Aftermath

The depopulation continued unabated after the war

Letters from Vienna #46

Aftermath

“Peter Jenniges,” writes Peter Schrijvers in his book “The Unknown Dead: Civilians in the Battle of the Bulge”, “his wife, and their two children—the only youngsters left in the village— were tucked in beneath their warm down blankets. The family had returned to the upstairs bedrooms some time ago. The cellar, filled with potatoes, had been much too cramped and uncomfortable. Besides, they had convinced themselves that a direct hit on the house would leave them not much safer in the cellar. Like most nights, they slept a restless sleep, tossing and turning nervously. Ever since the Americans had arrived, Afst had come under German artillery fire from behind the West Wall for at least half an hour every day. Most houses had received damage of some kind.”

“That morning, around 5:30, the Germans added yet another day to their routine. But this time Peter Jenniges noted straightaway that they were putting remarkable energy in their shelling. He was wide awake even before an explosion shook their house. While his family rushed to the cellar, he quickly assessed the damage. The kitchen windows had been shattered. Smoke and an acrid powder were sucked in by an icy draft. Then he suddenly noticed a bright light dance through one of the windows. He was outside in the blink of an eye. The hay, stacked in a loft attached to the house, was on fire. Water from a couple of buckets made no difference. Within minutes the house itself was ablaze. Mrs. Jenniges darted in and out to save some belongings. Peter Jenniges hurried to drive the cows from the stable, the thunder of explosions drowning out the animals’ fearful bellowing. As their home turned into a torch, they bolted to the nearest building, escaping American machine-gun fire by a hair’s breadth. By noon the Jenniges home and several other buildings in Afst were nothing but smouldering ruins.”[1]

Few focus on the toll war brings on civilians yet it’s often the civilians who are hardest hit.

“…the greatest material damage was done by the unprecedented bombing cam­paigns of the Western Allies in 1944 and 1945,” writes Tony Judt “and the relentless advance of the Red Army from Stalingrad to Prague. The French coastal towns of Royan, Le Havre and Caen were eviscerated by the US Air force. Hamburg, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Dres­den and dozens of other German cities were laid waste by carpet-bombing from British and American planes. In the east, 80 percent of the Byelorussian city of Minsk was destroyed by the end of the war; Kiev in the Ukraine was a smoulder­ing ruin; while the Polish capital Warsaw was systematically torched and dyna­mited, house by house, street by street, by the retreating German army in the autumn of 1944. When the war in Europe ended—when Berlin fell to the Red Army in May 1945 after taking 40,000 tons of shells in the final fourteen days—much of the German capital was reduced to smoking hillocks of rubble and twisted metal. Seventy-five percent of its buildings were uninhabitable.”[2]

“The overall death toll is staggering (the figures given here do not include Japan­ese, US or other non-European dead). It dwarfs the mortality figures for the Great War of 1914-18, obscene as those were. No other conflict in recorded history killed so many people in so short a time. But what is most striking of all is the number of non-combatant civilians among the dead: at least 19 million, or more than half. The numbers of civilian dead exceeded military losses in the USSR, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. Only in the UK and Germany did military losses significantly outnumber civilian ones.”

“Estimates of civilian losses on the territory of the Soviet Union vary greatly, though the likeliest figure is in excess of 16 million people (roughly double the num­ber of Soviet military losses, of whom 78,000 fell in the battle for Berlin alone). Civilian deaths on the territory of pre-war Poland approached 5 million; in Yu­goslavia 1.4 million; in Greece 430,000; in France 350,000; in Hungary 270,000; in the Netherlands 204,000; in Romania 200,000. Among these, and especially promi­nent in the Polish, Dutch and Hungarian figures, were some 5.7 million Jews, to whom should be added 221,000 gypsies (Roma).”

“The causes of death among civilians included mass extermination, in death camps and killing fields from Odessa to the Baltic; disease, malnutrition and star­vation (induced and otherwise); the shooting and burning of hostages—by the Wehrmacht, the Red Army and partisans of all kinds; reprisals against civilians; the effects of bombing, shelling and infantry battles in fields and cities, on the eastern Front throughout the war and in the West from the Normandy landings of June 1944 until the death of Hitler the following May; the deliberate strafing of refugee columns and the working to death of slave labourers in war industries and prison camps.”[3]

Perhaps the worst thing of all is the fact that the depopulation continued unabated after the war.

