World War II

September 21, 2015

Carolyn reads Chapter 20, “Lvov.” The situation found in the prisons of Lvov/Lviv, Ukraine when the Wehrmacht first entered the city on June 30, 1941 was shocking, to say the least. The prisons were filled with thousands of brutally murdered Ukrainians and some Poles - the work of the NKVD, Stalins secret police. In this program:

• Eyewitness accounts of finding 4,000 decomposing corpses in the prisons of Lvov, and thousands more in Zolochov, Rivne, Dubno and Lutsk;
• How German air crews were among those murdered in the hospitals and prisons;
• Why the local populations killed up to 7,000 Jewish residents in reprisal after the Soviets left;
• How Soviet propaganda tried to blame the killings on the Germans at the Nuremberg Tribunals, and through disinformation campaigns even up until today;
• Otto Ohlendorf testimony (and here);
  
• Two German newsreels are on this page: 2nd and 4th on the top row. 58min

Image below: Weary Ukrainians greet the German Wehrmacht in Western Ukraine in the summer of 1941. Note the women at left in traditional costume carrying flowers. Enlarge Two more photos here (relatives discover victims of NKVD in Lvov on June 30, 1941) and here (murdered ethnic Germans are being identified by their relatives at a Ternopil GPU prison on July 10, 1941)

Sept. 14, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 17 -“Feodosia”, 18 -“Grischino” and 19 -“Soviet Crimes against Non-Germans.” These chapters give further evidence of the Soviet policy of killing all Germans the Red Army was able to get it's hands on, plus adding sub-human mutilations such as cutting off body parts or killing with shovels and pickaxes. You will be horrified at some of the things you hear in this reading.

• In Feodosia, 160 severely wounded German soldiers convalescing in hospitals were thrown out the windows and left to freeze to death by Red Army troops;
• In Grischino (close to current Donetsk, Ukraine), nearly 600 Germans and their allies were murdered, mostly by shooting, plus the women first raped, when the Red Army temporarily reoccupied the town;
• Spanish, Italian and Crimean soldiers received worse treatment from the Soviets than did the Germans, and thousands of interned Ukrainian and Baltic civilians were shot before the Soviets abandoned the locations. 58min
  

Image below: A few of the 160 hospitalized German soldiers who were thrown out of 2nd floor windows of hospitals in Feodosia by Red Army soldiers and then down a several meter high wall, where they were left to freeze. Some were carried to the Sea and left in the surf to freeze. The material at the upper left of the picture is iced-over snow. Enlarge (This is the only picture to be easily found from all the accounts in these three chapters. History pages and Google and Yahoo images wipe it all clean; they only want atrocities BY Germans, not against Germans or their allies.)

September 4, 2015

Carolyn reads Chapter 16, "Captured German Soldiers in the Soviet Union."  Stalin and the Red Army had a policy of German genocide and it was evident on the very first day of the war. Main themes:

• Massacre at Broniki on July 1, 1941 when 180 mostly wounded Germans were stabbed, shot and grenaded to death with never anyone punished for it;
  
• Captured reports and orders, leaflets and intercepted radio and wireless messages, plus testimony of Soviet POWs all told of the policy of executing prisoners of war;
• Seven ways the Soviets justified the killing of prisoners;
• How the Soviets pretended they were following the Hague Conventions of war;
• Commissars and/or lower ranking officers were responsible for ordering the killings, but there were numerous reports of a Stalin Order.

War Crimes Bureau members believed that Stalin was responsible for the wide-spread killing of German prisoners of war. 1h2m

Below: Actual photo from the Broniki Massacre. 180 surrendered, wounded Germans were robbed, had their hands tied behind their backs and were stabbed and shot. Twelve survivors testified to the cruel treatment and carnage. enlarge

August 10, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 14 and 15.

Chapter 14 is titled "The Western Theater of War" which covers:

• Crimes by English soldiers against civilians, mainly in Belgium;
• Crimes against German soldiers in France;
• The French Resistance.

