WITNESS TO HISTORY

Michael Walsh

CHAPTER 20

GENOCIDE THROUGH STARVATION

"I felt sorry for the German people. We were planning - and we had the force to carry out our plans - to obliterate a once mighty nation. I had an uneasy feeling that those eighty million Germans some how or other would survive to fight again." - U.S. Admiral Daniel Leahy

"Our primary purpose is the destruction of as many Germans as possible. I expect to destroy every German west of the Rhine and within that area in which we are attacking." - General Dwight Eisenhower, J. Kingsley Smith (INS) Paris, February 24th 1945

"Instead of merely starving fortified towns, whole nations were to be methodically subjected . . . to the process of reduction by famine . . . " - Winston Churchill, The Great War, Vol.3, p.1602

GERMANY - SAVED BY A SOVIET CONSPIRACY

Germany - and the German people as we know them today, might have ceased to exist if the Soviets had not seen in the western program of 'genocide through starvation' an opportunity to bring West Germany into the Soviet Bloc.

In the months and years following Germany's defeat, the western allied treatment of the Germans reached such levels of depravity that the very nation's survival was threatened. The intention to reduce Germany to a state similar in size and population to say, Belgium, through a policy of territorial amputation, deportation, mass murder and starvation, came to a halt when:

"Russia, who had been egging us on, was quietly preparing to come forward as their champion and to offer an avenue of escape from us through the establishment of a unified, revived and Communist Reich to be joined to the Soviet Union. This had been made clear by Molotov in July at Paris." - Ralph Franklin Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, Institute of American Economics

HISTORY'S MOST TERRIFYING PEACE

The virtual elimination of tens of millions of Germans in the western zones was planned with meticulous detail at Potsdam. That West Germany and a proportion of her population did survive owes itself ironically to the Soviet Union. It was only through fear that the USSR, posturing as liberators from allied excesses, would occupy the ravaged West Germany that the genocidal intentions of the western allies were thwarted.

What then were these 'depths of depravity' so savage that Stalin's monstrous and genocidal regime might be looked upon by the German people as a potential savior?

At Potsdam, the allied warlords planned to remove from Germany the three essential elements of national survival. Land (natural resources), Labor (both physical and intellectual) and Capital (plant and equipment).

What was intended to follow Germany's defeat was aptly named 'HISTORY'S MOST TERRIFYING PEACE' by TIME MAGAZINE

Germany was to be broken up, her lands divided between the conquerors. The agricultural process was to be stopped with a ban on all fertilizer production leading to famine-liquidation based on Stalin's Ukrainian model. Deprivation and conditions in which disease would prevail were to be introduced to further reduce the population. Germany's industrial capacity was to be looted, transferred to the conquering nations and where this was not possible, destroyed. Germany's mature males were to be deported, deprived of the means to work, working permits to withheld, and its armed forces (prisoners-of-war) held as slaves indefinitely.

TERRITORY LOSS

The draconian terms of the Versailles Treaty, which many believe was directly responsible for the Second World war, had reduced German territory from 208,830 square to 181,699 square miles. This led to immense suffering in Germany as the reduced territory put strains on its ability to feed its population, a problem that was aggravated by restrictions placed on emigration.

The immediate effect of defeat in the Second World War was the loss of 75,850 square miles of territory, further reducing Germany in size to 133,000 square miles. This is equal to the size of The Netherlands - twice over. That which remained was to be divided between the victor nations without limit on time. Germany was to be obliterated and its population reduced and expelled in much the same way as Palestine and the Palestinians were dealt with. On this occasion the ban on emigration was absolute.

These measures had the effect of cramming half of America's population into the states of Michigan, Indiana and Ohio; with their cities, factories, railways and other means of production demolished. This was to be accompanied by a ban on growing foodstuffs.

