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Summary: Thought provoking, this book told peoples stories that the world needs to hear
Comment: If we ever forget that there are no depths to human depravity then we will always stand on the brink of actions described in this book. The common perception is that the acts were in direct consequense and "pay back" for what happened in the east. What this book brings clearly to light is that people can not be held responsible for a crime because they have a genetic link to the perpitrators and although it is young men who do the most of the fighting in wars it is everyone else who has to do the suffering. It has to be acknowledged that this was a human tragedy of a magnitude alongside the Holocaust, anything less is to to pass degrees of blame or innocence depending on race or accident of birth. War crimes are committed by individuals, sometimes with the condonance of superiors All we can do is to learn how to avoid it from happening again. Something that we seem unable to do. Perhaps this book will help people to see the truth in war. Perhaps there is a denial about this period in history because there is a feeling of guilt, of partial responsibility. Facing these uncomfortable facts is essential in understanding the reality of world war 2 there is too much about the glory. There is a memorial to the soldiers in almost every village and town. Where are the memorials to the young childeren caught up in this? the young women? the innocents? the farmers? the comunities that were swept away? who remembers them?
Read this book it will open your eyes, and then fill them with tears!
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Summary: A Terrible Revenge?????? Joke???
Comment: To what we have done as a Nation to billions of East Europeans and what had happened to us after WW2, it may seem A Terrible Revenge but it is not at all.
And if you where a "good german" not nazi not connected with 3reich you could have stayed in eastern europe as my family did and nothing happened tu us we still alive.
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Summary: Terrible revenge - and terrible apathy about it.
Comment: In wartime, no one side ever has a monopoly of virtue - or evil. Hitler's Germany undoubtedly inflicted many terrible atrocities on other nations and ethnic groups. Undoubtedly, the western allies were right to oppose Hitler's brand of Fascism. That said, some of the methods used by the allies were questionable from a moral viewpoint, and that applies in particular once the war was over and Europe settled down once again to peacetime living and the occupation of Germany.
There will always be some people who will say: "The Krauts had it coming," and "Germany can survive for another thousand years, but it will never wipe out the shame of Nazism." Some people take the view that most Germans "got off lightly" after the war. "Some of the top leaders were strung up, but most Germans got off scot-free."
The millions of German women and girls as young as 8 who were savagely gang-raped repeatedly over a period of many months by soldiers of all the victorious allies might disagree with that assessment. So might the thousands of German prisoners of war who starved to death in the US Army camps along the Rhine straight after the war, camps which provided "no shelter and no comforts" (Eisenhower's order) and precious little in the way of food either. So, too, might the millions of Germans, soldiers and civilians, who were transported to the Siberian gulags and worked to death as slave labour (most did not return) or the citizens of the bomb-shattered cities, trying to survive in their ruined houses without any support, and whose few remaining possessions were looted, often at gun-point, by allied soldiers.
Perhaps more than any other group, the 15 million Germans expelled from Germany proper (NOT Poland or Czechoslovakia) in 1945 can also claim that they did not get off "scot-free." 2 million of these unfortunates were murdered or died from exposure, starvation or disease and injury during the expulsions. The survivors were subjected to assault, mutilation, mass rape in the most brutal manner, robbery and assorted other indignities. They were often forced to walk hundreds of miles to their "relocations" or crammed into cattle trucks. They were forced to leave behind all their property and have never been compensated for loss of family home or personal possessions. These expulsions were authorised by the Potsdam Declaration which followed straight after the conference. The declaration stipulated that they were to be carried out in a manner that was as "humane and orderly as possible." They were nothing of the sort, as the framers of the declaration must have known when they published it. They happened in a way that demonstrated "not just an absence of niceness but the maximum of brutality" (Victor Gollancz).
These people had not been a "sinister 5th column working in an alien nation" or active Nazi collaborators working to undermine Poland or Czechoslovakia. They were legitimate inhabitants of a state that had been part of Germany for hundreds of years, Prussia. Prussia, the state "abolished" by the victors in 1947. Prussia, the state that was always the least Nazi of all Germans states, and the least supportive of Hitler. Prussia, the state that paid the highest price of all for Hitler's crimes. Prussia, which no longer exists.
