Allied Atrocities

Crann na Beatha

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tricky D

http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres.html lists a load of massacres.

War has the capacity to dehumanise. Was watching a Guadalcanal doc recently and one of the soldiers made this point. After the first day of intense fighting they spared noone, no more prisoners were taken. They way he said it was chilling but had an element of sadness and given the circumstances quite understandable.

Morlar

There is some good information here :

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=53295

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=24148

The most noteworthy ones to me would be the Katyn Massacre, the rape of Berlin, firebombing of Dresden & Hamburg also the millions of Germans who died in russian captivity.

Another key one would be the Neustettin story here :

http://www.lietuvos.net/istorija/communism/world_war_2_soviet_war_crimes.htm

I remember reading somewhere once that Beria had a hand in organising this particular atrocity but can not find the refference at the moment.

There are countless other stories & anecdotes in books and documentaries and the reason they were unpunished is simple - the victors get to write the history. They whitewash their own side whle using propaganda to blacken the other in order to justify their own warcrimes.

marcsignal

I've been reading some interesting claims recently that the Malmedy Massacre was a hoax.

There was also the incident during/after the Battle of the Bulge, where the Allies shot German soldiers dressed as American Troops. The commander of the German operation "Otto Skorzeny" only avoided hanging himself because he managed to convince the court, that if he was hanged, then all Allied Commando leaders should hang too.

The Americans also summarily executed 346 Waffen SS men on arrival at the Dachau camp in 1945.
The action is still controversial to this day.

arnhem44

I personally think the Russians were every bit as bad as the Germans,as Morlar mentioned above the Katyn massacre where 20,000 Polish soldiers were killed is a good example,the rape,pillage and murder of the ordinary people as the Russians advanced towards Berlin,the treatment of there own returning Prisoners of war and the treatment of German POW's just showed what was to come from Stalin,also I would have to say Allied bombing was questionable at times,the destruction death and sickness brought on by the use of the Atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and again the continious use of fire bombing of Dresden killing thousands.Its also worth noteing the handling of POW's by Allied troops basically turning a blind eye to the following mistreatment and executions being carried out,one such being Tito killing thousands after the war.

motherfunker

I think the americans handing over captured german soldiers to the russians was a bit sh1t aswell, they might as well have just shot them there and then, saved the germans a few years of torture before dying a horrible death in siberia.

Morlar

motherfunker wrote: »

I think the americans handing over captured german soldiers to the russians was a bit sh1t aswell, they might as well have just shot them there and then, saved the germans a few years of torture before dying a horrible death in siberia.

There were also the cases of the Russian prisoners (formerly in German captivity) who were handed back to their own side and then promptly shipped off to siberia to die. Their crime was to have been taken prisoner rather than die while their commissars sat things out safely behind the lines.

During the war the russians used penal battalions where men were not issued with weapons or camouflage - their job was simply to get shot so that the russians would see where the bullets came from.

I remember seeing once a documentary where one russian spoke of how before a major engagement they would line their machine guns up behind their own lines in order to shoot anybody who retreated -bearing in mind the infantry were very poorly armed and in dissaray at the time its pretty horrific stuff. There were also cases of russians faced with surrendering german prisoners -then chasing them across open fields with tanks (not shooting just ploughing over them).

Some of the worst was when the allies handed back the cossacks - many commited suicide on the spot yet the allies (eager to keep on stalins good side despite all their knowledge of what was going on) continued to insist on handing them over to a slow and certain death.

Another nasty aspect were the german pow's who were captured by the americans at the end of the war. They had been shipped off to camps in america for several years serving sentences in captivity in america. Then on their return to germany they went off to find their families & if they happened to be from the part of Germany that was then under communist rule they were promptly shipped off to Siberia despite having already been in allied captivity for years after the war.

ejmaztec

Morlar wrote: »

There were also the cases of the Russian prisoners (formerly in German captivity) who were handed back to their own side and then promptly shipped off to siberia to die. Their crime was to have been taken prisoner rather than die while their commissars sat things out safely behind the lines.