16,000,000 MURDERED THROUGH DEPRIVATION

The intention was as obvious as the results. As the allies squabbled over which areas of Germany territory they were to control, German civilians died of brutality, deprivation and starvation; the figure has been put at 16,000,000.

THE DEATH THROES OF A NATION

"Apart from the moral aspects of the matter, the dumping of all these millions of expropriated helpless people into what remained of a wrecked Germany piles chaos upon chaos and helps to covert the entire German nation into one vast Belsen or Buchenwald." - Ralph Franklin Keeling, Gruesome Harvest, Institute of American Economics

"These uprooted masses wandered along the main roads; famished, sick and weary, often covered with vermin, seeking out some country in which to settle....."

"Take also the case of the children. On 27th July 1945 a boat arrived at the west port of Berlin which contained a tragic cargo of nearly 300 children, half dead from hunger, who had come from a 'home' at Finkenwalde in Pomerania. Children from two to fourteen-years old lay in the bottom of the boat motionless, their faces drawn with hunger, suffering from the itch and eaten up with vermin. Their bodies, feet and knees were swollen - a well-known symptom of starvation." - Joint Relief Commission of the International Red Cross

"Thousands of bodies are hanging in the trees around Berlin and nobody bothers to cut them down. Thousands of corpses are carried into the sea by the Oder and Elbe Rivers - one doesn't even notice it any longer. Thousands and thousands are starving in the highways . . . children roam the highways alone; their parents shot, dead, lost." - Congressional Records, December 20th 1945. p.A-6130

"Germany's youth is one the road . . . they are wandering aimlessly; disillusioned, dissolute, diseased, and without guidance." - Wireless to New York Times/Chicago Tribune, Frankfurt April 13th, 1946

Note the date: a year after the war's end.

"In what was once east Germany, an anguished tide of humanity, one of the greatest mass movements of Germans in history, flowed towards the border of the shrunken Reich. At least, 10,000,000 hungry Germans were being uprooted from the old homes in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Sudetenland by the new Polish, Czech and Russian owners.

"The wanderers choked the roads in Russian-occupied Germany. Ragged, barefoot, with children in their arms, and the shabby remains of homes stacked on perambulators, carts and wheelbarrows, they trudged westwards." - Time Magazine, August 13th 1945

"New in the annals of recorded history, the victors forced millions of Germans from their homes." - The Catholic Bishops in America, November, 1946

".... never has anything so tragic happened on so colossal a scale as in these forced migrations." - Archbishop Alois J. Muench, Lent. 1946

"Nowhere in recorded history has such a grim chapter of brutality been written." - Senator William Langer, April 5th 1949

"Without precedent in history... a crime against humanity for which history will exact a terrible retribution." - Anne O'Hare McCormick, New York Times, October 23rd 1946

"The expulsion of the entire native population of eastern Germany by the puppet government of Poland is a crime against humanity for which retribution must be made." - The Houston Chronicle, March 28th 1947

"The most inhuman decision ever made by governments." - Anne O'Hare McCormick, The New York Times, November 13th 1946

THE BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY

The British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who witnessed the sight of the expellees, reacted with horror and reported to the House of Commons.

"It was a pathetic sight - the stream of perambulators and small vehicles of one kind or another, and the people were nearly all women and children, with very few men at all. Once could not help saying, 'My God! This is the price of stupidity and war. It was the most awful sight one could see."

RICHARD STRAUSS! CLEAR OUT BY MORNING

Richard Strauss, the last of the great classical composers, eighty-one years of age, had retired to his beloved home in Garmisch, awakened to find nailed to his door a notice posted by an American soldier: 'Clear out by morning!'

ANTON WEBERN, SHOT DOWN IN COLD BLOOD

Anton Webern, the Austrian classical composer, contemporary and pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, then aged sixty-two years of age, was shot dead by an American G.I whilst visiting his daughters near Salzburg on 15th, September, 1945 - over five months after the war had ended.

He had, before his death, buried most of his valued possessions, compositions and manuscripts in the garden of his Viennese home.

