How 3 Million Germans Died After VE Day
There's a 'secret history' to World War 2 that is rarely discussed, or featured in the mainstream media. It's not information that is covered up, or even denied. Much of it features in historical books and is occasionally mentioned in documentaries, but it's usually as background detail, so it is therefore lost history in the sense that most people who did not live through the war don't know of the entirety of the horror and loss of human life. Or that many of the inhumanities inflicted by the enemy, were likewise inflicted by the Western allies onto the enemy.
While millions of soldiers died in the war, an estimated 35 million or more civilians perished, including the most famous series of mass executions - the Shoah, or the destruction of European Jewry, which consumed up to six million lives.
But even German schools do not often teach that some three million Germans died in prison camps run by the British, Americans and Russians following the end of World War 2. Or that some seven million more Germans were expelled from their homes in one of the biggest wave of ethnic cleansing in history.
Germany lost the war, so the history of what happened to its citizens, both during and after the war, likewise became, in a sense, 'lost' to the promotion of our war history, that of the victors.
A new book, reviewed here in the UK Telegraph about the second holocaust of WW2 looks set to provoke controversy. But it should prove to be an important book, in the telling of the full story of the most destructive war in human history :
...the months that followed May 1945 brought no peace to the shattered skeleton of Hitler's Reich, but suffering even worse than the destruction wrought by the war. After the atrocities that the Nazis had visited on Europe, some degree of justified vengeance by their victims was inevitable, but the appalling bestialities that MacDonogh documents so soberly went far beyond that. The first 200 pages of his brave book are an almost unbearable chronicle of human suffering.The Original Morgantheu Plan, 1944 - How To Deconstruct An Industrial, Military Giant
His best estimate is that some three million Germans died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities. A million soldiers vanished before they could creep back to the holes that had been their homes. The majority of them died in Soviet captivity (of the 90,000 who surrendered at Stalingrad, only 5,000 eventually came home) but, shamingly, many thousands perished as prisoners of the Anglo-Americans. Herded into cages along the Rhine, with no shelter and very little food, they dropped like flies.
The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide - and mass murder.
Apart from the well-known repeated rape of virtually every girl and woman unlucky enough to be in the Soviet occupation zones, perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh - for the first time in English - is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. The survivors of this ethnic cleansing, naked and shivering, were pitched across the border, never to return to their homes. Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia and East Prussia as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.
Given that what amounted to a lesser Holocaust was unfolding under their noses, it may be asked why the western Allies did not stop this venting of long-dammed-up rage on the (mainly) innocent. MacDonogh's answer is that it could all have been even worse. The US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, favoured turning Germany into a gigantic farm, and there were genocidal Nazi-like schemes afoot to starve, sterilise or deport the population of what was left of the bombed-out cities.
(The German concentration camps) Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and even Auschwitz stayed in business after the war, only now with the Germans behind the wire.
