II, or to attempt to quantify whether the collective fate of the victims of Bleiburg was worse than that of the citizens of Hiroshima or Dresden, serves neither an academic or humanistic purpose. One half century after the fact, continuing to lay blame, access guilt or call for vengeance serves no purpose.
What is clearly needed is further study. Serious, unemotional, study by historians, political scientists, legal scholars, sociologists, psychologists, forensic criminologists and others. The study must be separated from political or ethnic considerations. The task at hand is to learn the true impact of Bleiburg on post-War Croatia, the psyche and self-image of the Croatian nation. The mere recognition that Bleiburg did occur, that questions exist, and that in all things there are causes, actions, and effects, is a giant first step toward understanding the tragedy and healing the wounds still felt by so many.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Acknowledging Genocide
« Reply #3 on: 2008-06-19 01:56:30 » |
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Found this charming piece at http://www.ety.com/HRP/rev/warcrimetrials.htm
Whose is the ethical superiority?
NEWS DESK 24th JUNE 2000
MICHAEL WALSH: BEHIND THE HEADLINES
SCANDAL EMERGING
HOW ALLIES TREATED GERMAN POWs
"War crime trials for allied soldiers overdue." Says analyst
"British and allied troops appearing as defendants in war crimes trials with brutal Serbs and former Red Army thugs is well overdue", says 20th Century analyst, Michael Walsh. His research exposes allied genocide, enslavement and institutionalized ill treatment of axis prisoners-of-war both during and after World War 11.
He says, "the scale of abuse of prisoners-of-war was contrary to the Geneva and other conventions to which Britain and its allies were signatories. As late as 1948, three years after the war’s end, the British Government’s treatment of its foreign prisoners was subject to International Red Cross scrutiny and international condemnation. The IRC threatened to bring the British government before international tribunals for abuse and illegal enslavement. Typically, British administered prisoner-of-war camps were worse than Belsen long after the war had ended and war disruption ceased. Tragically even civilians were illegally held, deported and murdered in the tens of thousands whilst the evil killers responsible have so far evaded justice.
The respected Associated Press Photographer, Henry Griffin who had taken the pictures of corpses in Buchenwald and Dachau when visiting Allied POW camps agreed: "The only difference I can see between these men and those corpses is that here they are still breathing." (1)
"According to revelations by members of the House of Commons, about 130,000 former German officers and men were held during the winter of 1945-46 in British camps in Belgium under conditions which British officers have described as 'not much better than Belsen." (2)
TORTURE AND BRUTALITY
Adding to international outrage, Cyril Connolly, one of England’s most acclaimed writers reported: "British guards imprisoned German troops and tortured them." He described how "they were so possessed by propaganda about German 'Huns' that they obviously enjoyed demonstrating their atrocities to visiting journalists. A British reporter named Moorehead who was present at these ‘torture fests’ observed that 'a young British medical officer and a captain of engineers managed the Bergen-Belsen camp. "The captain was in the best of moods," he said. "When we approached the cells of gaoled guards, the sergeant lost his temper." The captain explained. 'This morning we had an interrogation. I'm afraid the prisoners don't look exactly nice.'
The cells were opened for the visiting journalists. "The German prisoners lay there, crumpled, moaning, covered with gore. The man next to me made vain attempts to get to his feet and finally managed to stand up. He stood there trembling, and tried to stretch out his arms as if fending off blows. "Up!" yelled the sergeant. "Come off the wall."
"They pushed themselves off from the wall and stood there, swaying. In another cell the medical officer had just finished an interrogation. "Up." yelled the officer. "Get up." The man lay in his blood on the floor. He propped two arms on a chair and tried to pull himself up. A second demand and he succeeded in getting to his feet. He stretched his arms towards us. "Why don't you kill me off?" he moaned.
"The dirty bastard is jabbering this all morning." the sergeant stated. (3)
SHOOTING PRISONERS ‘FOR FUN’
Former British Army veteran A.W Perkins of Holland-on-Sea described conditions in the ‘Sennelager’ British concentration camp, which shockingly held, not captured troops but civilians. He recounts; "During the latter half of 1945 I was with British troops guarding suspected Nazi civilians living on starvation rations in a camp called Sennelager. They were frequently beaten and grew as thin as concentration camp victims, scooping handfuls of swill from our waste bins."
