The Starving of Germany in 1919
I first read about the starvation of Germans at the end of WWI in a book written by British historian Clive Ponting, he reported that close to 900.000 Germans died of starvation in 1918 and 1919.
The “starvation policy” had begun in 1914. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty and one of the framers of the scheme, admitted that it was aimed at “starving the whole population — men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound — into submission.”
Such British policy was in contravention of international law on two major points.
First, in regard to the character of the blockade, it violated the Declaration of Paris of 1856, which Britain itself had signed, and which, among other things, permitted “close” but not “distant” blockades. A belligerent was allowed to station ships near the three-mile limit to stop traffic with an enemy’s ports; it was not allowed simply to declare areas of the high seas comprising the approaches to the enemy’s coast to be off-limits.
The second point is related to contraband. Briefly, following the lead of the Hague Conference of 1907, the Declaration of London of 1909 considered food to be “conditional contraband,” that is, subject to interception and capture only when intended for the use of the enemy’s military forces.
In December 1918, the National Health Office in Berlin calculated that 763,000 persons had already died as a result of the blockade by that time. In some respects, the armistice saw the intensification of the suffering, since the German Baltic coast was now effectively blockaded and German fishing rights in the Baltic annulled.
The reason for the food blockade to be kept in place after the end of the hostilities was aimed at forcing Germany to sign the Versailles Treaty without any change on the strict conditions they were imposing. Today no one remembers it because it was kept secret and there were no leaks to the western press while 900,000 German men, women and children died because of the British naval blockade. Even today only a few non-Germans know the truth and American and British historians, seems to have brushed off this most appalling crime as a footnote in history.
Even the founder of the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell, naively expressed his satisfaction that the German race is being ruined; though the birth rate.
Although the war had ended in November 1918, Germany was still under Allied blockade, which was ruthlessly enforced. The first state of Germany to benefit from a lifting of the blockade would be communist-controlled Bavaria.
One must search diligently for historical references to the continued, devastating blockade. Diether Raff confirms the peace-time blockade in his “A History of Germany – From the Medieval Empire to the Present”:
“The Allied peace terms turned out to be extremely severe, far exceeding the worst fears of the German government… The peace treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest were declared invalid and the food blockade around Germany was to continue… Thus Germany’s capitulation was accomplished and an end set to four years of enormous bloodshed.
“It was the blockade that finally drove the Central Powers to accept defeat,” says Richard Hoveth in his study of the struggle on the high seas during World War I: “At first mild in its application, the blockade’s noose gradually tightened until, with the American entry, all restraint was cast aside. Increasingly deprived of the means to wage war, or even to feed her population, the violent response was insurrection; apathy and demoralization the mute consequence of dashed hopes and thin potato soup.”
Basil Liddell Hart is quoted by Hoveth to the effect that, revolution and internal unrest notwithstanding, the blockade was “clearly the decisive agency in the struggle.”
After confiscating the German merchant navy, the Allies proceeded to confiscate German private property all over the world, contrary to all precedent from previous wars when private property had been held in escrow until the ratification of peace treaties, when it would revert to its legitimate owners.
The Allied powers reserved the right to keep or dispose of assets belonging to German citizens, including companies they control [Article 167 B]. This wholesale expropriation would take place without any compensation to the owners [Articles 121 and 279 B].
But Germany remained responsible for the liabilities and loans on the assets that were taken from them. Profits, however, remained in the hands of the Allies. Thus, private German property and assets were confiscated in China (Articles 129 and 132), Thailand (Articles 135-137), Egypt (Article 148), Liberia (Articles 135-140) and in many other countries.
Germany was also precluded from investing capital in any neighboring country and had to forfeit all rights “to whatever title it may possess in these countries.
Germany was also precluded from investing capital in any neighboring country and had to forfeit all rights “to whatever title it may possess in these countries.
The Allies were given free access to the German marketplace without the slightest tariff while products made in Germany faced high foreign tariff barriers. Articles 264 to 267 established that Germany “undertakes to give the Allies and their associates the status of most favored nations for five years.
