Fate of german civilians under allied occupation

Ok,i never knew this!
I was just stating what i had read before! it was stated in paste link qoute,meaning it came from the internet or book.
One statement had an author and the name is Stephen E Ambrose.

cheers.

 

Hi Heidi, if you get that kind of info from that other site-i'd stay as far away from that site as is possible? and just visit here ;-D

 

This certainly is contradictory to everything else I have ever read or heard of the Western Allied occupation of Germany. While I suppose it is plausible that the Army of Occupation on the street was not aware of everything going on everywhere, it is inconceivable that something of this magnitude would have gone unnoticed.

I ran across a set of Army Guides to the World and in particular this one, "112 Gripe About the French" http://www.marshallfoundation.org/pdfs/army_guides/112-gripes-about-the-french.pdf awhile back. I don't know who has seen these before or if I ever posted these links, but they are a very interesting look into what the average GI was thinking in post-war Europe and elsewhere at the time. I can't lay my hands on another link at this moment (think it's on CMH Online) that also discusses the Occupation of Germany. Certainly the US was not prepared for what was about to happen but to assign malicious intent is an entirely different matter.

One of the things the "112 Gripes. . ." illustrates in "The French and The Germans" section and what you can find elsewhere, is that the Americans quickly began to identify positively with the Germans, in fact even moreso than the French who had been our allies. The initial US policy of non-fraternization between the A of O and the German population had to be abandoned pretty quickly, because nobody was following it, regardless if it was a good policy or not. Because of these things and a host of anecdoctal stories from returning veterans, I just can't see any systematic policy of German mistreatment having gone on and gone on undetected.
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Here's that other link THE U.S. ARMY IN THE OCCUPATION OF GERMANY

 

SS soldiers that were undernieth the U.S 45th infantry Division were killed and it was called in histroy- The Dachau massarce of the murderd ss Soldiers.(Hans Linberger story)
I am not sure if this was under the command of IKE! but it proves the US was just as cabable in doing such things as starving and killing German soldiers on pupose.

Ok Evans,i'll check on the net before i posts things!

 

The so-called Dachau Massacre is rather minor in scope, and even so it wasn't under the direct order of IKE even though as overall Supreme Commander it fell to him to take resposibility. Which he did, and for which the members of the US Army who took part in it were punished (lightly admittedly), but he also ordered that any other incedent of this nature would be more harshly dealt with. Remember it was he who refused to stop the shooting of Private Slovik for desertion. He had pardoned other men for the same offense but Slovik's happened during the Second Ardennes Offensive (Battle of the Bulge), and he wanted to send a message to the troops that this would no longer be a "prison sentence".

He also upheld the sentences of a great number of American soldiers to be hanged for capital crimes of murder and rape. He was not a coddler of the criminal element, no matter which side of the war the person was.

The SS guards at Dachau were not all killed by any stretch of the imagination, since no less than 130 of them survived to be both interrogated and imprisoned themselves.

No one with any credibility believes there were too many more than 50 victims and the absolute max possible set at 80. This is based on the official investigation of the event and subsequent studies. An official investigation that occurred quite rapidly. Indeed the main documented events were killing of 5 SS at "the death train", 17 SS at "the coal yard" and 10-17 SS killed at "Tower B". Isolated killings of 1-2 here and there are not well documented but most say these amount to 10 more, perhaps. (For example see Marcuse's Legacies of Dachau). Even if one estimated an absurdly high 50 isolated deaths on top of the main events that would be under 100 dead.

Some people with no credibilty claim every last SS soldier/guard was killed which is thoroughly wrong and based on very poor research and no evidence at all. Numerous sources discuss what became of the surviving SS. The official report even notes that not all Germans were killed and other reports note where the SS prisoners that survived were transferred to for imprisonment themselves. In the largest incident, the "coal yard incident", there were around 60 SS soldiers involved, of which 17 were killed.

The shooting was ordered stopped before the majority were even wounded. Those who were wounded were taken to the infirmary for treatment while the uninjured were taken elsewhere to protect them from the Jewish prisoners. Not only were not all of them killed, even if one or two men did initiate fire deliberately, the other Americans could plausibly have joined in because the prisoners began running away or towards them as they claimed, moreover the commanders stopped the shooting in time to prevent most from being shot. The firing lasted for only seconds.

If this was a deliberate or ordered attempt to kill every last German guard it was not very successful now was it!

 

Hi Clint, well said.

Heidi, I hope you don't take my comments in the wrong way-im not slamming you for it but just trying to help you out more ;-)) Capish? ;-D

 

Evans-I'm not offended, at all! don't worry about it!

brndirt1-I don't look at American soldiers as being evil in ww2,far from it. Example -the USA were great guys with some bad cookies mixed in there.
Americans did commit 5% war crimes but no nation was perfect!

