German Atrocities in Poland - WW2

[Thorum]

"The German police organised a roundup in the streets of Lublin and held a number of young Polish girls and women. After a medical examination the unfortunates were led to a barracks, where they were violated one after another by young German pilots who had arrived at Lublin after completing their training at Swidnik camp."

Excerpt from "The German New Order in Poland" (http://felsztyn.tripod.com/germaninvasion/id4.html); published for the Polish Ministry of Information by Hutchinson & Co., London, in late 1941. The period covered by the book is September, 1939 to June, 1941. It is the follow-up volume to the original publication "The German Invasion of Poland"

[Conservationist]

published for the Polish Ministry of Information

I'm sure it is unbiased then!

[Hors]

No, the only source of reliable information is Dr. Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda!

[Lenny]

"The German police organised a roundup in the streets of Lublin and held a number of young Polish girls and women. After a medical examination the unfortunates were led to a barracks, where they were violated one after another by young German pilots who had arrived at Lublin after completing their training at Swidnik camp."

Excerpt from "The German New Order in Poland" (http://felsztyn.tripod.com/germaninvasion/id4.html); published for the Polish Ministry of Information by Hutchinson & Co., London, in late 1941. The period covered by the book is September, 1939 to June, 1941. It is the follow-up volume to the original publication "The German Invasion of Poland"

Without any further knowledge on this matter, I'd only say that believing every word written about Germans coming out of London publishers in "late 1941" is not the wisest of things to do.

[Lenny]

According to the link, the alleged events took place in 1940 or 1941, as best I can tell.

I guess the most obvious question is:
How would the Polish government-in-exile in London know about any of these things happening long after they were gone? All of their reports seem to involve second and third hand stories, of questionable origin. Repeated references are made to unnamed and uncited and unverifiable "reports that are circulating".

This is exactly how the gas-chambers stories got started, btw. "Black rumors" began circulating for various reasons (partly Jewish angst about their captivity and a fear of showers by the least-Westernized of the captive Jews [the brilliant book "The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes" deals with this; the gas chamber myth has an interesting deep cultural origin among European Jewry]). These "reports" were wildly amplified by yellow-journalists and used to rally people against Germany. "Mass-killings at Dachau gas chambers" were regularly published by news-outlets in the USA and Britain during the hysteria of the war. When we actually liberated Dachau and the Germans had surrendered, slowly we investigated and found out that nothing of the kind had happened there. No similar investigation ever occurred/was-publicized 1945-1970s in the new Sovet puppet of Poland [which hosts Auschwitz, etc]. (In the 1980s and 1990s a few researchers began doing tests and they too discovered that the gassings stories were a hoax in those camps; exactly like the Dachau stories).

[Tabiti]

"Lapanka" or abducting people straight from the streets of Poland was a fact as far as I know from a Polish friend of mine, whose grandfather (not jewish!) was put in working camp that way.

However, he survived and had never seen or heard something about gas chambers...

[Rainraven]

Without any further knowledge on this matter, I'd only say that believing every word written about Germans coming out of London publishers in "late 1941" is not the wisest of things to do.

Perhaps it is not wise, but then it was during wartime. Is it that surprising to think the Germans invaded a town, took the women and raped them?

[Thorum]

Perhaps it is not wise, but then it was during wartime. Is it that surprising to think the Germans invaded a town, took the women and raped them?

I don't doubt the story and am surprised others think it impossible and completely false.

I bet that virtually every country involved in WW2 participated in events such as the above mentioned.

[SwordoftheVistula]

I don't doubt the story and am surprised others think it impossible and completely false.

I bet that virtually every country involved in WW2 participated in events such as the above mentioned.

The German (also American and British) military was pretty well disciplined not to do such things. Russian and Japanese are the only ones where I have seen evidence of organized mass rapes.

[Tabiti]

On the other hand the German army had brothels with voluntary prostitutes where all was under full control.
I don't know why would they risk with women picked from the streets after all?

[Loki]

I don't know why would they risk with women picked from the streets after all?

In those days AIDS was not an issue, so no risk really. German soldiers were no angels, on the contrary.

[Tabiti]

In those days AIDS was not an issue, so no risk really. German soldiers were no angels, on the contrary.
I don't say they were, especially in Poland and USSR, but the main purpose of the "official" borders was to prevent the high risk of veneral diseases.
Rape was a crime according to the German military laws and prosecuted as a crime, although some happenings and certain circumstances in USSR show different picture.

