Alternatives to Ethnic Cleansing

The War Around Us

Alternatives to Ethnic Cleansing

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Eisenhower Documents: Schlesien

On October 18, 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower telegraphed Washington: "In Silesia, Polish Administration and methods are causing a mass exodus westward of German inhabitants.

Germans are being ordered out of their homes and to evacuate New Poland. Many unable to move are being placed in camps on meager rations and under poor sanitary conditions. Death and disease rate in camps extremely high."

"Breslau death rate increased tenfold, and death rate reported to be 75% of all births. Typhoid, typhus, dysentery, and diptheria are spreading. Total number potentially involved in westward movement to Russian zone of Germany from Poland and Czechoslovakia in range of 10 million. No coordinated measures yet taken to direct stream of refugees into specific regions or provide food and shelter.

"... serious danger of epidemic of such great proportion as to menace all Europe, including our troops, and to probability of mass starvation on an unprecedented scale." (National Archives, Record Group 165, Record of the War Department TSOPD Message File, Telegram No. S 28399 of October 18, 1945)

Eisenhower's words have a lot of meaning for me, my mother and grandmother.  We were there, and survived only by the narrowest of margins. In fact, the work "miracle" comes to mind, and I had more close calls in Breslau, long after the Second World War had suposedly ended, than I would have many years later, as advisory team leader of a Montagnard company north of Kontum, and an ARVN battalion at Trung Lap, at the edge of the "Iron Triangle" of Vietnam.

Unfortunately, Eisenhower had also been one of the architects of the infamous "Morgenthau Plan", named after President Roosevelt's friend, Henry C. Morgenthau, who was then Secretary of the Treasury. On August 7, 1944, Eisenhower, during a lunch with Morgenthau and Harry C. White, said that he felt the people of Germany had been guilty of supporting their regime, and that he would like to "see things made good and hard for them for a while". Morgenthau said that it was necessary to reduce the military-industrial strength of Germany for ever.

The basic plan was to wreck or confiscate all important German industry, converting the country into one huge farm, while at the same time destroying the fertilizer plants on which German agriculture depended. It would also cut Germany into pieces, and allot a huge piece of territory to the Poles and Soviets. (Alfred Grosser, The Colossus Again: West Germany from Defeat to Rearmament - London: Allen &Unwin, 1955, page 18).

Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, told Churchill at Quebec: "You can't do this. After all, you and I have publicly said quite the opposite", Churchill replied: "Now I hope, Anthony, that you are not going to do anything about this with the war cabinet if you see a chance..." Eden also said that he and Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State, were both horrified at the plan. (Quoted in John Morton Blum, Roosevelt and Morgenthau, p. 591)

Hull knew, along with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, that the Morgenthau Plan would mean the deaths of some twenty million Germans by starvation and exposure.

To the detriment of American and other Allied soldiers, the plan was leaked, and this enabled the German Propaganda Minister to whip up the fighting spirit of the German Armed Forces, assuring the deaths of untold thousands of Allied soldiers. The German forces were no longer fighting to preserve the German borders, but were now desperately struggling to avoid Allied genocide against their families.

James Baque's excellent book is called "Crimes and Mercies", but, on balance, the crimes were official policy by a few insane Allied government officials, while the mercies were solely the work of a few Allied soldiers in whom their common sense of humanity with a defeated enemy surmounted the bitter hatreds of war.

As soon as Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, General Eisenhower sent an urgent message throughout the huge area that he commanded, making it a crime punishable by death for German civilians to feed prisoners, or gather food with the intention to feed them. To quote from the actual order, pages 42-43: ..."Those who violate this command and attempt to circumvent this blockade by permitting food to reach the prisoners incur the risk of being shot". One U.S. Army officer who was familiar with the order wrote that it was the intention of the army command to exterminate as many prisoners as possible in the US Zone between May 1945 and the end of 1947, without being exposed to international scrutiny. As a condition of his testimony, he insisted that the author James Bacque not publish his name.

However, Martin Brech, who was a guard at Andernach, where 50,000 to 60,000 German soldiers were starving in 1945, said that he was told by an officer that "it is our policy that these men not be fed. The men were living without shelter in holes in the ground, trying to nourish themselves on grass. Dr. Brech, now a retired professor of philosophy at Mercy College in New York, was told that he would be shot, if he tried once again to smuggle food to these men. As time passed at Andernach, he saw bodies leaving the camp in a continuing stream of trucks.

The French were no better: In July, 1945, Agnes Spira was shot and killed next to her children by French soldiers at Dietersheim, for trying to smuggle a basket of food to the imprisoned soldiers.

Hans Scharf, an American soldier at Bad Kreuznach, watched as the wife of an imprisoned German soldier approached the fence of the prison camp with her two small children, carrying a wine bottle. When she asked a guard to give this to her husband, he drank the bottle, then shot her husband, who had approached the fence, in front of his wife and children.

In 1966, excavations at Lambach in Austria revealed an 80x80 meter mass grave.  The evidence strongly suggests that these were German prisoners of war of the Americans. In 1945 there were three American-run camps in the area, one at Hofau, the others at Kuhweide and Grueberfeld. An expert recommended by the Austrian Miistry of the Interior certified that these men, with ages between 19 and 22, were all German prisoners of war .

