“England,your deed”.

Repatriation

The Dark Side of World War II

by Jacob G. Hornberger

When Hitler's forces invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, millions of Russians welcomed and embraced the Nazi military forces. In many instances, Russian soldiers willingly surrendered to the Germans. The German invasion of the Soviet Union was the beginning of what would ultimately become one of the darkest episodes of World War II — the forcible repatriation and mass murder of

millions of anticommunist, anti-Stalinist Russians.

At the center of one of the most fascinating and horrific stories of World War II was a Russian general named Andrey Vlasov. Vlasov was born in 1900 in the small village of Lomakino in the province of Nizhni Novgorod. He was one of eight children. His parents were peasants who did everything they could to see that their children received an education. Vlasov attended religious schools but finally decided to study agriculture.

During the Russian Revolution — in 1919 — Vlasov was called up to serve in the Red Army. He was commissioned an officer and led men into battle against the White Army. Sven Steenberg, in his book Vlasov , quotes the November 21, 1940, issue of the Red Star : "He understood how 'to win respect, lead men, bind them to himself, and at the same time increase their self-confidence.'"

At the end of the Revolution, Vlasov decided to remain in the army, rising to the rank of colonel by the late 1930s. Then, Stalin commenced his infamous purge against the Russian officer corps. Estimates of the casualties differ, but Steenberg says:

According to conservative estimates, about thirty thousand officers were arrested. Three of the Red Army's 5 marshals were liquidated, 13 out of 19 army commanders, more than half of the 186 division commanders. Even their families were not spared.

Vlasov survived the purge. But as Steenberg points out, he was undoubtedly deeply affected by Stalin's murder of so many of his fellow officers and compatriots.

On June 4, 1940, Vlasov — at the age of 39 — was promoted to major general. His wife, a doctor who he had married in 1933, bore him a son. Many years before, she had had to disavow her parents because they were "kulaks" — rich peasants — traitors to communism. But Vlasov continued to secretly support them. And Vlasov also maintained another family secret — his older brother Ivan had been murdered by the communists in 1919.

In the fall of 1941, German forces were twenty-five miles from Moscow. The city was in a panic. Stalin ordered Vlasov to Moscow and appointed him commander of the Twentieth Army, whose mission was to assist in the halting of the German assault on Moscow. Vlasov took command and counterattacked the Germans, halting their advance and helping to save the city.

In January 1942, Vlasov's army took part in an offensive near the city of Leningrad. The battle went badly for the Russians, and Vlasov requested permission to retreat. Stalin refused and ordered continued attacks against the Germans. Vlasov flew to Moscow to explain the urgency of the need to retreat. Stalin again refused the request. Vlasov returned to his forces, who were now in danger of being surrounded.

At this point, Vlasov received a note from his wife that said, "Guests were here." In the midst of this crucial battle, Stalin had sent the secret police to search Vlasov's home and question his family.

The Germans surrounded Vlasov and his army. For two weeks, the general avoided capture by secreting himself in the swamps that covered the battlegrounds. And those two weeks alone in the Russian swamps caused Andrey Vlasov to do a lot of questioning and much soul-searching about the plight of Russia and her future.

One day, a Russian mayor disclosed Vlasov's hiding place to German forces. Vlasov surrendered to the German army.

From the first grade in their public schools, Americans are taught the evils of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. "If we had not entered World War II, Hitler would have conquered the world," Americans are taught. "There is no way that the world could have tolerated the continuation of the Nazi regime. It was

necessary for tens of thousands of Americans to die to stop Hitler."

Yet, there is one uncomfortable fallacy with this reasoning. The United States and the Western world survived something even worse — the regime of Joseph Stalin and the rise and domination of the communist empire. Obviously, the world would have been better off without the evils and horrors of both Hitler and Stalin. But if we had to end up with one of them, who is to say that Stalin was better than Hitler? If we survived in a world of Stalin and communism, then why couldn't we have survived in a world of Hitler and Nazism?

Let us recall why Great Britain and France declared war on Germany in the first place (it was not Germany that declared war on them first). Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia and Austria, obviously with the intention of ultimately moving east against the Russians. In fact, contrary to popular opinion, the evidence that Hitler ever intended to invade the West is scant. For one, Hitler considered himself a Westerner. Moreover, he had already expressed his desire for Lebensraum — "living space" — in Russia.

When Germany threatened to invade Poland, the British and French emphasized that they would come to Poland's aid. But this was a hollow guarantee. There was no way that England and France had sufficient military forces to enforce the guarantee. Nevertheless, once the attack on Poland took place, England and France declared war on Germany. The specific goal of British and French intervention was to liberate the people of Poland and Eastern Europe from the clutches of totalitarian dictatorship.

And so what happened at the end of World War II? What were the consequences of the most massive death and destruction that mankind has ever seen? Were the people of Poland and Eastern Europe freed from totalitarian dictatorship?

The parades and speeches in 1995, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the winning of World War II, have one primary focus with respect to the European part of the war: the defeat of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. And there is a reason for that: If people begin reflecting on the real consequences of World War II, serious doubts will begin to form, not only about that war but about foreign wars in general — and the continued existence of the U.S. military-industrial complex.

In his campaign for reelection in 1940, Franklin Roosevelt assured Americans that he did not intend to involve the U.S. in the European conflict. Roosevelt was playing to public-opinion polls, since the overwhelming number of Americans did not want to intervene in the European war. Americans remembered the promises of Woodrow Wilson some twenty years before. If you will permit us to sacrifice your sons on the European battlegrounds, Wilson had told the American people, I promise you that this will be the final war — the war to end all wars — the war to make the world safe for democracy once and for all.

And so thousands of Americans died so that Wilson could have his noble dream. But Wilson was wrong. Within twenty years, the warring factions were at it again. The thousands of Americans who died in the First World War died in vain. They were sacrificed for nothing.

Thus, Americans overwhelmingly supported Roosevelt when he openly declared in a campaign speech on October 30,1940: "I have said this before, but I will say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars."

Most historians now recognize that Roosevelt knowingly and deliberately lied to the American people. At the very time he was assuring them of his intentions to stay out of the European conflict, he was making secret commitments to England to help maintain the British Empire in the Far East. He was doing his best to goad Germans submarines into attacking American vessels. And he ultimately found the "back door" to war by goading the Japanese in the Pacific. (See "December 7, 1941: The Infamy of FDR" by Jacob G. Hornberger and "Pearl Harbor: The Controversy Continues" by Sheldon Richman,

Freedom Daily , December 1991.) Franklin D. Roosevelt lied his way to reelection. And the result was another American intervention into a European war.

What were the results at the end of the war? Fifty million deaths. Tens of millions uprooted. Four trillion dollars in direct costs. The most massive destruction of property that mankind has ever seen. Acts of extreme brutality. Firebombings and other terroristic attacks against noncombatants. It was the most horrific event in the history of mankind. (See "The Consequences of World War II" by Sheldon Richman, Freedom Daily , November 1991.)

But what about the Poles and the Eastern Europeans? After all, they were the specific reason that Great Britain and France had declared war on Germany. Surely, they were free at the end of the war.

Not exactly. And this is what makes American public officials — as well as the American people — so uncomfortable. Yes, it is true that the German invaders were ousted and defeated by the Allied forces. Yes, it is true that the Poles, the Czechs, and the Eastern Europeans were saved from the clutches of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.

But they were delivered into the hands of Joseph Stalin and the communists .

We have been taught to believe that this was a great victory. That this brought freedom to the Eastern Europeans. That one of the great and glorious consequences of World War II was the liberation of the Eastern Europeans by Russian forces. Americans should be proud, we are told, that their sons and daughters died on the battlefield — or returned blinded or maimed — so that the Eastern Europeans could live under Stalin rather than Hitler.

But many Eastern Europeans did not live under Stalin. Instead, they died under him. For Stalin — this wonderful ally of Franklin D. Roosevelt — was one of the most brutal mass murderers in all of history.

While it is difficult to compare evil, Stalin has to be considered much worse than Hitler. Certainly, he was responsible for the deaths of many more people than Hitler. The estimates of Russian deaths under Joseph Stalin are estimated to be 40 million (yes, forty million individuals!), including the approximately 10 million killed as a result of Stalin's collectivization of the Russian farms in the early 1930s. Even Hitler (who killed twenty million individuals!) did not come close to matching these numbers.

Ask the Poles about the mass murder at the Katyn Forest. For decades, Russian and American government officials had scoffed at the notion that, in 1940, Russian military forces had rounded up 13,000 defenseless Polish military officers, taken them to the Katyn Forest, and shot them in cold blood. Instead, the claim was that the murder was committed by Nazi forces. Now, some forty years later, the Russians themselves have admitted that it was the communists — the great liberators of Poland and Eastern Europe — the great humanitarians — the great allies of England and the U.S. — who committed the murders.

Yes, the Poles were freed from the clutches of Adolf Hitler . . . so that they could live, suffer, and die at the hands of their freedom-loving liberators, Joseph Stalin and his communist comrades.

Why don't Americans have the same prejudice against Joseph Stalin that they have against Adolf Hitler? Why are brutal foreign dictators always referred to by American public officials as another Adolf Hitler rather than another Joseph Stalin?

One answer is that it is too painful to confront the reality of what happened to the Poles, the Czechs, and the Eastern Europeans at the end of the war — and for some forty years after that. Life under Nazism was not pleasant. But neither was life under communism. To confront the reality of who specifically won control of Poland and Eastern Europe is to confront the reason why so many Americans died in Europe: so that communism, not Nazism, would reign supreme in Eastern Europe.

Moreover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who is portrayed in American history books as one of this country's greatest presidents, considered Joseph Stalin his friend. He even referred to this mass murderer as "Uncle Joe." Furthermore, since victory in World War II is always portrayed as an Allied one, Americans have a tendency to think of the three Western leaders — Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin — as "all the same."

In a sense, Americans are right. For all three Allied leaders had the same ideological orientation. That is, all three believed that one of the proper roles of government was to own or control the means or results of production. The labels varied according to the country — socialism, communism, the welfare state, the planned economy, the New Deal. But the principles underlying the labels were the same. When it came to economic principles, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin were cut out of the same ideological cloth.

But this was not the only similarity among the three leaders of the Allied Powers. All three, as well as FDR's successor Harry S. Truman, shared another similarity with their counterpart Adolf Hitler: all five of them participated in the mass murder of millions of innocent people. And this brings us back to the issue at hand — the dark episode in history that American officials kept secret for so long — Andrey Vlasov, forcible repatriation, and the mass murder of millions of anticommunist and anti-Stalinist Russian people.

Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Truman shared two things in common — their philosophical belief on the role of government in economic activity and their participation in the mass murder of millions of innocent people.

All of them believed that government should own or control the means or results of production. Thus, each of them helped lead their respective nations down the collectivist road — to Nazism, fascism, the welfare state, the planned economy, the New Deal, and so forth.

But the misery and destitution that their economic philosophy brought to the citizenry of their countries were nothing compared to the tremendous evil associated with the holocausts in which these world leaders participated.

Hitler's holocaust, of course, is well known — six million people burned in the Nazi ovens. Less well known is the holocaust in which two million innocent Russians were massacred through the joint participation of the U.S., Great Britain, and Russia.

Americans have been taught to believe that World War II was a war of good versus evil. Unfortunately, the analysis is not that simple. For one thing, the U.S. and Great Britain were allied with one of the most evil political regimes in all of history — Stalinist Russia. There is nothing that Hitler and Nazi Germany did that communist Russia did not do. Hitler killed millions of innocent people. So did Stalin. Germany attacked Czechoslovakia and Austria. Russia attacked Finland. Germany invaded Poland. Russia did so at the exact same time. In fact, it is difficult to understand why Great Britain and France declared war only on Germany rather than on both Germany and Russia — both Germany and Russia had engaged in the exact same evils.

If France and Great Britain had not declared war on Germany, there is no doubt that Germany and the Soviet Union would have ultimately gone to war against each other. The Nazis hated the communists; and the communists hated the Nazis. With his move into Eastern Europe, Hitler was clearly moving eastward. And the overwhelming evidence is that Stalin was preparing to attack Germany (see the review by Richard M. Ebeling of Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? in Freedom Daily, November 1991).

So, when Germany finally attacked Russia, the war on the eastern front became one of Nazism versus communism — not exactly a wonderful choice for either Germans or Russians. But for thousands of

Russians, anything was better than the mass murderer Joseph Stalin and his communist regime. It would have been virtually impossible to find a Russian family who had not had a friend or relative killed by Stalin's forces. And political terror existed all across the nation.

Thus, thousands of Russian people had nothing but hate for — and fear of — Joseph Stalin and his communist regime. This was the reason that when Germany invaded Russia, thousands of Russians viewed the Germans as liberators rather than as conquerors.

When Andrey Vlasov was captured near Leningrad, the Germans knew that they had bagged a big prize. Vlasov was one of Stalin's most brilliant and courageous generals. The Germans removed Vlasov to a POW camp back in Germany.

There, Vlasov met many other Russian POWs. They began talking among themselves about Stalin, communism, the war, and Russia. Most of them shared two things in common — their hatred for Stalin and communism and their love for their country. After much soul-searching, deliberation, and reflection, the Russian POWs persuaded the Germans to permit them to form a Russian army to fight Stalin's forces. And they elected Andrey Vlasov as their commanding general.

Of course, this raises questions with respect to the meaning of patriotism. Were Vlasov and his men patriots or traitors? One might argue that they were traitors because they were opposing their own government during wartime. If that is the test for patriotism, then what about German citizens, like Marlene Dietrich, who opposed Hitler — were they patriots or traitors?

Vlasov and his men believed that patriotism meant more than blindly supporting one's government. Stalin was a mass murderer, they reasoned, who had brought nothing but misery and destitution to the Russian people. Their goal was to eradicate the communist regime and establish an independent and free Russia. Here are excerpts from "The Smolensk Declaration," issued by Vlasov on December 27, 1942:

An appeal by the Russian Committee to the men and officers of the Red Army, to the whole Russian nation, and to the other nations of the Soviet Union.

Friends and Brothers!

Bolshevism is the enemy of the Russian people. It has brought countless disasters to our country and finally has involved the Russian people in a bloody war waged in other's interests. This war has brought unheard-of sufferings to our Motherland. Millions of Russians have already paid with their lives for Stalin's criminal attempts to seize world-wide power to the profit of Anglo-American capitalists. Millions of Russians have been crippled and have lost their ability to work forever. Women, old people and children are dying of cold, starvation and because the work demanded of them is beyond their strength. Hundreds of Russian cities and thousands of villages have been destroyed, blown up and burned on Stalin's orders.

Defeats such as those experienced by the Red Army have never happened before in the history of our country. In spite of the selflessness of the troops and officers and the bravery and self-sacrifice of the Russian people, battle after battle has been lost. The fault lies with the rottenness of the whole of the Bolshevik system, and the incompetence of Stalin and his general staff.

At this very moment, when Bolshevism has shown itself to be incapable of organising the country's defences, Stalin and his clique make use of terror and lying propaganda to drive people to their deaths, for they want to remain in power, at least for a while, regardless of the cost in blood to the Russian people.

Stalin's allies — the British and American capitalists — have betrayed the Russian people. . . .

The Russian Committee has set itself the following aims:

a. The overthrow of Stalin and his clique, the destruction of Bolshevism.

b. The conclusion of an honourable peace with Germany.

c. The creation, in friendship with Germany and the other peoples of Europe, of a "New Russia" without Bolsheviks and Capitalists.

The Declaration then set forth thirteen specific goals, including the abolition of forced labor; the abolition of collective farms and their return to private ownership; the "re-establishment of commerce, trades and crafts" and "private initiative"; and the "complete dismantling of the regime of terror and the introduction of genuine freedom of religion, conscience, speech, assembly and the press; the guarantee of inviolability of persons and of their homes."

In March 1943, Vlasov published an open letter entitled "Why I decided to fight Bolshevism," which

stated in part the following: Inasmuch as I am calling on all Russian people to fight against Stalin and his clique, to build a "New Russia" without Bolsheviks and Capitalists, I consider it my duty to explain my actions. . . .

I am the son of a peasant, and was born in the province of Nizhni Novgorod. . . . During the Civil War, I fought with the Red Army because I believed that the Revolution would give the Russian people land, freedom and happiness. When I became a commander in the Red Army, I lived with the men and their officers — Russian workers, peasants, and members of the intelligentsia, all of them dressed in grey [army issue] overcoats. I knew their thoughts, their worries and problems. I did not lose touch with my family and my village and was familiar with the ways and means of the peasantry.

And so I realised that none of those things for which the Russian people had fought during the Civil War had been achieved by Bolshevik victory. I saw what a difficult life a Russian worker led and how the peasant was forcibly driven to join the collective farms. Millions of Russian people disappeared, having been arrested and shot without trial. I saw that everything Russian was being destroyed, that time-servers were being given positions of command in the Red Army, people to whom the interests of the Russian nation were of no importance. . . .

From 1938 to 1939 I was in China as military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. When I returned to the USSR, I saw that during that time the command structure of the army had been destroyed for no reason whatsoever on Stalin's orders. Thousands of the best officers, including the Marshals of the Red Army, had been arrested and shot or sent to the labour camps to disappear forever. Terror was unleashed not only on the army but on the whole nation. There was no family which was not involved in some way or other. The army was weakened, the terrified nation looked to the future with horror, awaiting the war which Stalin had made inevitable. . . .

