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A LONG HARD LOOK AT BRITTAN'S PAST
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
I don't know how this is being covered over there so thought I'd post it here...bit long, sorry.
Posted exact from http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Temp/Temp-PostwarHorror-Ayre.htm
"Let's get this straight: The Jews scream that their people have
been decimated by those evil Germans (but their story is iffy
at best) and they collect billion$... here we are told that the
German people themselves suffered unspeakable horrors at
the end of the war at the hands of the Allies... and never
wailed and complained... nor received a dime in compensation!
Could the entire history of those times be the reverse of what we have been told?
UNDER THE BRITISH JACKBOOT
Rape, torture, execution and the horrors of interrogation camps. A
new book paints a chilling picture of Germany under British rule
in the aftermath of World War II
...And Eisenhower deliberately starved to death German POWs after the war ended!
Read "Other Losses" by James Bacque... http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/01/08/DailyMail.html
Christopher Hudson
TRY to imagine Britain occupied by a victorious Germany after World War II. A young boy is executed for displaying a picture of Churchill on his birthday.
Theft carries the death penalty, so does possession of any kind of firearm.
Firing squads are expensive. Hanging wastes time. The Nazi Penal Branch asks permission to use the guillotine, which can carry out six single executions in 14 minutes.
Meanwhile, internment camps have sprung up across the country. Almost 40,000 British civilians and prisoners of war, men and women aged 16-70 have been swept up into these camps and are held without charge or expectation of a trial.
They include not only 'war criminals', profiteers and anti-Nazi agitators, but anyone who 'ridicules, damages or destroys' German culture, along with any persons 'considered dangerous to the Occupation or its objectives', even if they have not committed any offence.
One English mother of four has been imprisoned for a year because she hid in a ditch to snatch a word with her husband who was out on a working party.
Conditions in these camps are brutal. Inmates sleep in their clothes, packed five at a time like sardines on beds constructed from old pieces of wood.
There is so little to eat that the majority of them are emaciated.
Family visits are restricted to 30 minutes every three months.
Internees are frequently kept in dark cellars to prepare them for interrogation. According to a report compiled by a courageous German bishop, they are 'terribly beaten, kicked, and so mishandled that traces can be seen for weeks afterwards.
'The notorious Third Degree methods of using searchlights on victims and exposing them to high temperatures are also applied.' All this really happened -- but in reverse. It happened in Germany, and we, the British occupying forces, carried it out.
According to a new book by Patricia Meehan, historian and former BBC TV producer and documentarist who worked in Germany in 1945, the first few years of our Occupation were tarnished by deeds which would not have seemed out of place in Hitler's Third Reich.
Besides internment centres and holding camps for returned prisoners of war, there were also secret camps known by the initials DIC -- Direct Interrogation Centres.
One day in February 1947, two of the inmates of No.74 DIC (Bad Nenndorf) were dumped at an Internee Hospital. One patient was skeletal, suffering from frostbite, unable to speak; the other was unconscious, with no discernible pulse -- cold, skeletal and covered in 'thick cakes of dirt; frostbite to arms and legs'.
BOTH men died within hours. A third, who had been arrested on suspicion of drug trafficking, committed suicide while undergoing interrogation. The resulting investigation uncovered horror stories of deprivation amounting to torture. Men were treated for injuries without anaesthetic.
One prisoner, after eight days of solitary confinement, was put in an unheated punishment cell in midwinter. Buckets of cold water were thrown into the cell which the prisoner had to mop up with a rag.
His jacket and boots were removed, and he had to stand with bleeding feet for about ten hours in extreme cold on a concrete floor. Finally he had to crawl on hands and knees to interrogation.
The Camp Commandant, Medical Officer and three interrogators were suspended and charged. But charges were dropped or reduced to negligence.
All three courts-martial, including the Commandant's, petered out, and the men were allowed to leave the service.
True, Bad Nenndorf was an extreme case, which made the headlines. And after fighting Germany in two world wars, it was hardly surprising if there were outbreaks of vindictiveness among British officers who had fought and suffered in them.
CERTAINLY Hitler and Himmler would not have concerned themselves with the legality of such crimes.
Nevertheless, the very fact that this barbarism could have gone unnoticed or neglected by higher authorities for nearly two years is evidence of the chaos which engulfed defeated Germany, upon which no number of bureaucrats and administrators could at first impose order.
After Germany surrendered in May 1945, it was divided into sectors, with Russians in the east, Americans in the south, French in the west and the British occupying the northwest, from Bonn to Hamburg.
Millions of Germans were on the roads -- women, children and old people, pushing bicycles, prams and carts, or crowding into cattle wagons, to escape the Red Army which was killing and raping as it advanced, laying waste to millions of homes and driving soldiers and civilians alike back to forced labour in the USSR.
Meanwhile, thousands of Displaced Persons -- Germany's slave labourers from the East -- were roving the countryside, raping and pillaging, driven by hunger and vengeance.
