No more respect nowadays

Andy :

Are you positive about your last statements about not taking Germans up against a wall and shooting them ? If the war had raged a few months longer and had not the German civilians retreated out of Ost Preussia, I think you would agree that the Soviets "revenge" would have been sweet indeed. A intelligent person on the last months of the war cannot overlook the fact of many of the civilan population butchered out of hand, women and girls raped then blown away.....

getting back to the original question, the German kids don't give a rip about what Opa did because their country has been rebuilt and times are good, so it is of essence to have a passive atmosphere so things of WW 2 will not be repeated, but quickly forgotten.

E

 

Perhaps the question is how many opas really tell about their wartime experience. I hear about a lot more German people who have grandparents who don't want to talk about the war than I hear about grandchildren who aren't interested.

Best regards/ Daniel

[ 27. January 2003, 06:19 PM: Message edited by: charlie don't surf ]

 

Daniel :

true to some extent. I have interviewed maybe 50 Opa's that don't even care anymore since their grandkids have given them the finger and of course their WW 2 items come up on e-bay for sale., etc.... What's the point they have said, and several have exclaimed "because the younger generation has not proven themselves they are open for a repeat of WW 2 and destruction of Europe as a whole !" Gag ! pretty strong words don't you think... ? The other hand says that at least another 35 have talked freely with their grandkids whether they wanted to hear the horrors or not. This proved good and well for the older gents just to vent and the younger kiddo's with an open mind learned a bit of what really happened and how their country fell and was rebuilt.

E

 

I want to use the argument that if the Soviets were really waging a criminal war of annihilation against Germany, as Carl suggests, than they did a lousy job: The majority of German POWs survived, many nazis came off easily, the “hostile” social class (“capitalists” like junkers, factory owners etc.) wasn’t simple collectively executed by Red Army and NKVD units but “only” ousted. I haven’t heard of any order given to the Red Army soldiers to shoot nazi officials at the spot or “outlawing” the entire German population. Last I heard the chimneys of Auschwitz etc. stopped spitting human ashes into the air once the Red Army made it into Poland again. And I didn’t notice any extermination and enslavement program calculating the death of large proportions of the Germans by famine, to encircle the large cities to let the trapped population starve bevor grinding the town, nothing even close to Hitler’s, Himmler’s or the “Ostministerium”-plans. Face it, the Soviet occupation policy of Germany was a child’s play compared to that of the nazis vice versa.

Stalin wanted to exterminate Nazism and the old Prussian Military, expel the German population from the new-gained Polish and Soviet territory, and build up a Communist regime in “his” part of Germany, no more no less. And he had pretty much reason to do this in order to make it damned sure that he’s not again facing German soldiers at the gates of Moscow and a scorched Russia after some years.

 

Well, if the Russians failed to destroy Germany in the end they certainly had a good start, anyway.

Approximately 280,000 Germans are encircled at Stalingrad. About 40,000 are evacuated, most of them seriously wounded. Another 90,000 are taken prisoner. Only 5,000 survive to return home, the last in 1955. The remaining Germans, about 150,000, are dead or missing.

http://home.wanadoo.nl/cclinks/abtf/thebeg~1.html

The number of returned soldiers is quite common knowledge. Yes, compared to returned Russian soldiers the number is good.

However, it would not matter as the Russian POW´s were seen as traitors and were sent to camps or shot for treason.They were not so willing to return to "Uncle Joe"´s hands...They were dead when they surrendered already.

Just as well like people in caucasia i.e. on February 23, 1944, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered the Chechens and their Ingush neighbors -- some 400,000 people -- to be deported to Central Asia and Siberia for "mass collaboration" with invading Nazis.

Baltic countries:

Nazi Germany invaded in 1941, and 90 per cent of Lithuania's 250 000 Jews were killed during the occupation. Soviet forces then recaptured Lithuania in 1944 and around 700 000 Lithuanians were either deported to Siberia, forced into exile, imprisoned or shot.

etc etc

Stalin as well had the same idea for Finland: to send us to Siberia...

On German ethnic people handling:

A Terrible Revenge

The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944-1950

by: Alfred-Maurice de Zayas

Most of us believe the Second World War ended in 1945. The relatives and descendants of 267,000 Sudenten Germans murdered in Czechoslovakia after the shooting stopped may disagree with us. Hundreds of thousands of other Germans were murdered or died after hostilities in Europe ended.