"These remained unharmed when the invading soldiers took over the abandoned house, but they inflicted senseless damage on what remained in sight. Scores, books, and correspondence were strewn about the yard; Webern's cello was kicked in; his personal papers were used for kindling." - Jonathan D. Kramer, Listening to Music

BRITISH PRESS REPORTS OF THE PERIOD FOLLOWING THE WAR'S END

"Each day between fifty and one-hundred children, a total of over 5,000 already over a short period - who have lost both their parents, or have been abandoned, are collected from Berlin's stations and taken to orphanages or found foster mothers in Berlin.

"Of eighty-three persons (women and children) crammed into two of the trucks twenty were dead." - Berlin Correspondent, The Times, September, 10th, 1945

"Three orphans I saw aged between eight and twelve are still almost skeletons after ten days treatment . . . none of them weighed more than three stone. Another small boy turned out of Danzig had a scrawled postcard attached to him stating that his soldier father was long since missing and that his mother and two sisters had died of hunger." - Berlin Correspondent, The Times, September 10th 1945

"One train, which arrived in Berlin on August, 31st, started from Danzig on the 24th with 325 patients and orphans from the Marien Hospital and the orphanage in the Weidlergasse. They were packed into five cattle trucks, with nothing to cover the floors, not even straw.

". . . the only food provided when the journey began (a week earlier) was twenty potatoes and two slices of bread for each orphan. The patients had nothing, but the train stopped from time to time so that the passengers strong enough could forage. Between six and ten of the patients in each truck died during their journey. The bodies were simply thrown out of the train.

"About the same time, a transport of Sudetenlanders - men, women and children, arrived from Troppau. They had been travelling in open cattle trucks for eighteen days. They numbered 2,400 when they set out and 1,350 when they arrived, so that 1,050 had perished on the way." - F.A Voigt, Nineteenth Century and After

"On the train to Berlin she (a Stettin nurse) was pillaged once by Russian troops and twice by Poles who, she said were far more savage than the Russians. Women who resisted were shot dead, she said, and on one occasion she saw a Polish guard take an infant by the legs and crush its skull against a post because the child cried while the guard was raping the mother." - Donald MacKenzie, Berlin Correspondent, New York Daily News, October 7th 1945

"Under the bomb-wrecked roof of the Stettiner Railway Station, I looked this afternoon inside a cattle truck . . . on one side four forms lay dead under blankets on cane and raffia stretches; in another corner, four more, all women, were dying. One in a voice we could hardly hear, was crying for water."

"Sitting on a stretcher, so weakened by starvation that he could not move his head or his mouth, his eyes opened in a deranged, uncomprehending stare, was the wasted frame of a man. He was dying, too."

"Two women sanitary helpers did what they could in ministering to the small wants of the dying."

"Those people in the cattle truck, and hundreds who lay on bundles of belongings on the platform and in the booking hall, were the dead and dying and starving flotsam left by the tide of human misery that daily reaches Berlin . . .

"There are 8 million homeless nomads milling about the areas of the provinces around Berlin."

"Other things I saw when the Danzig train came in I am bound to record. Apart from the women rocking in tears and anguish, and the famished children asleep in their arms or crying for food, there was a group of young men - all Poles - who sat apart, waiting for the next train to go out. Then they would board it, and going through the train, would force these unprotected mothers and women to give up any possession of value . . . the guards at the stopping places are shot if they attempt to intervene." - Norman Clark, Berlin, News Chronicle, August 24th 1945

FAMINE AS A DELIBERATE POLICY OF GENOCIDE

"That there was a deliberate policy to reduce Germany's population through a program of starvation, is not a matter of dispute, but first the statistics of the effects of starvation on human beings.

"The average daily diet for a healthy working man is 7,600 calories; an active woman at least 2,200. Herbert Hoover, famed for his work in famine relief, says that 2,200 calories 'is a minimum in a nation of healthy human beings.'

