On April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide. On 8 May, german representatives signed the Instrument of Unconditional Surrender. The Third Reich collapsed and the Continental War came to an end.
The German capital Berlin was left in ruins after months of indiscriminate bombardment. Thousands of Allied soldiers poured into the devastated country——— Britain, France, and the United States occupied the west and the Soviet Union occupied the east.
Without ammunition, food, and water, the defenders chose to give up their resistance, and the German civilians hiding under the rubble had to obediently raise their hands and walk out of the bunker.
Allied soldiers escorted these former subjects of the Third Reich. Among the crowd were former followers of Hitler, participants in the war, and many ordinary people. However, it didn't matter what the way it was before, because now they all had a common identity, that is, "slaves to the country".
If the country is defeated, where can the people have dignity to speak of?
During his 13 years at the helm of Germany, the Nazi regime inflicted an unforgettable catastrophe on the people of the world. After six years of bloody fighting, Germany was defeated. It is a day to celebrate for the fascist oppressors of the world; but for the Germans who are surviving in the ruins, what awaits them will be a carnival of revenge——— the blood debt of the country, which will eventually be repaid by the people.
Expulsion of Germans
The first to be retaliated against were The German and German residents.
For historical reasons, there are some German-speaking ethnic groups in European countries. The most typical is Czechoslovakia, where more than 80% of the pre-war Sudetenland was of German descent, and these people split the Sudetenland at the instigation of the Nazis. After the victory of the war, Czechoslovakia naturally did not spare these internal thieves.
As a result, as soon as the new Czechoslovak government was formed, the Germans were expelled, more than two million Germans and Germans were driven to the remaining 200,000, and their property was confiscated. Among them, many German-speaking people have lived in the Czech Republic for generations, and they still march today to protest their return to their homeland.
Being confiscated, being deported, and becoming a refugee is not bad, at least a small life is saved. The worst were the Germans in Yugoslavia.
During World War II, the German policy of domination of Yugoslavia was the most brutal, so the victims decided to double their offerings. The German population of Yugoslavia is predominantly a Swabian offshoot. Before the war, there were 350,000 Germans in the Yugoslav-ruled vojvodina region. When the Nazis retreated, they also left behind hundreds of thousands of German expatriates and their widows, most of whom were military dependents, colonists, and speculative traders.
The Yugoslav Government found them war guilty of oppressing the Yugoslav people in cooperation with the Germans during the occupation. As a result, German citizenship was revoked, and private property was certainly gone. They were forced to leave their homes and share temporary shelters with Montenegrin, Croatian and Macedonian refugees in the Vojvodina region, who had been displaced by the German war of aggression.
Almost every refugee stronghold has prisons specially prepared for the Germans. There, Germans were used as hard labourers, often tortured, beaten, and died of disease and starvation.
In addition, the Yugoslavs handed over some Germans to the Red Army, which then transported them to Siberia to act as coolies for mining and potato cultivation. Lucky Germans are driven back to Germany or Austria.
Between 1944 and 1946, the total number of Germans who died in a series of reprisals by the Yugoslav authorities was 56,736. Of these, 240 were killed in the october 1944 evacuation, 8,049 were executed by Partisans and 48,447 died of starvation, disease and cold in prisons.
2. Enslave the aggressors
The Soviet Union and Germany fought a bloody battle for four years, killing 27 million people. Its tragic degree can be described as "every family hanging white, every household mourning". A large number of young and middle-aged workers have been lost, and post-war reconstruction faces major problems.
Thus, as a form of war reparations, almost all able-bodied German men in Soviet-controlled areas became soviet slaves.
In 1944, the Red Army invaded Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. The Ministry of War issued an order: "Mobilize and detain all Germans living on the territory of these countries, including men between the ages of 17 and 45 and women aged 18 to 30, regardless of their citizenship." ”
These were good laborers, and the Soviet government only had to provide a plate of soup and bread, and then let them do all day of hard work. Live as an animal, die as revenge, there will be no psychological pressure. Because that's nothing compared to the 1.8 million Soviet citizens who were maimed to death in German concentration camps.
Until 1946, more than 3.8 million German prisoners were held in the Soviet Union, of whom 2.4 million were German prisoners of war.
They were sent to rebuild factories, build dams, railways, ports, etc.
Some of them were fortunate that the Germans on the construction sites were paid so that they could support themselves in the Soviet Union. For example, former Wehrmacht soldiers are paid seven roubles a month, while former senior officers range from 10 roubles to 30 roubles. But these numbers were small—two roubles for a jar of milk and 150 roubles for a good pair of shoes—so ordinary prisoners of war without special skills had to find a way to survive.
Moreover, they are forced to work 16 hours a day without holidays. Depart early in the morning and don't return to camp until 9 or 10 p.m. Took a sip of soup and fell asleep. At five o'clock the next morning, we arrived at the construction site.
The worst were the SS prisoners of war who were sent to remote areas. They had to cut wood and build roads and railways in Siberian forest farms. As well as mining uranium, coal, iron and other minerals.
The Death Rate among Germans in Labor Camps is High. According to Soviet statistics, between 1945 and 1956, 356,000 people died in labor camps, of which nearly 70% occurred in the winter of 1945-1946.