German Federal Archives in Koblenz, Professor Alfred-Maurice de Zayas paints a horrorifingly graphic picture of the brutal efforts to evict ethnic Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia following the end of World War Two. As many as 2,000,000 farmers, small merchants and their wives and children were murdered for no reason other than the fact they were German. Few Poles, Russian, Jews, or Czechs have any sympathy for what happen to these Germans after the close of the Second World War. Their story has largely been ignored by the world for over half a century. Many believe the Germans simply " got what they deserved," or received a "just" punishment for what the Nazis did to other peoples.

On East Germany:

The Russians in Germany
A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949

Norman M. Naimark


Naimark captures the mood and the daily reality of the occupation, the chaos and contradictions of a period marked by rape and repression, the plundering of factories, the exploitation of German science, and the rise of the East German police state.The Russians in Germany also takes us deep into the politics of culture as Naimark explores the ways in which Soviet officers used film, theater, and education to foster the Bolshevization of the zone.

With the capture of Berlin, the Soviets also brought in several groups (the _Initiativgruppen_) of KPD leaders to begin rebuilding German administrations. From the start, however, Soviet efforts proved far from efficient. In the month before SVAG's founding, local Red Army commanders, without the benefit of clear lines of authority or special training, ruled the zone more or less arbitrarily. Even after the creation of SVAG ( Soviet Military Administration in Germany ), administrative efficiency in the zone was hindered by tensions between Moscow and SVAG headquarters in Karlshorst and between Soviet administrators in Germany. Even as the Soviets turned administrative functions over to their German clients, they tried to maintain control over even minute details of day-to-day administration. This practice improved neither zonal administration nor Soviet-German relations.

Naimark's research supports the estimate made by German historians Barbara Johr and Helke Sander that Soviet soldiers raped as many as two million German women between the time their counteroffensive reached German territory and well past the formal end of hostilities.
While Berlin was hardest hit, the problem was endemic in the Soviet zone. Though aware of the mass rapes, SVAG officers in Germany, KPD/SED leaders, and high-level Soviet officials remained unable or unwilling to do much to stop them. The extent to which Stalin was aware of the situation is unclear, but there is evidence he condoned the practice in general. Without question, the implications for Soviet and German Communist rule in the zone (or SBZ) were very serious: "...the Germans resisted rape...by turning it back against the Soviets. So long as Russians ruled in the Eastern zone, there could be no legitimacy for the Communist Party of Germany, which initially might have been counted on to be one of the most promising in Europe"

The Soviets fundamentally altered the economy of eastern Germany by forcibly redistributing land and expropriating factories and production. Meanwhile, soldiers and occupation officials took an enormous quantity of loot -- everything from wristwatches to priceless artwork. After the failure of the Allies to settle the reparations question, the Soviets went ahead with large-scale removals from their zone. No central records appear to have been kept of the often unplanned and haphazard "take" from Germany, but Naimark estimates that the Soviets achieved their goal of ten billion dollars in reparations through removals and ongoing (or current) production by 1950.
The costs to the German economy were enormous -- Moscow's "insatiable" demand for reparations resulted in the loss of perhaps one third of eastern Germany's industrial base.

Naimark provides us with the fullest account yet of the Stasi's birth. Beginning in the summer of 1945, "the Soviets constructed an impressive police system in the zone in a very short time indeed" (374). The German Communists were determined, of course, to dominate the new system, and built into it several branches designed "`to know everything and to report everything worth knowing'" (366). At the same time, the NKVD/MVD "led an almost completely independent Soviet secret policy operation in the zone" (379) by rounding up a total of 122,671 suspected Nazis and anti-Soviet elements (particularly young people, members of the Social Democratic Party [SPD], and former POWs) and depositing them in "special camps" where as many as 43,889 perished (376). SVAG and SED officials protested to Moscow about the NKVD/MVD's activities, but, again, much damage was done to Soviet-German relations before the Kremlin moved to alleviate the problem.

