“There is not one German who has not murdered our fathers. Every German is a Nazi. Every German is a murderer.” Menachem Begin, former Prime Minister of Israel[1]
We have seen in a previous article how the term “Holocaust” has progressively been transformed into a potent weapon in ideological warfare. Over the past several years, the Holocaust establishment has worked tirelessly to ensure that this weaponized narrative is disseminated across the globe, including in various Asian countries.
In 2014, The New York Times published an article entitled “Raising Asian Awareness of the Holocaust.”[2] Throughout the piece, however, no mention was made of the extermination programs associated with Joseph Stalin, which were ultimately responsible for the deaths of millions of Russian peasants.[3] Nor did it address Mao Zedong’s extensive campaigns of repression and execution, which resulted in the deaths of at least 45 million people.[4] Likewise absent was any discussion of China’s eugenic policies, which led to the destruction of millions of innocent lives,[5] or of the communist regime in Vietnam, which was responsible for the brutal deaths of millions.[6]
In the twentieth century alone, many Asian countries came under communist regimes whose policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people across the continent. Yet the New York Times article implicitly suggested that Asia suffers from a lack of sufficient awareness of the Holocaust. Asia—where this writer currently resides—was thus encouraged to focus on what was presented as the singularly defining genocide of the modern era: that perpetrated by Nazi Germany. In effect, the underlying message appeared to be quite clear: historical attention should be directed primarily, if not exclusively, toward the Jewish Holocaust, while other mass atrocities receive comparatively little recognition.........
........The fact that the so-called Holocaust establishment rarely addresses these issues suggests that its primary concern lies in advancing particular ideological narratives rather than fostering a comprehensive examination of history. The time to move beyond a narrowly defined framework and to examine more fully what transpired in the aftermath of World War II is long overdue. Serious historians should not feel constrained by ideological or political pressures; rather, they must remain committed to the rigorous pursuit of historical truth rather than adherence to ideological orthodoxy. Noted British historian Giles Macdonogh writes that after the war,
“In most cases it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death but women, children and old men.”[57] It proved to be devastating, “particularly for civilians.”[58] The Red Army “raped wherever they went. They even raped Russians and Ukrainians. The worst and most aggravated rapes were perpetrated against the women of the enemy—first the Hungarians, then the Germans.”[59] MacDonogh notes that raping women was probably viewed as “a form of vengeance against these ‘superior women and the best way to humiliate them and their menfolk.”[60]
Full text: https://www.unz.com/article/raping-german-women-and-children-as-a-form-of-revenge-after-wwii/
Like in our modern day, Jews who stood up against such immorality were severely punished. “When the Ukrainian Jewish intellectual Lev Kopelev tried to intervene to save a German woman from a group of rampaging soldiers, he was accused of ‘bourgeois humanism’ and imprisoned for nine years.”[107]
East Prussia was the first German territory that the Red Army visited. “In the course of a single night,” writes MacDonogh, “the Red Army killed seventy-two women and one man. Most of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of the victims had been crucified.”[108]
Russian soldiers broke into at least one hospital operated by surgeon Hans Lehndorff and robbed
“his patients of their watches, beating up anyone who stood in their way. One of the attackers, ‘a really young fellow, suddenly burst into tears because he had yet to find a watch. He struck three fingers in the air. He was going to shoot the people if he did not get one at once.’ They found him a watch.”[109]
Watches were so important to them because of their “inability to master anything technical,” and it was considered as “an inexhaustible chapter.”[110] They not only stole watches, but
“all the bicycles they could find. [One woman] saw them take them up to a street near the Hasenheide where they practiced riding them. They sat ‘stiff on the saddles like champanzees in the zoo.’ They frequently fell off before they mastered the use of the two-wheeled beast. Many bicycles were broken in the process and the wreckage strewn over the street.”[111]
The next day, “swarms of soldiers attacked the population as they ventured out of the warrens they had inhabited during the long siege. They were beaten, robbed, stripped and, if female, raped.”[112] Given those horrible circumstances, “a very large number of [the populace] took their own lives to escape the indignity of Soviet revenge.”[113] The soldiers quickly contracted sexually transmitted diseases.
