"After Hitler's war had been lost, millions of ethnic Germans in regions that are today part of Eastern Europe were expelled -- often under horrendous circumstances. At least 473,000 instances of death as people fled or were expelled have been proven. The Nazis' crimes had been far worse, but the suffering of ethnic Germans was immense. "It was a deceptively beautiful summer. Never before had the light of East Prussia seemed so bright, the sky so high, the countryside so vast, as in 1944, wrote Hans Graf von Lehndorff, a doctor and chronicler, in his diary. And yet the streets were already filling with columns of refugees; Germans from Lithuania, whose abandoned cattle roamed the countryside. Light tremors echoed distant detonations. Sometimes at night, a red glow was visible in the east, where border towns along the Niemen River were burning: Unmistakable signs that Soviet forces were moving inexorably closer. "They arrived on October 21. Red Army soldiers pushing through the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf massacred some 30 old people, women and children, leaving in their wake houses full of dead bodies. Thoughts about the sky, light and countryside were replaced by shock. When the East Prussian front collapsed in mid-January, the destruction and violence wrought by the Soviet troops surpassed anything the Germans had ever suffered. The inhabitants of eastern parts of East Prussia were the first to flee in blind panic." A Time of Retribution: Paying with Life and Limb for the Crimes of Nazi Germany - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
No one should ever make the German people into victims of the war. Its historic revisionism as bad as anything the loonie left does.
no kidding Mehar the spoils what there were of go to the victors. suggest you guys read a couple good books on the fighting in Ost Preußia, it has already been proven that the worst struggle was here for both sides they bled each other white, few prisoners were taken on either side and civilians were shot out of hand, noticeably as a revenge factor quite substantiated, though I cannot blame the Soviets. when the Soviets came into the fall months to start a major push into Prussia they were ousted by a combiantion of mediocre German units, and thus and revison of invasion plans and the push began in January of 45 in terrible weather. did the civilians both German and Russian deserve what they met ? of course not but it is always the non-military that suffers the worst
I think it would be magnanimous to have some considerable sypathy for the German civilians who suffered greatly in the last stages of the Second World War. It's difficult to argue that the elderly, women, and children somehow deserved the cruel fate that befell them in 1945. Having said that, I am reminded of an afternoon I spent touring HighGate Cemetery in London many years ago. The guide, a very knowledgable gentlemen in his seventies who had served with the British Army in Burma, talked at one point about the horrors resulting from the Allied bombing of cities like Dresden and Hamburg....Then he said abruptly, "Of course, the Germans started all this horror," and turned to show us some tombstones damaged during the London Blitz in 1940.
That doesn't seem to be very well supported from what I can see. The Germans were already at war with most of the allies and I don't see the Japanese holding back because the Germans aren't fighting the Soviets. I disagree they were very much victims if willing ones at first. Again I disagree. The Japanese actually started before the Germans and the Soviets gave things a helping hand when they decided to split Poland with Germany.
All I know is that IF one begins to work backward from the events that began on September 1939, the continent of Europe had always used armed conflict to settle their political differences. Regardless of who may have "started" the conflict, the fact remains that millions upon millions lost their lives and suffered terribly. Germany and Russia divided Poland between themselves, the Allies declare war on Germany; Russia invades Finland and the Allies do nothing! I respectfully disagree that only Germany is to blame for WW2. Churchill was correct in his assessment that WW2 (along with WW1) was another "Thirty Years War"
I have deep sympathy for the German Civilians caught up in the destruction of Germany but lets not believe this was all wrought by Russian hordes on the East and Allied Bombers on the The West. The Nazis and the SS were busy murdering thousands, shooting and hanging their own troops and any civilian thought to be willing to desert, preventing in some cases East Prussians from fleeing and refusing to evacuate civilians in the way of the Red Army. Hitlers specific orders were that supplies, ammunition, food and coal were to take precedence over civilians. Also lets not forget the extraordinary effort that the Nazis took to murder ten of thousands of Slave workers, Allied prisoners and Concentration and ordinary German prisoners on the death marches. As well as throwing in old men and boys of the Volksturm who died in their thousands for no military gain whatsoever. If Germany had taken the same sensible route of Ludendorf and the Kaiser in WW1, a great deal of the finally suffering of the German Nation would have been prevented. It was obvious to the German High Command that the War was lost in 1944. At the end of 1944, German civilians had hardly suffered at all. The likes of Guderian, Keitel, Manstein and the rest of the "honourable" German Military must accept a big share of the blame for the ultimate blood bath.
