European Atrocities the European Nations Don’t Confront

Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, February 1945

East Meets West - The American-Soviet Link-Up at the Elbe, April 1945

American and Soviet soldiers at the Elbe near Torgau, April 1945

Civilians fleeing the Soviets make their way across the Elbe, May 1945

Expelled ethnic German Volksdeutsche in Berlin, December 1945

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. Middle and bottom photos by British press photog. Fred Ramage. Credit: Sanna Dullaway. All photos fair use.

Territorial Changes of Germany and Expulsion of Ethnic Germans

Adolf Hitler in Warszawa during the expansion of the German Reich

The unconditional surrender of the Greater German Reich

Zones of occupation – Germany's new borders

Sprung in die Freiheit –The Leap into Freedom

West German Bundesgrenzschutz/Federal Border Guard

The German territory east of the Oder-Neisse line (Pomerania, Neumark, Silesia and East Prussia) was attached to Poland and the Soviet Union. The northern portion of East Prussia with the ancient capital of Königsberg became the newly-formed Kaliningrad Oblast, a part of the Russian SFSR, with a small portion, Memelland, joined to the Lithuanian SSR. All territory annexed by the German Reich during World War II was returned or annexed by the Soviet Union. Following Germany's defeat an estimated 1.6 million ethnic Germans were deported from the Sudetenland and the rest of Czechoslovakia to the American zone. An estimated 800,000 were deported to the Soviet zone. According to researcher Stefan Banasiak, 3,109,900 Germans were expelled to the Soviet and British occupation zones in Germany from Poland and former eastern territories of Germany ceded by Poland. An unknown number left without formal registration or was expelled to USSR by Soviet military authorities. It is estimated by Professor Dr. Arfon Rees and Dr. Steffen Prauser that over 12 million Germans fled or were expelled from east-central Europe during the last year of the war and in its aftermath. People from all over Eastern Europe quickly moved in to replace the former German population in a process parallel to the expulsions. In Yugoslavia, the remaining Germans were not expelled; according to historian Anna Bramwell ethnic German villages were turned into internment camps where over 50,000 perished. German expellee organizations who did not accept the post-war territorial and population changes were dismissed as far-right revanchists. Top image: Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler salutes the 8th Army of the Wehrmacht in Warszawa on October 5 1939 during the German-Soviet joint invasion of Poland. Germany expanded significantly between 1938 and 1939 as a result of the German Reich's annexations and conquests. The incorporated area of western Poland, which was deemed to be a part of the Reich, was to be ruthlessly Germanized. Photo by Kriegsberichter Lt. Eric Borchert. Credit: Mikołaj Kaczmarek. Entscheidende Stunden. FU. Second image: Re-enacting of the signing of the unconditional surrender by the representatives of the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht at the Pionier-Schule in Berlin-Karlshorst on May 8 1945. A day earlier, on May 7 1945, Wehrmacht Chief of Staff Generaloberst Alfred Jodl had signed the German surrender with the Allies in Reims in France, but it was not recognized by the Soviets. From left: Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen Stumpff, Chief of the Wehrmacht High Command Feldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, and Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine Generaladmiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg. Photo by Soviet photog. Georgy Petrusov. Credit: Facundo Filipe. FU. Third image: the Allied zones of occupation in post-war Germany. The provincial boundaries are those of Weimar Germany. Actual poster shown in Allied-occupied Germany after the war. PD. Fourth image: this photo taken by the West German photog. Peter Leibing became known as The Leap into Freedom and became an iconic image of the Cold War. East German border guard Hans Conrad Schumann was sent to the corner of Ruppiner Straße and Bernauer Straße to guard the Berlin Wall on its third day of construction. At 16.00 hrs on August 15 1961, Schumann leapt over the barbed wire that marked the border between the communist East and the free West. Credit: Paul Kerestes. FU. Bottom image: new Bundesgrenzschutz troops take their oath at Graf-Bernadotte-Platz in Kassel on May 15 1963. The BGS was established on March 16 1951 after the Cold War had begun to control and guard Germany's border and was organized along paramilitary lines. Occupation authorities judged the borders could be better policed by the Germans themselves. The first BGS inspector was the former Wehrmacht general and KC holder Anton Grasser. In the 1950s, Grasser was involved in organizing an illegal underground army set up by Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS veterans in the event of a Soviet invasion of West Germany. Source: historian Klaus Wiegrefe. Credit: Julius Backman. FU.