Germany was already experiencing near famine conditions but it was at this moment that the Allies decided to confiscate a substantial part of what was left of Germany’s livestock. The American representative at Versailles, Thomas Lamont, recorded the event with some indignation:
“The Germans were made to deliver cattle, horses, sheep, goats, etc.,… A strong protest came from Germany when dairy cows were taken to France and Belgium, thus depriving German children of milk.”
Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer and future president of the United States – in 1900 defended Tianjin from the assaults of the Boxer – was sent on a mission to help the starving population but he could do very little because of the fury of the French and the British. Shipments had been delivered to Allies and to neutrals, but British officials had refused to break their blockade to let cargoes go into Germany. Moreover, Germany had failed to act on an agreement to turn over merchant ships before receiving food [eventually forced on the Weimar government and showed no desire to pay for shipments in gold – a possibility that French financiers were thought to be opposing so that their nation might get what gold there was as indemnity.
There is evidence that Wilson actually thought the European powers would accept his 14 Points” and feed starving Germans now that the war was over but, of course, that was not the case as discovered by Wilson’s humanitarian point man, Hoover. England’s Prime Minister, Lloyd George, meanwhile, thought that the starvation was being ameliorated. He favored – although quietly – feeding his ex-enemy.
In early March 1919, General Herbert Plumer, commander of the British Army of Occupation, informed Prime Minister Lloyd George that his men were begging to be sent home; they could no longer stand the sight of “hordes of skinny and bloated children pawing over the offal from the British camps”.
Finally, the Americans and British overpowered French objections and at the end of March, the first food shipments began arriving in Hamburg. But it was only in July, after the formal German signature to the Treaty of Versailles, that the Germans were permitted to import raw materials and export manufactured goods.
On May 7 of that year, Count von Brockdorf-Rantzau had indignantly referred to this fact in addressing the Versailles assembly:”The hundreds of thousands of noncombatants,” the German chief delegate had stated, “who have perished since November 11, 1918, as a result of the blockade, were killed with cold deliberation, after our enemies had been assured of their complete victory.”
The food blockade ended on July 12, 1919.
Besides the direct effects of the British blockade, there are the possible indirect and much more sinister effects to consider. A German child who was ten years old in 1918, and who survived, was twenty-two in 1930. Vincent raises the question of whether the miseries and suffering from hunger in the early, formative years help account to some degree for the enthusiasm of German youth for Nazism later on.
Incredibly, the last cheque covering reparations for WW1 was issued by Angela Merkel in 2010.
Irish-American film director John Ford, famous for movies such as Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath, filmed the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach from both ship and land, being wounded himself in the process. But very little of his filming has been released to the public. The Eisenhower Centre reported in the 1990s that they were “unable to find the film”.
This is because of what the film contained, we only ever see what’s approved, whether the invasion of Normandy or anywhere else in the war.
The late historian Stephen Ambrose, who was both Eisenhower and Richard Nixon’s official biographer, conceded that one third of all the American combat GIs he’d ever interviewed (he’d interviewed well over 1000) said they had witnessed unarmed, surrendering German soldiers with their hands up being shot (Bradley A. Thayer, Darwin, and international relations p.190). And that’s just the ones prepared to confess it; let the enormity of it sink in for a moment.
This indicates war crimes on a gigantic scale having been committed, all while we’ve been brainwashed and deceived into thinking the Allies were ‘the good guys’. Many of the Allied troops were openly encouraged not to take prisoners and no charges were ever brought against those who shot prisoners.
American infantrymen wade towards a beach during the D-Day Landings
Ernest Hemingway was also one of those implicated in the murder of captives. Was this karma for this might be the dark secret behind the war correspondent’s suicide in 1961, by which he took his own life with a shot in the head.
The three-empire allies were determined to win World War II by any means necessary and to obliterate the German nation as a competitor once and for all.