If it was reversed and it was American soldiers being look after by the SS german soldiers and than being massacred to death,it would have already been a war crime straight away in everyone's eyes.
That's how i see it! And i see Americans as being just as good guys as any other allied soldier.

 

It was a war crime anyway and investigated as such by the US Army. However it was dealt with administrativly. I suspect one reason as in the US as in most countries there is the concept of "a crime of passion" and this certainly would have fit the bill. If the US soldiers had been tried and acquited for that reason or aquitted on appeal or pardoned (almost assuredly one of these would have happened) it would have been viewed as giving a green light to others. This would have been bad for discipline as well as likely to produce even more war crimes. So the course chosen was probably in the best interest of just about everyone. Note that several other US soldiers were convicted of killing POWs. The maximum penalty was quite a few years in prison. In two or three cases I've read about they were sentenced to front line duty instead. While that may sound like a light sentence none of the ones I know of survived the war. There are some well resourced threads on this over on the axis history forum in their warcrimes sub forum.

 

I don't know where the number 9 million came from, but a Canadian Reporter took on the book "Other Losses", which talks about the revenge that was enacted on Germans and especially a lot about Morgenthau. Americans did tell the German Wehrmacht soldiers to meet on an empty field and simply put barbed wire around to make it into a prison. True story. But not 9 million! Maybe 1.7 million? But still, a lot of people...

The book, OTHER LOSSES, found its way into the hands of a Canadian news reporter, Peter Worthington, of the OTTAWA SUN. He did his own research through contacts he had in Canada, and reported in his column on September 12,1989 the following, in part:

"...it is hard to escape the conclusion that Dwight Eisenhower was a war criminal of epic proportions. His (DEF) policy killed more Germans in peace than were killed in the European Theater."

"For years we have blamed the 1.7 million missing German POW's on the Russians. Until now, no one dug too deeply ... Witnesses and survivors have been interviewed by the author; one Allied officer compared the American camps to Buchenwald."

Then 15 million German were expelled from the East, where 2-3 million died en route (especially newborn and children under 2. I don't blame Ike for everything. It was "Open Season" on Germans after the war, and there wasn't the Internet, hidden video cameras or CNN to expose all the things that happened...

 

Other Losses has been pretty thoroughly discredited.

 

Yeah, this very thread has the info. Wikipedia has more. Basically didn't realise that other losses included people informally discharged for being too young or too old to be held as a POW, and exaggerated some other death figures by an order of magnitude due to misreading 700,000 as 70,000. Schoolboy errors.

Claims of mass deaths in the East are more credible though. But it's hard to get any accurate figures there, so the ranges from various sources are usually very wide, and typically reflect the author's particular agendas.

 

I live in the west Med where are wellcome German guests and neighbors since the fifties. I've never heard any thing like deliberate starvation in the West, nor my relatives, friends or clients. There was in the forties Austrian refugee children, in some cases adopted by Jewish-origin families...We know runaways from the east, famine ...but MILLION(S) killed ... How it was covered?

 

In the book "Interrigator" about Hans Scharff, the master Luftwaffe interrigator, he writes that the situation after surrender was very harsh for captives, and quite a few German's held in open camps died from exposure and illness. He also states that the Allies tried to process the German's out and home as fast as possible (while they were looking for those wanted for war crimes). The immensity of the job caught the Allies short. However, the numbers stated in the book in question here, are absurd.

 

There was a real food problem in Europe after the war (for that matter it was in short supply during the war). You can find the calorie schedule for various groups post war. One of the rule the Americans used was POWs and FEC were not to recieve more food than the local civilians.
Here are some diverse articles on it both during and after the war:
Food rationing during World War two: a special case of sustainable consumption?
Post-war Food situation in Occupied Germany - Your Archives
rationing during World War II -- Germany
German Economic Miracle: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics | Library of Economics and Liberty
Food, Famine and Relief 1940-1946 - Google Books
Fighting a War of Nutrition: Food and Ration Policy in Occupied Germany
JSTOR: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie
Rationing
There has also been considerable discussion on this over on the axis history forum.

 

It's pure fiction. Some Germans probably starved, or died from illness and even mistreatment, but whereas figures could be easily checked at the Volkbundkriegsversörge site, the figure of 9 millions is a joke.

I have a few figures for French cities and there are indeed graves for German pows between 1945 and 1948, but they can be counted on the fingers of one hand and do not always include ill treatment from military occupation forces. I have one example of a pow being shot be a drunk farmer in 1946...

 

Put it this way. The Allies had no intention in harming Axis civilians. In rare occurrences groups of rowdy soldiers committed war crimes. (ALL SIDES AXIS AND ALLIED) Unlike the Japanese Imperial Army in China which meant to slaughter the japanese populus. (Nanking)