Just back from Auschwitz.....

Morlar

I don't agree there is any kind of hirearchy between those targetted based on race, nationality, social class or religion. These people were also targetted based on ethnicity ;


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3664526/How-three-million-Germans-died-after-VE-Day.html

How three million Germans died after VE Day

12:01AM BST 18 Apr 2007

Comment

Nigel Jones reviews After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Airlift by Giles MacDonogh

Giles MacDonogh is a bon viveur and a historian of wine and gastronomy, but in this book, pursuing his other consuming interest - German history - he serves a dish to turn the strongest of stomachs. It makes particularly uncomfortable reading for those who compare the disastrous occupation of Iraq unfavourably to the post-war settlement of Germany and Austria.

MacDonogh argues that the months that followed May 1945 brought no peace to the shattered skeleton of Hitler's Reich, but suffering even worse than the destruction wrought by the war. After the atrocities that the Nazis had visited on Europe, some degree of justified vengeance by their victims was inevitable, but the appalling bestialities that MacDonogh documents so soberly went far beyond that. The first 200 pages of his brave book are an almost unbearable chronicle of human suffering.

His best estimate is that some three million Germans died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities. A million soldiers vanished before they could creep back to the holes that had been their homes. The majority of them died in Soviet captivity (of the 90,000 who surrendered at Stalingrad, only 5,000 eventually came home) but, shamingly, many thousands perished as prisoners of the Anglo-Americans. Herded into cages along the Rhine, with no shelter and very little food, they dropped like flies. Others, more fortunate, toiled as slave labour in a score of Allied countries, often for years. Incredibly, some Germans were still being held in Russia as late as 1979.

The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide - and mass murder.

Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh - for the first time in English - is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. The survivors of this ethnic cleansing, naked and shivering, were pitched across the border, never to return to their homes. Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia and East Prussia as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.

Given that what amounted to a lesser Holocaust was unfolding under their noses, it may be asked why the western Allies did not stop this venting of long-dammed-up rage on the (mainly) innocent. MacDonogh's answer is that it could all have been even worse. The US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, favoured turning Germany into a gigantic farm, and there were genocidal Nazi-like schemes afoot to starve, sterilise or deport the population of what was left of the bombed-out cities.

The discovery of the Nazi death camps stoked Allied fury, with General George Patton asking an aide amid the horrors of Buchenwald: 'Do you still find it hard to hate them?' But the surviving inmates were soon replaced by German captives - Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and even Auschwitz stayed in business after the war, only now with the Germans behind the wire.

It was Realpolitik, not humanitarian concern, that caused a swift shift in western attitudes towards their former foes. Fear of Communism spreading into the heart of Europe, and the barbarities of the Russians - who kidnapped and killed hundreds of their perceived enemies from the western zones of Berlin and Vienna - belatedly made the West realise that they had beaten one totalitarian power only to be threatened by another.

Even that hardline Kraut-hater Patton was sacked for advocating a pre-emptive strike against Russia. Building up West Germany and saving Berlin from Soviet strangulation with the 1948 airlift became the first battles of the Cold War - even if that meant overlooking Nazi crimes and enlisting Nazi criminals in the 'economic miracle' of reconstruction.

Although MacDonogh roundly condemns all the occupying powers, the British emerge with some credit. Apart from one Air Marshal who looted art treasures; and an MI5 interrogator nicknamed 'Tin Eye' Stephens who ran a private torture chamber, British hands may have been grubby, but were not deeply blood-stained. British squaddies preferred to purchase their sex privately with a packet of fags or a pair of nylons, rather than in the Soviet style.

MacDonogh has written a gruelling but important book. This unhappy story has long been cloaked in silence since telling it suited no one. Not the Allies, because it placed them near the moral nadir of the Nazis; nor the Germans, because they did not wish to be accused of whitewashing Hitler by highlighting what was, by any standard, a war crime. Giles MacDonogh has told a very inconvenient truth.

______________________


http://jta.org/news/article/2011/02/17/2743020/jewish-leaders-condemn-memorial-day-for-expelled-germans


Jewish leaders slam memorial day for expelled Germans

February 17, 2011

BERLIN (JTA) -- Jewish leaders and political groups in Germany condemned a proposed national day of remembrance for the 12 million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II.

The proposal was to be heard in parliament Thursday.

Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told reporters that "One could almost call [the proposal] a kind of retaliation" against remembrance of the victims of German war crimes.

The governing political coalition parties -- the conservative Christian Democratic Union, its sister party the Christian Social Union, and the center-right Free Democratic Party -- proposed the annual memorial day for Aug. 5. On that day in 1950, the association of Germans from the annexed regions signed a Charter of German Expellees in which they "renounce revenge and retaliation."