German prisoners-of-war are marched along Juno Beach
landing area after to a ship taking them to England, after
they were captured by Canadian troops
The words of an old German soldier come to mind: “We would have fought a lot harder in the West if we had known they were going to be like the Russians.”
D-Day landings in Normandy
are guarded by US troops at a camp in Nonant-le-Pin, France
US General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a war criminal of epic proportions boasted at the time of D-Day, “Once and for all, the stage is being set for the beginning of the United Nations.” What he really meant is it was being set for the New World Order.
The Lost Story of German Latin Americans Interned During WW2
After Pearl Harbor, the US state department strong-armed Latin American allies like Costa Rica into dispossessing, and often deporting, German immigrants.
With the Statue of Liberty looming overhead, an 11-year-old boy named Jurgen sat huddled in his coat, alongside his family and few pieces of luggage, as a cold wind blew off the Hudson River.
Ellis Island is best known as the former gateway for millions of immigrants entering the US, but in the winter of 1944, the boy – Jurgen – and his family were about to be deported to Germany.
“We were processed on Ellis Island as illegal immigrants,” said Jurgen, now 82. “In reality, we were kidnapped by the US government.”
Jurgen and his family were among thousands of Latin Americans of German origin who were rounded up by their respective governments on orders from the US following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.
They were detained in accordance with a little-known US state department program. The Special War Problems Division would orchestrate the detention of more than 4,000 Latin Americans from Germany, Japan and Italy in internment camps in Texas and elsewhere, as well as localized detention centers in Latin America.
In all, 15 Latin American countries would deport residents and citizens of German ancestry to detention centers in the United States, often without legal recourse, according to a statement from the National Archives.
The internment of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in camps has been recognized by the US Congress, but the story of Latin Americans with origins in axis countries has been largely lost to history.
As the 73rd anniversary of the US entry into the second world war approaches, fewer and fewer people remain who experienced firsthand the Immigration and Naturalization Service internment camps in the US.
The second world war arrived swiftly for Jurgen’s family and other Germans living in Costa Rica. Less than a month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Jurgen’s father was arrested by Costa Rican police on 2 January 1942.
By the late 1930s,the FBI had begun to identify possible Nazi sympathizers, fearing Axis forces would establish a foothold in Latin America. In the case of Costa Rica, the US Embassy in San José submitted a list of names to be deported to the government, a move acknowledged in a State Department memo dated 15 November 1943.
Larger countries like Mexico, Chile and Argentina resisted the demand to deport their citizens, but that was not an option for the small Central American nation. In 1942, the US state department announced that it would boycott all Costa Rican products from German-owned companies. Coffee accounted for more than half of the country’s exports between 1938 and 1945 – and the coffee business was dominated by German firms, according to Gertrud Peters, an economic historian at the National University of Costa Rica.
Unable to ship goods to Germany because of the allied blockade, Costa Rica – among many other Latin American nations – was forced to comply.
Two weeks after Jurgen’s father was detained, a letter arrived from the police informing his family that he had been deported to the US, where he was being held in the country’s largest internment camp, in Crystal City, Texas.
The dusty Texas town could not have been more different from the mild climate and green mountains of San José.
The 500-acre internment camp, which at its peak would house nearly 3,400 detainees, was still largely under construction when Jurgen arrived in late 1943.
“The camp was built on an old spinach field,” Jurgen said. “There was a statue of Popeye in the town.” The statue still stands in Crystal City today.
After rain the unpaved roads would become thick with mud, and Jurgen and the other children took to walking to the latrines on short stilts to protect their shoes.
Jurgen said that the camp provided all the basics for his family, including simple accommodation in three-unit row houses, communal latrines and food. His father, a businessman, found work laying asphalt for the camp’s roads and, briefly, plucking feathers off turkeys.
Jurgen and his younger brother cut beet greens with a knife to earn $1 an hour, which the family could use to order goods from the Montgomery Ward Catalog. The family was already saving up to buy coats for the next leg of their journey back to Germany.
