revision
05-20-2009, 02:19 PM
Human Loot : The High Cost of War Paid by Women
London's International News Service reported in January of 1946 that the American soldiers' wives who were brought to Germany were given special authorization to wear military uniforms because "the GIs did not want their wives mistaken for Frauleins by other occupation troops" and thus molested,
raped or propositioned. In the first six months of American occupation, venereal disease jumped to twenty times its former level.
Here, in the smoldering ruins of once beautiful Stuttgart, amid the anguish, rape, grieving and hunger of the German civilian population, 11 leading German churchmen in connection with a visit by a delegation of 8 non-German churchmen on October 18-19, 1945, made their famous "declaration of German guilt," unilaterally imposing a collective guilt on themselves.... and on everybody else.
The New York World Telegram, January 21, 1945, stated: "Americans look on the German women as loot, just like cameras and Lugers."
Human Loot: The High Cost of War Paid by Women
http://www.exulanten.com/humanloot.html
Although Soviet rape was notorious, rape committed under the Allies was not taken very seriously either. When Stuttgart was first occupied by the French immediately after the war in August 1945, troops from Africa under French command rampaged through the bombed out city and shelters and committed an orgy of rape. The local police had verified 1,198 cases of rape. The ages of the victims ranged from 14 to 74. According to police reports, most of them "were attacked in their homes by turbaned thugs who broke down the doors in looting forays. Four of the women were killed by their attackers, and four others committed suicide. One of the victims was killed by her husband who then killed himself." Eisenhower, fearing bad publicity, then ordered Stuttgart to be occupied by the Americans, but when the story broke anyway, American newspapers immediately and without any investigation, discounted it as "propaganda," apparently forgetting that the war was over.
As for the French occupiers, there were 385 rapes in the Constance area; 600in Bruchsal; and 500 in Freudenstadt. Those were only the reported rapes in limited areas.
All the same, by April 1945, 500 rape cases per week were being reported to the Judge Advocate General of American forces in Europe. Those were only the reported rapes in limited areas.
The U.S. Military certainly made it easy for irresponsible G.I.s to have casual sex with German girls. Aside from providing free condoms, on April 8, 1946, The Stars and Stripes published an article titled "Pregnant Frauleins Are Warned!" explaining that the U.S. Army was not responsible for the sexual relationships of its personnel and: "Girls who are expecting a child fathered by an American soldier will be provided with no assistance by the American Army ... If the soldier denies paternity, no further action will be undertaken other than to merely inform the woman of this fact.
She is to be advised to seek help from a German or Austrian welfare organization. If the soldier is already in the United States, his address in not to be communicated to the woman in question. Claims for child support
from unmarried German and Austrian mothers will not be recognized. "
Paternity cases involving Americans were not within the jurisdiction of German and Austrian courts. During the early stages of the occupation, the U.S. Army would not allow an American to make support payments to a German or Austrian woman even if he admitted being the father of their child because such allotments were considered "aid to the enemy". The U.S. Army wouldtake no responsibility for illegitimate children fathered by occupation troops, nor would it permit marriages between American troops and Austrian women until January 1946, and between American troops and German women until December 1946.
Over 37,000 illegitimate children were fathered just by American soldiers in the decade after 1945, most of whom ended up as wards of the German and Austrian welfare services. Most of them never met their American fathers and many of these children were never adopted and remained in long-term public care.
In Vienna, the Soviets were not only raping but also starving their victims to death. The Viennese under the Communists ate less than 1,000 calories a day, and 1,000 new cases of TB suddenly arose each month. Pregnant women, the elderly and children were at grave risk. In July of 1945 alone, 389 out of 1,000 newborn babies, most the result of rape, were dying. In Salzburg, under the Americans, there was at first a strict anti-fraternization policy with the local population.
The Red Army was sent into Germany stirred up by Ilya Ehrenburg's sick, hate-inspiring messages and they ended up committing the largest mass rape in history. Ehrenburg promoted rape by spreading false reports of Nazi rape in Russia when, in reality, rape was a German military offense punishable by death and German troops had the smallest record of rape (and looting) in occupied territories, even lower than that of American troops on American bases. In fact, according to recently disclosed US military records, between 1942 and 1945, American GIs committed 14,000 rapes in England, France and Germany.