[Loki]

I don't say they were, especially in Poland and USSR, but the main purpose of the "official" borders was to prevent the high risk of veneral diseases.
Rape was a crime according to the German military laws and prosecuted as a crime, although some happenings and certain circumstances in USSR show different picture.

I just think it is a bit naive to paint the picture of the well-behaved, gentlemanly, ubermensch Nazi soldier, as opposed to barbaric untermensch nature of the opposing forces. Sounds like Goebbels propaganda. :D

[Tabiti]

There are no gentlemen in war time!

[Loki]

There are no gentlemen in war time!

Sadly, true. :(

Fact of the matter is many of the Germans who lived after the Thirty Years War, were themselves the progeny of wartime rapes from Croats, Spaniards, Swedes, etc. I think this is one of the reasons why there is a dark element present in post-1700 Germany. The so-called Westische rasse (http://www.theapricity.com/earlson/race/rassen.htm), is just one of the types that was never originally German before 1618.

I'm digressing, but it's something to think about. :wink

[Tabiti]

I don't think exactly rapes are the main reasons of gene mixing, because here almost all babies conceived that way were killed either in the womb or the cradle (sounds cruel but stories of beheaded babies are fact!), so I suppose it was the same around Europe. Abortion isn't a new invention, used only by guilty teens or "buisness women".
However, in war time prostitution for survival occurs or even romantic relationships, which are most likely to get their contribution to new subracial types...Lonely women + lonely men - the border between the occupier and the occupied gets so thin...

[Loki]

I don't think exactly rapes are the main reasons of gene mixing, because here almost all babies conceived that way were killed either in the womb or the cradle (sounds cruel but stories of beheaded babies are fact!), so I suppose it was the same around Europe. Abortion isn't a new invention, used only by guilty teens or "buisness women".
However, in war time prostitution for survival occurs or even romantic relationships, which are most likely to get their contribution to new subracial types...Lonely women + lonely men - the border between the occupier and the occupied gets so thin...

In the Thirty Years War a lot of foreign blood entered the German gene pool. This is a historical fact. There were not many German males left after the war to procreate with the women, and many offspring who lived on were the progeny of wartime rapes. This is was not equally distributed, and worse in some areas. Least affected was northern Germany. And today, northern Germany is where you will find the most blondes still -- the original Germanic phenotype. Of course the Thirty Years War is not the sole reason for this. In southern Germany the population substratum was to a large degree non-Germanic in any way, and more brunet than the north as a result. Especially Bavaria. And don't even mention Transylvanian "Saxons". :wink

[RoyBatty]

The German (also American and British) military was pretty well disciplined not to do such things. Russian and Japanese are the only ones where I have seen evidence of organized mass rapes.

Is this comedy hour? :laugh: :speechless-smiley-0

[Thorum]

Actually, it was the Jews who were behind all the rapes in WW2....

[RoyBatty]

War is an ugly and messy business, full stop. There are no "good guys" in wars. Whatever your history teacher, library or Hollywood taught you.... forget it.

There are winners. They write the history books containing all the wonderful "facts" about "what really happened".

There are losers. They get bent over backwards.

[Hors]

On the other hand the German army had brothels with voluntary prostitutes where all was under full control.
I don't know why would they risk with women picked from the streets after all?

Was the Auswitz camp voluntary too?

[RoyBatty]

From what the experts are telling us today WW2 was a voluntary international contest presided over by gentlemen playing by the Queensbury rules of Honourable Warfare.

That is... all were gentlemen except for the "Russian" untermenschen (naturally the non-Russian Soviets were civilised) and the "Japanese".

Did Spielberg or Disney just release another film? All this confusion, there must be a reason for it?? :confused: :laugh:

[Sarmata]

I didn't heard about mass rapes in 2WW period in Poland:eek:, "only" about mass execution of civilians:rolleyes:...About "Łapanka"- catching people from the street, it was a fact, cause Germans needs workers in their factories etc. Well my grandmother(from my mother side) was sent to Germany(to hard works), cause her own cousin(she were in relationship with German officier) denounced that she spoken Polish in her house(Remember, that after German victory, Silesians were considered as Germans for 3 Reich) ...