Given Moscow's intense desire for reparations and a demilitarized, neutral Germany, Naimark seems to sympathize with those members of the Soviet Central Committee who sought to replace the hard-line propaganda chief. Perhaps greater "flexibility," he suggests, would have helped prevent the division of Germany...

The Soviet occupation of Germany was a failure for the Soviets and a disaster for the Germans.

http://www.codoh.com/review/revnaimark.html

 

codoh, huh?

Committee for
Open
Debate
On the
Holocaust

CODOH is one of the principle dissemintaors of Holocaust denial literature in the United States.

Kai, you're kind of weakening your argumentation by supporting your points using that kind of nazi-links, really.

Cheers,

 

Andy,

you´re not stupid and I expect you not to play stupid as well.It´s the book and not the site...

Norman M. Naimark

Norman M. Naimark is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies and chairman of the Department of History at Stanford University.

He is an expert in modern East European and Russian history, Poland since 1863, and the history of the German Democratic Republic since World War II. His current research focuses on the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after World War II and ethnic cleansing in the twentieth century.

Naimark is author of the critically acclaimed volume The Russians in Germany: The History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Harvard University Press, 1995).

He is editor, with David Holloway, of Reexamining the Soviet Experience: Essays in Honor of Alexander Dallin (Westview Press, 1997). He also edited, with Leonid Gibianskii, The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949 (Westview Press, 1997).

Naimark also wrote the volumes Terrorists and Social Democrats: The Russian Revolutionary Movement Under Alexander III (Harvard University Press, 1983), and The History of the "Proletariat": The Emergence of Marxism in the Kingdom of Poland, 1870–1887 (Columbia University Press, 1979).

He is a member of the editorial boards of East European Politics and Societies, Problems of Post-Communism, Slavic Review, Historical Abstracts, and the Yale University Press Soviet Archives Project.

He is executive vice president and president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (1996) and recipient of the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1996).

Naimark is a member of the Visiting Committee of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University (1994–) and former chairman of the Joint Committee on Eastern Europe of the American Council of Learned Societies and Social Science Research Council (1992–97).

Naimark is also a member of the Commission Internationale des Etudes Historiques Slaves and is on the academic council of the Institute for Contemporary Historical Studies in Potsdam, Germany.

He was awarded the Richard W. Lyman Award (for outstanding faculty volunteer service) in 1995 and was the recipient of the Dean's Teaching Award from Stanford University for 1991–92.

Naimark earned a B.A. (1966), M.S. (1968) and Ph.D. (1972) in history from Stanford University.

Before returning to Stanford, Naimark was a professor of history at Boston University and a fellow at the Russian Research Center at Harvard. He also held the visiting Catherine Wasserman Davis Chair of Slavic Studies at Wellesley College.

At Stanford, he serves on the Academic Senate and on the Alumni and External Relations Committee of the Board of Trustees.

-------------

Naimark's research adds additional depth to the issue. According to Naimark, SMAD documents provided numerous internal reports of violence initiated by drunk Soviet soldiers and officers refusing to bring the situation under control. Politically, these problems led German women to increasingly reject the Soviet system of government imposed on eastern Germany. Soviet authorities then moved to separate German civilians and the Soviet military. Not everyone was pleased; a number of high-ranking generals protested the decision in 1947 on the grounds that it was unreasonable to punish officers who had personal relationships with German women. Consequently, Naimark sees this problem and its resolution confirming Western sources which conclude that rape constituted a significant problem undermining Soviet political objectives in postwar eastern Germany.

Naimark's second example focuses on the activities of the NKVD/MVD (the predecessors of the Soviet KGB) and their special internment camps. Of the eleven camps, four were established on the sites of former Nazi concentration camps. Shortly after the war, camp inmates were primarily members of the Nazi Party, the SS, and their supporters. But less than twelve months later, camp inmates counted among their ranks former Social Democrats, Communists (not referred to by Naimark in the article), critics of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), and occasionally the immediate relatives of SED members. Naimark has no difficulty labeling these camps as death camps, but he reports that Western sources estimated the number of inmates to be considerably higher than proved to be the case. NKVD/MVD sources put the total at 120,000, of which 42,907 died in the camps for the period running from 1945-1949. Naimark, apparently suspicious of his new found sources, appeals to Western estimates in asserting that at least 120,000 and possibly 140,000 individuals died in these camps. (Somewhat surprisingly, Naimark does not refer in this article to evidence discovered over the last five years around the camps which indicates that Naimark's own figures are quite plausible.)