Hatred for the Germans knew no bounds. Thousands of them died in Polish camps. In Czech camps, babies were drowned in latrines while their mothers were made to watch; German doctors were made to crawl and eat human excrement.
Hence the panic-driven migration to the western sectors, where 50 million Germans crowded into territory where 38 million had lived before the war.
Britain inherited the most heavily populated zone. Hamburg, the second biggest city after Berlin, lay in ruins. From July 24 to 29, 1943, five RAF raids had created a firestorm which rose two and a half miles above the city.
In those five nights, most of Hamburg was destroyed. Some 750,000 people were made homeless, and up to 150,000 killed -- many more than died from air raids in Britain in the whole of World War II.
When the occupying forces arrived in Hamburg, they discovered a land of cave-dwellers.
Thousands of people were living in windowless concrete air-raid shelters; thousands more crammed into cellars under the rubble or else climbed a ladder into rooms suspended in some teetering ruin, amid falling masonry.
Water supply was a standpipe in the ruins for a few hours a day, for those lucky enough to have a receptacle which could hold liquid. There were no knives, forks, pots, pans, needles, scissors, shoelaces, soap or household medicines.
Urban Germany had become a nation of rag-and-bone people, dragging little trailers after them in case they spotted something in the rubble, and rooting in dustbins for food which the newly-arrived occupying forces had thrown away.
The human response of British servicemen might have been one of sympathy, but by order of the London government, the C-in-C of the British Zone, Field Marshal Montgomery, was ordered to enforce a strict policy of 'non-fraternisation'.
'You must keep clear of Germans -- man, woman and child -- unless you meet them in the course of duty,' he instructed. 'You must not walk with them or shake hands or visit their homes.' There was to be no smiling, no playing with children; (soldiers were put on a charge for 'permitting children to climb on an Army vehicle').
General Eisenhower, in the U.S. sector, thought this self-defeating -- how were the Allies supposed to influence the Germans if they could not speak to little children?
It took Montgomery three months to persuade London of the sense of this, and it was another three months before the Cabinet cancelled the non-fraternisation order.
Relations immediately eased between the conquerors and the conquered, although a system of apartheid remained in place.
British and Germans travelled in separate carriages on the Under- ground. They did not worship together, or see films together, or sit together to listen to music. Officers' wives attending dances would have to be warned in advance if Germans were present.
It was unnatural; more than that, it put a brake on every aspect of administering Germany.
In May 1947 a new instruction was handed down: 'We should behave towards the Germans as the people of one Christian and civilised race towards another whose interests in many ways converge with our own and for whom we no longer have any ill-will.' The trouble was that it had been drummed into British personnel going out to the British Zone that the Germans were a race of pariahs.
In November 1945, the Foreign Office had set out the principles by which Germany should be governed: 'The primary purpose of the JACKBOOT Occupation is destructive and preventive, and our measures of destruction and prevention are only limited by consideration for (1) the security and wellbeing of the forces of Occupation, (2) prevention of unrest among the German people, (3) broad considerations of humanity.' The consequence was that in the early years all Germans were regarded as equally guilty, except by a handful of German specialists.
Ignorance started at the top. The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had not forgotten his time as an infantry officer in the trenches of World War I.
He once confided in the late Lord Longford that he had always disliked Germans very much, but that he and his wife had once had a nice German maid.
His Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, explained: 'I try to be fair to them but I 'ates them, really.' Neither of them ever visited the British Occupied Zone.
British attitudes towards Germans had hardened since the pre-war maxim that: 'All Germans are intelligent, honourable and pro-Hitler, but never more than two of these three.' Media hostility played its part.
Several newspaper correspondents in Germany were under tacit instructions not to send back reports which were complimentary to the Germans -- a line which did not really change until the Queen's visit in 1965.
Three factors contributed to the failure of the British administration to get to grips with the situation in the Occupied Zone despite the efforts of the native population to help.
The first was a diktat laid down to the Allies by President Roosevelt that all Nazi party members were to be excluded from public office and from important positions in private enterprise.
HE WAS told that party membership had been virtually a condition of employment in most of the German civil service, and that whole new departments would have to be recruited and trained up. But Roosevelt was unyielding.
The second was that the existence of a genuine opposition to Hitler within Germany, which had culminated in the failed July 1944 plot on his life, had been concealed from the British public for propaganda reasons during the war; it was easier to rally arms against an undivided evil.
Nor did people recall the 20 million Germans who had voted against Hitler in the last election before the war. This left the Zone administrators with no more sophisticated a view of the German people than was provided in a booklet handed out to all new arrivals.
Entitled The German Character, it explained how the Germans 'stress fanatical willpower, work and sacrifice' and described their sadism, fatalism and sentimentality, warning that to 'try and be kind or conciliatory will be regarded as weakness'.
Thoughtful British officials might have raised an eyebrow at this, but -- which was the third factor -- recruits to the central administration of the British Zone, known as the Control Commission Germany (CCG), tended not to be of high calibre.