“April 20 was a blustery day with alternate rain, sleet and snow and with bone-chilling winds sweeping down the Rhine valley from the north over the flats where the inclosure was located. Huddled close together for warmth, behind the barbed wire was a most awesome sight – nearly 100,000 haggard, apathetic, dirty, gaunt, blank-staring men clad in dirty field grey uniforms and standing ankle-deep in mud. Here and there were dirty white blurs which, upon a closer look were seen to be men with bandaged heads or arms or standing in shirt sleeves! The German Division Commander reported that the men had not eaten for at least two days, and the provision of water was a major problem – yet only 200 yards away was the river Rhine running bank-full.”[4]

“In April 1945, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers as well as the sick from hospitals, amputees, women auxiliaries, and civilians were caught… One inmate at Rheinberg was over 80 years old, another was aged nine .... Nagging hunger and agonising thirst were their companions, and they died of dysentery. A cruel heaven pelted them week after week with streams of rain .... amputees slithered like amphibians through the mud, soaking and freezing. Naked to the skies day after day and night after night, they lay desperate in the sand of Rheinberg or slept exhaustedly into eternity in their collapsing holes.”[5]

One of the inmates described his experiences: “The latrines were just logs flung over ditches next to the barbed wire fences. To sleep, all we could do was to dig out a hole in the ground with our hands, then cling together in the hole. We were crowded very close together. Because of illness, the men had to defecate on the ground. Soon, many of us were too weak to take off our trousers first. So, our clothing was infected, and so was the mud where we had to walk and sit and lie down. There was no water at all at first, except the rain, then after a couple of weeks we could get a little water from a standpipe. But most of us had nothing to carry it in, so we could get only a few mouthfuls after hours of lining up, sometimes even through the night. We had to walk along between the holes on the soft earth thrown up by the digging, so it was easy to fall into a hole, but hard to climb out. The rain was almost constant along that part of the Rhine that spring. More than half the days we had rain. More than half the days we had no food at all. On the rest, we got a little K ration. I could see from the package that they were giving us one tenth of the rations that they issued to their own men. So, in the end we got perhaps five percent of a normal U.S. Army ration. I complained to the American camp commander that he was breaking the Geneva Convention, but he just said, “Forget the Convention. You haven’t any rights.”

“Within a few days, some of the men who had gone healthy into the camp were dead. I saw our men dragging many dead bodies to the gate of the camp, where they were thrown loose on top of each other onto trucks, which took them away.”[6]

James Bacque estimates that 790,000 German POWs were willfully murdered (the excuse of food shortages etc. was demonstrably a lie) by Eisenhower (and 250,000 by the French) between 1944 and 1949.

Civilians also suffered enormously and, according to Bacque, there was a “shortage of 5,710,095 people according to official Allied figures” in occupied Germany between the years of 1946 and 1950.[7]

Given the enormity of the crimes which went unabated well into the post-war years, crimes which can justly be termed “democide” (the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder), and the fact that few people are even aware of them today shows that it would be unwise on the part of anybody to trust their respective governments.

Democide is, sadly, the rule and not the exception. R. J. Rummel records how: “From the invasion of China in 1937 to the end of World War II, the Japanese military regime murdered near 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most probably almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. This democide was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture (such as the view that those enemy soldiers who surrender while still able to resist were criminals).”[8]

“As the Red Army pounded the Wehrmacht back toward Germany’s Eastern territories in October 1944, some 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 Germans fled or were forced by the Nazis to evacuate. The roads were clogged with millions of refugees, young and old, maim and sick, along with their carts and horses, and all sorts of belongings littered the roads; 500,000 of these refugees alone formed haphazard caravans across an ice-covered lagoon to reach Baltic ports. Thousands were killed by Soviet artillery and strafing planes, machine gunned on the roads and run over by tanks, or disappeared into holes in the ice created by bombs. Thousands more that tried to escape on over-crowded ships were killed when the ships were sunk by planes or submarines. Tens of thousands more died from exposure and sickness. Overall possibly 1,000,000 German civilians perished during this evacuation and flight, itself an incredible toll in human lives.”

“After the defeat of the Wehrmacht millions of Germans tried to return eastward to their former homes or areas. In the lands they passed through or returned to famine was widespread, social and health services were totally disrupted. Signs warned refugees that they would starve to death if they lingered.”

“For these returning Germans and those that had found havens in the Eastern territories from the war or had remained, the “greatest forcible dislocation of persons in European history” was yet to come. Within a few years of the war's end an incredible 15,000,000 Reichdeutsche and Ethnic German civilians would be thrown out of Poland, the Baltic States, Memel, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and the Eastern areas of Germany (this is as though the Netherlands, Afghanistan, or Greece were totally emptied of all humans by force). From around 500,000 to 3,700,000 Germans, probably near 1,900,000, would die or be killed in this process (in addition to those that died during the wartime evacuation and flight), most by actions of the Poles, Czechs, and Yugoslavs.”[9]

The Holocaust, the ongoing Genocide by Jab and the current war in the Ukraine need to be seen in this context. More needs to be written about the depopulation agenda but I will reserve this for a later letter.

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[1] p.13 The Unknown Dead: Civilians in the Battle of the Bulge, Peter Schrijvers

[2] p.16 Postwar, Tony Judt

[3] p.18 Ibid

[4] pp.34-35 Other Losses, James Bacque

[5] p.36 Ibid

[6] p.38 Ibid

[7] p.121 Crimes and Mercies, James Bacque.

[8] https://hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE5.HTM

[9] Ibid