The female population had swelled to 2,000,000 with thousands more refugee women who had fled there from the east. Up to a million of these females from age 8 to 80 were believed to have been raped. 10,000 women and underaged girls are recorded as having died as a result. There were so many rapes that doctors in the hospitals could not even treat all of them. In one horrible instance, "our noble Soviet ally," as Roosevelt called them, entered the Haus Dehlem, an orphanage, maternity hospital and repeatedly raped pregnant women and women who had just given birth.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a young captain in the Red Army when it entered East Prussia in January of 1945. He wrote later in his Gulag Archipelago: "All of us knew very well that if girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction." Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. In 'Prussian Nights', he writes:
Twenty-two Hoeringstrasse. It's not been burned, just looted, rifled. A moaning by the walls,half muffled:The mother's wounded, half alive.The little daughters on the mattress, Dead.How many have been on her? A platoon? A company perhaps? A girl's been turned into a woman, A woman turned into a corpse ... The mother begs, 'Soldier, kill me!'
Scenes of sexual depravity and horror spread throughout the Eastern regions as rampantly as the diseases the criminals left behind. The same situation repeated in Silesia when it was suddenly occupied by the Red Army. Following their violent pattern, Red Army soldiers embarked upon another horrendous spree of rape. The situation was so brutal that in one instance in Neisse, 182 Catholic nuns were raped by Red Army soldiers. In the diocese of Kattowitz, the soldiers left behind 66 pregnant nuns.
Solzhenitsyn was not alone in his revulsion of the violence. Other Russian officers agreed with him. Future dissident and propaganda officer Major Lev Kopelev came into East Prussia with the Red Army as a loyal communist. The first thing he saw was the corpse of an old woman:
"Her clothes were torn, between her thin hips there was a telephone,
the receiver of which was thrust into her v....".
For having the audacity to report excesses of violence against civilians,
Kopylev spent 9 years in the Gulag for "fostering bourgeois humanism" and for "compassion towards the enemy."
"Tot den Deutschen Okkupaten!"
Death to the German Occupants! The victorious Soviet soldier was under direct order to break the spirit and dignity of all "arrogant" Germans, particularly the German women. 'Rape' therefore was the order of the day, and regardless of age the German women and girls were to be taken without mercy. Thousands of women shuddered at the sound of "Frau komm!"
grunting from the invading army, for it not only meant they were about to be sexually violated, it might also mean torture or death of themselves, their mothers, grandmothers or little daughters.
The communist army entered Berlin first while the Americans and the British lagged behind to the west, and they were seething with hatred and determined to exact vengeance. They had two months to plunder and rape as much as was physically possible. In 1945, the city of Berlin was a city virtually without men.
Thousands of women committed suicide as a result, and thousands ofunderage girls died as a result of injury. Thousands more girls and women pregnant from rape would be left to virtually starve to death later when the Allies blocked shipments of food from the city.
As many as 20,000 girls and young women were stranded in the east at the mercy of the notoriously vicious Red Army. As the Red Army marched through in February, the women were generally lined up, and some were singled out for the Army's immediate "pleasure". Then they were packed into railroad cars which left in April of 1945 for Siberia. Many were again repeatedly raped while being transported and others died along the way from lack of food and ill treatment. Once in Siberia, they were slave laborers and forced to do heavy manual labor such road building, all the while enduring constant sexual abuse. Many of these young women remained in Stalin's work camps for up to five years, during which time two-thirds of them died. Some of the women were sent to an infamous camp near Petrozavodsk in Karelia called Number 517.
Once they arrived at the camp they were paraded naked in front of the camp officials, who would select favorites, promising lighter work in exchange for sex. "Stubborn prisoners" were subjected to murder, solitary confinement and even genital mutilation. Of the 1,000 girls and women who were transported to that camp, over half, or 522 of them, died within six months of their arrival.
As the Red Army started its offensive toward Berlin during the spring of 1945, thousands upon thousands of Germans from the east tried to cross the Oder River and flee westward, but there were just too many refugees, and many were trapped as they waited to be allowed to cross.
Female suffering did not end with the war. Never mentioned in our media, thousands of women suffered horrible repression at the hands of the Communists. With no men left to protect the women, the Stasi secret police in East Germany stuffed unruly females behind the walls of dank,dark Hoheneck castle, an old 13th century fortress overlooking the town of Stollberg in Thuringia, Saxony. Used as a jail for female political dissidents until 1989, the castle was a horror filled nightmare with features like a pitch-dark, underground chamber where female prisoners were hung waist-deep in frigid water for days at a time and forced to sleep on concrete floors between intermittent torture sessions, even those women pregnant from rape. Thousands of young women languished in filth, hunger and overcrowding, plagued by tuberculosis and other illnesses.