This ex-guard described how other guards amused themselves by baiting starving prisoners. "They could be shot on sight if they ventured close to the perimeter fence. It was a common trick to throw a cigarette just inside the fence and shoot any prisoner who tried to reach it." (4).
"When Press representatives ask to examine the prison camps, the British loudly refuse with the excuse that the Geneva Convention bars such visits to prisoner-of-war camps." complained press correspondent Arthur Veysey from London on May 28th 1946.
"UNDERFED AND BEATEN" ADMITS TOP AMERICAN NEWSPAPER
Typically "The prisoners lived through the winter in tents and slept on the bare ground under one blanket each. They say they are underfed and beaten and kicked by guards. Many have no underclothes or boots." reported the Chicago Tribune Press Service on 19 May 1946 one year after the war’s end.
"In the summer of 1946 an increasing number of prisoners of-war were escaping from British slave camps often with British civilian aid. "Accounts of the chases by military police are reminiscent of pre-Civil War pursuits by fleeing Negro fugitives." stated an Associated Press dispatch (London, August 27th, 1946) more than sixteen months after the war ended.
CIVILIANS; WOMEN AND CHILDREN MACHINE-GUNNED
Tens of thousands of middle-European peoples, displaced by the war who fell into British hands were treated even worse in British controlled Austria and Yugoslavia. There, Britain and the NKVD ran the concentration camps jointly. The latter, forerunners to the evil KGB, were invited to assist the British in the capture and corralling, deportation and slaughter of their captives.
One British officer described how "The prisoners (civilians) were treated coarsely but not brutally. They were pushed and shoved but there was no resistance, no fighting or trying to get back or get away. They were all completely docile, resigned to their fate. The soldiers collected them all quickly into groups and marched them away to be machine-gunned in groups.'
The British officer added, 'some of them didn't get very far I'm afraid. At the back of the station there was a wood, a copse, and they seemed to be marched behind this copse. Shortly afterwards there were quite a number of sustained bursts of machine-gun fire. I can't say for certain what happened, because I couldn't see the shooting. But I am pretty sure that a lot of them were shot there and then, not on the siding itself but just around the corner of the wood."
This is typical of many accounts when units of the British Army working with Red Army NKVD officers, hunted down and butchered tens of thousands of Cossack civilian refugees including children in Austria, in summer, 1945 after the war had ended.
A BLOOD-SPATTERED BRITISH TRANSPORT TRAIN
Tens of thousands of people of many nationalities were hunted down and rounded up like cattle to be taken to the Red Army’s killing fields. One account described how ‘the whole train was bespattered with blood. They were open-plan carriages, and I remember the bloodstains where bodies had been dragged right down the corridor between the seats and down three of four steps. The lavatories were absolutely covered in blood...."
"Another such patrol, consisting of two Red Army officers and four British soldiers set off into the hills on horseback on June 8th. They captured one such group on the lower slopes.... "The Cossacks ran off, leaving just a few, mainly women and children who were too weak to move. One soldier spotted a Cossack in the distance, aimed his rifle at him, fired and saw him drop. .... As he was not seen to rise again it was assumed he had been killed."
Captain Duncan McMillan remembers, 'Being guided to a small railway station where there was a barbed-wire enclosure' He saw the Cossacks being unloaded from the trucks and described how they were stripped of their possessions, even food before being marched away. 'Many British soldiers who were there have testified that they heard the rattle of machine-guns nearby just moments after the prisoners were removed." James Davidson said: "We thought that machine-gunning must be the finish of them. We thought they were just taken back there and slaughtered."
These awful accounts were described in Nicholas Bethell’s book, The Last Secret published by Futura, (London) in 1974. The English legal apparatus suppressed further accounts.
SLAVE LABOUR IN THE CENTURY
In August 1946 15 months after the end of the Second World War, according to the International Red Cross, "Britain had 460,000 German prisoners slaving for her." This was in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention (Enslavement of Prisoners-of-War is a violation of the Geneva Convention. Article.75) which Britain was a signatory to. Arthur Veysey of the Chicago Tribune Press Service on May 28th 1946 reported "When they (German POWs) learned upon arrival in British and French ports they were to be worked indefinitely as slaves, they became sullen."
PROFITING FROM GERMAN SLAVES
Arthur Veysey appalled by the British government’s abuse of human rights and the illegality of its evil slave-ownership policies and defiance of the Geneva Convention said, "The British Government nets over $250,000,000 annually from its slaves. The Government, which frankly calls itself the 'owner' of the prisoners, hires the men out to any employer needing men, charging the going rate for such work, usually $15 to $20 a week. It pays the slaves from 10 to 20 cents a day. The prisoners are never paid in cash, but are given credits either in the form of vouchers or credits."