While I was in the forests and swamps [avoiding capture], I finally came to the conclusion that my duty consisted in calling on the Russian people to fight to overthrow Bolshevik power, to fight for peace for the Russian people, to fight for an end to an unnecessary war being fought for foreign interests which was spilling Russian blood, to fight for the creation of a New Russia, in which every Russian might be happy. . . .

I reached the firm conclusion that the tasks facing the German people can be solved in alliance and cooperation with the German people.

Of course, the logical question is, how could Vlasov cooperate with the Nazis? After all, Hitler and the Nazis were not any different from Stalin and the communists. Vlasov knew that if he was to help liberate Russia from communist rule, he had no choice but to work with the Germans. His attitude was the same as the American and British toward Stalin and the communists — politics and war sometimes make strange bedfellows. But Vlasov also believed that he could ultimately maneuver the German political leaders into guaranteeing a free and independent Russia.

Little did Vlasov and his men know that their attempt to liberate their nation from communist tyranny would ultimately result in one of the worst holocausts in history — this one provided by Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin.

Adolf Hitler did not trust Andrey Vlasov. The Russian general had served in the Russian army since the Russian Revolution. He had fought hard and valiantly in the successful defense of Moscow. It was only because of Stalin's refusal to permit Vlasov and his men to retreat during the subsequent battle at Leningrad that the German forces had defeated and captured Vlasov. It was difficult for Hitler to believe that Vlasov was now willing to lead captured Russian soldiers against Stalin and his communist regime.

So, it was not until the very end of the war — January 1945 — that Hitler finally relented and permitted Vlasov to lead Russian POWs into battle against the Russian army. But by this time, Germany was close to defeat. The forces under Vlasov's command — some 50,000 Russian soldiers — played a minor military role in the war.

Ironically, Vlasov's forces did have one very interesting military victory. The Czech underground sought their assistance in helping to liberate Czechoslovakia from Nazi control! Vlasov, who despised the Nazis as much as he hated the communists, agreed to help. The Saturday Evening Post later reported:

Prague really was liberated by foreign troops, after all. Not by the Allies who did not arrive until the shooting was all over, but by 22,000 Russian outlaws wearing German uniforms. The leader of these renegades was General Vlasov, a former hero of the Red Army.

The battlefield was obviously chaotic. The Russians were approaching from the east. The Americans and British were approaching from the west. Vlasov and his forces were in the middle, and German forces were at his back.

On May 7, 1945, Germany capitulated.

Vlasov knew that Stalin was not a forgiving man. After his capture, Vlasov had openly defied the communists and communism. He had tried to arouse the Russian people to revolt against their communist tyrants. Vlasov knew that capture by the communists now meant certain death for him and his men.

Andrey Vlasov chose to surrender to American forces. He did not know that Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin had already sealed his fate. He did not know that these four rulers of the Allied powers had already committed themselves to one of the worst holocausts in history. He did not know that evil pervaded not only the Nazi and communist regimes, but the American and British regimes, as well.

Part of the Yalta Agreement between the Big Three — Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill — involved the repatriation of Russians and Americans to their respective homelands. Keep in mind that the German POW camps contained American prisoners, British prisoners, and Russian prisoners. The Big Three agreed that as the Russians liberated Germany POW camps, American and British POWs would be turned over to the American and British forces. As the Americans and British liberated German POW camps, Russian POWs would be returned to Russia.

There was one big problem with this agreement — a problem that each of the Big Three was well aware of. American and British POWs wanted to return to their own forces. Russian POWs did not want to return to Russian forces because they knew the fate that awaited them.

Stalin wanted revenge. The Russian prisoners were traitors to communism. They deserved to die.

And Roosevelt and Churchill felt the exact same way. Russia was "our friend." Stalin was "Uncle Joe" to the American people. Any Russian who had defied Uncle Joe — any Russian who had opposed our communist friends and allies — deserved to be executed.

The revenge and ensuing holocaust had to be kept secret from the world. The American and British people had to continue maintaining their illusion that this was a war of good versus evil — that only the Nazis engaged in cold-blooded murder — that the Allies epitomized all the goodness of mankind.

Therefore, the Big Three spelled out their plans not just in the official Yalta agreement but, also, in a March 31, 1945, secret codicil to the agreement. As James Sanders, Mark Sauter, and R. Cort Kirkwood point out in their shocking book, Soldiers of Misfortune (1992), the codicil was kept secret from the American and British people for fifty years . The codicil outlined the secret plan by which the Russians POWs would be forcibly returned to Stalin's clutches.

American government officials called their part in the holocaust Operation Keelhaul. In his book Operation Keelhaul (1973), Julius Epstein described the meaning of the term:

To keelhaul is the cruelest and most dangerous of punishments and tortures ever devised for men aboard a ship. It involves trussing a man up with ropes, throwing him overboard, unable to swim, and hauling him under the boat's keel from one side to the other, or even from stem to stern. Most of those keelhauled under water are already dead when their punishment is over.

And Epstein describes his reaction to the choice of this term by American government officials to describe their part in the Allied holocaust:

That our Armed Forces should have adopted this term as its code name for deporting by brutal force to concentration camp, firing squad, or hangman's noose millions who were already in the lands of freedom, shows how little the high brass thought of their longing to be free.

The roles played by each of the conspirators was clear: Roosevelt and Churchill would force the Russian anticommunists into Stalin's hands. The communists would take over from there and do the actual killing.

How many were turned over to the Russians by American and British forces? Two million individuals . Yes, two million Russian people sent back to the communists where they were either immediately executed or sent to die in the Gulag.

It was not easy to "persuade" the Russian prisoners to return to the communists. Sometimes, subterfuge was used. Epstein details several examples. One took place on May 28, 1945, in Lienz, Austria. British forces ordered all Cossack officials to attend an important British conference with high British officials. The Cossacks were told to leave their coats since they would be back by six in the evening. Their families were advised so that family members would not worry over their short absence. When the Cossacks appeared nervous, an English officer told them, "I assure you on my word of honor as a British officer that you are just going to a conference."

The 2,749 Cossacks — 2,201 of whom were officers — were driven straight into a prison camp and were advised by British officials that Soviet authorities would soon arrive to pick them up. Epstein writes:

One Cossack officer remarked: "The NKVD or the Gestapo would have slain us with truncheons, the British did it with their word of honor." The first to commit suicide by hanging was the Cossack editor Evgenij Tarruski. The second was General Silkin who shot himself. . . . The Cossacks refused to board [the trucks]. British soldiers with pistols and clubs began using their clubs, aiming at the heads of the prisoners. They first dragged the men out of the crowd and threw them into the trucks. The men jumped out. They beat them again and threw them onto the floor of the trucks. Again, they jumped out. The British then hit them with rifle butts until they lay unconscious and threw them like sacks of potatoes in the trucks.

The same scenes were repeated all along the lines — two million Russian people tricked and beaten by British and American forces so that Stalin could finish the job later on.

Some of this dirty work even took place on American soil. Epstein describes what happened to Russian POWs who were imprisoned at Fort Dix, New Jersey:

First, they refused to leave their barracks when ordered to do so. The military police then used tear gas, and, half-dazed, the prisoners were driven under heavy guard to the harbor where they were forced to board a Soviet vessel. Here the two hundred immediately started to fight. They fought with their bare hands. They started — with considerable success — to destroy the ship's engines. . . . A sergeant . . . mixed barbiturates into their coffee. Soon, all of the prisoners fell into a deep, coma-like sleep. It was in this condition that the prisoners were brought to another Soviet boat for a speedy return to Stalin's hangmen.

Andrey Vlasov — the man who hated communism — the man who hated Nazism — carefully explained his position and reasoning to the American generals. In his book Vlasov , Sven Steenberg describes Vlasov's conversation with one of his American captors:

He began to speak, at first slowly and dispassionately, but then with growing intensity. For one last time, he spoke of all the prospects, hopes, and disappointments of his countrymen. He summed up everything for which countless Russians had fought and suffered. It was no longer really to the American that he was addressing himself — this was rather a confession, a review of his life, a last protest against the destiny that had brought him to a wretched end. . . . [Vlasov] stated that the leaders of the ROA were ready to appear before an international court, but that it would be a monumental injustice to turn them over to the Soviets and thereby to certain death. It was not a question of volunteers who had served the Germans, but of a political organization, of a broad opposition movement which, in any event, should not be dealt with under military law.

Vlasov could not know that he was a dead man before he even surrendered to American forces. Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman had already decided that he needed to be executed for the "crime" of betraying his own government. There was no need to go through the time, expense, trouble, and possible embarrassment of a trial. All that needed to be done was for the Americans to turn him over to their friendly executioner, "Uncle Joe" Stalin.

American military officials delivered Andrey Vlasov to Soviet military authorities. On August 2, 1946, the Soviet press reported that Andrey Vlasov had been hanged by Soviet officials for "treason as well as active espionage and terrorist activity against the Soviet Union."

Unfortunately, all of the facts of the forcible repatriation of the Russian anticommunists have not been revealed. American and British government officials take the position that "national security" will be jeopardized if the citizenry is ever permitted to know all of the details of the Allied holocaust. Thus, fifty years after World War II, American "adults" are still not permitted by their public officials to see the government's files and records on America's involvement in the "good war" and, specifically, in the

Allied holocaust.

As with most claims of "national security," the concern is not so much with the security of the nation but rather with the security of the U.S. government and, specifically, the U.S. military-industrial complex. For it is entirely possible that the American people will finally pierce through all the lies and deceptions that have clouded their minds since the first grade in the public schools to which their parents were forced to send them. It is quite possible that they will recognize the wisdom of their Founding Fathers — and see that the biggest threat to their well-being lies not with some foreign government, but rather with their own government.

Was the Allied holocaust the end of the repatriation story? Unfortunately, no. The last chapter of Stalin's, Roosevelt's, Truman's, and Churchill's horrid tale of deception, brutality, and murder involves Americans "liberated" from German POW camps by the Russians — and the role played in this chapter by the U.S. government, the same government that has always insisted that the American people "support the troops."

To fully understand what happened to American soldiers who were part of the repatriation horror at the end of World War II — and why it happened — it is necessary to examine events in Germany, as well as the United States, that led up to the war.

On January 30, 1933, German President von Hindenberg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hitler's appointment at the age of forty-three was a monumental triumph for a man who, just a few years before, had been a penniless vagrant selling his artwork on the streets of Vienna.

In his biography Adolf Hitler (1976), John Toland sets forth Hitler's background. Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, to Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl. Alois had been born the illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. Alois' father (Adolf's paternal grandfather) was unknown, but there were three possibilities: Johann Nepomuk Hiedler (the man who legitimized Alois, had his name changed, and raised him); his brother Johann Georg Hiedler; or (as Adolf himself probably suspected) a Jew named Frankenberger or Frankenreither.

Alois' marriage to Klara, Adolf's mother, was his third. During his first marriage, he had sired an illegitimate daughter. His wife later attained a legal separation when she caught him having an affair with their kitchen maid, Fanni — the result: Alois' son, Alois, Jr. When the estranged wife died, Alois married Fanni. When Fanni died in 1884, Alois had already impregnated Klara, whose grandfather was the brother of Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, the man who had legitimized Alois. In 1885, Alois and Klara were married.

The Hitler home was not a pleasant place. Not only was Alois a philanderer, he was also an alcoholic — a very abusive alcoholic. Obedience was the foremost virtue in the Hitler household. Alois was a German civil servant — a customs inspector — who demanded the absolute allegiance of his children. "Do as you are told and do not ask questions" was the guiding principle of the Hitler household.

Disobedience or disrespectful conduct brought immediate retribution onto the Hitler children. Toland points out that "Alois, Jr., complained bitterly that his father frequently beat him unmercifully with a hippopotamus whip." When Alois, Jr., was caught skipping school, his father "held him 'against a tree by the back of his neck' until he lost consciousness."

Life in the Hitler home was so bad that Alois, Jr., ran away from home at the age of fourteen, never to return. Adolf then became the primary focus of his father's abuse. Adolf was continually whipped. He was also made to witness the beatings, as well, of his docile mother Klara. His sister Paula later recalled:

[It was Adolf] who challenged my father to extreme harshness and who got his sound thrashing every day. He was a scrubby little rogue, and all attempts of his father to thrash him for his rudeness and to cause him to love the profession of an official of the state were in vain. How often on the other hand did my mother caress him and try to obtain with her kindness, where the father could not succeed with harshness!

Years later, Adolf told one of his secretaries: I then resolved never again to cry when my father whipped me. A few days later I had the opportunity of putting my will to the test. My mother, frightened, took refuge in front of the door. As for me, I counted silently the blows of the stick which lashed my rear end.

The abuse was not only physical, but emotional, as well. After Alois, Jr., ran away, his chores were given to Adolf, who was constantly harangued by his father for failing to meet expectations. One day Adolf decided to run away from home. He had been locked in his room and was trying to escape through the window. To fit in the window, he had to take off his clothes. He heard his father coming up the stairs and covered his nakedness with a tablecloth. His father did not hit him this time but instead, in Klara's presence, teased him unmercifully with the appellation "toga boy." Adolf later confessed that it took him a long time to recover from the ridicule.

It is important to note one vitally important fact about Adolf Hitler's upbringing: The authoritarian family structure under which Adolf Hitler was raised in Austria was not an exception, but rather the rule. Millions of German children were raised under the same creed: Obey; do as you are told; do not talk back; and do not challenge the family system. Moreover, this was the family structure under which their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had been raised. The authoritarian patterns stretched back for centuries and had been passed on from generation to generation.

Adolf Hitler's father died on January 3, 1903. His obituary notice in the Linz Tagespost said: At all times an energetic champion of law and order and universally well informed, he was able to pronounce authoritatively on any matter that came to his notice.

At the age of fourteen, Adolf became the man of the household. The authoritarian family environment was gone. Whenever someone asked him what he was going to be, Hitler responded, "A great artist." In 1905, he graduated from a Realschule at the age of sixteen.

The following year, Hitler's mother permitted him to visit Vienna, Europe's cultural center. Hitler was captivated by the city. He moved to Vienna in 1907, with the hope of entering the Academy of Fine Arts.

In the meantime, his mother Klara was dying of cancer. A Jewish doctor named Edward Bloch treated her with a very painful process in which the open wounds on her body were treated with a substance called iodoform. On December 21, 1907, Klara died.

Hitler returned to Vienna, where he lived a fairly carefree life of painting and attending cultural events. But he was not accepted by the Academy of Fine Arts, and life got progressively worse for him. His funds that he had inherited were depleted, and he began roaming the streets of Vienna as a vagrant, ending up in a poorhouse where he painted picture postcards for sale. It was during this time that Hitler became an avid reader of anti-Semite literature. Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf that he became vehemently anti-Semitic in Vienna upon discovering that the Jew was the "cold-hearted, shameless, and calculating director" of prostitution.

In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich, where he continued pursuing his artistic interests. His life as a struggling artist came to a sudden end in 1914. The Austrian heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a Serb terrorist. Austria declared war on Serbia on July 28. Russia mobilized against Austria. German Kaiser Wilhelm II mobilized German forces against Russia. France and England entered the war soon thereafter.

The Austrian and German people were swept away by war fever. People roamed the streets and demanded action. German nationalists were singing: "Heil der Kaiser! Heil das Heer! We must gather all men of German tongues into one Reich and one people. An everlasting master race will then direct the progress of mankind!" As Toland points out, they could have been speaking for Adolf Hitler.

Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf: I am not ashamed to say that, overcome with rapturous enthusiasm, I fell to my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being allowed to live at this time.

Hitler, an Austrian, joined the German army and attained the rank of corporal. He served as a regimental messenger, saw combat, was seriously wounded, and ultimately was awarded the Iron Cross "for personal bravery and general merit."

As the war progressed, the European armies fought themselves to a standstill. As the troops on both sides became more and more exhausted, the probability of a negotiated settlement increased. But then the U.S. entered the war, which significantly altered the balance of power. The fresh American troops began pushing the Germans back. It became clear that Germany was going to lose the war.

As defeat loomed for the Germans, German life began to disintegrate. Marxism had already prevailed in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917. But the Marxists were not willing to settle for that triumph. They intended to spread their control to Germany and the rest of the world. Capitalizing on the chaos of war and the impending defeat of Germany, the Marxists began fomenting revolution in cities all across Germany. It was during this time that Hitler's deep-seated and malevolent anti-Semitism became a driving force in his life. For Hitler, like many other Germans, associated Jews with Marxism. From Hitler's perspective, the Jews and Reds were traitors to the Fatherland who, by instigating riots and insurrections on the homefront, were helping the enemy to defeat Germany.

Woodrow Wilson demanded the abdication of the Kaiser before America would agree to an armistice. Wilson's demand accelerated the disintegration of German society. Government after government across the country fell to socialist revolutionaries, many of whom were Jewish. Finally, on November 9, 1918, the Kaiser abdicated and relinquished power to the moderate socialists, led by a former saddlemaker, Frederick Ebert. As Toland points out:

It was the end of the German Empire, begun in France on January 18, 1871, when Wilhelm I, King of Prussia and grandfather of Wilhelm II, was proclaimed the first Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at the Versailles Palace. It was also the end of an era. Forty-eight years earlier Bismarck had achieved his dream of unifying Germany and in so doing had created a new image of Germany and Germans. Overnight the foundation on which rested the security of the Junker landowners in East Prussia and the great industrialists crumbled; and overnight the political philosophy on which the majority of Germans had based their conservative and patriotic way of life had apparently disintegrated with the lowering of the imperial flag.