Although not technically rape, since American occupation troops had ready access to food that hungry, deprived German and Austrian women needed, often to feed children, sexual favors were sold out of desperation. By the end of 1945, the official ration in the U.S. zone of Germany had slid to 1550 calories per day, and it later fell even lower to 1275 calories by the spring of 1946. In some areas, people were not receiving rations of much more than 700 calories per day, allotments well below the minimum necessary to maintain health. On December 5, 1945, the Times reported: " the American provost marshal Lieutenant Colonel Gerald F. Beane said that rape presents noproblem for the military police because a bit of food, a bar of chocolate, or a bar of soap seem to make rape unnecessary. Think that over, if you want to understand the situation in Germany." But he was understating the rape problem. In fact, the G.I.s were warned against indiscriminate sex merely to protect themselves from disease, not prosecution. TIME magazine reported in September,1945 that the government provided American soldiers with 50 million condoms per month.
The first Americans arriving in Salzburg from the west were units which had not been readied for Austria. They had been inadvertently issued a 'Handbook for Germany', which prescribed a strict treatment of the locals. The zone of occupation controlled by the US Armed Forces consisted of the provinces of Salzburg and Upper Austria, south of the Danube River, and parts of the Austrian capital, Vienna. The number of GIs stationed there between 1945 and 1955 eventually reached several hundred thousands. The US occupation of Austria lasted for ten years and produced almost 2,000 illegitimate children between 1945 and 1955 in the province of Salzburg alone, all the while, during these first years as occupiers, 80% of children in Austrian suffered from malnutrition, and the population was understandably depressed.
Directly in the first footsteps of the Red Army's bloody pathway, the girls and women of East Prussia bore the first brunt of the brutality. Here, most females were gang raped and then murdered.
"Kill!Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty.
Kill! As you storm forward. Kill! You gallant soldiers of the Red army." Ilya Ehrenburg
“. . . In Berlin, in August 1945, out of 2,866 children born, 1148 died, and it was summer, and the food more plentiful than now. . . From Vienna, a reliable source reports that infant mortality is approaching 100 per cent."
US correspondent Dorothy Thompson
Beyond the Rape: Secret Police and Waist Deep Ice Water
As an enemy, the Germans had been so thoroughly dehumanized that such depravity and abuse by the victors was merely winked at. Civilians hadalready born the brunt of the murderous Allied air war without any moral outrage emanating from the civilized world. Secondly, the Allies agreed to and then helped plan and execute the genocidal expulsion of millions of people from their homes in the east, with the women and children again bearing most of the burden, and this too passed without recrimination. And it was women and children again who suffered greatly from starvation policies put into place after war's end by Soviets and Allies alike. Lastly, female non-combatants experienced brutal "re-education" policies which by their nature degraded the unprotected females in order to "break their will".
Women on some such crews were often forced to dig out dead bodies and were continually exposed to disease and illnesses such as typhoid. Most did this work while on diets inadequate to sustain such rugged labor, and most worked under guard and there were often no private sanitation facilities.
Women, many having suffered enormously from the absence or deaths of their husbands, sons and fathers, were also forced to view traumatic staged exhibits of German "war crimes' as part of the re-education policies put in place by the Allies.
It is the women of Europe who pay the price while war rages, and it will be the women who will pay again when war has run its bloody course and Europe sinks down into the slough of poverty like a harried beast too spent to wage the fight. It will be the sonless mothers who will bend their shoulders to the plow and wield in age-palsied hands the reaphook. It will be the husbandless women who will level the graves and replant the grapevines in the blood fertilized lands of Europe. It will be tiny hands of fatherless children who will wield the hoe and man the machines in the factories. It will be the maidens who will never know wife-or motherhood who will bear the burdens that should have lain upon the shoulders of the lovers sleeping in the unmarked graves of an alien land. Upon the shoulders of women and children will fall the grinding, blighting, blasting struggle of covering the scars of wawhile paying the debts piled mountain high by war.From "The Wounded Who Do Not Fight" By Kate Richards O'Hare, World War One pacifist
The "MfS" workers operated a political persecution ring where they arrested opponents of the ruling communists. Among punishment offenses were: desire to travel, open criticism of state politics, political association formation, contacts to western politicians, public demonstrations, escape into the west and/or assistance with the escape of others. They employed wiretapping, room bugs, informers, letter interception, long-term observation, threats and entrance to all data from patient documents to school notes. A special method was "decomposition," the use of psychological warfare on an individual basis, including the use of anonymous letters, starting rumors, visiting places of employment and intimidating employers, causing controversy within friendships, threatening the family, financial ruination, harassing citations, destruction of life on an everyday basis.