THE SOVIET UNION FOLLOWS BRITAIN’S SLAVE EMPIRE EXAMPLE
When American attempts were made to prevent Stalin from abducting five million Germans, many of them civilians including children, as slave laborers after Germany’s defeat, the Soviets made their point. They produced a proclamation signed by General Dwight Eisenhower a year earlier, which gave the Soviets complete freedom to do whatever, they wished with captured Germans. This included deportation, enslavement; to loot and destroy without restraint, even using German transport to do so. They reminded the US Government that they had an equal right to do as the Americans were doing and were exercising the same right.
Eyewitness accounts describe events when Berlin and Breslau surrendered. "The long grey-green columns of prisoners were marched east downcast and fearful towards huge depots near Leningrad, Moscow, Minsk, Stalingrad, Kiev, Kharkov and Sevastopol. All fit men had to march 22 miles a day. Those physically handicapped went in handcarts or carts pulled by spare beasts." This was reported in the Congressional Record on March 29th 1946.
STARVATION OF POWS IN FRANCE
By August 1946 France according to the International Red Cross had enslaved nearly three-quarters of a million former German servicemen. Of these 475,000 had been captured by the Americans who ‘in a deal’ had transferred them to French control for the expressed purpose of forced labour. Interestingly in a macabre way, the French returned 2,474 German POWs complaining that they were weaklings. (5)
Those returned must indeed have been in a bad way for the 472,526 remaining slaves had already been described by correspondents as; "a beggar army of pale, thin men clad in vermin infested tatters." All were pronounced unfit for work, three quarters of them due to deliberate starvation. Of this unfortunate ‘army’ of slaves 19% were so badly treated they needed to be hospitalized (6)
In the notorious camp in the Sarthe District for 20,000 prisoners, inmates received just 900 calories a day; thus 12 died every day in the hospital. Four to five thousand are unable to work any more. Recently trains with new prisoners arrived at the camp; several prisoners had died during the trip, several others had tried to stay alive by eating coal that had been lying in the freight train by which they came. (7)
On December 5th 1946 the American Government requested the repatriation (by October 1, 1947) to Germany of the 674,000 German prisoners-of-war it had handed over to France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg.
France agreed in principle but refused to abide by the release date stipulated. They pointed out, correctly, that a December 1st 1945 memorandum clearly stated that German prisoners handed over to the French by the US Government ‘were chattels to be used indefinitely as forced labour’. (
US ARMY SLAUGHTERED GERMAN POWS
The German armed forces invariably obeyed the Rules of War conventions to the letter. Speaking for himself and other allied military commanders, Major General Robert W. Grow, U.S.A. Commander 6th Armored Division in Europe conceded there was ‘no German atrocity problem’.
"My service during World War Two was in command of an armored division throughout the European campaign, from Normandy to Saxony. My division lost quite a number of officers and men captured between July 1944 and April 1945. In no instance did I hear of personnel from our division receiving treatment other than proper under the 'Rules of Land Warfare'. As far as the 6th Armored Division was concerned in its 280 days of front line contact, there was no 'atrocity problem'. Frankly, I was aghast, as were many of my contemporaries, when we learned of the proposed 'war crimes' trials and the fact that military commanders were among the accused. I know of no general officer who approved of them." (9)
Despite the German observance of convention the American forces response was often as summary and as brutal as those practiced by their Soviet allies. Only in cases where large numbers of captured soldiers had been taken were they to be enslaved. If captured in smaller groups the US Army policy was simply to slaughter their captured prisoners where they stood.
A specific study is now being made for the purpose of compiling evidence of such atrocities to which the author, Michael Walsh, would appreciate input.
One such case was the cold-blooded slaying of an estimated 700 troops of the 8th SS Mountain Division. These troops who had fought with honorable distinction had earlier captured a US field hospital. Although the German troops had conducted themselves properly they were, when subsequently captured by the US Army, routinely separated and gunned down in groups by squads of American troops.
