My own holidays are just about over, and it is time to get back to business. It has been a wonderful Christmas - peaceful and congenial. I am glad that the last Christmas before "Y2K" turned out the way it did.
Now I return to my information outreach campaign.
Somebody sent me a well-written, rather lengthy article titled "Ethnic Cleansing and the Germans" - authored by Gregory Pavlik, editor of Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays by John T. Flynn.
Pavlik makes the point, well worth repeating over and over until it sinks in, that so-called "humanitarianism" is a cynical propaganda device. In the essay below he illustrates that the worst examples of ethnic cleansing in history are perhaps the least well known.
One of them, he writes, occurred with US approval and collaboration:
At the close of the Second World War, the Allied powers expelled fifteen million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. More than two million died as a result. The remainder were crowded together in a decimated Germany, which the Allied powers proceeded to deindustrialize, as put forward in the notorious Morgenthau plan.
As Harry Elmer Barnes noted, the planners "envisaged the starvation of between twenty and thirty million Germans in the process of turning Germany into a purely agricultural and pastoral nation. In revised form as JCS 1067 and JCS 1779 [the Morgenthau plan] was actually applied for several years in occupied Germany." German suffering was overshadowed by the attention given to the suffering of Jews at the hands of the Nazi establishment, though Allied "crimes against humanity" were at least as extensive.
The most thorough descriptions of the plight of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe are in the books of Alfred de Zayas, who notes: "most Americans and Britons do not even know that there was an expulsion at all, much less that Western authorization of the principle of compulsory population transfers made the American and British governments accomplices in one of the most inhuman enterprises in the history of Western civilization." Ethnic Germans were driven from their homes in Pomerania, Silesia, Sudetenland, and East Prussia at the end of the war-historically German areas turned over to the Polish and Czechoslovakian governments. In the case of Poland, the establishment of the Oder-Neisse line as the Polish border was rationalized as compensation for Soviet gains in the east. The expulsion of the German-speaking people, though unnecessary, was predetermined.
As Winston Churchill expounded in the House of Commons in 1944, "Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble.... A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions then they ever were before." Roosevelt and Churchill had entertained the idea as early 1943. It was officially agreed to by Truman, Churchill, and Stalin at Potsdam (Article XIII of the Potsdam protocol).
The first wave of expulsions came as the Soviet army moved into German territory for the first time. This was less an organized expulsion than the result of the fact that the Soviet soldiers simply went berserk: killing, raping, and pillaging indiscriminately. The story of Nemmersdorf, one of the first villages to experience Russian occupation, served as an illustration of what the ethnic Germans could expect.
Few persons were left alive after the forty-eight hours it took for the German Wehrmacht to recapture the village. The old men, women, and children had been tortured, shot, and nailed to barn doors. Most, if not all, the women were raped, an act that was to become a hallmark of the Russian occupation. One 84-year-old woman was found with her head sheared in two by an axe. Women were stapled to barns in cruciform position. The children were killed as well; babies were found bludgeoned to death, their heads caved in.
Here I want to point out that a similarly brutal massacre in Palestine produced similar results. The massacre at Deir Yassin was perpetrated by Israelis against Palestinians - and it took the Israelis 50 years before they admitted the murder and expulsion in their revised school books for 1999.
But to continue:
The story of Nemmersdorf spread rapidly, triggering a massive wave of refugee flight, even in the cold of the winter. Those fleeing before the Soviet army were targeted by Soviet aircraft and troops. German ships evacuating civilians across the Baltic sea were sunk by Soviet submarines. Of those that could not escape by land or sea, more that 200,000 were deported to the Soviet Union for forced labor "under conditions that were considerably more barbarous than the conditions under which Hitler-Germany had recruited forced labourers from the occupied countries during the war."
Many who could not escape committed suicide rather than endure the Allied liberation; women in particular killed themselves rather than endure the serial rapes that were routine facts of life under Polish and Soviet rule. Others who survived the exodus to Germany were killed in the carpet bombing by American and British bombers. Dresden, for example, was overcrowded with 600,000 refugees when the city was attacked on February 13-14, 1945, for terror purposes, in accord with Churchill's policies.
Those ethnic Germans unable to flee came under the control of Poland and Czechoslovakia. In Poland, the Soviet occupation authorized the commencement of expulsions long before the German capitulation. The actions were brutal, and accounted for the majority of civilian deaths. Washington was aware of these conditions: Eisenhower's reports contained details of "reasonable estimates [that] predict between 2 1/2 and 3 million victims of malnutrition and disease between the Oder and Elbe.... Breslau death rate increased ten fold, and death rate reported to be 75% of all births. Typhoid, typhus, dysentery, and diphtheria are spreading...."
In 1945 Secretary of State Byrnes contacted the US Ambassador in Poland Arthur Lane under pressure from Robert Murphy, US Political Adviser for Germany, instructing him to approach the Polish provisional government on this matter. Lane refused, stating that the Germans were exaggerating "in keeping with their characteristic whining after losing (the) war."
The question begs: When will the Western nations admit their guilt in planning this crime against humanity? When will the Western Allies change their school books to reflect their complicity?
(To be continued tomorrow)
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Thought for the Day:
"Nothing is settled permanently unless it is settled equitably."
(Abraham Lincoln)