During the war the russians used penal battalions where men were not issued with weapons or camouflage - their job was simply to get shot so that the russians would see where the bullets came from.

I remember seeing once a documentary where one russian spoke of how before a major engagement they would line their machine guns up behind their own lines in order to shoot anybody who retreated -bearing in mind the infantry were very poorly armed and in dissaray at the time its pretty horrific stuff. There were also cases of russians faced with surrendering german prisoners -then chasing them across open fields with tanks (not shooting just ploughing over them).

Some of the worst was when the allies handed back the cossacks - many commited suicide on the spot yet the allies (eager to keep on stalins good side despite all their knowledge of what was going on) continued to insist on handing them over to a slow and certain death.

Another nasty aspect were the german pow's who were captured by the americans at the end of the war. They had been shipped off to camps in america for several years serving sentences in captivity in america. Then on their return to germany they went off to find their families & if they happened to be from the part of Germany that was then under communist rule they were promptly shipped off to Siberia despite having already been in allied captivity for years after the war.

I think that it was quick for some of them. I remember a tv prog from a few years ago, where an English p.o.w. guard spoke about it. He and his colleagues couldn't believe it when they were told to hand over the Cossacks to the Russians near Linz, which was in the Soviet sector in Austria. The guard said that after they handed them over, all they could hear all night was the sound of machine-gun fire.

arnhem44

I guess the war had become so brutal at that stage nobody cared what happened,the sooner these guys were out of the way it was one less headache for the allies,had anybody plotted to kill Stalin during or after the war even within his army?

Crann na Beatha

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arnhem44

found this earlier,I came across a book review on Dunkirk,here was part of it.


the British were responsible for crimes against both German soldiers and Allied civilians. Some British troops were supplied with dumdum bullets-lethal missiles expressly banned by the Geneva Convention on the rules of war. London issued directives to take no prisoners except when they specifically needed captive Germans for interrogation. For this reason British Tommies feared being captured because "they supposed that the enemy's orders would be the same as their own." On 27 May, ninety prisoners of the Norfolk Regiment were killed by members of the SS Totendopf Division and on 28 May over eighty men of the Warwickshire Regiment were executed by troops of the SS Adolf Hitler Regiment. These acts were committed in retaliation for the massacre of large numbers of men of the SS Totenkopf Division who had surrendered to the British.

Morlar

Here are some links to a movie about the Soviet massacre of Poles at Katyn
Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUhBB3FgslI

Scene (heavy going to watch) ;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USZcrMn48Xg

I dont think this movie got as much coverage as it probably should have.

Here is the wiki article :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

Katyn Forest massacre (Polish: zbrodnia katyńska, 'Katyń crime'), was a mass murder of thousands of Polish military officers, policemen, intellectuals and civilian prisoners of war by Soviet NKVD, based on a proposal from Lavrentiy Beria to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps

Lavrentiy Beria, from what I recall this article once mentioned that Beria himself was jewish though it doesnt seem to have that entry anymore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrenty_Beria

How he met his end in 1953
....
Beria and all the other defendants were sentenced to death. When the death sentence was passed, according to Moskalenko's later account, Beria begged on his knees for mercy, but he and the other six defendants were immediately executed by firing squad on 23 December 1953. [5] Apparently his body was cremated and buried around Moscow.
.............

Sexual sadism

Charges of sexual assault and sexual sadism against Beria were first made in the speech by a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Nikolay Shatalin, at the Plenary Meeting of the committee on 10 July 1953, two weeks after Beria's arrest. Shatalin said that Beria had had sexual relations with numerous women and that he had contracted syphilis as a result of sex with prostitutes. Shatalin referred to a list (supposedly kept by Beria's bodyguard) of over 25 women with whom Beria had sex. Over time, however, the charges became more dramatic. Khrushchev in his posthumously published memoirs wrote: "We were given a list of more than 100 names of women. They were dragged to Beria by his people. And he had the same trick for them all: all who got to his house for the first time, Beria would invite for a dinner and would propose to drink for the health of Stalin. And in wine, he would mix in some sleeping pills..." Afterwards he would drop off his charge and the chauffeur would give them a bouquet of flowers. One victim, having recently given birth and still suffering from the sore breasts of nursing her infant, refused his advances, but was accidentally given the flowers. Upon noticing, Beria shouted, "It's not a bouquet, it's a wreath. May they rot on your grave." She was later arrested.