US ARMY TURNS PEACEFUL DACHAU INTO CHARNEL HOUSE
A similar fate befell infantrymen of the SS Westphalia Brigade who were captured by the US 3rd Armored Division. Most of the German captives were shot through the back of the head. "The jubilant Americans told the locals to leave their bodies in the streets as a warning to others of US revenge" Their corpses lay in the streets for five days before the occupying forces relented and allowed the corpses to be buried. After the war the German authorities attempted, without success, to prosecute the GIs responsible. (10)
Ironically in the light of postwar research it has been revealed that the only atrocities committed at Dachau were those carried out by the victorious allies. Equally ironically this camp was an allied concentration camp (eleven years) for a longer period of time than it was a German administered camp. There, "Three hundred SS camp guards were quickly neutralized." on the orders of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The term neutralized of course is a politically correct (or cowardly) way of saying that prisoners-of-war were rounded up and machine-gunned in groups. Accounts of the mass murder of prisoners-of-war at Dachau have been described in at least two books; 'The Day of the Americans by Nerin Gun, Fleet Publishing Company, New York, and, Deliverance Day - The Last Hours at Dachau by Michael Selzer; Lippincot, Philadelphia
These books describe how German prisoners were collected in groups, placed against a wall and methodically machine-gunned by American soldiers while some were still standing, hands raised in surrender. American soldiers casually climbed over the still twitching bodies, killing the wounded. Whilst this was happening, American photographers were taking pictures of the massacres that have since been published.
At Dachau, which was in the American zone of Germany, a shock force of American and Polish guards attempted to entrain a group of Russian prisoners from Vlasov's Army who had refused to be repatriated under the new American ruling.
MASS SUICIDES
'All of these men refused to entrain,' Robert Murphy wrote in his report of the incident. 'They begged to be shot. They resisted entrainment by taking off their clothes and refusing to leave their quarters.... Tear-gas forced them out of the building into the snow where those who had cut and stabbed themselves fell exhausted and bleeding in the snow. Nine men hanged themselves and one had stabbed himself to death and one other who had stabbed himself subsequently died; while twenty others are still in hospital from self-inflicted wounds. The entrainment was finally effected of 368 men." (11)
"The last operation of this kind in Germany took place at Plattling near Regensburg, where fifteen hundred men of Vlasov's Army had been interned by the Americans. In the early hours of February 24th, 1946, they were driven out of their huts wearing only their night-clothes, and handed over to the Russians in the forest near the Bavarian-Czech border. Before the train set off on its return journey the American guards were horrified to see the bodies of Vlasov's men who had already committed suicide hanging in rows from trees, and when they returned to Plattling even the German SS prisoners in the nearby POW camp jeered at them for what they had done." (13)
According to the Toronto Daily Star, March, 9th, 1968, "Former members of an illegal Israeli force which was given absolute freedom to slaughter Germans conceded that "More than 1,000 Nazi SS Officers died as a result of eating arsenic-impregnated bread introduced April, 13th, 1946, in an American-run prisoner-of-war camp near Nuremberg."
After the US victory (the battle for Remagen Bridge) Germans in the Rhineland surrendered en masse. Between April and July 1945, some 260,000 German prisoners-of-war were held under American guard in the boggy fields between Remagen and Sinzig. They were kept in the open air and their daily ration was one potato, a biscuit, a spoonful of vegetables and some water. Racked by disease, at least 1,200 died, according to German records." (14)
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH CONDEMNS US SLAVERY
In the USA where 140,000 German prisoners-of-war were shipped, the Catholic Bishops Conference described how, "Multitudes of civilians and prisoners of war have been deported and degraded into forced labor unworthy of human beings."
"Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are put like slaves to forced labor, although the only thing with which they can be reproached is the fact that they were soldiers. Many of these poor fellows are without news from home and have not been allowed to send a sign of life to their dear ones."
GERMAN SLAVES HELD IN ALLIED COUNTRIES
United States 140,000 (US Occupation Zone of which 100,000 were held in France, 30,000 in Italy, 14,000 in Belgium. Great Britain 460,000 German slaves. The Soviet Union 4,000,000 - 5,000,000 estimated. France had 680,000 German slaves by August 1946. Yugoslavia 80,000, Belgium 48,000, Czechoslovakia 45,000, Luxembourg 4,000, Holland 1,300. Source: International Red Cross.
"AN EVIL PRECEDENT"
An outraged International Red Cross organization opined: "The United States, Britain and France, nearly a year after peace are violating International Red Cross agreements they solemnly signed in 1929. Although thousands of former German soldiers are being used in the hazardous work of clearing minefields, sweeping sea mines and razing shattered buildings, the Geneva Convention expressly forbids employing prisoners 'in any dangerous labour or in the transport of any material used in warfare.'