[chap]

http://www.detecting.org.uk/html/Gold_of_the_Oradour-sur-Glane_Massacre.html


On June 10 the 1st battalion of the Waffen-SS (Der Führer) regiment, led by Sturmbannführer Otto Dickmann, encircled the town of Oradour-sur-Glane and ordered all the inhabitants to congregate in a public fairground near the village centre, ostensibly to examine people's papers. All the women and children were taken to the church, while the village was looted. Meanwhile, the men were taken to six barns where machine gun nests were already in place. According to the account of a survivor, the soldiers began shooting at them, aiming for their legs so that they would die more slowly. Once the victims were no longer able to move, the soldiers covered their bodies with kindling and set the barns on fire. Only five men escaped; 197 died there.

Having finished with the men, the soldiers then entered the church and put an incendiary device in place. After it was ignited, the surviving women and children tried to flee from the doors and windows but were met with machine gun fire. Only one woman survived; another 240 women and 205 children died in the mayhem. Another small group of about twenty villagers had fled Oradour as soon as the soldiers appeared. That night the remainder of the village was razed. A few days later the survivors were allowed to bury the dead.

[RoyBatty]

There's a Soviet film called Idi I Smotry (Come and see) which deals with this topic in Belarus.

[The Lawspeaker]

The German (also American and British) military was pretty well disciplined not to do such things. Russian and Japanese are the only ones where I have seen evidence of organized mass rapes.


Soon after the US marines landed, all the women of a village on Motobu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motobu) Peninsula fell into the hands of American soldiers. At the time, there were only women, children and old people in the village, as all the young men had been mobilized for the war. Soon after landing, the marines "mopped up" the entire village, but found no signs of Japanese forces. Taking advantage of the situation, they started "hunting for women" in broad daylight and those who were hiding in the village or nearby air raid shelters were dragged out one after another
Source (http://books.google.com/books?id=4qdLb-LKtpgC&pg=PA112&dq=raped+okinawa&lr=&sig=SHjXgvBF78U67PL23j-pKaXMDJ0#PPA111,M1)




"rape was so prevalent that most Okinawans over age 65 either know or have heard of a woman who was raped in the aftermath of the war."
Source (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/01/world/3-dead-marines-and-a-secret-of-wartime-okinawa.html?scp)



And also after the war it didn't stop:




The criminalization of prostitution and brothels also lead to mass rapes in the spring of 1946.On April 4, 50 GIs broke into a hospital in Omori prefecture and raped 77 women, including a woman who had just given birth. It is also reported that the woman's baby was killed during the assault. On April 11, forty US soldiers cut phone lines to a housing block in Nagoya city, and simultaneously raped "many girls and women between the ages of 10 and 55 years."[28] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Japan#cite_note-autogenerated1-27)


More about it can be found on Wikipedia "Occupation of Japan" and here (http://japanfocus.org/-Terese-Svoboda/2737)
Not just Americans did and do it- (the latest rape cases are still ungoing), the Australians were little better:



Allan Clifton, an Australian officer who acted as interpreter and criminal investigator wrote:
"I stood beside a bed in hospital. On it lay a girl, unconscious, her long, black hair in wild tumult on the pillow. A doctor and two nurses were working to revive her. An hour before she had been raped by twenty soldiers. We found her where they had left her, on a piece of waste land. the hospital was in Hiroshima (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima). The girl was Japanese. The soldiers were Australians.The Moaning and wailing had ceased and she was quiet now. The tortured tension on her face had slipped away, and the soft brown skin was smooth and unwrinkled, stained with tears like the face of a child that has cried herself to sleep.I will not speak about the horrific crimes the Imperial Japanese Army has committed all over the place- like in the Rape of Nanking or the way in which they treated the citizens of the Philippines or the western women that were sexually enslaved as comfort women- but the Allies were definitely little better.

[SwordoftheVistula]

I will not speak about the horrific crimes the Imperial Japanese Army has committed all over the place- like in the Rape of Nanking or the way in which they treated the citizens of the Philippines or the western women that were sexually enslaved as comfort women- but the Allies were definitely little better.

Now that's ridiculous-compare the harsh treatments and being worked to death in the Japanese and Soviet POW camps to the US, where POWs were well fed, well treated, and even allowed to wander around the countryside to some extent. There's tons of stories floating around like this:

http://www.traces.org/encounters.html#byronholcomb
Byron Holcomb

bylaw@aol.com

It was D-Day, June 6, 1944, and everyone was in downtown Fairmont, Minnesota to find out together how the boys were doing on the beaches of Normandy and to share and comfort each other in the worry over it all. Some had sons, grandsons and relatives there. The merchants had placed radios above entry doors to hear the continuing news coverage, and semi-circles of hundreds of people stood outside together at each store. I was nine at the time. Those boys were our heroes, believe me! In front of Paulson’s Drug Store I looked at the man to my right along with his buddies--a German soldier, in uniform, listening as intently as the rest of us. I nudged him with my elbow and defiantly chided him with my finger thumping on my chest, “I am Byron.” He nodded quickly and responded without gesture, “Jerry.” Whether that was his name or the reference to Germans, I did not know. A solitary tear effortlessly flowed down his cheek. A German soldier crying--what is this? “Jerry” was one of the remnants of Rommel’s fierce Afrika Korps brought in regiment strength as POWs to do the work of Fairmont while her sons were away. He wanted to know like everyone else that day what was happening. Enough people in Fairmont spoke German to keep them advised. The war had come down to the two of us on this momentous day, and there I stood next to the enemy ready to defend Fairmont against them, even at my age! I will never forget "Jerry” and that moment.

Enemy soldiers in uniform, walking around freely in the heartland, hanging out at the local drug store listening to the radio! You'd be very hard pressed to find any country in any war, before or since, which gave this sort of treatment to enemy POWs.

[RoyBatty]

German POW's were treated harshly by the US and other Allies. Tens of thousands (if not more) died. The source of the quote below is from Rense. Of course there is no chance of the evidence being corroborated by Western History books. After all, "The Winner Writes History".




Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, who was given access to the
Eisenhower personal letters, states that he proposed to exterminate the
entire German General Staff, thousands of people, after the war.

Eisenhower, in his personal letters, did not merely hate the Nazi Regime,
and the few who imposed its will down from the top, but that HE HATED THE
GERMAN PEOPLE AS A RACE. It was his personal intent to destroy as many of
them as he could, and one way was to wipe out as many prisoners of war as
possible.

Of course, that was illegal under International law, so he issued an order
on March 10, 1945 and verified by his initials on a cable of that date, that
German Prisoners of War be predesignated as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" called
in these reports as DEF. He ordered that these Germans did not fall under
the Geneva Rules, and were not to be fed or given any water or medical
attention. The Swiss Red Cross was not to inspect the camps, for under the
DEF classification, they had no such authority or jurisdiction.

Months after the war was officially over, Eisenhower's special German DEF
camps were still in operation forcing the men into confinement, but denying
that they were prisoners. As soon as the war was over, General George Patton
simply turned his prisoners loose to fend for themselves and find their way
home as best they could. Eisenhower was furious, and issued a specific order
to Patton, to turn these men over to the DEF camps. Knowing Patton as we do
from history, we know that these orders were largely ignored, and it may
well be that Patton's untimely and curious death may have been a result of
what he knew about these wretched Eisenhower DEF camps.

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."

It is known, that the Allies had sufficient stockpiles of food and medicine
to care for these German soldiers. This was deliberately and intentionally
denied them. Many men died of gangrene from frostbite due to deliberate
exposure. Local German people who offered these men food, were denied.
General Patton's Third Army was the only command in the European Theater to
release significant numbers of Germans.



Then we get to the USA and UK's deliberate starvation of German civilians from around 1945 - 1946, the Morgenthau plan etc.



In a plan devised by U.S. secretary of the treasury Henry C. Morgenthau Jr., the Allies "pastoralized" Germany. They slashed production of oil, tractors, steel and other products that had been essential to the war effort. They cut fertilizer production by 82 per cent. They undervalued German exports (which they controlled), depriving Germans of cash needed to buy food. And a large percentage of young male workers were kept in forced-labour camps for years. During the six months following the end of the war, Germany's industrial production fell by 75 per cent.

The loss of so much fertile land and the drop in fertilizer supplies caused agricultural production to fall by 65 per cent. Sixty million people began to starve in their huge prison.

The mass explusions from one part of Germany to another, approved at the Allied victory conference in Potsdam in July and August, 1945, were enforced "with the very maximum of brutality," wrote British writer and philantropist Victor Gollancz in his book, Our Threatened Values (1946). Canadian writer and TV producer Robert Allen, in an article titled "Letter From Berlin", in Reading magazine (February, 1946), described the scene in a Berlin railway station as refugees arrived in late 1945: "They were all exhausted and starved and miserable.... A child only half alive... A woman in the most terrible picture of despair I've seen... Even when you see it, it's impossible to believe....God, it was terrible."

In the West, the plan to dismantle German industrial capacity began at the British headquarters of General Dwight Eisenhower in August, 1944. Meeting with Mr. Morgenthau, Gen. Eisenhower prescribed a treatment for Germany that would be "good and hard," giving as his reason that "the whole German population is a synthetic paranoid."

