German victims - German soldiers - Our German soldiers were Victims suffering a horrific fate. They were tortured to death by enemy forces from all enemy countries. No honor in their warfare! A conspiracy world-wide to torture and murder the German soldiers -must have been put in place by the New World Order as this was done to German soldiers by enemy soldiers and civilians in all enemy territories.
MIKE WALSH JUST COMPLETED HIS 4 VOLUMES “WITNESS TO HISTORY.”
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Former Enemies Of Germany Talk About The German Military Of WW2
By Gerry Frederics
I was surprised, to put it mildly, as I was going through the hallways of West Point, because there I saw photographs and art work, of a large number of German Waffen-SS soldiers. Included was the general of the Waffen-SS Felix Steiner, commander of the famed Wikinger Division. When I expressed my surprise, I was informed, that the tactics of the Waffen-SS were being taught not only in West Point, but in many countries, including Russia and Israel (!). When I told them I had been a member of the Waffen-SS, American officers questioned me eagerly about the SS and the Russians. I was treated as if I had been the hero of Guadalcanal.
Andre Bayle, French author and SS volunteer at the eastern front.
____________________________________________________________________
I have had to revise my former derogatory remarks after I have seen the Germans up-close. It is a fact, they fought bravely and honorably.
General Dwight Eisenhower, Commander in Chief, Europe.
As Commander in Chief, Eisenhower engineered the mass murder of about 1 million Germans after the war by deceitful means and must be regarded as one of the most horrible persons ever to have had a German (?) name. According to his West Point Yearbook of 1915, he was a Swedish Jew, which would explain his hideousness.
____________________________________________________________________
I have tremendous respect for the soldiers of the German Wehrmacht, who have astounded me throughout the war with their bravery and honorable behavior.
General George Patton, the most famous of all allied ‘fighting’ generals. He died under mysterious circumstances after it became known he had favored the correct & fair treatment of German POW’s. He held Eisenhower in unusual disdain, a fact known to “The Swedish Jew”. Did that mass murderer have a hand in the weird death of this great American warrior?
____________________________________________________________________
The soldiers of the German Wehrmacht are without a doubt the best soldiers in the world.
Lord Alanbrooke, Marshal of the Royal Armed Forces of Britain.
____________________________________________________________________
We have to admit that the Germans are outstanding soldiers with the finest training. Particularly their None-Commissioned-Officers Corp. Their discipline was unshakable.
George C. Marshall, American General and statesman.
__________________________________________________________________
Several thousand military experts from all over the world were queried by the Israeli General Staff as to which army they considered to have been the best in WW2.
The answers:
1) The German Wehrmacht received 93 points.
2) The Japanese army received 86 points.
Which soldier had displayed the highest degree of bravery?
1) The German ‘Landser” (soldier).
Which units (platoons, companies etc.) had been bravest?
1) The German units had displayed more bravery than any other.
Which branches in the various armies were the elite-troops?
1) The USA : US Navy
2) England -: The commandos
3) France—: The French Foreign Legion*
4) Germany: The Waffen-SS**
5) Japan—-: The Navy
6) Soviet Union: The Worker’s Militias.
All paratrooper units, regardless of nationality were considered to have been elite troops by the experts as well.
*According to the definitive study of the Foreign Legion (entitled: Inside The French Foreign Legion) she was, since the early 1900’s made up to a large degree by Germans. Up to 44 % of all Legionaires were of German origin.
**The Waffen-SS , at its maximum strength, had about 900.000 members of all nationalities, including Albanian & Russian troops. Those two however distinguished themselves by their cruelty, not by their bravery. The Albanians were so ineffective and untrustworthy, they were disbanded in January 1945, a time when the Germans needed every able-bodied man.
The Russian SS-commander Kaminsky was court-martialed and executed for war crimes by the German SS-authorities in Sept. 1944 and his unit was disbanded. The Germans were the only ones who enforced the rules of war against their own. The Russians, under Jewish leadership encouraged the committing of war crimes of the most horrific kind and the Americans, as well as the French, turned a blind eye, condoning criminal behavior (as long as it was directed against Germans or Italians) in their ranks. The Japanese lived by a different code altogether. To them war-crimes were part of warfare. They simply did not and I dare say, still do not, accept the concept.
Other European SS troops (including the otherwise largely less-than-brave Italians!) were brave and loyal to the bitter end, many of them never giving up. Until the year 1947 (!) Lithuanian and Estonian SS troops fought a guerrilla war against the Russians on their home-turf. The Italian SS troops had fought honorably and bravely. They surrendered to Jew-inspired communist Italian partisans and were murdered to the last man with the full knowledge of the allied troops in the vicinity.
source: http://germancross.com/former-enemies-of-germany-talk-about-the-german-military-of-ww2/
TRANSLATION OF THE VIDEO BELOW:
GRANDPA I MISS YOU
It’s one of those days when we are visiting Grandma,
It smells for coffee and cake.
We listen to her words
And cannot miss her tears
When she talks about grandpa.
They all walked a very difficult path in those days.
And I look at the pictures on grandma’s wall:
‘Grandpa, I miss you,
And I believe with all my heart,
Regardless of what they tell us,
You were a good man.
Oma says you were a hero
And gave your life for your country.
Her tears do not lie.
How much I would have loved to know you.
She tells of a time
We cannot even imagine,
Forged by tears, happiness and sorrow.
And always when she says ‘grandpa’
Her voice sounds soft and warm,
She closes her eyes
And wants to fall asleep in my arms.
Refrain…
* * *
German Soldiers in the Soviet Union - Letters from the East
Posted on FaceBook:
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Some Support Women - They were NOT SOLDIERS!
Contrary to the lies, German women were not allowed to fight in the battle field but only work as support teams in the position of “Flak Helfer” (helpers for the ground troops) but were not involved in the actual fighting. There was nursing, cleaning, cooking, purchasing, inventory, shipping, receiving, etc. that needed to be done out on the field. This could free up time for the soldiers in battle. Also in order to work in this position, they had to exit the Hitler Youth program. They had a hidden hand gun for self protection. Boys also worked in the same positions. Neither of them had military training in the “Hitler’s Youth.” The lie is that the children were trained as soldiers in the Hitler’s Youth to spread the totally false idea that Germany was war-crazy. Yes, some leaders said: “We are raising our boys as soldiers,” but what they meant by that within the content of their statements is that German men must be strong and disciplined so that they are able to defend their country; this following the severe betrayal at capitulation in WWI and abuse for decades after the war by Jews and the Allied occupation. Toward the end of the war, when Germany was losing millions of soldiers, young boys apparently volunteered to fight. Also youngsters at the end just grabbed guns and fought to their death. They were great heroes for Germany because they knew what they were fighting for: freedom from Jewish Russian Communism.
The suppressed History of Crimes committed on German soldiers in WWII. Part I
By Wilfried Heink
The following essays are based mostly on “Verbrechen der Sieger. Das Schicksal der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen in Osteuropa”(Crimes of the victors. The fate of German POWs in Eastern Europe, Druffel-Verlag, Leoni am Starnberger See, 1975). It begins with a foreword by Brigadier General Wolfgang Schall, retired, POW in the SU (Soviet Union) from 1945 to 1955, as well as a statement of intent by Wilhelm Anders. No actual author is mentioned; it is a compilation of documents and witness statements by the Verband der Heimkehrer und Bund der Vertriebenen (Organization of Returnees and Organization of the Dispelled). They decided to publish this book in 1975 – as preparation for the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Germany’s defeat, and the distortions of history affiliated with that defeat – were underway.
Since then, many books have been written defaming German soldiers, portraying them as brutal killers. The latest effort by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer, simply titled “Soldaten” (Soldiers), features a collection of ‘newly discovered‘ British and American wiretaps, allegedly of conversations of German POWs in various camps. And of course there was the 1995-1999 exhibition, “Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1994”(War of Annihilation: Crimes of the German armed forces 1941-1945), produced by the Hamburge Institut für Sozialforschung (Hamburg Institute for Social Research), with its many distortions and outright lies, addressed by Walter Post in “Die Verleumdete Armee” (The defamed army, Pour le Mérite, 1999). These are just two of many examples of German scribblers, who call themselves historians, distorting history. But all of them ignore the book under discussion.
W. Schall writes, on p.7:
“Was die Wissenschaftliche Kommission für deutsche Kriegsgefangenengeschichte in fünfzehn Bänden und mehreren Beiheften an Zeugnissen zusammengetragen hat, ist ein Epos des Grauens und Leidens, das oft jede Phantasie übersteigt. Und doch haben wir es erlebt und sind Zeugen — soweit wir die Heimat wiedersehen durften“.
(The fifteen volumes of testimonies, compiled by the Scientific Commission for Prisoner of War History, tell of an epoch of horror and sufferings straining the imagination. But we did experience it and are witnesses – those of us, at least, who were fortunate enough to return home.)
Mr. Schall tells us that an official body did gather evidence of crimes committed by the victors, consisting of documents as well as testimonies: a fifteen volume endeavor. Prof. Seidler writes that the Wehrmacht (Third Reich fighting force) investigations documented 8,000 cases, including crimes committed by partisans on German soldiers, the results are contained in 226 folders. The whole of it was taken to the USA and only returned in 1968, with many of the files missing (Franz W. Seidler, Die Wehrmacht im Partisanenkrieg, Pour le Mérite-Verlag für Militärgeschichte, Selent, Austria 1999, p. 87). Prof. Seidler also writes that at the end of the war the Allies were not able to prove that Germans violated that elusive “International Law”; Germans, however, had documented numerous cases of the Allies doing so (Ibid, p. 89). The President – during the IMT proceedings of May 16, 1946 – prevented the German defense counsel Dr. Laternser from pointing this out, stating:
“We are not trying whether any other powers have committed breaches of international law, or crimes against humanity, or war crimes; we are trying whether these defendants have.” (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/05-14-46.asp , p. 521)
Victor’s ‘justice’ at its finest. What happened to this fifteen volume magnum opus? W. Anders writes on p. 9:
“In einem Telegramm an den Bundeskanzler forderte das Präsidium des Verbandes der Heimkehrer die „sofortige Freigabe der unter Verschluß liegenden deutschen Kriegsgefangenen-Dokumentation durch die Bundesregierung”.
(The steering committee of the [abovementioned] organization, in a telegram to the German chancellor, is demanding that the POW documents still under closure be released immediately.)
Why would this material be, to this day, under lock and key? If reconciliation is the aim, or “never again”, is it not of utmost importance that the truth is told and all sides heard? Apparently not, since finger pointing directed solely at the Germans continues unabated. And this one-sidedness is supposed to be the basis of understanding between peoples? Never!
W. Anders titled his introduction: “Warum dieses Buch geschrieben wurde” (Why this book was written). It starts out with a declaration by the Organization (I will refer to the Verband der Heimkehrer as the Organization), an appeal to Germans for unity:
„Zur Würde eines jeden Menschen gehört sein guter Ruf. Ohne Grund und leichtfertig darf er nicht in Frage gestellt werden. Dies gilt auch für die Deutschen.
Der überwältigende Teil der deutschen Soldaten hat nicht für eine unmenschliche Diktatur, sondern in Erfüllung der Pflichten für Volk und Vaterland gekämpft. Unser Volk darf diese Soldaten nicht als imperialistische Faschisten-Horden beschimpfen lassen. Es ist aufgerufen, sich in Wahrung seiner Selbstachtung dagegen zu wehren.
Wir verschweigen kein Unrecht, das Deutsche begangen haben. Wir wehren uns aber dagegen, daß jede Erwähnung des schweren Unrechts, das an Deutschen begangen wurde, unterdrückt wird. Wir rechnen nichts auf, aber verwahren uns gegen jede Geschichtsklitterung und gegen jede einseitige Dokumentation“.
(Part of everyone’s dignity is a good reputation; it must not be jeopardized. This also applies to Germans.
The overwhelming majority of German soldiers did not fight to protect an inhuman regime, but considered it their duty to fight for their nation. Our people must not be allowed to defame those soldiers as imperialistic fascist hordes. We call upon them to defend them, so as to sustain their own dignity.
We are not interested in covering up injustices committed by Germans. We are however protesting against the cover up of the injustices committed against us Germans. We are not interested in finger pointing, but are against the distortion of history and the one-sided portrayal of history.)
The book was published based on documents and testimony supplied be members of that organization and because the German government refused to publish the material. And also because of the waves of propaganda emanating from the east about “German criminals” alongside portrayals of the Soviet army as the “most humane army in the world”, this according to a TASS release (p. 11). Novosti, a Russian daily, praised the immediate help provided by the Red Army, supplying necessary goods for civilians (Actually they stole everything they could get their hands on; I witnessed some of it. Wilf). The article continued to say that the treatment of German POWs was “beyond reproach” and in compliance with the Geneva Convention, which surprised the POWs (p. 10). Here’s a comment by the Organization, on the same page:
“Dies ist ein Hohn auf die 1,2 Millionen in sowjetischen Lagern umgekommenen deutschen Kriegsgefangenen und Hunderttausender von Heimkehrern, die nach ihrer Entlassung in der Heimat vor Entkräftung verstorben oder heute noch schwer gesundheitsgeschädigt sind“.
(This makes a mockery of the 1.2 million German POWs who died in Soviet captivity, as well as of the hundreds of thousands who died at home as a result of malnutrition or are still suffering from the effects of ill treatment.)
The “Voice of the GRD” (Stimme der DDR) on April 26, 1975 asked why German fathers and sons were killed. Their answer: they were part of a “fascist campaign of conquest” and it is therefore a fact “that every German soldier was a participant in the biggest crime in European history.” This is how every German soldier was branded a “war criminal,” a practice originating from propaganda at that time and now accepted as fact by “historians” and the public. The Czech news agency PAP stated on the same day that “German soldiers were kept a little longer in POW camps because of their dishonorable fighting practices.” This “little longer” meant ten years for many, violating all international agreements regarding treatment of POWs.
But, there appears to have been some concern in the East about the truth emerging. On March 20, 1975 – keep in mind that this hype was all about the 30th anniversary of the defeat of the “German Fascists” and the May 8th celebrations – Radio Moscow raised concerns about “curious news” coming from Bonn (the German capital then), of the pending release of “disreputable (berüchtigte) documents concerning crimes allegedly committed on German soldiers during the war,” and that the publication of this material would be considered a new “provocation.” [*Notice this! a “provocation!” They mean “provocation for war” against Germany! As they said at the desired capitulation: “If you do not capitulate, we will drop more bombs on you.” For nearly 70 years it has been: “If you do not keep silent, Germans, about our crimes and our lies, we’ll drop more bombs on your civilians. This is how they keep the Germans freightened! These Allied criminals!!!~germanvictims] Radio Moscow continued to say that in this document, “soldiers and partisans of the SU, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, in fact the whole of the antifascist organizations, are defamed.” A comment by the authors: “Whoever experienced the malicious and devious tactics used by the partisans will have to agree that it is not a defamation, but fact.” (p. 11)
No effort was spared to prevent the publication of the 17 volume documentary, as well as the book under discussion: the eastern paranoia suggesting that details were known and publication was feared. “The intent was to exonerate the Germans and defame the Red Army”: that according to the eastern mass media. “Izvestia” on March 1, 1975 called the documentary “dirty rubbish” (diesen dreckigen Plunder); Radio Prague talked of a “neofascist provocation”; Radio Moscow informed its listeners that this was “in contrast…to the spirit and contents of the agreements signed with the socialist countries,” referring to the 1975 Helsinki accord then in preparation.
As expected, the German government, no doubt ‘encouraged’ by others, caved in. Government spokesman Bölling declared on February 4, 1975, even before the big push from the East, that although the facts cannot be denied and he has no reason to doubt any of it, he is against publication of the documents because it would nullify all efforts made by German governments. “By our policy we have for years tried to come to an understanding with other countries, to overcome the problems of crimes committed by Germans and on Germans.” And he considers it bad politics that this issue “is pushed to the fore and used by those not interested in conciliation.” (pp. 12, 13)
The authors protest against this interpretation, especially the last sentence. It is not them who are preventing conciliation, but the East that continues to distort facts, portraying German soldiers as criminals and the others as saints. It is not the Organization’s intention to shift the blame, but to present facts to prevent this subject from being used as a “political club.” Soldiers especially are interested in peace, but if one side continually sabotages every effort at coming to an understanding, by distorting facts, peace cannot be achieved.
Wilhelm Anders closed his deliberation by stating that, according to a poll, 55% of Germans are in favor of addressing this issue fairly. He asks, “Are they all “Neofascists, Revanchists or Enemies of Détente?” One has to wonder if 30 years plus later 55% of Germans would still welcome a fair reworking of history. I doubt it; it appears that most Germans today are satisfied with distorted history and are comfortable with their guilty role. This is a disturbing development: the intended “re-education,” or brainwashing, has taken effect.
To be continued….
The Amazing German Pilot Hans Ulrich Rudel
The suppressed History of Crimes committed on German soldiers in WWII. Part I
GERMAN SOLDIERS SAVED EUROPE FROM THE IMMIDATE TAKE OVER BY THE JEWISH SOVIETS
DECEPTION ABOUT GERMAN ‘WAR CRIMES’
*****
This is how the German Military honored the defeated French Soldiers
THIS IS HOW THE GERMANS HONORED DEAD BRITISCH POWS
This is How the American Military Frequently “Honored” the German Soldiers as instructed by their military leaders.
DWIGHT EISENHOWER WAS IN CHARGE OF EXTERMINATING
THE GERMANS AFTER THE WAR. GREAT GENERAL PATTON COMPLAINED TO HIM ABOUT THE TREATMENT OF THE GERMANS; INTERESTINGLY, SHORTLY THEREAFTER, GEN. PATTON HAD TWO SMALL ACCIDENTS IN ONE DAY IN GERMANY AND “DIED!”