They included demobbed servicemen with nowhere to go, officers who could not find a good job in 'civvy street', and in the words of a Foreign Office memo, 'retired drain-inspectors, unsuccessful businessmen and idle ex-policemen'.
Very few of them could speak German. Encouraged to believe that non-Nazis were as dangerous as Nazis, they kept all Germans at arm's length.
No one could apply for public employment who had not been de-nazified, which meant they had to fill in a form demanding their record of employment and income, and their memberships of every party, group, club, union or institute since Hitler came to power.
More than one million of these forms were issued. Checking them became a nightmare for the CCG officials, who knew no German and could not conceive the reality of life under a dictatorship.
Anybody who had not risked death by openly resisting the Nazi authorities became liable to dismissal or even internment. The process meant that Germans with invaluable knowledge and experience were being removed from their posts.
The Germans joked about Hitler's 1,000-year Reich -- 12 years of Nazism and 988 years of de-nazification. The CCG took the point. Soon it was no longer necessary to de-nazify all the typists, only the head typist.
Finally, in October 1947, the task was handed over to the German Lander or local government areas, to sort out properly.
There was plenty left to administer. It was a condition of the peace treaty that swathes of German industrial plant had to be dismantled and equipment destroyed.
Meanwhile the CCG regulated matters which even the Nazis had never interfered with. And even songs came under scrutiny in case they had links to the Nazis.
By the end of 1946, the CCG numbered 24,785 personnel, their American opposite numbers merely 5,008.
Overmanning brought boredom, drunkenness and corruption to the CCG as well as to servicemen. They were, after all, living in a country where everything could be bartered.
German food rations averaged 1,500 calories a day: too much to die on but not enough to live comfortably. Cigarettes were the only viable currency and all sales were black market.
Even girls from good families found that they had nothing to offer except their bodies -- either that or join the 'rubble ladies' who cleared the roads and ruins and emptied basements of half-decomposed corpses.
There were three women to every man. In Berlin, by December 1946, half a million women were selling sex for Western goods.
In the British zone, where one cigarette was worth five marks and troops had a free weekly allowance of 50 (plus chocolate and soap), 80 per cent of the girls suffered from VD, and penicillin had to be flown in from Britain.
On the grounds that the standard of morality of German women was so low, the British Army and Government agreed that troops should officially be excused from paying maintenance for any offspring that they conceived.
The Army C-in-C responded to the scandal by organising 'Leadership Courses' and early morning runs.
So much negligence, and so much callousness. But it has to be weighed against the loathing that existed for all things German -- a loathing which was being deepened by revelations of Nazi atrocities.
Newsreel of the death camps had been seen across the Western world.
Unlike eastern Europeans, the British in occupied Germany had no bloodlust for revenge.
AND their behaviour, even the worst of it, has to be set against the plans Hitler had for Occupied Britain, which decreed that Britain's entire able-bodied male population aged 17-45 would be dispatched to the Continent, thus bringing the UK effectively to a standstill.
And, slowly, some of the right decisions were made.
With a gigantic effort, German education in the British Zone was put back on its feet and the years of Nazi indoctrination overcome.
In June 1948 the three Western allies introduced the new currency, the Deutschmark, thus in a stroke destroying the black market and allowing shopkeepers to put goods on their shelves for sale in real money.
Finally, in July 1951, after six years, came the formal announcement of the end of 'the state of war with Germany'. The Army stayed on, but the Occupation was at an end.
A STRANGE Enemy People: Germans Under The British 1945-50, by Patricia Meehan, will be published by Peter Owen Publishers in September at GBP 17.99.
IP: Logged
kernal_panic
Executive Member
Posts: 1583
From:north fort myers a portion of florida that is still in america but being invaded
Registered: Jan 2001
posted 29 August 2001 19:34
oh and this is some kind of a surprise? HELLO! we are talking about the BRITISH! ASK anyone i mean anyone who ever was occupied by the british EVER if they weren't thugs. Gandhi when asked what he thought of western ie british civilization said " i think its a great idea" or to that effect.
Diesel
88888888
Posted exact from http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Temp/Temp-PostwarHorror-Ayre.htm
"Let's get this straight: The Jews scream that their people have
been decimated by those evil Germans (but their story is iffy
at best) and they collect billion$... here we are told that the
German people themselves suffered unspeakable horrors at
the end of the war at the hands of the Allies... and never
wailed and complained... nor received a dime in compensation!
Could the entire history of those times be the reverse of what we have been told?
UNDER THE BRITISH JACKBOOT
Rape, torture, execution and the horrors of interrogation camps. A
new book paints a chilling picture of Germany under British rule
in the aftermath of World War II
...And Eisenhower deliberately starved to death German POWs after the war ended!
Read "Other Losses" by James Bacque... http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/01/08/DailyMail.html
Christopher Hudson
TRY to imagine Britain occupied by a victorious Germany after World War II. A young boy is executed for displaying a picture of Churchill on his birthday.
