Crimes and Mercies (15 page)

Another proof of the KGB accuracy is the record of the fate of the German civilians who were taken away as reparations slaves to the Gulag in 1945. During the Cold War, the German government found itself unable to believe the reports of the Soviet government on the subject, so they laboriously surveyed the families and published the results of the civilian study in a massive book
entitled
The Expulsion of the German Population from the Territories
East of the Oder–Neisse Line
.
⁴⁵
They concluded that the Soviets had deported some 218,000 civilians to the Gulag as slaves. Deaths were suspected by the Germans to be about 20,000. However, as we saw above, when the NKVD/MVD/KGB archives on prisoners of war were opened recently, the Soviet documents showed that 271,672 people in this category had been deported, of whom a huge number, 66,481, had died.
⁴⁶
Here was another Soviet atrocity suspected in the West, and confirmed in the Soviet archives. The great significance of this is that we now know that the Germans and Soviets agree that the Soviet records are authentic
on the subject of German prisoners
.

The Red Cross and the names

The Russian Red Cross has over the last twenty years responded to 500,000 requests from German families inquiring about the fate of their men, who they supposed had been taken to the Soviet Union. Using the KGB records, the Russians were able to trace 50,000 prisoners and report their fate. The Japanese have been given similar data for 62,000 of their prisoners. German researchers have been at work in the CSSA archive since 1991, transcribing data for millions of prisoners from the original Russian into German.
⁴⁷
No such information is available in American, French, Canadian, Swiss or British archives.

Documents about the fate of some 640,000 Japanese prisoners taken by the Red Army in Manchuria in August 1945 have a significant relation to the fate of the German prisoners in the hands of the Western powers, because they provide another chance to determine the general accuracy of KGB prisoner records.

In at least thirty-five central camps already identified, Japanese prisoners were kept alongside German and other European prisoners. It is highly significant that the death rate reported by the KGB among the Japanese and German prisoners from 1945 onwards was almost exactly the same. For the Japanese
the rate was about 9.6 per cent (full term) and for the Germans 9.4 per cent. As we shall see below, the death rate among the Japanese was reported correctly by the KGB,
according to the
Japanese themselves
. This provides even more evidence of the accuracy of the KGB figures for deaths among Germans after 1945.

Because the Japanese were kept by the same MVD camp system under the same conditions and in many of the same camps as the German and other European prisoners after August 1945, the fate of the Japanese must be very similar to that of the Germans and other Europeans after August 1945. The fate of the Japanese prisoners has been determined by the Japanese themselves, which enables us to give a definite answer to the question, is that fate accurately described in the Soviet documents?

Beginning about two years after the war, Japanese families began asking when their missing men were coming home. The US military government of Japan, the US State department, and the Japanese, British and Australian governments berated the Soviets for enslaving a million or more Japanese prisoners of war during 1945–50. They accused the Soviets of hiding the fate of these prisoners because they were slaves, or else slave-soldiers impressed into the Red Army to wage war against the democracies. The Japanese and Americans said at various times that some 300,000 to 500,000 prisoners were ‘missing’ or ‘not accounted for’, in Soviet camps. They hinted strongly that most were dead. The Soviets angrily denied this, saying that only 10,627 had died.
⁴⁸
They then fired back the charge that around 100,000 Japanese POWs had died in American, British and Australian camps. The Japanese produced for the UN a list of 253,000 ‘known dead’, whereupon Jakob Malik, the Soviet Ambassador to the UN, denounced the Japanese. Huge rallies gathered in Tokyo, and General Douglas MacArthur, the American commander, said that the missing prisoners were ‘the most serious concern’ he had ever had in his years of rule in Japan.
⁴⁹

Just as they had lied to the public about Katyn for many years, the Soviets kept their records secret while they lied about the
deaths of Japanese in their camps. For instance, having said in 1950 that some 3,800 Japanese prisoners died, a few years later they amended this to the much higher figure of 30,000.

