Hatred for Germans
Hatred for Germans
American soldiers force German troops to see the bodies of those who starved to death in Woebbelin.
Original Caption: "An American MP escorts the line of German soldiers marched past the graves of the Wobbelin concentration camp starvation visctims under the supervision of the 82nd Airborne Division, U.S. Ninth Army, in the town of Ludwigslust, Germany, where graves have been prepared by German civilians.
“God , I hate the Germans,” Eisenhower wrote to his wife, Mamie, in September, 1944. Earlier, in front of the British ambassador to Washington, he had said that all the 3,500 or so officers of the German General Staff should be “exterminated.”
The Allies and their concentration camps
Former British Army veteran A.W Perkins of Holland-on-Sea described conditions in the ‘Sennelager’ British concentration camp, which shockingly held, not captured troops but civilians. He recounts;“During the latter half of 1945 I was with British troops guarding suspected Nazi civilians living on starvation rations in a camp called Sennelager. They were frequently beaten and grew as thin as concentration camp victims, scooping handfuls of swill from our waste bins.”
The most notorious American camps were the Rheinwiesenlager – the Rhine Meadow Camps – where more than 400,000 prisoners were left to starve out in open in the mud. 10% of them died from hunger, disease and exposure.
If captured in smaller groups, even the US Army policy was to slaughter the prisoners where they stood, especially if they were SS. The largest (currently acknowledged) massacres at the hands of the Americans were the murder of 700 troops of the surrendered 8th SS Mountain Division, atrocities carried out against the surrendered SS Westphalia Brigade where most of the German captives were shot through the back of the head, and the machine gunning of three hundred surrendered camp guards at Dachau.
By the winter of 1947, it was estimated that 4,160,000 German POWs were still held in ‘work camps’ outside Germany: 750,000 in France, 30,000 in Italy, 460,000 in Britain, 14,000 in Belgium (at one point, 48,000), 4,000 in Luxembourg and 1,300 in Holland (as discussed later, the Soviet Union started with 4,000,000-5,000,000, Yugoslavia had 80,000 and Czechoslovakia 45,000) as well as the USA’s 140,000 in the US Occupation Zone with 100,000 more later also held in France. It is estimated that 700,000 to a million men may have died within the period they spent incarcerated in American and French camps alone from 1945 to 1948.
In Poland, the so-called “Office of State Security,” an agency of the country’s new Soviet-controlled government, imposed its own brutal form of “de-Nazification.” Its agents raided German homes, rounding up some 200,000 men, women, children and infants — 99 percent of them non-combatant, innocent civilians. They were incarcerated in cellars, prisons, and 1,255 concentration camps where typhus was rampant and torture was commonplace. Between 60,000 and 80,000 Germans perished at the hands of the “Office of State Security.”

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