Mr. Morgenthau took a written version of their discussion to U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill when the two met in Quebec City in September, 1944. British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, U.S. secretary of Cordell Hull and the U.S. secretary for war Henry L. Stimson all protested vigorously against the Morgenthau Plan because a pastoralized Germany could not feed itself. Mr. Hull and Mr. Stimson told Roosevelt that about 20 million Germans would die if the plan were implemented.

Most historians say the Morgenthau Plan was abandoned after the protests, but Mr. Morgenthau himself said it was implemented.

In the New York Post for Nov. 24, 1947, he wrote, "The Morgenthau Plan for Germany [...] became part of the Potsdam Agreement, a solemn declaration of policy and undertaking for action... signed by the United States of America, Great Britain and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

I first happened on the outlines of this story while researching my 1989 book Other Losses, about the mass deaths of German prisoners of war in Allied camps. For 45 years, historians have never disputed a massive survey conducted over four years by the government of chancellor Konrad Adenauer, which stated that some 1.4 million German prisoners had died in captivity. What is still disputed by the two sides is how many died in each side's camps. Each has blamed the other for nearly all the deaths.

The fall of the Soviet empire in 1989 provided a spectacular test of the truth: If the KGB archives recorded how many Germans died in Soviet camps, the world would know how many died in the West.

In 1992, I went to the KGB archives in Moscow, where I was permitted to troll the long, gloomy aisles, free to read and photocopy anything I wanted. And there I found the reports from KGB Colonel I. Bulanov and others showing that 450,600 Germans had died in Soviet camps. Given the figure of 1.4 million deaths, this meant that close to one million had died in Western camps.

In addition, the KGB records show that the Soviets had also imprisoned hundreds of thousands of civilians, of whom many thousands died.

This was the shadow of a greater tragedy, the fate of German civilians.

The recent declassification of the Robert Murphy Papers at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, California, and the Robert Patterson manuscript papers in Washington focused the picture. Mr. Murphy had been chief U.S. diplomatic adviser in Germany, and Mr. Patterson the secretary for war after 1945.

Some of Mr. Murphy's papers show a catastrophic death rate in Germany, highlighted by a surprising comment by Mr. Murphy in discussing German demographics. He said in a State Department position paper in 1947 that the U.S. statistical projection of births, immigration and officially reported deaths showed that over the next three years the German population should be 71 million, but that "to be conservative and in view of the present high death rate in Germany, a figure of 69 million will be used." In other words, Mr. Murphy was basing high-level U.S. policy on the knowledge that the actual German death rate was approximately double the rate officially reported to Washington by the U.S. military governor.

In the National Archives in Ottawa, I found a document seized by Canadians in 1946, showing a death rate in the city of Brilon in north-central Germany almost triple the total reported by the Allies for their zones of Germany in 1945-46. The U.S. Army medical officer in Germany secretly reported that the actual death rate in the U.S. zone in May, 1946, was 21.4 per 1,000 per year, or 83 per cent higher than the military governor was reporting to Washington.

These documents in Ottawa, Moscow, Washington and Stanford, recently revealed or long neglected, show that the Allies not only destroyed most major German industry, they also reduced German food production to the point that Germans received less food for long periods during several years than the starving Dutch had received under German occupation.

"From 1945 to the middle of 1948, one saw the probable collapse, disintegration and destruction of a whole nation," These are not the words of a revisionist historian of the 1990s, but the sober judgment of a U.S. Navy medical officer on the scene. Captain Albert Behnke compared German and Dutch starvation: For months in parts of Germany, the ration set by the occupying Allies was 400 calories per day; in much of Germany it was often around 1,000, and officially for more than two years it was never more than 1,550. The Dutch always got more than 1,394.

And for his part in starving people in the Netherlands, Nazi commander Arthur Seyss-Inquart was hanged by the Allies.

A comparison of the German censuses of 1946 and 1950 show the effect of the food shortages. The 1950 census showed 5.7 million people fewer than there should have been according to the number of people recorded in the 1946 census, minus officially reported deaths, plus births and "immigrants" (people expelled from the east and returning prisoners) in the period from 1946 to 1950.


http://www.serendipity.li/hr/bacque01.htm

[RoyBatty]

Germans were "well fed and treated in US POW camps and under US / UK occupation".

That's a sick joke.

[SwordoftheVistula]

Germans were "well fed and treated in US POW camps and under US / UK occupation".

That's a sick joke.