According to news reports, the parties argued that the memorial day would not dissociate the expulsion of ethnic Germans from German responsibility for the war and for war crimes, but they said it was time that the stigmatization in Germany of expellees and their descendants come to an end.

Opposition political leaders and a group of historians have condemned the proposal as revisionist and avoiding German guilt.

Kramer said such a memorial day could have a "catastrophic effect" on Germany's image abroad.

The president of the League of German Expellees, Erika Steinbach, told Deutsche Welle that the 1950 charter was about the expellees "overcoming their own justified resentment to say that they wanted to look forward and bring about a peaceful coexistence in Europe."

She said she expected "the sympathy of the German state ... for the particular fate of a substantial part of the German people."

Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, called the proposal "a disgraceful distortion of history and
an abuse of truth and memory."

"In reality, ethnic Germans who colonized Eastern Europe during World War II were the unbridled instruments of the brutal Nazi plans for the conquest and plunder of Europe. They served as agents of an evil design," Steinberg said in a statement.

"To link their commemoration to the 1950 Charter of Expellees, which expresses no contrition for the victims of the Nazis, mocks the memory of all who were brutalized by the Hitler regime, Jew and non-Jew," he said.

jonniebgood1

Morlar wrote: »

I don't agree there is any kind of hirearchy between those targetted based on race, nationality, social class or religion. These people were also targetted based on ethnicity ;

In the case of your example the Germans were targeted not because of their ethnicity, rather they were targeted because of their association with the crimes of the Nazi/ Wehrmacht. This type of vengeance was openly encouraged by all allied sides, particularly Russia as they approached central Europe. It was also fuelled by dicovery of the camps.
Their ethnic background and nationality may have held them together as a target group (i.e. made them recognisable) but was not the reason for them being targetted.

Morlar

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

...they were targeted because of their association with the crimes of the Nazi/ Wehrmacht.

12, 000,000 ethnic Germans living across eastern europe who were ethnically cleansed were not responsible for the nsdap or Wehrmacht, nor were the millions of 'missing'. They were targetted based on their ethnicity. Their memorialisation is frowned upon in some quarters to this day for that very same reason.

jonniebgood1

Morlar wrote: »

12, 000,000 ethnic Germans living across eastern europe who were ethnically cleansed were not responsible for the nsdap or Wehrmacht, nor were the millions of 'missing'. They were targetted based on their ethnicity. Their memorialisation is frowned upon in some quarters to this day for that very same reason.

What happened them was terrible and they should be entitled to memorial without people casting aspersions on them for doing so. It is also true to say that not all of them would have supported or been responsible for the Nazi's or the Wehrmacht (nobody said this by the way). However to say that they were targeted solely on ethnic grounds is not true. The people who targetted them did so as revenge for the war time crimes against their own countries. Crimes that were uncovered in 1945 such as those at Auschwitz were used to fuel support for revenge attacks on the perceived perpetrators.
I think the distinction between killing as revenge as opposed to killing for ethnic reasons is important although it obviously is not a justification. For example a racist killing could be viewed differently than a revenge killing in court but both crimes would get a sentence.

Morlar

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

However to say that they were targeted solely on ethnic grounds is not true.

They were undoubtedly targeted on ethnic grounds.

Your attempts at equivocation notwithstanding there is no doubt whatsoever that they were solely targeted on the basis of their ethnicity.

As mentioned, their ethnicity is also the reason why their memorialisation is under attack.

Felim Uallachain

Shinners should have to go there and then justify why they allied themselves with the people who did that evil deed.

brianthebard

Felim Uallachain wrote: »

Shinners should have to go there and then justify why they allied themselves with the people who did that evil deed.

This is your only warning, stop stirring or you'll be banned. Mod.

dubbie82

I have visited the place about 2 years ago while I was traveling around the area.
I have heard stories about Auschwitz before and how it was pushed as a tourist attraction and you can buy souvenir mugs etc. I was glad this was not the case at all.
I was prepared, knowing the history and all that but what got to me was the thousands of baby and children shoes that were collected in the last weeks before the liberation of the camp. Also there was a mountain of womens hair. I don't think that sight leaves anyone untouched.

You can't just wander around on your own but are part of a small group with a guide and our guide was very good. She mentioned a lot of facts and stories that are not generally known.

After the visit at the camps I just wanted to go home and have a long shower, I felt like I could smell death. It's hard to describe but I heard a lot of people saying the same thing after beeing there.