Treatment of Germans after WWII

[lorelai]

First, I ought to introduce myself a bit. I'm not what many would call a revisionist. I am, however, extremely pacifist by nature. From writing a distressed diary entry at age nine about the US invasion of Panama to protesting the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I've never believed that war makes anything better.

WWII is often referred to as "The Good War" -- in fact, the book with that title was required reading in my AP European History class in high school. It is used to criticize pacifism and promote the idea of a "just war". Even when another country mounts a military attack on our own soil (Pearl Harbor), war makes you sink to your enemy's level. We put our own citizens in concentration camps solely because of their ethnicity, and while the Japanese internees were in many ways treated better than our conscientious objectors (the internees were not *forced* to work, and the ones that did were paid between $12 and $19 a month, whereas COs were forced to work in the Civilian Public Service 54 hours a week and given between $2.50 and $5.00 in spending money a month -- none of which was paid for by the government, but instead by the families and the historic peace churches), we still deprived them of their liberty and grossly underpaid them. We also were the first, and so far the only, country to use nuclear weapons in combat.

The worst part, to me, though, was not our behavior during the war, but our behavior after it. We forced German POWs (though many did not get that designation, instead called "Disarmed Enemy Forces", so we didn't have to treat them according to the Geneva Convention) into slave labor -- Russia alone demanded four million Germans to do forced labor as part of "reparations", and they were not the only ones.

Worse yet, we refused to allow relief agencies to deliver food until 34 Senators wrote in protest. We ordered that leftover food be either destroyed or rendered inedible so Germans could not even eat our leftovers. The food crisis in Europe was real, but in Germany it was far more attributable to human hands than the weather, and Germany had not been self-sufficient in its production of food since before the first World War (hence the naval blockades causing many Germans to die of starvation in that war). Because it was policy to "de-industrialize" Germany, they weren't able to produce goods to sell for food like that had before the war.... and were forbidden to trade the goods they already had with other countries for food.

Roosevelt claimed these policies were not because he was "bloodthirsty", but because "[he wanted] the Germans to know that this time at least they have definitely lost the war". Other quotes show that he believed the German people deserved to be punished collectively for the sins of their leadership. Even Japan was not treated as harshly regarding food supply -- though the fact Japan gained strategic importance and was only under the control of the US may have something to do with that.

War makes beasts of us all. And as Roger Waters said, "You can take your revenge, but you'll still feel bad.... you can prove your point, but your kids will still be dead...."

BTW: I don't play the "numbers game" -- in my experience, trying to enumerate the dead leads to attempts to medal in the Oppression Olympics. Members of my own religion (I'm Pagan) have tried to do so regarding the alleged "Burning Times" -- sometimes claiming the number of "Witches" killed was more than the numbers claimed for the Holocaust. Where in reality, confirmed deaths are several magnitudes lower, and it's doubtful *any* practiced witchcraft as it is known today. Killing is bad, whether it's one death or a million.

[Hektor]

There is somewhere a thread here on American War Plans prior to Pearl Harbor.
I think James Bacque, a Canadian, did do some research on American treatment of German POW and civilians AFTER the capitulation (the war never ended formally), but this may be outdated on several issues.

Alfred de Zayas did publish some research on the expulsion (and mass murder) of Germans in Eastern Europe:

https://archive.org/details/AlfredMauri ... eanGermans

The American / Western Allied policy on Germans and Germany may also have changed due to strategic reasons being the upcoming cold war in which they needed Western Germany as a bastion against Communism.

[Inquisitor]

One of the common themes you will find that run though Revisionism(be it "holocaust" related, general war related, etc.) is that there is usually ample blame to go around to all sides in most any given war/conflict, and that breaking things down into simplistic "good guy/bad-guy" categories, or worse lumping virtually ALL blame on one side or the other, is neither ethical, honest or historically factual in any way.

WW2 must stand out as one of the most egregious examples of doing that mentioned above - both heaping ALL the blame onto one side, and wildly exaggerating and distorting actual occurrences, twisting truths in knots, simply making unimaginably horrific things up, until the final product is really not history at all, but merely propaganda sanctified as being "true" by the victors, who of course, write the "histories" themselves.