Passions ran high in Europe in 1945 and many disparate groups sought retribution on Germans for the horrors their nations had suffered. It should have been the work of the victorious allied governments to protect the civil population of Germany from these excesses; victory in war placed the entire German nation under their "protection." Instead the victor governments tolerated and in some cases encouraged the worst of these excesses, and it was the citizens of Prussia who suffered most.
Professor de Zayas has contributed an outstanding book on these crimes (which is what they were) and the fate of the Prussian expellees. It is well-researched and well-written. He writes in a manner that is highly disciplined from both a legal and a historic viewpoint, excluding cases that cannot be verified. There is no hearsay in this book. It contributes to our understanding of World War 2 by highlighting a series of events which have never received any sort of coverage elsewhere. The events he describes happened and they cannot simply be airbrushed out of history, however much we wish they could be.
Almost as bad as the allies condoning what went on, they have also sought to cover it up and pretend it never happened. We, the rest of the world, have had constant reminders of Nazi atrocities for the past 63 years, but many of us are unaware of the terrible fate that befell so many Germans in the final years of the war and in the post-war years. This book lifts the lid of silence and secrecy that has surrounded these events.
There will never be proper closure on World War II until the events described in such harrowing detail in this book are better known, and western governments have acknowledged that they happened. We, the citizens of the western allies, need to be more aware of what was done in our names. Above all, we need to shed the habit of applying collective guilt to all Germans, even those born after 1945, lest some future (and victorious) enemy applies the same brutal logic to us one day.
S. LISTER.
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Summary: Editorial Reviews and add-on
Comment: "De Zayas has uncovered testimony in German and American archives detailing these atrocities, adding a new chapter to the annals of human cruelty. His carefully documented book serves as a reminder that many different peoples have been subjected to ethnic cleansing."--Publishers Weekly
"DeZayas's moving plea is that one's home should be a human right. As frontiers once more shift in Eastern Europe, he could hardly have chosen a better moment to deliver it."--The Times (London)
An interesting additional reading concerning this topic makes the book "Our threatened values" by British-Jewish publisher Victor Gollancz.
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Summary: A very sensitive subject that needs to be talked about...
Comment: This book touches on a very sensitive subject and one that has been hidden from view. De Zayas takes on a very tough assignment, one that is highly sensitive: how the Germans living in eastern Europe were driven out from their homeland as a result of political negotiating and juggling during WWII. It is a book that should have been written already many years ago. My father, originally from East Prussia, gave this book to me to show me what our family suffered during the years of the WWII and afterwards. Both of my parents were born in Germany. I am a first generation German-American, a native of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. This is a book I highly recommend for several reasons. First it teaches us that all ethnic groups during times of war are ugly and hateful to each other. There is no society/culture in the world that is superior over another. Second, history is important to study so that we learn from it and do not make the same mistakes again. Sadly history seems to repeat itself. Third, this is an important lesson about ethnic cleansing; western society just seems to take it for granted that certain ethinc groups can be discrimminated against no matter what. Case in point here is that it has come to be 'accepted', since WWII, that all German people are suposed to be discrimminated against for ' eternity', even those Germans like myself who are innocent and had no part in the Jewish Holocaust. During the 1960's when I was a young child growing up in the U.S.A. I remember the terrible discrimmination against me by others in my community because I was German. I was an innocent child who had to suffer for something I never did. My experiences resulted from events that happened in the 1940's, years before I was even born! This book is profound and requires a strong stomach to read. It is well written. The personal accounts are very similar to what my parents talked about and others and are difficult to read. No ethnic group deserves to be murdered and tortured. There must be forgiveness otherwise the vicious cycle does not stop. And this is the most important lesson to learn here. At present we live in a world full of hate, terrible pain and suffering, with genocide happening around the world everyday. Why does it go on? Because somehow we have been led to think that it is 'okay', for certain ethnic groups to be tortured, discrimminated against and murdered, the ones we don't like. We are led to think this way because the metanarrative of 'history', that nurtures politics , excludes those things it wants to avoid talking about. All views must be heard otherwise the history that is written is not accurate. This book does exactly that. It talks about everything no one wants to hear about: the way the German people suffered too because they are human beings.
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