It seems that the subject of Allied war crimes is a sensitive subject, on which the German population is best kept in ignorance: The West German farmer Otto Tullius was prevented by the German police from digging in his own land for evidence pertaining to a former American/French camp. Of course, finding such clear evidence of Allied atrocities might be detrimental to German business interests. In the scheme of things, that will always be more important than truth or justice. (Crimes and Mercies, James Bacque, Warner Books, 1997, pages 44-46.)

There is a lot more, in fact too much documentation of Allied atrocities, which James Baque has so painstakingly researched, so if you really want the truth about World War II, I recommend that you buy his book.  If you truly want peace, you must first understand the truth about war. It's an extremely wretched business, and there is no glory in it, and it is a destroyer of all that is civilized in us.

For the sake of our immortal souls, more must yet be said by those who saw them die. Each age must fight this force again - or pay its price!

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The War Prayer, by Mark Twain

A Brilliant Light During the "Dark Ages":

There was a time, in the the century, when Sicily was a model of multi-ethnic harmony. Once the home of Phoenician traders and Greek colonists long before Rome was a world power, Norman adventurers and German knights walked among the vineyards and orchards of this sundrenched land. While futile crusades brought misfortune to generations of European invaders of the middle east, these lords of Sicily depended on Arab treasurers for a faithful accounting of their substantial wealth.

The German king Frederick had been a mighty crusader in the Holy Land, and he had died there. His son, Frederick Hohenstaufen, the ruler of Sicily, had been raised at the Vatican by Pope Innocent. In return for permitting the unity of Sicily with his father's kingdom in Germany, he had agreed to embark on a crusade, following in the footsteps of his renowned father.

Frederick was crowned in Rome right before the news of a disastrous crusade against Egypt reached the shores of Italy. After corresponding with Al Kamil, the Moslem ruler of much of the Middle East, Frederick travelled to the Holy Land with a relatively small force, entered into Jerusalem peacefully, and declared the city open to both the Moslem and Christian religions. At a banquet in Jerusalem with the Moslem amirs, he announced that this would be the beginning of a peace between Moslems and Christians, and he trusted that the friendship between these two great religions would be as lasting as in Sicily. A ten year truce with the Sultan ended the cycle of violence in the Holyland for a longer time than it seems possible in our "modern" era. Frederick was crowned King of Jerusalem in 1229. He died in 1250AD.

Today, many historians define the "Middle Ages" as the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, ending at the close of the 15th century. We also have called the time between the 5th to the 11th or 13th century as the "dark ages", referring to the intellectual stagnation during that period. If such harmony among the world's religions was possible during the so called "dark ages", what designation will future historians give our current period of perpetual war for perpetual peace?

Ethnic Cleansing? None for me, please!

So, where do I stand? What can we do now, many years after my grandparent, parents, and I, were, like millions of other Germans, the innocent victims of ethnic cleansing. Puleeease! Don't give me any crap about "my" guilt, when I was one year old, for the crimes that the Germans committed during the dark days of their history. The crimes of the "allies" were just as great, the body count of the murdered much greater, but their crimes have been almost totally deleted from all school text books, and almost completely eliminated from the realm from which most draw their information. On the other hand, the innocence of most citizens of the Allied countries which were involved in these atrocities is just as great as those of those countries officially designated as evil by the prevailing powers that be.

I accept no blame, nor do I blame any of the citizens of other nations for their many, though poorly documented crimes against myself, including deliberately caused malnutrition, the wholesale rape and murder of our relatives and neighbors.

My family and I were not given the opportunity to leave Breslau, until the British rescued us from almost certain death, by exchanging us for Polish citizens in West Germany. During one of her walks to work at the railway station, my mother witnessed the savage beating, mostly with rifle butts, of a young German soldier, who tried to leave by hiding on the roof of a freight car, by Russians and Poles. (She had stopped and watched for a few moments, mesmerized by the bloody scene, until she was struck more gently with the butt of another rifle, and ordered to move on, tears streaming down her face.)

Any attempt to take revenge becomes ever more futile with the passage of time, since the intended targets of such action are completely innocent of the times of their forefathers, and any such effort itself becomes a crime against humanity.

Instead, we must:

1. Listen earnestly to those who preach ethnic hatred, and then work to confine them in a properly secured insane asylum. If those who preach war claim to be religious leaders, especially if they claim to be Christians, ask that they take a few moments to read the New Testament.

If you have been supporting these "religious" impostors financially, stop this ridiculous waste of your financial resources immediately, and persuade your friends to do likewise. In other words, eliminate the profits of these false prophets. There is hope even for them: When their funds begin to dwindle, they will begin to think, to reflect; they might even read, and a few of them may eventually "see the light".

2. Listen carefully to those who continue to preach war, and work to confine them to a mental institution or a maximum security prison. If these evil persons happen to be members of a "legally constituted" government, that may be difficult, but it is certainly worth a try.

3. Before each government recommended war, find out as much as possible about our government's advertised enemy de-jour: Their culture and value system, their religion. Read translations of their writers and poets and see if there isn't a lot you have in common with them. Use the internet to ask questions of the very real people on the other side, and then ask yourself, whether you would be prepared to continue your communication with them over the open sight of an automatic rifle, or whether you wouldn't rather do so over the internet.

I can assure you from personal observation, that the former tend to be relatively brief, beginning with: "Halt, who goes there", usually ends with a bang, and not much meaningful philosophy tends to be exchanged during that experience. I call this the "big bang" theory of philosphy, and it tends to be counterproductive to mutual understanding.