DECEPTION ABOUT GERMAN “WAR CRIMES”
Germans soldiers lived like this for months - until they died - 1 Million of them
This is how Satan Eisenhower killed them - by starving and freezing them death.
The only difference was, these below had a little bit more space to move about.
Extreme Human Rights Abuses to Murder Capitulated German Soldiers. They were kept worse than cattle freezing and starving just like on these pictures until Millions of them died. One could call this Millions of lust murders arranged by those people who hate all people and executed by Jew Dwight Eisenhower, Satan in human form.
Video - Rhine Meadows German POWs Death Camps
From Video on Rheinwiesenlager - Conditions in the camps:
Dr. Alfred De Zayas:
After WWII, the focus on historical research inquiring about German war crimes may have ultimately been caused by the lack of concrete documentation showing violations of international law by the Allies. It must be the responsibility of historical science to shed light onto this, undoubtedly, uncomfortable chapter of history to determine in what situations which crimes against humanity were perpetrated and to establish a prerequisite for better compliance with the norms of human rights in war fare.
________________
Heinz Matthias [white shirt]:
And with this [this incarceration? or with May 8? ] began really a gruesome… by far the most gruesome time in my life.
[text]:
Rheinwiesenlager [They call it Wiesen (meadows) but they were often just mud flats]
Death Planned by the Victors
[speaker]:
In view of the May 8 celebration in the whole world and the assertion of an alleged liberation of Germany in 1945, it is the duty of every loyal German to show the other side of the coin: namely, in 1945, the Allies liberated Millions of Germans indeed, but from their property, from their homeland, and from their life.
At the end of the war, roughly 11 Million German soldiers were in the hands of the Allies. Of those, about 8 Million in custody of the British and Americans. This film addresses the prison camps located at the so-called “Rheinwiesenlager.” We loyal Germans do not celebrate an alleged liberation on May 8; instead, we mourn on this day the German victims after the war who were exterminated by starvation, hypothermia, and other murder methods.
During the Hague Convention, at the beginning of the 20th century, the participating countries decided to subjugate themselves to international law. This international law was meant to humanize warfare amongst other things, meaning that, for example, violence against defenseless humans or prisoners of war is excluded [from warfare.] On January 26, 1910, the Hague Ground War Rule was ratified by the attending countries, including [Germany], England, France, and the USA.
Regarding prisoners of war the following is laid down as law in the Hague ground war rules, Article 7:
[text read]:
The government in charge of the prisoners of war is required to assure provisions for the prisoners. In absence of any special agreement between warring countries, the prisoners of war are to be treated equal to the troops that took them into custody regarding nourishment, accommodation, and clothing…
[speaker]:
On July 27, 1929, the protective provisions of the Geneva Convention which were formerly only granted to the wounded of a war, were now also extended to all prisoners of war. It was determined here that the prisoners are to be treated equally in every respect to the troops of the victor.
[moderator]:
You arrived in Remagen and were lead through the gates of the camp or driven through it and then put into your quarters. Do you want to describe what that looked like?
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [checkered jacket with glasses]:
Well, the way you describe it, it almost sounds as if I was arriving at a nice vacation retreat; but the experience was completely different. The [bad] situation began already in Niederbreisig and then also in Remagen in the same way with an enormous shock. We were chased off the trucks, and then we saw the alley, the Gauntlet alley which the American soldiers formed all the way to the gate with 2 rows, armed with wooden boards, chasing us through the gauntlet with the boards, “Come on, let’s go!” “Come on, let’s go!” always hitting us across the lower back; and this was really an experience I thought could not be possible. I was then thinking: “If soldiers are capable of doing this to other soldiers, then we can expect them to do just about anything to us.” [And he was right.]
[speaker]:
Above all, prisoners must be under the observation of the International Red Cross. After the conclusion of warfare, all prisoners are to be released as soon as possible. This addition at the Geneva Convention, the so-called ‘Liberators of 1945,’ also signed.
In 1943, the Allies agreed [by their own accord], to categorize the German prisoners of war not as prisoners of war but as criminal prisoners, disregarding international law. The respective highest commanders of the Allies were free to handle the prisoners as they pleased. In this sense, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, Dwight David Eisenhower, received on March 10, 1945 the authorization from Washington not to release the German prisoners of war held on German ground but to keep them imprisoned as so-called “Disarmed Enemy Forces.” As a result, the prisoners had no protection under international law and were abandoned to the ill will of the victors.
Josef Dreßen [black shirt]:
The outrage is, that the Americans purposefully starved hundreds of thousands and starved to death a large part of them, or caused them to die from debilitation. The Russians also took prisoners. The Russians were very bad off themselves, and so the prisoners suffered equally; the ones guarding the prisoners were not much better off than the prisoners. The Russians could not help it because they did not have the resources. But the Americans-and that is the outrage-they even turned away help from charities because they wanted to do this to us.
[speaker]:
After crossing the Rhine in March of 1945, the Americans decided that they did not want to bring the German prisoners of war to the camps prepared for them in northern France. By order of Eisenhower they settled the prisoners of war along the western shore of the Rhein on the fields.
Of 188 American prison camps, dozens were placed along the Rhein and its outback area. These so-called Rhein meadow camps stretched from Remagen across Mainz to Bad Kreuznach and all the way across Ludwigshafen. Other camps were frequently dissolved after a while, and the occupants deported to the Rhein meadow camps.
No determination can be made as to the exact numbers of occupants in the camps since the Americans did deliberately not register them. Only in isolated cases were incoming and outgoing numbers determined. The International Red Cross would have had the ability to take on this work, but they were denied access to the camps. One had to estimate the occupation to be 5 Million prisoners between April and September 1945 in the Rheinwiesen camps. At the end of the war the surrendering soldiers were captured at various battle locations. Also taken into captivity were an unknown number of old men, youths belonging to the Volkssturm group, civilians in uniform; for example, firemen, party officials, and members of the NSAPD. Further, injured soldiers on home visit were collected from hospitals, female support and news personnel, and sometimes even youth whom they deemed old enough to hold a weapon, were also hauled off.
Reasons for these breaks of international law and inhuman treatment cannot be seen as anything but a determined desire to take the greatest number possible of Germans as prisoners. What happened to the prisoners as they were taken into custody and immediately thereafter was of unpredictable nature. The American G.I.s acted with great harshness, communicating to the German soldier that he was to feel completely defeated. We have documentation of physical abuse in every form with the intention to bring about death, both before and after the capitulation, mock executions, nightly arrests of young boys who were dressed only with a pajamas, but also-even if more seldom-proper behavior by the G.I.s
Independent of all this, most of the German soldiers claim that after the capitulation they have been repeatedly and systematically filched by the American soldiers. The Americans stole their watches, their cameras, even their wedding bands. No wonder that in bitter irony U.S.A. was translated into “Uhren sammelnde Armee” [Army of watch collectors.] The apparent wealth of having your own watch, which each German boy received for his Holy Communion or Confirmation, was not something the American soldiers had. Beyond that, the prisoners had to frequently give up other personal belongings, including shaving utensils, mess kits, rain protection and tarp.
[speaker]:
The Camp
Most of the Rheinwiesen camps were planned for about 100,000 men. The actual camp was a large square on an open field which was divided into cages. A cage usually had a length and width of about 250 meters. Depending on the location, a cage had between 5,000 to 15,000 prisoners made up of various groups. The cages were patrolled from all sides and at night they used floodlight. Attempted escapes were punished with immediate execution. But from time to time they even just shot into the masses for no reason.
Heinz Matthias [white shirt]:
We were located in smaller camps. There were several camps with 70,000 prisoners on this field, without a building, without a tent. Most of us were without a coat, sitting day and night in the mud, and were totally full of lice. I myself have stood in line for 14 hours, up to the ankles in mud to get a tin can of water. Whoever, could not hold out that long, tipped over and belonged to the dead because no one came to bring him water.
[speaker]:
Guards
The prisoners were usually guarded by second rate soldiers, blacks or Polish help troops, and former foreign workers. These workers were commanded by white soldiers. These were seen by the prisoners as extraordinarily brutal, arrogant, explosive, and aggressive. Roll call ended with beatings for those who tipped over because of exhaustion. The soldiers of the Waffen-SS were treated especially cruelly. Hours of punitive exercises and bestial beating to death were frequently witnessed. They did not even refrain from the maltreatment of high ranking officers.
[speaker]:
American investigations verified further war crimes. 104 German prisoners of war suffocated in an American train transport. 24 others and 3 civilians were murdered at Tambach. And in Luxemburg, US soldiers murdered 70 German prisoners of war.
[speaker]:
‘Living Quarters’
Daily men and women arrived from collection camps behind the front cooped up in locked cattle cars and on trucks and were poured out of the trucks like trash into the cages behind the barbed wire. Some of the prisoners already died in transport. Life in the camps was shaped by the temperament of the camp commander and the insecurity of our future. It was the most basic battle for survival. The prisoners lived through burning heat in the summer and icy cold in the winter on bare ground on fields that turned into mud from rain and snow without any cover over their heads.
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [checkered jacket with glasses]:
And we stood there on the field and after three days it was a wasteland of mud; I can’t even remember if it was a field or a meadow.
[speaker]:
During the 4 months under American commanders, each prisoner had 3-5 square meters. The occupants had no tools or material, whatsoever, to make their camp livable. The only possibility was getting a hold of some cardboard, using tin food cans or cutlery for digging, and dig holes into the ground to live in that gave some protection from the elements. Usually three to five prisoners shared one ground hole which was just large enough that they could lay in it sideways.
[speaker]:
The spring of 1945 was wet and cold. It rained and snowed off and on. The field turned into a wasteland of mud. Ernst Albrecht, then 18 years of age, tried to protect himself from the elements.
Ernst Albrecht [white jacket with glasses and black hat]:
After we got so lucky to get a hold of tin food cans, we scraped out a hole the length and width of our bodies. If it was raining, we put the blankets over our head and stayed this way until the blankets were soaked through.
[lady speaker]:
Starvation camp is what the prisoners called it. Frequently we had only a few crackers and dried beans. There was no drinking water access.
[speaker]:
The building of ground holes was forbidden time and time again and the prisoners were forced to close them back up. Not just because the ground holes were dangerous because the rainwater saturated them quickly and they collapsed, but it even happened that bulldozers ran through the camp and sealed up earth holes along with the inhabitants in them.
Tents were not given out even though there were plenty of them in the depots of the German military and the U.S. Army. About 40% of the prisoners lived in the earth holes. Only about 5% had the luck to have a tent and the rest camped on the earth.
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [checkered jacket with glasses]:
I have lived 4 weeks on the fields, others much longer, at a time in spring when after a warm weather spell then the typical March-April weather began: cold, damp, rain; and since we could not sit down anywhere, we stood most of the time or walked back and forth.
[moderator]:
Didn’t you have any waterproof clothing and raincoats and tarp, or such, to protect yourselves from the rain?
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [checkered jacket with glasses]:
On average, I must say that most of them-and I cannot be absolute sure-had nothing but their regular uniform. They did not even have regular coats because they were usually taken from them. There were a few who had tarp, but really only very few. I myself received by sheer luck a good motorcycle coat during the last days of war. But they took it from me when they took me prisoner. But I stole it back from the heap of coats when we marched off, so that in regard to that I was in an especially good position.
There was only mud. There was no dry place. Since there was only mud, we could only wander around even at night, but at one time or another sleep overcomes you, and so I closed up my coat on the top, just like a pant with a band on the top, and let myself drop into the mud in the hope that I would be able to sleep a few hours before my feet freeze off.
[speaker]:
After much difficulties, we finally had one latrine in every cage. The longer the condition of starvation continued the weaker the prisoners became. Whereas men first helped an ill comrade to the latrine, later they were all so weak that they relieved themselves wherever they were.
Heinz Matthias [white shirt]:
We then got lime for the dead and for the latrine. The only problem was, if a completely exhausted man finally made it to the latrine to sit on the rail and due to exhaustion fell backwards into it, he drowned. No one was capable of helping him. Soon we were only able to crawl. We no longer had the strength to stand.
Josef Dreßen [black shirt]:
Help? None! There were so many of us like that. Who could help anyone?
[speaker]:
I took a long while to get a water station set up. Before that, the prisoners got a water quota. The water was taken unfiltered from the Rhein or from a nearby creek and pumped full of Chlorine to prevent an epidemic.
For a prisoner to get water it usually meant he had to stand in line for hours even though he was already totally exhausted. Sometimes it took up to 10 hours to get a tin cup of water. Because of their great thirst, some prisoners drank even from puddles with the result of ruinous health issues. Their thirst was especially tormenting in the summer months when they were exposed to heat and sun without interruption.
A person needs about 1200 calories during rest. A working man between 2000 and 3000 calories per day. The prisoners in the Rheinwiesenlager received in the months of April to July 1945 only between 400 and 900 calories daily. In many camps they received no food at all on Sundays, and new arrivals had to wait two to four days before getting any food.
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [chekered jacket with glasses]:
And in this tin can, I had about this much of a food mash. Maybe you can appreciate what it means when I say that for 4 weeks I had no digestion; that’s how little food I got. And when after 4 weeks I pressed out this hard, black stuff, I passed out and would have almost drowned in the cesspool, just missing it by a hair’s breadth.
[moderator]:
How many calories do you think they gave you a day?
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [karierte Jacke mit Brille]:
I’ve researched this once comparing to modern tables
* [picture with text]: Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller mit 18 Jahren (18 years of age)*
and I concluded that on this day, on this first day, which was relatively ample in comparison, we received, besides the two raw potatoes, 500 calories. With the potatoes, it then came to 700 calories. If we found a fire to put the potatoes into some ash, that helped.
[moderator]:
And how many calories does a man need to halfway survive?
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [checkered jacket with glasses]:
Two thousand.
[speaker]:
One possibility to get additional food would have been through support from the residents of the nearby villages. But the residents were forbidden under death penalty to provide food to the prisoners. The German government was ordered to instruct their people accordingly. See written document [22:50]. If anyone still tried to get some food to the prisoners, he would be driven off or shot by the fence in front of the starving prisoners. There was no medical care in the beginning, as we had no medical equipment setup, and the Americans did not allow German doctors to practice. If they did it anyhow, then only from their own resources and without medications and equipment. They could only help with advice or try to mitigate pain. The International Red Cross, as mentioned, was not allowed access to the camps. Food and relief supplies which the Red Cross transported on trains to the camps were ordered to be returned by Allied Commander Eisenhower. Sick prisoners were not treated in the camps but only sorted aside by the Americans.
We can assume that only 20% had a normal amount of food, 60% were starving, and 20% had so little food that they died. Camp Kreuznach, the so-called Feld des Jammers [Field of Misery,] had a hospital but they only took patients that died within 24 hours. During the whole imprisonment, the prisoners were under constant stress because they did not know what will happen to them or what was happening politically all around them. They had no idea as to what happened to their families. Furthermore, they were forbidden to write their relatives in order to give them a sign that they are alive.
[speaker]:
The Number of Deceased and what happened to them
First I need to say that there are no numbers at all available as to all types of suicides. Also no numbers are available about prisoners who died due to collapses of fox holes caused by weather conditions, or who were bulldozed over in their earth holes, who suffocated in the mud or in the cesspools, or who died from their injuries.
[blue shirt with white pullover]:
There was only one thing: the will to survive to get home some day… or, however to croak.
[speaker]:
There are no established numbers of prisoners who died due to punitive action against them or who stood shortly before their death and were sent to an evacuation hospital [Evakuierungslazarett]. Further, there are no records of prisoners that were shot during escape or shot indiscriminately either by day or by night. It is frequently documented that prisoners had to take the clothes off the dead and remove their dog tags, load them onto trucks that had an undetermined destination. A small number of dead was buried in mass graves right by the camp. The clothes were then burned and the dog tags had to be given to the Americans who DID NOT give them to the Red Cross but melted them deliberately.
[black coat]:
And here in this field that has been build on, where you no longer can tell what happened here with all this time gone by, here rest-and the number is unknown-thousands of those poor individuals who had been cooped up out in the open without water and food.
[speaker]:
In the camp Bretzenheim, for example, there were three variations of graves without names. There were graves for those who apparently aroused the anger of the guards. The next one for those who for some reason gave resistance or were shot during escape. The third one was for those who fell into the cesspool or have been shot in willful random shootings. According to the Americans, only 3,000 prisoners lost their lives at the Rheinwiesenlager, which would be a quota of not even 1 per 1,000. This data refers to persons who died of their illnesses or due to refusal of help. Today we have in 12 months approximately 15 death per 10,000 due to illness, for people in the range from 20 to 40 years of age. In these cases, we can assume that these people had enough food, clothing, a stable place to live, and medical help; in contrast to the prisoners who had almost no food and no medical care and lived on open fields. Considering this environment, these official numbers are nothing but a mockery. The unsuspecting Franko-Canadian journalist James Bacque determines the number of dead in his book “Der Geplante Tod”to be over a Million in the Rhein camps. But where are these dead? In the areas around the former camps, tenths of thousands lay buried but not hundreds of thousands.
Where did the U.S. trucks take the many corpses? Here it is conspicuous that these U.S. trucks came fully loaded with provisional supplies for the Allies from the main supply center in Antwerp and returned there empty. Empty? No, full of German corpses, and only this explains that in Belgium there is such a large number of unidentified corpses of German soldiers and civilians present who could not possibly all have fallen during the comparatively short duration of battles. The Belgium war cemeteries are full of unidentified corpses because their dog tags had been taken away from them, and they were dumped like garbage left and right along the roadside in the woods on the way to Antwerp.
We accuse!
[young man with glasses and cap]:
…as far as the lie goes, that we were liberated from something horrible, in reality, something horrible came over us. 7 Million Germans have lost their live during the war. But now, note and remember this as an answer for those who tell you lies: 12 Million Germans were murdered after May 8, 1945! And the 1 Million that were murdered here, not on meadows, but in the sludge and mud of farmland by starving them to death within a few months, they also belong to this number!
