A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans (Paperback

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

Today i found out that one of our Forum Family member is a survivor

of ethnic cleansing that few of us may be aware of (i was not). One

sentence sums it all: " Men are beasts, and there is no cruelty they

will not commit if they are allowed to do that. "

 

Since i did not experience anything even remotely resembling it there

is no way i can genuinely feel the immense post-survival pain and

self-torture of such victims, much less the fear, horror and

traumatic nightmare of the ethnic cleansing ordeal itself. Making

myself and others aware of such inhuman atrocities may bring the

healing Silence of consciousness, conscience and compassion.

 

regards to all,

 

jagbir

 

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A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans

(Paperback) by Alfred-Maurice de Zayas (Author)

 

Book Description

The closing phase and the aftermath of World War II saw millions of

refugees and displaced persons wandering across Easter Europe in one

of the most brutal and chaotic migrations in world history.The

genocidal barbarism of the Nazi forces has been well documented. What

hitherto has been little known is the fate of fifteen million German

civillians who found themselves at the mercy of Soviet armies and on

the wrong side of new postwar borders. All over Eastern Europe, the

inhabitants of communities that had been established for many

centuries were either expelled or killed. Over two million Germans

did not survive. Many of these people had supported Hitler, and for

the Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, and surviving Jews, their fate must

have seemed just. However, the great majority--East Prussian farmers,

Silesian industrial workers, their wives and children--were

guiltless. Their fate, sentenced purely by race, remains an appalling

legacy of the period.Alfred de Zayas's book describes this horrible

retribution. On the basis of extensive research in German and

American archives, he outlines the long history of these German

communities, scattered from the Baltic to the Danude, and, most

movingly, reproduces the testimonies of surviors from the

catastrophic exodus that marked the final end to Nazi fantasies of

Lebensraum.

 

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)

Original Language: German

 

 

ALFRED DE ZAYAZ GIVES VOICE TO THE MILLIONS OF INNOCENT VICTOMS FORGOTTEN BY

HISTORIANS, June 19, 2006

E.Walter author of BAREFOOT IN THE RUBBLE.

 

It is very difficult when members of one's family have been killed and are

buried with thousands of others in unmarked mass graves in Eastern European

Communist Countries, yet one does not find it in the history books. However,

hundreds of thousands know it happened because they remember. They remember the

fear, hunger, and pain that they experienced in Communist concentration camps.

They remember walking over fields in the dark and the wet and cold seeping

through ragged clothing as they escaped to the West. Suppose you were one of the

many who experienced this. You were in the camps for almost three years when you

were only a young child. As a teenager living in the USA in the 1950's you read

in your history book about the atrocities that were committed in World War II by

the Nazis and the Japanese. Eagerly you search to see what is written about the

horrifying experiences that remain so vividly in your mind, but you find

nothing. In your senior year in English class the teacher asks you to write a

true story - so you write about your childhood for the first time. It is very

painful for you to put the words on paper for the memories hurt. The paper comes

back marked with a D and THIS IS NOT TRUE is written across in bold red letters.

Devastated, you put your paper away and decide that what you went through does

not matter to the rest of the world for you are an Ethnic German. These were my

experiences and this is how I felt. All this has changed since this book has

come out. It contains the stories about ordinary people who were caught in the

fangs of war. I was not a NAZI at age 4 - I was an innocent child - like the

millions of others that had to pay for what they did not do. At last someone has

brought the truth to light about what the Communists did to purge Eastern

European countries of their Ethnic German population. Thank you Alfred de Zayas

for this gripping book.