However, by careful interrogation of returning Japanese prisoners over many years, the Japanese themselves gradually determined by 1960 that of the 640,000 soldiers in the Kwantung army taken prisoner, some 62,000 had died.
⁵⁰
The British, Americans and Australians meanwhile contended in the UN and other places that millions had been taken and many hundreds of thousands had died.

After
glasnost
, Russians working in the Soviet archives found the death certificates and personal dossiers for the prisoners. The deaths recorded there numbered about 62,000. Mikhail Gorbachev in April 1991 and Boris Yeltsin in 1994 each gave the figure of 62,000 to the Japanese government with an apology, and Yeltsin provided a list of the names of those who died. The list and explanation were accepted with thanks by the Japanese.
⁵¹

As the propaganda missiles roared round the world for forty years, these separate records lay undisturbed in the archives in Moscow, Tokyo and probably Washington. And the amazing thing was, these records agreed that 62,000 had died.

And for forty years, no one said so.

In sum, then, these tremendous Soviet archives report in great detail the fates of three ranks of prisoner from twenty-five countries through fifteen years. They are by far the most valuable, precise and comprehensive documents ever discovered in any archive in the world about the fate of prisoners of the Second World War. We know they are reliable because they fit all other known evidence, explain Western historical lacunae, are supported by millions of subsidiary documents, and are confirmed by German, Polish and Japanese reports. Most important, they were kept secret for over forty years because the Soviet leaders feared them. And this was because they believed them. They recorded a huge atrocity committed against many nations.
⁵²

In contrast, in the West, it is admitted by archivists and historians that the Western archives have been weeded of revealing material.
⁵³
There are no personal dossiers for any prisoners anywhere in the West. The British government withheld documents such as the Phillimore Report from this author when he was researching the Germans in British camps.
⁵⁴
The Canadian archives contain complaints by the former Empress Zita of Austria that the Canadian troops were behaving like Nazis towards Austrian prisoners in the camp at Aurich. But there are no records of any investigation, just a routine high-level denial that is contradicted by an unpublished Canadian army report. This frankly records ‘indescribable filth’ in the latrines, complete lack of utensils in the kitchens, ‘extremely cold’ conditions, and ‘poor health’ among the prisoners, most of whom had been taken from hospital.
⁵⁵
As we have already seen, the International Red Cross has several times refused this author access to their Second World War files while admitting three other writers. Following reports in 1991 of atrocities in French camps in 1946, the death records in the archive of the town of Labouheyre were closed to historians. They had previously been open for over sixty years. These are only a few of the many examples of how a vast international falsification has been maintained for sixty years. Sometimes the Allies have lied in co-operation with the Soviets, sometimes they have lied to foment hatred of them, sometimes they have lied to cover up their own crimes. They are still at it.

Since there is no doubt of the veracity of the Soviet records, and no doubt as to the veracity of the German reports of the missing, we are led inevitably to conclude that the 1.4/1.7 million known missing German soldiers did not die in the Soviet camps as previously alleged. When the 450,000 German deaths in Soviet hands are subtracted from the overall total of 1.4/1.7 million missing prisoners,
⁵⁶
we see that the deaths not in the Soviet camps must have been at least one million.

The Cold War is over, the Russians are telling the truth, but in the West, the lying continues. In the last few years, dozens of articles, hours of TV film and two books have been published which
perpetuate this cover-up. This is undoubtedly the longest running big lie in the history of the Western democracies.

*
‘Complete’ means 100 per cent of the households in the area were surveyed. For more detail see Appendix 7.

V
A
ND THE
C
HURCHES
F
LEW
B
LACK FLAGS

‘The Morgenthau Plan was conceived in sin, died at birth and lived
to a ripe old age.’