But, as Toland observes, perhaps the greatest shock for the German people was to find Ebert — a socialist and a "man of the people" — sitting as the new German chancellor, in place of a member of the Hohenzollern regime.

When Germany agreed to terms of the Allied armistice, Wilson required the German representatives to assume the responsibility for the war. Little did he know that he was handing Adolf Hitler the tool by which Hitler would later be able to claim that the socialists — the "November criminals" — had sold out Germany to the Allies.

Thus, in 1918, Adolf Hitler became one of the Western world's first anticommunists. Hitler, who himself would become leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi Party), would use his political philosophy of anticommunism to help propel him to the highest reaches of political power in Germany.

When Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1933, Americans expected him to fulfill certain promises that he had made during the presidential campaign: balance the budget; lower taxes; reduce government spending; downsize government; and keep the U.S. out of foreign wars. Americans were in for a surprise. Roosevelt not only broke all of his promises, he also engaged in the most radical restructuring of society in American history.

For over 100 years, Americans had placed individual liberty at the top of their value scale. While there were certainly exceptions (like slavery and tariffs), the following philosophy guided our American

ancestors: Individuals come into life with certain talents and abilities. They use these talents to get the food, clothing, and shelter necessary to sustain their lives. In order to improve their own well-being, they enter into trades with others — trades in which both sides mutually benefit. In this process, they begin to accumulate wealth and property. It is the inherent right of the individual to keep the fruits of his earnings and to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth. It is the right of the individual to decide what to do with that wealth — donate it to the poor, spend it, invest it, or whatever.

Thus, the core of our ancestors' philosophy was that the individual in society — and his right to live his life the way he chooses — are sovereign and supreme. In other words, as long as an individual does not murder, rape, steal, and so forth, he has the God-given right to be free of government control. In fact, our ancestors believed that one of government's few functions was to protect peaceful individuals as they pursued happiness in their own way.

Thus, it is not a coincidence that for over a century, our ancestors said no to: income taxation, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public schooling, central banking, economic regulations, and the like.

With his New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt abandoned that philosophy. From the day he assumed the presidency, Roosevelt told the American people that what mattered was not the sovereignty of the individual, but rather the sovereignty of the nation — society — the collective. He said that whenever the freedom of the individual collided with the interests of society, as expressed through the government, the individual's interests would have to be sacrificed.

How did FDR sell this new order of things to the American people? He said that the stock market crash of 1929 proved the failure of America's free-enterprise system. What was needed, Roosevelt said, was massive government intervention into people's economic affairs in order to save free enterprise.

Of course, by 1933, the U.S. had an entire generation of people who had been forced to attend public (government) schools. They had been taught that good citizenship meant obedience and support of their political rulers. Thus, it did not occur to most Americans that Roosevelt was lying to them — that what had failed in 1929 was not free enterprise, but rather the socialized, central planning of the Federal Reserve Board — the agency that had been created in 1913 to stabilize the monetary system.

Immediately after his election, FDR approached Congress and asked to be given virtually unlimited powers to deal with the economic emergency. Give me the power to rule by decree, Roosevelt said, because I know the way out of this crisis.

And Congress gave him what he requested. What was Roosevelt's plan for America? Contrary to the campaign promises he had made, he embarked on a massive program of governmental borrowing; government spending; public works (including road construction); tax hikes; military spending; welfare; economic regulation; and a national youth corps. It was a way of life and a philosophy that were totally contrary to every principle on which this nation was founded.

There were two obstacles to Roosevelt's plans: the Constitution and the U.S. Supreme Court. When the New Deal legislation ultimately reached the court, much of it was declared in violation of the Constitution and the way of life that had been established in 1787. For example, the National Recovery Act required entire industries to combine into government-protected cartels and directed them to fix wages and prices in their respective industries. If a businessman disagreed with the cartel, he was threatened with a massive protest by "Blue Eagle" demonstrators. More important, he was threatened with prosecution and punishment.

The Supreme Court said that this way of life was not constitutionally permitted in the U.S. The court declared the NRA and several other New Deal programs unconstitutional.

Roosevelt was outraged. How can "nine old men" interfere with my power to do what is right for

America? Roosevelt asked. He came up with a plan to pack the court with additional judges who would rule in his favor. But although FDR was changing America's economic system without a constitutional amendment, the American people refused to permit him to change the judicial system. FDR's court-packing scheme failed. However, as a result of the pressure he had put on the court, one justice changed his vote ("the switch in time that saved nine"), enabling Roosevelt to win the judicial war. From 1937 on, the court took the position that government had omnipotent powers over the wealth and economic activity of the American people.

Ironically, in 1933, another man assumed high political office, and it is instructive to review his philosophy and programs. Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany when that nation, too, was suffering from the Depression. The Germans actually had it worse — they were still suffering the effects of World War I. Their industrial base had been shattered; thousands of young men had been killed; they were still paying reparations; their country had been split in two (the Polish Corridor separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany); and there was communist agitation.

Hitler immediately approached the Reichstag and said: Give me the power to rule by decree; I know the way out of this crisis.

The Reichstag granted Hitler his wish. And when German President von Hindenberg died, the Reichstag granted Hitler's request to combine the offices of president and chancellor into one. Hitler had secured even more power than Roosevelt to address the German economic emergency.

What did he do? He embarked on a massive program of governmental borrowing; government spending; public works (including road construction, e.g., the Auto-bahn); tax hikes; military spending; welfare; economic regulation; and a national youth corps. Hitler's philosophy was encapsulated in the Nazi Party platform: "The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all."

Any German who objected to Hitler's plan was immediately threatened with persecution and prosecution.

If you detect a similarity between the economic philosophy and programs of Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, then it will not surprise you to know that Hitler sent the following letter to U.S. Ambassador Thomas Dodd on March 14, 1934:

The Reich chancellor requests Mr. Dodd to present his greetings to President Roosevelt. He congratulates the president upon his heroic effort in the interest of the American people. The president's successful struggle against economic distress is being followed by the entire German people with interest and admiration. The Reich chancellor is in accord with the president that the virtues of sense of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline must be the supreme rule of the whole nation. This moral demand, which the president is addressing to every single citizen, is only the quintessence of German philosophy of the state, expressed in the motto "The public weal before the private gain."

John Toland observes in his biography Adolf Hitler (1976): Hitler had genuine admiration for the decisive manner in which the President had taken over the reins of government. "I have sympathy for Mr. Roosevelt," he told a correspondent for the New York Times two months later, "because he marches straight toward his objectives over Congress, lobbies and bureaucracy." Hitler went on to note that he was the sole leader in Europe who expressed "understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt."

And Hitler was not Roosevelt's only admirer. Benito Mussolini had led Italy into fascism, an economic philosophy that called for government control over economic activity, including government-business partnerships. Mussolini said that he admired FDR because he was, as Mussolini, a "social fascist."

Of course, Hitler had his admirers too. Toland points out: [Winston] Churchill had once paid a grudging compliment to the Führer in a letter to the Times : "I have always said that I hoped if Great Britain were beaten in a war we should find a Hitler who would lead us back to our rightful place among nations."

Toland points out that the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith would later write: Hitler also anticipated modern economic policy . . . by recognizing that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was combined with wage

and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic fear would respond to Hitler as Americans did to F.D.R. is not surprising.

It was this similarity between communism, socialism, fascism, welfare statism, and New Dealism that caused Friedrich Hayek, who would later win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, to warn the West that it was following the same collectivist, statist road as the Nazis, socialists, fascists, and communists. Hayek's famous book, The Road to Serfdom (1944), angered Americans — they did not like hearing what Hayek said to them.

In the late 1930s, Hitler's economic program of massive government intervention was moving toward collapse. Thus, he did what rulers have done throughout history. He moved toward war in order to distract the German people from the growing economic crisis. But the German people remembered the ravages of World War I and were overwhelming against another war. Even many of Hitler's generals were opposed to the invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. When Chamberlain made his famous trips to Germany trying to secure peace, the German people wildly cheered him. But Hitler believed that war would be in the best interests of the nation.

As the end of the 1930s approached, Roosevelt's New Deal programs were also collapsing. There was a deep economic depression in 1937. People were figuring out that free enterprise is not saved by massive government control over people's lives and money. Roosevelt came to a firm conclusion before his reelection in 1940 that he kept secret from the voting public: Americans would have to go to war. There was a problem: the American people were even more insistent than the German people about staying out of another European war. But Roosevelt believed that war would be in the best interests of the nation.

Even though the Russian communists, the National Socialists (Nazis), the welfare statists, the fascists, and the New Dealers all had the same philosophical core, Roosevelt felt much more sympathy toward the communists. In fact, as recently opened Soviet files show, the Roosevelt administration was riddled with communist spies. Roosevelt believed that while the Nazi goals — full employment, public works, public highways, Social Security, national health care, public schooling, and so forth — were good and honorable, he did not like the notion of Aryan superiority promoted by the Nazis. He instead leaned toward what Stalin was doing, because he believed that the communists were for the little guy — the proletariat — the masses.

Hitler, on the other hand, was an ardent anticommunist. Like later American presidents, he rose to political power and justified his huge military buildup by pointing to the threat of communism. The goal of the communists, Hitler repeatedly said, was world conquest and domination. The West must combine to keep communism from taking over the world, he continually told Great Britain and the United States.

Franklin Roosevelt disagreed — Joseph Stalin ("Uncle Joe," he called him) was a man he could work with; the threat to world peace came from the Nazis, not the communists. Winston Churchill, on the other hand, while fighting to defeat the Nazis, fully agreed with Hitler's assessment of the communist threat to the West.

After FDR's death and the defeat of Nazi Germany, Harry Truman concluded that communism was the enemy and West Germany (even Nazis) was America's friend.

And this sets the backdrop for what happened to American soldiers who were in Nazi POW camps that were "liberated" by America's communist ally — the Soviet Union — as the war neared its end.

The U.S. government's cry to the American people during recent wars has been: "Support the troops." A person might disagree with the war itself. Or the president may have failed to secure the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war. But, the government says, put all objections aside once the shooting starts. What matters then is that the people support the troops. The strategy is

always effective in diminishing opposition to the war.

Unfortunately, however, the U.S. government has not always followed its own exhortation. Sometimes, not only has it failed to support its own troops, it has actually knowingly and deliberately abandoned them to imprisonment and death. The best example of this is what happened to American soldiers who had been captured by the Nazis and who were "liberated" by Russian forces at the end of World War II. The sordid tale of how the U.S. government failed to support its own troops is detailed in a shocking book published in 1992 entitled Soldiers of Misfortune: Washington's Secret Betrayal of American POWs in the Soviet Union by James D. Sanders, Mark A. Sauter, and R. Cort Kirkwood.

On the Eastern Front, German forces had taken hundreds of thousands of Russians as prisoners. On the Western Front, they had taken Americans, British, and Commonwealth prisoners. The prisoners were incarcerated in German POW camps inside Germany.

As the Allied forces invaded Germany from the west, they liberated the German POW camps in their sector of operations. These camps included Russian, American, and British prisoners. As the Russian forces invaded from the east, they liberated camps that, again, contained Allied soldiers.

Quite naturally, the Americans and British soldiers held captive in the Russian zone wanted to return quickly to their own forces. But such was not the case with Russian prisoners. Their attitude toward returning to their homeland was exactly the opposite. Many of them hated the communist system. More important, all of them feared what Stalin and the communists would do to them for having been taken captive by the Germans.

At Yalta, Roosevelt and Churchill entered into a secret agreement with Stalin that required the U.S. and Great Britain to forcibly return the Russian prisoners to the clutches of Joseph Stalin. Over a million Russians were returned against their will, and most of them were either immediately killed or sent to the gulag, where many of them later died. (See Part 3 of this series.)

By the time the war ended, however, political events were shifting dramatically. Throughout the war, the U.S. government had taught the American people to hate not simply the Nazi regime but the German people, as well. Thus, for example, when thousands of defenseless women, children, and refugees were firebombed at Dresden by Allied forces, the American people, by and large, saw nothing wrong with this. Since Germany and the German people — not simply the Nazi regime — were trying to conquer the world, Americans believed, there was nothing wrong with killing them all.

Throughout the war, through his highly effective propaganda machinery, Roosevelt also taught Americans to view the Soviet communists as friends and allies of the American people.

Hitler and Churchill shared a different perspective about the communists. They both viewed Stalin and his regime as a monumental threat to world peace and security.

Why is all this important? Because it had enormous consequences that resulted in the suffering and death of millions of innocent people, including the American and British POWs "liberated" by Stalin's forces.

Roosevelt had insisted that only an "unconditional" surrender of German forces would be acceptable to the U.S. The result of this unusual demand was not only that German forces fought harder, thereby prolonging the war, but also that the Soviet Union ultimately took control over Eastern Europe and East Germany.

Recall that in World War I, the Kaiser abdicated near the end of the war as a condition of peace. Suppose the same thing had happened near the end of World War II. Suppose that the U.S. and Great Britain had opened negotiations with Germany in 1944 — before Russian forces had invaded Eastern Europe — and before millions of Jews had been killed in the Nazi ovens. There is at least the

possibility that Hitler — whose health was failing dramatically anyway — along with Göring, Goebbels, and other leading Nazis — might have chosen to live in exile rather than continuing to fight a war they knew they were losing. If such a peace could have been negotiated, Eastern Europeans and East Germans would not have had to suffer under fifty years of Soviet domination. And millions of Jews would have been saved from the Nazi ovens.

But FDR's hatred of Germans and Germany — and his deep admiration and respect for Joseph Stalin and the communists — and his profound sympathy for communist goals — precluded him from exploring such a possibility. Americans would have to continue hating Germans and loving Russians until there was an unconditional surrender by Germany.

But things changed on Roosevelt's death near the end of the war. America's new president, Harry Truman, shared Churchill's (and Hitler's) perspective about the communist threat to the West. Soon after the war ended, Americans were told to immediately shift positions with respect to hatred and admiration. They were told that Germans — at least those in the western half — were not so bad after all. They had simply been misled by the Nazis. Americans were encouraged to love, admire, and assist these Germans. But those on the eastern side were still to be hated and despised, especially since they were now part of the Soviet bloc.

Americans were also told that it was necessary to begin hating the Soviet communists — the same communists who Americans had been taught were great and wonderful during the war.

All of this shifting of feelings was not lost on Joseph Stalin. Since Churchill, Roosevelt, and Truman had honored the secret agreement to return most of the Russian forces to the Soviet Union, where Stalin was able to finish off these "traitors," Stalin had honored his side of the bargain by returning most of the American and British soldiers in the Nazi camps liberated by Russian forces. But the operative word is "most."

Stalin was not a man to trust others, and he certainly did not trust Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. To ensure that Churchill and Roosevelt would live up to their side of the bargain to return the Russian soldiers to him, he retained "bargaining chips" in the form of American and British soldiers. If Churchill or Roosevelt reneged on their end of the bargain, Stalin would do the same.

As the war against the Nazis ended, the new war — the Cold War with the communists — began in earnest. The U.S. and Great Britain began treating the Germans (the ones in the west) more nicely and also began enlisting the active assistance of former Nazis — yes, the same Nazis that Americans had only recently been taught to hate and despise! Moreover, Churchill and Truman quietly began releasing thousands of anticommunist Russians who had still not been returned to Stalin — these Russians could be valuable friends and spies in the new "cold" war against the communists.

Stalin learned what was happening and retaliated. He permanently "retained" the American and British soldiers whom he still held as bargaining chips. What did he do with them? He carted them to the Soviet Union where they lived the rest of their lives in the Russian gulags. How many American and British soldiers? Over 20,000 Americans and over 30,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers ! In fact, as the authors of Soldiers of Misfortune point out: "Starting in 1945, the Soviet Union became the second-largest employer of American servicemen in the world."

This horrible tale is well documented in Soldiers of Misfortune . Much of the evidence involves the eyewitness accounts of American POWs who barely missed being "liberated" by Stalin's forces. For example, the authors detail the story of three Americans held in a German POW camp — John L. Connolly, Carmen Gomez, and Joseph Friedl. One morning in 1945, they woke to find their German captives gone. Connolly and Gomez decided to head west in search of American forces. Friedl decided to wait for Russian "liberators." Their story will chill you:

But when the men tried to cross a bridge to the tantalizingly close American line, Red Army troops stopped them at gun point. "The Russians herded us into a bombed-out building. . . . When there were several hundred of us [Americans], they began to march back into Germany."

Wisely refusing to march away from their own lines, Connolly and about a dozen others ducked out of the column as it passed through town. Hours later, they ran across a team of American scout cars under the command of a brigadier general. "The Soviets are taking a column of American POWs back east," Connolly told the general. Flying into a rage, the American officer sped off to catch the column. But the POWs had vanished.

Joseph Friedl was taken back to the Soviet Union. He was one of the fortunate ones — he was released in 1946.

Another American soldier, Technical Sergeant D.C. Wimberly, was straggling back to American lines and found himself in the German town of Luckenwalde. The Germans were herding back a column of German POWs to the Soviet Union, but when a few men near the end of the column saw Wimberly's American flag on his uniform, they called out: "Hey! You American? We're American. I'm from Philadelphia . . . Boston . . . Chicago. Help me!"

Americans also compared German army records of how many Americans were held in the camps. It was not difficult to see that the Soviets had failed to return all of them.

So, why has all of this been kept secret from the American people? World War II has been billed as the "good war" — the war that justifies all subsequent foreign wars. And every student in every public school across America is taught that FDR was one of our country's greatest presidents.