[speaker]:
For one, what persuaded the Americans to incarcerate so many innocent people, and for another to keep them locked up under conditions presented here? Why were the prisoners not registered? What prevented the Allies from accepting German supply stock or to use the supplies from the Red Cross? Why these deliberate abandonment politics by the U.S. military authority [commandment]? Why was it not allowed to give the dead in the mass graves on the Rhein an honorable burial? In conclusion it has been assessed that the systematic murder of German prisoners has hardly gotten any attention in the public, and there is a great need for detailed research. We hope that this documentary can contribute, in a small way, to the findings and evidence of American war crimes. The goal of the Allies was and is [today] a targeted decimation of the German people.
Heinz Matthias [white shirt]:
I walked down the Berkusenstrasse (?), I think it was July 15, und took a turn into the Juklerstrasse (?). This was my neighborhood. And whilst I was turning into the street, my mother sat in the bath tub crying-I was able to reconstruct that exactly-because she did not know if her son was still alive. And then the bell rang. And then my mother washed her face and dried it off hoping that the stranger coming to the door would not see that she had cried. Then she walked down the hallway to the door and opened it and there I stood. And then my mother cried. She was not able to say my name. And then only on the third attempt she said, “My boy” and took me into her arms.
[text]:
The truth differentiates from the half-truth that it comprises the whole reality.
Part of the whole reality is the fact that the time that followed May 8, 1945, was a time of absolute oppression of the German people.
The fate of the Germans was in the occupation zones of the Soviets, the French, and the Americans especially terrible.
After May 8, 1945, 12 Million Germans died because of the crimes by the Allies.
Millions of German prisoners of war were murdered or have been killed in the camps of the Allies.
A total of 16 Million Germans fled from the eastern part of Germany or were systematically driven off [their homes and land]. The most shocking part is the methods used to force them out. These methods were enforced with unimaginable cruelty.
Millions of German citizens were murdered on the spot in their home town, or they were murdered in flight… or they did not survive the trauma of escape.
Further causes of death were documented: beating, executing, strangling, drowning, stabbing, repeated rape, castrating, crucifying, whipping, trampling.
… also, deaths through burning alive, mutilation, rolling in drums and pumping people full of sewage.
In the criminal and show processes, the Soviet interrogating officers had German prisoners of war frequently tortured or shot if they did not willingly inform.
American interrogating officers, in many cases, let German prisoners starve for many days, poured feces over them, put sacks over their heads whilst beating them to soften them up for interrogation.
In the “Malmedy-Litigation” the accused German prisoners had wooden wedges driven under their nails or had their testes crushed to force ‘confessions.’
The US military authority forbade distribution of provisions and tents to the prisoners, available from the German and U.S. military depots and prohibited the provision of drinking water and food for the German civil population…
…ordered the helping civilians to take the food away and to destroy it.
Die Folgerung, daß die Deutschen den Krieg allein verursacht und damit die Vertreibung und das Elend ab 1945 selbst verschuldet hätten, ist historisch unhaltbar.
The judgment that the Germans alone are responsible for the war and therefore caused the expulsion of ethnic Germans since 1945, is historically unsustainable.
The causes of WWII start with the European disagreements that led to WWI…
…and continued with the merciless methods by the victors of that time to slip the German people the sole blame for WWI and then to plunder them…
… and continue on to the Danzig-dispute and the discrimination and persecution of the German minority in Poland.
The suffering of 16 Million German citizens driven off land and home, the captivity of 11 Million German men in death camps, and the deaths of far more than 6 Million German citizens on our land…
…after May 8, 1945 are far too significant to keep concealed from this day and stand in stark contrast to those who see themselves basically as liberated!
____________________
volksfront-medien
End
****************************************************************************** 
EISENHOWER’S DEATH CAMPS
THE LAST DIRTY SECRET OF WORLD WAR TWO
by James Bacque
Saturday Night
Sept 1989
Call it callousness, call it reprisal, call it a policy of hostile neglect: a million Germans taken prisoner by Eisenhower’s armies died in captivity after the surrender.
In the spring of 1945, Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich was on the brink of collapse, ground between the Red Army, advancing westward towards Berlin, and the American, British, and Canadian armies, under the overall command of General Dwight Eisenhower, moving eastward over the Rhine. Since the D-Day landings in Normandy the previous June, the westward Allies had won back France and the Low Countries, and some Wehrmacht commanders were already trying to negotiate local surrenders. Other units, though, continued to obey Hitler’s orders to fight to the last man. Most systems, including transport, had broken down, and civilians in panic flight fromt he advancing Russians roamed at large.
“Hungry and frightened, lying in grain fields within fifty feet of us, awaiting the appropriate time to jump up with their hands in the air”; that’s how Captain H. F. McCullough of the 2nd Anti-Tank Regiment Division described the chaos of the German surrender at the end of the Second World War. In a day and a half, according to Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, 500,000 Germans surrendered to his 21st Army Group in Northern Germany. Soon after V-E Day-May 8, 1945-the British-Canadian catch totalled more that 2 million. Virtually nothing about their treatment survives in the archives in Ottawa or London, but some skimpy evidence from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the armies concerned, and the prisoners themselves indicates that almost all continued in fair health. In any case, most were quickly released and sent home, or else transferred to the French to help in the post-war work of reconstruction. The French army had itself taken fewer than 300,000 prisoners.
Like the British and Canadians, the Americans suddenly faced astounding numbers of surrendering German troops: the final tally of prisoners taken by the U.S. army in Europe (excluding Italy and North Africa) was 5.25 million. But the Americans responded very differently.
Among the early U.S captives was one Corporal Helmut Liebich, who had been working in an anti-aircraft experimental group at Peenemunde on the Baltic. Liebich was captured by the Americans on April 17, near Gotha in Central Germany. Forty-two years later, he recalled vividly that there were no tents in the Gotha camp, just barbed wire fences around a field soon churned to mud. The prisoners received a small ration of food on the first day but it was then cut in half. In order to get it, they were forced to run a gauntlet. Hunched ocer, they ran between lines of American guards who hit them with sticks as they scurried towards their food. On April 27, they were transferred to the U.S. camp at Heidesheim farther wet, where there was no food at all for days, then very little. Exposed, starved, and thirsty, the men started to die. Liebich saw between ten and thirty bodies a day being dragged out of his section, B, which at first held around 5,200 men.. He saw one prisoner beat another to death to get his piece of bread. One night when it rained, Liebich saw the sides of the holes in which they were sheltered, dug in soft sandy earth, collapse on men who were too weak to struggle out. They smothered before anyone could get to them. Liebich sat down and wept. “I could hardly believe men could be so cruel to each other.”
Typhus broke out in Heidesheim about the beginning of May. Five days after V-E Day, on May 13, Liebich was transferred to another U.S. POW camp, at Bingen-Rudesheim in the Rhineland near Bad Kreuznach, where he was told that the prisoners numbered somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000, all without shelter, food, water, medicine, or sufficient space.
Soon he fell sick with dysentery and typhus. he was moved again, semiconscious and delirious, in an open-topped railway car with about sixty other prisoners: northwest down the Rhine, with a detour through Holland, where the Dutch stood on bridges to smash stones down on the heads of the prisoners. Sometimes the American guards fired warning shots near the Dutch to keep them off. After three nights, his fellow prisoners helped him stagger into the hug camp at Rheinberg, near the border with the Netherlands, again without shelter or food.
When a little food finally did arrive, it was rotten. In none of the four camps had Leibich seen any shelter for the prisoners. the death rate in the U.S. Rhineland camps at this point, according to surrviving data from a medical survey, was about thirty per cent per year. A normal death rate for a civilian population in 1945 was between one and two percent.
One day in June, through hallucinations of his fever, Liebich saw “the Tommies” coming into the camp. The British had taken over Rheinberg, and that probably saved his life. At this point, Liebich, who is five-foot-ten, weighed 96.8 ponds.
According to stories told to this day by other ex-prisoners of Rheinberg, tha last act of the Americans before the British took over was to bulldoze one section level while there were still men living in their holes in the ground.
Under the Geneva Convention, three important rights are guaranteed prisoners of war: that they will be fed and sheltered to the same standard as base or depot troops of the Capturing Power; that they can send and receive mail; and that they will be visited by delegates of the International Red Cross (ICRC) who will report in secret on their treatment to a Protecting Power. (In the cas eof Germany, as the government disintegrated in the closing stages of the war, Switzerland had been designated the protecting power.)
In fact, German prisoners taken by the U.S. Army at the end of the Second World War were denied these and most other rights by a series of specific decisions and directives stemming mainly from SHAEF-Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force. General Dwight Eisenhower was both supreme commander of SHAEF-all the Allied armies in northwest Europe-and the commanding general of the U.S. forces in the European theatre. He was subject to the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) of Britain and the U.S., to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and to the policy of the U.S. government, but in the absence of explicit directives-to the contrary or otherwise-ultimate responsibility for the treatment of the German prisoners in American hands lies with him.
“God , I hate the Germans,” Eisenhower wrote to his wife, Mamie, in September, 1944. Earlier, in front of the British ambassador to Washington, he had said that all the 3,500 or so officers of the German General Staff should be “exterminated.”
In March, 1945, a message to the Combined Chiefs of Staff signed and initialled by Eisenhower recommended creating a new class of prisoners-Disarmed Enemy Forces, or DEFs-who, unlike Geneva-defined prisoners of war, would not be fed by the army after the surrender of Germany. This would be a direct breach of the Geneva Convention. The message, dated March 10, argues in part: “The additional maintenance commitment entailed by declaring the German Armed Forces prisoners [sic] of war which would necessitate the prevision of rations on a scale equal to that of base troops would prove far beyond the capacity of the Allies even if all German sources were tapped.” It ends: “Your approval is requested. Existing plans have been prepared upon this basis.”
On April 26, 1945, the Combined Chiefs approved the DEF status for prisoners of war in American hands only: the British members had refused to adopt the American plan for their own prisoners. The Combined Chiefs stipulated that the status of disarmed troops be kept secret.
By that time, Eisenhower’s quartermaster general at SHAEF, General Robert Littlejohn, had already twice reduced rations for prisoners, and a SHAEF message signed “Eisenhower” had reported to General George Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of staff, that the prisoner pens would provide “no shelter or other comforts….”
The problem was not supplies. There was more than enough material stockpiled in Europe to construct prison camp facilities. Eisenhower’s special assistant, general Everett Hughes, had visited the huge supply dumps at Naples and Marseille and reported: “More stocks than we can ever use. Stretch as far as eye can see.” Food should not have been a problem, either. In the U.S., wheat and corn surpluses were higher than they had ever been, and there was a record crop of potatoes. The army itself had so much food in reserve that when a whole warehouse was dropped from the supply list by accident in England it was not noticed for three months. In addition, the International Red Cross had over 100,000 tons of food in storage in Switzerland. When it tried to send two trainloads of this to the American sector of Germany, U.S. Army Officers turned the trains back, saying their warehouses were already overflowing with ICRC food which they had never distributed.
Nonetheless it was through the supply side that the policy of deprivation was carried out. Water, food, tents, space, medicine-everything necessary for the prisoners was kept fatally scarce. Camp Rheinberg, where Corporal Liebich would fetch up in in mid-May, shivering with dysentery and typhus, had no food at all when it was opened on April 17. As in the other big “Rhine meadow” camps, opened by the Americans in mid-April, there were no guard towers, tents, buildings, cooking facilities, water, latrines, or food.
George Weiss, at tank repairman who now lives in Toronto, recalls of his camp on the Rhine: “All night we had to sit up jammed against each other. But the lack of water was the worst thing of all. For three and a half days, we had no water at all. We would drink our own urine….”
Private Heinz T. (his surname is withheld at his request) had just turned eighteen in hospital when the Americans walked into his ward on April 18. he and all his fellow patients were taken out to the camp at Bad Kreuzpath in the Rhineland, which already held several hundred thousand prisoners. Heinz was wearing only a pair of shorts, shoes, and a shirt.
Heinz was far from the youngest in the camp, which also held thousands of displaced German civilians. there were children as young as six among the prisoners, as well as pregnant women, and men over sixty. At the beginning, when trees still grew i the camp, some men managed to cut off limbs to build a fire. the guards ordered the fire put out. In many of the enclosures, it was forbidden to dig holes in the ground for shelter. “All we had to eat was grass,” Heinz remembers.
Charles von Luttichau was convalescing at home when he decided to surrender voluntarily to US troops about to occupy his house. He was taken to Camp Kripp, on the Rhine near Remagen.
“We were kept in crowded barbed wire cages in the open with scarcely any food,” he recalled recently. “More than half the days we had no food at all. On the rest, we got a little K ration. I could see from the package that they were giving us one-tenth of the rations that they issued to their own men….I complained to the American camp commander that he was breaking the Geneva Convention, but he just said, ‘Forget the Convention. You haven’t any rights.’
“The latrines were just logs flung over ditches next to the barbed-wire fences. Because of illness, the men had to defecate on the ground. Soon, many of us were too weak to take our trousers off first. So our clothing was infected, and so was the mud where we had to walk and sit and lie down. In these conditions, our men very soon started to die. Within a few days, some of the men who had gone healthy into the camp were dead. I saw our men dragging many bodies to the gate of the camp, where they were thrown loose on top of each other onto trucks, which took them away.”
Von Luttichau’s mother was American and he later emigrated to Washington, D.C., where he became a historian and wrote a military history for the U.S. Army. he was in the Kripp camp for about three months.
Wolfgang Iff, who was imprisoned at Rheinberg and still lives in Germany, reports that, in his subsection of perhaps 10,000 prisoners, thirty to fifty bodies were dragged out every day. A member of the burial work party, Iff says he helped haul the dead from his cage out to the gate of the camp, where the bodies were carried by wheel barrow to several big steel garages. there Iff and his team stripped the corpses of clothing, snapped off half of their aluminium dog tag, spread the bodies in layers of fifteen to twenty, with ten shovelfuls of quicklime over each layer till they were stacked a metre high, placed the personal efefcts in a bag for the Americans, then left. Some of the corpses were dead of gangrene following frostbite. (It was an unusually wet, cold spring.) A dozen or more others had grown too weak to cling to the log flung across the ditch for a latrine, and had fallen off and drowned.
The conditions in the American camps along the Rhine in late April were observed by two colonels in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, James Mason and Charles Beasley, who described them in a paper published in 1950: “Huddled close together for warmth, behind the barbed wire was a most awesome sight-nearly 100,000 haggard, apathetic, dirty, gaunt, blank-staring med clad in dirty field grey uniforms, and standing ankle-deep in mud….The German Divisions Commander reported that the men had not eaten for at least two days, and the provisions of water was a major problem-yet only 200 yards away was the River Rhine running bankfull.”
On May 4, 1945, the first German prisoners of war in U.S. hands were transferred to DEF status. The same day, the U.S. war Department banned mail to or from the prisoners. (when the International Committee of the Red Cross suggested a plan for restoring mail in June, it was rejected.)
On May 8, V-E Day, the German government was abolished and, simultaneously, the U.S. State Department dismissed Switzerland as the protecting power for the German prisoners. (Prime Minister Mackenzie King of Canada protested to the foreign Office in London the parallel removal of the Swiss as protecting power in British-Canadian camps, but was squelched for his pains.) With this done, the State Department informed the International Red Cross that, since there was no protecting power to report to, there was no longer and point in visiting the camps.
From then on, prisoners held by the US Army had no access to any impartial observer, nor could they receive food parcels, clothing, or medicines from any relief agency, or letters from their kin.
general George Patton’s US Third Army was the only army in the whole European theatre to free significant numbers of captives during ma, saving many of them from probable death. Bothe Omar Bradley and General J.C.H. lee, Commander Communications Zone (Com Z) Europe, ordered a release of prisoners within a week of the war’s end, but a SHAEF order signed “Eisenhower” countermanded them on my 15.
That same day, according to a minute of their meeting, General Eisenhower and Prime Minister Churchill talked about reducing prisoner rations. Churchill asked for an agreement on the scale of rations for prisoners, because he would soon have to announce cuts in the British meat ration and wanted to make sure that the prisoners “as far as possible…should be fed on those supplies which we could best spare.” Eisenhower replied that he had already “given the matter considerable attention,” but was planning to re-examine the whole thing to see “whether or not a further ereduction was possible.” He told Churchill that POWs had been getting 2,200 calories a day. (The US Army medical Corps considered 2,150 an absolute minimum subsistence level for sedentary adults living under shelter. US troops were issued 4,000 calories a day.) What he did not tell Churchill was that the army was not feeding the DEFs at all, or was feeding them far less than those who still enjoyed prisoner-of-war status.
Rations were reduced again soon after this: a direct cut was recorded in the Quartermaster Reports. But indirect cuts were taking place as well. One was the effect of extraordinary gaps between prisoner strength as given on the ration lists and official “on hand” accounts, and between the on-hand counts, and between the on-hand count and the actual number of prisoners in the camps.
The meticulous General Lee grew so worried about the discrepancies that he fired off a challenging cable from his headquarters in paris to SHAEF headquarters in Frankfurt:
“This Headquarters is having considerable difficulty in establishing adequate basis for requisitioning rations for prisoners of war currently held in Theatre…In response to inquiries from this Headquarters…several varying statements of number of prisoners held in theatre have been published by SHAEF.”
He then cites the latest SHAEF statement:
“Cable…dated 31 May states 1,890,000 prisoners of war and 1,200,000 disarmed German forces on hand. Best available figures at this Headquarters show prisoners of war in ComZ910,980, in ComZ transient enclosures 1,002,422 and in Twelfth Army GP 965,125, making a total of 2,878,537 and an additional 1,000,000 disarmed German forces Germany and Austria.”