As that famous quote attributed to Aeschylus goes - "In war, truth is the first casualty." I find that has never been more true than in regard to WW2.

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[lorelai]

There is somewhere a thread here on American War Plans prior to Pearl Harbor.
I think James Bacque, a Canadian, did do some research on American treatment of German POW and civilians AFTER the capitulation (the war never ended formally), but this may be outdated on several issues.

I have no doubt there were already plans for a US entry into the war, and while Roosevelt claimed he would not involve the US in the war, it seemed like he either wanted to or saw it as inevitable (or both). Public opinion was very against getting America involved in yet another foreign war, at least until Pearl Harbor. While I've never truly subscribed to the LIHOP theory -- that America knew exactly where and when the attack would be -- it's definitely known that Roosevelt had been provoking Japan and making such an attack inevitable, and that he did not want to be the one to "shoot" first.

Still, people justify Roosevelt's actions (and possible inaction) by saying that America needed to actively participate in the war -- that material support was not enough and if the only way to make the public accept it was for an attack to happen, then it was "good" that Pearl Harbor was bombed. Gag.

As far as Bacque's work is concerned, my main worry is that he seemed to be trying to go for that medal in the Oppression Olympics. Some have used his work to extrapolate a death total of 9 million Germans in the post-war period. That's a magnitude higher than conventional estimates of Germans who starved in WWI because of the extended naval blockades.

The American / Western Allied policy on Germans and Germany may also have changed due to strategic reasons being the upcoming cold war in which they needed Western Germany as a bastion against Communism.

True, especially when Truman really took control -- he was far more suspicious of the USSR than Roosevelt ever had been. But other European countries were suffering from not being able to trade with Germany, too. Hoover also tried to advocate for reform on the punitive food policy, frankly saying that the only way it would work is for the German population to be reduced by 25 million. Whether they would have accepted the fact that post-war punitive policies were hurting all of Europe had the Cold War not loomed ahead is something we'll never know. Allegedly the policy was to keep the German "standard of living" from being more than its neighbors, but people were still starving in Germany after the rest of Europe was eating well.

I just find the whole idea of collective punishment repugnant. I pray Iraq never takes over this country and punishes me for the actions of people I didn't vote for and actively protested against.

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One of the common themes you will find that run though Revisionism(be it "holocaust" related, general war related, etc.) is that there is usually ample blame to go around to all sides in most any given war/conflict, and that breaking things down into simplistic "good guy/bad-guy" categories, or worse lumping virtually ALL blame on one side or the other, is neither ethical, honest or historically factual in any way.

Yep -- I don't believe any human being can be all-good or all-bad, so it follows that human actions can't be lumped into those categories either. It does seem, though, that humans have a difficult time with the idea that both sides can be in the wrong in a conflict. There's always the need to paint one side as better or worse, and addressing the bad that the "Good Guys" did seems to many people to be an attempt to justify the "Bad Guys" bad behavior, or minimize it.

As I said, I'm not really a revisionist. There is plenty of hard evidence that Hitler and the Nazi leadership had significant anti-Jewish sentiment, that laws were passed targeting Jewish people (of course, the American South still had laws targeting blacks at that time), that Jewish people were very disproportionately represented in what camp records exist compared to the general population at that time, and that a lot of people died as a result. Even without gas chambers and several million victims, that's still worthy of the name "Holocaust" to me. Historians will argue numbers long after I'm dead, most likely.

But even if you believe everything accepted by mainstream historians about the Holocaust (and I must admit the hair on display at the museums, along with the piles of shoes, plus eyewitness testimony, is compelling to me), it in no way justifies the punitive nature of polices toward ethnic Germans post-war. Stopping the Vatican from sending food for infants? Good Lord! What did babies do to deserve to suffer like that? Wasting precious food just to keep Germans from eating the scraps left behind? Forced labor in uranium mines or clearing minefields?