How could the U.S. government tell the truth about what happened to American servicemen? To tell the truth would mean exposing American complicity in the murder of over a million innocent Russian people. It would entail a closer examination of the Allied alliance with one of the most brutal political regimes in all of history. And it would expose all the scheming and machinations that resulted in the abandonment of over 50,000 Allied soldiers to our communist "friends."

What could the U.S. government have done differently as the war approached its end? It could have negotiated a peace with Germany that entailed the exile of Nazi leaders and ensured democratic regimes in all of Germany and Eastern Europe. It could have refused to participate in one of the worst holocausts in history — the forcible repatriation of Russian anticommunists — by refusing to force them to return to the Soviet Union against their will.

If Russian forces refused to return American and British POWs, one option would, of course, could have been war against the Soviet Union. But if war was not a practical option at that point, then the least that the U.S. government owed its own soldiers was to let the world know what happened — so that the soldiers would never be forgotten. Imagine the loneliness those men must have felt as they were being transported to the Soviet gulags. They had trusted their own government. They had fought and had been willing to die at the behest of their government. They had helped to win the war. Instead of coming home to their loved ones, they were being transported from a German POW camp to a Russian gulag.

Would public pressure over the years have resulted in the release of these American and British soldiers? Possibly. But even if it did not, there was always the chance that word would leak into the gulag — letting American and British doughboys know, before they died, that they still had not been forgotten by their fellow Americans.

Unfortunately, however, they were forgotten, because they were abandoned by their own government — the same U.S. government that starts out every new war with "Support the troops."

As the authors of Soldiers of Misfortune carefully document, U.S. governmental officials not only have refused to open the files on this dark and sordid episode of World War II, they have also altered and destroyed pertitent documents. Moreover, American officials still refuse to open up the files on the forcible repatriation of the Russians as well as other aspects of World War II. They claim that national security is at stake — fifty years after the end of the war.

The final questions arise: So what? Why bring all of this up now? What is the purpose? What good does it do? Why not let sleeping dogs lie? Why focus on World War II rather than simply on current episodes of governmental misconduct?

Because the lessons to be learned affect us so deeply today — fifty years after the end of World War II. And the lessons are profound indeed.

What purpose does it serve to talk about wrongdoing of fifty years ago? What relevance does the past have to us to today? So what if Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin cooperated in the murder of over 1,000,000 innocent Russian people? So what if FDR, Truman and succeeding presidents abandoned 20,000 American servicemen to Soviet gulags? Why not simply let bygones be bygones? Why bring up this dark and painful period in American history?

To confront reality is sometimes a very difficult and painful process. Human beings will often do whatever they can do to avoid the pain of facing reality. Nowhere is this more true than in how Americans view their country. Americans simply will not accept or believe that for the past fifty years, the U.S. has had an economic system that is totally different from the economic system established by our Founding Fathers. Instead, they live the life of myth and delusion that they were taught in their schools — that the welfare-state and regulated-economy way of life is simply a modified form of free enterprise.

Moreover, it is easy to accept that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi forces committed war atrocities. It is much more difficult for many Americans to accept, no matter what the evidence, that two presidents they have been taught to love — Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, along with American military forces — did the same.

But if we are ever going to return to a free and prosperous society, it will be essential to confront the reality of where this country has been, where it is now, and where it is going. A strong, healthy, and free society is only possible through the rejection of myth and delusion and through the acceptance of truth and reality. In his profound book The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (1978), M. Scott Peck put the matter this way:

The third tool of discipline or technique of dealing with the pain of problem-solving, which must continually be employed if our lives are to be healthy and our spirits are to grow, is dedication to the truth. Superficially, this should be obvious. For truth is reality. That which is false is unreal. The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we are to deal with the world. The less clearly we see the reality of the world — the more our minds are befuddled by falsehood, misconceptions and illusions — the less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and make wise decisions. Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost.

To underscore why this is so important to me, I would like to share with you my own personal background and my own experience with truth and reality, some of which has been quite painful.

I grew up on a farm in Laredo, Texas, which is situated on the Mexican border. My father's family had immigrated to Texas from Germany in the 1800s. My grandfather — Jacob G. Hornberger — owned an insurance company in San Antonio, lost everything in the Great Depression, and died soon thereafter, when my father was sixteen. My father moved to Laredo soon after World War II.

My mother's family immigrated to Texas from Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. The revolutionaries confiscated their property and "retained" it for "public use." (The home in which my grandmother was born and raised in Lampasos, Mexico, today still houses the local city hall — ugh!)

As a young man in Laredo, my grandfather — Matias de Llano, who could barely speak English when he came to the U.S. — delivered newspapers on horseback; he later founded a hat factory that produced hats for people during the Depression.

My parents were married soon after the end of the war. My father was an attorney. My mother was a housewife. My father was authoritarian and strict, and we grew up "well behaved." We had no doubts that we were raised correctly in a "nice" family.

My "leftist" credentials go back a long way. My father was active in Democratic Party politics. As a young boy, I stuffed campaign envelopes to help elect John Kennedy president. During the campaign, I attended a political barbecue at the Johnson Ranch in the Texas hill country, where I shook hands with Lyndon Johnson! I was even the local youth representative for Lady Bird Johnson's beautification of America campaign! (I knew this last one would really impress you!)

I attended college at Virginia Military Institute, where I opposed the Vietnam War. After graduation from law school at the University of Texas, I became the local representative in Laredo for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). I also served on the board of trustees for the local Legal Aid Society, a governmental agency that provided legal assistance to poor people.

I was a real leftist. I had no doubts that the primary purpose of government was to assist those at the bottom of the economic ladder. And government programs for the poor were a central part of Laredo life. As part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, my grandfather had brought the first public housing project to Laredo — La Colonia Guadalupe — which, unfortunately, is still operating today. In 1960, the Census Bureau named Laredo the poorest city in the U.S. And Laredo was one of Lyndon Johnson's first Model Cities in his Great Society.

One day in the late 1970s, I came across a collection of libertarian essays that had been published many years before by The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. That was the major turning point in my life — a true "road to Damascus" experience. Authors included Leonard E. Read (who had founded FEE in 1949); Henry Hazlitt; Frank Chodorov; F.A. Harper; Ludwig von Mises; Albert J. Nock; Paul Poirot; John Chamberlain; Frederic Bastiat; and Edmund Opitz.

As I read and re-read the essays, I recognized that my belief of the proper role for government in society had been wrong. I had, in essence, been living a life of the lie — a life of deception and delusion. The welfare state was evil and immoral because it was based on political stealing. The regulated economy was evil and immoral because it was based on coercive interference with peaceful choices. And I realized that this wrongful way of life had not helped the poor — it had instead helped to destroy them.

I resigned my positions with the ACLU and the Legal Aid Society. Many years later — in 1987 — I left the practice of law to accept a position with FEE, the organization that had changed my life. In 1989, Richard Ebeling and I founded FFF.

Three years ago, I had to confront another lie that I had been living for quite some time. I was in a relationship with a woman whom I had every intention of marrying. At the same time, I fell into a deep emotional depression. Even worse, I began to increasingly emotionally abuse her. I could not understand how I could hurt someone who meant so much to me.

I sought help from a psychiatrist, who helped me to confront a painful reality: I was raised not in a "nice" family, but instead in an alcoholic one — one in which my parents were abusive, not only to themselves, but to their children, as well. I discovered that alcoholism does not adversely affect only the alcoholic; it also has consequences on other family members. As I studied the literature that has developed in this area since the early 1980s, I realized that I suffered from many of the symptoms of

"adult children of alcoholics." The therapist helped me to confront the truth and reality about myself and my upbringing. And the more I discover about my family tree, the more I find that alcohol and abuse in my family stretch back for generations.

Two years of therapy have helped to lift my depression and root out the emotional problems. The process has been much like an emotional rollercoaster ride. The realization that I had been living a life of the lie — that everything in my upbringing and family life was not hunky-dory — has been very difficult, but it was an essential step that is bringing me to health and recovery.

I was not able to save the relationship that had caused me to seek help in the first place. If you have ever lost someone you love, then you know that last year was a very painful one for me. But due to her, I've learned a lot. I've learned the importance of confronting the core essence of myself. I've learned the importance of feelings — that it is okay (and healthy) for men (and women) to express them openly and honestly. I've learned that it is okay (and not sissified) for men to cry. I've learned why people listen to country music! I've learned to enjoy life more. I've even learned how to be a little more open about myself with others!

Most important, I learned the importance of a relentless quest for truth and reality, both internally and externally. A life of the lie in either area has enormous, unhealthy consequences.

We are living in extremely dangerous times. America's economic system today is identical, in principle, to the economic system that existed in Germany in the 1930s — Social Security; Medicare; Medicaid; welfare; public schooling; central banking; and so forth. Yet, the American people insist on living their life of the lie. They continue believing that their system, unlike the Nazi system, is "free enterprise." They refuse to face the reality of their external lives because it is simply too painful to do so. Peck writes:

What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that that view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn? The painful effort required seems frightening, almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the new information. Often this act of ignoring is much more than passive. We may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality. Rather than try to change the map, an individual may try to destroy the new reality. Sadly, such a person may expend much more energy ultimately in defending an outmoded view of the world than would have been required to revise and correct it in the first place.

The result of their life of the lie is that Americans, like the Germans, continue to relinquish more and more of their lives and fortunes to public officials in order to solve the problems of "freedom."

It intrigues me that American public officials are still so obsessed with Adolf Hitler fifty years after the man's death. Notice that whenever a foreign despot becomes too tyrannical, American government officials always refer to him as another Adolf Hitler rather than as another Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, and so on. On the conscious level, the notion is that Hitler was a political monster who comes along every few hundred years. But the obsessiveness with Hitler may very well reflect a subconscious belief that comes closer to the truth: that Adolf Hitler was not the aberrant monster who only occasionally appears in history but, instead, that Hitler was "Everyman" — every political leader who becomes corrupted with ever-increasing amounts of political power.

Alice Miller's psychological profile of Hitler in her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence (1983) is fascinating. As a result of the horrible physical and emotional abuse that Hitler received from his alcoholic father (see Part 4 of this series), Hitler was filled with repressed anger and rage. Having neither a wife nor children on which to project his feelings, Hitler used his massive political powers to project his inner, destructive feelings on an entire race of innocent people. In the absence of the political power, Hitler would have been just another German citizen who disliked Jews.

What is equally significant about Miller's writings is her observation that Hitler did not accomplish his

mass murders alone. The Nazi governmental system depended on the active support of thousands of German civil servants, as well as the active and passive support of millions of German people. In fact, overwhelming numbers of Germans loved and idolized Hitler in the same way that Americans loved and idolized Roosevelt. Miller says that the authoritarian society in which Germans were raised — including their families and their schools — caused the German people to view their political leaders as their daddy. Viewing themselves as dependent, adult children of the Reich, individual Germans lacked the self-esteem and inner resolve to take an independent stand against the Nazi tyranny.

Examine the situation in the U.S. today. Millions of Americans come from alcoholic or abusive families; in fact, it has been estimated that only five percent of Americans are raised in healthy families. Most Americans view their government in the same way as the German people — as their daddy who gives them an allowance (what's left after income taxation); forces them to share with their siblings (the welfare state); spanks them when they put bad things in their mouths (the war on drugs); and protects them from bad decisions (the regulated economy).

Moreover, adult children of dysfunctional families do as Hitler did — they gravitate toward political power. Is it a coincidence that the political rulers who have absolutely no feelings of remorse for the massacres at Waco and Ruby Ridge — Bill Clinton and Janet Reno — come from alcoholic and abusive families? Is it a coincidence that Hitler came from an abusive family? Stalin? Roosevelt?

Does this mean that the solution is to put "better" people into public office? No. Every one of us has his dark side. Political power is no different from alcohol. Drink enough liquor, and the greatest saint will become drunk. Exercise ever-increasing amounts of political power, and the result is the same. Lord Acton was right — power does tend to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The ultimate solution, then, is to limit the power that public officials have to exercise. This was the idea behind our Founding Fathers' conception of the Constitution. That document called the national government into existence but strictly limited the powers of those in office. In order to restore a free, healthy, and prosperous society, we need to continually focus on how to constitutionally prohibit public officials from exercising power in illegitimate ways.

How do we achieve this in a society composed largely of people who view government as their daddy? By continuing to focus on ourselves. The only way to improve society is to continue improving ourselves. This means improving our understanding of freedom (the external world) and improving our spiritual and mental health (the inner world). Ultimately, the healthier members of society will reach a critical mass that will lead the U.S. and the American people to the highest reaches of freedom ever seen by man.

http://www.fff.org/aboutUs/index.asp

Democrats.

Historical Deceptions: Operation KeelhaulFrom the World Affairs Brief:OPERATION KEELHAUL The prime source for this US-led travesty is Julius Epstein’s Operation Keelhaul The Story of Forced Repatriation (Devin-Adair, 1973). Julius Epstein was one of the prime researchers for the belated Congressional investigation of the State Department’s cover-up of Russian involvement in the Katyn Forest murders. While searching through military archives during his investigation, he discovered evidence of a top secret program of forced repatriation, called Operation Keelhaul, which is still classified to this day. Obviously the US has some very dirty secrets they still want hidden.

Although the US signed international agreements opposing forced repatriation, and verbally assured they world they would never countenance such actions, they inserted fine print in these documents excepting from the ban all those who originated from nations given over to the Soviets at the close of WWII. While claiming to “make the world safe for Democracy,” Roosevelt and his cronies condemned millions to slave labor camps. The Allies even kept secret from the world the fact that Stalin was holding over 5,000 Allied soldiers as hostages in order to make sure that the West complied with his demands for repatriation. US and British troops had to beat, drug, and drive at gunpoint these millions of liberty loving people back to Russia. Even after doing so, Stalin never did return American and British prisoners. They died in the Soviet Gulags. The US still refuses to open the archives about their fate.

Even refugees that had fled from WWI and who had already been integrated into Western society were driven back into Stalin’s work camps. Thousands of Eastern Germans had fled the advancing Russian armies in order to find a haven in the West. Most were driven back to slavery. Almost a million anti-Communist Russian soldiers under Russian General Vlasov had defected to the Germans in hopes of freeing Russia from Stalin’s grasp. They had never become Nazis, but had agreed to fight on the

German side solely for purposes of achieving Russian liberty. At the war’s end, they pushed West desperately trying to seek asylum, or to at least the designation of prisoners of war, so they could be protected under the Geneva Convention. US military leaders expressly guaranteed that Gen. Vlasov’s men would never be turned back over to the Soviets. But under General Eisenhower, in consultation with the State Department, the US went back on their word of honor. Headquarters refused to designate them POWs or give them asylum, and eventually turned them over to the Russians. All their military leaders were shot or hanged. The rest went to Soviet labor camps. Some committed suicide before falling into Russian hands, knowing of their fate.

This entire operation was filled with horror stories. Let there be no ambivalence in our conclusions. US and British leaders were guilty of war crimes. Allied soldiers shot innocent men trying to escape as they were being forcibly repatriated. Soldiers used clubs to beat hundreds of men senseless, then dragged them onto trucks and ships. When deportees would disable a Russian ship, Americans would come aboard, subdue the resisters and make the repairs. Americans and British leaders have on their heads the blood of hundreds who committed suicide rather than being sent back, as well as of all those who eventually died in Stalin’s work camps. These were criminal acts and American soldiers and officers should have refused to follow orders. Only a handful did and they were treated with severe threats and/or punishments. A few American servicemen allowed prisoners to escape, having pity on them. But, by in large, American and British servicemen were no more moral or courageous in standing up against evil military orders than their German counterparts.

The Allies used grand deceptions and lies to trick victims into submitting to forced repatriation. Here is one egregious example from Epstein’s book.

“General Shkuro and his Ukranian Cossack troops had long been known to be anti-Bolsheviks. Gen Shkuro, himself, had emigrated after World War I and had never been a Soviet citizen. He felt he was safe from repatriation. The Cossacks had fought for Germany and surrendered to British troops. They demanded political asylum for which they easily qualified. The British confiscated all their Western currency and held them in detention. They were told on May 28 that all officers and enlisted men were to attend a conference with higher British authorities, and would be transported by truck. This seemed implausible. Why transport everyone in trucks when the British could come to them? When the Cossacks started to feel nervous about the destination, an English Lieutenant said, ‘I assure you on my word of honor as a British officer that you are just going to a conference.’ Another British officer gave the same assurance. The convoy was guarded, which did nothing to alleviate the Cossack’s anxiety. A few jumped from the trucks and escaped into the forest. They were the smart ones. Those that trusted the British ended up at a prisoner of war camp in Spittal, Austria (in the Russian sector of control). A British officer then informed them that, ‘in accordance with an agreement concluded between the military authorities of the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, all officers will be put at the disposal of Soviet military authorities.’ A Cossack General asked the officer when the agreement was signed. He replied, ‘On May 23 of this year (1945).’” According to Epstein, one Cossack officer remarked, “The NKVD or the Gestapo would have slain us with truncheons, the British did it with their word of honor.” There were multiple suicides that night in the camp, and all of the others had to be subdued by clubs and rifle butts as none would leave the camp voluntarily.