The situation was astounding: Lee was reporting a million or more men in the US Army camps in Europe than SHAEF said it ha don its books. But he was wrestling with the wind: he had to his issue of food on the number of prisoners on hand supplied to him by SHAEF G-3 (Operations).
Given the general turmoil, fluctuating and inaccurate tallies were probably inevitable, but more than 1 million captives can actual be seen disappearing between two reports of the Theatre Provost Marshal, issued on the same day, June2. the last in a series of daily reports from the TPM logs 2,870,400 POWs on hand at June 2. The first report of the new weekly series, dated the same day, says that there are only 1,836,000 on hand. At one point in the middle of June, the prisoner strength on the ration list was shown as 1,421,559, while on Lee’s and other evidence there were probably almost three times that number.
Spreading the rations thinner was one way to guarantee starvation. Another was accomplished by some strange army bookkeeping during June and July. A million prisoners who had been receiving at least some food because of their nominal POW status lost their rights and their food when they were secretly transferred to the DEF status. The shift was made deliberately over many week, with careful attention paid to maintaining plausible balances in SHAEF’s weekly POW and DEF reports. (The discrepancy between those “shifted” from POW status during the period from June 2 to July 28 and those “received” in the DEF status is only 0.43 per cent.) The reclassification to DEF did not require any transfer of men to new camps, or involve any new organisation to get German civilians supplies to them. The men stayed where they were. All that happened was that, by the clatter of a typewriter, their skimpy bit of US Army food was stopped.
The effect of a policy arranged through accountancy and conveyed by winks and nods-without written orders-was first to mystify, then to frustrate, then to exhaust the middle-rank officers who were responsible for POWs. A colonel in the Quartermaster Section of the advance US fighting units wrote a personal plea to Quartermaster General Robert Littlejohn as early as April 27: “Aside from the 750 tons received from Fifteenth Army, no subsistence has been received nor do I expect any. What desirable Class II and IV (rations) we have received has been entirely at the suffernece of the Armies, upon personbal appeal and has been insignificant in relation to the demands which are being put upon us by the influx of prisoners of war.”
Rumours of conditions in the camps ran through the US Army. “Boy, those camps were bad news,” said Benedict K. Zobrist, a technical sergeant in the Medical Corps. “We were warned to stay as far away as we could.” In May and early June of 1945, a team of US Medical Corps doctors did survey some of the Rhineland camps, holding just over 80,000 German POWs. Its report is missing from the appropriate section of the National Archives in Washington, but two secondary sources reproduce some of the findings. The three main killers were diarrhoea and dysentery (treated as one category), cardiac disease, and pneumonia. But, straining medical terminology, the doctors also recorded deaths from “emaciation” and “exhaustion.” And their data revealed death rates eighty times as high as any peacetime norm.
Only 9.7 percent to fifteen percent of the prisoners had died of causes clearly associated with lack of food, such as emaciation and dehydration, and “exhaustion.” But the other diseases, directly attributable to exposure, overcrowding, filth, and lack of sanitation, were undoubtedly exacerbated by starvation. As the report noted, “Exposure, overcrowding of pens and lack of food and sanitary facilities all contributed to these excessive (death) rates.” The data, it must be remembered, were taken from the POW camps, not from the DEF camps.
By the end of May,1945, more people had already died in the US camps than would die in the atomic blast at Hiroshima.
On June 4, 1945, a cable signed “Eisenhower” told Washington that it was “urgently necessary to reduce the number of prisoners at earliest opportunity by discharging all classes of prisoners not likely to be required by Allies.” It is hard to understand what prompted this cable. No reason for it is evident in the massive cable traffic that survives the period in the archives in London, Washington, and Abilene, Kansas. And far from ordering Eisenhower to take or hold on to prisoners, the Combined Chiefs’ message of April 26 had urged him not to take in any more after V-E Day, even for labour. Nonetheless more than 2 million DEFs were impounded after May 8.
During June, Germany was partitioned into zones of occupation and in July, 1945, SHAEF was disbanded. Eisenhower, reverting to his single role as US commanding general in Europe, becoming military governor of the US zone. He continued to keep out Red Cross representatives, and the US Army also informed American relief teams that the zone was closed to them. It was closed to all relief shipments as well-until December, 1945, when a slight relaxation came in to effect.
Also starting in July, the Americans turned over between 600,000 and 700,000 German captives to the French to help repair damages done to their country during the war. many of the transferees were in five US camps clustered around Dietersheim, near Mainz, in the section of Germany that had just come under French control. (most of the rest were in US camps in France.)
On July 10, a French unit took over Dietersheim and seventeen days later a Captain Julien arrived to assume command. His report survives as part of an army inquiry into a dispute between Julien and his predecessor. In the first camp he entered, he testified to finding muddy ground “people living skeletons,” some of whom died as he watched. others huddled under bits of cardboard which they clutched although the July day was hot. Women lying in holes in the ground stared up at him with hunger oedema bulging their bellies in gross parody of pregnancy; old men with long grey hair watched him feebly; children of six or seven with the racoon rings of starvation looked at him from lifeless eyes. Tow German doctors in the “hospital” were trying to care for the dying on the ground under the hot sky, between, the marks of the tent that the Americans had taken with them. Julien, who had fought against the Germans with his regiment, the 3erne Regiment de Tirailleure Algeriens, found himself thinking in horror: “This is just like the photographs of Buchenwald and Dachau.”
There were 103, 500 people in the five camps round Dietersheim and amongst them Julien’s officers counted 32, 640 who could do no work at all. These were released immediately. In all, two-thirds of the prisoners taken over by the French that summer from American camps in Germany and in France were useless for reparations labour. In the camp at Sainte-Marthe, 615 of 700 captives were reported to be unable to work. At Erbiseul near Mons, Belgium, according to a written complaint, twenty-five per cent of the men received by the French were “dechets,” or garbage.
In July and August, as US Quartermaster Littejohn signalled to Eisenhower in due course, the Army food reserves in Europe grew by thirty-nine percent.
On August 4, a one-sentence order signed “Eisenhower” condemned all prisoners of wear still on hand in the US camps to DEF status: “Effective immediately all members of the German forces held in US custody in the American zone of occupation in GERMANY will be considered as disarmed enemy forces and and not as having the status of prisoner of war.” No reason was given. Surviving weekly tallies suggest the dual classification was preserved, but, for the POWs now being treated as DEFs, the death rate quadrupled within a few weeks, from .2 percent per week to .8 percent.
Long-time DEFs were dying at nearly five times that rate. the official “Weekly PW and DEF Report” for the week ending Sept 8, 1945, still exists in the US National archives in Washington. It shows an aggregate of 1,056,482 prisoners being held by the US Army in the European theatre, of whom about two-thirds are identified as POWs. the other third-363,587 men-are DEFs. During that one week, 13,051 of them died.
In November, 1045, general Eisenhower succeeded George Marshall as US Army chief of staff and returned to the US. In January, 1946, the camps still held significant numbers of captives but the US had wound down its prisoner holdings almost to zero by the end of 1946. the French continued holding hundreds of of thousands through 1946, but gradually reduced the number to nothing by about 1949. During the 1950’s, most non-record material relating to the US prison camps was destroyed by the Army.
Eisenhower had deplored the Germans’ useless defence of the Reich in the last months of the war because of the waste of life. At least ten times as many Germans-undoubtedly 800,000, almost certainly more than 900,000, and quite probably over 1 million-died in the French and American camps as were killed in all the combat on the Western Front in northwest Europe from America’s entry into the war in 1941 through to April, 1945.
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HOW ALLIES TREATED GERMAN POWs
“War crime trials for allied soldiers overdue.” Says analyst
NEWS DESK 24th JUNE 2000MICHAEL WALSH
“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’. (8)
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).
(8) 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
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After the Reich: The Brutal History of Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh
NEW BOOK DETAILS MASS KILLINGS AND BRUTAL MISTREATMENT OF GERMANS AT THE END OF WORLD WAR TWO
By Mark Weber
Germany’s defeat in May 1945, and the end of World War II in Europe, did not bring an end to death and suffering for the vanquished German people. Instead the victorious Allies ushered in a horrible new era that, in many ways, was worse than the destruction wrought by war.
In a sobering and courageous new book, After the Reich: The Brutal History of Allied Occupation, British historian Giles MacDonogh details how the ruined and prostrate Reich (including Austria) was systematically raped and robbed, and how many Germans who survived the war were either killed in cold blood or deliberately left to die of disease, cold, malnutrition or starvation.
Many people take the view that, given the wartime misdeeds of the Nazis, some degree of vengeful violence against the defeated Germans was inevitable and perhaps justified. A common response to reports of Allied atrocities is to say that the Germans “deserved what they got.” But as MacDonogh establishes, the appalling cruelties inflicted on the totally prostrate German people went far beyond that.
His best estimate is that some three million Germans, military and civilians, died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities.
A million of these were men who were being held as prisoners of war, most of whom died in Soviet captivity. (Of the 90,000 Germans who surrendered at Stalingrad, for example, only 5,000 ever returned to their homeland.) Less well known is the story of the many thousands of German prisoners who died in American and British captivity, most infamously in horrid holding camps along the Rhine river, with no shelter and very little food. Others, more fortunate, toiled as slave labor in Allied countries, often for years.
Most of the two million German civilians who perished after the end of the war were women, children and elderly — victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide, and mass murder.
Apart from the wide-scale rape of millions of German girls and woman in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. The wretched survivors of this ethnic cleansing were pitched across the border, never to return to their homes. There were similar scenes of death and dispossession in Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia as the age-old German communities of those provinces were likewise brutally expunged.
We are ceaselessly reminded of the Third Reich’s wartime concentration camps. But few Americans are aware that such infamous camps as Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz stayed in business after the end of the war, only now packed with German captives, many of whom perished miserably.
The vengeful plan by US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to turn defeated Germany into an impoverished “pastoral” country, stripped of modern industry, is recounted by MacDonogh, as well as other genocidal schemes to starve, sterilize or deport the population of what was left of the bombed-out cities.
It wasn’t an awakening of humanitarian concern that prompted a change in American and British attitudes toward the defeated Germans. The shift in postwar policy was based on fear of Soviet Russian expansion, and prompted a calculated appeal to the German public to support the new anti-Soviet stance of the US and Britain.
MacDonogh’s important book is an antidote to the simplistic but enduring propaganda portrait of World War II as a clash between Good and Evil, and debunks the widely accepted image of benevolent Allied treatment of defeated Germany.
This 615-page volume is much more than a gruesome chronicle of death and human suffering. Enhanced with moving anecdotes, it also provides historical context and perspective. It is probably the best work available in English on this shameful chapter of twentieth century history.
Mark Weber is director of the Institute for Historical Review. This review is adapted from an item in the Summer 2007 issue of the IHR Update newsletter.
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IN ‘EISENHOWER’S DEATH CAMPS:” A U.S. PRISON GUARD RMEMBERS
Martin Brech
In October 1944, at age eighteen, I was drafted into the U.S. army. Largely because of the “Battle of the Bulge,” my training was cut short, my furlough was halved, and I was sent overseas immediately. Upon arrival in Le Havre, France, we were quickly loaded into box cars and shipped to the front. When we got there, I was suffering increasingly severe symptoms of mononucleosis, and was sent to a hospital in Belgium. Since mononucleosis was then known as the “kissing disease,” I mailed a letter of thanks to my girlfriend.
By the time I left the hospital, the outfit I had trained with in Spartanburg, South Carolina, was deep inside Germany, so, despite my protests, I was placed in a “repo depot” (replacement depot). I lost interest in the units to which I was assigned, and don’t recall all of them: non-combat units were ridiculed at that time. My separation qualification record states I was mostly with Company C, 14th Infantry Regiment, during my seventeen-month stay in Germany, but I remember being transferred to other outfits also.
In late March or early April 1945, I was sent to guard a POW camp near Andernach along the Rhine. I had four years of high school German, so I was able to talk to the prisoners, although this was forbidden. Gradually, however, I was used as an interpreter and asked to ferret out members of the S.S. (I found none.)
In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate enclosure that I did not see until later. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets. Many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. It was a cold, wet spring, and their misery from exposure alone was evident.
Even more shocking was to see the prisoners throwing grass and weeds into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this to help ease their hunger pains. Quickly they grew emaciated. Dysentery raged, and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches. Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before our eyes. We had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, including no medical assistance.
Outraged, I protested to my officers and was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from “higher up.” No officer would dare do this to 50,000 men if he felt that it was “out of line,” leaving him open to charges. Realizing my protests were useless, I asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could slip me some extra food for the prisoners. He too said they were under strict orders to severely ration the prisoners’ food, and that these orders came from “higher up.” But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with, and would sneak me some.
When I threw this food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, I was caught and threatened with imprisonment. I repeated the “offense,” and one officer angrily threatened to shoot me. I assumed this was a bluff until I encountered a captain on a hill above the Rhine shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 caliber pistol. When I asked, “Why?,” he mumbled, “Target practice,” and fired until his pistol was empty. I saw the women running for cover, but, at that distance, couldn’t tell if any had been hit.
This is when I realized I was dealing with cold-blooded killers filled with moralistic hatred. They considered the Germans subhuman and worthy of extermination; another expression of the downward spiral of racism. Articles in the G.I. newspaper, Stars and Stripes, played up the German concentration camps, complete with photos of emaciated bodies. This amplified our self-righteous cruelty, and made it easier to imitate behavior we were supposed to oppose. Also, I think, soldiers not exposed to combat were trying to prove how tough they were by taking it out on the prisoners and civilians.
These prisoners, I found out, were mostly farmers and workingmen, as simple and ignorant as many of our own troops. As time went on, more of them lapsed into a zombie-like state of listlessness, while others tried to escape in a demented or suicidal fashion, running through open fields in broad daylight towards the Rhine to quench their thirst. They were mowed down.
Some prisoners were as eager for cigarettes as for food, saying they took the edge off their hunger. Accordingly, enterprising G.I. “Yankee traders” were acquiring hordes of watches and rings in exchange for handfuls of cigarettes or less. When I began throwing cartons of cigarettes to the prisoners to ruin this trade, I was threatened by rank-and-file G.I.s too.
The only bright spot in this gloomy picture came one night when. I was put on the “graveyard shift,” from two to four a.m. Actually, there was a graveyard on the uphill side of this enclosure, not many yards away. My superiors had forgotten to give me a flashlight and I hadn’t bothered to ask for one, disgusted as I was with the whole situation by that time. It was a fairly bright night and I soon became aware of a prisoner crawling under the wires towards the graveyard. We were supposed to shoot escapees on sight, so I started to get up from the ground to warn him to get back. Suddenly I noticed another prisoner crawling from the graveyard back to the enclosure. They were risking their lives to get to the graveyard for something. I had to investigate.
When I entered the gloom of this shrubby, tree-shaded cemetery, I felt completely vulnerable, but somehow curiosity kept me moving. Despite my caution, I tripped over the legs of someone in a prone position. Whipping my rifle around while stumbling and trying to regain composure of mind and body, I soon was relieved I hadn’t reflexively fired. The figure sat up. Gradually, I could see the beautiful but terror-stricken face of a woman with a picnic basket nearby. German civilians were not allowed to feed, nor even come near the prisoners, so I quickly assured her I approved of what she was doing, not to be afraid, and that I would leave the graveyard to get out of the way.
I did so immediately and sat down, leaning against a tree at the edge of the cemetery to be inconspicuous and not frighten the prisoners. I imagined then, and still do now, what it would be like to meet a beautiful woman with a picnic basket under those conditions as a prisoner. I have never forgotten her face.
Eventually, more prisoners crawled back to the enclosure. I saw they were dragging food to their comrades, and could only admire their courage and devotion.
On May 8, V.E. Day [1945], I decided to celebrate with some prisoners I was guarding who were baking bread the other prisoners occasionally received. This group had all the bread they could eat, and shared the jovial mood generated by the end of the war. We all thought we were going home soon, a pathetic hope on their part. We were in what was to become the French zone [of occupation], where I soon would witness the brutality of the French soldiers when we transferred our prisoners to them for their slave labor camps.
On this day, however, we were happy.
As a gesture of friendliness, I emptied my rifle and stood it in the corner, even allowing them to play with it at their request. This thoroughly “broke the ice,” and soon we were singing songs we taught each other, or that I had learned in high school German class (“Du, du, liegst mir im Herzen”). Out of gratitude, they baked me a special small loaf of sweet bread, the only possible present they had left to offer. I stuffed it in my “Eisenhower jacket,” and snuck it back to my barracks, eating it when I had privacy. I have never tasted more delicious bread, nor felt a deeper sense of communion while eating it. I believe a cosmic sense of Christ (the Oneness of all Being) revealed its normally hidden presence to me on that occasion, influencing my later decision to major in philosophy and religion.
Shortly afterwards, some of our weak and sickly prisoners were marched off by French soldiers to their camp. We were riding on a truck behind this column. Temporarily, it slowed down and dropped back, perhaps because the driver was as shocked as I was. Whenever a German prisoner staggered or dropped back, he was hit on the head with a club and killed. The bodies were rolled to the side of the road to be picked up by another truck. For many, this quick death might have been preferable to slow starvation in our “killing fields.”
When I finally saw the German women held in a separate enclosure, I asked why we were holding them prisoner. I was told they were “camp followers,” selected as breeding stock for the S.S. to create a super-race. I spoke to some, and must say I never met a more spirited or attractive group of women. I certainly didn’t think they deserved imprisonment.
More and more I was used as an interpreter, and was able to prevent some particularly unfortunate arrests. One somewhat amusing incident involved an old farmer who was being dragged away by several M.P.s. I was told he had a “fancy Nazi medal,” which they showed me. Fortunately, I had a chart identifying such medals. He’d been awarded it for having five children! Perhaps his wife was somewhat relieved to get him “off her back, ”but I didn’t think one of our death camps was a fair punishment for his contribution to Germany. The M.P.s agreed and released him to continue his “dirty work.”
