The Falsification of History: Our Distorted Reality (56 page)

In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate enclosure. The men had no shelter and no blankets and most had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for use as toilets.
 
It was a cold, wet spring and their misery from exposure alone was evident.

Even more shocking was to see the prisoners throwing grass and weeds into a tin can containing a thin soup.
 
They did this to help ease their hunger pains but they soon grew very emaciated.
 
Dysentery was rife and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches.
 
Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before the eyes of their captors who had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, even refusing them medical assistance.

Outraged, he protested to the officers and was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from ‘higher up.’
 
No officer would dare do this to 50,000 men if he felt that it was ‘out of line,’ leaving himself open to charges.
 
Realising that his protestations were useless, he asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could smuggle out any extra food for the prisoners.
 
He too said they were under strict orders to severely ration the prisoners’ food and that these orders came from ‘above’.
 
But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with and would see what he could do.

When he threw this food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, he was caught and threatened with imprisonment.
 
After repeating the offence, one officer angrily threatened to shoot him but he assumed this was a bluff until he encountered a captain on a hill above the camp shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 calibre handgun.

When asked why, he mumbled ‘target practice’ and fired until his pistol was empty.
 
The women ran for cover, but at that distance it was not possible to see if any had been hit.
 
He soon realised he was dealing with cold-blooded killers filled with moralistic hatred that considered the Germans subhuman and worthy only of extermination; another expression of the downward spiral of racism.
 
Articles in the GI newspaper, Stars and Stripes, played up the German concentration camps, complete with photos of emaciated bodies.
 
This amplified the Americans self-righteous cruelty and made it easier to imitate behaviour they were supposed to have been fighting to bring to an end.

These prisoners were mostly farmers and working men, as simple and ignorant as many of the US troops.
 
As time went by, more of them lapsed into a zombie-like state of listlessness, while others tried to escape in a demented or suicidal fashion, running through open fields in broad daylight towards the Rhine to quench their thirst.
 
They were mowed down by machine gun fire.

Some prisoners were as eager for cigarettes as for food, saying they took the edge off their hunger.
 
Accordingly, enterprising GIs were acquiring hordes of watches and rings in exchange for handfuls of cigarettes or less.
 
When he began throwing cartons of cigarettes to the prisoners to ruin this trade, he was threatened by rank-and-file GIs too.

The only bright spot in this gloomy picture came one night when he was on the ‘graveyard shift’ from two to four am.
 
There was a cemetery on the uphill side of this enclosure, not many yards away.
 
His superiors had omitted to give him a flashlight and he had not asked for one, disgusted as he was with the whole situation by that time.
 
It was a fairly bright night and he soon became aware of a prisoner crawling under the wires towards the graveyard.
 
They were supposed to shoot escapees on sight, so he started to get up from the ground to warn him to get back but suddenly noticed another prisoner crawling from the graveyard back to the enclosure.
 
They were risking their lives to get to the graveyard for something.

Upon investigating in the gloom of this shrubby, tree-shaded cemetery, he felt overwhelmingly vulnerable, but somehow curiosity kept him moving.
 
Despite his caution, he tripped over the legs of someone in a prone position.
 
Whipping his rifle around while stumbling and trying to regain composure of mind and body, he was relieved that he had not reflexively fired a shot.
 
The figure sat up and gradually, the beautiful but terror-stricken face of a woman with a picnic basket nearby became apparent.
 
German civilians were not allowed to feed, nor even come near the prisoners, so he quickly assured her that he approved of what she was doing, not to be afraid and that he would leave the graveyard immediately.

Having departed the graveyard he sat down, leaning against a tree at the edge of the cemetery to be inconspicuous and not frighten the prisoners.
 
Eventually, more prisoners crawled back to the enclosure and he saw that they were dragging food back to their comrades and he could only admire their courage and devotion in the face of such desperation.

On the 8th May 1945, VE Day, he decided to celebrate with some prisoners he was guarding who were baking the bread the other prisoners occasionally received.
 
This group had all the bread they could eat and shared the jovial mood engendered by the cessation of hostilities. Everyone thought that they would be going home soon, which as it turned out was far from the truth.
 
At this point in time however, they were in what was to become the French zone of occupation, where he soon would witness the brutality of the French soldiers when the prisoners were transferred to them for their slave labour camps.
 
On this day, however, all were happy.

Shortly afterwards, some of the more weak and sickly prisoners were marched off by French soldiers to their camp and the GIs followed on a truck behind this column.
 
On several occasions, temporarily it slowed down and almost stopped, possibly because the truck driver was shocked to see that whenever a German prisoner staggered or dropped back, he was hit on the head with a club and killed.
 
The bodies were rolled to the side of the road to be picked up by another truck.
 
For many, this quick death might have been preferable to the slow starvation that otherwise awaited them.

“...it is hard to escape the conclusion that Dwight Eisenhower was a war criminal of epic proportions.
 
His policy killed more Germans in peace than were killed in the European Theatre.”
  