Yes, I agree with this. There was a lot of blame to be given for the war, and if one wants to blame the Germans for the way they executed the war and the accompanying attrocities, you can, but the war itself was a European war and definitely a continuation of the Great War. Good question to ask is: Had the allies of 1918/1919 handled things differently at Versailles does Adolph Hitler ever rise to power? I believe a lot of people saw WWII coming. According to Herbert Hoover, who worked with President Wilson on his peace proposals at Versailles, Wilson predicted there would be another World War in Europe because of Allied intransigence towards Germany.
I've always been wary of this overly-precise chicken and egg scenario. For instance, Versailles created a lot of longstanding greivances - but it didn't exactly create the Wall Street Crash or the Depression, did it? That created a lot more economic problems in Germany than WWI reparations did. And Versailles didn't create hyper-inflation in the 1920s, the Weimar government's printing money did. Hitler's rise to power would be more directly attributed to how the nascent Weimar Republic failed to establish itself quickly enough and strongly enough....and needed the assistance of the Army and Freikorps to stabilise the new postwar state. in THAT environment - rightwing groups were always going to be more tolerated than normal, policed more leniently... In other words - Hitler rose to power because an Adolf Hitler COULD rise to power; all the other factors "merely" influenced why people voted for the NSDAP. Hitler used that support, it didn't create HIM.
But to return to the original post.... We need to be very careful of how we regard Nemmersdorf - lest we forget that events there have been ALREADY heavily propagandized during the war by Goebbels to encourage the Germans to resist? I'm not saying that the events mentioned above in the town didn't happen....more that the German media should be careful of regarding them as martyrs for or against Nazism.
I can make a pretty good case for both the Versailles Treaty, and American intransigence in refusing to modify or forgive the war debts of the winning Allied nations being the root cause of both the Wall Street collapse and the following Great Depression. When the Republicans swept back into power with Harding in 1920, the very idea of modifying the war debts to the British or French were "out of the question"; you have debts, you pay them (sound familiar?). In the words of then vice-President Coolige; "..the business of America is business." However the demolished economies of the western Allies, not even considering the non-recognized Soviet Union, eventually put the financial market in the US into the odd position of loaning money to its debtors by way of Germany. Of course American financial "wizards" made money in both directions, and got richer and richer, while "selling their paper profit" concept to ordinary American citizens and allowing margin purchasing for stocks. This concept of borrowing and spending might as easily have been the cause of the economic collapse of both Wall Street and the global economy as anything. There were other "problems", such as the over-production of American farmers for food and fiber on borrowed money, which became a non-profitable enterprise as soon as Europe started getting back on its feet and not needing American produce post war. The American farmer had borrowed money to plant more crops, broke more land, and sold to the Europeans while the war raged, but as soon as the war ended their market disappeared, and they still had the debts of overproduction and products nobody needed. And don't forget Prohibition which gave rise to the concept of organized crime, and removed millions if not billions of dollars from the revenue base of the government. Al Capone wasn't convicted of any of his truly heinous crimes, but tax evasion. The British and French had to press for reparation money from Germany, they needed it to pay for US loans. The Germans couldn’t repay with gold (they had run out), they had to pay with printed money and that started their hyper-inflation to grow. But, that had been brought under control with the "Dawes Plan" while Hitler was still in Landsberg. And unemployment had fallen to about 8.5 percent. Now American financial brokers are investing and lending to the Weimar government, and the Weimar is paying the British and the French, who in turn are paying their war debt to the Americans. In this round-about the Americans are in reality "paying themselves", with the Germans, the French, and the British cutting out a bit of profit before it comes back to Wall Street. Margaret MacMillan (Canadian historical scholar/author ) maintains that Germany paid only about $4.5 billion in the entire period between 1918 and 1932. Slightly less, she points out, than what France paid after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71–with a much smaller economy. And the French paid in gold Francs, on time and in full. "Whatever the treaty", she argues, "Germany would have been an unhappy place in the 1920s." Even though the reparations were initially set at $33 billion, they were never paid so that had nothing to do with the problem in Germany. (Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World; McMillan) Stephen Schuker, a University of Virginia historian and author of American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919- 1933, believes that the Weimar Germans, by using the proceeds of American loans (Dawes Plan) to pay off their debts in Europe, ultimately paid no reparations at all. And when the Germans defaulted in the early thirties as a result of the beginning of "The Great Depression" (Schuker argues), American bankers had effectively paid reparations to Germany and by doing so had literally created the global money crisis. Couple that with both the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, and the global stability didn't need the instability created in Wall Street with the loans to Germany. Indeed, according to Schuker's calculations, the total net transfer from the United States to Germany in the period 1919-1931, adjusted for inflation, "...amounted to almost four times the total assistance that the United States furnished West Germany under the Marshall Plan from 1948 to 1952." Then if the Allies had drawn boundaries on ethnicity alone at Versailles, as Boston University historian William Keylor points out, they would have made post-war Germany bigger than it was in 1914! And that, after four years of fighting and millions of deaths, "was politically impossible (unthinkable)." When you look at Europe at the end of 1919, says Keylor, "...it (Versailles) comes as close to an ethnographic map as any settlement before or since."(A World of Nations: the International Order Since 1945)
Didn't intend it to be either precise or a chicken and egg scenario, in fact I wasn't considering economics. It was intended to be a question involving Hitler's use of the Treaty to play on the Nationalistic pride of the Germans, a theme prevelent in most of his speeches. Whether Hitler comes to power or not, I believe that another World War in Europe was bound to happen sooner or later, because of the 1919 treaty. As it turned out it may have been better sooner than later. There is also his political use of the hatred of the Jews, which again was there with or without Hitler.