Loot and Plunder: The Ignored Cultural Rape of Germany

Soviet Red Army with the Victory Banner in Brandenburg

U.S. Army troops in the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig

U.S. Army troops in the Schlosskirche of Ellingen

Messerschmitt Me 262 - The World's First Operational Jet Fighter

Throughout Germany, priceless art, religious and secular treasures, were violently torn from church-altars, wretched from museum walls or even stolen from private collections and homes by Soviet and Allied soldiers. Joseph Stalin's minions emptied nearly all museums, collections, archives, and sheltering depots in his zone of occupation and for decades his successors hid many of these objects from the world, treasures representing the entire German history. In 1945, as the Red Army advanced into Germany, special “trophy brigades” went out to collect the slated works in German museums and ship them back to Moscow. From 1945 to 1949, more than two and a half million works of art were carried off from Germany, mostly to the metropolises of the Soviet Union where many of them are in secret storage even today. From the time they conquered Potsdam in April 1945, where many collections had ended up, until 1946, everything that could be moved was taken to Moscow and documents dating from centuries past were destroyed or scattered. Treasures so meticulously organized through the ages in Germany, were scattered so widely they will never all be found and identified even if they survived the abysmal storage conditions. 450,000 freight-train wagon loads were received in Moscow in 1945 alone. This doesn't even touch upon the sculpture, porcelain, musical instruments, clocks, silver, furniture, prints and drawings and millions of rare books plundered by Soviet and allied soldiers alike. The real estate and whole households of the millions of expelled ethnic Germans provided loot for years to come in those areas. The Russians are unrepentant and arrogant about their thievery and seem to go down this brazen path with the tacit approval of civilized nations. The Pushkin Museum shamelessly insists, incorrectly and in violation of international law, that all looted art and cultural valuables obtained from Germany and its allies during the war are federal property of the Russian Federation. German cultural institutions issued a catalogue in 2008 detailing thousands of objects of art that disappeared from Berlin at the end of the war in the hope that foreign governments will return the stolen art to them. Over 180,000 items disappeared from itemized and inventoried German collections alone along with thousands of other cultural treasures which have never been recovered. Another lucrative plunder was scientific. At the end of World War II, both Allied and Soviet scientific intelligence experts accompanied the invading forces into Germany to plunder as much equipment and expertise as possible from the rubble, and they were delighted and shocked at the advanced German technical achievements they found. Sadly, the biggest theft of all, the most massive art heist of all times, the looting and plundering of German treasures has drawn scant, if any, media attention. Credit: Researcher and writer Linda Schaitberger. Top image: according to TASS, commanding Soviet officers who stormed the Reichstag in Berlin in May 1945. Credit: Olga Shirnina. Priv.coll. FU. Second image: US GI stands in the Leipzig Monument to the Völkerschlacht, or Battle of the Nations in April 1945. US officers stole original ancient and renaissance writings from the Leipzig University Library before turning the city over to the communists in July 1945. The guardians of the fallen warriors still standing silent sentinel over the scene of the last German stand in Leipzig. Credit: Paul Kerestes. Third image: US GI stands amid crates and stacks of treasures stored in a castle church after the farming hamlet Ellingen had been bombed by US Airforce on Feb. 23 1945. US Army emptied the local church of what they considered looted art in late April 1945. Credit: Marina Amaral. Bottom image: Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe in Leipheim. Before the guns fell silent in 1945, the Allies had already drawn up plans for gathering as much German technology as they could take and.to secure the minds behind Germany's advanced weaponry. The Soviets attempted the same, but the Allies gained the lion's share of Nazi scientists, prototypes, and know-how. The USAAF had at the top of its priority targets’ list one name: Messerschmitt 262 in its fighter variant. As a fighter, the German jet scored heavily against Allied air formations. Allied bombers, however, destroyed hundreds of Me 262s on the ground. Credit: KL-Dokumentation.