Henry Wales in Geneva, Switzerland on April 13, 1946 added, 'The bartering of captured enemy soldiers by the victors throws the world back to the dark ages when feudal barons raided adjoining duchies to replenish their human live stock. It is an iniquitous system and an evil precedent because it is wide open for abuse with difficulty in establishing responsibility. It is manifestly unjust and sell them for political reasons as the African Negroes were a century ago."
GERMAN TREATMENT OF POWs FAR MORE HUMANE
By contrast the German armed forces behaved impeccably towards their prisoners-of-war. "The most amazing thing about the atrocities in this war is that there have been so few of them. I have come up against few instances where the Germans have not treated prisoners according to the rules, and respected the Red Cross reported respected newspaper The Progressive February, 4th1945.
Allan Wood, London Correspondent of the London Express agreed. "The Germans even in their greatest moments of despair obeyed the Convention in most respects. True it is that there were front line atrocities - passions run high up there - but they were incidents, not practices, and misadministration of their American prison camps was very uncommon." Lieutenant Newton L. Marguiles echoed his words.
US Assistant Judge Advocate, Jefferson Barracks, April 27th1945. "It is true that the Reich exacted forced labour from foreign workers, but it is also true that, they were for the most part paid and fed well."
"I think some of the persons found themselves better off than at any time in their lives before." added Dr.James K.Pollack, Allied Military Government.
"What did the Germans do to get efficient production from forced labour that we were not able to do with Germans working down the mines? They fed their help and fed them well." Said Max H. Forester, Chief of AMG's Coal and Mining Division in July 1946.
WILL NEMESIS DELIVER?
Asked what were the chances of the evil perpetrators of such crimes being brought to justice, Michael Walsh said that the only thing that stood between the allied sadists and the hangman’s rope was the will to bring them to trial.
Precedent on retrospective justice is already a fact of life. Its failure is that war crimes justice is selective and so far applicable only to the defeated foe under highly questionable and internationally criticized legal procedures.
What is needed is to raise public awareness and a lead be given by those in public life whose voice is less likely to be censored. He added that the interests of justice must come before national pride, political expediency and military guilt. "How else." He added, "can human civilization progress than through the administration of justice that is blind to race, political dogma and national interests?
Sources:
(1) Congressional Record, December 11, 1945 p. A-5816.
(2) Gruesome Harvest, R.F. Keeling, Institute of American Economics, Chicago, 1947.
(3) Cyril Connolly, The Golden Horizon, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London
(4) Daily Mail, London, 22nd, April, 1995
(5) John Thompson, Chicago Tribune Press Service, Geneva, August 24, 1946).
(6) Gruesome Harvest, R.F. Keeling, Institute of American Economics, Chicago, 1947).
(7) Louis Clair, The Progressive, 14 January, 1946).
( Gruesome Harvest, R.F. Keeling, Institute of American Economics, Chicago, 1947).
(9) Doenitz at Nuremberg: A Re-Appraisal, H.K Thompson/Henry Strutz, Amber Publishing Corp.
N.Y 1976.
(10) Daily Mail, London, May 1, 1995.
(11) Douglas Botting, In The Ruins of The Reich, George Allen & Unwin, London
(12) Douglas Botting, In The Ruins of The Reich, George Allen & Unwin, London
(13) Douglas Botting, In The Ruins of The Reich, George Allen & Unwin, London
(14) Roger Boyes, The (London) Times, 7th March 1995
A MICHAEL WALSH SPECIAL REPORT
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Fritz
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Re:Acknowledging Genocide
« Reply #4 on: 2008-06-19 11:20:02 » |
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WOW
...pin drop....yet another evening lost in cyberspace.
To say cathartic would be an understatement.
Hermit; thank you very much for the info and the leads ....
The most disturbing point came for me the next day; realizing all that has been posted on Afghanistan and Iraq underscores we have not learned or evolved one iota as a society or learned from history, because we don't actually record history just the musings of the "Politically Expedient" to support their "Power" ... this has been asserted time and time again but popular western culture just doesn't want to acknowledge that we are 'played' and lied to, on a daily basis.
.... as pointed out earlier 'No one expects the Spanish Inquisition' , but we engage in it, again and again and again and again .... :'(
Fritz
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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