When that happened, they would burst into hospitals and “demanded treatment at gunpoint.”[114] But nothing dimmed their undying hatred towards the Germans:
“Those who lived in the villages of East Prussia fared no better than the townsfolk. A witness who made it to the west talked of a poor village girl who was raped by an entire tank squadron from eight in the evening to nine in the morning. One man was shot and fed to the pigs. Another woman tried to take the last train from Mohringen, but it was derailed and the passengers proceeded on foot, only to run into the Russians. She describes these soldiers breaking into a farmhouse and finding an Iron Cross, Second Class. The owner of the decoration and his wife were taken out and shot in the back of the head. The narrator herself was raped around twenty times the night she was captured, but there was worse in the store. She was carried off by two officers and seven men, whom she suspected were deserters, or temporarily estranged from their unit.
“They lodged her and eight other females, including a fourteen-year-old girl, in a house in the forest, where they raped them for a week. Their ordeal came to an end only when the GPU, the secret police, found the house. The woman was then taken to Insterburg and shipped beyond Stalingrad to the north-eastern Urals. She was in a carriage with fifty women for three weeks. During that time she had only two hot meals. The guards gave them salted herrings. They were so thirsty that they licked the condensation off the window panes. Five of the women had died by the time they reached their destination. They were suffering from typhus, dysentery and facial erysipelas.”[115]
Once the Russians had done all they could to denigrate the Germans, they set the city on fire. “Once the fun was over the remaining citizens were assembled for forced marches to camps. Anyone who was too old or too ill was shot there and then, either in their beds or in the gutters.”[116]
The Russians moved on to other cities, committing the same horrible crimes. In Pomerania, the women knew about the Russian rapists. “To protect them- selves,” MacDonogh tells us,
“the women covered themselves with ashes to make themselves look old, hobbled around on crutches or painted on red spots to feign disease. In a village near Greifenberg, in the western part of East Pomerania, the squire’s wife Kathe von Normann took the precaution of removing her false front tooth to make herself look older, and dressed herself in peasant costume. The older women adopted the same attire. It rarely worked—the Russians were none too choosy anyhow, and the victims ranged in age from tiny children to great-grandmothers.”[117]
In Danzig,
“it was open season for the Russian soldiers once again. They raped, murdered, and pillaged. Women between the ages of twelve and seventy-five were raped; boys who sought to rescue their mothers were pitilessly shot. The Russians defiled the ancient Cathedral of Oliva and raped the Sisters of Mercy. Later they put the building to the torch. In the hospitals both nurses and female doctors were subjected to the same outrages after the soldiers drank surgical spirit.
“Nurses were raped over the bodies of unconscious patients in the operating theatres together with the women in the maternity ward. Doctors who tried to stop this were simply gunned down…Many Danzigers took their own lives. The men were rounded up, beaten and thrown into the concentration camp at Matzkau. From there 800 to 1,000 were despatched to Russia twice daily.”[118]
Similar things happened in other cities such as Silesia, where “in one appalling incident thirty women were driven into a barn and raped. When one refused she was shot. The local Soviet commander heard about the atrocity and went to the barn and shot four of his own men.”[119]
One mother “went with her heavily pregnant sister to see a Russian doctor, believing that he would be a civilized man. They were both raped by the medic and a lieutenant, even though she herself was menstruating. The soldiers raped every female they found; one twelve-year-old girl complained of the terrible tearing they had caused her.”[120]
In light of these considerations, one may reasonably ask whether it is possible to discuss Nazi Germany while simultaneously ignoring these historical realities. Unless those who dominate the discourse surrounding the Holocaust are prepared to engage seriously with such events, we should not listen to their daily moaning, which begins generate growing public irritation.
This article is drawn from a chapter of my book Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism, vol. 2, which was written a little over a decade ago.