Waffen-SS – Part of a Criminal Organization

Unidentified soldier of the Waffen-SS

Unidentified SS-Maiden of the SS-Helferinnenkorps

In their brief but extraordinary existence the Waffen-SS won a unique reputation for daring élan and esprit de corps and unfailing professionalism in combat. Their courage was unquestioned and they achieved worldwide fame and notoriety. Waffen-SS played a conspicuous role in most of the important German triumphs, one far disproportionate to their numbers. Despite repeatedly sustaining horrendous casualties, their discipline remained unbroken, their fighting ardour unimpaired. After WWII, the Allies declared that the whole of the SS, including the Waffen-SS, was a criminal organization. Regardless of the military professionalism and the record of individual combat units, the entire organization was declared criminal. At a stroke, the imprisoned European volunteers were stripped of the protection of the Geneva Convention. All Soldiers of the Waffen-SS were automatically considered war criminals by virtue of being volunteers in the Waffen-SS; and for all their matchless undoubted bravery, the Waffen-SS now bears a reputation which will remain forever stained with infamy. Sir Norman Birkett, British alternate judge at the Nuremberg Tribunal, explained in April 1946 that: the trial is only in form a judicial process and its main importance is political. Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit der Angehörigen der ehemaligen Waffen-SS (Mutual Help Association of Former Waffen-SS Members) was an organization founded in 1951 by former members of the Waffen-SS to provide assistance to the approximately 250.000 former Waffen-SS veterans living in West Germany at the time. The HIAG successfully fought numerous legal battles in West Germany to overturn the Nürnberg ruling and win legal status of the Waffen-SS. Waffen-SS veterans were denied many of the rights afforded to soldiers of the regular Wehrmacht, even pensions were denied to its members as a result of having been condemned as a criminal organization by the victorious Allies. Left image: a perfect shot of the elite esprit de corps so commonly found in Waffen-SS. Commons: Bundesarchiv. Right image: a great portrait of a female volunteer in the SS-Helferinnenkorps. As members of the Waffen-SS they wore the SS runes and sleeve eagle on their uniforms. After the war, its members were mistakenly often regarded as members of the SS-Gefolges, female SS guards, who were not members of the Waffen-SS. Fair use.

The Roman Catholic Church and Vatican's Refugee Commission

Postwar Köln – Der Kölner Dom 1945

Destroyed German Panther in front of the Kölner Dom, March 1945

The Roman Catholic Church and Vatican is credited with helping, networking and organising the escape of thousands of Waffen-SS men in post-war Europe. In Rome, pro-Nazi Austrian bishop, Alois Hudal, was linked to the Nazi-smuggling networks. According to various sources, the Vatican, through its Refugee Commission, provided members of both the Waffen-SS and infamous war criminals of the Allgemeine-SS with false identity papers. These escape routes mainly led toward havens in Francisco Franco's Spain, South America or United States. According to Assistant Professor of History Gerald Steinacher, other so-called ratlines were running through Scandinavia and West-Europe. Research shows that Britain and Canada alone inadvertently took in around 8,000 former Waffen-SS members in 1947. The U.S. also recruited many Waffen-SS veterans, often with an assist from high Vatican officials. The Vatican's help was based on a hoped-for revival of European Christianity and dread of the Soviet Union. The Vatican has consistently refused to comment and has kept its archive closed to the public. However, on April 29 2020, the German Catholic bishops issued a statement criticising the behaviour of their predecessors during World War II. Top image: the ancient Catholic Cathedral of Cologne still stands tall amidst ruins caused by massive Allied air raids in 1945. It did not collapse but stood tall in an otherwise flattened city. The Kölner Dom is a renowned monument of German Catholicism and Gothic architecture. Credit: Marina Amaral. Bottom image: the knocked out Panther tank of the Panzer-Brigade 106 Feldherrnhalle, famed from the so-called 'Shootout at Cologne Cathedral' or 'Tank duel at Cologne Cathedral'. The defender of the Cologne Cathedral himself, Panzer Commander Oberleutnant d.R Wilhelm Bartelborth managed to escape the burning tank in the bombed-out city on March 6 1945 and lived until the age of 93. U.S. Army Signal Corps Collection. Both photos in the Public domain.