 

 

_______________________

 

Victors' shame, June 7, 2006

By Albert Doyle (Sanibel, Florida USA)

 

War is hell,we all know that. But the strength of this shocking book is that it

shreds the Veil of the Temple of Nobility with which the allies, particularly

the US and the British, like to cover their actions during and after WW II. The

high principles of the Atlantic Charter were readily abandoned at Yalta and

Potsdam where these supposedly Christian western nations slipped into the orgy

of revenge, disregarding the principles of international law regarding the

treatment of civilians and the illegality of " ethnic cleansing " which their

former words renounced but which their actions and agreements at the very same

time approved. In spite of the comments of some ignorant or malicious defenders

of the perpetrators in other reviews here the victims were universally innocent

people. There were however individuals in the west who protested in vain

including one I would like to single out, Victor Gollancz, the English publisher

and a Jew, who protested the inhuman mistreatment of the German expellees. To

our lasting shame he had little impact. I also note that the author calls

attention to the moral, legal and intellectual unacceptablility of ethnic

cleansing of populations from their homes and gives some current examples

without mentioning the treatment of the Palestinians by the Zionists. I suppose

he didn't want any trouble in having this fine book published.

 

 

_______________________

 

Harrowing tales of forgotten victims, July 10, 2002

Kenneth Brittian (Louisville, USA)

 

This book tells the tale of millions of ethnic Germans who were murdered,

deported or otherwise ethnically cleansed from areas in eastern Europe towards

the end of World War II and in the immediate years following the Third Reich's

final defeat. This story has rarely been touched upon in books until now. The

author recounts many first hand narratives of survivors of the violence that was

doled out to anyone of German ancestry who found themselves in areas conquered

by the Soviet army plus lists evidence gathered by the German Wehrmacht War

Crimes Bureau. Among the horrors the reader will encounter is the savagery dealt

out to citizens of the German town of Nemmersdorf which included crucifictions

of women and the mass murder of children. The reader will march along ethnic

Germans being forced from their homes in eastern Europe and will witness the

wholesale murders that befell many.

 

 

_______________________

 

Important book about forgotten facts., April 11, 2000

by brx

 

Being a (young) German, and not from an expelled family, I was quite

unaware of what went on during the last days of the war in Eastern

Germany. Nobody tells you about that here. The " Vertriebenen "

(Expelled ones) are considered to be very strange and right-wing and

do not have much public exposure. Reading this book I was very

shocked and touched, understanding the pain and loss of those people.

Even worse, they are not even allowed to express what they have

witnessed. The Shoah is very well documentated (and rightly so), but

this dark chapter of the holocaust on the Germans after the war will

soon be forgotten. The book is very well written, very balanced and

not biased, the facts are proven and documentated. Reading it, I had

the same bitter feeling that I head reading the KZ-Documents F321 and

other first-hand recollection of the Shoah: Men are beasts, and there

is no cruelty they will not commit if they are allowed to do that.

Hitler allowed the SS to kill the Jews any which way they wanted.

Chuchill and Roosevelt allowed Stalin and Benez to kill the Germans

any which way they wanted. And they all did.

 

 

_______________________

 

Long overdue, facts of brutality against ethnic Germans., May 31, 2006

By K.D.K. " KDK " (Wales, UK)

 

I am the son of a German father who emigrated to the UK after WWII. It was

January 1945 when as a four year old he was separated from his mother and forced

out of his ancestral home before the advancing Red Army. He was with his aunts

and grandparents when his sorry column of fleeing refugees was over-run by the

Red Army, women were raped, youngsters abducted and men beaten to death at the

roadside. Those who survived the ordeal fled westwards with only what they wore.

Meanwhile my Father's mother and brothers experienced trauma at the hands of the

Polish militia, where the young boys were executed in front of their mothers.

 

I'm a keen geneaologist and have been trying to ascertain exactly where in

Germany/Austria my Dad's family originally come from as they settled in Eastern

Poland/Volhynia in the early 1800's. I've travelled back to our ancestral home

and made many new friends in Poland and Ukraine.

 

I have also heard many more horrific stories from family and acquaitances who

witnessed this barbarity first hand. We must never forget the pain and suffering

of millions at the hands of the Nazis. This book finally brings to light

atrocities perpetrated against a people who had no part in the instigation of

the Nazi state and whose only crime was to speak German at home and have

Germanic surnames.