By the 1980s, the sexual assault stories about Beria included the rape of teenage girls. Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, author of a biography of Beria, described in an interview a specific sexual game Beria is said to have forced upon young girls before picking one of them to rape. This alleged practice got the name "Beria's Flower Game".[6]

Numerous stories have circulated over the years involving Beria personally beating, torturing and killing his victims. Since the 1970s, Muscovites have been retelling stories of bones found in the back yard, cellars, or hidden inside the walls of Beria's former residence, currently the Tunisian Embassy. Such stories continue to re-appear in the news media. The London Daily Telegraph reported in December 2003: "The latest grisly find—a large thigh bone and some smaller leg bones—was only two years ago when a kitchen was re-tiled. In the basement, Anil, an Indian who has worked at the embassy for 17 years, showed a plastic bag of human bones he had found in the cellars."[6] According to historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Beria personally tortured Nestor Lakoba's family, driving his widow mad by placing a snake in her cell and beating his teenage children to death.[7]

Such reports have been dismissed by people close to Beria, such as his son Sergo, and former Soviet foreign intelligence chief Pavel Sudoplatov, as politically motivated smears.

It is said that Beria kept a special room adjacent to his office for the torturing and raping of small children.[8]

Crann na Beatha

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Morlar

Iolar wrote: »

Do ya know where i can get that film?

I wouldn't mind getting hold of a copy of it myself. Amazon seem to be sold out of it at the moment :

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Katyn-DVD-Joachim-Paul-Assb%C3%B6ck/dp/B0012XQU7G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1243262101&sr=8-1

Here is a good dvd review here ;


http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=67128

also some stuff about the subtitles
http://filmjournal.net/kinoblog/2008/02/27/katyn-dvd-good-news-and-bad-news/

There was a link to an online version with english subtitles doing the rounds but it doesnt work anymore.

Morlar

Iolar wrote: »

Do ya know where i can get that film?

FYI This movie is now on at the IFI

Friday 19 June at 17.00
Saturday 20 June at 17.00
Sunday 21 June at 17.00
Monday 22 June at 14.35|18.00|20.35
Tuesday 23 June at 14.35|18.00|20.35
Wednesday 24 June at 14.35|18.00|20.35
Thursday 25 June at 14.35|20.35
Friday 26 June at 14.35|20.35
Saturday 27 June at 14.35|20.35
Sunday 28 June at 14.35|20.35
Monday 29 June at 14.35|20.35
Tuesday 30 June at 14.35|20.35

http://www.ifi.ie/cinema/dispfilm_07.asp?filmID=6428&Date=19/06/2009&PageID=15

It has also been reviewed in the Irish times today and a few other sites.

Dr Strange

If anyone is interested I can supply a copy of the Wehrmacht investigation report into Katyn. It is in German but very interesting as it uses a team of what can now be termed international forensic pathologists rather than just German ones. EDIT: here's the document available on the net:

http://katynbooks.narod.ru/amtliches/amtliches_material.html

and the associated pictures (Warning: NSFW and may be upsetting to some!):

http://katynbooks.narod.ru/amtliches/bilds274-331.html

As for the thread topic: Regarding the French after the WWII. My uncle was lucky enough to be caught by American soldiers in France. He was in the Kriegsmarine in Brest and when his boat went down in the harbour he and his comrades where issued with German Infantry uniforms and told to fight their way out with the German paratroopers. He got treated well by the Americans but after the war was handed over to the French. He said it was the most miserable time he had. They had to work in the coal mines for years before being released and he said many of his friends and colleagues died due to tuberculosis and the coal dust (they weren't issued any protective clothing and the meals were, compared to the American food, lousy.

arnhem44

Here is a link to a site I came across earlier covering different massacres of WW2 from Europe to Asia,makes for some interesting reading

http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres.html#Belgium