For example, two SMAD generals, namely, I.S. Kolesnicenko in Thuringia and Vassilii Makarov, took their concerns to then Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. They characterized NKVD policies as the greatest threat to German cooperation with Soviet authorities, since they undermined attempts to restructure the German political system.

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~german/articles/meier1.html

The Russians in Germany
A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949

Norman M. Naimark


"[A] masterly analysis of the Soviet occupation between the end of the war and the emergence of two German states...[A] startlingly original book."

--Daniel Johnson, New York Times Book Review
"The best study of the making of Communist East Germany, based on remarkable archival research and invaluable for anyone seeking to understand the psychological as well as the political origins of the German Democratic Republic."

--Tony Judt, New York Review of Books
"An outstanding analysis of the ruthless Stalinization of East Germany in the early postwar years, and of its economic and scientific exploitation. Using newly released East German and Soviet archives, [Naimark] gives us a complete picture of what has been called Stalin's `march to the west.' "

--Amos Perlmutter, Wall Street Journal
"[A] remarkable historical treatment...[This] is a quite splendid work of erudition, style and humanity, which replaces all earlier writing in English on the subject...Using primarily the German and the Russian sources, Naimark sets new levels of archival research and raises many issues for historians to debate in years to come...It is unlikely...that his overall study of these few crucial years will be superseded for a good while to come. In particular, he has set the scene for a fuller understanding of the regime and society which followed the occupation."

--Jonathan Osmond, Times Higher Education Supplement
"What makes this book superior to anything that has been written about the Soviets in early postwar Germany...is its comprehensiveness. It contains important chapters on reparations and economic transformation, the use of German scientists, culture and education, and the construction of an Orwellian police state. Finally, there is a lengthy and daunting chapter on 'Soviet Soldiers, German Women, and the Problem of Rape,' For many years, this remained a taboo subject, and when Naimark began his research, it took some courage to venture into this field...This excellent study of the encounter between Russians and Germans after the defeat of Nazism contains a wealth of insights for all historians of postwar Europe."

--V. R. Berghahn, American Historical Review
"[Norman Naimark] has produced a richly textured and important story, delving into subjects usually ignored in the longer narratives of postwar eastern Germany, including the sensitive issue of Red Army rape during the period of conquest and early occupation, the seizure of scientific materials and talent, and the organization of popular culture. From my perspective, Naimark's perspective and conclusions are both sensitive and sensible...This book represents one of the first important results of multiarchival work that draws on records so unattainable until recently but so critical to historical reconstruction. The Soviet archives will never finally resolve issues of historical intention and responsibility, any more than American archives, but they are the basis for informed inference and argumentation. Naimark uses them precisely in that scholarly spirit. The Russians in Germany will remain one of the exemplary contributions to the unfolding post-1989 historiography of Europe under communism."

--Charles S. Maier, Journal of Modern History
"Naimark's work is an important study of nation-building in the Eastern bloc and will also be of interest to students of German politics, history, and reunification...This is likely to be the standard text on the early years of GDR"

--Library Journal
"[An] impressive study...a nuanced and balanced picture of the development of the Soviet Zone...The range of topics addressed is staggering, since the text moves from administration to rape, from reparations to science, from relations with the Left to issues of control, from the police state to cultural policy...[A] pathbreaking book."

--Konrad H. Jarausch, Central European History
"Naimark's achievement is superb. His book is elegantly written, clearly analyzed, rich in detail."

--Tim Hornor, Nationalities Papers
"Naimark has produced a brilliant history of the first four years of what was to become the German Democratic Republic...Highly recommended."

--Choice

-----------------

parts from a letter with sources:

http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/6225-9.cfm

I am familiar mainly with some memoirs about events in Budapest. Practically every book written by Hungarian Holocaust survivors who witnessed the Soviet “liberation” contains descriptions of the looting, rape, and murder. The memoirs by Lars Berg, a Swedish diplomat who headed a department within the Swedish Legation in Budapest and who worked with Raoul Wallenberg, gives very impressive details [3]. What makes this particular memoir unusual is that Soviet officials confirmed at the diplomatic level one of his descriptions – the rape of a woman servant at the Swedish Legation.