Siege of Breslau - Former Capital of Schlesien

Schlesien refugees in the Spreewald, January 1945

Former Festung Breslau, May 1945

Uprooted Eastern German children in Berlin, September 1945

The very German city of Breslau became part of Poland, along with almost all of the fertile flatlands of Lower Silesia, under the terms of the Potsdam Conference in August 1945. When the Soviets approached the city in February 1945, 18,000 women and children froze to death in icy snowstorms during a poorly organised evacuation. By the end of the siege, an estimated 40,000 civilians lay dead in the ruins. Eyewitness account No. 15 from the Bonn investigation report gives an inkling of what it was like: I was raped twice a day for seven days, each time by several soldiers, she said. The seventh day was my worst. I was picked up in the evening, and released the next morning. My genitals were completely ripped open, and I had an arm-wide sore all the way down to my knees. I could neither walk nor lie down. There were three more terrible days like this one before the Russian soldiers decided we had had enough, and chased us naked out of that hellhole. Together with other victims, she was sent on a death march barefoot. According to historian Christian Habbe almost 90,000 people perished in the evacuation of the city and the subsequent siege. The end of the war also signalled an active campaign to de-Germanize Breslau, renamed Wrocław, and Sovietisation soon followed. By January 1948 the city was officially declared to be free of German inhabitants, there were in fact still 3,000 in the city, essentially kept on to do jobs Poles were unqualified for. This siege remains little-known in the West therefore the first-hand account In the fire of the Eastern Front by Dutch Waffen-SS Volunteer Henrik C. Verton is of particular historical interest. He served in SS-Festungs-Grenadier-Regiment Besslein, an ad-hoc unit raised in February 1945 for the defense of Breslau. Credit: Der Spiegel. Top image: Schlesien refugees pass through the Spreewald towards Berlin in Jan. 1945. The Eastern German refugees were subject to ethnic cleansing from their ancestoral lands by the Poles and Czechs. Photo by the prominent German photojournalist Arthur Grimm. Credit: Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Middle image: bombed-out ruins of Breslau in May 1945. Credit: Dolny Śląsk. Bottom image: Eastern Germans who were uprooted during the war are pictured at the Lehrterstraße Transient Refugee Camp in Moabit in central Berlin on Sept. 26 1945. Photo by Associated Press photog. Henry Dashiell Burroughs Jr. Credit: Sanna Dullaway. Fair use.

Wild Expulsions and Killings of Ethnic Germans – a Collective Silence

Eastern German civilians fleeing massacres, February 1945

Refugees from the East of the Greater German Reich 1945

German post-war refugees in Berlin 1945

Czech Television (ČT2) released a documentary film in 2010 showing atrocities committed on ethnic German civilians in post-war Czechoslovakia. Civil engineer Jirí Chmelnicek's film lay hidden for decades in an aluminum canister, shot with an 8 mm camera on May 10 1945, in the Prague district of Borislavka. Communist police asked about the film and threatened Chmelnicek. But he didn't turn over his reel. Jirí Chmelnicek wanted the world eventually to learn what had been done to defenseless people that day in May in Borislavka. His camera caught groups of ethnic Germans, who had been driven out of their houses and into Kladenska Street by Red Army and or Czech militias. Chmelnicek's film shows how the Germans were rounded up in a nearby movie theater, also called the Borislavka. Shots ring out and, one after another, each person in the line slumps and falls forward over a low embankment. The injured lying on the ground begs for mercy. Then a Soviet Red Army truck rolls up, its tires crushing dead and wounded alike. Later other Germans can be seen, forced to dig a mass grave in the meadow. External link: Töten auf tschechische Art. The expulsions were encouraged by Czech Communist politicians and highly supported by British PM Winston Churchill. On May 16 1945, Edvard Beneš - president of Czechoslovakia declared that the country must be completely purged of Germans and Magyars. These German and Hungarian “colonists” had settled in the area in the 12th and 13th century. Though some massacres could be explained as acts of cleansing, like the one in Postoloprty were about 800 German civilians were tortured and murdered on June 3-7 1945 or the one in Ober Moschtienitz near Prerau were 265 Carpathian Germans, 71 men, 120 women and 74 children, were forced to dig their own graves and murdered by Slovak soldiers on June 18-19 1945, others could not. Many ethnic Germans were in-fact murdered while trying to leave Czechoslovakia. A law, passed by the Czech authorities (the Beneš decrees: Act No. 115/1946 Coll) stated that all Czech crimes against ethnic Germans were not legible to penalty. The German Red Cross Search Service confirmed the deaths of 18,889 ethnic Germans during the expulsions from Czechoslovakia. Czech records indicated 22,247 deaths including 6,667 unexplained cases or suicides. Other sources puts the number of murdered Germans much higher, assuming that not all deaths were reported. Top image: German civilians fleeing massacres in East Prussia in February 1945. Photo taken by Vinzenz Engel. Credit: Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Fair use. Middle and bottom images: German refugees await accommodations in Berlin 1945. Both photos taken by American surgeon Dr. Edward Churchill. Credit: Jacob Westberg via Pinterest. Fair use.