We did just about everything we accused the Nazis of doing, but justified it by saying they did it first. Two wrongs do not make a right. It's kind of like how I view the death penalty -- how does killing people for killing people show that killing people is wrong?

And you're definitely right about the victors writing the histories. In that AP European History class I mentioned, the Japanese "internment" was briefly mentioned, as were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But they didn't mention a bit of these punitive post-war policies. I recall the Marshall Plan being discussed, but not the Morgenthau plan or JCS-1067.

(BTW: my "Oppression Olympics" analogy refers to the use of the claimed number of victims in the Holocaust as a yardstick against other mass atrocities. I'm sure you've noticed that just about every mass atrocity is compared to that number, with the implication that matching or beating that number indicates a group was more oppressed . This creates a terrible competition that often sacrifices fact for emotional impact -- trying to claim the dubious honor of being "more persecuted than thou" . I mentioned the "Burning Times" mythology as a prime example, but there are others.)

[Inquisitor]

As I said, I'm not really a revisionist. There is plenty of hard evidence that Hitler and the Nazi leadership had significant anti-Jewish sentiment, that laws were passed targeting Jewish people (of course, the American South still had laws targeting blacks at that time), that Jewish people were very disproportionately represented in what camp records exist compared to the general population at that time, and that a lot of people died as a result. Even without gas chambers and several million victims, that's still worthy of the name "Holocaust" to me. Historians will argue numbers long after I'm dead, most likely.

There is no doubt whatever that the NSDAP was anti-Jewish on many levels. The question, from a historical-interest perspective should be, why. According to the official WW2 - that is to say American/Jewish/UK/EU/USSR, etc. sanctioned version - the National Socialists essentially just "hated" Jews for no good reason, and of course, all manner of horrors were visited upon them as a result. But is that even remotely true?

A quick overview of the topic, not specifically related to the Third Reich only:

http://ihr.org/other/anti-semitism-why- ... t-dec-2013

Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, expressed a similar view. In his memoirs, he wrote: “Whenever the quantity of Jews in any country reaches the saturation point, that country reacts against them ... [This] reaction ... cannot be looked upon as anti-Semitism in the ordinary or vulgar sense of that word; it is a universal social and economic concomitant of Jewish immigration, and we cannot shake it off.”

Of course one can argue the matter unto death in terms of the "right and wrong" of such attitudes. But the key is that they were not plucked out of thin air by any means.

And these opinions played right into the political climate surrounding the second World War - although, per the "official" version, that is hardly even acknowledged today - if not denied outright.

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n1p-4_Weber.html

And of course - more specifically:

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/20 ... -republic/

The Weimar Republic of 1918–1933 not only removed the last barriers against Jewish influence in the field of politics, education and culture, but its democratic institutions ironically created enough breathing space for a cultural and political struggle against the new republic which was largely fought along ethnic lines: the revolutionary Jewish spirit clashed against the conservative German spirit. The overrepresentation of Jews in secondary education diminished the numerical difference between Germans and Jews and made schools in cities as Berlin and Breslau into a mirror image of the armed struggle in Germany between revolutionaries and conservatives in 1918–1919. It was the Jewish overrepresentation in these revolutionary movements and their zeal to destroy the Christian and nationalist foundations of Germany that led to a surge of NS as a racially defined counter-movement against Jewish cultural domination. In short, Jews had become and were seen by Germans as a hostile elite which attacked the culture which most Germans embraced.

I cite these examples not as a "justification" of anti-Semitism, but for historical context on WHY these beliefs and attitudes were held - and this, of course, must be understood to in any way understand why National Socialists felt as they did. And why Jews were so largely represented in camps and so forth, why any number were indeed executed for involvement in the Partisan movement, why a certain indifference to their plight must have developed on the part of many as the war dragged on, etc.

It was a complex and ugly time - we know that for sure! But, as we've all noted already, it was ugly and horrible for many, if not ALL involved...not just ONE group who feels they can monopolize the suffering sentiment!(to say nothing of endlessly exploiting that same sentiment for political and financial gain, etc.)


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