Under Soviet military occupation, Thuringia, as all of Eastern Germany, suffered from political and religious oppression and devastating cultural destruction, when, after the horrendous British and American bombing, massive looting and plundering took place by the Soviets of nearly all old state treasures, most never to be returned, followed by the typicalcommunist decay. The historical bond, that fragile interaction which had for centuries uniquely woven the diverse regions of German lands together with a thread of mutual cultural identity, was forever shattered physically and spiritually. Regional dialects, customs, music and dress in many cases became obsolete and even outlawed.
Occupying Americans in war torn Thuringia, the land of Bach and Luther, "liberated" it just long enough to turn it all over to the Red Army for enslavement to the surprise and horror of the trapped inhabitants. In the Thuringer area, the communist GDR, for stated reasons of " public security," instituted areas of detention for political prisoners. From 1950 to 1989, an insidious internal spy agency existed with a military structure and over 90,000 workers. In Thuringia there were district offices in over 30 cities.
The Biggest Mass Rape in History
Rape by any other Word...
The Allied Heroes
For 40 years, the GDR ran Hoheneck Prison, left, for female political prisoners: women and young girls, who by Soviet and East German military courts received long prison sentences for alleged espionage, anti-communism or because of "defamation of the socialist state" by attempting to travel. These women and girls were robbed of their dignity and degraded daily with physical and psychological punishments. Many children were born here as products of rape during the Soviet occupation.
In 1949, the surviving women, malnourished and suffering from frostbite and other illnesses including severe emotional damage, were transported back to eastern Germany but forbidden to talk about their experiences. Once the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, some of former labor camp prisoners related their experiences only to find it was politically incorrect to "dwell" on such topics in modern Germany. These women were among tens of thousands of German civilians sent to the Soviet Union for use as slave laborers.
London's International News Service reported in January of 1946 that the American soldiers' wives who were brought to Germany were given special authorization to wear military uniforms because "the GIs did not want their wives mistaken for Frauleins by other occupation troops" and thus molested,
raped or propositioned. In the first six months of American occupation, venereal disease jumped to twenty times its former level.
Here, in the smoldering ruins of once beautiful Stuttgart, amid the anguish, rape, grieving and hunger of the German civilian population, 11 leading German churchmen in connection with a visit by a delegation of 8 non-German churchmen on October 18-19, 1945, made their famous "declaration of German guilt," unilaterally imposing a collective guilt on themselves.... and on everybody else.
The New York World Telegram, January 21, 1945, stated: "Americans look on the German women as loot, just like cameras and Lugers."
Human Loot: The High Cost of War Paid by Women
http://www.exulanten.com/humanloot.html
Although Soviet rape was notorious, rape committed under the Allies was not taken very seriously either. When Stuttgart was first occupied by the French immediately after the war in August 1945, troops from Africa under French command rampaged through the bombed out city and shelters and committed an orgy of rape. The local police had verified 1,198 cases of rape. The ages of the victims ranged from 14 to 74. According to police reports, most of them "were attacked in their homes by turbaned thugs who broke down the doors in looting forays. Four of the women were killed by their attackers, and four others committed suicide. One of the victims was killed by her husband who then killed himself." Eisenhower, fearing bad publicity, then ordered Stuttgart to be occupied by the Americans, but when the story broke anyway, American newspapers immediately and without any investigation, discounted it as "propaganda," apparently forgetting that the war was over.
As for the French occupiers, there were 385 rapes in the Constance area; 600in Bruchsal; and 500 in Freudenstadt. Those were only the reported rapes in limited areas.
All the same, by April 1945, 500 rape cases per week were being reported to the Judge Advocate General of American forces in Europe. Those were only the reported rapes in limited areas.