Liberation of Europe by Soviet Red Army – Mass Rapes of Women

C/O's whose troops raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag

Raising of the Soviet flag in the capital of the vanquished German Reich

Soviet Occupation Zone or Ostzone (Berlin 1945)

Lost German Girl - 42 seconds frozen in time (Czechoslovakia 1945)

The Soviet Russian wartime rapes has been surrounded by decades of silence. As well as the estimated two million rapes in Germany, there were between 70,000 and 100,000 in Wien and anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 in Hungary, as well as thousands in Romania and Bulgaria, which had been pro-Nazi, but also in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which had not been. The Soviet Red Army even raped women who had been liberated from concentration camps, emaciated and wearing their prison uniform. Nine, ten, twelve men at a time - they rape them on a collective basis, wrote Russian Communist playwright Zakhar Agranenko about his red comrades in his diary when serving as a Soviet officer in East Prussia in early 1945. Rape was often accompanied by torture and mutilation ending with the victim being killed or bludgeoned to death. British Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, Sir Richard J. Evans, guotes a Soviet officer recalling when his unit overtook a column of fleeing German refugees: Women, mothers and their children lie to the right and left along the route, and in front of each of them stands a raucous armada of men with their trousers down. The women, who are bleeding or losing consciousness, get shoved to one side, and our men shoot the ones who try to save their children. The Soviet Red Army's atrocities against women in Dresden in the spring of 1945, a city that had already suffered heavily from Allied bombing, were carried out in a sickeningly systematic manner. Gulag survivor John H. Noble, a U.S. civilian from Detroit, who at the time lived in Dresden recalled: Soviet troops went in and pulled the women on to the street, had their mattresses pulled out and raped the women. Right at the end of the street, a woman was tied to a wagon wheel and terribly misused. The men had to watch, and then the men were shot. Leningrader Natalya Gesse, a personal friend of Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov, observed the Red Army in action 1945 as a Soviet war correspondent: The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty. It was an army of rapists, she recounted later. Jewish Ukrainian novelist Vasily Grossman, another front-line reporter attached to the gigantic invading Red Army, soon discovered that rape victims were not just Germans. Polish women also suffered. So did Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian women. Liberated Soviet girls quite often complain that our soldiers rape them, he noted. The rape of Soviet women and girls seriously undermines Russian attempts to justify Red Army behaviour on the grounds of revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union. Schwester Kunigunde, the mother superior of Haus Dahlem in Berlin, a maternity clinic and orphanage, told the following story: The majority of the Red Army's soldiers were ill-educated and primitive. Nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity. Vladimir Gelfand, a Jewish lieutenant and a diarist from Ukraine, wrote with extraordinary frankness about some captured German women in February 1945: They must be destroyed without mercy. Our soldiers suggest stabbing them through their genitals but I would just execute them. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in Berlin, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. Altogether at least two million German females are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape. Female deaths in connection with the rapes in Germany, overall, are estimated at 240,000, a subject still taboo in Russia. References and sources: Historians Sir Antony Beevor, Richard Lourie, Franz W. Seidler, Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Helke Sander and Barbara Johr. Quotes from British Daily Mail and The Guardian. Top image: Soviet Maj.Gen. A.I. Litvinov, Gen.Lt. M.F. Bukshtynovich and Gen.Col. V.I. Kuznetsov of the 3rd Shock Army whose troops captured the Reichstag and hoisted the Hammer and Sickle atop of its ruins. Second image: an iconic photo by Ukrainian-born Jewish officer and PJ. Yevgeny Khaldei that became a symbol of the victory over Nazi Germany. The original photo taken on May 2 1945 was altered by Khaldei because Dagestani Sgt. Abdulkhakim Ismailov's multiple wristwatches were visible in the photo. Top two photos credited Olga Shirnina. SU stock photos. Third image: Berliners become familiar with their new masters; a woman holds onto her bicycle as a Soviet soldier tries to yank it away. Bottom still: The Lost German Girl. Footage by Swedish-American Capt. Oren William Haglund between Prague and Pilsen on May 8 1945. U.S. NARA.

