Claimed mass killings of Germans by the WWII Allies

Anti-German agitator Ilya Ehrenburg during WWII; Ehrenburg's incendiary writings contributed in no small measure to the communist part of the mass killings of Germans by the WWII Allies.

Claimed mass killings of Germans by the WWII Allies is a less politically correct topic on war crimes, since National Socialist Germany lost the war and official historiography and especially the mass media tend to depict the war in almost religious terms, as battle between good and evil. If these mass killings are mentioned, then they are often minimized and more or less explicitly justified, since National Socialist Germany is argued to have started the war and to be responsible for the Holocaust.

Holocaust revisionists argue that one of the primary reasons for the orthodox Holocaust version being created/supported is to justify or distract from the Allied mass killings (genocide against the German people). See Holocaust motivations: Argued Exploitation.

History

Victims of the Red Army during the Massacre of Nemmersdorf (Massaker von Nemmersdorf) in October 1944.

Burial marker of 24 raped and murdered civilians from Nemmersdorf.

War criminal and butcher Ernest Miller Hemingway was proud of murdering 122 defenseless German prisoners of war.

Czech Hell

Before the war

The British Royal Navy's shipping blockade of Germany during the First World War caused mass deaths of German civilians and influenced Second World War policies, as discussed in the article on The World Wars and mass starvation.

Poland

Oppression and treatment of ethnic Germans in Poland was one of the stated reasons given by Germany which led to war. One report claimed 58,000 dead or missing. This included also murders immediately after the start of the war, such as Bloody Sunday.

See also Gleiwitz incident and Revisionist views on the causes of the World Wars.

During the war

See also Bombing of Germany during World War II

After Churchill became Prime Minister, the first British air raid against a German city was carried out on Mönchengladbach. On the night of 12 May 1940, dozens of bombs fell on the city, killing four civilians and wounding dozens more. In the days that followed, air raids on Dortmund, Essen, Hamm, Aachen, Hanover and other cities followed. The pilots did not aim at industrial plants but at residential buildings.

It has been suggested that these air raids were carried out to cause a German bombing retaliation, in order to increase British civilian public support for the war. It has also been argued that the British Government could have stopped the subsequent German air-raids at any time, merely by stopping the air-raids on Germany. Another less well-known fact is that the Allied bombing of Germany killed far more civilians than the German bombing of Britain, with one estimate stating ten times more.

"In March 1942 Churchill’s War Cabinet adopted the ‘Lindemann plan’, whereby civilian targeting became official. Working-class homes were preferred to upper-class because they were closer together, and so a greater flesh-incineration-per-bomb could be achieved. Professor Frederick Lindemann, Churchill's friend and scientific advisor (who in 1941 was created Lord Cherwell) submitted a plan to the War Cabinet on March 30th urging that German working-class houses be targeted in preference to military objectives, the latter being harder to hit. Middle-class homes had too much space around them, he explained. He was not prosecuted for this ghastly new war-crime, hitherto undreamt-of. Thereby all cities and town over 50,000 inhabitants could be destroyed, or at least brought to ruin. The War Cabinet realised that no inkling of this must reach the public."

The German born Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn, with the help of others such as German-emigre set designers from a Hollywood film studio, constructed an entire "German Village" in Utah, in order to develop weapons of mass destruction for use against civilian targets in Germany. This despite such civilian targets including working-class districts, which had sometimes been Communist strongholds and strongly anti-National Socialist before the National Socialists gained power. Assaulted by napalm, gas, anthrax and incendiary bombs, the "German Village" was rebuilt several times during 1943. This contributed to the destructiveness of attacks such as the bombing of Dresden. During the war, US and UK bombing attacks destroyed 45% of German housing.

Churchill argued that if using mass terror against civilians and killing and mutilating them in sufficient numbers, then they would rise up against Hitler and bring a quick end to the war. One of his proposals was "Operation Thunderclap" that aimed to kill 275,000 Berliners in a single 2,000-plane raid scheduled for August 1944. Another was using biological weapons spreading disease among civilians. He thus argued for using 500,000 top-secret "N-bombs" - filled with anthrax - to be dropped on Berlin and five other German cities.

Furthermore, Churchill strongly wanted to "drench" German cities with poison gas, but reluctantly gave in due to his military advisers stating that this would actually have less effect than the conventional bombing of German cities and that Germany would very probably retaliate. In contrast, a British Army chemical warfare expert has argued that Germany could have used poison gas in order to achieve important military goals, such as delaying the Allied cross-channel invasion. Germany had developed and produced far more advanced and lethal gases (such as nerve gases) than the Allies. That they were not used has been argued to be in part due to Hitler's recollection of the horror of his own gassing during the First World War, which temporarily blinded him. Air attacks was not limited to bombing.