Hitler took war to a new level. As bad as the Mongols were, well Hitler and thousands of Germans, the SS and their relatives, took evil to a level far greater then Hell. If one takes the time to think just exactly how the Poles and other Eastern Europens suffered, just what exactly happaned to them, what they saw, such as the ovens, children being taken away from parents to die, or children dying together with parents naked in rooms, digging graves just to get shot, medical experiments of the worst type, starving to death,.... Well, for anyone who feels sorry for thousands of Germans fleeing, or even some getting shot, well I wish you were Polish during WW2 and took a nice vacation in Auschwitz. And please dont mention how many thousands Germans died, as the other side deals in millions. And bombing of German cities, well the West learned from the best, the Luftwaffe.
It certainly is. But you are incorrect. France had no War Debt with the USA neither did any other of the Allies except Great Britain. The simple fact is that all purchases of American Arms and munitions were channelled through Great Britain for the hard nose reason that only Britain had the wealth to pay and the Americans were certainly not going to give credit to others. Russian and Italy never paid Britain at all, yet received plenty of American arms - whilst France re-paid Britain for the American arms, most of the others did not. Thus Britain ended up with a huge war debt far far higher than anyone else as well as paying the Americans for arms supplied to her Allies. This influenced British policy in the inter-war years eg the British hoped that agreeing at the Washington Conference to the larger British fleet being reduced to the same size as the American fleet and also through abandoning the British\Japanese Naval Treaty, that America might reduce the bill for the War.
And I believe you are incorrect as to what is both meant by the term "war debt", and who owned them. During and immediately after World War I, America's cobelligerents borrowed some $10.350 billion ($184.334 billion in 2002 dollars) from the U.S. Treasury. These funds were used mainly to finance payments due the United States for munitions, foodstuffs, cotton, other war-related purchases, and stabilization of exchange. Of that sum, $7.077 billion represented cash loans extended prior to the armistice; $2.533 billion was advanced to finance reconstruction after the armistice; and postarmistice relief supplies and liquidated war stocks amounted to an additional $740 million. Total foreign indebtedness—including interest due before funding of the original demand obligations but excluding loans to Czarist Russia, for which no hope of collection remained—came to $11.577 billion ($206.186 billion in 2002 dollars). In turn, the U.S. government borrowed from its own citizens, mostly through Liberty Bonds paying 5 percent interest. During the period of economic disorganization in Europe following the termination of hostilities, the administration of Woodrow Wilson agreed to grant the debtor nations a three-year postponement of interest payments. But it indicated that eventually the debtors would be required to repay the loans. In February 1922 Congress created the World War Foreign Debt Commission, on which representatives of the House and Senate flanked the secretaries of state, commerce, and the Treasury. Congress directed the debt commission to seek funding arrangements providing for amortization of principal within twenty-five years and an interest rate of not less than 4.25 percent. Disregarding this limitation on its mandate, the commission managed to reach agreement with thirteen European debtor nations before its five-year term expired. The settlements all provided for repayment of principal over sixty-two years. Assuming that the debtors would continue to pay for sixty-two years, the settlements as a whole were equivalent to cancellation of 51.3 percent of what could have been required on a 5-percent basis. Actually, those who drafted the agreements did not expect them to continue in force much beyond a generation, so that the true percentage of the debt forgiven was appreciably larger. Nevertheless, the governments of the four principal debtor nations—Great Britain, France, Italy, and Belgium—believed that the debts should have been canceled altogether as the American contribution to a common struggle. They settled most unwillingly—Great Britain, to avoid losing its own standing as a creditor nation and banking center, and the Continental countries, to avoid being barred from access to American capital markets. Goto: World War I War Debts: Information from Answers.com