The US and Britain represented the highest images of liberty and freedom for the rest of the world laboring under Nazi or Communist domination. To have betrayed these 6 million persons (quite another holocaust) certainly caused many behind the iron curtain to vow never to trust the West again. Indeed, the Communists used this very argument with those who had been forcibly repatriated. To those who had been released after years of camp labor, a commissar said, “Whether they were Vlasov men or prisoners of war who did not want to return to the motherland does not matter now. All their sins have been forgiven. But the English and American bayonets, truncheons, machine guns and tanks used

against them will never be forgotten. No Russian will ever forget Lienz, Dachau, Plattling, Toronto and other places of extradition, including New York, And they must never be forgotten. It is a lesson all Russians must learn well. For it show that you cannot trust the capitalist states in the future.” The West had provided the Communists with the best argument for deterring future defections from the Soviet state.

http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com/keytopics/Keelhaul.shtml

LORD ALDINGTON: DEAD, BUT NO R.I.P.

by Srdja TrifkovicLord Aldington, 86, a former British trade minister and Conservative Party vice chairman who filed one of Britain's most famous libel cases against a man who labeled him a war criminal, died of cancer Dec. 8 at his home in Kent, southern England. In 1989, Lord Aldington was awarded $2.2 million in damages after winning a libel suit against historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a distant relative of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who had written a pamphlet accusing Lord Aldington of war crimes. As a British army officer in Austria at the end of World War II, Lord Aldington — then known by his given name, Toby Low — oversaw the repatriation of thousands of Cossack and Yugoslav refugees. Many were subsequently killed or interned in prison camps. At the libel trial, Lord Aldington agreed that the refugees' fate was "ghastly" but said he had not known that many faced execution if returned to their homelands. (The Washington Post, December 9, 2000)

An obituary sometimes begs a thousand words. Well worth doing in this case, especially since it's been over a decade since we wrote about Aldington, Tolstoy, and one of the greatest untold tragedies of World War II (cf. "Writing in the Tolstoy Tradition" by Sally Wright, Chronicles, April 1989). This is a story of heinous crimes that went unpunished and establishmentarian conspiracies to cover them up, of miscarriage of justice, of one man's quixotic efforts to tell the truth and another's quiet campaign to keep it suppressed. The story starts at Yalta in February 1945, when the return of all Soviet citizens that may find themselves in the Allied zone was demanded by Stalin — and was duly agreed to by Churchill and FDR. Accordingly, hundreds of thousands of Soviet POWs liberated by the Allies were sent back home, regardless of their wishes, and regardless of what Stalin had in store for them. In addition, in May and June 1945 tens of thousands of refugees from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union — unarmed civilians escaping communism, as well as anticommunist resistance fighters and assorted collaborationists — were rounded up by the British in Austria, and forcibly delivered to Stalin and Tito. Most of them were summarily executed, sometimes within earshot of the British. Forced repatriations were known as Operation Keelhaul — the "last secret" of World War II, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn called it. Men, women, and children were forced into boxcars headed for the Soviet zone in the east, or for Slovenia in the south.Non-Soviet and non-Yugoslav citizens and Serbian royalists were supposedly exempt from the deportation order, but key military officials in the British chain of command surreptitiously included them, too. As a result émigré Russians waving French passports and British medals from the World War I were all rounded up and delivered to Stalin.There was panic in the camps when the inmates realized what was going on. The British lied

to some that they were to be taken to Italy, or some other safe haven; if the subterfuge didn't work they used rifle butts and bayonets as prods. Some refugees committed suicide by sawing their throats with barbed wire. Mothers threw their babies from trains into the river. To its credit one British regiment, the London Irish, refused: they went to war to fight German soldiers, they said, not to club refugee women and children. (Americans proved willing to open the gates of refugee camps and look the other way as the desperate inmates fled.) In late June 1945 the original policy of screening the would-be deportees was reinstated, but it was too late: most of them were already dead, or in the depths of the Gulag. The tragedy would have remained little known outside obscure émigré circles were it not for British historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy, who has dedicated his life to exposing the truth and identifying those responsible. This great-grand-nephew of Russia's famous novelist — and heir to the senior line of the family — has written three books on forced repatriations, each more revealing than the previous one, as more suppressed information came to light. In 1977 his Victims of Yalta was published, followed by Stalin's Secret War in 1981, and then his most controversial book, The Minister and the Massacres (1986).In his books Tolstoy argued that refugees not covered by the Yalta agreement — émigré Russians and royalist Yugoslavs — were forcibly repatriated because Harold Macmillan, "minister resident" in the Mediterranean and later prime minister, wanted to advance his political career by appeasing Stalin. He persuaded a British general whose 5th Army Corps occupied southern and eastern Austria to ignore a Foreign Office telegram ordering that "any person who is not (repeat not) a Soviet citizen under British law must not (repeat not) be sent back to the Soviet Union unless he expressly desires."Enter Lord Aldington, then a politically well-connected 30-year-old brigadier called Toby Low, who was the Fifth Corps chief of staff. He was also an aspiring Tory politician, hopeful of being nominated as a candidate at the forthcoming general election in Britain. Low had no qualms about acting upon Macmillan's suggestions. On May 21, 1945 he issued an order to 5th Corps officers as to how to define Soviet citizenship: "Individual cases will NOT be considered unless particularly pressed ... In all cases of doubt, the individual will be treated as a SOVIET NATIONAL." The émigrés' fate was thus sealed. Tolstoy named Aldington in his last book as the chief executor of the policy of forced repatriation on the ground, the man who went way beyond the call of duty in carrying out Macmillan's instructions, and who did so in contravention of orders.The charges were serious, by British standards quite scandalous in fact, but Aldington was reluctant to sue Tolstoy over the book. He did sue one Nigel Watts instead, however, an obscure property developer who distributed a pamphlet — written by Tolstoy — in which Aldington was called a war criminal. The pamphlet included the following statements:

As was anticipated by virtually everyone concerned, the overwhelming majority of these defenceless people, who reposed implicit trust in British honour, were either massacred in circumstances of unbelievable horror immediately following their handover, or condemned to a lingering death in Communist gaols and forced labour camps. These operations were achieved by a combination of duplicity and brutality without parallel in British history since the Massacre of Glencoe ... The man who issued every order and arranged every detail of the lying and brutality which resulted in these massacres was Brigadier Toby Low, Chief of Staff to General Keightley's 5 Corps, subsequently ennobled by Harold Macmillan as the 1st Baron Aldington ... The evidence is overwhelming that he arranged the

perpetration of a major war crime in the full knowledge that the most barbarous and dishonourable aspects of his operations were throughout disapproved and unauthorised by the higher command, and in the full knowledge that a savage fate awaited those he was repatriating ... a major war criminal, whose activities merit comparison with those of the worst butchers of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.

As the author of the text Tolstoy felt honor-bound to include himself as Watts' co-defendant. At the trial Aldington freely acknowledged signing the repatriation orders, but claimed that there was "no way" he could have known the refugees would be killed: "We were told that international law would be obeyed."His mission in Austria accomplished, Brigadier Low returned to England on some unknown date in May 1945 to be selected as the Conservative MP for Blackpool — the beginning of the slow rise that would see him ennobled (by Macmillan!) and ushered into the boardrooms and elite gentlemen's clubs of Britain. The exact date of his return is highly significant: Tolstoy argued that Low did not leave Austria until after the key order on indiscriminate deportations was issued, and therefore it was he who — contrary to the orders issuing from Yalta — was personally responsible for the crime. When the trial came it should have been possible, easy even, to prove the order of events and name the man who had issued the orders. The British are efficient administrators, and the Public Record Office should have contained the answer. Some of the relevant documents Tolstoy had copied when he researched his books, but when he went back he found that the old boy network had done its work. All key documents related to the case had been sent to various government ministries — notably to the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence — and duly "misplaced." When Tolstoy's researcher asked for these documents, including reports and signals relating to Aldington, she was told they were "not available." Only after the trial had started was Tolstoy given a photocopy of the most important of the files, but four-fifths of the contents were missing.Lord Aldington had no such problem: the files were not only readily available to him, but delivered to his office by government couriers. "Dear George," he wrote to George Younger, the (then) Defence Secretary, on March 8, 1987, "you are a friend who will understand my distress ... if the files can be brought to the Westminster area in a series of bundles, that would be very helpful." "Dear George" duly obliged. Aldington's mind eventually clarified as to the date on which he had finally left Austria — he gave three dates in three interviews — but there were no records by which these could be confirmed. Heavily influenced by the trial judge, the jury found against Tolstoy and awarded Lord Aldington astronomic damages — a million and a half pounds sterling — in November 1990. Tolstoy, who declared bankruptcy, was denied the right to appeal. Aware that Tolstoy was penniless after the libel verdict, Britain's High Court ruled that he had no right to appeal unless he came up with almost $200,000 in advance to cover Aldington's legal expenses. The court further denied Tolstoy access to a $1m defense fund that had been set up in his name, and to which Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the late Graham Greene had contributed. The British establishment, and in particular the grandees who were friends of Aldinton — the man on first-name terms with ministers in every Tory government since the war — got the desired verdict. As far as they were concerned, a crank — and a foreign crank at that — had received his well-deserved comeuppance.L'affaire Tolstoy proved yet again that British libel laws are flawed. The machinery of the

British government seemed to tilt the scales of justice, and the state apparently interfered in a private court case. The Human Rights Court at Strasbourg ruled in a unanimous judgment that the failure to permit an appeal was "unfitting for a democratic society" and "constituted a violation of the applicant's right ... to freedom of expression."A recent reminder of the travesty of justice perpetrated under British libel laws concerned two ITN journalists who successfully sued the LM Magazine (see "News & Views," April 20). Free speech was damaged both times, and — in the absence of the First Amendment equivalent — free speech is not so strong in Britain that it can take such damage. But, as Cambridge historian Michael Stenton points out, for as long as the rich have all the legal advantages, the chance of constitutional reform is poor indeed: "When historical truth becomes intensely politicized it is possible to get trapped on the wrong side of the factual fence by sympathies and first impressions. All we can do, and must do, is promise to climb over the fence if the evidence demands it."Lord Aldington's remarkable claim that he had had absolutely no idea what the fate of these people would be was a lie. Everyone knew, and Aldington's awareness of the draconic nature of his orders was reflected in the official name of the operation — "Keelhaul." Keelhauling was a disciplinary measure on English ships in the old days: a seaman guilty of some grave offence would have a loop of a rope attached under his arms, to be thrown into the water and dragged all the way from the stern to the bow of the ship before being hauled out again. (This had the advantage that some of the barnacles would be scraped from the ship's bottom, but few survived such treatment.) After Tolstoy's trial his Minister and the Massacres was banned from British libraries and universities. Although the British government would like to silence Tolstoy and any reference to forced repatriation, the issue will never go away. Ever the idealist, Tolstoy hopes that sooner or later it will have to come clean and apologize for the crimes of its agents in occupied Central Europe in that awful spring of 1945. He recalls that Prime Minister Tony Blair recently issued an apology on behalf of Britain for the 19th century potato blight in Ireland, "though many historians and members of the public found it hard to envisage in what way that tragedy could be regarded as a direct responsibility of the government of the day, let alone its late 20th century successor." He also points out that the British government "pressed consistently and successfully" for German and Japanese governments to compensate British victims of their wartime atrocities.Lord Aldington won his court case thanks to the twisted British libel laws and thanks to the Kafkaesque nature of Britain's power structure, but wherever he is now he may be wondering if it was a victory worth having. That flawed man, disdainful of the suffering of such lesser breeds as Slavs, cynically manipulative and devoid of any capacity for moral distinctions, is beyond human judgment now; but one hopes that a much higher court will take a dim view of his life and times. May his name live in infamy.

Keelhauling (Dutch kielhalen[1]; "to drag along the keel") was a severe form of corporal punishment meted out to sailors at sea. The sailor was tied to a rope that looped beneath the vessel, thrown overboard on one side of the ship, and dragged under the ship's keel to the other side. As the hull was often covered in barnacles and other marine growth, this could result in cuts and other injuries. This generally happened if the offender was pulled quickly. If pulled slowly, his weight might lower him sufficiently to miss the barnacles but might result in his drowning.Keelhauling was legally permitted as a punishment in the Dutch Navy. The earliest official mention of keelhauling is a Dutch ordinance of 1560, and the practice was not formally abolished until 1853. While not an official punishment, it was reportedly used by some British Royal Navy and merchant marine captains, and has become strongly associated with pirate lore.

Today keelhauling can refer to the spinnaker sheets getting stuck under the hull after dowsing the sail. This occurs especially in dinghy sailboats such as Laser 2 because nothing prevents the sheet from being pulled under the bow.

http://www.viswiki.com/en/Keelhauling

The Secret of the West

Greatest genocide of all time: hushed up! The real extent: US-led Alliance deliberately murdered 13.2 million Germans after 1945!6 + 5.7 + 1.5 = 13.2Western historiography an accessory to genocide! Sources include: German Chancellor Adenauer, American President Roosevelt, American Secretary of State Hull!

Letter from Gerd Honsik to the Presidents of Austria and Germany, Horst Köhler and Heinz Fischer, distributed in seven languages to eleven pro-German governments worldwide, namely:To the governments of Russia, China, Japan, India, Iran, Ireland, South Africa, Turkey, the Vatican, Palestine and Brazil.Re.: request for acknowledgment, review and distribution of the fact, suppressed by Western historiography, that the United States of America are directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of 13 million Germans, civilians and prisoners, after the War.I, Gerd Honsik, am the first German to draw these conclusions from the facts and documents uncovered by Professor Dr. App (USA) and James Bacque (Canada), and state:The war-aim of the US-led Alliance against Germany in the Second World War was the reduction of the German population by twenty million people through genocide. Thus, this plan represents the greatest intentional genocide in world history. This unparalleled, greatest genocide of all time was in fact carried out against more than 13 million Germans - in 1945, after the surrender.At the same time I appeal to the Presidents of the German nations to see to the following:1. To comprehensively inform the German people of their role as the victim of the greatest and most brutal genocide in all of history.2. To close the Institutes for Contemporary History in Vienna and Munich and to dismiss all staff without notice, as well as to appoint an investigative committee composed of history teachers drawn from the regular universities, and to charge the same to investigate the genocide as planned and as actually committed against some 13 million Germans after the Allied victory of the US-led Alliance!3. To demand the withdrawal of American troops from Germany, Europe and all nations of the world.

To the politicians of our nations I pose three questions:1.) Is it true what Konrad Adenauer wrote in his memoirs, namely that of the 13.5 - 17 million German

expellees only 7.5 million arrived in what remained of Germany after 1945? Yes or no?2.) Is it true that the American Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize laureate C. Hull recorded in his notes that it was Roosevelt's and Morgenthau's war aim to exterminate 20 million Germans after the war by starving them to death? Yes or no?3.) Is it true that population statistics show that after the "liberation" of 1945 the mortality rate in Germany rose from 11.5 per thousand inhabitants (1937) to 35 per thousand annually (1945 / 1949) and claimed a total of 5.7 million lives due to starvation? Yes or no?HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE MEDIA HAVE HUSHED UP, DENIED OR JUSTIFIED THESE THINGS FOR 60 YEARS.The three elements of the American genocide:

1. Ordained starvation:The American government strove for victory over Germany, not for purposes of liberation or democratization but for the purpose of genocide. While the USA reaped record harvests, they let 5.7 million people starve in Germany in 1945-1949. This ordained starvation struck everyone alike: the great majority who knew they had been defeated as well as the small minority who hoped they had been liberated. While the victors sat in judgment of the German Reich government in the show trial of Nuremberg, a great, million-fold, silent dying took place among the infants, toddlers and elderly in the German sphere: the victors pursued their war-aim dating from before the war, namely to reduce the German people's numbers by 20 million by means of starvation in order to break their industrial and military might for all time. The American-planned infant mortality rose as high as 60% at times. Mortality rates tripled after the "liberation", compared to pre-war times: for instance, 35 of 1,000 inhabitants died annually in Vienna between 1945 and 1949, as opposed to 11.5 before the war. Thus, in Vienna alone, the genocide claimed more than 200,000 starvation victims.In order to promote this death by starvation, the United Statesa) exported harvests abroad,b) blew up artificial-fertilizer factories,c) prevented the fishing fleet from sailing,d) dismantled 75% of factories and moved their components out of the country so that the appointed administrations would not have access to means with which to avert the genocide,e) banned the German Red Cross so that it could not document or perhaps even combat the genocide,f) excluded Germany from world hunger aid, while the nations of North America were deceived about the continuation of the Eisenhower-Morgenthau Plan and prevented from rendering humanitarian aid.

2. Murder Instead of Expulsion:The German governments knew: of the 15 million expellees, only 7.5 million - not 13 million - arrived in what remained of Germany. The Adenauer Administration knew that six million German civilians had lost their lives in the expulsion from the Eastern territories after the Second World War - not one million as today's governments state submissively under pressure from the Imperium.

3. Slavery and Death by Starvation:After the "liberation" of 1945 a total of eight million Germans were led into "post-war captivity", i.e into slavery, out of no military necessity and in violation of the "Geneva Convention". Eighty years after the end of the American Civil War (1865) the USA returned to the practice of slavery. The only difference was that this time the slaves were White!There were no news of American death camps because everyone there was stripped of their POW status and remained imprisoned until they starved to death. Only the regular POWs returned from captivity, and while they can tell about hunger and severe maltreatment, to this day they have no idea of the magnitude of this murder of prisoners.

