World War II: The Savage Aftermath

1945 The Savage Peace – BBC 2015 Documentary Atrocities Against German Civilians

A powerful documentary revealing the appalling violence meted out to the defeated in 1945. Using rare and unseen archive film, 1945: The Savage Peace tells a harrowing story of vengeance against German civilians, which mirrored some of the worst cruelty of the Nazi occupiers during the years of war.

When the Second World War ended, the people celebrated their freedom from Nazi tyranny. Their years of suffering had ended, but for millions of Germans, the end of the conflict opened a new and terrible chapter. The Savage Peace reveals the appalling violence meted out to the defeated, especially to those ethnic Germans who had lived peacefully for centuries in neighboring countries.

Eisenhower’s Rhine Meadows Death Camps

Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower’s policies caused the death of 1 million German POW German captives in internment camps through disease, starvation and cold from 1944 to 1949. In similar French camps some 250,000 more are said to have perished. The International Committee of the Red Cross was refused entry to the camps, Switzerland was deprived of its status as “protecting power” and POWs were reclassified as “Disarmed Enemy Forces” in order to avoid recognition under the Geneva Convention. Bacque argued that this alleged mass murder was a direct result of the policies of the western Allies, who, with the Soviets, ruled as the Military Occupation Government over partitioned Germany from May 1945 until 1949. He laid the blame on Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, saying Germans were kept on starvation rations even though there was enough food in the world to avert the lethal shortage in Germany in 1945–1946.

Hitler Lives
This Academy Award winning documentary is an excellent example of post-WWII, pre-Cold War propaganda (the target is a revitalized and aggressive Germany, not an expansionist and totalitarian Soviet Union). It is very effectively produced, incorporating a powerful emotional narrative with many searing images familiar to theater audiences of the day who had been exposed to Frank Capra’s celebrated Why We Fight series.

So long as hate, racism, and intolerance exists — Hitler Lives.

After The Reich – The Brutal History of The Allied Occupation, by Giles MacDonogh .pdf

Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, by Keith Lowe;  After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, by Giles MacDonogh;  Gruesome Harvest, by Ralph Franklin Keeling; Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation, 1944–1950, by James Bacque; OTHER LOSSES: The Shocking Truth Behind the Mass Deaths of Disarmed German Soldiers and Civilians Under General Eisenhower’s Command, by James Bacque; Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, by Thomas Goodrich; Churchill’s War, by David Irving; Churchill’s War – Volume II: Triumph in Adversity, by David Irving ; Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, by Patrick J. Buchanan; Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans, by Alfred-Maurice de Zayas;  A Terrible Revenge. The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944–1950, by Alfred-Maurice de Zayas;  Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War, by R. M. Douglas;  Forgotten Voices: The Expulsion of the German from Eastern Europe After World War II, by Ulrich Merten; The Fall of Berlin 1945, by Anthony Beevor;  No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945, by Norman Davies; Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder;  Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, by Anne Applebaum;  Operation Keelhaul: The Story of Forced Repatriation, by Julius Epstein;  Advance to Barbarism: How the Reversion to Barbarism in Warfare and War-Trials Menaces Our Future, by F. J. P. Veale;  Victims of Yalta: The Secret Betrayal of the Allies, 1944-1947, by Nikolai Tolstoy;  I Saw Poland Betrayed: An American Ambassador Reports to the American People, by Arthur Bliss Lane;  Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath, by George H. Nash (ed.); The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Christopher Simpson; The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, by David Talbot;  and Crimes Unspoken: The Rape of German Women at the End of the Second World War 1st Edition, by Miriam Gebhardt (Author), Nick Somers (Translator).

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