[3] Berg, Lars G., The Book That Disappeared: What Happened in Budapest (New York: Vantage Press, 1990), pp. 55, 144-156, 160-162, 193-199.

I feel that Antony Beevor missed two important points in the excerpt. First, that the atrocities were ignored by the Communist Party Leader and Commander-in-Chief Josef Stalin himself. It is well known that when the Yugoslav Communists complained to Stalin about the atrocities, Stalin told one of the Yugoslavs, Milovan Djilas: “Can’t [you] understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?” Stalin held the same opinion about atrocities in East Prussia: “We lecture our soldiers too much, let them have some initiative” [4].

Second, there were some extremely courageous Soviet officers who protested against the atrocities. Such protests were almost suicidal in the environment of the Soviet army. I personally knew two of these former officers. Both were Jewish (by origin) and, of course, were not the Nazi sympathizers. They were decent human beings in inhuman circumstances. Both were accused of “slandering the Soviet Army,” convicted and spent years in the Gulag. One of them, Lev Kopelev, worked for a while as an imprisoned technical scientist with Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the secret laboratory “Marfino” [5]. Later he became a well-known dissident writer and described “Marfino” in his memoirs [6]. The second, geneticist Vladimir Efroimson, was found “guilty” of two crimes—in 1945, he reported atrocities he witnessed, and in 1947, he protested against the pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who was supported by the Communist Party and Stalin himself

4] Djilas, Milovan, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Michael Petrovich (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962), pp. 88-89, 95, 101).

[5] Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, The First Circle (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).

[6] Kopelev, Lev, Ease My Sorrow. A Memoir, trans. from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Random House, 1983).

 

an essay “The Expulsion” by a son of a Swedish attaché in Berlin, Eric Edelstam.

http://www.wordsandart.com/forums/viewtopic.php?TopicID=4

The ethnic cleansing of Germans after the Second World War.


Some years ago, I stood in the pouring rain at the Bregenzstrasse in Berlin in an attempt to look for the shadows of my parents in 1941. - My father Harald, then a young, good looking, enthusiastic attaché at the Swedish legation in Berlin, with high ambitions and my mother Louise, innocent and sweet, with dimples in her cheeks and my new-born brother Carl in her arms, lived in one end of the street.
Bregenzstrasse is a little street in the vicinity of Kurfürstendam. Easy to seal off from both sides. There were nearly only Jews living in the quarters. Harald woke up many times during the night by trucks; the rush of spike clad boots, commando shouts and screams of anguish.
He used to run down to the entrance door, dressed only in pyjama and waved in so many he could of the despairing people who looked for cover. They hid in the little apartment, crouching and trembling. Next day he was forced to let them go. There was no lifeline - the Swedish government had even forced a J in the passport of the Jews to differ them from the other German citizens.
Harald, who felt completely powerless regarding to this, proposed to his boss, the envoy Arvid Richert, that one perhaps could give these people a kind of passport of protection, like what his college later gave the Jews of Budapest. - Richert got white in his face and raged: - Do you want to throw us in war with Germany?
And that was it.
The Jews were driven from their homes, deprived from all possibilities of support and were put in a kind of quarantine of deprivation and starvation, till it was time for eradication.

In January 1945 the time came to the Germans themselves. In a way their own Holocaust. In any case, for some of them. A result of Hitler’s merciless politics.
It is called the Expulsion (der Vertreibung) - the ethnic cleansing of 15 million Germans from central and Eastern Europe. Hitler had cleaned out many groups of people, but this expulsion was something quite different.
Today the world has been shocked by what happened in former Yugoslavia, where Muslims, Croats and Serbs were driven away from their homes. Like cattle, with a scant hope of returning home again. The concept of ethnic cleansing has become very familiar, which one hears in all sorts of different contexts. One often hears:” The worst ethnic cleansing since World War II...” - But what happened then?