Naturally, the other persecuted countries in Europe will not spare these cheap labor, and the Germans, who were once mighty, are now being exploited by the victorious powers.
For example, because the Germans planted countless mines along the Atlantic coast during the war to intercept the Allied landings, the Danish, Norwegian, and French governments asked German prisoners to carry out highly dangerous demining work. According to French authorities, until September 1945, two thousand German prisoners were maimed or killed by mines every month.
The Germans, who were reduced to hard labor, had very little daily nutritional intake, were weak, and weighed only 50 pounds.
3. Sexual revenge
Ancient peasants fought as soldiers for nothing more than to eat mixed food.
Their salaries were pitifully low, and they had to risk their lives to fight around. If there is a long-term lack of outlets, the loyalty and enthusiasm of soldiers will fall into a low valley, and even cause mutinies.
Therefore, every time a city is captured, the commanders will "arson for three days to feed the soldiers", so that the soldiers can grab money and grain in the simplest and most rude way.
This "old tradition" in human military history has continued into modern times and has been reinterpreted at the last moment of the world war.
The Allies won, but what was it going to make the soldiers feel deeply that they had won? That's the arsonists. Strong J is a way for the victor to dominate the people of an enemy country. Women in defeated countries are considered spoils of war. The victors insulted their sons, husbands and fathers after killing them.
During the war, Nazi Germany committed horrific crimes against humanity, from the Holocaust to systematic rape and the killing of innocent women and children. Now, the tide of battle has turned and the relatives of the victims have arrived. When they set foot on German territory, German women became the first targets of revenge.
Allied soldiers, including American, British, and French soldiers, raped German women. However, the Soviet Union was far more serious than the rapes of other Allied forces, after all, the country was also hurt more deeply.
The hatred of the Soviets towards the Germans was so deep that even soviet female soldiers approved of the actions of the male soldiers. Not only that, they even find it "interesting."
The Soviet media often portrayed German women in a disparaging way and incited vengeance. The Soviet propaganda writer Ilya Ehrenburg once wrote: "Use force to break the racial pride of these German women." Treat them as your legitimate booty! ”
Sexual violence against women by military personnel is widespread throughout Europe. The Americans regarded German women as spoils of war, like cameras and Ruger pistols. They insulted more than 200,000 German women.
Even when American military dependents accompanied their husbands to Germany, they had to wear military uniforms to avoid being insulted.
In the first six months of the U.S. occupation of Germany, the rate of STD transmission increased by 2,000 percent, but only a handful of soldiers were tried and punished for their violence. British gendarmes often received complaints of British soldiers raping women. However, they do not have sufficient resources to investigate and punish the perpetrators.
Horrificly, food shortages forced German women into prostitution in the American occupation zone. They also have children waiting to be fed, and they can only exchange sexual favors for food.
"They volunteered to take off their skirts for us and lay on the bed," said an officer in a tank company. Recalling what he did back then, he is proud: "We have at least two million children born in Germany".
However, the victims were not only Germans, but also Poles, and even Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians under soviet rule were inviolable. They were rescued from German concentration camps and were re-ravaged by soldiers on their way home.
Nuns, maidens, old women, pregnant women and even mothers who had just given birth were all insulted without mercy, while women in the occupied areas learned how to make themselves disappear in the "hunting time" at night.
The young daughters hid in the storage room for several days in a row. The mothers did not dare to go out into the streets to fetch water until early in the morning, when the Soviet soldiers had not yet woken up from the wine they had drunk the night before. Sometimes, the greatest danger comes from a mother who betrays the hiding places of other girls to the Russians in order to save her daughter. To this day, old Berliners still remember the terrible screams of every night.
But there was only one way to resist, and some women chose to pay tribute to a higher-ranking Soviet commander and become the "private property" of the commander to protect them from other soldiers.
Interestingly, some Soviet officers settled with "German wives". Once the situation in Germany had stabilized, the countries began to withdraw in an orderly manner, and to the infuriation of the Soviet authorities, some simply did not return home, bent on staying with their German lovers.
Seeing this, many people may ask: "Why is soviet military discipline so 'bad'?" ”
Remember, it's 1945. Well-disciplined soldiers had already died on the battlefields of Minsk, Smolensk, Stalingrad, brest fortresses, Kiev, and even in enemy prisoner-of-war camps.
The soldiers of the Red Army of the Soviet Union who responded to Stalin's call in 1941 with all their enthusiasm and devoted themselves to the cause of justice have been numbed by the corpses scattered along the way, leaving only the goal of revenge for their compatriots and the long-suppressed desire.
The Allied soldiers seemed to have undertaken the "moral" mission of liberating Europe from fascism, bringing a more "free" and "bright" future to the German people, but they were not knights in shiny armor, but like "wolves in sheep's clothing". Remember, the damage caused by war on both sides is far more brutal than imagined.
Text/Winds of Peace
Resources:
1. "Research on the Medical treatment and supply of prisoners of war in the Soviet Union (1939-1956)", Wang Xueli
2. "Study on the Question of Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union (1941-1956)"