Terror from the Sky – Allied Carpet Bombing of German Cities and Towns

British RAF and USAAF Carpet bombing of Dresden, February 1945

The destruction of Dresden, February 1945

Postwar Dresden – Die Gute 1945

When on the night of 24 August 1940 the German Luftwaffe accidentally and against Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's orders - dropped some bombs over London, the British prime minister Winston Churchill requested a retaliatory raid on Berlin. The Blitz, i.e. the air raids on London, began only after Britain had continuously bombarded German cities for three month. After the defeat in Dunkirk in June 1940, the heavy bombers remained the only means by which Britain could fight the Germans in continental Europe. RAF Bomber Command was later instructed to shift the focus onto the 'morale of the enemy civil population'. This new policy came to be called 'area bombing'. The aiming points for bombing raids were no longer military or industrial installations, but a church or other significant spot in the centre of industrial towns. German civilians had become a supposedly legitimate target. In 1944, the Americans too found themselves moving towards area bombing of cities. Although they would continue to claim that they were engaged in 'precision' bombing of military targets. By then, most German towns of industrial importance were all but destroyed. Since the heavy bombers were running out of targets, towns like Würzburg or Pforzheim, were selected primarily because they were easy for the bombers to find and destroy. Because they had a medieval centre, they were expected to be particularly vulnerable to fire attack. The raid on Dresden, filled with civilians and refugees, marked the erosion of one last moral restriction in the bombing war. Although these refugees clearly did not contribute to the German war effort, they were considered legitimate targets. The author and historian Jörg Friedrich presents a vivid account of the saturation bombing, rendering in acute detail the annihilation of cities such as Dresden, the jewel of Germany's rich art and architectural heritage in the book Der Brand in which he portrays the Allied bombing of civilian targets during World War II as systematic and in many ways pointless mass murder. The Fire is a rare account of the air raids as they were experienced by the civilians who were their targets. Friedrich previous work examining Wehrmacht crimes and Nazi justice enables him to approach the subject without risking automatic dismissal as a right-wing apologist. Quoted from Douglas Peifers review of The Fire. Credit: TV writer Detlef Siebert. Though no one involved in the bombing of Dresden was ever charged with a war crime, historical research often characterize the Allied bombing campaign against German cities in the last months of the war as a war crime. Top clips: the destruction of the medieval city of Dresden on the night of 13-14 February 1945. Bottom image: August Schreitmüller's sandstone sculpture “Die Gute” on Dresden's Rathaustrum somehow survived the bombings. It once overlooked a magnificent city. Now beyond its outstretched arms lies a sea of ruins. It took until the 1990s for the British and American governments to formally apologize to Germany for the unnecessary attack. Deutsche Fotothek. FU. 

