More and more letters and manuscripts like this one below are coming my way. Let no one say that there is no awakening among the younger generation. Just recently, Ernst Zundel said to me: "Biology lasts longer than ideology." The writer below is in his early thirties, and his mother experienced things very closely the way I experienced them at her age:
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I had the pleasure of hearing you speak to our local German group this past Feb. for the "Dresden Day of Remembrance." We spoke very briefly during your book signing.
I've finished your "Lebensraum" series, and appreciate them very much. Just to let you know, I am ____ years old, and my mother, who was 8 years old at the end of the war, was one of the millions of Germans expelled from the east.
She was born in Koenigsberg, East Prussia, and lived for several years in Danzig after the war as a prisoner of the Soviets and Poles. "Lebensraum" touched me especially as I experienced so many parallels between your story and accounts my mother has shared. They are quite painful, and she doesn't often share much - but what I have and continue to learn from her appalls me.
I'm sure I don't have to tell you about constant rapes and brutalization (my mother as an 8 year old saw women literally raped to death - not to mention many executions in Danzig).
What has really prompted this letter are some continuing experiences I've had which seem actually to be escalating - and that is more and more anti-German feeling, remarks from even people I know, and media propaganda. Just the other day my church (I'm an Episcopalian by marriage) held a reconciliation service, where the main talk was from a former US soldier talking about how he'd to come to grips to forgive the German people when he returned to Germany 5 years ago on a local business/cultural exchange program.
Everyone was heaping all kinds of accolades for his service in taking the city of Saarbrucken, and expelling NAZI officials from their homes and sending German soldiers to prison camps. I've been conditioned not to how anger, but it was very difficult to take it in knowing that at the same time my mother and grandmother were being brutalized by Soviet soldiers, and my grandfather was one of these being sent to a prison camp in Russia. Nothing bad ever happened to Germans in the war, nobody suffered but the Jews, and if terrible things were experienced by the Germans, then they deserved it --- this is the mantra --- and I can't take it any more.
The following is a summary account of events in East Prussia at the end of the war (from Eastern Documentation Section of the German Federal Archives at Koblenz):
"In East Prussian villages within the triangle Gumbinnen-Goldap-Ebenrode the same scenes were witnessed, old men and boys being castrated and their eyes gouged out before being killed or burned alive. In nearby Metgethen, a suburb of Königsberg, recaptured by the German 5th Panzer Division, around 60 women were found in a demented state in a large villa. They had been raped on average 60 to 70 times a day. In nearly every home, the bodies of women and children were found raped and murdered. The bodies of two young women were found, their legs had been tied, one limb each between two trucks, and then torn apart when the trucks were driven away in opposite directions. At Metgethen railway station, a refugee train from Konigsberg, consisting of seven passenger coaches, was found and in each compartment seven to nine bestially mutilated bodies were discovered. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an ex captain in the Soviet Army, recalls, "All of us knew very well that if girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction."
(Details of these, and other atrocities, are contained in the Eastern Documentation Section of the German Federal Archives at Koblenz)."
This type of information is NEVER discussed - and to use a question I know you've asked also "Where's the National Museum of East Prussian Annihilation documenting Allied (esp. Soviet) atrocities? The recent film "Enemy at the Gates" did a good job showing heroic Soviet soldiers, and of course had to include the obligatory scene of a German officer hanging a 10 year old child (disgusting).
In Hollywood, there are ZERO, NULL, NICHTS decent Germans except Oscar Schindler. I remember my grandmother briefly and quietly crying to my mom before she died in 1980 saying that "We're Germans, and everyone still hates us because we're evil."
She was not evil ... and I want the world to know. I've been trying to get more involved with my local chapter, which has an interest in bringing forth historical truths about this - but it's very slow going.
Someday I hope to write my family's story in a similar vein to your effort, and wanted you to know you've inspired me to hang on.
Thank you and kind regards ...
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Thought for the Day:
"Former IDF Intelligence Branch director Maj. Gen. (Res.) Shlomo Gazit today recommends establishing a 'non-democratic emergency regime' in Israel that would act to limit the birth rate and give back the territories due to the 'demographic danger' they pose.
"At the Jewish Agency Zionist Council conference, Gazit said that 'Israel is a terminal country that needs a dictatorship for a couple of years.'"
Yedioth Ahronoth, March 26, 2001 by Amir Rappaport --
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