The USA sentenced one million Germanpost-war prisoners-of-war to death by starvation.In American custody twice as many young, innocent German prisoners starved to death in peacetime as did so in Russia. While it was the lack of provisions that resulted in death in Russia, the US Army fueled stoves with butter and grain while standing guard over the millionfold famine death of the German youth.The German governments were aware of these death counts and of the extent of the US-ordained genocide, but for reasons of state and by means of the falsification of history they took pains to hide this crime from subsequent generations, as well as from the war generation itself, who did not know the exact figures and interrelationships.The Americans have twice as many German post-war prisoners-of-war on their conscience as do the Soviets. The 6 million victims of the expulsion and the 5.7 million starvation victims whom the liberators have to answer for are thus joined by a third category of victims which is hushed up, downplayed or even denied in post-Adenauer times by the German governments and their historiography: the great, silent dying of the post-war "prisoners of war".

Balance Sheet of the "Liberation"!"Peace" cost us 30 x Stalingrad!6 + 5.7 + 1.5 = 13.26 million victims of the expulsion (instead of 1 million as claimed to date)!5.7 million starvation victims (instead of zero as claimed to date)!1.5 if not 2 million starvation victims in post-war slave labor camps (instead of 0.5 as claimed to date)!Since the genocide was carried out largely against the "expellees", 7 million of whom never arrived in Germany, and by means of a targeted three-year starvation blockade that claimed the lives primarily of newborns, toddlers and the elderly - 5.7 million of them - the German people have never yet become aware of the true magnitude of this crime.The prehistory of the greatest genocide of all time:The American government's five genocide plans against Germany from 1918 to 1948.Committing genocide on the German people was the Western powers' goal as far back as the First World War. What prompted the USA to set themselves this goal was not any one ideology prevailing in Germany but rather the wish to eliminate the German competitor from the world market.The five genocide plans hatched by the USA against Germany in the twentieth century, whether implemented or not, were similar in their goals and methods. They were:I.) The Dictates of Versailles and St. Germain. (Collective guilt, collective punishment of all Germans through starvation, and collective enslavement and impoverishment.)II.) The Kaufman Plan. (Castration of all fertile German men over 16 years of age. Settling of Germany by foreigners to alter the ethnic base.)III.) The Hooton Plan. (Abduction of all German men to lifetime slavery abroad, and importation of foreigners in order to breed the "warlike genes" out of the Germans. Harvard University.)IV. The Morgenthau Plan. (Expropriation of a quarter of the German land and dismantling the German industrial facilities in order to trigger a mass starvation which Morgenthau calculated would cost the lives of 20 million Germans.)V. Liberation of 1945. (Now the genocide is implemented against 13.2 million Germans by means of starvation, murder and expulsion, regardless of the victims' political affiliations. As it turned out later despite all official denials, the plan to be carried out was the Morgenthau Plan after all.)The racist motive!The American people are innocent:The race hatred and race-based distrust of the Germans did not have its roots in the attitude of the American people as a whole, but rather in an intellectual clique at Harvard University which, probably

acting against its better knowledge and on the orders of political and economic vested interests, creatively endowed the peaceful German people with a sort of killer gene in order to have grounds for denying them their continued existence as an ethnically defined community.The bulk of the Americans, then as well as now, are just as unaware of the implementation of this first crime against humanity as the bulk of the Germans today. They were deceived, in that the American politicians kept the implementation of the Morgenthau Plan from public knowledge!In other words, the motive for this greatest genocide in human history, carried out after 1945 by the US-led Alliance that purported to combat "racism", was a racist one.The Harvard-spawned genocide plans show that the American elites who were based there pretended to believe in a "German gene" for making war, which could be bred out by means of race-mixing or by reproductive handicapping and immigration. (Compare this with the theories of Harvard-based historian Daniel Goldhagen today.)National Socialism as a Smoke ScreenEliminating National Socialism was only a smoke screen for the Allies, who evidently saw nothing criminal about the National Socialist program themselves: to this day National Socialist parties, badges or symbols are neither prosecuted nor banned in the USA. However, there certainly has been prosecution of Communists! Why? In the years from 1933 to 1939, in other words before the war began, Anglo-Saxon politicians interacting with National-Socialist Germany did not raise any objections to any criminal characteristics inherent in the program of the state party that might have demanded a cessation of diplomatic relations. After the guns fell silent, all Germans, regardless of their party affiliations, were included in the genocide plan.What can justify genocide? Nothing!And this is the Hallmark of the American Imperium!This greatest and thus unique and unparalleled genocide in the history of mankind exposed here, committed on the German people, was not, as our politicians and church leaders claim, the "logical consequence" of actions committed "by our side" earlier. And therefore even the Jewish fate of persecution cannot justify the genocide plans outlined here, concocted by the US-led Alliance against Germany. These plans of genocide of the German people were devised by the American government years before the relevant accusations against the National Socialist regime were made and publicized.Furthermore, crimes against innocent persons can never be justified by crimes which may have been committed earlier against other innocent persons. Doing so would be the same criminal insanity with which the perpetrators of genocides have always sought to vindicate themselves.The fact that the Jewish fate of persecution did not figure among the motives of the Alliance in planning and carrying out their genocide of the Germans is also shown by the recollections of de Gaulle and Churchill, who - oh, disgraceful! - did not deem the extermination of the Jews deserving of mention in their memoirs.Instead of Rule by the People - Rule by Foreigners;Instead of Democracy - "Democratization":There is no Crime in the East which the USA did not Initiate or Tolerate.The US-led Alliance of the Second World War never intended to install democracy in Germany but rather to set up a tyranny led by enemy-appointed puppet governments. Under these parameters, Adenauer, a member of Coudenhove-Kalergi's "Pan-Europe Movement", made Roosevelt's short list of candidates, and Renner was chosen and installed in power by Josef Stalin. That these puppet governments tried after the war to ease the consequences of the Allied tyranny and genocide invested them with popular authority after the Allied-ordained starvation had finally ended. After the Second World War, Allied propaganda and re-education succeeded in cleverly laying all German post-war casualties - in so far as they could not be hushed up - at Hitler's door by portraying their fate as the logical consequence (causality) of his policies. In particular the mass starvation, which was deliberately brought about in times of world-record harvests by confiscating and sabotaging the German crops, has

been portrayed to my people and to the world, not as North American genocide, but as a consequence of the war.

The US-Ordained Policy of Extermination Continues:Low Birth Rate, National DebtAfter Central Germany was "reunited" with West Germany by Chancellor Kohl along the lines decreed by the United States, the birth rate in the so-called "new Federal states" decreased by 50% within 9 months, and this would seem to be no coincidence: the USA's war goal, namely the permanent reduction of the number of Germans in order to make room for racially-motivated immigration, is likely to have determined family policies in post-War Germany. Part and parcel of this goal was the destruction of Honecker's kindergarten network by the Kohl Administration after the German re-unification. The birth rate dropped to half its previous level within 9 months.Similarly, the "German Democratic Republic"'s heavy industry was dismantled, the farmers and estate owners - formerly expropriated by the Allies - were cheated out of the return of their property, the land itself was largely sold out to foreign stock companies and at the same time flooded with foreign settlers. The West German people's right to determine their financial policy (in other words, their politics) was surrendered along with the Deutschmark. In this way, the Federal government's ability to act, and thus the small niche of German democracy (self-determination), was destroyed. Entire areas in the former German Democratic Republic died - a zone of death and desolation. In the richest state ever to exist on German soil, the family as a social institution was driven to the poverty line by means of generation theft.All these actions by the Kohl Administration clearly manifest elements of the old American war aims in Germany: the Kaufman Plan, the Hooton Plan, the Morgenthau Plan and the Kalergi Plan. The Kalergi Plan is a "light" version of the Morgenthau Plan! It is a plan about which we know that the USA picked up on it after 1948 for the purpose of a bloodless disposal of the German people and sought to install it as a guideline for Maastricht Europe.In this context I appeal to our two Federal Presidents: Open the Archives!To date the facts about their role of victim in the greatest genocide in human history have been kept from the German people, who know little more than what the grandmothers have whispered into their incredulous grandsons' ears.I appeal to the eleven pro-German governments of the nations addressed by this letter to support our two heads of state in exposing - 60 years after the fact - this greatest genocide in human history, perpetrated by the US-led Alliance on the German people.By acting as accessories to the denial, hushing-up and justification of this GAU of genocide, the German politicians and their court historians have incurred a great deal of guilt: not only towards their own people, but towards mankind as a whole. Let us only recall the Palestinians, the Iraqis, the Serbs, the Apaches and the Afghans!The tyrants of the American Imperium have long thought themselves safe in the assumption that genocide of whatever magnitude can remain undiscovered if it is only lied about and redefined as "democratization" or "liberation".In defense of our politicians, posterity will have to take into account the threatening stage set by the Cold War and by American politics: the Great Powers had faced off with each other, ready to wage a localized nuclear war on West and East German and Austrian soil, without German politicians being granted any commensurate say about the use of these weapons. But the tears which German politicians have shed on behalf of "victims of violence and genocide" to date may quite possibly have been crocodile tears!The truth has waited long enough: more than 13 million German victims cry out in condemnation! I am calling for the revocation of the "Germany Treaty" (May 26, 1952) and the "Two Plus Four Treaty", since these dishonest treaties "obliged" the German government to accept and acknowledge the version

of history peddled by these perpetrators of genocide. I am further calling for the ostracism and the unconditional surrender of German-American historiography and the permanent closure of the "Institutes for Contemporary History", those monstrous institutions of the occupation powers whose efforts at hushing-up, justifying and trivializing have prevented the exposure of this horrific genocide for 60 long years. And who thereby became its accomplices.

Sincerely,

Gerd Honsik

The Sources:1. "7.3 million arrived in the Eastern Zone and in the three Western Zones. Six million Germans have vanished from the face of the earth. They are dead and gone."Chancellor K. Adenauer, "Erinnerungen 1945-1953", p. 186.2. "...that means that only 60% of the Germans would be able to sustain themselves from the German soil, the rest would die."American Secretary of State Cordell Hull in: "The Memoirs of Cordell Hull", New York, 1948, p. 1617.3. "We must deal harshly with the Germans, and I mean the German people, not the Nazis. Either we must castrate the German people or else treat them in such a way that..."American President F. Roosevelt, quoted as per James Bacque, "Der geplante Tod", p. 21 (original title "Other Losses").4. "The statistics [N.B. the post-war mortality rates] published to this day by the Federal German government also contradict almost all other sources, German as well as Allied..."James Bacque, "Verschwiegene Schuld", p. 141 (original title "Crimes and Mercies").5. "Strictly speaking there is no longer any German Red Cross, because the Allies abolished it..."Geneva, January 14, 1946, speech by Mr. Dayton of the American Red Cross.6. "General Mark Clark, US Military Commissar of the American Zone of Austria, reported in April 1946 that the mortality rate in Vienna fluctuated between 27 and 35 per thousand annually..."From the press release of the US forces headquarters in Austria, April 15, 1946. (NB: even though the death rate was already three times that of pre-war days, food rations were subsequently reduced further from 1,500 to 1,000 calories per day.)

Another 42 important sources, eyewitness statements and documents that substantiate this charge of genocide against the US-led Alliance may be found in the book by Professor Austin J. App, Hellbrunn-Verlag, Salzburg 1947 (original title "History's Most Terrifying Peace") as well as in the books "Other Losses" and "Crimes and Mercies" by Canadian historian James Bacque: Toronto, General Paperbacks, 1991, and Toronto, Little Brown and Co., 1997.

PS: thanks is due the Christian churches in the USA whose courageous resistance to the American genocidal policies against Germany after 1945 helped first to break the starvation blockade and finally to put a stop to these activities of the American government, after it already had the deaths of 13.2 million Germans on its conscience.

Note:Stalin's victims within the Soviet Union, for example, indeed number several times as many as the German victims. However, these victims were on the whole selected according to political, not ethnic criteria. Thus, no genocide - whether of the 20th century or of earlier times - is comparable to the genocide committed by the US-led Alliance against the German people after 1945.

http://www.danzigfreestate.org/

Strange CreaturesA review of Russia in Search of Itself, by James H. Billington

For Russia, the last century was one bitter cruelty after another—the Tsar, war, revolution, famine,

Stalin, war, Communism. Her people lived under totalitarianism for seven decades, longer than any one

else. Something happens to a society under the total state. In time, fear, lies, denunciation, and arrest

fray the bonds that hold a healthy society together. In Russia's case, these strains have left it much like

an ocean: cold, vast, and swarming with strange creatures.

James Billington's Russia in Search of Itself is a wise reflection on Russia's destiny by a lifelong

student. It has a somewhat uneven feel, as if it were written first as a series of essays. But Billington,

who has served as the Librarian of Congress since 1987, is an eminent authority, and the insights found

in his book transcend its faults.

Billington catalogues Russia's quest for the National Idea. "No nation," he says, "ever poured more

intellectual energy into answering the question of national identity than Russia." Nor has the search

ever been more urgent; an answer could mean salvation. But Russia's pursuit is schizophrenic. Its lost

empires have spread both pious Orthodoxy and militant atheism. Since the Middle Ages, it has been

divided into serfs and masters with little in between. And in the 1830s, it was divided again by the

contest between Westernizers and Slavophiles—Turgenev looked West, Tolstoy East. The Soviets

officially put that question on hold, but if you want to spark a dinner-table debate, ask Russians

whether they belong to Asia or Europe.

Throughout her history, Russia's misfortune has been to watch mounting discord reach a breaking

point, and then snap violently in one direction or the other. Billington observes that each time Russia

has reconstituted itself—in 1861, with Alexander II's abolition of serfdom; in 1917, with the

Bolshevik's seizure of the state; and in 1991, with the USSR's dissolution—it has been swift,

unexpected, and a self-declared break with the past.

Russia prides herself on a long and celebrated cultural tradition, but some of it is borrowed. Her early

art and religion, for example, were appropriated from Byzantium. (In 988 C.E., Prince Vladimir I

converted Russia to Orthodoxy; legend says he considered Islam, but it had a fatal shortcoming: no

alcohol.) Peter the Great modeled his state on Sweden, his Baltic rival. During the Silver Age, Russia's

nobility spoke French, bought Italian art, and, "most fatefully of all," says Billington, thought in

German. And when Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II pushed Russia into the Industrial Revolution,

their beau ideal was Germany, with whom they would war twice in the next 60 years.

Finally in 1991, Russia announced that it would adopt the markets and democracy of her Cold War

adversary. Unfortunately, it didn't work out as many hoped. Privatization became a giant swindle in

which well-positioned bureaucrats divvied up amongst themselves the vast Soviet carcass. Russians

would vote, but active and participatory civic associations would never develop. Within a matter of

years, power and wealth were once again highly concentrated. Former Prime Minister Viktor

Chernomyrdin remarked, in superlative Russian fashion, "We wanted it to go better, but it turned out as

always."

Since 1991, failure and uncertainty have opened the floodgates to a number of strange ideologies.

Billington focuses on the most influential and dangerous school, the "Eurasianists," who combine

nationalism with a foundation myth that places Russia back at the center of history. They intend to raise

Russia from its knees so that it can once more face down the West. Billington calls them the

"troubadours of autocracy."

A.S. Panarin of the Russian Academy of Sciences, for example, calls for a "United States of Eurasia,"

in which Orthodox Christianity and Islam would form a popular front against Western secularism and

individualism. Activist Alexander Dugin dreams of an anti-Atlantic axis of Berlin, Tokyo, and Tehran,

each led by "charismatic theocrats." Politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky threatens to restore Alaska to

Russia and spread radioactive waste across Germany. (One of his campaign slogans was "A man for

every woman and a cheap bottle of vodka for every man.") This January, he called on the Russian

government to ban Jewish organizations, which, he explained, amount to "nothing less than Satanism."

Eurasianism is an eccentric and bigoted movement, but Billington insists on taking it seriously. Most

Westerners, however, dismiss the clownish Zhirinovsky. This would be a lot easier if he did not

command Russia's third-largest party, which doubled its vote in the December 2003 elections. Dugin,

for his part, directs Russia's burgeoning nationalist movement. Eurasianism boasts of disciples in the

highest echelons of the Russian military and security services. The question of Russia is really the

question of how authoritarian it will become.

Fascism has once again invaded Russia, this time without the aid of an army. It seems inconceivable in

the land that lost 20 million of its own to Nazism, yet walls in Moscow are defiled with swastikas.

Skinheads carry out hundreds of attacks annually against minorities—one Moscow rights-group

estimates skinhead ranks at 50,000—and the number of attacks rises by a third every year. Meanwhile,

in Russia's parliament, a thriving Red-Brown alliance unites those nostalgic for departed glory and

order. Marxist theory was always an overlay, but nationalism is not. According to Billington, the appeal

of the new xenophobia has yet to peak.

Russians once ruled half the world, and now their decrepit military watches as its nuclear submarines

sink and its helicopters crash. Former "brotherly nations" like Poland and Lithuania are isolating Russia

by joining the E.U. President Bush promises Ukraine entry into NATO should it stay on the democratic

course, a prospect which appears to Russians the way Russia's stationing troops in Canada would

appear to us. It's hardly just nationalists who are frustrated by a West that classifies them as a

"developing" nation alongside former client states, and that allows Mongolia into the World Trade

Organization, but not them.

* * *

In a 1996 poll of political attitudes commissioned by Boris Yeltsin, three categories ended in a tie:

democrats, Communist revanchists, and apoliticals. But one category beat them all: nihilists.

Historically, Russia is the only country in which nihilism became an actual popular movement, and

now, 150 years later, it has returned: Russian ballots feature the option "Against all." In a March

presidential poll, it placed second.