Famine began to spread among the German civilians also. It was a common sight to see German women up to their elbows in our garbage cans looking for something edible — that is, if they weren’t chased away.
When I interviewed mayors of small towns and villages, I was told that their supply of food had been taken away by “displaced persons” (foreigners who had worked in Germany), who packed the food on trucks and drove away. When I reported this, the response was a shrug. I never saw any Red Cross at the camp or helping civilians, although their coffee and doughnut stands were available everywhere else for us. In the meantime, the Germans had to rely on the sharing of hidden stores until the next harvest.
Hunger made German women more “available,” but despite this, rape was prevalent and often accompanied by additional violence. In particular I remember an eighteen-year old woman who had the side of her faced smashed with a rifle butt, and was then raped by two G.I.s. Even the French complained that the rapes, looting and drunken destructiveness on the part of our troops was excessive. In Le Havre, we’d been given booklets warning us that the German soldiers had maintained a high standard of behavior with French civilians who were peaceful, and that we should do the same. In this we failed miserably.
“So what?” some would say. “The enemy’s atrocities were worse than ours.” It is true that I experienced only the end of the war, when we were already the victors. The German opportunity for atrocities had faded, while ours was at hand. But two wrongs don’t make a right. Rather than copying our enemy’s crimes, we should aim once and for all to break the cycle of hatred and vengeance that has plagued and distorted human history. This is why I am speaking out now, 45 years after the crime. We can never prevent individual war crimes, but we can, if enough of us speak out, influence government policy. We can reject government propaganda that depicts our enemies as subhuman and encourages the kind of outrages I witnessed. We can protest the bombing of civilian targets, which still goes on today. And we can refuse ever to condone our government’s murder of unarmed and defeated prisoners of war.
I realize it’s difficult for the average citizen to admit witnessing a crime of this magnitude, especially if implicated himself. Even G.I.s sympathetic to the victims were afraid to complain and get into trouble, they told me. And the danger has not ceased. Since I spoke out a few weeks ago, I have received threatening calls and had my mailbox smashed. But its been worth it. Writing about these atrocities has been a catharsis of feelings suppressed too long, a liberation, that perhaps will remind other witnesses that “the truth will make us free, have no fear.” We may even learn a supreme lesson from all this: only love can conquer all.
Martin Brech lives in Mahopac, New York. When he wrote this memoir essay in 1990, he was an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Brech holds a master’s degree in theology from Columbia University, and is a Unitarian-Universalist minister.
This essay was published in The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1990 (Vol. 10, No. 2), pp. 161-166. (Revised, updated: Nov. 2008)
For Further Reading
James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950 (Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1997)
James Bacque, Other Losses: An investigation into the mass deaths of German prisoners at the hands of the French and Americans after World War II (Toronto: Stoddart, 1989)
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Nemesis at Postsdam (Lincoln, Neb.: 1990)
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Eastern European Germans, 1944-1950 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994)
John Dietrich, The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (New York: Algora, 2002)
Ralph Franklin Keeling, Gruesome Harvest: The Allies’ Postwar War Against the German People (IHR, 1992). Originally published in Chicago in 1947.
Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007)
John Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Story of Jews Who Sought Revenge for the Holocaust (2000)
Mark Weber, “New Book Details Mass Killings and Brutal Mistreatment of Germans at the End of World War Two” (Summer 2007)
( http://www.ihr.org/other/afterthereich072007.html )
YOU CAN LISTEN TO THE MUSIC AND KEEP THE SAME PAGE OPEN, IF YOU HIT CTRL+THE MP3 AT THE SAME TIME.
German POWs
***
Rheinwiesenlager German POW Extermination Camp
English - German (bottom)
3,250,000 German POWs were murdered by the Allies!
1,000,000 German POWs were murdered in the American Prison camps by beating them to death, starving them to death and freezing them to death! Medical help and Red Cross were denied!
About the Allied Christian Warriors:
US-American War Methods
What kind of war do you think we waged?! We murdered prisoners in cold blood. We pulverized hospitals, sunk rescue boats, killed and wounded the civilians of the enemy country, killed the wounded, dumped the dying into holes in the ground along with the dead.
In the Pacific we beat in the heads of our enemies, boiled their heads and made table decorations out of them and letter openers from their bones for our brides. We crowned the dropping of phosphorus bombs and the murders of civilians with atomic bombs dropped unto undefended cities and are holding the undisputed record in mass murder.
As the victors we took it upon us to take our enemies to court for war crimes. [But the Germans had not committed any war crimes-they fought strictly under the Hague and Geneva Convention - the accusations are all undocumented and flimsy at best. Our German defendants had been massively tortured into confessions ; At Nurnberg they had their testes irreparably damaged by torture to force them to sign documents with false accusations against themselves without any real defense and without being allowed to bring up the crimes of the accusers.]
But we should be realists enough to understand that we would be declared guilty in a dozen accusations if we would be put before the courts for breaking international war regulations. We have fought a war without honor [you can say that again!] because morality was the last thing on the minds of the soldiers.
This was written by the well-known US War Correspondent, Edgar L. Jones, as a protest against the hypocritical American Military Tribunal in February 1946 in the newspaper “Atlantic Monthly.” [in brackets are comments by the admin.]
*
read - Eisenhower’s Death Camps
by Admin
According to the Hague Convention, prisoners of war have to be released immediately after hostilities end. Germany strictly held to this convention. Already in 1940 and 1941 the German military released POWs from the Soviet Union, Holland, Norway, Greece even though hostilities had not ended.
Hager Landkriegordnung - PDF
Video - Der Sysematische Mord unserer Tapferen Soldaten in Deutsch - Englishe Uebersetzung folg hier im Text unten:
Video - Personal witnesses - English Text below on this page
Rheinwiesenlager Murder of Millions of German Prisoners - Deutsch
by the American GIs
IT IS VERY CLEAR THAT ONE REASON THE ALLIES, INCLUDING THE AMERICANS, DID NOT RELEASE THE GERMAN MEN WAS SO THAT THE GIs COULD GO ON A ROB, RAPE AND TORTURE SPREE OF THE GERMAN WOMEN AND CHILDREN. 500,000 RAPED BY THE GIs WITH A HIGH DEATH RATE. 2 MILLION RAPED IN GERMANY PROPER BY THE ALLIES, AND IT IS ESTIMATED THAT 5 MILLION ETHNIC GERMAN WOMEN AND CHILDREN WERE RAPED IN ALL OF EUROPE. MANY OF THEM WERE TORTURED AND MURDERED DURING THE RAPES, ESPECIALLY IN THE EAST BLOC COUNTRIES.
WHILE THE GERMAN WOMEN AND CHILDREN WERE RAPED BY THE GIs, THEIR HUSBANDS WERE PURPOSELY STARVED AND FROZEN TO DEATH OUT IN THE OPEN PRISON CAMPS BY THE GIs.
Without rights, the German prisoners were stamped ‘free game’ and were subjected to running the gauntlet when taken into captivity throughout cities in Europe and Germany. Humiliations, defamations, abuse of every type, unbelievable torture, beatings unto death, freezing to death, and massive starvation unto death was the lot of Millions of imprisoned German soldiers throughout Europe. Starvation to death was a major tool to which Millions succumbed. All the Allies abused and murdered the German soldiers, whereas the Germans treated their prisoners humanely adhering to the treaty they have signed at Hague. Toward the end of the war, the Germans had a lack of food for all as even the farmers were firebombed and hunted to death with machine guns from planes, and the whole infrastructure of Germany was bombed out.
The American GI’s also abused the German soldiers in horrific ways with a slow death by freezing and starvation, stretched out over a couple of months living on hundreds of open field prison camps with no shelter of any type, no coats and no blankets, subjected to rain, snow and mud. They sat and slept in the wet mud. Sometimes German soldiers were just simply beaten to death. Others succumbed by having no medical help for their war injuries because Red Cross help was denied. 1 Million perished this way in the U.S. camps. About 3,250,000 German soldiers perished as Allied prisoners.
Even 5 years after the war hundreds of thousands of Germans were still kept in Allied prisons. Not only that…
In the Fall of 1957, the last German POWs were supposedly returning to Germany, 12 years later!!! The Allies, who call themselves fighting for freedom and justice have broken the Hague Convention keeping the Germans prisoners, frequently for years in prison camps and exploited them for slave labor. Most likely, there families did not know where they were for years.
However, in 1994 a German Television crew discovered there were still some German prisoners living in the UdSSR who had to settle in nearby areas of prison camps as they were not allowed to return to Germany because they had no papers and had lost all contacts to Germany. (The question is, who did not allow it? The Soviet Union or Germany, that treason Allied-Jewish reigned ‘German’ country?)
*According to the DRK Suchdienst in Munich in 1945.
**Rolf Kosiek, Grabert Verlag
**Ludwig Peters “Wir haben Euch nicht Vergessen.”
**Wissenschaftliche Kommission der Deutschen Kriegsgefangenengeschichte, “Zur Gescichte der Deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges,” 15 Bde. Munich
**Paul Carell und Guenter Boeddecker, “Die Gefangenen,” Ullstein, Muenchen
GERMANS ARE THE VICTIM! LONG LIVE THE TRUTH!
============================================
ENGLISH - DEUTSCH
These are not buildings; these are German prisoners of war out in the open with a ca. 25% death rate.
Dies sind keine Huegel oder Gebaeude; dies sind alles Deutsche Kriegsgefangene im offenen lebend mit ca. 25% Todesresultat.
Extreme Human Rights Abuses to Murder Capitulated German Soldiers. They were kept worse than cattle freezing and starving just like on these pictures until Millions of them died. One could call this Millions of lust murders. 1 Million murdered this way by the American Military. 3.5 Million murdered by the Allies after capitulation.
Extreme Menschenrechte Verletzungen um die Deutschen Soldaten Umzubringen. Sie wurden schlimmer wie Vieh im Freien zusammengepfercht bis sie erfroren und verhungert waren. Man koennte es wirklich Millionen von Lustmorden nennen! 1 Million wurden so erledigt by the Amerikanischen Soldaten alleine! 3.5 Millionen by den Allies zusammen ermordet nach der Kapitulation!
German Prisoners of War - Kriegsgefangene
Amtliche Bundesdeutsche Dokumentation Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, Band XV, Tabelle 1
| Great Britain | 3,835,000 |
| USA | 3,097,000 |
| Soviet Union | 3,060,000 |
| France | 937,000 |
| Jugoslavia | 194,000 |
| Polend | 70,000 |
| Belgium | 64,000 |
| Czechoslovakia | 25,000 |
| Netherlands | 7,000 |
| Luxemburg | 5,000 |
Total 11,094,000*
According to the Hague Convention, prisoners of war have to be released immediately after hostilities end. Germany strictly held to this convention. Already in 1940 and 1941 the German military released POWs from the Soviet Union, Holland, Norway, Greece even though hostilities had not ended.
Even 5 years after the war hundreds of thousands of Germans were still kept in Allied prisons.
In the Fall of 1957, the last German POWs were supposedly returning to Germany, 12 years later!!! The Allies, who call themselves fighting for freedom and justice have broken the Hague Convention keeping the Germans prisoners, frequently for years in prison camps and exploited them for slave labor. Most likely, there families did not know where they were for years.
However, in 1994 a German Television crew discovered there were still some German prisoners living in the UdSSR who had to settle in nearby areas of prison camps as they were not allowed to return to Germany because they had no papers and had lost all contacts to Germany. (The question is, who did not allow it? The Soviet Union or Germany, that treason Allied-Jewish reigned ‘German’ country?)
*According to the DRK Suchdienst in Munich in 1945.
**Rolf Kosiek, Grabert Verlag
**Ludwig Peters “Wir haben Euch nicht Vergessen.”
**Wissenschaftliche Kommission der Deutschen Kriegsgefangenengeschichte, “Zur Gescichte der Deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges,” 15 Bde. Munich
**Paul Carell und Guenter Boeddecker, “Die Gefangenen,” Ullstein, Muenchen
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Prisoners in the London Torture Center in the Kensington Palace Garden
Goetz Eberbach reports on his father, General Heinrich Eberbach, who was in charge of the 12th Waffen-SS Tank Division “Hitlerjugend:” “He was taken prisoner on August 31, 1944 by the British with a serious kidney ailment. Though he was seriously ill he was transported to the above torture prison to ‘prepare’ him for testifying against Kurt Meyer and was asked friendly to sign a document of accusation against Meyer. My father did not want to sign as the document was because the whole document was full of false accusations against Kurt Meyer whom he knew from the front and appreciated. My father, General Eberbach, changed everything on the document to make it fit the truth and then signed it. As punishment he was put into a filthy isolation cell and had to sleep on the floor. At night he heard the screaming of German prisoners who were interrogated. General Eberbach was to be released three days later but asked to first sign a document stating that he was treated well in this prison. Father told them he will change it t fit the truth and accuse those who have mistreated him. Father was told that in that case he will never return home; so he withdrew the accusations against the officers who mistreated him inprison. However, he had lifelong regrets over that.
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Forced Labor of Germans in England after 1945
The Western Allies had hundreds of thousands of German prisoners for years in various prisons. At the same time they gave the death penalty by hanging to Politician Fritz Sauckel for recruiting forced labor during the war and not in peace times. In addition they had more than 87,000 Germans as forced labor in the near East.
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England kidnapped German scientists 1945 [So did the U.S.A.]
The greatest robbing of patents and kidnapping of German researchers and scientists has been done by the Allies after the so-called “liberation day.” They were exploiters of the worst kind ever in history. Industrial information of invaluable worth was taken from Germany. It saved the Allies decades of research. The British Newspaper Guardian discovered in the summer of 2007 that 6,000 Germans had been kidnapped and taken to Britain. They were interrogated for many months to provide scientific information and were then released or kept prisoners and forced to work in Britain. Main criminals were Chemical Concern ICI, Textile Manufacturer Courtaulds, and Machine manufacturing BSA Tools.
President of the British Crown Advisory, Herbert Morrison said amongst other things, regarding the kidnapping of German scientists for British use, unabashedly: “Just like in 1914, we have entered this war for the reason that we cannot accept a German domination.”
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Hager Landkriegordnung - PDF
Video - Der Sysematische Mord unserer Tapferen Soldaten -
Persoenliche Zeugen von den verherenden Rheinwiesenlagern auf diesem Video - Deutsch.
English Uebersetzungstext hier unten!
Video - Mord von Millionen Deutschen Soldaten by GIs
English / German Translation below of what it was like at one of the open prison camps:
English / Deutsche Uebersetzung wie es war in den offenen Rheinwiesenlager:
English Translation of Video:
volksfront-medien
From Video on Rheinwiesenlager - Conditions in the camps:
Dr. Alfred De Zayas:
After WWII, the focus on historical research inquiring about German war crimes may have ultimately been caused by the lack of concrete documentation showing violations of international law by the Allies. It must be the responsibility of historical science to shed light onto this, undoubtedly, uncomfortable chapter of history to determine in what situations which crimes against humanity were perpetrated and to establish a prerequisite for better compliance with the norms of human rights in war fare.
____________________
Heinz Matthias [white shirt]:
And with this [this incarceration? or with May 8? ] began really a gruesome… by far the most gruesome time in my life.
[Text]:
Rheinwiesenlager [They call it Wiesen (meadows) but they were often just mud flats]
Death Planned by the Victors
[Speaker]:
In view of the May 8 celebration in the whole world and the assertion of an alleged liberation of Germany in 1945, it is the duty of every loyal German to show the other side of the coin: namely, in 1945, the Allies liberated Millions of Germans indeed, but from their property, from their homeland, and from their life.
At the end of the war, roughly 11 Million German soldiers were in the hands of the Allies. Of those, about 8 Million in custody of the British and Americans. This film addresses the prison camps located at the so-called “Rheinwiesenlager.” We loyal Germans do not celebrate an alleged liberation on May 8; instead, we mourn on this day the German victims after the war who were exterminated by starvation, hypothermia, and other murder methods.
During the Hague Convention, at the beginning of the 20th century, the participating countries decided to subjugate themselves to international law. This international law was meant to humanize warfare amongst other things, meaning that, for example, violence against defenseless humans or prisoners of war is excluded [from warfare.] On January 26, 1910, the Hague Ground War Rule was ratified by the attending countries, including [Germany], England, France, and the USA.
Regarding prisoners of war the following is laid down as law in the Hague ground war rules, Article 7:
[text read]:
The government in charge of the prisoners of war is required to assure provisions for the prisoners. In absence of any special agreement between warring countries, the prisoners of war are to be treated equal to the troops that took them into custody regarding nourishment, accommodation, and clothing…
[speaker]:
On July 27, 1929, the protective provisions of the Geneva Convention which were formerly only granted to the wounded of a war, were now also extended to all prisoners of war. It was determined here that the prisoners are to be treated equally in every respect to the troops of the victor.
[moderator]:
You arrived in Remagen and were lead through the gates of the camp or driven through it and then put into your quarters. Do you want to describe what that looked like?
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [karierte Jacke mit Brille]:
Well, the way you describe it, it almost sounds as if I was arriving at a nice vacation retreat; but the experience was completely different. The [bad] situation began already in Niederbreisig and then also in Remagen in the same way with an enormous shock. We were chased off the trucks, and then we saw the alley, the Gauntlet alley which the American soldiers formed all the way to the gate with 2 rows, armed with wooden boards, chasing us through the gauntlet with the boards, “Come on, let’s go!” “Come on, let’s go!” always hitting us across the lower back; and this was really an experience I thought could not be possible. I was then thinking: “If soldiers are capable of doing this to other soldiers, then we can expect them to do just about anything to us.” [And he was right.]
[speaker]:
Above all, prisoners must be under the observation of the International Red Cross. After the conclusion of warfare, all prisoners are to be released as soon as possible. This addition at the Geneva Convention, the so-called ‘Liberators of 1945,’ also signed.