Chapter 15 is titled "Crete":

• Violations of International Law  by British Armed Forces and Cretan civilians;
• Mutilation of German corpses was widespread, which brought on reprisals against civilians;
• Eyewitness reports by Wehrmacht survivors of British killings of wounded Germans. 1hr10min
  

Above: Remains of the crew of a Heinkel 111 that landed in Doullens, near Vimy, France in June 1940, amd were lynched by French civilians (and badly beaten too, it appears), but try to find something about it on the Internet. You won't. These photographs are from the Bundesarchiv, published in De Zayas' book. Fortunately, a court-martial was held on June 6, with three perpetrators being sentenced to death. The sentence was carried out on June 29. (Read something about it in chapter 9.) Enlarge

From AFP :

Moscow (AFP) - Russian officials have ordered libraries to remove books by well-known British historians John Keegan and Antony Beevor, saying they promote Nazi-era stereotypes, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

The move is part of a broader official push in Russia that is seeing school curricula and textbooks reshaped to cut out alleged foreign influences and provide a Kremlin-backed narrative of history.

The regional education ministry in Sverdlovsk, near the Ural Mountains, issued a decree telling school and university libraries to "check the availability of books" by the historians and "take measures to remove them from access by students and teaching staff".

Both Keegan, who died in 2012, and Beevor are reputed military historians with a focus on World War II.

August 3, 2015

Carolyn reads Chapter 13, titled "Poland." The German War Crimes Bureau was set up on Sept. 4, 1939 in response to the huge increase of reports of attacks against ethnic Germans, mainly from the former German provinces of Posen and West Prussia.

The first judges arrived as early as Sept. 9 and began taking depositions at Bromberg and Hohelsalza. By the end of October, they had six volumes of documents and commentary, each about 500 pages, organized as follows:

• 1) Polish atrocities in Bromberg, Pless, and Stopnica;
• 2) Polish atrocities against ethnic Germans and POW's in Poznan;
  
• 3-4) Violations of laws of war by the Polish Army; 
• 5) Massacre of ethnic Germans in Lodz;
• 6) Polish murders of ethnic Germans (an addendum).

The Bureau's investigations found no evidence of franc tireur or “fifth column” activities among the ethnic Germans, which is what Polish soldiers and civilians were claiming as excuses to rob and kill them. The chapter ends with de Zayas asserting that German SS and SD were committing what he considered to be war crimes against Polish irregular fighters. 51m

Below: Journalists of the major Western press on May 4, 1939 "convince themselves" of the reality of Polish crimes against minority Germans. Standing over the bodies is a German Catholic priest. Enlarge

July 27, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 11 and 12. Chapter 11 is titled “Investigations of German War Crimes” which discusses Adolf Hitler's “Order Number 1” (which was not a war crime but allows de Zayas to bring up the concentration camps and alleged “extermination of Jews”); alleged war crimes in North Africa; the status of medical personnel; alleged crimes during the Allied invasion of Europe and at Malmedy.

Chapter 12, titled “Wehrmacht Conceptions of Postwar International Law,” covers ideas that were being developed for a more German-friendly Convention of international laws of war. The current laws, they thought, represented British interests. 1h12m

Below: Unidentified prisoners of war (POW's) whom are supposed to be protected by the Geneva Convention.

July 20, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 9 and 10. Chapter 9, "The Bureau and War Crimes Trials," describes what went into the decisions to hold trials against prisoners of war in German custody. It's divided into sections for Polish, French, British & American, and Russian POW's.

Chapter 10 discusses reprisal actions by the Wehrmacht troops, many of which were threatened but never carried out. De Zayas continues to show his moderate bias for the Allied side and against Adolf Hitler's N-S regime. 1h3m

Rudolf Lehmann was a respectable German jurist who was Judge Advocate General of the Wehrmacht in WWII. He joined the NSDAP in 1935, was arrested by the Americans in 1945, found guilty of war crimes at the Nuremberg High Command trial in 1947. Sentenced to 7 years imprisonment, he was released in 1950, as was typical.

July 6, 2015

Carolyn reads chapters 7 and 8, having to do with how Bureau investigations were used by the German government and by the Wehrmacht.

Chapt. 7 talks about White Books and White Papers which were put out by the German Foreign Office. One unexpected and disappointing development was that when photographs of the atrocities committed on Germans in Poland were published in the White Books, there was such an outcry over the "horror pictures" that Germany stopped adding those images. Naturally, since the Germans didn't commit mutilations on their enemies, the other side didn't have such pictures to print.

Chapt. 8 is about the use of Bureau investigations for "Diplomatic Protection" for prisoners of war, the wounded, medical personnel, etc. A number of examples of protests are given, on both the West and East Fronts (South too). Something I did not know: "thousands of German POW's had already been liquidated by Soviet forces in the first weeks of fighting." 47m28s

Image: A German White book from the First World War, 1914. I could not find a single image of a WWII White Book. Are they outlawed? Enlarge