Very few people today have a slightest idea what happened all these Germans the years after the war and the tremendous suffering they had to endure. Nobody has, anyhow, been interested. The common idea is that the Germans got what they deserved. An idea that, 55 years afterwards, it is, perhaps, time to revise. The subject is very touchy. A former German ambassador warned me that to bring this topic up today in Germany, might classify you as a neo-nazi. Anyhow, the Expulsion represents a big white area on the historical map.

My own introduction to the Expulsion was the book of Marion Dönhoff, the founder of ”Die Zeit”: ”Namen die keiner mehr nennt”, in a dusty antiquarian shop in Berlin. She had big estates in East Prussia and had to flee as the Red Army approached. She left on her riding horse in - 25º cold and snow storm and joined the fleeing population on the full packed roads. After two weeks she halted her horse at two a clock in the night, at the big train bridge, crossing the river Nogat, by Marienburg, near Danzig.
The bridge was deserted, but she heard a strange, clattering sound, as from a three legged being: ”...soon I saw three figures in uniform, slowly dragging themselves over the bridge in silence: One of them was walking with crutches, one with a stick and the third had a big bandage round the head, and the left arm hanging down limb... For me this was the end of East Prussia: three dead sick soldiers, dragging themselves over the Nogat Bridge to West Prussia. And a woman on horse, whose ancestors 700 years before, had pushed, from west to east, right in to the great wilderness on the other side of the river, who now was riding back to the west. - 700 years of history was now wiped out...”

The story of Marion Dönhoff is typical and tells much about the historical background. The laborious and industrious German burghers and farmers colonised Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages, often invited by local lords. From the Baltic States, through Prussia, Poland, Bohemia, Moravia (Czech Rep and Slovakia today), down to Hungary and the Balkan, they cultivated the land and founded thousands of cities and villages. The First World War changed all and a big part of the German population in these areas became minorities under national governments. The second word war made things worse with the Nazis as a ruthless occupation force, terrorising all these countries. The ethnic Germans became the scapegoats as the Reich fell apart in ruins. - The situation was a bit different in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, since they were purely German areas since the 13th century.

During the Second World War, several politicians on the allied side demanded that the Germans in these areas should be driven away. The first one to air such thoughts was the Czech, exiled premier, Eduard Benes. The British government agreed.
During conferences, the fate of the Germans was sealed. Stalin wanted to keep the eastern part of Poland, that he got from Hitler in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and as compensation Poland would get East Prussia, West Prussia and Silesia. And then the current population must go. Roosevelt and Churchill promised help with transports. Stalin beamed. Churchill said in a speech:”...a clean sweep will be made...”
An other question that came up, was the matter of ”reparations of war damage” in the devastated Soviet Union. Stalin wanted German labour. Request was permitted. The result was that around 875.000 people, mostly elderly people, women and children, was sent to mines and slave camps, and were the greater part perished of starvation and hardship. The responsibility of Roosevelt and Churchill in this program is undeniable.

One can divide the Expulsion in three phases:
1. The Soviet phase with flight from the terror of the Red Army.
2. The flight from revenge, primary from Poland and Czechoslovakia.
3. The organized expulsion from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Balkan.

The first phase opened when Stalin launched his winter offensive, ”Uranius”, against East Prussia, the 12th of January 1945, with 2.2 million soldiers. Facing them was 400.000 Germans. The Russian soldiers were highly motivated and had been instructed to kill so many Germans they could and that included the civilians. After reconquering his own devastated fatherland for years, each man was filled with revenge.
The population knew what was in store for them. During the fighting in the autumn, the Red Army had conquered some communes and been driven away again. What they left was horrible. Murdered civilians in all houses, raped women and something that would be repeated during all the conquest - naked women crucified to barn doors. These incidents were ruthlessly used in the Nazi propaganda to strengthen the resistance.

