It took twenty years before the former American Minister of Defence could admit to the world that the American government had made “a terrible mistake” with the Vietnam war! Robert McNamara used the term ‘mistake’ in that 58,000 American soldiers lost their lives in fighting for their fatherland. It was a ‘mistake’ that cost two million Vietnamese their lives? Two million?
The historian Dr Golo Mann, declared that “To research the crimes of the Allies against the Germans in Germany, is absolutely necessary for German history”. I will do that.
The Americans held over three million German soldiers prisoner in the summer months of 1945, in Europe. The American General, and Commander-in-Chief of the Allies, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who later sat in the top-most seat of the government, that of the US President, said it all when declaring, “We did not come as liberators, we came as conquerors”. He never said a truer word. Liberators have no need to torture, have no need to rape and have no need to harass. Liberators possess the self-esteem to keep to the rules of human rights. They have no need to plague, or deliberately let people starve, as he did.
Dwight D. Eisenhower begrudged the prisoners a roof over their heads, begrudged the prisoners even the simplest and most meagre portion of food, even though huge reserves were available. Prisoners were given less consideration than animals that had a burrow to keep them dry and warm. Out of the rain? Protected from the sun? The prisoners on the meadows of the Rhine had none of that. They lived in holes in the ground and were forced to go there. Holes that filled with rain produced a bog. They did not even have the most primitive of sanitary conditions, which in turn produced epidemics and death, adding to that of being left to rot. Many died in the Rhineland between Remagen and Sinzig. It was a deliberate programme of extermination. It happened not only in the Rhineland, but in other places as well. Places of extermination!
An article in the magazine Der Spiegel, in their 40th edition from 1989, reported, “Foodstuffs, although in huge reserves, were deliberately withheld, so that the interned died. They also died from lack of hygiene and sanitary conditions, both leading to epidemics which killed”. “Ten times more than those Germans who lost their lives on the battlefields of Normandy, and from then until the capitulation, died in POW camps”. A quote from the former candidate for the US Presidency, Pat Buchanan said, “Nearly a million prisoners died, not only in American POW camps after 1945, but in French camps too”. That quote is from the bestseller by James Bach,.
The figures are only the official ones and most certainly could be added to, but the official figures should not be used to judge or for revenge, conquerors or not. They should be used to add weight on the other side of the scales to achieve a balance that was not done in Nuremberg. There, morals, conscience and most of all justice, were non-existent, and also deliberately ignored. Can we now interpret the words from Carl von Clausewitz as, “The prisoner of war status is another form of the progress of politics”?
The war had now ended, but not in the POW camps. The German people have the key to unlocking the door of the past that is necessary for German history, necessary for the future. But those who stay ‘mum’, together with those who will not take a look into the past, are lost. One-sided accusation, one-sided “researched facts”, and one-sided withholding of documents of historical importance in their archives, plus those who keep silent, all that has to end.
For me, it was at that time important not only to have a full stomach and a roof over my head, it was a daily battle to stay incognito and not to become one of those POWs. There were however always checkpoints and inspections of papers. It was all too easy to be noticed at these inspections and arrested. Between 1945 and as late as 1950, 122,671 Germans were to become prisoners of war. 43,000 of those died. 776 were sentenced to death, and that happened in peacetime.
In Finsterwald the same situation slowly evolved as in Breslau. The longer that I stayed, the more well-known I became, and that I had been a Dutch volunteer for the German Waffen SS. What if someone were careless with this information? This fear was always breathing down my neck and so I moved away. I moved very near to the Laska family once more. But I was to spend the next few weeks and months in the northern part of the East zone and not in the suburbs of Leipzig.
The eldest sister of my fallen friend, Robert Reilingh, had been married to a German soldier, an officer who fell in Russia. Now being widowed, Eva Gahrmann lived in Greifswald with her parents-in-law. A circle of very nice people, her friends and family members welcomed me with open arms. Greifswald lay on the coast and had surrendered to the Russians. It had remained undamaged, possessing the oldest University in the whole of Germany, dating from 1465. It lay in a romantic setting with old gabled houses. Extreme want or need was not to be seen here, for the Gahrmann family, just like that of Inge, were the owners of a large furniture and textile business. They were respected in the vicinity. They had contacts with the farmers in the country, the academics in the University, and with the chemists in the city, who possessed alcohol, for the ‘black’ market. Yes, I was also the executive here, in Greifswald, in the wheeling and dealing business. I undertook the long and uncomfortable train journey from Saxony to Mecklenburg.
I had, in both the pre-war and post-war years, experienced from many people evidence of unity, and of help and support. That included the medical care of a doctor upon falling foul of malaria. It was during my second visit to Brigitte in May 1947. I detoured on the way back, calling in on friends of the Laskas and from a very short visit, I had to stay for five weeks. I was cared for by those very dear Laska friends as a refugee, and also cared for free of charge, by their doctor, Dr Schuler. The summer months of 1946 had wandered into the summer months of 1947 in the East zone. I spent wonderful days on Germany’s largest island of Rügen, in the very large sum-merhouse belonging to the Gahrmanns. We arrived with more than enough ‘black’ market provisions, with friends who had journeyed with us on the train, over Stralsund and the Sound of Rügen, to Germany’s largest island.
It was paradise! It was a paradise of flat land, steep cliffs, calm and raw angry seas, woods of beeches hiding moorland and labyrinths of reed. The long, long sandy beaches I remember were empty of people, and were guarded, as we bathed, by towering chalk cliffs. We never saw any Russian military. Tourists? There were none. I thought of Rügen as sitting under a large glass dome, which resisted the disturbance of the occupying government. But even there in the north there were moments that sickened and saddened, such I was to see in Bad Kleinen in the railway station.
There was a column of German prisoners standing on the platform and after counting, it was found that they were one man short. One had obviously escaped. Without much ado, one of the Russian guards snatched one of the other travellers and forced him into line with the other prisoners. Now the numbers were correct! The shocked man made no protest and neither did the passers-by who witnessed what had happened. They remained shocked and ‘mum’. I protested to a German railway policeman who did not want to know. He didn’t want any trouble with the army and was annoyed with me that I had the privilege of travelling the way I did, as a disabled person, i.e. war-wounded, so he took away my permit.