In 1943, the Allies agreed [by their own accord], to categorize the German prisoners of war not as prisoners of war but as criminal prisoners, disregarding international law. The respective highest commanders of the Allies were free to handle the prisoners as they pleased. In this sense, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, Dwight David Eisenhower, received on March 10, 1945 the authorization from Washington not to release the German prisoners of war held on German ground but to keep them imprisoned as so-called “Disarmed Enemy Forces.” As a result, the prisoners had no protection under international law and were abandoned to the ill will of the victors.
Josef Dreßen [black shirt]:
The outrage is, that the Americans purposefully starved hundreds of thousands and starved to death a large part of them, or caused them to die from debilitation. The Russians also took prisoners. The Russians were very bad off themselves, and so the prisoners suffered equally; the ones guarding the prisoners were not much better off than the prisoners. The Russians could not help it because they did not have the resources. But the Americans-and that is the outrage-they even turned away help from charities because they wanted to do this to us.
[speaker]:
After crossing the Rhine in March of 1945, the Americans decided that they did not want to bring the German prisoners of war to the camps prepared for them in northern France. By order of Eisenhower they settled the prisoners of war along the western shore of the Rhein on the fields.
Of 188 American prison camps, dozens were placed along the Rhein and its outback area. These so-called Rhein meadow camps stretched from Remagen across Mainz to Bad Kreuznach and all the way across Ludwigshafen. Other camps were frequently dissolved after a while, and the occupants deported to the Rhein meadow camps.
No determination can be made as to the exact numbers of occupants in the camps since the Americans did deliberately not register them. Only in isolated cases were incoming and outgoing numbers determined. The International Red Cross would have had the ability to take on this work, but they were denied access to the camps. One had to estimate the occupation to be 5 Million prisoners between April and September 1945 in the Rheinwiesen camps. At the end of the war the surrendering soldiers were captured at various battle locations. Also taken into captivity were an unknown number of old men, youths belonging to the Volkssturm group, civilians in uniform; for example, firemen, party officials, and members of the NSAPD. Further, injured soldiers on home visit were collected from hospitals, female support and news personnel, and sometimes even youth whom they deemed old enough to hold a weapon, were also hauled off.
Reasons for these breaks of international law and inhuman treatment cannot be seen as anything but a determined desire to take the greatest number possible of Germans as prisoners. What happened to the prisoners as they were taken into custody and immediately thereafter was of unpredictable nature. The American G.I.s acted with great harshness, communicating to the German soldier that he was to feel completely defeated. We have documentation of physical abuse in every form with the intention to bring about death, both before and after the capitulation, mock executions, nightly arrests of young boys who were dressed only with a pajamas, but also-even if more seldom-proper behavior by the G.I.s
Independent of all this, most of the German soldiers claim that after the capitulation they have been repeatedly and systematically filched by the American soldiers. The Americans stole their watches, their cameras, even their wedding bands. No wonder that in bitter irony U.S.A. was translated into “Uhren sammelnde Armee” [Army of watch collectors.] The apparent wealth of having your own watch, which each German boy received for his Holy Communion or Confirmation, was not something the American soldiers had. Beyond that, the prisoners had to frequently give up other personal belongings, including shaving utensils, mess kits, rain protection and tarp.
[speaker]:
The Camp
Most of the Rheinwiesen camps were planned for about 100,000 men. The actual camp was a large square on an open field which was divided into cages. A cage usually had a length and width of about 250 meters. Depending on the location, a cage had between 5,000 to 15,000 prisoners made up of various groups. The cages were patrolled from all sides and at night they used floodlight. Attempted escapes were punished with immediate execution. But from time to time they even just shot into the masses for no reason.
Heinz Matthias [white shirt]:
We were located in smaller camps. There were several camps with 70,000 prisoners on this field, without a building, without a tent. Most of us were without a coat, sitting day and night in the mud, and were totally full of lice. I myself have stood in line for 14 hours, up to the ankles in mud to get a tin can of water. Whoever, could not hold out that long, tipped over and belonged to the dead because no one came to bring him water.
[speaker]:
Guards
The prisoners were usually guarded by second rate soldiers, blacks or Polish help troops, and former foreign workers. These workers were commanded by white soldiers. These were seen by the prisoners as extraordinarily brutal, arrogant, explosive, and aggressive. Roll call ended with beatings for those who tipped over because of exhaustion. The soldiers of the Waffen-SS were treated especially cruelly. Hours of punitive exercises and bestial beating to death were frequently witnessed. They did not even refrain from the maltreatment of high ranking officers.
[speaker]:
American investigations verified further war crimes. 104 German prisoners of war suffocated in an American train transport. 24 others and 3 civilians were murdered at Tambach. And in Luxemburg, US soldiers murdered 70 German prisoners of war.
[speaker]:
‘Living Quarters’
Daily men and women arrived from collection camps behind the front cooped up in locked cattle cars and on trucks and were poured out of the trucks like trash into the cages behind the barbed wire. Some of the prisoners already died in transport. Life in the camps was shaped by the temperament of the camp commander and the insecurity of our future. It was the most basic battle for survival. The prisoners lived through burning heat in the summer and icy cold in the winter on bare ground on fields that turned into mud from rain and snow without any cover over their heads.
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [karierte Jacke mit Brille]:
And we stood there on the field and after three days it was a wasteland of mud; I can’t even remember if it was a field or a meadow.
[speaker]:
During the 4 months under American commanders, each prisoner had 3-5 square meters. The occupants had no tools or material, whatsoever, to make their camp livable. The only possibility was getting a hold of some cardboard, using tin food cans or cutlery for digging, and dig holes into the ground to live in that gave some protection from the elements. Usually three to five prisoners shared one ground hole which was just large enough that they could lay in it sideways.
[speaker]:
The spring of 1945 was wet and cold. It rained and snowed off and on. The field turned into a wasteland of mud. Ernst Albrecht, then 18 years of age, tried to protect himself from the elements.
Ernst Albrecht [white jacket with glasses and black hat]:
After we got so lucky to get a hold of tin food cans, we scraped out a hole the length and width of our bodies. If it was raining, we put the blankets over our head and stayed this way until the blankets were soaked through.
[lady speaker]:
Starvation camp is what the prisoners called it. Frequently we had only a few crackers and dried beans. There was no drinking water access.
[speaker]:
The building of ground holes was forbidden time and time again and the prisoners were forced to close them back up. Not just because the ground holes were dangerous because the rainwater saturated them quickly and they collapsed, but it even happened that bulldozers ran through the camp and sealed up earth holes along with the inhabitants in them.
Tents were not given out even though there were plenty of them in the depots of the German military and the U.S. Army. About 40% of the prisoners lived in the earth holes. Only about 5% had the luck to have a tent and the rest camped on the earth.
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [checkered jacket with glasses]:
I have lived 4 weeks on the fields, others much longer, at a time in spring when after a warm weather spell then the typical March-April weather began: cold, damp, rain; and since we could not sit down anywhere, we stood most of the time or walked back and forth.
[moderator]:
Didn’t you have any waterproof clothing and raincoats and tarp, or such, to protect yourselves from the rain?
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [checkered jacket with glasses]:
On average, I must say that most of them-and I cannot be absolute sure-had nothing but their regular uniform. They did not even have regular coats because they were usually taken from them. There were a few who had tarp, but really only very few. I myself received by sheer luck a good motorcycle coat during the last days of war. But they took it from me when they took me prisoner. But I stole it back from the heap of coats when we marched off, so that in regard to that I was in an especially good position.
There was only mud. There was no dry place. Since there was only mud, we could only wander around even at night, but at one time or another sleep overcomes you, and so I closed up my coat on the top, just like a pant with a band on the top, and let myself drop into the mud in the hope that I would be able to sleep a few hours before my feet freeze off.
[speaker]:
After much difficulties, we finally had one latrine in every cage. The longer the condition of starvation continued the weaker the prisoners became. Whereas men first helped an ill comrade to the latrine, later they were all so weak that they relieved themselves wherever they were.
Heinz Matthias [white shirt]:
We then got lime for the dead and for the latrine. The only problem was, if a completely exhausted man finally made it to the latrine to sit on the rail and due to exhaustion fell backwards into it, he drowned. No one was capable of helping him. Soon we were only able to crawl. We no longer had the strength to stand.
Josef Dreßen [black shirt]:
Help? None! There were so many of us like that. Who could help anyone?
[speaker]:
I took a long while to get a water station set up. Before that, the prisoners got a water quota. The water was taken unfiltered from the Rhein or from a nearby creek and pumped full of Chlorine to prevent an epidemic.
For a prisoner to get water it usually meant he had to stand in line for hours even though he was already totally exhausted. Sometimes it took up to 10 hours to get a tin cup of water. Because of their great thirst, some prisoners drank even from puddles with the result of ruinous health issues. Their thirst was especially tormenting in the summer months when they were exposed to heat and sun without interruption.
A person needs about 1200 calories during rest. A working man between 2000 and 3000 calories per day. The prisoners in the Rheinwiesenlager received in the months of April to July 1945 only between 400 and 900 calories daily. In many camps they received no food at all on Sundays, and new arrivals had to wait two to four days before getting any food.
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [chekered jacket with glasses]:
And in this tin can, I had about this much of a food mash. Maybe you can appreciate what it means when I say that for 4 weeks I had no digestion; that’s how little food I got. And when after 4 weeks I pressed out this hard, black stuff, I passed out and would have almost drowned in the cesspool, just missing it by a hair’s breadth.
[moderator]:
How many calories do you think they gave you a day?
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [karierte Jacke mit Brille]:
I’ve researched this once comparing to modern tables
* [picture with text]: Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller mit 18 Jahren (18 years of age)*
and I concluded that on this day, on this first day, which was relatively ample in comparison, we received, besides the two raw potatoes, 500 calories. With the potatoes, it then came to 700 calories. If we found a fire to put the potatoes into some ash, that helped.
[moderator]:
And how many calories does a man need to halfway survive?
Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [checkered jacket with glasses]:
Two thousand.
[speaker]:
One possibility to get additional food would have been through support from the residents of the nearby villages. But the residents were forbidden under death penalty to provide food to the prisoners. The German government was ordered to instruct their people accordingly. See written document [22:50]. If anyone still tried to get some food to the prisoners, he would be driven off or shot by the fence in front of the starving prisoners. There was no medical care in the beginning, as we had no medical equipment setup, and the Americans did not allow German doctors to practice. If they did it anyhow, then only from their own resources and without medications and equipment. They could only help with advice or try to mitigate pain. The International Red Cross, as mentioned, was not allowed access to the camps. Food and relief supplies which the Red Cross transported on trains to the camps were ordered to be returned by Allied Commander Eisenhower. Sick prisoners were not treated in the camps but only sorted aside by the Americans.
We can assume that only 20% had a normal amount of food, 60% were starving, and 20% had so little food that they died. Camp Kreuznach, the so-called Feld des Jammers [Field of Misery,] had a hospital but they only took patients that died within 24 hours. During the whole imprisonment, the prisoners were under constant stress because they did not know what will happen to them or what was happening politically all around them. They had no idea as to what happened to their families. Furthermore, they were forbidden to write their relatives in order to give them a sign that they are alive.
[speaker]:
The Number of Deceased and what happened to them
First I need to say that there are no numbers at all available as to all types of suicides. Also no numbers are available about prisoners who died due to collapses of fox holes caused by weather conditions, or who were bulldozed over in their earth holes, who suffocated in the mud or in the cesspools, or who died from their injuries.
[blue shirt with white pullover]:
There was only one thing: the will to survive to get home some day… or, however to croak.
[speaker]:
There are no established numbers of prisoners who died due to punitive action against them or who stood shortly before their death and were sent to an evacuation hospital [Evakuierungslazarett]. Further, there are no records of prisoners that were shot during escape or shot indiscriminately either by day or by night. It is frequently documented that prisoners had to take the clothes off the dead and remove their dog tags, load them onto trucks that had an undetermined destination. A small number of dead was buried in mass graves right by the camp. The clothes were then burned and the dog tags had to be given to the Americans who DID NOT give them to the Red Cross but melted them deliberately.
[black coat]:
And here in this field that has been build on, where you no longer can tell what happened here with all this time gone by, here rest-and the number is unknown-thousands of those poor individuals who had been cooped up out in the open without water and food.
[speaker]:
In the camp Bretzenheim, for example, there were three variations of graves without names. There were graves for those who apparently aroused the anger of the guards. The next one for those who for some reason gave resistance or were shot during escape. The third one was for those who fell into the cesspool or have been shot in willful random shootings. According to the Americans, only 3,000 prisoners lost their lives at the Rheinwiesenlager, which would be a quota of not even 1 per 1,000. This data refers to persons who died of their illnesses or due to refusal of help. Today we have in 12 months approximately 15 death per 10,000 due to illness, for people in the range from 20 to 40 years of age. In these cases, we can assume that these people had enough food, clothing, a stable place to live, and medical help; in contrast to the prisoners who had almost no food and no medical care and lived on open fields. Considering this environment, these official numbers are nothing but a mockery. The unsuspecting Franko-Canadian journalist James Bacque determines the number of dead in his book “Der Geplante Tod”to be over a Million in the Rhein camps. But where are these dead? In the areas around the former camps, tenths of thousands lay buried but not hundreds of thousands.
Where did the U.S. trucks take the many corpses? Here it is conspicuous that these U.S. trucks came fully loaded with provisional supplies for the Allies from the main supply center in Antwerp and returned there empty. Empty? No, full of German corpses, and only this explains that in Belgium there is such a large number of unidentified corpses of German soldiers and civilians present who could not possibly all have fallen during the comparatively short duration of battles. The Belgium war cemeteries are full of unidentified corpses because their dog tags had been taken away from them, and they were dumped like garbage left and right along the roadside in the woods on the way to Antwerp.
We accuse!
[Youth with glasses and cap]:
…as far as the lie goes, that we were liberated from something horrible, in reality, something horrible came over us. 7 Million Germans have lost their live during the war. But now, note and remember this as an answer for those who tell you lies: 12 Million Germans were murdered after May 8, 1945! And the 1 Million that were murdered here, not on meadows, but in the sludge and mud of farmland by starving them to death within a few months, they also belong to this number!
[speaker]:
For one, what persuaded the Americans to incarcerate so many innocent people, and for another to keep them locked up under conditions presented here? Why were the prisoners not registered? What prevented the Allies from accepting German supply stock or to use the supplies from the Red Cross? Why these deliberate abandonment politics by the U.S. military authority [commandment]? Why was it not allowed to give the dead in the mass graves on the Rhein an honorable burial? In conclusion it has been assessed that the systematic murder of German prisoners has hardly gotten any attention in the public, and there is a great need for detailed research. We hope that this documentary can contribute, in a small way, to the findings and evidence of American war crimes. The goal of the Allies was and is [today] a targeted decimation of the German people.
Heinz Matthias [white shirt]:
I walked down the Berkusenstrasse (?), I think it was July 15, und took a turn into the Juklerstrasse (?). This was my neighborhood. And whilst I was turning into the street, my mother sat in the bath tub crying-I was able to reconstruct that exactly-because she did not know if her son was still alive. And then the bell rang. And then my mother washed her face and dried it off hoping that the stranger coming to the door would not see that she had cried. Then she walked down the hallway to the door and opened it and there I stood. And then my mother cried. She was not able to say my name. And then only on the third attempt she said, “My boy” and took me into her arms.
[text]:
The truth differentiates from the half-truth that it comprises the whole reality.
Part of the whole reality is the fact that the time that followed May 8, 1945, was a time of absolute oppression of the German people.
The fate of the Germans was in the occupation zones of the Soviets, the French, and the Americans especially terrible.
After May 8, 1945, 12 Million Germans died because of the crimes by the Allies.
Millions of German prisoners of war were murdered or have been killed in the camps of the Allies.
A total of 16 Million Germans fled from the eastern part of Germany or were systematically driven off [their homes and land]. The most shocking part is the methods used to force them out. These methods were enforced with unimaginable cruelty.
Millions of German citizens were murdered on the spot in their home town, or they were murdered in flight… or they did not survive the trauma of escape.
Further causes of death were documented: beating, executing, strangling, drowning, stabbing, repeated rape, castrating, crucifying, whipping, trampling.
… also, deaths through burning alive, mutilation, rolling in drums and pumping people full of sewage.
In the criminal and show processes, the Soviet interrogating officers had German prisoners of war frequently tortured or shot if they did not willingly inform.
American interrogating officers, in many cases, let German prisoners starve for many days, poured feces over them, put sacks over their heads whilst beating them to soften them up for interrogation.
In the “Malmedy-Litigation” the accused German prisoners had wooden wedges driven under their nails or had their testes crushed to force ‘confessions.’
The US military authority forbade distribution of provisions and tents to the prisoners, available from the German and U.S. military depots and prohibited the provision of drinking water and food for the German civil population…
…ordered the helping civilians to take the food away and to destroy it.
Die Folgerung, daß die Deutschen den Krieg allein verursacht und damit die Vertreibung und das Elend ab 1945 selbst verschuldet hätten, ist historisch unhaltbar.
The judgment that the Germans alone are responsible for the war and therefore caused the expulsion of ethnic Germans since 1945, is historically unsustainable.
The causes of WWII start with the European disagreements that led to WWI…
…and continued with the merciless methods by the victors of that time to slip the German people the sole blame for WWI and then to plunder them…
… and continue on to the Danzig-dispute and the discrimination and persecution of the German minority in Poland.
The suffering of 16 Million German citizens driven off land and home, the captivity of 11 Million German men in death camps, and the deaths of far more than 6 Million German citizens on our land…
…after May 8, 1945 are far too significant to keep concealed from this day and stand in stark contrast to those who see themselves basically as liberated!