Russia in Search of Itself argues that most Russians understand success as the product of either good

luck or immorality. Eighty-four percent believe themselves unable to influence decision-making.

Consider that the term parliament comes from the Old French parlez, to talk. The word for Russia's

legislative body, on the other hand, the Duma, comes from dumat, to think: The politician's job is to

think for the people, and the people's job is to accept it.

Billington worries that demagoguery will advance, not because of popular support, but because of

popular indifference. Could a worrying New York Times headline, "Mounting Discontent in Russia

Spills Into the Streets," thus represent progress? Perhaps the spirit that moved hundreds of thousands of

orange-clad Ukrainians to contest their December elections will make its way to Russia. Street protests

might be the closest thing Russia has to an opposition.

For centuries, a Kremlin oligarchy, whether comprising Muscovite and Kievan princes, the Romanov

court, or the General-Secretary's Politburo, has governed Russia. But this seems to have finally given

way to a rough and imperfect liberty. This does not mean, of course, that thousand-year-old traditions

disappear overnight, or for that matter, over a decade of nights. The tiny parasitic elite is back, this time

in the form of the superrich "new Russians," and the siloviki, the super-bureaucrats. These groups, as

Billington notes, are the chief obstacles to democratic change.

If you wish to understand the nature of arbitrary power in Russia, look no further than a little flashing

blue light, the migalka. Available to elites with cash and connections, it confers on its owner the right to

disregard any and all traffic laws. I've seen migalka-equipped Mercedes 600s and Land Rovers drive on

sidewalks and fly through red lights at busy intersections.

During the Yeltsin era, a handful of "oligarchs" built financial-industrial clans that came to control

nearly half the Russian GDP. Such a concentration of wealth, especially in the absence of reliable legal

and financial institutions, distorts the growth of markets. Some estimate that this thievery has created a

gap between rich and poor wider than the one that preceded the Revolution. By most indicators, Russia

is now a Third World country, yet it is second only to the U.S. in its number of billionaires.

With the end of the Cold War, Russia lost half its industrial output. Each year, Russia's population

declines by a stunning one million people. At this rate, by 2050 its population will have shrunk by a

third. Male life expectancy is 58 and falling (it's 75 in the U.S.). One cause, according to a

parliamentary report, is "stress generated by people's lack of confidence in their futures and those of

their children." Another is alcoholism. The suicide rate between 1995 and 2000 was quadruple that of

Europe. A sodden, depressed Russia can only be further eclipsed on the international stage.

President Vladimir Putin is working to reverse this. In his mind, a good number of Russia's problems—

poverty, terrorism, mafiosi, Chechnya—are the result of a weak and semi-dismantled state, and so he

has set about rebuilding it. His soft authoritarianism, coupled with various tax, legal, and benefit

reforms, has contributed to economic growth averaging 6.5% per year since 1998—though Russia's

economy is still only slightly larger than that of Los Angeles County. Putin has also taught the country's

most powerful men that they are nothing compared to his state. But if Russia is to democratize, the

state cannot always win.

* * *

Everyone knows that the historic Iraqi elections in January were a breakthrough. Fewer know that the

first constitutional transfer of power in Russian history took place only in 2000, when Putin succeeded

Yeltsin. Though Russia's democracy is in its adolescence, with all the immaturity and hesitancy typical

of that difficult age, we often judge it by European standards. Russia is again trying to import

institutions without the traditions that uphold them.

Remarkably, Russians see America as a country much like their own—large and multiethnic, unfurled

across a continent. They also see the society—creative, open, tolerant, rich, and free—they wish for

themselves. This gives Billington hope. But a fair prediction is that Russia's fate is unpredictable. In the

course of the last century, Russia made an unlikely metamorphosis from the bastion of reactionary

monarchism, to the exporter of world revolution, to a struggling, dysfunctional democracy.

But one thing is certain. Russia possesses one-third of the world's natural gas, 7% of its oil, one-fifth of

its precious metals, endless forest and farmland, ports on seven seas, the world's second-largest nuclear

stockpile, and 140 million patient and educated citizens—all spread across eleven time zones. This

means that no matter how stormy its progress, Russia will matter. Like the ocean, the strength of a

nation is a matter of ebb and flow.

The Execution of Eddie Slovikby Laurence M. Vance

Every child learns in school that Dwight D. Eisenhower was the thirty-fourth president of the United States. Some Americans also know that Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II. "I Like Ike" was not just a campaign slogan. Many Americans genuinely liked Eisenhower – many Americans except Private Eddie Slovik. And no doubt many Europeans liberated by the Allies also liked Ike – many Europeans except those Russian prisoners of war sent back to the Soviet Union.

Jeffrey Tucker has written about all modern armies being essentially totalitarian enterprises. "Once you

sign up for them, or are drafted, you are a slave. The penalty for becoming a fugitive is death. Even now, the enforcements against mutiny, desertion, going AWOL, or what have you, are never questioned."

One notable example of a man who paid the ultimate price for wanting to change his job, a job that he never asked for in the first place, was Edward Donald "Eddie" Slovik (1920–1945). Slovik was a private in the U.S. Army during World War II. Today, January 31, marks the 60th

anniversary of his execution by firing squad for desertion. There were 21,049 soldiers sentenced for desertion during WWII, with 49 of them receiving death sentences. However, only Slovik’s death sentence was carried out. He was the first U.S. soldier to be executed for desertion since the Civil War. He was also the last, but that may soon change when Rumsfeld and Company decide to make an example of U.S. soldiers who choose to no longer participate in the war in Iraq.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Slovik was a small-time thief and ex-convict who was originally classified as unfit for military service. But shortly after his first wedding anniversary, in November of 1943, he was drafted anyway. Then, after training for a few months at Camp

Wolters in Texas, he was sent to France in August of 1944. Slovik faced impending death in The Battle of Hürtgen Forest, where the American army suffered 24,000 casualties during the battle and an additional 9,000 casualties due to fatigue, illness, or friendly fire. After Slovik’s request to be reassigned from the front lines to the rear was refused, he deserted, voluntarily surrendered, and wrote that he would run away again if sent into combat. Confined in the division stockade and facing a court-martial, Slovik refused to return to his unit. On November 11 (Armistice Day), 1944, he was tried and pleaded not guilty, but was convicted of desertion. He wrote a letter to General Eisenhower on December 9 pleading for clemency, but on December 23, during the Battle of the Bulge, Eisenhower confirmed the death sentence.

Slovik’s life and death were recounted in the 1954 book The Execution of Private Slovik, by William Bradford Huie. The award-winning 1974 NBC-TV movie of the same name, staring Martin Sheen, Ned Beatty, and Gary Busey, is available on video. The trailer can be viewed here.

Captain Benedict Kimmelman, a member of the court martial board, wrote in 1987 that "Slovik, guilty as many others were, was made an example, the sole example, it turned out." He considered the execution a "historic injustice." Colonel Guy Williams, another officer on the panel, said that he didn’t think "a single member of that court actually believed that Slovik would ever be shot. I know I didn't believe it."

According to Bernard Calka, the man responsible for bringing Slovik’s remains home in 1987 from an army cemetery in France reserved for criminals to Woodmere cemetery in Michigan, "The man didn’t refuse to serve, he refused to kill." Calka, a Polish-American WWII veteran who served as an MP during the war and a commander of a VFW post afterward, and later became a commissioner of Macomb County (one of the three counties in Detroit’s "tri-county" metro area), spent more than ten years and $8,000 of his own money to have Slovik’s remains re-interred next to his wife. Stephen Osinski, a retired judge who filed a formal petition for a Slovik pardon, said that he found "a virtual plethora of significant deprivations of Pvt. Slovik’s

constitutional rights."

Like Private Slovik, there are others who owe their deaths to Eisenhower. The repatriation of Russian prisoners of war under Operation Keelhaul was another shameful event of World War II. Russian prisoners liberated from German prison camps were to be returned to the Soviet Union – even though they did not want to go back to life under Stalin (our ally in World War II).

One historian with the courage to report this atrocity is Thomas Woods. In his important new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, Professor Woods describes how Operation Keelhaul was also carried out on American soil: "At Fort Dix, New Jersey, hundreds of Soviet POWs, who fought with all their strength when they learned that the American government was reneging on its promise not to send them back to the USSR, were drugged in order to calm them down enough for them to be shipped back."

The execution of Eddie Slovik, Operation Keelhaul, and much worse state-sponsored acts of terror during World War II, like the firebombing of cities and the dropping of the atomic bombs, are often dismissed even by opponents of all the U.S. wars and interventions since World War II because it was "defensive" and important that we "stop Hitler." But was it defensive when U.S. forces (the Flying Tigers) attacked Japanese forces before Pearl Harbor? That Japan attacked the United States without provocation is another of the great myths of World War II. And was it so important that 292,131

American soldiers had to die so that the Communists could control Eastern Europe for forty-five years while the United States wasted billions of dollars fighting the Cold War? Our alliance with Stalin and the USSR during World War II was unconscionable, another point made by Professor Woods.

This brings up another question: Who really won World War II? Tragically, the winner was theory and practice of perpetual war for perpetual peace and the rise of the collectivist state, all at the price of true peace and individual liberty.

Does anyone ever "win" a war anyway? Many have thought not:

• "War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory." ~ Georges Clemenceau

• "One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one." ~ Agatha Christie

• "You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." ~ Jeannette Rankin

• "For the people wars do not pay. The only cause of armed conflict is the greed of autocrats." ~ Ludwig von Mises

• "The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky." ~ Solomon Short

Randolph Bourne’s (1886–1918) dictum that "War is the health of the State" has been quoted many times before, and I am sure that it will be quoted many times hence. But when people will heed the truth of this powerful statement is one of life’s great unanswered questions.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance34.html

http://judicial-inc.biz/p_atton_murder_supplement.htm

Eisenhower's Holocaust - His

Slaughter Of 1.7 Million Germans

Author Not Known12-28-03

"God, I hate the Germans..." (Dwight David Eisenhower in a letter to his wife in September, 1944) First, I want you to picture something in your mind. You are a German soldier who survived through the battles of World II. You were not really politically involved, and your parents were also indifferent to politics, but suddenly your education was interrupted and you were drafted into the German army and told where to fight. Now, in the Spring of 1945, you see that your country has been demolished by the Allies, your cities lie in ruins, and half of your family has been killed or is missing. Now, your unit is being surrounded, and it is finally time to surrender. The fact is, there is no other choice. It has been a long, cold winter. The German army rations have not been all that good, but you managed to survive. Spring came late that year, with weeks of cold rainy weather in demolished Europe. Your boots are tattered, your uniform is falling apart, and the stress of surrender and the confusion that lies ahead for you has your guts being torn out. Now, it is over, you must surrender or be shot. This is war and the real world. You are taken as a German Prisoner of War into American hands. The Americans had 200 such Prisoner of War camps scattered across Germany. You are marched to a compound surrounded with barbed wire fences as far as the eye can see. Thousands upon thousands of your fellow German soldiers are already in this make-shift corral. You see no evidence of a latrine and after three hours of marching through the mud of the spring rain, the comfort of a latrine is upper-most in your mind. You are driven through the heavily guarded gate and find yourself free to move about, and you begin the futile search for the latrine. Finally, you ask for directions, and are informed that no such luxury exists. No more time. You find a place and squat. First you were exhausted, then hungry, then fearful, and now; dirty. Hundreds more German prisoners are behind you, pushing you on,

jamming you together and every one of them searching for the latrine as soon as they could do so. Now, late in the day, there is no space to even squat, much less sit down to rest your weary legs. None of the prisoners, you quickly learn, have had any food that day, in fact there was no food while in the American hands that any surviving prisoner can testify to. No one has eaten any food for weeks, and they are slowly starving and dying. But, they can't do this to us! There are the Geneva Convention rules for the treatment of Prisoners of War. There must be some mistake! Hope continues through the night, with no shelter from the cold, biting rain. Your uniform is sopping wet, and formerly brave soldiers are weeping all around you, as buddy after buddy dies from the lack of food, water, sleep and shelter from the weather. After weeks of this, your own hope bleeds off into despair, and finally you actually begin to envy those who, having surrendered first manhood and then dignity, now also surrender life itself. More hopeless weeks go by. Finally, the last thing you remember is falling, unable to get up, and lying face down in the mud mixed with the excrement of those who have gone before. Your body will be picked up long after it is cold, and taken to a special tent where your clothing is stripped off. So that you will be quickly forgotten, and never again identified, your dog-tag is snipped in half and your body along with those of your fellow soldiers are covered with chemicals for rapid decomposition and buried. You were not one of the exceptions, for more than one million seven hundred thousand German Prisoners of War died from a deliberate policy of extermination by starvation, exposure, and disease, under direct orders of the General Dwight David Eisenhower. One month before the end of World War 11, General Eisenhower issued special orders concerning the treatment of German Prisoners and specific in the language of those orders was this statement, "Prison enclosures are to provide no shelter or other comforts." Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, who was given access to the Eisenhower personal letters, states that he proposed to exterminate the entire German General Staff, thousands of people, after the war. Eisenhower, in his personal letters, did not merely hate the Nazi Regime, and the few who imposed its will down from the top, but that HE HATED THE GERMAN PEOPLE AS A RACE. It was his personal intent to destroy as many of them as he could, and one way was to wipe out as many prisoners of war as possible. Of course, that was illegal under International law, so he issued an order on March 10, 1945 and verified by his initials on a cable of that date, that German Prisoners of War be predesignated as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" called in these reports as DEF. He ordered that these Germans did not fall under the Geneva Rules, and were not to be fed or given any water or medical attention. The Swiss Red Cross was not to inspect the camps, for under the DEF classification, they had no such authority or jurisdiction. Months after the war was officially over, Eisenhower's special German DEF camps were still in operation forcing the men into confinement, but denying that they were prisoners. As soon as the war was over, General George Patton simply turned his prisoners loose to fend for

themselves and find their way home as best they could. Eisenhower was furious, and issued a specific order to Patton, to turn these men over to the DEF camps. Knowing Patton as we do from history, we know that these orders were largely ignored, and it may well be that Patton's untimely and curious death may have been a result of what he knew about these wretched Eisenhower DEF camps. The book, OTHER LOSSES, found its way into the hands of a Canadian news reporter, Peter Worthington, of the OTTAWA SUN. He did his own research through contacts he had in Canada, and reported in his column on September 12,1989 the following, in part: "...it is hard to escape the conclusion that Dwight Eisenhower was a war criminal of epic proportions. His (DEF) policy killed more Germans in peace than were killed in the European Theater." "For years we have blamed the 1.7 million missing German POW's on the Russians. Until now, no one dug too deeply ... Witnesses and survivors have been interviewed by the author; one Allied officer compared the American camps to Buchenwald." It is known, that the Allies had sufficient stockpiles of food and medicine to care for these German soldiers. This was deliberately and intentionally denied them. Many men died of gangrene from frostbite due to deliberate exposure. Local German people who offered these men food, were denied. General Patton's Third Army was the only command in the European Theater to release significant numbers of Germans. Others, such as Omar Bradley and General J.C.H. Lee, Commander of Com Z, tried, and ordered the release of prisoners within a week of the war's end. However, a SHAEF Order, signed by Eisenhower, countermanded them on May 15th. Does that make you angry? What will it take to get the average apathetic American involved in saving his country from such traitors at the top? Thirty years ago, amid the high popularity of Eisenhower, a book was written setting out the political and moral philosophy; of Dwight David Eisenhower called, THE POLITICIAN, by Robert Welch. This year is the 107th Anniversary of Eisenhower's birth in Denison, Texas on October 14, 1890, the son of Jacob David Eisenhower and his wife Ida. Everyone is all excited about the celebration of this landmark in the history of "this American patriot." Senator Robert Dole, in honor of the Commander of the American Death Camps, proposed that Washington's Dulles Airport be renamed the Eisenhower Airport! The UNITED STATES MINT in Philadelphia, PA is actually issuing a special Eisenhower Centennial Silver Dollar for only $25 each. They will only mint 4 million of these collector's items, and veteran's magazines are promoting these coins under the slogan, "Remember the Man...Remember the Times..." Pardon me if I regurgitate! There will be some veterans who will not be buying these coins. Two will be Col. James Mason and Col. Charles Beasley who were in the U.S. Army Medical Corps who published a paper on the Eisenhower Death Camps in 1950. They stated in part: "Huddled close together for warmth, behind the barbed wire was a most awesome sight; nearly 100,000 haggard, apathetic, dirty, gaunt, blank-staring men clad in dirty gray