The violence against the civilians was documented where it was possible, for example, when German forces reconquered areas, like in Metgehten, a suburb of Königsberg, in the end of January 1945. The chocked soldiers could not believe their eyes, when the entered the town.
Big piles of dead bodies littered the streets. Most of them were women and children. Few were men. Nearly all women had been beaten to death or stabbed with bayonets. A big number were mutilated, especially by the genitals, and had cut off breasts. In the biggest pile, they counted to 3.000 dead. In one place people were driven down in a big bomb crater and then blown to pieces by explosives. I all buildings civilians lay dead. Several trains that had come with fugitives stood motionless, full of dead. A witness saw the rests of two women, who had been tied to their ankles and torn apart by two cars, which had driven in opposite directions. In a big villa, 60 surviving women were found. They had been raped 60 - 70 times per day. The villa had obviously served as a brothel. Half of the women had to be taken to psychiatric institutions.
A bit outside, in the village Gross Heydekrug, stood an abandoned tank, which had been dragging four naked women in ropes. In the church a young girl was nailed to the cross of the altar, with to German soldiers strung up on each side... - A bizarre biblical metaphor of pain and suffering.

The road to the west was filled with hardships and suffering for the fugitives. - When the Russian tanks advanced north from Poland, they cut off the German territory in several places. The population was thus caught in pockets and could not flee west by land. Instead they moved to the coast and the harbours where they hoped to get on a ship. The German navy then organized an evacuation that far surpasses the one made in Dunkerque in May 1940.
1,5 million fugitives and 700.000 soldiers were evacuated by 790 boats of different sizes from January to the end of the war. The admiral Dönitz, who was the successor of Hitler, delayed the final capitulation, just in order to evacuate as many as possible from the east.

But the evacuation could not be made without sacrifices. The 30th of January the passenger ship ”Wilhelm Gustloff” sailed out from Pillau, the harbour of Königsberg, with 6.000 fugitives on board. Outside in the snowstorm, waited the Soviet submarine S-13, under the command of captain A.I. Marinesko. Three, well-aimed torpedoes sank ”Wilhelm Gustloff”. Despite the storm and cold temperature, the escort ships saved 1.100 people. The same submarine sent the hospital ship ”General von Steuben” to the bottom. It was painted white with red crosses, carrying 3.500 wounded soldiers. The worst sinking was ”Goya”, with 7.000 fugitives on board. There only 183 survived.

The problem was that the Red Army chased the fugitives as much as the German soldiers. The endless columns of charts that crossed the ice if Frischer Haff from Königsberg, towards the harbour Pillau, were bombed without mercy. On the roads the Russian tanks simply mashed the fugitives with their chains, mowed them down with their machine-guns or liquidated them at the roadside.

After the Russians came the Polish army, polish militia and civilians who should take over the country. They co-operated closely with the Soviet occupation authorities and participated in the looting and the killings. Polish fugitives from the eastern parts took over the houses of the Germans. The former owners were thrown out in the street. The provision of food stopped completely. Famine and diseases like typhoid and cholera ravaged.
Later the Allies stared to organise train transports to the west. They became veritable trains of horror, that was constantly stopped and plundered by hooligans and armed gangs. The conditions soon became so unbearable that the Allies had to stop the transports.
Of course there were exceptions. Decent Soviet officers were chocked by the violence. Solsjenytsin, who participated in the fighting of East Prussia, wrote in the ”Gulag Archipelago” that rape and the following murder of the woman, almost was considered as a combat distinction. Individual Poles gave Germans food and shelter and helped them cross the border. In many farms the Polish workers hid the German owners.

The inhabitants of Silesia that fled from the Red Army, mostly tried to get to Dresden. The city had not been bombed any time during the war. Thanks to the exquisite art treasures and the unique baroque architecture of the town, it was considered as an open city, like Rome and Paris. No military installations or industries were in the vicinity. A safe place.
The 13th of February the Royal Air Force attacked with a first wave of planes during the night. The city was packed with refuges, around 200.000. The night after the next wave came. A total of 1.400 planes participated. As if it was not enough, 450 American planes made daylight bombings, which completed the destruction.
The city was engulfed in a firestorm, never seen since the destruction of Hamburg in 1943. Very little was left. The figures concerning the number of perished are very unsure, but it is estimated that between 150.000 and 200.000 people died and 400.000 were left homeless. It shall be noted that in Hiroshima, around 50.000 people died.