ANONYMOUS

Two contradictory Allied policies began to operate simultaneously in Germany in the spring of 1945. The dominant policy was vengeance through imposed starvation; the subsidiary policy was relief through imports of food to ward off threats to the occupying armies. The victorious Allies began to punish the Germans for their crimes as soon as the Germans had surrendered. Among the many fantastic crimes of Germany – against Jews, socialists, Christians, Polish intelligentsia, homosexuals – one of the worst was their treatment of the Dutch, whose country they had cruelly invaded in 1940.

One of the reasons for the Dutch famine has never been fully told in the West, perhaps because it is discreditable to Winston Churchill. He imposed a blockade in this war as he had tried to do in 1917, because he believed that the relief proposed by Hoover for the Belgians or Dutch would materially help the Germans. But Churchill was ignoring Hoover’s arrangements to protect the food from possible German depredations. The food would be sent by the ICRC in its own ship, guarded through the journey to Belgium by neutral observers. It would be cooked and eaten by the children in the presence of supervisors. And finally,
Hoover’s master touch: the Germans agreed to match pound for pound everything that Hoover could round up for the starving. Not only would there be no gain to the Germans, there would be a very slight loss. That the Germans were perfectly sincere in this is now certain because of the recent discovery of a secret German diplomatic telegram signed Albrecht in Berlin to the German Embassy in Moscow in February 1941, routinely informing them that the Hoover plan for aid ‘against starvation for Belgium has been thoroughly examined by the German government and … agreed,’ It continues: ‘… it was assured that neither the food envisaged in the plan coming from abroad nor food taken in a similar way from Belgium would be requisitioned for the purposes of the occupying power [Germany] in Belgium.’ The telegram referred with apparent pride to the ‘already successful deliveries of considerable quantities of potatoes and cereal grains from Germany, which under conditions of war constitute all the greater concession since Belgium, in peacetime drew [much of] its food supplies from overseas’.
¹

All this was jettisoned by the British, who thereby inflicted no harm at all on the German war effort. The people who suffered most were the children in Belgium and Holland.

The situation changed towards the end of the war, as the Germans lost territory in the east. The Dutch grew short of food because the Germans were taking so much away to feed their soldiers and workers. By the end of the war in the spring of 1945, the plight of the Dutch was so serious that the Allies threatened the Germans with war crimes charges if they did not permit Allied airlifts to cross their lines. This the Germans did, at the order of their Nazi civilian commander, Arthur Seyss-Inquart.
²

Nevertheless, Seyss-Inquart was hanged at Nuremberg, for earlier crimes against the Dutch. No secret was ever made of this trial or execution; on the contrary, the record of the Nuremberg trials was published in dozens of books in several languages. The German crimes have been recorded in every possible way as a warning against similar crimes. Only Hoover has recorded that the mercy that the Allies had made possible in the First World
War was deliberately denied in the Second. Conventional history has spared Roosevelt and Churchill all account of this sad episode.

Even as the gallows at Nuremberg displayed their awful warning, the Allies were depriving men, women and children in Germany of available food. Foreign relief agencies were prevented from sending food from abroad; Red Cross food trains were sent back full to Switzerland; all foreign governments were denied permission to send food to German civilians; fertilizer production was sharply reduced; and food was confiscated during the first year, especially in the French zone. The fishing fleet was kept in port while people starved. British soldiers actually blew up one fishing boat in front of the eyes of astonished Germans. ‘The people say the sea is full of fish, but they want to starve us,’ said Burgomaster Petersen.
³
For several years after the Allied conquest, the Germans subsisted on less food than the Dutch in the hungriest time.

The judgement against Seyss-Inquart was, in sum, that he had deprived the Dutch of food in order to further the German war effort. Yet Churchill and many other Allied leaders also deprived the Dutch of food, in order to further the Allied war effort.
⁴
Hoover wrote that his wartime efforts ‘became a crusade on my part against a senseless stone wall of opposition from Churchill and Roosevelt … But we did keep some moral and spiritual lamps alight among our own people during the eclipse of human decency and compassion which swept over the world.’