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Tuesday, October 19. 2010One horror after another: After the ReichI am reading - or trying to read - McDonogh's 2007 After The Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift. It's about the horrors inflicted on ethnic Germans by the Allies in the years following WW2. Prussia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany. This is indeed a tale which nobody wants to hear, and it is gut-wrenching to read. Probably 3 million ethnic Germans were killed after the war ended, including around one million surrendered soldiers. From Nigel Jones' excellent review:
Read the whole brief review to get an idea. Seems to me that the Czechs were the most brutal and bloody to the Germans in the German-majority Sudetenland, but the Red Army was close behind. In this time period, the Czechs reduced their prosperous German population from 3 million to the handful today - ethnic cleansing by murder, torture, forced death marches, exile, and in concentration camps (the camps were widely used to incarcerate, starve, torture and kill Germans in the Red Army regions). Comments
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It does not excuse those who committed crimes to note that the Germans reaped what they had sown. At that, they paid for their crimes at a discount, as did the Japanese. There were also gruesome vigilante actions against collaborators in most of the occupied countries.
A good post BD. Thanks.
I am wondering how he arrived at his numbers? Does he cite sources for his estimates or does he pull the number out of his posterior? My HS history book had numbers for Germans kicked out of various counties after WWII. I only remember the biggest number - 6 million expelled from Prussia. So Russia could resettle the Poles they were kicking off their land so they could steal the eastern half of Poland.
... you are just trying to distract attention from Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians!
Talk about ethnic cleansing! The Czechs had no Jews to send to concentration camps, so they had to settle for Germans instead! What a world, what a world.
Germans in East Germany have been rather sub-par since the Soviet rape babies grew up. It is an age-old tactic of conquerors: rape the women and change the makeup of the conquered land. Perhaps the Sudetenland Germans later regretted their support of Hitler prior to his takeover of Czechoslovakia. From what I have read, "fifth column" and "Quislings" described rather well the conduct of many of the Sudetenland Germans up to the annexation of Czechoslovakia to Germany. [Slovakia a rump state?... Herta Daubler Gmelin's papa- she of "American justice system is lousy" and Dubya and "Adolf Nazi- fame- helped send Slovakian Jews to the camps.]
Czechoslovakia learned that "diversity" wasn't as good as some thought it was. Compared to Poland, Czechoslovakia emerged relatively unscathed from WW2 with.a much lower percentage of civilian population killed. Not many killed, but with blood lust, were the Czechs and Slovaks.[of course the Slovaks had little hand in what happened to the Sudetenlanders.] Nor did many Germans remain in Pomerania nor in Silesia after Poland took them over. They reaped the whirlwind. 20 million Chinese, 20 million Russians[ many by Joe Stalin], 6 million Jews, etc. A lot of the German civilians' deaths occurred during their migration to Germany, which is similar to what occurred to Hindus and Muslims in the population movement before and after the independence of Pakistan and India. I will not lose much sleep over this. Compassion fatigue, even if they spoke one of my ancestral tongues. I don't know. This is not reasoning but stream of unconsciousness. Considering all the savagery that WW2 unleashed, perhaps we should ask ourselves why the savagery stopped short of the annihilation of Germany and Japan, instead of why the savagery continued after the war for a while before petering out. Damned if I know. American and British armies, heavily armed and sitting on German soil drew a line maybe?
I believe the Russians also carried out a massive removal of Poles from eastern Poland, as part of the giant ethnic cleansing scheme devised by Stalin and rubberstamped by Churchill.
The Baltic countries which had all been invaded by Stalin in 1940 were flooded with ethnic Russians soon after the war, a situation which remains to this day. More likely the Poles fled west to get away from control of the Russkies.
No, not more likely. Eastern Poland was annexed by the Soviet Union. The Poles there were ejected and resettled in Prussia - where the Germans who had lived there for at least a thousand years were booted out.
standard Soviet practice, not unique to Poland.
As part of the "Russification" of the central Asian republics, millions of the native people living there were loaded into cattle cars and trained off to Siberia, where they were dumped along the tracks of the trans Siberian railroad and told to build towns and cities with their bare hands (they were given no more than some hand tools and the clothes on their backs, most starved or died from exposure). The towns and cities thus emptied were resettled with Russians and Ukrainians (and where Ukrainians were used, Russians took over their towns in the Ukraine). This mass movement of population groups in order to "Russify" and "homogenise" the population was central to Stalinist thinking. I'm not at all surprised it was also carried out in Poland, somewhat surprised it wasn't done in Germany (remove most of the population there to Siberia and replace them with Wolga Germans for example). There are Allies and there are allies. While those you're calling "Allies" were killing Germans after the war, and generally taking advantage of the situation, the Americans were helping Japan and West Germany rebuild.
The Germans treated the inhabitants of their occupied territories very badly, and so did the Japanese. They had it coming, and the current Germans would be the first to admit it. I don't have much patience for revisionist hand-wringing. You shall reap what you sow. Spoken as a son of a German immigrant from Bavaria, who fought for America in World War I. If ordinary citizens are to be held collectively guilty for the sins of their government then I suppose any atrocity is easy to justify by way of the "had it coming" rationale. Certainly that was the main rationale underpinning the 9/11 attacks.
Yes I am sure you are the child of an immigrant. I am also sure that you can sanction the murder of the helpless because they were Germans. I mean all Germans were responsible for Hitler weren't they? Just as you are responsible for the actions of the politicians here in the US.
I guess some terrorist somewhere will say you had it coming because you are an "American." To see the lies of the West, Roosevelt said the war wasn't for land. Oh really? And if the West was so holy why didn't France and England declare war on Russia which invaded Poland with the Germans? You mean 12 year-old ethnic German girls in the Sudetenland "had it coming" to be raped by 42 drunk Red Army soldiers? And then maybe beaten to death?
I don't think so. This was Attila the Hun stuff. No,they didn't have it coming but after the bestial nature of the war started by their menfolk then what other outcome could be expected. As a maybe bonus the germans havr forsaken war for the foreseeable future.
If you were to ask any of those who did these things to the Germans to justify their conduct, you would hear the same collectivism that started the whole war in the first place: "[They[/i] did such-and-such to us!"
Well, not really. The women who were raped by Russian soldiers in East Germany had nothing to do with what the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, and SS did to any Russian; but "punishing" the noncombatants of an enemy tribe for the conduct of that tribe's warriors has been part of inter-tribal affairs since the dawn of time. Then again, I am sure that some of these atrocities were committed from simple opportunism. The victims were unpopular and defenseless, and so any number of depredations could be committed with impunity. ...such good heartfelt comments --almost all of them bewildered, as anyone of goodwill must always be in the presence of this war.
Thanks Bird Dog, the "prophets" here will certainly never consider reap what they're sowing.
To such "prophets" St. Benedict may say, "Drink yall's own poison." see #9.2...
Hey, it's the famous troll!!! http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/candance-moore/2010/01/23/obama-loving-spammer-ellie-light-dupes-42-newspapers |
Tracked: Nov 04, 09:44