uniforms, and standing ankle deep in mud ... water was a major problem, yet only 200 yards away the River Rhine was running bank-full." Another Veteran, who will not be buying any of the Eisenhower Silver Dollars is Martin Brech of Mahopac, New York, a semi-retired professor of philosophy at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, NY. In 1945, Brech was an 18 year old Private First Class in Company C of the 14th Infantry, assigned as a guard and interpreter at the Eisenhower Death Camp at Andernach, along the Rhine River. He stated for SPOTLIGHT, February 12, 1990: "My protests (regarding treatment of the German DEF'S) were met with hostility or indifference, and when I threw our ample rations to them over the barbed wire. I was threatened, making it clear that it was our deliberate policy not to adequately feed them." "When they caught me throwing C- Rations over the fence, they threatened me with imprisonment. One Captain told me that he would shoot me if he saw me again tossing food to the Germans ... Some of the men were really only boys 13 years of age...Some of the prisoners were old men drafted by Hitler in his last ditch stand ... I understand that average weight of the prisoners at Andernach was 90 pounds...I have received threats ... Nevertheless, this...has liberated me, for I may now be heard when I relate the horrible atrocity I witnessed as a prison guard for one of 'Ike's death camps' along the Rhine." (Betty Lou Smith Hanson) Note: Remember the photo of Ike's West Point yearbook picture when he was dubbed "IKE, THE TERRIBLE SWEDISH JEW"? By the way, he was next, or nearly so, to the last in his class. This article was first printed in 1990, but we thought it was meaningful to reprint it now. Note: During Cadet Eisenhower's time at West Point Academy, Eisenhower was summoned to the office of the headmaster and was asked some pointed questions. At the time, it was routine procedure to test a cadet's blood to insure White racial integrity. Apparently, there was a question of Eisenhower's racial lineage and this was brought to Eisenhower's attention by the headmaster. When asked if he was part Oriental, Eisenhower replied in the negative. After some discussion, Eisenhower admitted having Jewish background. The headmaster then reportedly said, "That's where you get your Oriental blood?" Although he was allowed to remain at the academy, word got around since this was a time in history when non-Whites were not allowed into the academy. Note - The issue of Eisenhower's little-known Jewish background in academically essential in understanding his psychopathic hatred of German men, women and children. Later, in Eisenhower's West Point Military Academy graduating class yearbook, published in 1915, Eisenhower is identified as a "terrible Swedish Jew." Wherever Eisenhower went during his military career, Eisenhower's Jewish background and secondary manifesting behavior was a concern to his fellow officers. During World War II when Col. Eisenhower was working for Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the South Pacific, MacArthur protested to his superiors in Washington (DC) that Eisenhower was incompetent and that he did not want Eisenhower on his staff. In 1943, Washington not only transferred Col. Eisenhower to Europe but promoted him over

more than 30 more experienced senior officers to five star general and placed him in charge of all the US forces in Europe. Thus it comes as no surprise that General George Patton, a real Aryan warrior, hated Eisenhower. [Ed: Patton was keen to fight the Soviets, and reportedly kept some German units ready to move against the Soviets...unsurprisingly he was killed; after the war, in a 'car crash,' just like Lawrence of Arabia was conveniently bumped off, in a similar manner, for his 'pro-fascist' views]. Comment From George 12-28-3 Finally, the truth about Ike. He was a Zword!, a racist! and a slaughterer of innocents! He was always these things. And all anyone remembers is his famous quote "to beware of the military/industrial complex." Like this knowledge means he was a great precient prophet, when he was really a part of the NWO and helped set the US up for all that followed. The tooling jobs and industry started to leave the US in the early '50's, when Ike got into power. It was Japan they were building. Notice the difference between the destruction of Japan and the quick buildup of the Philipines and Japan and the Pacific the US took over, after the war of hegemony to steal the wealth of the Pacific Rim and present day Afghanistan, Iraq etc., now that the Zword rule the 'world'. The zionist essence is evil, destructive and self-destructive. Ike was a tool of the Zword evil essence. German POW's Diary Reveals More Of Ike's Holocaust 12-29-3 Note - The following diary extract has been provided by the nephew of the author under the conditions we honor his request for anonymity. -ed A transcript of my Uncle's words...from my Mother's diary: "Suddenly an American Jeep moved towards us and several American Soldiers surrounded us. There was no officer in charge, and the first thing the 'Amis' did - they liberated us, I mean, from our few valuables, mainly rings and watches........ We were now prisoners of war- no doubt about it! The first night we were herded into a barn, where we met about 100 men who shared the same fate. To make my story short, we were finally transported to Fuerstenfeldbruck near Munich. Here we, who were gathered around Hermann, interrupted him and gasped in dismay. Fuerstenfeldbruck had become known to us as one of the most cruel POW camps in the

American zone. Then my brother continued: Again we were searched and had to surrender everything, even our field utensils, except a spoon. Here, in freezing temperature, 20,000 of us were squeezed together on the naked ground, without blanket or cover, exposed day and night to the winter weather. For six days we received neither food nor water! We used our spoons to catch drops of rain. We were surrounded by heavy tanks. During the night bright searchlights blinded us, so that sleep was impossible. We napped from time to time, standing up and leaning against each other. It was keeping us warmer that sitting on the frozen ground. Many of us were near collapse. One of our comrades went mad, he jumped around wildly, wailing and whimpering. he was shot at once. His body was lying on the ground, and we were not allowed to come near him. He was not he only one. Each suspicious movement caused the guards to shoot into the crowd, and a few were always hit. German civilians, mainly women of the surrounding villages, tried to approach the camp to bring food and water for us prisoners. they were chased away. Our German officers could finally succeed to submit an official protest, particularly because of the deprivation of water. As a response, a fire hose was thrown into the midst of the densely crowded prisoners and then turned on. Because of the high water pressure the hose moved violently to and fro. Prisoners tumbled, fell, got up and ran again to catch a bit of water. In that confusion the water went to waste, and the ground under us turned into slippery mud. All the while the 'Amis' watched that spectacle, finding it very funny and most entertaining. They laughed at our predicament as hard as they could. Then suddenly, they turned the water off again. We had not expected that the Americans would behave in such a manner. We could hardly believe it. War brutalizes human beings. One day later we were organized into groups of 400 men .... We were to receive two cans of food for each man. This is how it was to be done: The prisoners had to run through he slippery mud, and each one had to grab his two cans quickly, at the moment he passed the guards. One of my comrades slipped and could not run fast enough, He was shot at once .... On May 10th , several truckloads of us were transported the the garrison of Ulm by the Danube..... As each man jumped into the truck, a guard kicked him in the backbone with his rifle butt. We arrived in the city of Heilbronn by the Neckar, In the end we counted 240,000 men, who lived on the naked ground and without cover. Spring and summer were mild this year, but we were starving. At 6;00 am we received coffee, at noon about a pint of soup and 100 grams of bread a day........

The 'Amis' gave us newspapers in German language, describing the terrors of the concentration camps. We did not believe any of it. We figured the Americans only wanted to demoralize us further. The fields on which we lived belonged to the farmers of the area...soon nothing of the clover and other sprouting greens were left, and the trees were barren. We had eaten each blade of grass..... In some camps there were Hungarian POW's. 15,000 of them. Mutiny against their officers broke out twice amongst them. After the second mutiny the Americans decided to use German prisoners to govern the Hungarians. Since the Hungarians were used as workers they were well fed. There was more food than they could eat. But when the Germans asked the Americans for permission to bring the Hungarians' leftovers into the camps of the starving Germans, it was denied. The Americans rather destroyed surplus food, than giving it to the Germans. Sometimes it happened that groups of our own men were gathered and transported away. We presumed they were discharged to go home, and naturally, we wished to be among them. Much later we heard they were sent to labor camps! My mother's cousin, feared that he would be drafted into the Hitler Youth SS, he volunteered to the marines, in 1945 his unit was in Denmark. On April 20th they were captured by the Americans. his experience in the POW camp was identical that of my brother's. They lived in open fields, did not receive and food and water the first six days, and starved nearly to death. German wives and mothers who wanted to throw loaves of bread over the fence, were chased off. The prisoners, just to have something to chew, scraped the bark from young trees. my cousins job was to report each morning how many had died during the night. "and these were not just a few!" he adds to his report he wrote me. It became known, that the conditions in the POW camps in the American Zone were identical everywhere. We could therefore safely conclude, that it was by intent and by orders from higher ups to starve the German POW's and we blamed General Eisenhower for it. He, who was of German descent could not discern the evildoers during the Nazi time from our decent people. We held that neglect of knowledge and understanding severely against him. I wish to quote the inscription on the grave stones of those of my German compatriots who have already passed away: We had to pass through fire and through water. But now you have loosened our bonds.

Ida Elizabeth StoverFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, searchIda Elizabeth Stover Eisenhower (May 1, 1862–September 11, 1946) was a lifelong pacifist, and the mother of U.S. President Dwight David Eisenhower.

She was born in Mount Sidney, Virginia, the only child of Elizabeth Ida Link and Simon P. Stover. She was of interracial decent.

When her mother died while she was five years old, Ida was sent to live with her paternal grandparents and later was brought up by her elder brothers in Kansas, who thought that girls shouldn't be educated and instead pushed her to memorize the Bible. When she was ready to go to high school, she was told that she couldn't so she ran away. She graduated at age 19 and taught for two years before entering Lane University, where she met her future husband, David Jacob Eisenhower.

She was named Kansas Mother of the Year in 1945.

http://judicial-inc.biz/Hopie_ike_supplement.htm

The Fate of the Cossacks in LienzDuring the 20th Century

The Massacre of Cossacksat Lienz

(From Russia, Vol. VI, No.84, September 1949)

To the Representative of the Don Ataman in North and South America, Lt. General S. V. Denisov.

Your Excellency,

In view of the approaching fourth anniversary of the ghastly tragedy of the Cossacks, namely their compulsory extradition to the Soviet Union, I believe it appropriate to recall briefly this terrible event in the memory of Cossacks.

As already known, the Cossack Corps of General Domanov, consist ing of about 28,000 persons, including women and children, on leaving Italian territory in early May 1945, crossed over the mountain pass into Austria and set up camp in the valley of the river Drau.

The Staff of the Cossacks and a part of the administrative units were billeted within the city limits of the town of Lienz. The Cossack regiments (disarmed) camped on adjoining territory in tents, while the noncombatants, the aged, the women and children, found quarters in the camp Peggetz, about two miles outside the city.

The attitude of the British authorities towards the Cossacks was quite beyond reproach and even benevolent up to May 26th, and there was nothing to indicate the impending catastrophe. However, on that particular day two events took place which foreshadowed the imminent tragedy. Namely, a British truck pulled up before the Cossacks' Bank, and the soldiers, referring to orders from their superiors, demanded the keys to the

strongboxes, locked them up, and, loading them on the truck, drove away to an unknown destination. The protest of the Director of the Bank, and his remonstration that the strongboxes contained but personal savings of the Cossacks, had no effect. According to the declaration of the Bank Director, those strongboxes had contained at that time about 6 million German Marks, and about as much in Italian Lire, all of which had been personal money of the Cossacks.

On the same day, a British officer came to the hotel where General Shkuro and four of his officers had been billeted, and ordered them to pack their belongings so as to move to other billets. When asked, "Which other billets," he answered, "Where your Staff will be."

Later on it became known that General Shkuro and his officers had been moved to Spittal camp and kept there behind barbed wire.

It is important to note that simultaneously a British order had been read, according to which all Cossacks were to receive increased rations and, in fact, were to receive full British rations, which fact had considerably lulled any suspicions there might have been among the Cossacks, and had made it easier for the British to carry out their intentions.

The pleasure of receiving increased rations lasted but a short while. The next day, May 27th, at about 10:00 A.M., the British ordered all officers to turn in their pistols which, so far, they had been permitted to keep. Scarcely anybody guessed the actual purpose of this disarmament. There were but a few who anticipated instinctively, or rather, subconsciously, something mysterious and evil taking place.

On the morning of May 28th all officers, military officials, and medics were ordered to report at 1:00 P.M. to the square before the Staff billets, to be moved in trucks according to directives from the British General.

The Town Commander of Lienz, the British Major Davis, declared that the luggage should not be taken, as everybody was supposed to be back in three or four hours. This declaration was taken at its face value, nearly all had reported and were driven away. But, actually, as soon as the truck convoy, carrying over 2,000 officers and officials, headed by General Krasnov, got under way, it was surrounded by British tanks and escorted to its destination.

Guarded in this manner, everybody was brought into Spittal camp, which was surrounded by several stockades of barbed wire, and was strongly patrolled by the British.

Twenty-four hours later, all these unfortunate prisoners were transported into the Soviet Zone and were handed over to the Soviets. Only five persons were able to escape by a miracle. Numerous camp inmates had committed suicide, numerous others were killed by the guards while attempting an escape, while some had been executed on the way to the Soviet Zone, and it is unknown to this day exactly how many reached the Soviet Union.

In the evening of May 29th, British trucks equipped with loud speakers drove up to the tent camp Peggetz, where the Cossack regiments were camping, and announced that everybody had to get ready to be voluntarily repatriated into the Soviet Union. The British repeated this announcement on May 30th and May 31st.

Everywhere the unanimous reaction of the Cossacks had been to refuse, and to emphasize their protest they declared a hunger strike and hoisted black banners. When British supply trucks rolled up as usual to certain distribution points, there was nobody to accept the rations and, having dumped the food on the ground, they drove away. No Cossack touched that food.

On the morning of June 1st the Cossacks of the Peggetz camp had decided to unite in prayer to God, maybe for the last time. For this purpose an altar was erected on the camp square and a crowd of thousands of aged, of women and children, gathered around. Cadets, as if to protect them, formed an outer ring, holding hands. Black banners were flying from every barrack.

This picture was deeply moving and awesome at the same time. No human nerves could have endured to watch this multitude kneeling, intensely praying, and bitterly weeping.

It was during this Liturgy that the British surrounded the camp area on three sides with tanks and soldiers armed with machine guns. The fourth side remained free: there was the deep and swift Drau river forming a natural barrier. Together with the tanks there appeared trucks and, about 150 to 200 yards away, on the railroad there pulled up a long train of freight cars, waiting for the victims, the Cossacks.

The British waited awhile. Then, seeing that the people did not discontinue their prayers, they fired a volley into the air, charging at the same time into the defenseless people who had sat down on the ground, embracing one

another, and refusing to board the trucks.

Now there began a beastly, brutal, and inhuman bloodshed, a massacre of innocent human beings. They hit them with gunbutts, causing an indescribable panic. Soul-piercing screams filled the air. In this inconceivable cataclysm many were trampled to death, mainly children.

Whoever was able to do so put up a desperate defense as long as he had any strength left.

It was only the unconscious, many of them with broken limbs, whom the British were able to grab and dump like logs on their trucks filled with bodies.

When already on the trucks, some Cossacks, regaining consciousness, had jumped off. They were beaten until they fainted and were thrown on the trucks again. The cadets put up the fiercest resistance. They defended not only themselves, but did everything humanly possible to aid the women, the children, and the aged to escape imprisonment, repatriation, and their eventual doom in the USSR.

Numerous Cossacks and their wives committed suicide on that day, preferring death rather then deportation to a barbarous country which had once been Russia, our Fatherland.

Semiconscious, blood-soaked, and heavily wounded - that is how they filled the death train.

For unknown reasons the "Honorable Authority" had decided to give a respite, and the next voluntary transport "home" with respective victims was scheduled to take place on June 3rd. This respite saved the lives of many Cossacks and their wives.

During the night from June 1st to June 2nd there began the second act of the Cossacks' tragedy: the local population began to ransack the possessions of the Cossacks. Like black ravens who gather at the smell of fresh blood, the Austrians now looted the property of the Cossacks by the carload.

During these very days, and with equal procedures, the 15th Cossack Corps, consisting of 18,000 men, had been handed over to the Soviets near the town of Judenburg. Of this multitude there survived only 10 officers and 50 to 60 Cossacks who had broken the guards' cordon by using hand grenades, and who saved themselves by hiding in the nearby woods.

That is how, on May 29th, June 1st, and June 3rd, 1945, 45,000 Russians had been handed over to suffer violent retaliation, by close cooperation on the part of those governments of foreign powers, for whose integrity and interests the Russian Nation had shed its blood and had won victories in World War I.

At present the Peggetz camp is abandoned and has disappeared. Only in one of its comers there are, even now, as a momento of the Cossacks' tragedy, some forgotten graves of victims, with small, weather beaten crosses.

A future historian will pass an unbiased verdict on this bitter tragedy, a verdict on those representatives of "Proud Albion" who have disgraced the ruler of the seas in the past, and who are not worthy to call themselves contemporaries of civilized mankind.

Losses in personnel as great as had been suffered by these two units, namely that of General Domanov and the 15th Cossack Corps, in the course of a couple of days, in conditions of a finished war, have no precedent in Russian military history.

Within these units there had been representatives of the Don Cossacks, and they had formed the main cadres. However, there had been also Cossacks and their wives from other Cossack armies.

Within the 15th Cossack Corps there had been a number of compatriots who were not Cossacks.

Among the slain were heroic warriors of the former Army of the Russian Empire during World War I, and the leaders of the White

Cossacks in the years of the Civil War: General Ataman P.N. Krasnov, the Generals Shkuro and Prince Sultan-Girei-Klytch, and others.

In the capacity of the acting Don Ataman, I believe it to be my direct duty to remind the Cossacks of this monstrous catastrophe, and of its victim, the distinguished Don Ataman and White leader, Cavalry General Peter Nikolaevich Krasnov.

I ask you to give this event wide and expressive publicity, and to commemorate the days of the tragic anniversary in a solemn way wherever there are areas in which Cossacks have settled more densely.

I believe that all Cossacks, also those of our co-nationals who are non-Cossacks, will offer their sincere prayers

to commemorate the perished Russian soldiers.

I am convlnced that the Cossacks, united in common grief in these days of mourning, will forget their personal discords, and that they will ever closer unite to serve our dear Fatherland and its loyal sons, the Cossacks.The original signed by:

The Acting Don Ataman,Major General of the General Staff POLIAKOV

Lienz, AustriaMay 12th, 1949

Cossacks

General Andrei Andreievich Vlasov reviewing Russians in German uniforms http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Western_betrayal

Stallin's enemy