The Canadian author and historian James Bacque claimed in Crimes and Mercies that Allied policies (particularly Soviet policies) led to the premature deaths of 5.7 million German civilians, 2.5 million ethnic German refugees from Eastern Europe and 1.1 million German POWs due to Soviet and Allied starvation and expulsion policies in the five years following World War II. Crimes and Mercies met with minor hostility from historians, who acknowledge the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German soldiers and civilians held in Soviet captivity, and possibly up to two million civilians who died in the mass expulsions of Germans from East Prussia, eastern Brandenburg, Pomerania, western Poland, Silesia, the Sudetenland and Romania. The leading Jewish Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg's words of merciless cruelty spread throughout Russia and Eastern Europe. In Ehrenburg's anti-German hate propaganda, he exhorted Soviet troops to kill all Germans they encountered without pity. The following is a verbatim quote from his famous leaflet distributed to the Soviet troops upon entering Germany in 1945:
The Germans must be killed. If you are a righteous a conscientious man - kill a German! Kill! Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn but is evil! Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! Kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army. Top image: the so-called Big Three, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. The Potsdam Protocol from August 1945 throw “a mantle of legality” over the expulsions of 12 million ethnic Germans carried out immediately following the war. The agreement reached at the Yalta Conference was a particularly heinous crime in that it led to millions of deaths during the post war reparations in kind. Both Churchill and Roosevelt knew that democracy was doomed in any turf conquered by the Soviet Red Army. Stalin even got assurances from Churchill and Roosevelt that millions of Soviet citizens who had been captured by the Germans or anti-communist who had abandoned the Soviet Union would be forcibly returned. After the war ended, the disgraceful Operation Keelhaul sent many of them to certain death or long-term imprisonment. It was covered up or ignored by Western media until the 1970s. Second image: troops of the U.S. 69th Infantry Division and Soviet 58th Guards Rifle Division shake hands on a damaged bridge over the Elbe River at Torgau on April 26 1945. This contact between the Soviets, advancing from the East, and the Americans, advancing from the West, meant that the two powers had effectively cut a crumbling Nazi Germany in two. Staged photo by INS war correspondent Allan Jackson taken the day following the actual Link-Up. Third image: Soviet and U.S. link-up near Torgau in April 1945. Credit: Jakob Lagerweij. Fourth image: German civilians cross partially destroyed railway bridge over Elbe at
Tangermünde to escape advancing Soviet forces on May 1 1945. Bottom image: one of a series of photos showing the only survivors of an original 150 ethnic Germans who walked from Litzmannstadt or Łódź in Poland to Berlin on December 14 1945. Most of the considerable German community in Łódź had fled the city back in January 1945. Contact sheets reveal that the child, second from the right, died during the photo session. Credit: Sanna Dullaway. Middle and bottom photos by British press photographer Fred Ramage. All photos fair use.
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ReplyDeleteMoscow, Washington and Brussels’ satellite states attempts to falsify or rewrite the reasons and outcomes of the Second World War in Europe will continue. The more time has passed, the easier it is to rewrite their own history and to dupe regular people, who do not know history and what took place in reality.
ReplyDeleteBritain declared war NOT Germany. And Hitler had offered numerous peace solutions prior to that declaration by Britain. A not widely known fact. Hitler even offered numerous generous peace terms for a plebescite on Danzig and a corridor to East Prussia after defeating first Poland, then France then the BEF in the course of that war which he had not wanted. That most people do not know about those peace terms is exactly why the history we are all indoctrinated with is a lie-by-omission. Britain rejected those peace terms. And it was Churchill who started the deliberate mass-murdering of German civilians after his defeat culminating at Dunkirk, with his carpet bombing of German cities. Plus we chose to ally with Stalin the greatest peace-time mass-murder in known history who had just commited the little-known little-publicised genocidal crime of Holodomor. And ally with America the most genocidal, racist country in the world having just completed three hundred years of genocide for white supremacist 'lebensraum'. Face it, we have all been raised from childhood on deceitful victor-propaganda. The evil actions, war-crimes and white-man supremacist attitude of Churchill are monstrous. Yet we celebrate the man and are proud of him. The problem is that we have ALL been indoctrinated from early childhood with a deceptive history of that conflict.
DeleteThe most terrifying thing is that the Allies got a free pass committing war crimes. The truth is that their armies and air forces caused the deaths of more civilians than the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS combined. They violated the laws of war by targeting civilians and civilian objects in a scale that goes beyond the ability of national authorities to cope with them. It really doesn't matter how you count, and it didn't stop when the war ended. Yet even those with an above-average knowledge of history will scarcely recall the war crimes perpetrated by the Allies, including the Soviets, during the war. The western powers, and certain the Soviets, have got away their crimes against humanity by pointing finger at the horrific crimes committed by the Nazi regime and their allies. And just to clarify, I am not a neo-Nazi, fascist, white supremacist or an anti-Semite.
DeleteDedicated WW2 historians deserve far more praise. They are telling the stories that need to be told. Thank you.
DeleteTanto soviéticos como aliados eran tan criminales como los Nazis.
DeleteI have read both of James Bacque’s books on the subject. By revealing these atrocities Mr. Bacque was smeared and pilloried for much of the rest of his life.
DeleteThere are ppl who actually make an effort to be objective and tell the truth about WWII and they aren't getting as much love cus some ppl will get upset with hard truths. It kinda sucks, but it is what it is.
DeleteMy Mother crossed this bridge in the last days of the war. She was eleven years old and was together with her mother and younger sister and brother. They fled out of Potsdam because of the approaching Russian Army. As she told me they walked together with the soldiers of the 12. Army towards the West. At the end they stranded at the bridge. The border between English/American on the one side and Russian on the other side. After crossing the bridge they were carried by the American Army to a small village in the (British) area. Unfortunately this area was given after the war to the Russians. They lived nearly 4 years in this small village in the Russian sector. After 4 years my Grandpa came out of a Russian POW camp and they fled again. Now in the American sector near Kassel.
ReplyDeleteAt the Tehran Conference in 1943, Stalin suggested to Roosevelt and Churchill that after the end of the war 50,000 German officers should be summarily executed. Churchill protested vehemently. Roosevelt chipped in with the suggestion that perhaps 50,000 executions was a bit excessive.
ReplyDeleteIt is to our everlasting shame that the UK ever fought on the same side as the Red Army. They were the most evil bunch of thugs, thieves and rapists of the 20th. century, led by Stalin, a homicidal maniac.
ReplyDeleteThat Britain and The United States, for that fact, seemed not to care or be oblivious to Stalin’s ruthless and murderous nature seems unforgivable. Especially when those, such as the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones firsthand account, tried to warn the world of the dictator’s atrocities to his own people several years before the outbreak of World War II. Jones was kidnapped and murdered in 1935, most likely by the Soviet NKVD.
DeleteThe Allies helped the USSR enslave half of Europe.
DeleteJust as millions of ethnic German Men, Women, Children & Infants vanished from history, so did any questions about their numbers, fate & the morality of the “Good War”.
ReplyDeleteStalin expected to have to barter for control of portions of Europe, and as an experienced barterer asked for way more of Europe than he expected to get at the end of WWII, and to his surprise, and the shame of the West, US and UK agreed to his initial bid without challenge!
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