"University tests showed that a daily diet of less that 1,600 calories resulted in 25% weight loss, and let to fainting, dizziness, and always cold so that even in summer they needed two blankets. Their hearts shrank and three-quarters lost their ability to work. They became obsessed with the need for food." - Ralph F. Keeling, Gruesome Harvest

THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL STATES:

"European adult males reduced to an intake of 1,400 to 1,700 calories for a period of six months will suffer an ability to do only the lightest work, loss of mental concentration; apathy, depression, high irritability. An increase in susceptibility to infection and contagious diseases. A population subjected to such a low level of food supply might be expected to develop epidemics which might spread to other nations."

The famine inflicted on the defeated German population by the victorious allies has ranged between 1,550 to a low of 1,180 per person per day. Herbert Hoover called it,

"A grim and dangerous base . . . the children's health will become susceptible to disease. Many of the children and aged will fall by the wayside."

FOOD LOCKED UP WHILE MILLIONS STARVED

"The greatest famine catastrophe of recent centuries is upon us in Central Europe. Our Government is letting down the military government in the food deliveries it promised, although all that was asked for was the barest minimum for survival of the people. We will be forced to reduce the rations from 1,550 calories to 1,000 or less. The few buds of democracy will be burned out in the agony of death of the aged, the women and the children.

"The British and we (the Americans) are going on record as the ones who let the Germans starve. The Russians will release at the height of the famine substantial food stores they have locked up (300,000 to 400,000 tons of sugar, large quantities of potatoes).

"Aside from the inhumanity involved, it is so criminally stupid to give such a performance of incredible fumbling before the eyes of the world. It makes all the hard-working officers of the Office of Military Government, Food and Agricultural Branch, ashamed." - Karl Brandt, Berlin, March 18th 1946

Note: Note the date, a full year after the war's end, and the incredible revelation that even the evil Communist regime, was prepared to release held food stocks before the allies were.

A NATION DRIVEN TO MASS HYSTERIA

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD:

"The people hunger . . . they are without the energy to trace the link of causes . . . there is growing as though by psychological compulsion, a mass hysteria, with a thousand different symptoms . . . the situation is reaching a generally psycho-pathological state, through chronic hunger. We are seeing aberrations such as caravans in desert sands . . . they, the people, have only animal urges.

"The explanation of this mass phenomenon, this mental and spiritual paralysis, is physical. They are emaciated to the bone. Their clothes hang loose on their bodies, their lower extremities are like the bones of a skeleton, their hands shake as though with palsy, the muscles of the arms are withered, the skin lies in folds and is without elasticity, the joints spring out as though broken.

"Often women of childbearing age weigh no more than 65 pounds. The number of stillborn children is approaching the number of those born alive, and an increasing proportion of those die these days. Very often the mothers cannot stand the loss of blood in childbirth and perish. Infant mortality has reached the horrifying height of 90%." - Congressional Record, March 29th 1946, p.2865

STARVING CHILDREN SO THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE - WHILE FOOD IS WITHHELD

"In Frankfurt at a children's' hospital there have been set aside 25 out of 100 children. These will be fed and kept alive. It is better to feed 25 enough to keep them alive and let 75 starve than to feed the 100 for a short while and let them all starve." - Dr. Lawrence Meyer, Executive Secretary of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, January 13th 1946

"In Berlin, in August, 1945, out of 2,866 children born, 1,148 died, and it was summer, and the food was more plentiful now. From Vienna a reliable source reports that . . . infant mortality is approaching 100%.