Forgotten Victims in Terror Bombing of Germany – a Collective Silence

B-17 Flying Fortress of USAAF on a bombing raid west of Berlin 1945

Postwar Nürnberg – The medieval city centre 1945

Postwar Köln – Der Kölner Dom 1945

The allied bombing of Nazi Germany by the British RAF and U.S. Army Air Force - in particular that of Bomber Command - brought massive death and destruction to Germans, destroyed priceless artifacts built and preserved for centuries, yet made little contribution to actually winning the war. For five years during World War II, the Allies launched a trial and error bombing campaign against Germany's historical city landscape. Peaking in the war's final three months, it was the first air attack of its kind. Civilian dwellings were struck by in today's terms weapons of mass destruction, with a total of 600,000 civilian deaths, including 70,000 children. The bombing of the larger city of Hamburg in 1943 created one of the greatest firestorms raised by RAF and USAAF killing roughly 50,000 civilians and practically destroying the entire city. The most controversial raid took place in the late evening on February 13 1945. The bombing of Dresden resulting in a lethal firestorm which killed several tens of thousands of civilians. 722 heavy bombers of the British RAF and 527 of the USAAF dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. In February 1945, the Commanding-in Chief of RAF Bomber Command Arthur Travers Harris (Bomber Harris) wrote: I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. Raids such as that on Dresden and Pforzheim when Germany had already lost the war have been criticised and is recognized as one of the many examples of high civilian casualties caused by Allied strategic bombing. The destruction it caused in Continental Europe had little military value. The culmination of Bomber Command's offensive occurred in March 1945 when the RAF dropped the highest monthly weight of ordnance in the entire war. Despite protests from Germany as well as some in Britain, the Bomber Harris Trust erected a statue of him outside the RAF Church of St. Clement Danes in London in 1992. Credit: the historian Jörg Friedrich. Top image: almost 1,000 B-17 bombers of the U.S. 8th Air Force, protected by some 575 P-51 Mustangs, attacked Berlin on the forenoon of February 3 1945. The order told American bombardiers to use the Friedrichstraße Railway Station in Berlin as the aiming point. Lt-General James Doolittle, commander of the 8th Air Force, objected to it as an attack on morale, but he was overruled by the USAAF commander, General Carl Spaatz, who was supported by the Allied commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Photo by U.S. Air Force photographer sergeant Lew Funk (1-14-45). Credit: Nathan Howland. Private Collection. PD. Middle image: Nürnberg was heavily bombed from 1943 to 1945 by allied forces. The first RAF raid of greater Nuremberg took place on August 7 1940. The greatest damages occurred on January 2 1945 in which 521 RAF bombers dropped 6,000 high-explosive bombs and one million incendiary devices on the city. Credit: Rue des Archives. FU. Bottom image: Köln was bombed in over 260 separate air raids. The ancient Cathedral of Cologne suffered fourteen hits by aerial bombs during the war and was seriously damaged. It did not collapse, but stood tall in an otherwise flattened city. Thankfully, the medieval windows and many of the important items in the cathedral had been removed in time. Construction of the Cathedral began in 1248 and was declared a World Heritage Site in 1996. 20,000 people died during the war in Köln due to aerial bombardments. PD. Ext. Links: Berlin in color 1936, Berlin in color May 1945 and Berlin in color July 1945.

Eisenhower's Death Camps – Die Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine Meadow Camps)

Surrender of Hersfeld in northeastern Hessen, March 1945

278.Infanterie-Division surrender at the Brenner Pass, May 1945

Dutch collaborationists detained at the Harskamp POW camp, June 1945

Sinzig enclosure, part of the Rheinwiesenlager, May 1945

The mere mention of German suffering in World War II is regarded by many as implicit German war crimes denial. This one is not. The treatment of Prisoners of War by Soviet Union and Third Reich is well known, but the war crimes committed by the Western Allies are hardly spoken of. U.S. Colonel Ernest F. Fisher, 101st Airborne Division, who in 1945 took part in investigations into allegations of misconduct by U.S. troops in Germany and later became a Senior Historian with the United States Army alleges that U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower intentionally caused the deaths by starvation or exposure of German POWs held in Western internment camps after World War II. Hundreds of thousands of German POWs were designated as Disarmed Enemy Forces in order to avoid recognition under the third Geneva Convention, for the purpose of carrying out their deaths through disease or slow starvation. The standards set by the Geneva Convention were, in most cases, totally ignored by the Americans and French in relation to their treatment of German POWs. The camps were simply open fields surrounded by concertina wire. The worst U.S. temporary enclosures were the 19 Rhine Meadow camps founded in April 1945. Those were situated in the Allied-occupied western Germany at Bad Kreuznach, Bretzenheim, Büderich, Heidesheim, Remagen-Sinzig, Rheinberg and Wickrathberg. The German POWs were denied enough food and water and had to sleep in holes which they dug with their bare hands. In the Bad Kreuznach cage alone, 557,000 men were interned in an area that could only comfortably hold 45,000 and the camps soon became huge latrines. Prisoners died in their thousands through deliberate starvation, disease and exposure. The task of guarding these prisoners, numbering around 920,000, fell to the men of U.S. 106th Infantry Division. The former U.S. Prison Guard at the Andernach enclosure Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Religion Martin Brech wrote: Quickly they grew emaciated. Dysentery raged, and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches. Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before our eyes. We had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, including no medical assistance. Top image: German officers Hauptmann Karl Güntzel and Major Karl Damm being transported by the U.S. 4th Armored Division, pass by a 37th Armored Battalion M5 Stuart tank during the surrender of Hersfeld on March 31 1945. Credit: Richard James Molloy. USASC. Second image: the 278.Infanterie-Division surrender to the 5th and 7th U.S. Armies at the Brenner Pass on the Austrian–Italian border in May 1945. Credit: R.J. Molloy. Nevington War Museum. Third image: Dutch collaborationists photographed at the Harskamp POW camp following the defeat of the Greater German Reich. Approx. 4,000 Dutch collaborators including volunteers of the Waffen-SS were awaiting trial in this camp. In the center stands a frontline veteran of SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment Germania of the 5.SS-Panzer-Division Wiking still wearing his Iron Cross 1st Class, Infantry Assault Badge and Wound Badge. Photo by Dutch PJ. Willem van de Poll in June 1945. Credit: Benjamin Thomas. Nationaal Archief. Bottom image: the enclosure at Sinzig on May 12 1945. On that date, 116,000 POWs were held there. These POWs are in a barbed wire fenced open field with little or no shelter. The Red Cross (ICRC) was prohibited from providing aid and visit the U.S. run Rhine meadow camps until Feb. 1946. U.S. Army.