"In his autobiography, the famous American aviator, Chuck Yeager, recalls that his squadron was ordered to machine gun “everything that moved” over a 50-square mile area: “Germany cannot be so easily divided into innocent civilians and military personnel. The farmer on his potato patch was, after all, feeding German troops.”"

The Soviet Union deported the Volga Germans to Siberia, which was associated with mass deaths/killings. See also the article on The World Wars and mass starvation.

At the end of and after the war

Massive ethnic cleansings, mass rapes, and mass deaths/killings of the German civilian population (especially in the areas under Communist control) occurred during the later stages of the war and afterwards.

One purpose of the atrocities was to drive away the German population from both the territories Germany lost to other countries due to the war and from areas in other countries where German minorities had existed before the war. Many millions of ethnic German civilians were thus expelled from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia.

See the article on the Morgenthau Plan on this very harsh plan for the occupation of Germany. While the Morgenthau plan was formally rejected, very harsh measures were despite this implemented on occupied Germany, which have been argued to have caused large scale German deaths in the first years after the war.

Another issue is the treatment of German POWs. Many were used as forced laborers, many were not released until long after the end of the war, and many died in captivity.

"At the February 1945 Yalta Conference, Churchill and Roosevelt further agreed to permit Stalin to use Germans as slave labor after the war, a practice that the diplomats dubbed “reparations in kind.” An estimated 874,000 German civilians were abducted to Soviet Russia, of whom 45 percent perished in captivity."

During the postwar period, groups such as Nakam and Tilhas Tizig Gesheften are alleged to have killed at least hundreds of individuals they suspected may have been involved in the Holocaust. The Nakam group is furthermore alleged to more generally have intended to kill six million Germans.

The book An Eye for an Eye: The Story of Jews Who Sought Revenge for the Holocaust argued that after the Second World War, many concentration camps were established for purposes of the indiscriminate internment of mostly German victims, many of whom were to die an agonizing death there. The book argued that mostly Jewish concentration camp guards in Polish camps took gruesome revenge on innocent Germans, who had been rounded up more or less at random.

See also Western Holocaust camps: Allied atrocities at the Western Holocaust camps.

The book Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation 1944-1950 argued that Allied policies, such as of expulsion and starvation in the post-war period, caused the premature deaths of 5.7 million German civilians, 2.5 million ethnic German refugees from Eastern Europe and 1.1 million German POWs. These numbers have been criticized, but also other books have confirmed very high numbers, such as the book After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation.

"A nation in tatters, in many places literally flattened by bombs, was suddenly subjected to brutal occupation by vengeful victors. Rape was rampant. Hundreds of thousands of Germans and German-speakers died in the course of brutal deportations from Eastern Europe. By the end of the year, Germany was literally starving to death. Over a million German prisoners of war died in captivity, where they were subjected to inadequate rations and often tortured. All told, an astounding 2.25 million German civilians died violent deaths in the period between the liberation of Vienna and the Berlin airlift. [...] brutality which has been largely ignored by historians or, worse, justified as legitimate retaliation for the horror of the Holocaust."

Argued responsibility for starting and prolonging the war as well as casualties due to rejecting German proposals

See Revisionist views on the causes of the World Wars on theories arguing for the Allies having started the war.

The Allies rejected various peace proposals, which could have ended the war even before "the Holocaust" allegedly started. See also the article on Rudolf Hess and his peace proposal.

The Allies have been alleged to deliberately have wanted to keep the Jews in German areas, in order to increase Germany’s logistical problems, and therefore, for example, to have refused a German offer to exchange Jews in German internment for German nationals who were being held by the British.

The Soviet Union refused to accept international conventions on the treatment of POWs and rejected German proposals on this, which has been argued to have contributed to mass deaths of German and non-German POWs. See Claimed mass killings of non-Jews by National Socialist Germany.

The Allied demand for "unconditional surrender" has been argued to have needlessly prolonged the war and to have massively increased civilian and military casualties.

The harsh Morgenthau Plan was leaked to the public, which has been argued to have prolonged the war and to have increased the number of casualties on all sides, by increasing German willingness to continue to fight despite clearly having lost the war.

Quotes

• Sergeant Horace T. West killed 37 prisoners of war in cold blood at Biscari. He was court-martialed, his trial began at 2 September 1943. He was found guilty, stripped of his rank, and sentenced to life imprisonment. On 23 November 1944, he was pardoned quietly and his status restored. I find that an apt example of how the Western Allies ‘prosecuted’ criminals on their side. It seems the life of a man was worth about eleven days in prison.