The U.S. Military certainly made it easy for irresponsible G.I.s to have casual sex with German girls. Aside from providing free condoms, on April 8, 1946, The Stars and Stripes published an article titled "Pregnant Frauleins Are Warned!" explaining that the U.S. Army was not responsible for the sexual relationships of its personnel and: "Girls who are expecting a child fathered by an American soldier will be provided with no assistance by the American Army ... If the soldier denies paternity, no further action will be undertaken other than to merely inform the woman of this fact.
She is to be advised to seek help from a German or Austrian welfare organization. If the soldier is already in the United States, his address in not to be communicated to the woman in question. Claims for child support
from unmarried German and Austrian mothers will not be recognized. "
Paternity cases involving Americans were not within the jurisdiction of German and Austrian courts. During the early stages of the occupation, the U.S. Army would not allow an American to make support payments to a German or Austrian woman even if he admitted being the father of their child because such allotments were considered "aid to the enemy". The U.S. Army wouldtake no responsibility for illegitimate children fathered by occupation troops, nor would it permit marriages between American troops and Austrian women until January 1946, and between American troops and German women until December 1946.
Over 37,000 illegitimate children were fathered just by American soldiers in the decade after 1945, most of whom ended up as wards of the German and Austrian welfare services. Most of them never met their American fathers and many of these children were never adopted and remained in long-term public care.
In Vienna, the Soviets were not only raping but also starving their victims to death. The Viennese under the Communists ate less than 1,000 calories a day, and 1,000 new cases of TB suddenly arose each month. Pregnant women, the elderly and children were at grave risk. In July of 1945 alone, 389 out of 1,000 newborn babies, most the result of rape, were dying. In Salzburg, under the Americans, there was at first a strict anti-fraternization policy with the local population.
The Red Army was sent into Germany stirred up by Ilya Ehrenburg's sick, hate-inspiring messages and they ended up committing the largest mass rape in history. Ehrenburg promoted rape by spreading false reports of Nazi rape in Russia when, in reality, rape was a German military offense punishable by death and German troops had the smallest record of rape (and looting) in occupied territories, even lower than that of American troops on American bases. In fact, according to recently disclosed US military records, between 1942 and 1945, American GIs committed 14,000 rapes in England, France and Germany.
The female population had swelled to 2,000,000 with thousands more refugee women who had fled there from the east. Up to a million of these females from age 8 to 80 were believed to have been raped. 10,000 women and underaged girls are recorded as having died as a result. There were so many rapes that doctors in the hospitals could not even treat all of them. In one horrible instance, "our noble Soviet ally," as Roosevelt called them, entered the Haus Dehlem, an orphanage, maternity hospital and repeatedly raped pregnant women and women who had just given birth.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a young captain in the Red Army when it entered East Prussia in January of 1945. He wrote later in his Gulag Archipelago: "All of us knew very well that if girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction." Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. In 'Prussian Nights', he writes:
Twenty-two Hoeringstrasse. It's not been burned, just looted, rifled. A moaning by the walls,half muffled:The mother's wounded, half alive.The little daughters on the mattress, Dead.How many have been on her? A platoon? A company perhaps? A girl's been turned into a woman, A woman turned into a corpse ... The mother begs, 'Soldier, kill me!'
Scenes of sexual depravity and horror spread throughout the Eastern regions as rampantly as the diseases the criminals left behind. The same situation repeated in Silesia when it was suddenly occupied by the Red Army. Following their violent pattern, Red Army soldiers embarked upon another horrendous spree of rape. The situation was so brutal that in one instance in Neisse, 182 Catholic nuns were raped by Red Army soldiers. In the diocese of Kattowitz, the soldiers left behind 66 pregnant nuns.
Solzhenitsyn was not alone in his revulsion of the violence. Other Russian officers agreed with him. Future dissident and propaganda officer Major Lev Kopelev came into East Prussia with the Red Army as a loyal communist. The first thing he saw was the corpse of an old woman:
"Her clothes were torn, between her thin hips there was a telephone,
the receiver of which was thrust into her v....".
For having the audacity to report excesses of violence against civilians,
Kopylev spent 9 years in the Gulag for "fostering bourgeois humanism" and for "compassion towards the enemy."
"Tot den Deutschen Okkupaten!"
Death to the German Occupants! The victorious Soviet soldier was under direct order to break the spirit and dignity of all "arrogant" Germans, particularly the German women. 'Rape' therefore was the order of the day, and regardless of age the German women and girls were to be taken without mercy. Thousands of women shuddered at the sound of "Frau komm!"
grunting from the invading army, for it not only meant they were about to be sexually violated, it might also mean torture or death of themselves, their mothers, grandmothers or little daughters.