Forgotten Missing Prisoners Of War – a Collective Silence

Aus der Traum – Waffen-SS and Heer POWs, May 1945

Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures (PWTE), June/July 1945

Austrian Prisoner of War returning home from the East, 1949

Judge Robert H. Jackson, Chief U.S. prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials, told U.S. President Harry S. Truman that the Allies themselves: have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. Dr. Richard Dominic Wiggers argued that the Allies violated international law regarding the feeding of enemy civilians, they both directly and indirectly caused the unnecessary suffering and death of large numbers of civilians and POWs in occupied Germany, guided partly by a spirit of postwar vengeance when creating the circumstances that contributed to their deaths and by strict orders to U.S. military personnel to destroy or otherwise render inedible their own leftover surplus so as to ensure it could not be eaten by German civilians. The Americans also prevented locals from bringing prisoners food under threat of being shot. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was prevented from visiting German POWs. Only in the autumn of 1945 the Red Cross was granted permission to send delegations to visit camps in the French and U.K. occupation zones, and to provide - very small - amounts of relief. On February 4 1946 the Red Cross was allowed to send relief also to those in the U.S. run occupation zone. During their visits, the delegates observed that German POWs were often detained in appalling conditions. According to American historian and Professor Edward N. Peterson the U.S. chose to hand over another hundred of thousands German POWs to the Soviet Union in May 1945 as a gesture of friendship. Official Russian sources list the deaths of some 475,000 German POWs. They died in Soviet labor camps of harsh conditions, beating and starvation during World War II and in the years that followed. The destiny of another 440,000 missing on the eastern front remains unclear. They probably died in Soviet custody or was killed on the spot and therefore not counted as POWs. Both the Maschke Commission and military historian Lt. Colonel Rüdiger Overmans puts the number of German POWs dead in Soviet captivity to over 1,000,000. Officially 77,000 German POWs are confirmed to have died in Western custody. According to one of the most comprehensive works about the German POWs by Rüdiger Overmans they died in the post-war period after June 1945. According to the section of the German Red Cross dealing with tracing the captives, the ultimate fate of 1,300,000 German POWs is still unknown and officially listed as missing. They entered captivity and effectively disappeared from the historical record. It is a story that has been kept quiet. Top image: Waffen-SS and Heer POWs at the Elbe River. Photo by American photojournalist William Vandivert in May 1945. Credit: Johannes Dorn. LIFE photo archive. Middle image: German POWs at Camp Remagen, part of the Rhine meadow camps, in June/July 1945. U.S. Army photo. Bottom image: an Austrian lady holding up a photo of a missing young soldier while a returnee passes by her. Photo taken at the Wien Südbahnhof by Austrian press photographer Ernst Haas and publ. in LIFE magazine with an anti-communist viewpoint on Aug. 8 1949. Credit: Facundo Filipe. Archive Heute.