Theft carries the death penalty, so does possession of any kind of firearm.
Firing squads are expensive. Hanging wastes time. The Nazi Penal Branch asks permission to use the guillotine, which can carry out six single executions in 14 minutes.
Meanwhile, internment camps have sprung up across the country. Almost 40,000 British civilians and prisoners of war, men and women aged 16-70 have been swept up into these camps and are held without charge or expectation of a trial.
They include not only 'war criminals', profiteers and anti-Nazi agitators, but anyone who 'ridicules, damages or destroys' German culture, along with any persons 'considered dangerous to the Occupation or its objectives', even if they have not committed any offence.
One English mother of four has been imprisoned for a year because she hid in a ditch to snatch a word with her husband who was out on a working party.
Conditions in these camps are brutal. Inmates sleep in their clothes, packed five at a time like sardines on beds constructed from old pieces of wood.
There is so little to eat that the majority of them are emaciated.
Family visits are restricted to 30 minutes every three months.
Internees are frequently kept in dark cellars to prepare them for interrogation. According to a report compiled by a courageous German bishop, they are 'terribly beaten, kicked, and so mishandled that traces can be seen for weeks afterwards.
'The notorious Third Degree methods of using searchlights on victims and exposing them to high temperatures are also applied.' All this really happened -- but in reverse. It happened in Germany, and we, the British occupying forces, carried it out.
According to a new book by Patricia Meehan, historian and former BBC TV producer and documentarist who worked in Germany in 1945, the first few years of our Occupation were tarnished by deeds which would not have seemed out of place in Hitler's Third Reich.
Besides internment centres and holding camps for returned prisoners of war, there were also secret camps known by the initials DIC -- Direct Interrogation Centres.
One day in February 1947, two of the inmates of No.74 DIC (Bad Nenndorf) were dumped at an Internee Hospital. One patient was skeletal, suffering from frostbite, unable to speak; the other was unconscious, with no discernible pulse -- cold, skeletal and covered in 'thick cakes of dirt; frostbite to arms and legs'.
BOTH men died within hours. A third, who had been arrested on suspicion of drug trafficking, committed suicide while undergoing interrogation. The resulting investigation uncovered horror stories of deprivation amounting to torture. Men were treated for injuries without anaesthetic.
One prisoner, after eight days of solitary confinement, was put in an unheated punishment cell in midwinter. Buckets of cold water were thrown into the cell which the prisoner had to mop up with a rag.
His jacket and boots were removed, and he had to stand with bleeding feet for about ten hours in extreme cold on a concrete floor. Finally he had to crawl on hands and knees to interrogation.
The Camp Commandant, Medical Officer and three interrogators were suspended and charged. But charges were dropped or reduced to negligence.
All three courts-martial, including the Commandant's, petered out, and the men were allowed to leave the service.
True, Bad Nenndorf was an extreme case, which made the headlines. And after fighting Germany in two world wars, it was hardly surprising if there were outbreaks of vindictiveness among British officers who had fought and suffered in them.
CERTAINLY Hitler and Himmler would not have concerned themselves with the legality of such crimes.
Nevertheless, the very fact that this barbarism could have gone unnoticed or neglected by higher authorities for nearly two years is evidence of the chaos which engulfed defeated Germany, upon which no number of bureaucrats and administrators could at first impose order.
After Germany surrendered in May 1945, it was divided into sectors, with Russians in the east, Americans in the south, French in the west and the British occupying the northwest, from Bonn to Hamburg.
Millions of Germans were on the roads -- women, children and old people, pushing bicycles, prams and carts, or crowding into cattle wagons, to escape the Red Army which was killing and raping as it advanced, laying waste to millions of homes and driving soldiers and civilians alike back to forced labour in the USSR.
Meanwhile, thousands of Displaced Persons -- Germany's slave labourers from the East -- were roving the countryside, raping and pillaging, driven by hunger and vengeance.
Hatred for the Germans knew no bounds. Thousands of them died in Polish camps. In Czech camps, babies were drowned in latrines while their mothers were made to watch; German doctors were made to crawl and eat human excrement.
Hence the panic-driven migration to the western sectors, where 50 million Germans crowded into territory where 38 million had lived before the war.
Britain inherited the most heavily populated zone. Hamburg, the second biggest city after Berlin, lay in ruins. From July 24 to 29, 1943, five RAF raids had created a firestorm which rose two and a half miles above the city.
In those five nights, most of Hamburg was destroyed. Some 750,000 people were made homeless, and up to 150,000 killed -- many more than died from air raids in Britain in the whole of World War II.
When the occupying forces arrived in Hamburg, they discovered a land of cave-dwellers.
Thousands of people were living in windowless concrete air-raid shelters; thousands more crammed into cellars under the rubble or else climbed a ladder into rooms suspended in some teetering ruin, amid falling masonry.