Besides keeping axis nationals from supposedly impeding the US war effort at home, Crystal City served an important role for the US abroad: providing the country with a grab-bag of prisoners who could be traded for Americans held by the Third Reich.
Faced with the prospect of spending the remaining years of the war in detention, Jurgen’s family volunteered for deportation.
The family traveled by train to Ellis Island before they boarded a Red Cross ship and sailed back to Europe. Allied and Russian forces were beginning to close in on Germany. As Jurgen and his family filed off the boat in Lisbon, a line of American prisoners waited to board, bound back to the United States.
Jurgen’s family eventually returned to Costa Rica in 1948. They were able to recover their properties, but the same could not be said for many German families, whose businesses and land were seized by the government and sold to pay down the national debt and subsidize populist land reforms.
After years in war-torn Germany, what they found in Costa Rica was yet more conflict: following a disputed election in 1948, the country fell into a brief civil war. That war brought about the rise of President José Figueres, the leader who abolished Costa Rica’s army in 1948. The following year, Costa Rica declared its political neutrality.
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The "Nazis" never "proclaimed Deutschland uber alles." That well-recognized term -- often mistranslated to "Germany above all others" and erroneously believed to be the title of the song in question -- is actually only the opening line of the "Deutschlandlied" (Song of Germany). The song, which later became Germany's National Anthem, was penned in 1841 by August Heinrich Hoffmann - nearly a half-century before Hitler was even born, and three decades before the German state (Reich) was consolidated. Far from preaching "supremacy," the "Deutschlandlied" only represented the hopes for the eventual unification of the 30 or so German states, nothing more!
Hitler hadn't even born yet when the lyric "Deutschland uber alles" was coined. In fact, Hitler's mom, Klara, hadn't been born either!
Additionally, the phrase "Deutschland uber alles" - (Germany above all things), is always, and I mean always, presented out-of-context, as if to suggest that the Germans were boasting of their superiority to all other peoples. The following line of the song clarifies and confirms that the anthem, far from being a song about conquest, was actually about the unified defense of the small German states which, historically, have been relentlessly attacked by Romans, Huns, Mongols and, most relevant to the song, the French. Here is the full translation of the harmless and beautiful song of national defense and brotherhood:
1. Germany, Germany above all * (Deutschland uber alles)
Above everything in the world * (in terms of love for Germany)
When, always, for protection and defense
Brothers stand together.
From the Maas to the Memel
From the Etsch to the Belt,
Germany, Germany above all
Above all in the world.
Above everything in the world * (in terms of love for Germany)
When, always, for protection and defense
Brothers stand together.
From the Maas to the Memel
From the Etsch to the Belt,
Germany, Germany above all
Above all in the world.
2. German women, German fidelity,
German wine and German song,
Shall retain, throughout the world,
Their old respected fame,
To inspire us to noble deeds
For the length of our lives.
German women, German fidelity,
German wine and German song.
German wine and German song,
Shall retain, throughout the world,
Their old respected fame,
To inspire us to noble deeds
For the length of our lives.
German women, German fidelity,
German wine and German song.
3. Unity and right and freedom
For the German Fatherland;
Let us all strive to this goal
Brotherly, with heart and hand.
Unity and rights and freedom
Are the pledge of fortune grand.
Prosper in this fortune's glory,
Prosper German fatherland.
For the German Fatherland;
Let us all strive to this goal
Brotherly, with heart and hand.
Unity and rights and freedom
Are the pledge of fortune grand.
Prosper in this fortune's glory,
Prosper German fatherland.
These lyrics transcend ideology and political systems. Indeed, it was the ultra-liberal, western puppet, Jewish-owned Wiemar Republic, not "the Nazis," who declared the Deutschlandlied the National Anthem in 1922! But that won't stop the Marxist-Jewish propagandists from continuing to dupe good men with never-ending disinformation about "the Nazis" and the phrase "Deutschland uber alles."
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