 

 

_______________________

 

Absorbing Tome On Ethnic Cleansing Of Post WWII Germans!, September

7, 2004

by Barron Laycock

 

Among the most horrific of acts following the carnage of World War

Two in Europe was the so-called revenge events against civilian

Germans in the eastern-most provinces of what had been Germany until

the end of the war and retracing of national boundaries pursuit with

treaty agreements that had been reached. Much of the indigenous

German population within what is now western Poland was subjected to

unspeakable acts of violence, retribution, and forced resettlement,

much as the German and Polish Jews had been under the repressive

hands of the Third Reich during the war. This well-researched and

superbly written book focuses on the ways in which this set of events

triggered a genocidal wave of reaction against ethnic Germans

unfortunate enough to be living in the areas suddenly no longer part

of Germany proper.

 

This is not to either suggest any legal rationale for the genocide

which ensued, but to admit the pent-up grievances and immense

frustration of other ethnic groups toward Germany in particular, and

to any ethnic Germans in general, such that they became the victims

of an incredible amount of focused antipathy and homicidal rage after

the war. One of the most fascinating aspects of this book is the way

in which the author animates the events with first-person anecdotes,

which serve to graphically demonstrate what the edicts and events

meant in human terms to those individuals caught in the cross hairs

of place and circumstance, victims ineluctably on the wrong side of

history.

 

For anyone well-read in the events of the times, the incidents of

brutality in the immediate period following cessation of hostilities

are legend, and Jews and other forced " evacuees " returning to

liberated Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe most often found all

their legal property - farms, houses, apartments, and businesses, -

still occupied by people who had summarily usurped them during the

war and were now singularly disinterested in giving them back. The

lack of simple humanity shown by so many individuals under the duress

of war is testimony to the continuing enmity the ethnic Germans soon

felt the rage of. Thus this book adds the curious and yet fascinating

dimension of those civilian Germans, just as much victimized in their

own way by the German Third Reich's geo-political activities as

anyone, suddenly victimized for the mere reason of ethnicity and the

endless enmity of other groups within the country itself. This is a

fascinating book, and one I can highly recommend. Enjoy!

 

 

_______________________

 

A long overdue tale about the greatest crime of the 20th century in peacetime,

February 16, 2007

By El Chupacabra (Scandinavia)

 

This book is one of the few books I've read that actually caused me to feel

physically ill. It details the horrible treatment innocent German civilians had

to endure from the Bolshevik hordes in the period from 1944 and onwards. Even

though written from a liberal and kind of " excuse me for being German "

perspective, I appreciate the effort the author has made in writing and

researching this thought-provoking book.

 

I'm fully aware that the German soldiers and their allies didn't exactly rub the

Slavic population gently on the back as they passed, but due to partisans and

Bolsheviks, I don't think they had much of a choice. But that being said, I

think you'll be hard pressed to find instances where 20 German soldiers rape one

Slavic girl again and again in front of her parents, before they slaughter the

entire family and torch the property, for no other reason than the family being

Slavic. As you might have guessed by now, this was more or less what happened to

every German girl that found herself in the hands of these Eastern hordes.

 

After the initial ravage, plunder, murder and rape was through, in the ending

phase of the war and just afterwards, followed the forced expulsion from their

Germanic ancestral lands for nearly a millennium with nothing but what they

could carry away in a few minutes, if that, in hand. The treatment these

Germanic brethren of ours got by the Bolshevik conquerors, and the cowardice

displayed by the Western " Allies " , turning a blind eye to the horrible crimes

committed against these helpless people from 1944 and onwards, is probably the

most unknown and at the same time apocalyptic crime, carried out in peacetime in

the heart of Europe.

 

Highly recommended as a compliment to the eternal repetitions we are forced to

hear about daily in regards to the events nowadays elevated to what basically

amounts to " our " modern mode of religion.