Water supply was a standpipe in the ruins for a few hours a day, for those lucky enough to have a receptacle which could hold liquid. There were no knives, forks, pots, pans, needles, scissors, shoelaces, soap or household medicines.
Urban Germany had become a nation of rag-and-bone people, dragging little trailers after them in case they spotted something in the rubble, and rooting in dustbins for food which the newly-arrived occupying forces had thrown away.
The human response of British servicemen might have been one of sympathy, but by order of the London government, the C-in-C of the British Zone, Field Marshal Montgomery, was ordered to enforce a strict policy of 'non-fraternisation'.
'You must keep clear of Germans -- man, woman and child -- unless you meet them in the course of duty,' he instructed. 'You must not walk with them or shake hands or visit their homes.' There was to be no smiling, no playing with children; (soldiers were put on a charge for 'permitting children to climb on an Army vehicle').
General Eisenhower, in the U.S. sector, thought this self-defeating -- how were the Allies supposed to influence the Germans if they could not speak to little children?
It took Montgomery three months to persuade London of the sense of this, and it was another three months before the Cabinet cancelled the non-fraternisation order.
Relations immediately eased between the conquerors and the conquered, although a system of apartheid remained in place.
British and Germans travelled in separate carriages on the Under- ground. They did not worship together, or see films together, or sit together to listen to music. Officers' wives attending dances would have to be warned in advance if Germans were present.
It was unnatural; more than that, it put a brake on every aspect of administering Germany.
In May 1947 a new instruction was handed down: 'We should behave towards the Germans as the people of one Christian and civilised race towards another whose interests in many ways converge with our own and for whom we no longer have any ill-will.' The trouble was that it had been drummed into British personnel going out to the British Zone that the Germans were a race of pariahs.
In November 1945, the Foreign Office had set out the principles by which Germany should be governed: 'The primary purpose of the JACKBOOT Occupation is destructive and preventive, and our measures of destruction and prevention are only limited by consideration for (1) the security and wellbeing of the forces of Occupation, (2) prevention of unrest among the German people, (3) broad considerations of humanity.' The consequence was that in the early years all Germans were regarded as equally guilty, except by a handful of German specialists.
Ignorance started at the top. The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had not forgotten his time as an infantry officer in the trenches of World War I.
He once confided in the late Lord Longford that he had always disliked Germans very much, but that he and his wife had once had a nice German maid.
His Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, explained: 'I try to be fair to them but I 'ates them, really.' Neither of them ever visited the British Occupied Zone.
British attitudes towards Germans had hardened since the pre-war maxim that: 'All Germans are intelligent, honourable and pro-Hitler, but never more than two of these three.' Media hostility played its part.
Several newspaper correspondents in Germany were under tacit instructions not to send back reports which were complimentary to the Germans -- a line which did not really change until the Queen's visit in 1965.
Three factors contributed to the failure of the British administration to get to grips with the situation in the Occupied Zone despite the efforts of the native population to help.
The first was a diktat laid down to the Allies by President Roosevelt that all Nazi party members were to be excluded from public office and from important positions in private enterprise.
HE WAS told that party membership had been virtually a condition of employment in most of the German civil service, and that whole new departments would have to be recruited and trained up. But Roosevelt was unyielding.
The second was that the existence of a genuine opposition to Hitler within Germany, which had culminated in the failed July 1944 plot on his life, had been concealed from the British public for propaganda reasons during the war; it was easier to rally arms against an undivided evil.
Nor did people recall the 20 million Germans who had voted against Hitler in the last election before the war. This left the Zone administrators with no more sophisticated a view of the German people than was provided in a booklet handed out to all new arrivals.
Entitled The German Character, it explained how the Germans 'stress fanatical willpower, work and sacrifice' and described their sadism, fatalism and sentimentality, warning that to 'try and be kind or conciliatory will be regarded as weakness'.
Thoughtful British officials might have raised an eyebrow at this, but -- which was the third factor -- recruits to the central administration of the British Zone, known as the Control Commission Germany (CCG), tended not to be of high calibre.
They included demobbed servicemen with nowhere to go, officers who could not find a good job in 'civvy street', and in the words of a Foreign Office memo, 'retired drain-inspectors, unsuccessful businessmen and idle ex-policemen'.
Very few of them could speak German. Encouraged to believe that non-Nazis were as dangerous as Nazis, they kept all Germans at arm's length.
No one could apply for public employment who had not been de-nazified, which meant they had to fill in a form demanding their record of employment and income, and their memberships of every party, group, club, union or institute since Hitler came to power.
More than one million of these forms were issued. Checking them became a nightmare for the CCG officials, who knew no German and could not conceive the reality of life under a dictatorship.
Anybody who had not risked death by openly resisting the Nazi authorities became liable to dismissal or even internment. The process meant that Germans with invaluable knowledge and experience were being removed from their posts.
