What is it with these myths that they have such sticking power?

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Isn't it nice when you run across an honest American?

Quote:

Institute for Historical Review

In 'Eisenhower’s Death Camps': A U.S. Prison Guard Remembers

Martin Brech

In October 1944, at age eighteen, I was drafted into the U.S. army. Largely because of the “Battle of the Bulge,” my training was cut short, my furlough was halved, and I was sent overseas immediately. Upon arrival in Le Havre, France, we were quickly loaded into box cars and shipped to the front. When we got there, I was suffering increasingly severe symptoms of mononucleosis, and was sent to a hospital in Belgium. Since mononucleosis was then known as the "kissing disease," I mailed a letter of thanks to my girlfriend.

By the time I left the hospital, the outfit I had trained with in Spartanburg, South Carolina, was deep inside Germany, so, despite my protests, I was placed in a “repo depot” (replacement depot). I lost interest in the units to which I was assigned, and don't recall all of them: non-combat units were ridiculed at that time. My separation qualification record states I was mostly with Company C, 14th Infantry Regiment, during my seventeen-month stay in Germany, but I remember being transferred to other outfits also.

In late March or early April 1945, I was sent to guard a POW camp near Andernach along the Rhine. I had four years of high school German, so I was able to talk to the prisoners, although this was forbidden. Gradually, however, I was used as an interpreter and asked to ferret out members of the S.S. (I found none.)

In Andernach about 50,000 prisoners of all ages were held in an open field surrounded by barbed wire. The women were kept in a separate enclosure that I did not see until later. The men I guarded had no shelter and no blankets. Many had no coats. They slept in the mud, wet and cold, with inadequate slit trenches for excrement. It was a cold, wet spring, and their misery from exposure alone was evident.

Even more shocking was to see the prisoners throwing grass and weeds into a tin can containing a thin soup. They told me they did this to help ease their hunger pains. Quickly they grew emaciated. Dysentery raged, and soon they were sleeping in their own excrement, too weak and crowded to reach the slit trenches. Many were begging for food, sickening and dying before our eyes. We had ample food and supplies, but did nothing to help them, including no medical assistance.

Outraged, I protested to my officers and was met with hostility or bland indifference. When pressed, they explained they were under strict orders from “higher up.” No officer would dare do this to 50,000 men if he felt that it was “out of line,” leaving him open to charges. Realizing my protests were useless, I asked a friend working in the kitchen if he could slip me some extra food for the prisoners. He too said they were under strict orders to severely ration the prisoners’ food, and that these orders came from “higher up.” But he said they had more food than they knew what to do with, and would sneak me some.

When I threw this food over the barbed wire to the prisoners, I was caught and threatened with imprisonment. I repeated the “offense,” and one officer angrily threatened to shoot me. I assumed this was a bluff until I encountered a captain on a hill above the Rhine shooting down at a group of German civilian women with his .45 caliber pistol. When I asked, “Why?,” he mumbled, “Target practice," and fired until his pistol was empty. I saw the women running for cover, but, at that distance, couldn't tell if any had been hit.

This is when I realized I was dealing with cold-blooded killers filled with moralistic hatred. They considered the Germans subhuman and worthy of extermination; another expression of the downward spiral of racism. Articles in the G.I. newspaper, Stars and Stripes, played up the German concentration camps, complete with photos of emaciated bodies.

[Typical US propaganda, all the while, engaged in the same things.]

This amplified our self-righteous cruelty, and made it easier to imitate behavior we were supposed to oppose. Also, I think, soldiers not exposed to combat were trying to prove how tough they were by taking it out on the prisoners and civilians.

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Sorry, the link.

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v10/v10p161_Brech.html

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@JTT,

In Iowa I met German folks or those of German descent who told me they were treated quite badly. Also In Minnesota an Italian family told me they were discriminated and called all sorts of names like Dego and Wops.

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Quote:

Eisenhower's Holocaust - His
Slaughter Of 1.7 Million Germans

"God, I hate the Germans..." (Dwight David Eisenhower in a letter to his wife in September, 1944)

...

Your body will be picked up long after it is cold, and taken to a special tent where your clothing is stripped off. So that you will be quickly forgotten, and never again identified, your dog-tag is snipped in half and your body along with those of your fellow soldiers are covered with chemicals for rapid decomposition and buried. You were not one of the exceptions, for more than one million seven hundred thousand German Prisoners of War died from a deliberate policy of extermination by starvation, exposure, and disease, under direct orders of the General Dwight David Eisenhower.

One month before the end of World War 11, General Eisenhower issued special orders concerning the treatment of German Prisoners and specific in the language of those orders was this statement,

"Prison enclosures are to provide no shelter or other comforts."

Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, who was given access to the Eisenhower personal letters, states that he proposed to exterminate the entire German General Staff, thousands of people, after the war.

Eisenhower, in his personal letters, did not merely hate the Nazi Regime, and the few who imposed its will down from the top, but that HE HATED THE GERMAN PEOPLE AS A RACE. It was his personal intent to destroy as many of them as he could, and one way was to wipe out as many prisoners of war as possible.

Of course, that was illegal under International law, so he issued an order on March 10, 1945 and verified by his initials on a cable of that date, that German Prisoners of War be predesignated as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" called in these reports as DEF. He ordered that these Germans did not fall under the Geneva Rules, and were not to be fed or given any water or medical attention. The Swiss Red Cross was not to inspect the camps, for under the DEF classification, they had no such authority or jurisdiction.

http://www.rense.com/general46/germ.htm

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@JTT,

I find that intriguing in that Eisenhower has a German sounding name. Iowa has a half-half Irish German makeup. Mamie Eisenhower is from Iowa.

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@JTT,

Eisenhower was of German, English and Swiss ancestry.

From Wikipedia:

Quote:

Eisenhower's paternal ancestors can be traced to Hans Nicolas Eisenhower, whose surname is German for "iron worker";[4][5] in his autobiographic book, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, Dwight thought the name to mean "iron craftsman". Hans Eisenhauer and his family emigrated from Karlsbrunn (now Saarland), Germany, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1741. Hans' descendants traveled west; Eisenhower's family settled in Abilene, Kansas, in 1892.

Wikipedia site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower

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@talk72000,

Apparently, ole Dwight hated being German and having a German name. How does America culture so many war criminals/subhuman leaders. It must be mighty reassuring to wake up each day knowing that every one of your presidents is a war criminal/mass murderer.

Here's another viewpoint. It was probably written using a pseudonym by MM or Oralloy or Okie or Ican, those American patriots who would demand that these evil deeds and their perpetrators are found out and punished.

That image of the Americans as good guys is really taking a beating.

Quote:

US War Crimes in World War II: Part 2

by Lt. Col. Gordon "Jack" Mohr, AUS Ret.

In spite of everything which has been written about Eisenhower which makes him out to be a hero, there seems little question that Dwight Eisenhower meets all the qualifications of a certified war criminal, even if Bacque's figures are off a bit. (If Germany had been the winner, there is little doubt he would have been tried and found guilty of the most heinous crimes against mankind.)

Many veterans will get upset with this appraisal of a man they looked on as a "bona fide" American hero. But the proof for these accusations can be found in what happened to those Germans who were fortunate enough to surrender to the British and the Canadians some two million of them. The evidence shows that "almost all continued in fair health and many were quickly released and sent home or transferred to the French, to help in the post-war work of reconstruction.

Bacque specifically commends General Patton for behavior towards his POWs in a civilized manner. His Third Army freed vast numbers of German captives during May 1945, to the dismay, no doubt, of the Zionists who controlled Washington.

Both General Omar Bradley and J. C. H. Lee, Communications Zone (ComZ) Europe, ordered the release of prisoners within a week of the war's end. This SHAEF order was countermanded by Eisenhower on May 15, 1945.

While German soldiers from the British and Canadian zones were quickly regaining strength and were helping rebuild Europe, Germans taken by the Americans were dying by the hundreds of thousands - emaciated figures in diarrhea smeared clothing, huddling pitifully in watery holes with perhaps a scrap of cardboard over their heads and a rotten potato for supper. At times many of them were reduced to drinking urine and eating grass.

http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/us_war_crimes/us_war_crimes_in_world_war_II_2.htm

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@JTT,

If you look at the whole sweep of human history the USA doesn't come out that bad. Alexander the Great massacred all those who resisted him. The Romans utterly destroyed the Carthagians. Genghis Khan destroyed an entire culture in Central Asia. The Aztecs sacrificed victims to their gods. The Muslims raped and took Christian slaves and converted them and the British committed atrocities everywhere they conquered and on and on. Hitler and Stalin directly or indirectly caused millions to die. Americans in wars with Spain took Mexican lands. There are a lot worse things that happened in the world.

1 Reply

@talk72000,

That's not how we should look at it. It was largely the Americans who established just what is a war crime. It was these sanctimonious bastards that mouth respect for human rights and denouncing those who abuse them, when they are presently the worst on the planet.

Had Hitler been taken alive, you can bet we would have heard the most meretricious claptrap during his trial, all the while Eisenhower was committing war crimes left and right.

Excuse my frankness but it is vacuous to suggest that John Gotti should get a reprieve because Al Capone was as bad or worse.

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What is it with these myths that they have such sticking power?

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