Peter Worthington, the ‘Ottawa Sun’, 12th September 1989

Eventually, famine began to spread among the German civilians also.
 
It was a common sight to see German women up to their elbows in garbage cans looking for something edible.
 
There were never any Red Cross personnel at the camp or helping civilians, although their coffee and doughnut stands were available everywhere else for the US troops.
 
In the meantime, the Germans had to rely on the sharing of hidden stores until the next harvest.

Hunger made German women more ‘available’ but despite this, rape was prevalent and often accompanied by additional violence.
 
In particular there was an eighteen-year old woman who had the side of her faced smashed with a rifle butt and was then raped by two GIs.
 
Even the French complained that the rapes, looting and drunken destructiveness on the part of US troops was excessive.
 
In Le Havre, the US forces were given booklets warning that the German soldiers had maintained a high standard of behaviour with French civilians who were peaceful and that they should do the same.
 
In this they failed miserably.

‘So what’, some may say?
 
The enemy's atrocities were worse than ours.
 
It is true that he experienced only the end of the war, when the Allies were already the victors.
 
The German opportunity for atrocities had ended, but two wrongs do not make a right.
 
Rather than mimicking an enemy's crimes, should we not aim to break the cycle of hatred and vengeance that has always plagued and distorted human history?
 

We can reject government propaganda that depicts our enemies as subhuman and encourages the kind of outrages he witnessed.
 
We can protest the bombing of civilian targets, which still goes on today in places like Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine, Afghanistan and Libya and we can refuse ever to condone our government’s murder and torture of unarmed and defeated prisoners of war and helpless civilians.

Even GIs sympathetic to the victims were afraid to complain and get into trouble and the danger has not ceased.
 
After this brave man spoke out many, many years later, he received threatening calls, was intimidated physically and had his mailbox smashed.

The abuses committed by the forces of the occupation in Germany reached such bestial extremes that various people in the Allied command structure opposed it, or tried to.
 
Charles Lindbergh mentioned how the American soldiers burned the leftovers of their meals to keep them from being scavenged by the starving Germans who hung around the rubbish bins.

Lindbergh also wrote:

“In our homeland the public press publishes articles on how we 'liberated' the oppressed peoples.
 
Here, our soldiers use the word 'liberate' to describe how they get their hands on loot.
 
Everything they grab from a German house, everything they take off a German is 'liberated' in the lingo of our troops.
 
Leica cameras are liberated, food, works of art, clothes are liberated.
 
A soldier who rapes a German girl is ‘liberating’ her.

There are German children who gaze at us as we eat ... our cursed regulations forbid us to give them anything to eat.
 
I remember the soldier Barnes, who was arrested for having given a chocolate bar to a tattered little girl.
 
It's hard to look these children in the face.
 
I feel ashamed.
 
Ashamed of myself and my people as I eat and look at those children.
 
How can we have gotten so inhumane?”

Colonel Charles Lindbergh was regarded as a national hero of the United States and was proposed as a candidate for the presidency of his country.
 
He served in the USAF and was no Nazi or Nazi sympathiser, but simply recognised the injustices committed by man against his fellow man, supposed enemy or not.

The apocryphal story about Hitler and his wife Eva Braun’s suicides and subsequent ‘home-made cremations’ with a can of petrol in the grounds adjoining the ‘fuhrerbunker’ at the end of April 1945 is simply Soviet Russian propaganda in collusion with British and American wartime High Command and nothing more.

Even the mainstream, politically correct, Elite-controlled History Channel’s own investigation in the early 2000s proved beyond reasonable doubt that the skull portion and dental fragments in the possession of the Russians, retrieved from the burial of the burnt corpse of ‘Hitler’ could not have belonged to him.
 
And this was after an extensive forensic investigation lasting more than a year, during which his authenticated dental records were meticulously compared with the burnt tooth and bone fragments.
 

At the time, the Russians did not wish to admit that Hitler had evaded capture as was planned from the start.
 
They believed it would have reflected extremely badly on them and so their propaganda machinery went into overdrive and concocted a credible story to deflect criticism from them, over the sorry affair.
 
As time went on, the propaganda as always, came to be regarded as ‘fact’ and the real story died, along with the propaganda’s perpetrators.
 
In fact, the usual modus operandus.

It is well known that Hitler had more than one ‘double’, just as in more recent times there have been several Saddam Husseins and Osama bin Ladens and thus how easy would it have been to surreptitiously execute one of them and burn his body in a pit?
 
I personally find it beyond incredible to seriously suggest that in the last months of the war when the Russians were rampaging through Eastern Germany towards Berlin that no arrangements had been made either through his own efforts or on his behalf by third parties, to evacuate him and Eva Braun to safety.
 
Are we really supposed to believe that he just remained there in the bunker awaiting his ultimate and inevitable fate?
 
All the other major Nazi figures (with the possible exception of Josef Goebbels and family – and even that is by no means certain) made good their escapes whilst there was still time enough to do so, albeit that several of them were ‘captured’ in the following weeks and months.