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| "Les Assassins Reviennent Toujours sur les Lieux de Leur Crime" |
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| Widespread looting of SS memorabilia |
The theft and looting of Normandy households and farmsteads by liberating soldiers began on June 6 1944 and never stopped during the entire summer. One woman - from the town of Colombieres - is quoted saying:
They are looting everything and going into houses everywhere on the pretext of looking for Germans. Even more feared, of course, was the crime of rape - and here too the true picture has arguably been expunged from popular memory. The evidence shows that sexual violence against women by Allied servicemen in liberated Normandy was common. Reference: William Hitchcock's The Bitter Road to Freedom. According to the American Professor and historian Robert Lilly, there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of World War II. According to an article in Der Spiegel by Klaus Wiegrefe, many personal memoirs of Allied soldiers have been willfully ignored by historians until now because they were at odds with the "Greatest Generation" mythology surrounding World War II, but this has recently started to change with books such as "The Day of Battle" by American journalist and author Rick Atkinson (winner of the Pulitzer Prize) where he describes Allied war crimes in Italy, and "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy" by British military historian Antony Beevor. References: Spiegel Online 05/04/2010. Credit: Wikipedia. Top image: a French pro-German poster of 1944 in the Norman city of Cherbourg, featuring the prayerful figure of saint Jeanne d'Arc superimposed on images of the ancient city of Rouen burning under Allied bombardment:
Criminals always return to the scene of the crime. See Original Poster. Bottom screenshot: two American G.I.'s pose in liberated SS Panzer wrappers in France 1944. The ultimate souvenirs was no doubt various insignia and decorations of the feared Waffen-SS. Photos in the Public domain.
This is a US Navy photo, taken soon after the liberation of Cherbourg, July 1944, showing German propaganda posters stuck up on a wall. The central one says something like "Assassins always return to the scene of their crimes". This refers to Allied bombing raids on France - it is an attempt to stir up bad feeling against the Allies due to French civilian casualties in these raids.
ReplyDeleteThe posters on either side are obviously trying to turn French opinion in favour of the Nazi regime. The one to the right is a recruiting posters to encourage French people to join the Waffen SS. It says "If you want France to live, you will fight in the Waffen-SS against Communism." It's painted from a photo taken by SS Kriegsberichter Duerr.
The one on the left is presumably meant to show someone holding back the tides of the Soviets.
The soldier in the commanders hatch on the famous French recruiting poster is the highly decorated SS-Ustuf. Joachim-Günther Schöntaube from SS-Div. Das Reich.
ReplyDeleteI came across this blog entry while reading Charles Whiting's Hemingway Goes To War (recommended but with reservations - he makes a few silly mistakes and just one can shake your faith in an author).
ReplyDeleteIn it he describes the looting and rape of Frenchwoman by GIs in Cherbourg in the week after D Day, of which I'd never been aware. So I googled the claim and came across a New York Times review of Mary Louise Roberts 2013 book The Dark Side Of Liberation (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/books/rape-by-american-soldiers-in-world-war-ii-france.html). Sadly what Whiting wrote was not sensationalist hyperbole at all.
It occurs to me that such behaviour - OK, it was almost 80 years ago, but GI behaviour in Vietnam was often also not admirable - places the US and the West on rather thinner ice in regards Putin's vicious invasion of Ukraine. It's a dilemma.
NB Roberts, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, could not find a US publisher, apparently. I'm not surprised. The US and the West prefers to subscribe to the 'gallant WWII GIs' myth. That might be the reason why Russians find it difficult to accept reports of what their soldiers have been up to.