• Around 4 p.m., six of the 17 and 18-year-old SS soldiers, wearing only boots, pants and undershirts, with their hands raised, were chased to the cemetery by about 20 drunken negro soldiers, cheering and accompanied by music. Every now and then the boys were beaten into the ditch, from which they got up again covered in blood. At the Stations of the Cross [Note: Kreuzwegstationen are pilgrimage stations in honor of Jesus Christ.], the Americans fired several volleys into the air. The six boys had their skulls bashed in and brain matter was splattered all over the place. – Franz Frank, eyewitness of the Lippach massacre

• "More than 9 million Germans died as a result of deliberate Allied starvation and expulsion policies after World War II--one quarter of the country was annexed, and about 15 million people expelled in the largest act of ethnic cleansing the world has ever known. Over 2 million of these alone, including countless children, died on the road or in concentration camps in Poland and elsewhere. That these deaths occurred at all is still being denied by Western governments. At the same time, Herbert Hoover and Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King created the largest charity in history, a food-aid program that saved an estimated 800 million lives during three years of global struggle against post--World War II famine--a program they had to struggle for years to make accessible to the German people, who had been excluded from it as a matter of official Allied policy. Never before had such revenge been known. Never before had such compassion been shown." – James Bacque, in: Crimes and Mercies – The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944–1950

See also

• Allied atrocities
• Bombing of Germany during World War II
• Mass rapes by Allied forces during World War II
• Rheinwiesenlager
• Marocchinate
• The World Wars and mass starvation
• National Socialist Germany and partisans/resistance movements
• German Expellees (forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Germans)

Censorship

• Anti-Holocaust revisionism - The section "Censorship, persecution, and prohibition of Holocaust revisionism" on related censorship of Allied atrocities in some countries.

Movies

• Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947

Further reading

• Benton L. Bradberry: The Myth of German Villainy, AuthorHouse, 2012, ISBN 978-1477231838 [454 p.]

Sources

• Death in Poland - The Fate of the Ethnic Germans in September 1939, by Edwin Erich Swinger, Jena, Germany, 1940, English-language edition 2004, second printing 2021.
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, 1st UK edition 1970, reprinted 1972-3-4-5.
• The Nuremberg Raid 30/31 March 1944 by Martin Middlebrook, Allen Lane, London, 1973, ISBN: 0-7139-0612-X
• Prussian Nights by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, London, 1977, ISBN: 0-00-262648-9.
• Hour of the Women by Count (Graf) Christian von Krockow, Faber & Faber, London, 1992, ISBN: 0-571-14320-2
• Dresden 1945 by Alexander McKee, London, et al, 1982, ISBN: 0-583-13686-0.
• The Destruction of Dresden by David Irving, first published 1963; revised 1971 and again 1985 , Macmillan, London, 1985, ISBN 0-333-40483-1.
• Dresden - Tuesday 13 February 1945, by Frederick Taylor, Bloomsbury, London, 2004, ISBN 0-7475-7078-7.
• The Fire - The Bombings of Germany 1940-1945, by Jorg Friedrich, Columbia University Press, English-language edition, 2006, ISBN 0-231-13380-4
• The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau 1939-1945, by Prof. Alfred M. de Zayas, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, and London, 1989 (originally published in German in 1979), ISBN: 0-8032-1680-7, contains terrible and utterly verified atrocities against Germans by the Allies.
• A Terrible Revenge - The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans by Prof., Alfred M. de Zayas, German edition 1986, 1st English-language edition 1994: second revised and update edition May 2006, Palgave Macmillan, London & USA, ISBN: 978-1-403907308-5.
• Weeds Like Us (Escaping East Prussia) by Gunter Nitsch, Authorhouse, Bloomington IN., 2006, ISBN: 978-1-4389-3312-2
• Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War by Prof. R. M. Douglas, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2012, ISBN: 978-0-300-19820-1.
• The Fire and the Darkness: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 by Sinclair McKay, St.Martin's Press, New York, Feb 2020, ISBN: 978-1-250-25801-4

External links

• Other Losses, Book Review
• A Hidden Holocaust Revealed: Crimes and Mercies, by James Bacque, A Review
• After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupationm Book Review
• Suppressing the Story of Genocide Against Germans, Author Details Postwar Jewish Crimes
• Deutschland unter Allem: Lifting the Conquerors' Heels from Germany, Book Review
• American Historian Looks At “Ethnic Cleansing” of Germans, Book Review
• Churchill Wanted to "Drench" Germany With Poison Gas

Article archives

• Codoh: Deprivation, Ethnic Cleansing and (Mass) Murder
• Codoh: Allied War Crimes in General
• Codoh: Ethnic Cleansing in Poland
• Codoh: Bombing + Air Raid Defense
• Codoh: Allied Concentration Camps
• Justice for Germans
• The Scriptorium: Archive