"The infant mortality rate is 16 times as high today as in 1943. There is going to be a definite age group elimination, Most children under 10 and people over 60 cannot survive the coming winter." - Congressional Record, December 4th 1945, p11553

"German children look in through the window. We have more food than we need, but regulations prevent giving it to them. It is difficult to look at them. I feel ashamed of myself, of my people, as I eat and watch those children. They are not to blame for the war. They are hungry children. What right have we to stuff ourselves while they look on - well-fed men eating, leaving unwanted food on plates, while hungry children look on. What right have we to damn the Nazi and the Jap while we carry on with such callousness and hatred in our hearts." - The Diaries of Charles A. Lindbergh, p.961. Harcourt Brace Javanovich, N.Y. 1970

STARVED TO CANNIBALISM

"Official announcement that two German women had been murdered and the flesh sold on a food black market aroused fear today that organized gangs of human butchers were at work here. Spokesmen for the Criminal Investigation Department of the German Police said only two cases of 'murder for flesh' have been established but it was possible the butchers were operating on a much larger scale, killing their victims and peddling their flesh in local black markets." - United Press, February 18th 1946

"Thirty-three workmen collapsed from hunger today. . . with hostility rising among the Hamburg working classes, and food riots continued in Hamburg for the fourth straight day." - United Press, Hamburg, March 22nd 1946

DELIBERATE OR INEVITABLE CHAOS?

"The fact can no longer be suppressed, namely, the fact that it has been and continues to be, the deliberate policy of a confidential and conspirational clique within the policy making circles of this government to draw and quarter a nation now reduced to abject misery.

"In this process, this clique, like a pair of hyenas struggling over the bloody entrails of a corpse, and inspired by a sadistic and fanatical hatred, are determined to destroy the German nation and the German people, no matter what the consequences.

"At Potsdam the representatives of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics solemnly signed the following declaration of principles and purpose:

'It is not the intention of the allies to destroy or enslave the German people. Mr. President, the cynical and savage repudiation of these solemn declarations that has resulted in a major catastrophe, cannot be explained in terms of ignorance or incompetence. This repudiation, not only of the Potsdam Declaration, but also of every law of God and men, has been deliberately engineered with such a malevolent cunning, and with such diabolical skill, that the American people themselves have been caught in an international death trap.

'For nine months now this administration has been carrying on a deliberate policy of mass starvation without any distinction between the innocent and the helpless and the guilty alike.

'The first issue has been and continues to be purely humanitarian. This vicious clique within this administration that has been responsible for the policies and practices which have made a madhouse of Central Europe has not only betrayed our American principles, but they have betrayed the GIs who have suffered and died, and they continue to betray the American GIs who have to continue to do their dirty work for them.

'The second issue that is involved is the effect this tragedy in Germany has already had on the other European countries. Those who have been responsible for this deliberate destruction of the German state and this criminal mass starvation of the German people have been so zealous in their hatred that all other interests and concerns have been subordinated to this one obsession of revenge.

'In order to accomplish this it mattered not if the liberated countries in Europe suffered or starved. To this point the clique of conspirators have addressed themselves: 'Germany is to be destroyed. What happens to other countries in Europe in the process is of secondary importance'." - Senator Homer E. Capehart, Indiana. Address to the United States Senate, February 5th 1946

THESE REMARKS OF THE SENATOR'S WERE INTERSPERSED WITH A MASS OF SUPPORTING EVIDENCE

"There can be no question that there was a deliberate policy among the allies to keep the matter of genocide through famine our of the public arena. Senator Eastland, Mississippi, for example, in a stirring address to the United States Senate (December 3rd 1945) told of the great difficulty he had in gaining access to the Calvin Hooper official report on conditions in the occupied Reich.

"The State Department at first refused to supply it, but through the intercession of a high official conceded the report, 'with the understanding that the promise received from me first that the information therein would not be made available to the people in this country.'

"There appears to be a conspiracy of silence to conceal from our people the true picture of conditions in Europe, to secrete from us the facts regarding conditions on the continent and information as to our policies toward the German people. . . Are the real facts withheld because our policies are so cruel that the American people would not endorse them?