The communist army entered Berlin first while the Americans and the British lagged behind to the west, and they were seething with hatred and determined to exact vengeance. They had two months to plunder and rape as much as was physically possible. In 1945, the city of Berlin was a city virtually without men.
Thousands of women committed suicide as a result, and thousands ofunderage girls died as a result of injury. Thousands more girls and women pregnant from rape would be left to virtually starve to death later when the Allies blocked shipments of food from the city.
As many as 20,000 girls and young women were stranded in the east at the mercy of the notoriously vicious Red Army. As the Red Army marched through in February, the women were generally lined up, and some were singled out for the Army's immediate "pleasure". Then they were packed into railroad cars which left in April of 1945 for Siberia. Many were again repeatedly raped while being transported and others died along the way from lack of food and ill treatment. Once in Siberia, they were slave laborers and forced to do heavy manual labor such road building, all the while enduring constant sexual abuse. Many of these young women remained in Stalin's work camps for up to five years, during which time two-thirds of them died. Some of the women were sent to an infamous camp near Petrozavodsk in Karelia called Number 517.
Once they arrived at the camp they were paraded naked in front of the camp officials, who would select favorites, promising lighter work in exchange for sex. "Stubborn prisoners" were subjected to murder, solitary confinement and even genital mutilation. Of the 1,000 girls and women who were transported to that camp, over half, or 522 of them, died within six months of their arrival.
As the Red Army started its offensive toward Berlin during the spring of 1945, thousands upon thousands of Germans from the east tried to cross the Oder River and flee westward, but there were just too many refugees, and many were trapped as they waited to be allowed to cross.
Female suffering did not end with the war. Never mentioned in our media, thousands of women suffered horrible repression at the hands of the Communists. With no men left to protect the women, the Stasi secret police in East Germany stuffed unruly females behind the walls of dank,dark Hoheneck castle, an old 13th century fortress overlooking the town of Stollberg in Thuringia, Saxony. Used as a jail for female political dissidents until 1989, the castle was a horror filled nightmare with features like a pitch-dark, underground chamber where female prisoners were hung waist-deep in frigid water for days at a time and forced to sleep on concrete floors between intermittent torture sessions, even those women pregnant from rape. Thousands of young women languished in filth, hunger and overcrowding, plagued by tuberculosis and other illnesses.
Although not technically rape, since American occupation troops had ready access to food that hungry, deprived German and Austrian women needed, often to feed children, sexual favors were sold out of desperation. By the end of 1945, the official ration in the U.S. zone of Germany had slid to 1550 calories per day, and it later fell even lower to 1275 calories by the spring of 1946. In some areas, people were not receiving rations of much more than 700 calories per day, allotments well below the minimum necessary to maintain health. On December 5, 1945, the Times reported: " the American provost marshal Lieutenant Colonel Gerald F. Beane said that rape presents noproblem for the military police because a bit of food, a bar of chocolate, or a bar of soap seem to make rape unnecessary. Think that over, if you want to understand the situation in Germany." But he was understating the rape problem. In fact, the G.I.s were warned against indiscriminate sex merely to protect themselves from disease, not prosecution. TIME magazine reported in September,1945 that the government provided American soldiers with 50 million condoms per month.
The first Americans arriving in Salzburg from the west were units which had not been readied for Austria. They had been inadvertently issued a 'Handbook for Germany', which prescribed a strict treatment of the locals. The zone of occupation controlled by the US Armed Forces consisted of the provinces of Salzburg and Upper Austria, south of the Danube River, and parts of the Austrian capital, Vienna. The number of GIs stationed there between 1945 and 1955 eventually reached several hundred thousands. The US occupation of Austria lasted for ten years and produced almost 2,000 illegitimate children between 1945 and 1955 in the province of Salzburg alone, all the while, during these first years as occupiers, 80% of children in Austrian suffered from malnutrition, and the population was understandably depressed.
Directly in the first footsteps of the Red Army's bloody pathway, the girls and women of East Prussia bore the first brunt of the brutality. Here, most females were gang raped and then murdered.
"Kill!Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty.
Kill! As you storm forward. Kill! You gallant soldiers of the Red army." Ilya Ehrenburg
“. . . In Berlin, in August 1945, out of 2,866 children born, 1148 died, and it was summer, and the food more plentiful than now. . . From Vienna, a reliable source reports that infant mortality is approaching 100 per cent."