The Germans joked about Hitler's 1,000-year Reich -- 12 years of Nazism and 988 years of de-nazification. The CCG took the point. Soon it was no longer necessary to de-nazify all the typists, only the head typist.
Finally, in October 1947, the task was handed over to the German Lander or local government areas, to sort out properly.
There was plenty left to administer. It was a condition of the peace treaty that swathes of German industrial plant had to be dismantled and equipment destroyed.
Meanwhile the CCG regulated matters which even the Nazis had never interfered with. And even songs came under scrutiny in case they had links to the Nazis.
By the end of 1946, the CCG numbered 24,785 personnel, their American opposite numbers merely 5,008.
Overmanning brought boredom, drunkenness and corruption to the CCG as well as to servicemen. They were, after all, living in a country where everything could be bartered.
German food rations averaged 1,500 calories a day: too much to die on but not enough to live comfortably. Cigarettes were the only viable currency and all sales were black market.
Even girls from good families found that they had nothing to offer except their bodies -- either that or join the 'rubble ladies' who cleared the roads and ruins and emptied basements of half-decomposed corpses.
There were three women to every man. In Berlin, by December 1946, half a million women were selling sex for Western goods.
In the British zone, where one cigarette was worth five marks and troops had a free weekly allowance of 50 (plus chocolate and soap), 80 per cent of the girls suffered from VD, and penicillin had to be flown in from Britain.
On the grounds that the standard of morality of German women was so low, the British Army and Government agreed that troops should officially be excused from paying maintenance for any offspring that they conceived.
The Army C-in-C responded to the scandal by organising 'Leadership Courses' and early morning runs.
So much negligence, and so much callousness. But it has to be weighed against the loathing that existed for all things German -- a loathing which was being deepened by revelations of Nazi atrocities.
Newsreel of the death camps had been seen across the Western world.
Unlike eastern Europeans, the British in occupied Germany had no bloodlust for revenge.
AND their behaviour, even the worst of it, has to be set against the plans Hitler had for Occupied Britain, which decreed that Britain's entire able-bodied male population aged 17-45 would be dispatched to the Continent, thus bringing the UK effectively to a standstill.
And, slowly, some of the right decisions were made.
With a gigantic effort, German education in the British Zone was put back on its feet and the years of Nazi indoctrination overcome.
In June 1948 the three Western allies introduced the new currency, the Deutschmark, thus in a stroke destroying the black market and allowing shopkeepers to put goods on their shelves for sale in real money.
Finally, in July 1951, after six years, came the formal announcement of the end of 'the state of war with Germany'. The Army stayed on, but the Occupation was at an end.
A STRANGE Enemy People: Germans Under The British 1945-50, by Patricia Meehan, will be published by Peter Owen Publishers in September at GBP 17.99.
IP: Logged
kernal_panic
Executive Member
Posts: 1583
From:north fort myers a portion of florida that is still in america but being invaded
Registered: Jan 2001
posted 29 August 2001 19:34
oh and this is some kind of a surprise? HELLO! we are talking about the BRITISH! ASK anyone i mean anyone who ever was occupied by the british EVER if they weren't thugs. Gandhi when asked what he thought of western ie british civilization said " i think its a great idea" or to that effect.
Diesel
88888888
0
Comments
If you read that carefully you will see that its an article from the Daily Mail, one of our largest newspapers..
This article is exactly how its being covered over here..Sorry if that knocks your views on the censorship of the British press <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/smile.gif">
As to my views on the article, you might have read my reply to it on another board <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/smile.gif">
Ill wait until I actually read the book and see its sources before I pass judgement..It just seems a little odd that more people arent talking about it. There have been letters in the daily mail about the story, from people who were actually there working. These people dont seem to remember any of this happening..
If this stuff did happen, it certainly didnt happen everywhere and it certainly wasnt common practice.
America wasnt pure as the driven snow in and after ww2 if you remember <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/smile.gif">
"An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue." --Henry James
Misdeeds can only be hid for just so long...frankly, I expect to book to be banned by your government shortly after it comes off the press...just like the details of the murder of Rudolph Hess...by english troops guarding Spandau prison...victor's justice indeed.
Diesel
88888888
Considering the sheer numbers of people involved in the rebuilding of Berlin, I dont believe for a second that they shut everyone up in the name of national security. Surely the Germans might have brought it up in conversation dont you think?
Anyway I will read the book as it sounds interesting..I dont doubt you have heard things about this kind of thing. I know what you think of Britain.
rofl...yeah sure the book will be banned...After its been previewed in a national newspaper..Hell why not even have a massed book burning in Trafalgar Square...It doesnt work that way in Britain..If it were a book detrimental to national security then it would certainly NOT have been reviewed in the papers.
The British people know that we havent had a perfectly clean history..It was worse than some and better than some. You seem to have this image that we are not told anything by our government and all the secrets are still hidden deep in some old bunker somewhere...The UK government is a LOT more open than the US government and thats a fact im afraid.