In the rest of Europe, revenge struck hard on the ethnic Germans. It was like in Poland. In Czechoslovakia the Germans had to wear white sleeve badges with an N (Nemec, which means German in Czech). The Germans had to take off their hat for every Czech or Soviet officer they met.
In Prague, thousands of civil Germans were massacred by the end of war. At Uti 2.000 women and children were tossed from a bridge (Vaclav Havel had a commemoration plate put up at the place in 1990) and the Czech militia detained hundreds of thousand people in concentration camps. The old German camps were handy. No food was distributed and diseases ravaged. People died like flies. The ethnic Germans got the same treatment as Czechs and Jews had before.
With all the free looting, rapes and other atrocities, it must be said that the majority of the Czechs were revolted and ashamed over the treatment of the Germans. Vaclav Havel later publicly apologised for these events.

In Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania the ethnic cleansing followed the same pattern. The German inhabitants had to leave their farms, houses and business with what they could carry in a suitcase. No valuables were permitted. It was just to hand over the keys. - Here the Germans were particularly struck by the deportations to the Soviet Union.
Most of the Germans were put in labour camps. Those who could not work, like women, children and old people, were put in special starvation camps, were most perished. A witness tells about the starvation camp in Jarek. In June 1945 there was 25.000 prisoners. In May next year there was only 2.800 left. Other starvation camps were Rudolfsgnad, Gakovo, Mitrovica or Molidorf.

Those who were driven away from their ancestral lands came to a Germany that thanks to the bombings not could provide shelter for its own population. Nothing worked and food was scarce. The fugitives got no fugitive status of the Allies, which did that they could not get help from the Red Cross or other help organisations. They were in fact busy repatriating the displaced slave workers that the Nazis had brought in to Germany during the war. The question of the expulsed Germans was regarded as an ”internal German affair”.
In this situation Germany received more than 13 million fugitives!
Around two million of the expulsed Germans are estimated to have lost their lives, due to starvation, liquidations and other hardships.

The ethnic Germans had a terrible fate. They were at the wrong place at the wrong time. Some were surely Nazis, but the majority were simple farmers and artisans who did not care much about politics and just wanted to live in peace. The tragedy is that the governments that drove out the Germans treated them in the same way as the Nazis had treated their own people.
Now some facts start to emerge, concerning the Expulsion. Witnesses and victims dare to testify. Governments apologise. For the victims, it is perhaps not enough. One witness said:
”...It is difficult to loose all you have, but unbearable when you loose your identity and your history...”

 

This is a quite interesting thread. I hate having missed it to follow it as I should have. Now, I can only say a couple of things about everyone's intelligent comments.

First, I quote general Günther Rall, 3rd best air-ace in History:

"We were at war. How? We were not informed! We didn't fight for Hitler, we fought for Germany. As the British say: 'Good or wrong my country'".

War itself is a crime, but it is as natural as breeding. Unfortunately, there are wars which simply do not qualify as such, and the best example is the war in the East 1941-1945, which was an annihilation war for both sides, a war for the survival of two nations in which the loser would lost EVERYTHING. That explains why it was so horrible and bloody, along the fact that it was also a fight between the two MOST HORRIBLE régimes the world has ever seen. The two greatest butcher in History were fighting for their survival and the war did become not only a war.

My grandfather, as member of the Wehrmacht did comit some actions that fit into war crime's cathegory and he has accepted it. When they entered into the vast country, they used to bombard a Russian town or city they had to take with artillery and aircraft. Obviously many civilians were killed if they remained in the city. But also many Soviet soldiers were killed and this prevented German casulaties. Also, a 16.000 men division had a lot of problems to feed its own 16.000 men. It had some 45.000 POWs who COULD NOT be fed. So, many died of their wounds, of deceases and starvation... And yes, when winter came, they DID shoot some. Why? Because Russian POWs oftenly escaped, became partisans and shot German rear personnel. Also, many Russian soldiers who had surrendered duruing the advance attacked the Germans from the rear in several times. That taught the men and the officers that capturing them did not assure having them out of combat and troops to take care of them were, of course not available. The German soldiers, since them, assured that ANY Russian soldiers would remain to shoot at them again...
Those are not excuses. But those are the undeniable facts.

Also, there are other undeniable facts; like thousands of German women and children being raped in 1945. Hitlerjugend unarmed boys being BURNED alive, wounded and old men being shot in the ruins of Berlin... How about starving Germans being tortured to death in the gulags? The gulags did not have gas cahmbers nor ovens, but they were pretty much the same; they were there to destroy the enemies of the USSR...