US correspondent Dorothy Thompson
Beyond the Rape: Secret Police and Waist Deep Ice Water
As an enemy, the Germans had been so thoroughly dehumanized that such depravity and abuse by the victors was merely winked at. Civilians hadalready born the brunt of the murderous Allied air war without any moral outrage emanating from the civilized world. Secondly, the Allies agreed to and then helped plan and execute the genocidal expulsion of millions of people from their homes in the east, with the women and children again bearing most of the burden, and this too passed without recrimination. And it was women and children again who suffered greatly from starvation policies put into place after war's end by Soviets and Allies alike. Lastly, female non-combatants experienced brutal "re-education" policies which by their nature degraded the unprotected females in order to "break their will".
Women on some such crews were often forced to dig out dead bodies and were continually exposed to disease and illnesses such as typhoid. Most did this work while on diets inadequate to sustain such rugged labor, and most worked under guard and there were often no private sanitation facilities.
Women, many having suffered enormously from the absence or deaths of their husbands, sons and fathers, were also forced to view traumatic staged exhibits of German "war crimes' as part of the re-education policies put in place by the Allies.
It is the women of Europe who pay the price while war rages, and it will be the women who will pay again when war has run its bloody course and Europe sinks down into the slough of poverty like a harried beast too spent to wage the fight. It will be the sonless mothers who will bend their shoulders to the plow and wield in age-palsied hands the reaphook. It will be the husbandless women who will level the graves and replant the grapevines in the blood fertilized lands of Europe. It will be tiny hands of fatherless children who will wield the hoe and man the machines in the factories. It will be the maidens who will never know wife-or motherhood who will bear the burdens that should have lain upon the shoulders of the lovers sleeping in the unmarked graves of an alien land. Upon the shoulders of women and children will fall the grinding, blighting, blasting struggle of covering the scars of wawhile paying the debts piled mountain high by war.From "The Wounded Who Do Not Fight" By Kate Richards O'Hare, World War One pacifist
The "MfS" workers operated a political persecution ring where they arrested opponents of the ruling communists. Among punishment offenses were: desire to travel, open criticism of state politics, political association formation, contacts to western politicians, public demonstrations, escape into the west and/or assistance with the escape of others. They employed wiretapping, room bugs, informers, letter interception, long-term observation, threats and entrance to all data from patient documents to school notes. A special method was "decomposition," the use of psychological warfare on an individual basis, including the use of anonymous letters, starting rumors, visiting places of employment and intimidating employers, causing controversy within friendships, threatening the family, financial ruination, harassing citations, destruction of life on an everyday basis.
Under Soviet military occupation, Thuringia, as all of Eastern Germany, suffered from political and religious oppression and devastating cultural destruction, when, after the horrendous British and American bombing, massive looting and plundering took place by the Soviets of nearly all old state treasures, most never to be returned, followed by the typicalcommunist decay. The historical bond, that fragile interaction which had for centuries uniquely woven the diverse regions of German lands together with a thread of mutual cultural identity, was forever shattered physically and spiritually. Regional dialects, customs, music and dress in many cases became obsolete and even outlawed.
Occupying Americans in war torn Thuringia, the land of Bach and Luther, "liberated" it just long enough to turn it all over to the Red Army for enslavement to the surprise and horror of the trapped inhabitants. In the Thuringer area, the communist GDR, for stated reasons of " public security," instituted areas of detention for political prisoners. From 1950 to 1989, an insidious internal spy agency existed with a military structure and over 90,000 workers. In Thuringia there were district offices in over 30 cities.
The Biggest Mass Rape in History
Rape by any other Word...
The Allied Heroes
For 40 years, the GDR ran Hoheneck Prison, left, for female political prisoners: women and young girls, who by Soviet and East German military courts received long prison sentences for alleged espionage, anti-communism or because of "defamation of the socialist state" by attempting to travel. These women and girls were robbed of their dignity and degraded daily with physical and psychological punishments. Many children were born here as products of rape during the Soviet occupation.
In 1949, the surviving women, malnourished and suffering from frostbite and other illnesses including severe emotional damage, were transported back to eastern Germany but forbidden to talk about their experiences. Once the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, some of former labor camp prisoners related their experiences only to find it was politically incorrect to "dwell" on such topics in modern Germany. These women were among tens of thousands of German civilians sent to the Soviet Union for use as slave laborers.