American Historian Looks At 'Ethnic Cleansing’ of Germans

The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace, by Alfred-Maurice de Zayas. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. 200 pages. 24 Photographs. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index.
Reviewed by Robert Clive


The grim fate of the 15 million German civilians who found themselves trapped in the path of the Red Army in the closing months of World War II, or on the wrong side of the re-drawn postwar borders, is not a topic that has tended to excite the interest of historians. And the general public, which is subjected to constant reminders about wartime Nazi brutality, is certainly not aware that at least two million Germans lost their lives in the course of flight and mass expulsion from their ancestral homes in Eastern Europe.

Alfred de Zayas, a graduate of Harvard Law School who earned a doctorate in history at the University of Gottingen in Germany, has devoted much of his professional career to setting the record straight. His earlier books, Nemesis at Potsdam (which detailed Allied responsibility for the brutal mass expulsion of Germans at the end of the war), and The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, met with critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.

First published in German in 1986, The German Expellees is based on extensive research in European and American archives. This American edition is updated with new material not included in the German version.

Chapter One sketches the history of the Germans living throughout East Central Europe. Even students of history are generally unaware of the fact that, starting in the twelfth century, German artisans, farmers, soldiers, and churchmen were invited by reigning princes, kings, and emperors to settle in their domains. The essentially peaceful character of the so-called “Drang nach Osten,” which witnessed the establishment of a German presence in East Prussia, Pomerania, East Brandenburg, Silesia, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Transylvania and Russia, has long been misrepresented as some sort of "march of conquest."

The author then turns to the Paris Peace conference, where President Wilson's lofty pledge to secure "self-determination" did not, it turned out, apply to Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians. The Treaty of Versailles also denied the right of self determination to German citizens who resided in areas to be separated from pre-war Germany, including those living in Danzig, Posen, and West Prussia. De Zayas recounts that the interwar Czech and Polish governments discriminated against their German minorities. Polish atrocities against ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) were, unfortunately, not a fiction of Goebbels' propaganda office, but were all too true. Soviet atrocities against the German civilian populations of East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia have been recounted before, even if they are still not widely known.

De Zayas reviews these grim events, drawing specific attention to the fate of Nemmersdorf, East Prussia, which fell to the Red Army in October 1944 and was then recaptured a short time later by the Wehrmacht. Women and children were gang raped and then murdered in the most brutal fashion.

In the words of American historian and diplomat George Kennan: “The disaster that befell this area with the entry of the Soviet forces has no parallel in modern European experience. There were considerable sections of it where, to judge by all existing evidence, scarcely a man, woman or child of the indigenous population was left alive after the initial passage of Soviet forces … The Russians … swept the native population clean in a manner that has no parallel since the days of the Asiatic hordes.”

Allied decisions for "resettlement" are considered in Chapter Four. Although the 1941 "Atlantic Charter" proclaimed by Roosevelt and Churchill expressly rejected territorial changes that did not meet the desires of the affected people, this did not discourage the British and American leaders from victims of this relatively unknown holocaust have later supporting the forcible mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern and Central Europe. As early as August 1942, the Allied leaders accepted the principle of forcible expulsion, which they reaffirmed at the Teheran Conference in 1943. 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.

The expulsion and deportation of millions of ethnic German civilians from Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia is detailed by the author, who remarks that "hitherto it would seem that the blackout on this period of history had been complete." While the Allied leaders at the Potsdam Conference called for the "orderly" and "humane" resettlement of the hapless Germans, in practice it was anything but.

As de Zayas further points out, mass deportations were designated as "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" by the Nuremberg Tribunal. But even as the Allied court was sentencing Germany's wartime political and military leaders to death for such acts, millions of Germans were being brutally driven from their homes.

The German Expellees is a well-written, concise introduction to a chapter of what James J. Martin has characterized as "inconvenient history." These horrific events were not haphazard or spontaneous. Rather, this mass "ethnic cleansing" of German civilians was official Allie policy. For too long, the victims of this relatively unknown holocaust have remained largely forgotten and unmourned.

About the Author
Robert Clive is the pen name of an American specialist of the political, diplomatic and military history of modern Europe. He holds a doctorate in history.
From The Journal of Historical Review, March/April 1994 (Vol. 14, No. 2), page 39.
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Who Financed Hitler and Why ?

Economist Henry C K Liu writes of Germany's remarkable transformation:

The Nazis came to power in 1933 when the German economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit. Through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began.” (Henry C. K. Liu, "Nazism and the German Economic Miracle," Asia Times (May 24, 2005).

In Billions for the Bankers, Debts for the People (1984), Sheldon Emry commented: “Germany issued debt-free and interest-free money from 1935 on, which accounts for Germany’s startling rise from the depression to a world power in five years. The German government financed its entire operations from 1935 to 1945 without gold, and without debt. It took the entire Capitalist and Communist world to destroy the German revolution, and bring Europe back under the heel of the Bankers.”

These facts do not appear in any textbooks today, since Jews own most publishing companies. What does appear is the disastrous runaway inflation suffered in 1923 by the Weimar Republic, which governed Germany from 1919 to 1933. Today’s textbooks use this inflation to twist truth into its opposite. They cite the radical devaluation of the German mark as an example of what goes wrong when governments print their own money, rather than borrow it from private cartels. In reality, the Weimar financial crisis began with the impossible reparations payments imposed at the Treaty of Versailles.

Hjalmar Schacht ~ the Rothschild agent who was currency commissioner for the Republic before being dismissed when Hitler realized what he was up to~ opposed letting the German government print its own money. Schacht echoed the textbook lie that Weimar inflation was caused when the German government printed its own money. However, in his 1967 book The Magic of Money, Schacht let the cat out of the bag by revealing that it was the PRIVATELY-OWNED Reichsbank, not the German government, that was pumping new currency into the economy. Thus, the PRIVATE BANK caused the Weimar hyper-inflation. Naturally this terrifies the bankers, since it eliminates their powers. It also terrifies Jews, since their control of banking allows them to buy the media, the government, and everything else.

NOTE: Today China is investing into Canada - US is investing into Canada - There has always been trade and investment for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Therefore, to those who delight in saying “Jews financed Hitler,” I ask that they please look at all the facts. Prescott Bush and others including Henry Ford made donations to help finance Hitler. Some did it because they simply had political sympathies for Hitler. Others had a different agenda, namely they saw in Hitler a strongman who would rebuild a strong Germany which was needed for the well planned second world war. All that was needed after Hitler got into power and nationalized the German economic system and built a prosperous nation, was to get Hitler to take the bait. 

Jewish NKVD squads organized a massive ethnic cleansing in the former German states ceded to Poland 20 years earlier, killing tens of thousands of Germans in the preceding weeks, deliberately provoking the 1st September 1939 German attack to stop the massacre of Germans in the former German states in Poland. 

Have you ever wondered why France and England declared war on Germany for the well deserved German attack on Poland, but not on the Soviet Union when it also attacked and occupied most of Poland ?

                                                                 Striking Similarity: 80 year Old “Nazi Propaganda” vs. Reality   

 Harvey Weinstein and the Rape of Non-Jewish Women in Hollywood

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