It's very true. Unless you think these are all fictional people concocting BS stories decades after the war was over? There's no reason for these non-political people to concoct stories decades after the war was over.

Another one, not from a military book, but a random memoir of a farmwife who happened to live near one of the prison camps: (for point of reference, 'Don' is the author's husband and 'Mother Douglas' her mother in law)


from the book Eggs in the Coffee, Sheep in the Corn: My 17 Years as a Farmwife by Marjorie Myers Douglas (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1994; pages 55-62).

Once we had made the move to the farm in 1943, with the draft board’s approval, and settled into the unfamiliar routines, I had been able to keep the ugliness of the Second World War II at the back of my mind. Two summers later, however, all that changed. In the middle of haying, John—one of the older hired hands—left for higher wages. He was not very energetic, but that was hard to find when so many young men were in the service. We had kept this hired man through the winter to be sure of having someone to count on for the crop season. When we were unable to find a substitute for him, Don had to work early and late, more than he could sustain.

As the hot days and weeks followed, I kept wondering when the war would end and we could find help for Don and return to a more normal life. When that happened, I had heard, the town fathers planned to rename the streets of Appleton [Minnesota], as memorials to our boys who had already died in Europe and the Pacific. There was still a steady barrage of stories about the ferocity of the German people under Hitler. We presumed it was partly propaganda to bolster the war effort, but surely it must be based on something. Could there be truth to the dreadful tales of atrocities?

Don steadfastly refused to believe the rumors, saying, “They’re just people like us, trying to get along in the world.” But for me war was madness. Would I or my child someday have to lose a brother, husband, or son to war? Tucking Anne in for her afternoon nap, I gave her a lingering hug, rejoicing that she would never be called upon to carry a gun.

Resolutely, I put these unsettling thoughts out of my mind and hurried to make bread. I had just shaped six shiny, yeasty—smelling loaves when Don strode into the kitchen and grabbed the phone. He sank gratefully onto the chair, mystifying me with a brighter—than—usual smile. I knew he was bone weary. He had managed to cut and bale three hundred acres of the best upland hay—bluestem, redtop and bluegrass. Because he’d had no helper to do the stacking as he ran the baler, the oblong, sixty—five—pound bales of prime hay were left lying in the large field. Now ominous black clouds, gathering in the west, threatened this important feed crop.

I spread a faded blue tea towel over the loaves where the sunshine would help them rise, and I listened in growing bewilderment to his conversation.

“Am I talking to the officer in charge?” he asked. “Can you send me twenty of the prisoners tomorrow to stack hay bales—probably two days’ work? I’ll pay four dollars per man. By eight o’clock? And you’ll send a guard? And their food also? Sounds okay to me—tomorrow then.”

“What in the world? What prisoners?” I gasped as soon as he put the phone down.

“The mailman gave me the idea,” Don gloated. “Can you believe it? There are German prisoners of war in a temporary camp at Ortonville—just twenty miles away. We didn’t see it the day I drove you over there to Big Stone Lake. I’d never even heard of it. But they hire out the men to farms around here. I plan to get Bill Ahrens over to interpret. I’ll put a skid on the other tractor. Twenty prisoners as farm hands! We’re all set.”

This is farming? I thought. I knew about Germans. Growing up, I had been told how popular my father’s university classes in the German language had been—before World War I. Then few people dared study German. He had become an economist and also volunteered as a government “Dollar a Year Man,” scanning German-American periodicals for any hint of disloyalty or subversion. And in this war, while the fear of German Americans was lessened, the new weapons of war made the carnage unspeakable. All the hate talk came into focus. Mental pictures crowded back of butchered bodies on bloody battlefields. Headlines had screamed, “Air Raid Kills 1,500 Civilians,” “Barbarous Bombing,” “Polish City in Flames.” Spy posters of helmeted Germans with cat eyes warned: “HE’S WATCHING YOU.” I still carried a feeling of shock from a small item I’d read in the newspaper the year we moved to the farm. Apparently, a member of the President Roosevelt’s own party condoned anti-Semitism on the floor of the House and was not rebuked for it. While I seldom had time for the newspaper since coming to the farm, I still wondered at the power of prejudice, never guessing it would lead to the horrors of the Holocaust.

As everyone else was caught up in the tide of hatred and fear, I, too, felt myself shrink from having anything to do with the Germans. But no matter where my political thoughts took me, in farming I had learned to ask practical questions first. “Will they come to the house to eat? What time?” I asked Don.

