ZGram - 7/3/2004 - "Rheinwiesen once again!"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

July 3, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

I just got the following Reuters write-up from a Midwest Zundelsite 
scout on the Rheinwiesen war crime, committed by the American Allies 
after Germany's defeat. 

This article strikes a particular chord because Ernst's father, a Red 
Cross medic on the Eastern front, was one of the POWs who had to 
spend a year and a half in one of those barb wire camps.  He returned 
at the end of 1947, a broken man who never again recovered from what 
he saw and experienced.  He was in Camp # 613 - which, in itself, 
tells you how many such post-"detention" places there were. 

My media scout added this:

"Of course Kirschbaum neglects to mention James Bacques book, "Other 
Losses", which places the overall number [of German soldiers and 
civilians who perished] at approximately 750,000 - not 20,000 as 
insinuated in this article. It seems like every article I read, 
regardless of whether it is coming from the left or right these days, 
it has a 'chosenite' name attached to it."

I am so sick of the Holocaust lies that get weaved into practically 
every article dealing with World War II  that I am beginning to quash 
them like insects I find in my path.  Unapologetically, I have 
excised several such lying references to the "six million" as 
"justification" for the post-World War II atrocities described below. 

Even so, this article does not do justice to what really happened, 
but at least this is a beginning.  After all, it IS a Reuters article 
- which means it has gone on the wire.

Here it is:

[START]

By Erik Kirschbaum

RHEINBERG, Germany (Reuters) - The nightmares come back to Heinz 
Gerth when pictures of American soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq 
appear on television, images that remind him of his brush with death 
as a U.S. prisoner in 1945.

Gerth had surrendered to American soldiers as an 18-year-old German 
conscript and was put behind barbed wire in an open field at the end 
of World War II.

Thousands starved to death, died from disease or exposure -- and 
Gerth nearly perished with them.

"We thought the Americans wanted us to starve to death," said Gerth, 
bursting into tears at memories of prisoners dying slow deaths, or of 
those who were buried alive when makeshift trenches dug for shelter 
collapsed in rain or of those shot by guards in suicidal runs at the 
barbed wire.

"It was a death camp," said 77-year-old Gerth, referring to one of 
the most notorious "Rhine Meadow camps" at Rheinberg, north of 
Cologne. (...)

Gerth said his weight fell to 110 lb from 176 lb in his month at 
Rheinberg. "We went days on end without food or water. Eating grass 
saved me. Those abused in Iraq will be haunted for life."

In Iraq, U.S. military police have been accused of hooding, stripping 
naked and sexually humiliating prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near 
Baghdad, a scandal that has caused outrage in the Arab and Muslim 
world and undermined U.S. efforts in Iraq.

Although the origins and scale of maltreatment in Iraq and post-war 
Germany are vastly different, the images from Iraq have revived 
memories of the conditions at 16 "Rhine Meadow camps" where thousands 
of Germans were held in open fields without shelter and a minimum of 
food in the months after the war ended.

"Rheinberg was a shocking place," said Herbert Schnoor, who spent 
several months there as a 17-year-old conscript.

"It was a brutalisation of human beings," Schnoor, retired interior 
minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, told Reuters. "But the 
whole war was filled with atrocities. In hindsight, we were lucky to 
avoid the Soviets. That would have been worse."

Like the controversial detention without charge of 650 foreigners 
described as "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, the 
United States classified the Germans "disarmed enemy forces" rather 
than "prisoners of war." That meant they were not protected by the 
Geneva Convention.

Under Geneva Convention rules, German POWs should have received the 
same rations as their Allied captors. As "disarmed enemy forces," 
they got less.

"We weren't POWs and had no rights," said Dietrich Kienscherf, 77, 
who spent seven weeks in the Rheinberg camp.

"We had no shelter and hardly any food," added Kienscherf, who saw 
Americans maltreating German prisoners caught trying to steal food. 
(...)

With daily rations of a slice of bread and a half-liter of soup or an 
uncooked potato, some prisoners took to eating grass, tree bark, 
turnip roots or even snails, according to a 1995 report by the town 
of Rheinberg filled with survivors accounts.

It quoted survivors accusing American soldiers of taking their 
watches and rings and beating those who complained. Several said 
those caught stealing food were forced to eat soap.

As the German army's western front collapsed in early 1945, some five 
million Wehrmacht soldiers were captured or surrendered to advancing 
U.S. forces. Even the wounded, including amputees, were taken from 
hospitals and put in camps.

Historians estimate that between 5,000 and 20,000 German prisoners 
died of starvation, disease and exposure.

"The Rhine Meadow camps are a dark chapter in American military 
history," said Klaus-Dietmar Henke, a history professor at Dresden 
University. "There were certainly incidents of murder, executions, 
and thousands did starve to death. (...)

Henke and U.S. historians have noted there was a worldwide shortage 
of food in 1945 and they estimated the death rate of German POWs in 
American hands was one to five percent, slightly higher than a one 
percent death rate of U.S. POWs in Germany and far below that for 
Germans in Soviet hands: 35 to 50 percent.

"It was more that the Allies were overwhelmed by so many prisoners 
and were not prepared for them," said Henke.

A West German government commission in 1971 estimated that up to 
9,000 died in the six largest Rhine Meadow camps. Testimony from some 
of the survivors included in the government's report said they had 
estimated as many as 32,000 died.

In Rheinberg, a village just west of the Rhine river, there are 
hardly any reminders of the horrors. Tidy houses and farmland occupy 
the land where the camp with its 6-mile long barbed wire perimeter 
once stood.

There are no remnants of the holes which the prisoners dug in the 
ground for primitive shelter but local officials say the remains of 
prisoners who drowned or were buried alive in the pits are still 
sometimes found during construction work.

"I thought I would never make it out of there alive," said Hubert 
Wallrauen, whose weight halved to 77 lb. "I was fortunate I found a 
big turnip root that saved my life."

[END]

=====

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

<http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=5581386&pageNumber=0>http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=5581386&pageNumber=0>

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