America has had her fair share of atrocities...both in the past and currently happening as we speak. Britain is involved in the current ones as well.
Do you honestly think that while the British were apparently doing all this to the poor Germans that the Americans were being angels? I think it is FAR more telling that there is no book on US actions in their area of Germany...I wonder why that is???It certainly isnt because they were so bleedin kind.
PS...What book on Hess is banned by the Brit govt?
"An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue." --Henry James
Depends on which book you read The Brits, Yanks, Russians and I think French (?) all took turns guarding Hess and I'm sure I've read at some time or another all Countries have been blamed for his death/murder.
Some doubt that it was even Hess that was there ?
your view of the UK is somewhat incorrect IMHO
peacechild
And if I show you my dark side
will you still hold me tonight
and if I open my heart to you
and show you my weak side
what would you do
sure, we've done some unforgivable stuff in our time. but, in comparison to nazi atrocities (they did create almost a new definition for the word) its a bit naive to complain.
to put the boot on the other foot:
lets take a not very long or hard look at the past of the USA:
1807 - britain and almost every other country in the world has banned the slave trade. except the USA.
1833 - britain and almost every other country has banned the institution of slavery. except the USA.
1890 - wounded knee. US forces massacre over 300 defenceless native americans
1945 - 'little boy' and 'fat man' kill an estimated 280,000 civilians (mainly women and children), and ruin the lives of millions for decades. menawhile, tentative peace feelers were being sent out by Japan.
1968 - US troops massacre 109 unarmed civilians (mainly women and children) at the vietnamese village of My Lai.
1775-present day - US systematically annihilates the Native American population, by a variety of means (war, land seizure, biased negotations, commercial strangulation). actual death toll unknown - estimated anywhere between 12 and 100+ million.
you see, every nation has a pretty awful past, and i'm not saying that britain doesnt. i just thought i should present a slightly more objective view of US history, whilst you slag off my homeland.
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum
Diesel, where did u get that piece of info from?? Becos a few days ago the Daily Mail (a paper over here) did an article with EXACTLY the same wording!
Actually matey, IT IS the same.
If we were so scared of our past would our newspapers do articles on it?
I'm ashamed of somethings we have done, but I do have one word to say about the thing you wrote...REVENGE.
It was all about revenge, naturally we were a bit pissed off at Germany trying to conquer Europe, FOR A SECOND time round. Your soldiers were friendly towards the Nazis because your civilians weren't being killed by them. You weren't so lenient on the Japanese were you???
Personally, I thought the USA was doing okay up to that point. No country's perfect, and they've only had a century-and-a-half to find their feet.
Then they go and forget all their nation's beginnings and go fight a brutal war they REALLY should have known better than to touch. The reason: it was Far-Eastern mirror of their own War of Independence.
Ho Chi-Minh was primarily a nationalist. That's right, just like Washington, Adams, Jefferson and company, he wanted his homeland to be free from its imperial masters.
Of course, when your imperial masters happen to be arch-capitalists, you aren't going to get much support from anyone except the Soviets and Chinese.
Ho Chi-Minh was nominally communist, and only nominally. He turned to them only because no-one else would help him in his quest to free his country. As Vietnamese leader, he lived the life of a near-ascetic, shunning the cult of personality that was thrown up around him.
The USA should have known far better than to get involved in a war of national independence. Having fought one only 150 years beforehand, they should have known damn well how unbeatable the idea of national unification and freedom is.
America is still in denial about the Vietnam War. Still you here phrases like "It was not a defeat!" or "The military could have won it, but the politicians fluffed out!" The stark truth is that the USA shouldn't have been there in the first place, for moral, not practical, reasons.
USA, the UK welcomes you to the Failed Imperialist Powers Club. Membership fees fully paid - in blood.
The American general in charge ordered every person over the age of TEN killed lest he bear arms against the Americans..This was actually ordered and carried out..
America has its skeletons
"An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue." --Henry James
Hmmmmm...... where do you start?
Say what you want about the British but they always fought like gentlemen and observed the rules of war.
Feel free to point out where British soldiers deliberately massacred an entire village load of innocent civilians.
Interesting that us Brits have done more fighting than almost any other nation on earth and yet we have very few atrocities committed by our troops.
Ill be waiting with anticipation for your documented evidence of Britains 'Vietnams'. I cant wait <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/smile.gif">
When we decided to "obtain" an empire, we didnt systematically slaughter the native populations. Americans and Germans are both guilty of that.
Maybe we did try and force our value system, but we didnt do it in a cruel and oppresive way. In many of the countries we ruled, for example India, Egypt, Iran, Iraq we allowed the local populations to mostly administer their own affairs, keep their own currencies, practice their own religions.
The only thing we insisted on was that they abided by our rules, and in return we provided for them. We gave them health, education and most importantly protection. People knew that as long as the British maintained a prescence they were safe from outside oppression. It is well documented that many people living under our rule had a better standard of living than people living in Britain itself.