My anxiety must have showed, for he pulled me down onto his lap. “For once, you don’t have to think of food. The camp will send it along.”

“Coffee?” I asked, noticing that his usual high color came back to his cheeks, smooth now since their annual peeling from sun and wind. I smiled as he pushed his fingers through his thick brown hair. I wished I’d known him when he’d been nicknamed Curly—the president of his high school class, a star in football, track and Glee Club.

“The camp manager says that everything is supplied. Just relax. When have I had a chance to say that to you before? Not since we moved to the farm,” Don laughed. “Enjoy it while you can. It will all work out,” he said and kissed me.

Somewhat reassured, I said “If only we’d get two more days of good weather before that storm hits.”

After I mentioned the weather, there was no hope of getting more information about the prisoners. He gave me a quick hug and hurried out with an anxious look at the darkening western sky.

As I set about cleaning up the kitchen, I could not get the German prisoners out of my mind. A temporary prisoner-of-war camp near Big Stone Lake, Don had said. If I had my geography right, this lake drained south into the Minnesota River. Thus the lake water joined little Pomme de Terre River, which looped through our pasture a mile south of the buildings. Men who had perhaps killed our own boys were living in custody that close to us. Too close, I thought. How could Don be so calm about them, and even plan to use them here!

Promptly at eight o’clock the next morning, the German prisoners arrived in a big pickup truck and were marched off to the west field in their rumpled, ill-fitting work clothes. I studied them from our kitchen window. They had none of the hangdog, discouraged look that I expected. Their youthfulness also surprised me. With a spring in their step, two led the way. Many were looking around curiously, as if taking mental note of an American stock farm. The guard’s eyes darted about, his gun ready. He seemed out of place—and yet reassuring. These were German soldiers, after all.

Marjorie Douglas' mother-in-law, "Mother Douglas"

Mother Douglas came up the lane to enjoy morning coffee with me. She was happily feeding applesauce to Anne when Don hurried in to report on the workers’ progress. He said he had taken a look at the small amount of cheese, bread and water provided for the noon meal and was appalled. “The guard argued when I told him to give the men this food at ten o’clock,” Don said. “He told me those weren’t his orders, but I said: ‘They’re working for me now, and it’s backbreaking work stacking those bales. They need plenty to eat.”‘ Don turned to me. “Can we rustle up some sandwiches for their dinner?”

Remembering his promise, I grinned and said nothing. He shrugged his shoulders helplessly, and I had to laugh. I was learning fast that everything on a farm revolves around food.

“Good for you, Son. We’ll manage something,” Mother Douglas reassured him. She smiled and glanced curiously at me, but said nothing more. Soon we were both busy preparing two big pork roasts for the oven. Her patrician face grew pink with her effort. Her cheerful energy and resourcefulness were never exhausted, and she had Don’s easy way of making the best of whatever happened.

Later, Don told me that he had bought cigarettes, and the men were delighted when he gave them each a pack at morning break. They sat or sprawled in the sweet-smelling hay. Many of them spoke fairly adequate English, though with a heavy guttural accent. They began to ask questions about the cost of machinery and land. A blond young man ventured that he would like to return to this country after the war was over. Several nodded in agreement.

A slight fellow, hardly more than a boy, said shyly, “The Americans, they sent Karl to work in town. For a mechanic. I was helper. We got wages. I learned and saved.”

Afterwards Don wondered whether they were perhaps better-fed and housed in the converted youth camps here than in Germany. We knew nothing of their former army conditions. Don had learned that the camps provided showers and recreation rooms, small libraries, and playing fields. There were even musical instruments, and some did wood carving. The men appeared to be in good health.

At noon he and Papa drove the pickup to the field with our lunch—hearty sandwiches of homemade bread with thick crusty slabs of the meat. We put in baskets of tomatoes with saltshakers, lots of coffee, and hot apple pie sweetened with Karo syrup—our wartime sugar substitute. The meal was a treat to the men, and they showed their appreciation by working faster than anyone would have expected.

The rows of finished haystacks grew slowly but steadily, and Don and Bill Ahrens covered them with sheets of neoprene and tied them down with rope. The clouds hung heavy in the sky, and the shirts of the men showed dark patches of sweat in the sultry heat. Don began to believe he had a chance to save most of the crop. Well over half of the field was finished when the huge Minneapolis- Moline tractor stopped abruptly. The men gathered around it. A small part in the carburetor had broken. Don made the familiar dash to town for a replacement, but he returned half an hour later to report that the part was unavailable. They would simply have to give up any idea of finishing today and continue to do the best they could with the big old International Harvester M.