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volksfront-medien
End
DEUTSCHER ORGINAL TEXT
volksfront-medien
Text vom Video ueber die Rheinwiesenlager
00:06 | Dr. Alfred De Zayas:
Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg hat sich die historische Forschung weitgehend auf die Untersuchung deutscher Kriegsverbrechen konzentriert, wozu letztlich auch der Mangel an konkreten Unterlagen über Völkerrechtsverletzungen Seitens der Alliierten beigetragen haben mag. Aufgabe der Wissenschaft muss es sein, Licht in dieses sicherlich sehr unerfreuliche Kapitel der Zeitgeschichte zu bringen, um festzustellen in welchen Situationen welche Völkerrechtsverletzungen begangen wurden und so eine Voraussetzung für eine bessere Beachtung der Normen des Kriegsvölkerrechtes zu schaffen.
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01:06 | Heinz Matthias [weisses Hemd]:
Und damit begann eigentlich eine grausame… die mit deutlichem Abstand grausamste Zeit meines Lebens.
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01:26 | [Text]:
Rheinwiesenlager
Der geplante Tod der Siegermächte
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01:41 | [Sprecher]:
Angesichts der 8. Mai-Feiern der ganzen Welt und der Behauptung einer angeblichen Befreiung Deutschlands 1945 ist es die Pflicht eines jeden volkstreuen Deutschen, die andere Seite der Medaille aufzuzeigen. 1945 befreiten die Alliierten Millionen Deutsche von ihrem Besitz, ihrer Heimat, und ihrem Leben.
Mit Kriegsende befanden sich rund 11 Millionen Deutsche Soldaten in den Händen der Siegermächte. Darunter etwa 8 Millionen im Gewahrsam von Briten und Amerikanern. Dieser Film beschäftigt sich mit dem Teil der Gefangenen, der in den so genannten Rheinwiesenlagern gefangen gehalten wurde. Wir volkstreuen Deutschen feiern am 8. Mai nicht die vermeintliche Befreiung, wir trauern vielmehr an diesem Tag um die Deutschen Nachkriegsopfer, welche durch Hunger, Kälte und Mord sterben mussten.
Während der Haager Friedenskonferenzen zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts beschlossen die teilnehmenden Staaten, sich einem übergeordneten Völkerrecht zu unterwerfen. Das Völkerrecht sollte unter anderem die Kriegsführung humanisieren, das heisst zum Beispiel Gewalt gegen Wehrlose bzw. Kriegsgefangene ausschliessen. Am 26. Januar 1910 wurde die Haager Landkriegsordnung von den teilnehmenden Staaten, darunter neben England und Frankreich auch den USA, ratifiziert.
Über Kriegsgefangene wird in der Haager Landkriegsordnung Artikel 7 folgendes festgelegt:
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03:39 | [Vorgelesener Text]:
Die Regierung, in deren Gewalt sich die Kriegsgefangenen befinden, hat für ihren Unterhalt zu sorgen. In Ermangelung einer besonderen Verständigung zwischen den Kriegführenden sind die Kriegsgefangenen in Beziehung auf Nahrung, Unterbringung und Kleidung auf demselben Fuss zu behandeln wie die Truppen der Regierung, die sie gefangen genommen hat…
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04:01 | [Sprecher]:
Am 27. Juli 1929 wurden hinzukommend die bisher nur für Verwundete eines Krieges geltenden Schutzbestimmungen der Genfer Konvention auch auf Kriegsgefangene ausgedehnt. Hier wurde festgelegt, dass die Gefangenen in jeder Beziehung den eigenen Truppen gleichzustellen sind.
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04:29 | [Moderator]:
Sie kamen in Remagen an und wurden durch die Lagertore geführt oder gefahren und wurden dann einquartiert. Wollen sie das mal darstellen, wie das aussah?
____________________
04:42 | Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [karierte Jacke mit Brille]:
Ja, so wie sie es jetzt angedeutet haben klingt das ja fast wie der Empfang in einem netten Ferienresort, aber die Erfahrung war völlig anders. Es begann eigentlich schon in Niederbreisig, dann aber auch in Remagen, auf dieselbe Weise, mit einem enormen Schock. Wir wurden von den Lastwagen heruntergescheucht und dann sahen wir die Gasse, die Spiessrutengasse die die Amerikanischen Soldaten gebildet hatten, bis zum Lagertor in Zweierreihen mit Latten bewaffnet und scheuchten uns durch diese Gasse mit ihren Latten mit “Come on, let’s go! Come on, let’s go!” immer über die Brücken weg, und das war tatsächlich eine Erfahrung, die ich nicht für möglich gehalten hätte. Ich hab’ damals gedacht, wenn Soldaten es fertig bringen, das anderen Soldaten anzutun, dann kann man von denen ungefähr alles erwarten.
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05:52 | [Sprecher]:
Überdies müssen die Gefangenen unter der Aufsicht des Internationalen Roten Kreuzes stehen. Nach Beendigung der Kampfhandlungen sind alle Gefangenen baldmöglichst freizulassen. Auch diese Erweiterung der Genfer Konvention haben die so genannten Befreier von 1945 unterschrieben.
1943 einigten sich die Alliierten darauf, die Deutschen Kriegsgefangenen eben nicht als Kriegsgefangene sondern unter Nicht-Achtung des Völkerrechtes als Strafgefangene zu behandeln. Die jeweiligen Oberkommandierenden der Streitkräfte sollten über die Gefangenen frei verfügen können. In diesem Sinne erhielt der Oberkommandierende der US-Truppen, der spätere US-Präsident Dwight David Eisenhower am 10. März 1945 aus Washington die Ermächtigung, die auf Deutschem Boden gefangen gehaltenen Deutschen Soldaten nicht zu entlassen, sondern sie als so genannte Entwaffnete Feindliche Truppen, “Disarmed Enemy Forces”, weiter gefangenzuhalten. Die Gefangenen hatten somit keinen Schutz des internationalen Rechtes und waren der Willkür des Siegers ausgeliefert.
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07:17 | Josef Dreßen [schwarzes Hemd]:
Das Skandalöse daran ist, dass die Amerikaner Hunderttausende hungern und einen Grossteil haben verhungern lassen, oder an Entkräftung sterben. Die Russen haben auch Gefangene gemacht. Den Russen ging es schlecht, sehr schlecht persönlich, und den Gefangenen ging es schlecht. Die Wachmannschaften hatten es nicht wesentlich besser als die Gefangenen. Die Russen konnten nicht anders, weil sie es nicht hatten. Die Amis, und das ist der eigentliche Skandal, die haben sogar Hilfe von Hilfsorganisationen abgelehnt weil die uns so behandeln wollten. Das ist der Unterschied.
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08:00 | [Sprecher]:
Nach Überquerung des Rheines im März 1945 beschlossen die Amerikaner, dass sie die Deutschen Kriegsgefangenen nicht in die für sie vorgesehenen Lager nach Nordfrankreich bringen wollten. Sie begannen auf Weisung Eisenhowers entlang des westlichen Rheinufers für die Deutschen Kriegsgefangenen Lager auf der grünen Wiese anzulegen.
Von den 188 Amerikanischen Gefangenenlagern waren Dutzende am Rhein und seinem Hinterland errichtet. Diese sogenannten Rheinwiesenlager erstreckten sich von Remagen über Mainz, Bad Kreuznach bishin über Ludwigshafen. Andere Lager wurden häufig nach einiger Zeit aufgelöst und die Insassen an den Rhein deportiert.
Über die Belegungsstärke können keine genauen Angaben gemacht werden, da bewusst eine Registrierung seitens der Amerikaner nicht vorgenommen wurde. Es lassen sich nur vereinzelt Zu- und Abgänge feststellen. Das Internationale Rote Kreuz hätte die Möglichkeit gehabt, diese Arbeit zu übernehmen, aber ihm wurde der Zutritt in die Lager verwehrt. Es muss von einer Belegungsstärke von weit über 5 Millionen Kriegsgefangenen im Zeitraum vom April bis September 1945 in den Rheinwiesenlagern ausgegangen werden. Zum Kriegsende hin wurden auf den verschiedensten Kriegsschauplätzen die sich ergebenden Deutschen Soldaten gefangen genommen. Mit in Gefangenschaft gerieten dabei in unbekannter Anzahl alte Männer und Jugendliche des Volkssturmes, Zivilisten in Uniform, also zum Beispiel auch Feuerwehrmänner, Parteifunktionäre, aber auch einfache Mitglieder der NSDAP, Verwundete auf Heimaturlaub und aus den Lazaretten, weibliche Flab- und Nachrichten-Helferinnen, schwerversehrte und damit nicht mehr kriegsverwendungsfähige ehemalige Soldaten, und teilweise sogar Jugendliche die den Alliierten alt genug erschienen eine Waffe halten zu können.
Gründe für dieses völkerrechtswidrige und unmenschliche Vorgehen lassen sich in nichts anderem finden als in dem festen Willen, eine möglichst grosse Anzahl von Deutschen zu inhaftieren. Was bei der Gefangennahme und unmittelbar danach mit den Inhaftierten geschah, war von sehr unterschiedlicher Natur. Auf Seiten der Amerikanischen G.I.s wurde mit aller Strenge vorgegangen, denn der Deutsche Soldat war besiegt worden und ihm sollte auch das Gefühl der totalen Niederlage vermittelt werden. Es lassen sich körperliche Misshandlungen in jeglicher Form, mit bewusster Inkaufnahme des Todes vor und nach der Kapitulation, Scheinhinrichtungen, nächtliche Verhaftungen von Jungen bezeugen, die nur mit einem Schlafanzug bekleidet waren, aber auch, wenn auch seltener, korrektes Verhalten.
Unabhängig hiervon wird vom grössten Teil der Deutschen Soldaten ausgesagt, dass sie nach der Kapitulation von den Amerikanischen Soldaten mehrfach in der Form gefilzt wurden, dass man ihnen Armbanduhren, Fotoapparate und sogar Eheringe stahl. Nicht umsonst übersetzte man in bitterer Ironie USA mit “uhrensammelnde Armee”, denn der vermeintliche Reichtun einer eigenen Armbanduhr, die jeder Deutsche zur Kommunjon oder Konfirmation bekam war in den USA vollständig unbekannt. Darüber hinaus mussten die Inhaftierten nicht selten auch ihre persönliche Ausrüstung abgeben, zu der unter anderem das Rasierzeug, das Essbesteck, das Essgeschirr, der Nässeschutz sowie die Zeltplanen gehörten.
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12:00 | [Sprecher]:
Das Lager
Die meisten der Rheinwiesenlager waren für je 100’000 Mann geplant. Das eigentliche Lager bestand aus einem grossen abgezäunten Viereck auf freier Fläche, welches wiederum in einzelne Käfige, “Cages” gennant, unterteilt wurde. Ein “Cage” hatte meist eine Länge und Breite von ca. 250 Metern. Je nach Gefangenenlager war das “Cage” mit 5’000 bis 15’000 Gefangenen belegt und setzte sich aus verschiedenen Gruppen zusammen. Die “Cages” wurden von allen Seiten bewacht, Nachts mit Flutlicht. Fluchtversuche hatten sofortige Erschiessung zur Folge. Zuweilen wurde aber auch ohne Anlass einfach in die Menge der Gefangenen geschossen.
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12:46 | Heinz Matthias [weisses Hemd]:
Wir lagen in unseren Klein-Lagern, es waren mehrere Lager mit 70’000 auf diesem Acker, ohne Haus, ohne Zelt, weithin ohne Mantel, Tag und Nacht im Schlamm, total verlaust. Ich selber habe 14 Stunden Schlage gestanden, bis zu den Knöcheln im Schlamm, um eine Konservendose Wasser zu bekommen. Wer das nicht schaffte, kippte um und der gehörte dann zu den Toten, kein Mensch ist gekommen und hat dem das Wasser gereicht.
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13:18 | [Sprecher]:
Die Bewachung
Bewacht wurden die Gefangenen meist von Amerikanischen Soldaten zweiten Ranges, Negern oder Polnischen Hilfstruppen, teilweise ehemalige Fremdarbeiter. Befehligt wurden diese meist von weissen Soldaten. Diese wurden von den Gefangenen oftmals als ausserordentlich brutal, arrogant, aufbrausend und aggressiv beschrieben. Zählappelle endeten mit Schlägen für die, die vor Entkräftung umkippten. Desweiteren wurden Soldaten der Waffen-SS besonders grausam behandelt. Stundenlang strafexerzieren, bishin zum viehischen Totschlagen ist vielfach bezeugt. Selbst von der Misshandlung von hohen Offizieren schreckten die Alliierten nicht zurück.
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14:04 | [Sprecher]:
Amerikanische Untersuchungen belegen weitere Kriegsverbrechen. So ersticken 104 Deutsche Kriegsgefangene während eines Amerikanischen Eisenbahntransportes. 24 weitere und 3 Zivilisten werden bei Tambach getötet. Und in Luxemburg ermorden US-Soldaten 70 Deutsche Kriegsgefangene.
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14:23 | [Sprecher]:
Die Unterbringung
Täglich trafen Männer und Frauen aus Sammellagern hinter der Front in verschlossenen Viehwagons und auf Lastwagen zusammengepfärcht ein, um dann wie Müll hinter die Stacheldraht-Zäune der “Cages” gekippt zu werden. Manche der Gefangenen waren auf dem Transport bereits verstorben. Das Lagerleben war zunächst einmal vom jeweiligen Lagerkommandanten und der Ungewissheit was kommen wird geprägt. Es war in erster Linie ein Kampf ums Überleben. Die Gefangenen hausten trotz brennender Hitze im Sommer und schneidender Kälte im Winter, bei Regen und Schnee, ohne ein Dach über dem Kopf, auf nacktem Boden, der sich nach wenigen Tagen in eine unergründliche Schlammwüste verwandelte.
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15:10 | Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [karierte Jacke mit Brille]:
Und dann standen wir einfach auf der Wiese oder Feld und nach drei Tagen war das eine Schlammwüste, ich weiss gar nicht mehr ob es sich um Feld oder Wiese gehandelt hat.
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15:20 | [Sprecher]:
In den 4 Monaten unter Amerikanischer Führung stand jedem Gefangenen zwischen 3 und 5 Quadratmeter zu. Die Insassen verfügten über keinerlei Werkzeug oder sonstigen Material um das Lager bewohnbar zu machen. Ihnen blieb nur die Möglichkeit, sich Pappdeckel zu organisieren, mit Hilfe von Konservendosen oder Essbesteck Fuchsbauten zu graben, die einigermassen Schutz vor der Witterung boten. Meist teilten sich drei bis fünf Gefangene einen Bau, der so gross war, dass sie alle auf der Seite liegen konnten.
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15:55 | [Sprecherin]:
Der Frühling 1945 war nass und kalt. Immer wieder regnete und schneite es. Der Acker verwandelte sich in eine Schlammwüste. Der damals 18-jährige Kriegsgefangene Ernst Albrecht versuchte, sich vor der Witterung zu schützen.
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16:11 | Ernst Albrecht [weisse Jacke mit Brille und schwarzem Hut]:
Nachdem wir mit grossem Glück an Konservendosen herangekommen sind, haben wir uns für unsere Grösse, in der Breite und Länge unserer Körper, entsprechend ein ganzes Loch gekratzt. Wenn es geregnet hatte, dann hat man sich die Decken übergezogen, ja, und hat gewartet bis die Decken dann durch waren. Wir waren also praktisch gesehen regelrecht dem Wetter ausgesetzt.
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16:38 | [Sprecherin]:
Hungerlager nannten es die Gefangenen. Oft gab es nur ein paar Kekse oder trockene Bohnen. Trinkwasser fehlte.
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16:45 | [Sprecher]:
Der Bau von Erdlöchern wurde immer wieder untersagt und die Gefangenen wurden gezwungen, diese zuzuschütten. Nicht nur, dass diese Erdbauten gefährlich waren, weil das Regenwasser sie schnell durchweichen liess und zum Einsturz brachte, es kam sogar vor, dass Bulldozer durch die Lager fuhren und Erdlöcher samt den darin vegetierenden Gefangenen zuwalzten.
Zelte wurden nicht ausgegeben, obwohl sie in den Deopts der Deutschen Wehrmacht und in denen der US-Armee reichlich vorhanden waren. Ungefähr 40% der Gefangenen haben in solchen Erdlöchern gehaust. Nur etwa 5% hatten das Glück, ein Zelt zu haben und der Rest hat so auf der Erde campiert.
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17:28 | Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [karierte Jacke mit Brille]:
Wir haben, ich persönlich, manche noch viel länger, haben vier Wochen auf dem Acker gelebt zu einer Zeit im Frühjahr wo nach anfänglich warmem Wetter dann das typische März-April Wetter einsetzte; kalt, nass, Regen; und da man sich ja nirgendwo niederlassen konnte, haben wir hauptsächlich gestanden oder sind auf und ab gegangen.
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17:53 | [Moderator]:
Haben sie denn da auch nicht die wasserundurchlässige Kleidung und Regenmäntel und Zeltbahnen oder sowas um sich gegen den Regen zu schützen?
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18:04 | Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [karierte Jacke mit Brille]:
Im Schnitt muss man sagen, dass die meisten, ich kann das nicht quantifizieren, nichts hatten ausser ihrer normalen Uniform. Nicht einmal Stoffmäntel, die ihnen meistens abgenommen worden waren. Es gab ein paar die Zeltbahnen hatten, aber wirklich nur wenige. Ich persönlich hatte durch Zufall in den letzten Kriegstagen einen guten neuen Kratmantel bekommen. Den hatte mir aber bei der Gefangennahme abgenommen. Ich habe ihn nur dann beim Abmarsch wieder von dem Haufen mir weggeklaut, so dass ich auf diese Weise in der Beziehung besonders gut gestellt war.