A lot of people will also claim racism was rife, this is blatantly unjustified. Racism was only present amongst visitors, it is widely known that the soldiers and administrators living in the region were very close to many locals.
How many other empires, apart from the Roman empire can boast this? Certainly not the Germans, Americans, or Japanese. The only empires that were similar in organisation to ours were the French and Dutch.
Except that it was the Brits who 'invented' concetration camps - during the Boer War
This would probably be in India (I forget the exact place) where Britsish Troops massacred over 300 unarmed civilians.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That said, your underlying point is correct.
The US can throw as many stones as they like, but they live in a glasshouse just like us.
Thats as may be but I very much doubt it was the troops who did that kind of thing but rather local administrators. I also think it was a matter of teaching the boers a lesson..They gave us quite a kicking back then..It wasnt a common occurance though even if it was horrificly barbaric.
You'll have to be a little more specific on that.
"An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue." --Henry James
I suggest you take a look at the mutiny. Indians strapped across the mouth of canon and blown to bits. Gentlemen?
Ah, so that is why the word "wog" is so widespread through descriptions of the period. Why Lawrence was so impressed with his fellow officers.
I can think of worse words and treatment that were around in other countries, and still are.
Only a barbaric country would allow the ku klux clan to exist.......
Soldiers sean, soldiers..They never strapped a little old lady across the barrel of a cannon.
Sean do you even know what wog means? It was not a derogatory word to describe non-whites as so many think today. Look it up and stop spouting your ignorant rubbish
What it was and what it has become through useage are very different things. Btw, the British Army may not have strapped any little old ladies across the mouth of canon, but they sure did strap more than just soldiers. And even for soldiers, it isn't behavior fit to a gentleman, is it? Kind of like impressment, and flogging, and keel hauling. But the British have always behaved as gentlemen, haven't they?
Hmmmmm...sounds like what the Nazis said about the Jews...
Well you referred to how it was being used in the period of Lawrence...Its an acronym for 'Westernised Oriental Gentleman'..It has been bastardized by the modern generation.
You seem to think this was a common occurance. It wasnt..This was used as a method of execution..It was reserved for soldiers and serious criminals. If you can provide some evidence that they ever did it to civilians then ill take your point.
Erm we arent talking about the way soldiers treat soldiers..This is a thread about the treatment of german civilians..Feel free to go on one of your anti british tirades on another thread.
eh?? I have no idea what you are talking about in that one.
"An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue." --Henry James
----
The English (and later the British) haven't always fought like gentlemen. But name one people that HAVE always been white knights and you can count that as a demerit - and only then.
Anyone remember Maximus' line in Gladiator? It could equally well apply to the British Empire as the Roman:
The Romans had their nasty side, but they were a heck of a lot better (by our standards, I concede) than those they assimilated.
Maximus saw Rome as the light because he was Roman. No German or Hun would have felt the same way.
Two words: Northern Ireland
Here's a link to a page that describes the punishment of the mutineers.
http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Alley/5443/delhi2.jpg
"I'd rather have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it."
[This message has been edited by Mr_Perfect (edited 01-09-2001).]
A quote from this site below and many other articles describe the events in a very similar fashion. Not just mutineers murdered but all the villagers as well. http://landow.stg.brown.edu/victorian/history/empire/epic.html
How gentlemanly of you.
"I'd rather have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it."
I think he's referring to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 13 April 1919.
Here an excerpt from the web site I have linked below:
http://w3.gwis.com/~ajmani/jalianwalabagh.html
These post aren't directed at Man of Kent. MoK and I both agree that both countries have this to be ashamed of. These post are to the jokers who say the British always fight like gentlemen.
Personally, I like the British and I'm glad we're allies. The USA isn't perfect, but it's the closer to being perfect than any other country in the world with England as a close runner up.
"I'd rather have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it."
I guess we are, after all, just as bad as everyone else.
but you would say that. because you're an american <IMG alt="image" SRC="http://www.thesite.org/ubb/smile.gif">. actually, i think countries like andorra, greenland, and many others with largely unremarkable recent histories (no offence!) are far superior (if we're talking morals here) to the US or UK.
anyhow, a nations actions are in general determined not by the people but by the leadership, even up to the present day. there are obvious exceptions of course, but the role of the individual or small group in history is generally what is felt more than the actions of a people as a whole.
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum
I didn't say that the UK was that much better than the USA. I simply pointed out that the USA completely abrogated its original principles by fighting as it did in Vietnam. Or perhaps you think that massacring women and children in an effort to maintain an imperial grip over a country that only ever wanted to govern itself was right? I thought America was built on the principle that a nation should be allowed to make its own fuckups, even if others knew better.
Are you under the mistaken impression that the Vietnam War was a civil war? Or that there wasn't both Chinese and Russian influence in Vietnam?
Not defending the American handling of Vietnam, particularly in 1945 when they could have befriended Ho Chi Minh, but the points you make aren't actually the centre of the issues in that war.