Don Douglas with his children

The man called Karl stepped up and looked closely at the broken part. “A piece of sheet metal you have got?” he asked. “And a coarse file? A few minutes only I need. That old part, it cannot be fixed. But a new one, that is easy.”

He and Don hurried to the shop building crowded with tools and broken parts. Karl had been silent when some of the younger men had asked questions, but now as he worked he kept glancing at Don.

Suddenly he burst out, “I suppose you hate us?” “Well, now, I don’t know how you get into the army over there,” Don began.

“A card to us is sent. It says, ‘Come!’”

“Same here” Don replied. “Then they give us a gun and issue some ammo, and we go and shoot at each other.”

Karl gave him a look that Don found to be at once searching and full of gratitude. They completed the work in what had become a comfortable, companionable silence. When the two men returned to the field, no one was surprised that the tractor part fit perfectly.

With only a quick afternoon stop for more sandwiches, fresh doughnuts and coffee, the men finished what Don had thought would be two days’ work. Don continued covering stacks until, when he came in for a warmed-over supper at ten, he could say the job was literally all wrapped up.


As for the Morgenthau plan, it never went into operation due to the death of President Roosevelt (his wife Eleanor had been the most influential proponent of the plan) and the start of the 'Cold War' at the end of WWII. What ended up happening is the US rebuilt West Germany's economy with the 'Marshall Plan' and the 'allies' decided that a 'better' way to neuter Germany was by establishing the 'European Coal and Steel Community' to tie Germany's industry, particuarly the parts involved in war materials production, to other western European countries. Later this scheme evolved into the European Union.

[Thorum]

The book, "Other Losses", and paranoid conspiricy theorist, Mr. Bacque, is ridiculous and laughable. Among various reviews and panel discussions done on this book, here are some choice quotes:


"Our first conclusion (http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/b/bacque-james/ambrose-001.html) was that Mr. Bacque had made a major historical discovery. There was widespread mistreatment of German prisoners in the spring and summer of 1945. Men were beaten, denied water, forced to live in open camps without shelter, given inadequate food rations and inadequate medical care. Their mail was withheld. In some cases prisoners made a "soup" of water and grass in order to deal with their hunger. Men did die needlessly and inexcusably. This must be confronted, and it is to Mr. Bacque's credit that he forces us to do so.
Our second conclusion was that when scholars do the necessary research, they will find Mr. Bacque's work to be worse than worthless. It is seriously - nay, spectacularly - flawed in its most fundamental aspects. Mr. Bacque misuses documents; he misreads documents; he ignores contrary evidence; his statistical methodology is hopelessly compromised; he makes no attempt to look at comparative contexts; he puts words into the mouth of his principal source; he ignores a readily available and absolutely critical source that decisively deals with his central accusation; and, as a consequence of these and and other shortcomings, he reaches conclusions and makes charges that are demonstrably absurd...."


And:

"Bacque's Other Losses work might normally be treated with the same mixture of headshaking (http://everything2.com/title/Other%2520Losses) ire and amusement the real experts use when, say, a Kodak photo technician working as a NASA temp proclaims himself a NASA expert and claims photos of rocks are proof there are pyramids on Mars. However, Other Losses has been seized by the Holocaust revisionist crowd. In their convoluted logic Other Losses figures something like this: The Holocaust never happened, of course ha ha, but if it did, the American army committed genocide itself so why are those whiney Jews acting like they're the only ones who suffered during Word War II?"

I must admit the 2 things that interest me the most as far as human gullibility goes are god and conspiracies...

[RoyBatty]

The Morgenthau Plan wasn't implemented in its entirety or its original format but much of it was used by the Allies until at least 1947.

Large numbers of the German civilian population were starved until around 1947 when the US / UK feared that they may become attracted to Communism and it was decided to end the policies of de-industrialisation and malnutrition.

The Marshall Plan was extended late to West Germany while it also provided less assistance to it than to other European countries.


An account of one German POW of his "humane" treatment by the US and French:

http://www.read-all-about-it.org/archive_english/POW/in_a_US_death_camp.html

[SwordoftheVistula]

Yes, there does seem to be a huge difference between the camps in post-WWII Europe and the ones in the US & UK.

My main point was in degrees of comparison, the US at one end of the scale, the Japanese and Russians at the other, everyone else in between, and the Germans a mixed bag who basically would "do unto others as they do unto us"