Es gab nur Schlamm. Es gab keinen trockenen Platz. Es gab nur Schlamm und nachts ist man entweder auch nachts weiter herumgewandert, aber irgendwann übermannt einen doch der Schlaf, und ich hab dann meinen Kratmantel oben zugemacht, zugebunden, da konnte man so Hosen draus binden und habe mich in den Schlamm kippen lassen und gehofft, dass ich wenigstens ein paar Stunden schlafen kann, ehe mir die Füsse erfrieren.
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19:16 | [Sprecher]:
Desweiteren befanden sich nach anfänglichen Schwierigkeiten in jedem Cage eine Latrine. Je länger der Zustand der Unterernährung andauerte, desto schwächer wurden die Inhaftierten. Hatte man anfangs den kranken Kammeraden zur Latrine geholfen, waren später alle so schwach, dass jeder vor Ort seine Notdurft verrichtete.
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19:42 | Heinz Matthias [weisses Hemd]:
Wir kriegten dann auch Kalk, für die Toten und für die Latrinen. Nur, wenn einer völlig erschöpft sich nun endlich auf den Balken setzte und genauso erschöpft hinten runterfiel; der ertrank, den holte keiner raus. Wir konnten ja oft nur noch kriechen, wir hatten ja gar nicht mehr die Kraft aufrecht zu stehen.
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20:02 | Josef Dreßen [schwarzes Hemd]:
Hilfe, keine. Wir hatten ja so viele dort. Wer wollte da wem helfen?
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20:12 | [Sprecher]:
Eine Wasserstelle wurde erst im Laufe der Zeit angelegt, denn vorher bekamen die Gefangenen meist Wasser auf Zuteilung. Das Wasser wurde ungefiltert entweder direkt dem Rhein oder aus einem nahegelegenen Bach entnommen und mit sehr viel Chlor angereichert, um die Seuchengefahr zu bannen.
Für die Gefangenen bedeutete das Wasserholen trotz totaler Erschöpfung meist stundenlanges Anstehen von bis zu 10 Stunden für einen Becher Wasser. Aufgrund des grossen Durstes scheuten sich einige Gefangene nicht davor, auch aus Pfützen zu trinken, mit verheerenden gesundheitlichen Folgen. Den Durst empfanden die Inhaftierten als besonders schlimm in den Sommermonaten, da sie pausenlos der Hitze und der Sonne ausgesetzt waren.
Ein Mensch im Ruhelager benötigt ungefähr 1200, ein arbeitender Mensch zwischen 2000 bis 3000 Kalorien pro Tag. Die Gefangenen in den Rheinwiesenlagern erhielten in den Monaten April bis Juli ´45 nur zwischen 400 und 900 Kalorien täglich. In vielen Lagern wurde an Sonntagen überhaupt kein Essen ausgegeben, und Frisch-Eingelieferte mussten zwei bis vier Tage auf ihre Verpflegung warten.
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21:26 | Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [karierte Jacke mit Brille]:
Dann hatte ich in dieser Büchse etwa diese Höhe Masse. Sie können vielleicht ermessen, was das bedeutete wenn ich sage, dass ich vier Wochen keine Verdauung gehabt habe, so wenig war das, und als ich nach vier Wochen dieses harte schwarze Zeug da rausgepresst hab’, bin ich in Ohnmacht gefallen und beinahe, um ein Haar, in dem Scheissgraben umgekommen.
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21:52 | [Moderator]:
Wieviel Kalorien, schätzen Sie, hat es da gegeben am Tag?
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21:56 | Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [karierte Jacke mit Brille]:
Ich hab’ das mal nach modernen Kalorien-Tabellen erforscht
* [Bild mit Text]: Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller mit 18 Jahren *
und da kam ich drauf, dass an diesem Tag, an diesem ersten, der relativ üppig war im Verhältnis, wir abgesehen von den beiden rohen Kartoffeln auf 500 Kalorien kamen. Mit den Kartoffeln waren es dann 700, wenn man ein Feuer fand in dem man die Kartoffeln in die Asche legen konnte.
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22:22 | [Moderator]:
Und wieviel braucht der Mensch, um einigermassen zu überleben?
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22:27 | Prof. Dr. Richard M. Müller [karierte Jacke mit Brille]:
Zweitausend.
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22:30 | [Sprecher]:
Eine Möglichkeit, an zusätzliche Nahrung zu gelangen, war die Unterstützung durch die Bewohner der umliegenden Dörfer. Der Bevölkerung war es aber bei Todesstrafe verboten, die Gefangenen mit Nahrung zu versorgen. Die Deutschen Behörden wurden angewiesen, die Bevölkerung entsprechend zu instruieren. Siehe Schriftdokument [22:50]. Wer dennoch versuchte, den hungernden Gefangenen über den Lagerzaun etwas zukommen zu lassen wurde vertrieben oder am Lagerzaun vor den Augen der Hungernden erschossen. Eine ärztliche Versorgung gab es zunächst überhaupt nicht, da es weder Sanitätseinrichtungen gab, noch den Deutschen Ärzten von den Amerikanern erlaubt wurde zu praktizieren. Wenn sie es taten, dann aus eigenem Antrieb und ohne Medikamente oder Zubehör. Sie konnten nur versuchen, mit Ratschlägen zu helfen oder versuchen Leiden zu lindern. Das Internationale Rote Kreuz hatte wie gesagt keinen Zutritt zu den Lagern. Nahrungsmittel und Hilfsgüter, welche das Rote Kreuz in Eisenbahnwagons an den Rhein transportieren liess, wurden auf Befehl Eisenhowers zurückgeschickt. Kranke wurden in den Lagern nicht behandelt, sondern nur von den Amerikanern aussortiert. Es kann davon ausgegangen werden, dass nur 20% normal ernährt, 60% unterernährt, und 20% so ernährt waren, dass sie starben. Im Lager Kreuznach, dem so genannten Feld des Jammers, gab es zwar ein Lazarett, in welches aber einzig und allein Kranke aufgenommen wurden, die binnen 24 Stunden tot waren. Während der ganzen Gefangenenzeit standen die Gefangenen unter ständigem Stress, da sie nicht wussten, was mit ihnen geschehen sollte oder was um sie herum politisch geschah. Sie hatten keine Ahnung darüber, wie es um ihre Familien stand. Zudem wurde ihnen verwährt, an ihre Angehörigen zu schreiben, um ein Lebenszeichen von sich geben zu können.
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24:32 | [Sprecher]:
Die Anzahl der Verstorbenen und ihr Verbleib
Zunächst muss erwähnt werden, dass keine Zahlenangaben zu Freitoden in jeglicher Form gegeben werden können. Ebenso zu Gefangenen, die in ihren Fuchsbauten durch witterungsbedingte Einstürze, Einplanierungen durch Bulldozer, Ersticken im Schlamm oder in den Latrinen, oder an ihren Verletzungen gestorben sind.
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25:00 | [blaues Hemd mit weissem Pullover]:
Es gab ja da nur eins. Den Willen zum Überleben um mal nach Haus zu kommen, oder aber, zu krepieren.
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25:10 | [Sprecher]:
Es gibt keine Zahlenangaben zu Gefangenen, die aufgrund von Strafaktionen gestorben sind oder die kurz vor ihrem Tode standen und in ein Evakuierungslazarett gekommen sind. Desweiteren gibt es weder Angaben zu Gefangenen die auf der Flucht erschossen wurden, noch durch willkürliche Schiesserei, sei es Tags oder in der Nacht. Belegt ist in vielfacher Form, dass Mitgefangene Tote zunächst entkleiden und dann ihnen die Erkennungsmarken abnehmen mussten, um die nackten Toten anschliessend auf LKWs zu verladen, die dann mit unbekanntem Ziel wegfuhren. Ein kleinerer Teil der Toten wurde in Massengräbern direkt bei den Lagern vergraben. Die Kleidung wurde anschliessend verbrannt und die Marken mussten den Amerikanern übergeben werden, welche sie jedoch eben NICHT an das Rote Kreuz weitergaben, sondern wohl gezielt einschmolzen.
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26:12 | [schwarzer Mantel]:
Und hier in diesem bebauten Feld, dem man es jetzt nicht mehr ansieht, wo die Zeit drüber gegangen ist, da liegen, die Zahl ist unbekannt, tausende von armen Menschen die hier unter freiem Himmel eingepfercht wurden, ohne Wasser und ohne Nahrung.
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26:30 | [Sprecher]:
Im Lager Bretzenheim zum Beispiel gab es drei unterschiedliche Variationen von Gräbern ohne Namen. Eine Variation waren Kriegsgefangene, die den vermeintlichen Zorn der Wachmannschaften erregt hatten. Eine weitere diejenigen, die aus irgendeinem Grund Widerstand geleistet hatten oder auf der Flucht erschossen wurden. Die dritte Kategorie waren die, die in die Latrine gefallen waren oder in einer willkürlichen Schiesserei um’s Leben kamen. Nach Angaben der Amerikaner kamen in den Rheinwiesen nur 3’000 Gefangene um’s Leben, was einer Quote von nicht einmal einem Promille entspräche. Die Angaben der Toten beziehen sich auf Menschen, die an ihren Krankheiten oder der unterlassenen Hilfe gestorben sind. Heute kommen in 12 Monaten auf 10’000 Menschen im Alter von 20 bis 40 Jahren ca. 15 Todesfälle vor, die auf Krankheiten zurückzuführen sind. Bei diesen Sterbefällen kann davon ausgegangen werden, dass diesen Menschen ausreichend Nahrung, Kleidung, eine feste Behausung und medizinische Versorgung, heute, zugute gekommen ist; im Gegensatz zu den Gefangenen, die ohne Nahrung und ohne medizinische Versorgung unter freiem Himmel hausen mussten. Vor diesem Hintergrund erscheinen die offiziellen Zahlen geradezu als eine Verhöhnung. Der unverdächtige, franko-kanadische Journalist James Bacque geht in seinem Buch “Der Geplante Tod” von über einer Millionen Toten in den Lagern am Rhein aus. Doch wo sind diese Toten geblieben? In der direkten Umgebung der Lager liegen Zehntausende, aber keine Hunderttausende von Toten. Wohin fuhren die US-Laster mit den vielen Leichen? Hier fällt auf, dass diese US-Laster mit den Versorgungsgütern für die Alliierten voll aus dem Alliierten-Hauptversorgungslager in Antwerpen kamen und leer nach dorthin zurückfuhren. Leer? Nein, voll mit deutschen Leichen und nur so ist es zu erklären, dass in Belgien solch eine große Zahl nicht-identifizierbarer toter deutscher Soldaten und Zivilisten liegt, die dort in den vergleichsweise kurzen Kampfhandlungen garnicht gefallen sein können. Die belgischen Kriegsgräberstätten sind voll mit Nichtidentifizierten, weil die Alliierten ihnen die Erkennungsmarke abgenommen hatten und sie auf dem Weg nach Antwerpen wie Müll von den LKWs in die Wälder links und rechts der Strassen kippten.
Wir klagen an!
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29:24 | [Junge mit Brille und Kappe]:
…Auf der Lüge, dass wir befreit worden wären, von etwas Schrecklichem. In Wirklichkeit ist etwas Schreckliches über uns gekommen. 7 Millionen Deutsche haben während des Krieges ihr Leben gelassen. Aber jetzt hört und merkt euch das als Antwort für die, die euch Lügen erzählen. 12 Millionen Deutsche wurden nach dem 8. Mai ’45 umgebracht. Und dazu zählt auch diese Million, die hier an den Rheinlagern, nicht aus Wiesen sondern auf Äckern, auf Matsch und Schlamm verhungern gelassen wurden in wenigen Monaten.
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30:00 | [Sprecher]:
Was hat die Amerikaner dazu bewogen, zum einen, so viele unschuldige Menschen zu inhaftieren, und zum anderen, sie auf diese vorgestellte Weise gefangezuhalten? Warum wurden die Gefangenen nicht registriert? Was hinderte die Alliierten daran, auf Deutsche Versorgungsbestände oder aber auf die des Roten Kreuzes zurückzugreifen? Warum diese bewusste Unterlassungspolitik der US-Militärbehörden? Warum durfte man die Toten der Massengräber am Rhein nicht ehrenvoll beisetzen? Abschliessend ist festzustellen, dass der systematische Mord an Gefangenen bisher kaum Beachtung in der Öffentlichkeit genossen hat und vieles noch detaillierter Nachforschung bedarf. Dieser Filmbeitrag hofft, einen kleinen Teil zur Aufarbeitung Amerikanischer Kriegsverbrechen beitragen zu können. Das Ziel der Alliierten war und ist die gezielte Dezimierung des Deutschen Volkes.
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31:05 | Heinz Matthias [weisses Hemd]:
Ich ging, ich glaube es war der 15. Juli, die Berkusenstrasse (??) runter und bog in die Juklerstrasse ein, das war mein Wohnort. Und während ich da einbog, das konnte ich genau rekonstruieren, sass meine Mutter im Bad und weinte, weil sie nicht wusste, ob ihr Junge noch lebt. Und dann klingelte es. Und dann hat meine Mutter ihr Gesicht mit Wasser nass gemacht und abgetrocknet, in der Hoffnung, dass der Fremde nicht sieht sie hat eben geweint. Dann öffnete sie die Toilettentür, ging auf den Flur und öffnete die Haustüre und ich stand davor. Und dann weinte meine Mutter. Sie war nicht imstande meinen Namen zu sagen. Und erst beim dritten Mal sagte sie dann “mein Junge” und schloss mich in ihre Arme.
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32:15 | [Text]:
Die Wahrheit unterscheidet sich dadurch von der Halbwahrheit, daß sie die ganze Wirklichkeit umfasst.
Zur ganzen Wirklichkeit zählt auch, dass für die deutsche Bevölkerung die Zeit, die dem. 8. Mai 1945 folgte, eine Zeit der puren Unterdrückung war.
Das Schicksal der Deutschen war in den Besatzungszonen der Sowjets, der Franzosen und der Amerikaner besonders übel.
Nach dem 8. Mai 1945 starben 12 Millionen Deutsche an den Folgen der Verbrechen der Siegermächte.
Millionen deutsche Kriegsgefangene sind in den Lagern der Siegermächte ermordet worden und umgekommen.
Insgesamt 16 Millionen Deutsche flohen aus Ostdeutschland oder wurden systematisch vertrieben. Das Erschütterndste war der Akt der Vertreibung selbst. Er wurde mit unvorstellbarer Grausamkeit vollzogen.
Millionen deutsche Bürger wurden noch am alten Wohnort oder auf der Flucht von den Vertreibern umgebracht… oder sie sind auf der Flucht umgekommen.
Als weitere Todesursachen sind schriftlich überliefert:
Erschlagen, Erschießen, Erdrosseln, Ertränken, Erstechen, Tod nach mehrfacher Vergewaltigung, Entmannen, Kreuzigen, Totpeitschen, Tottrampeln…
… Verbrennen bei lebendigem Leib, Verstümmeln, zu Tode Rollen in Fässern und Vollpumpen mit Jauche.
In den Straf- und Schauprozessen ließen sowjetische Vernehmungsoffiziere nicht aussagewillige deutsche Kriegsgefangene in vielen Fällen foltern und erschießen.
Amerikanische Vernehmungsoffiziere ließen in vielen Fällen deutsche Kriegsgefangene tagelang hungern, mit Fäkalien übergießen, Säcke über die Köpfe stülpen, dann auf sie einschlagen, um sie für die Verhöre weich zu bekommen.
Im “Malmedy-Prozess” wurden den angeklagten deutschen Kriegsgefangenen Holzkeile unter ihre Fingernägel getrieben oder die Hoden zerquetscht, um sie zu “Geständnissen” zu zwingen.
Die US-Militärbehörde verbot, Verpflegung und Zelte aus Wehrmachts- und US-Depots in den Gefangenenlagern zu verteilen, untersagte die Bereitstellung von Trinkwasser und Nahrungsmitteln für die deutsche Bevölkerung…
… befahl den helfenden Zivilpersonen die Lebensmittel abzunehmen und zu vernichten.
Die Folgerung, daß die Deutschen den Krieg allein verursacht und damit die Vertreibung und das Elend ab 1945 selbst verschuldet hätten, ist historisch unhaltbar.
Die Ursachen des Zweiten Weltkrieges beginnen mit den europäischen Auseinandersetzungen, die zum Ersten Weltkrieg führten…
… und setzen sich mit der gnadenlosen Art for,t in der die damaligen Sieger dem deutschen Volk in Versailles erst die Alleinschuld am Kriege zuschoben und es dann ausgeplündert haben…
…und gehen bis zum Danzig-Streit und der Diskriminierung und Drangsalierung der deutschen Minderheit in Polen.
Das Leid von 16 millionen deutschen Bürgern während der Vertreibung, von elf Millionen deutschen Männern in der Kriegsgefangenschaft und der Tod von weit über sechs Millionen Bürgern unseres Landes …
…nach dem 8. Mai 1945 ist zu bedeutend, als daß es neben der Erleichterung derer, die sich praktisch befreit sahen, von damals an diesem Tag verschwiegen werden dürften!
35:37 | [Ende]
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THE GERMANS ARE THE VICTIMS! THE ALLIES ARE THE CRIMINALS! WE CAN THANK PARTIALLY THE JEWISH LIE AND DEFAMATION PROPAGANDA AGAINST GERMANS FOR THIS!
Kriegsgefangene
Amtliche Bundesdeutsche Dokumentation Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges, Band XV, Tabelle 1
German Prisoners of War
| England | 3,835,000 |
| USA | 3,097,000 |
| Sovietunion | 3,060,000 |
| Frankreich | 937,000 |
| Jugoslavien | 194,000 |
| Poland | 70,000 |
| Belgien | 64,000 |
| Tschechoslovakia | 25,000 |
| Niederlande | 7,000 |
| Luxenburg | 5,000 |
Summe 11,094,000*
***********************************************************
Mehr Verbrechen an unseren Deutschen Soldaten
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