"What have we to hide, Mr. President? Why should these facts be withheld from the people of the United States? There cannot possibly be any valid reason for secrecy. Are we following a policy of vindictive hatred, a policy which would not be endorsed by the American people as a whole if they knew of the true conditions?

"Mr. President. I should be less than honest if I did not state frankly that the picture is much worse, so much more confused, than the American people suspect, that I do not know of any source that is capable of producing the complete factual account of the true situation into which our policies have taken the American people. The truth is that nations of central, southern and eastern Europe are adrift on a flood of anarchy and chaos." - Congressional Record, December 4th 1945, p.11552

"The plain fact is that when spring is in the English air we are starving the German people, and we are starving them not deliberately in the sense we prefer their death to our own inconvenience.

Others, including ourselves, are to keep and be given comforts while the Germans lack the bare necessities of existence." - Victor Gollancz, Publisher. Leaving Them to Their Fate - The Ethics of Starvation

"On the contrary it (the famine) is the product of foresight. It was deliberately planned at Yalta by Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, and the program in all its brutality was later confirmed by Truman, Atlee, and Stalin. The intent to starve the German people to death is being carried out with a remorselessness unknown in the western world since the Mongol conquest." - Chicago Daily Tribune, May 1945

SURPLUS FOOD WITHHELD

"Stocks of food and feeding stuffs in this country owned and controlled by the Minister of Food, exclusive of stocks on farms or held by secondary wholesalers and manufacturers, were estimated to total on the last day of Match no less that 4,000,000 tons." - Victor Gollancz, British Publisher. Leaving them to their Fate - The Ethics of Starvation

At this time, Denmark, formerly occupied by the Germans as the means of denying the allies a North Sea bridgehead and access to the Baltic, was bursting at the seams with surplus food and was pleading with the allies to put it to good use. It was refused.

"While the rest of Europe hungers for meat, Denmark has 3,000 to 4,000 tons of surplus beef weekly..." - Associated Press Dispatch. Copenhagen, summer 1945

Robert Conway of the New York News, March 22nd 1946 dismissed as an exaggeration reports that all of Europe was afflicted by shortages. He went on to report how, 'in France, Italy and England, where it was possible to eat well and live cheaply in London, Canterbury and other English towns."

"The UNRRA (Official Relief Agency) is the biggest racket in Europe." - Cyril Osborn, M.P, August 1946

"No Central Red Cross has been permitted to function in the stricken Reich. And it is now a matter of history that the Washington administration for nearly a year hotly resisted all efforts to bring private relief to the Germans." - Ralph Franklin Keeling, Institute of American Economics, 1947

A ban was put on all fertiliser use, without which crops could not be grown.

"For six months our military government refused to supply any food from the outside to supplement the vanishing German stocks." - Ralph Franklin Keeling, American Institute of Economics, Chicago 1947

"For the first time in the history of Christian nations powerful governments are making the exercise of Christian charity impossible through official regulations." - Bishop Aloisius Muench, Fargo, North Dakota

"The American people should know once and for all that as a result of this government's official policy they are being made the unwilling accomplices in the crime of mass starvation." - Chicago Daily Tribune, January 8th 1946

RELIEF PLUNDERED BY ROOSEVELT AND HENCHMEN

Throughout the spring of 1946, Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Roosevelt, attracted a great deal of favorable publicity for her highly trumpeted appeals for donations to feed the starving German people:

"Washington, D.C., June 6th (1946) - The Emergency Food Collection Committee headed by Henry A. Wallace, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, and Herbert Leham, has collected $323,000 in cash . . . it is retaining $300,000 for administrative expenses."

It seemed that there were no depths of inhuman depravity that certain western leaders were not prepared to plumb.

Michael Foote, M.P., in discussing the question reminded the House of Commons that there was an older law than any promulgated for the protection of victims of our policy.

"But those who shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it would be better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."  Congressional Record, December 4th 1945

Next -- Chapter 21 -- THE VULTURES DESCEND