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From: "Boehm-Chronik" <>
Subject: Re: [DSL] Ethnic cleansing after WWII
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2004 20:36:35 -0400
References: <LBEOIMDCMHFIECPCAOIJCEMODAAA.muellenh@pt.lu>


... and there are still people out there playing with war.

Best regards,
Guenter Boehm

***********************************************
"Böhm-Chronik"
http://www.boehm-chronik.com
600-jährige Familiengeschichte
in Schlesien (1329-1948)
***********************************************


----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerd Müllenheim" <>
To: <>
Sent: Sunday, April 18, 2004 10:41 AM
Subject: [DSL] Ethnic cleansing after WWII


>
> Dear Guenter Boehm,
>
> This could be your story, too:
>
> In the winter of 1945, the world ended for ethnic Germans living in
Eastern
> Europe. As the German army retreated before the Soviet advance, Eastern
> Europeans who had been terrorized and brutalized by their Nazi occupiers
> exacted revenge on the ethnic Germans whose ancestors had settled where
> they lived centuries before. By 1950, some fifteen million ethnic Germans
> had either fled or been expelled from Eastern Europe. Two and one-half
> million civilian Germans either died or went missing in the "ethnic
> cleansing" of Soviet-occupied Europe in the years immediately following
> WWII.
>
> My mother was twelve years old when on January 18, 1945, she and her
> mother, brother and grandparents were given twenty-four-hours notice to
> load their possessions and evacuate their tiny village of Chodziez near
the
> Warthe River in central western Poland. The refusal of the Nazi regime to
> acknowledge the collapse of the eastern front and to accept the reports
> that the war was being lost translated into a complete lack of preparation
> for evacuating German civilian populations from the advance of the Soviet
> army. Only days before my mother's family was given the order to evacuate,
> German men, too old to fight on the eastern front, were busy digging
> anti-tank ditches to slow the Soviet advance. In evacuating, my mother's
> family joined a line of refugees that stretched westward as far as the eye
> could see. Independent descriptions confirm their accounts of this as a
> train of chaos, despair, death and misery as people fled in panic for
their
> lives. Less than two weeks later, the advancing Soviets intercepted the
> westward stream and, after pillaging the possessions of trapped refugees,
> ordered them to return to their villages. My mother's family, after being
> stripped of all their possessions except for the clothes they wore and
> carefully concealed money, turned around and walked home. Here women and
> girls were raped, and men were beaten and murdered. Through propaganda and
> firsthand experience of the brutality of SS "occupation" detachments in
> Eastern Europe, Soviet soldiers were convinced that civilian Germans were
> little more than dangerous animals to be tortured and liquidated. The
> family now stayed as strangers in their own village, their property
> expropriated and handed over to Poles. Their new masters ordered the
> returning women to refill all those anti-tank ditches dug a fortnight
> earlier. My grandmother worked in a Soviet military camp as a virtual
> slave, suffering horrors she was never able to describe but which hung
over
> her life like a cloud of despair until her death. In December 1945, a
> carefully hatched plan resulted in my mother's family escaping occupied
> Poland for Soviet-occupied Germany.
>
> Meantime, as my mother's family were fleeing their village of Chodziez, at
> 4 pm on January 19, 1945, ethnic Germans in Komorowo, near Konin, were
also
> escaping the Soviet advance. Among them were my father, his older sister,
> toddler brother, mother and grandmother. The Soviet army rolled into my
> father's farm less than twenty-four hours later. A week later, on January
> 24, my father's family too were captured by Soviet forces, robbed at
> gunpoint and ordered to return home. My father was sixteen, the "man" of
> the house: his father had perished on the eastern front in 1944. In the
> preceding months, he had ignored the whispered urging from retreating
> German troops to flee for his life, laughing at the suggestion that
Germany
> was going to lose the war. Upon returning to his local village, he was
> loaded onto a boxcar with all the other German males of his vicinity and
> deported to work as a slave laborer at a factory in Charkov in present-day
> Ukraine. There he stayed for seven months, at the end of which he was the
> bare shadow of a human being, louse-ridden, diseased, and in an advanced
> stage of starvation. Small for his age, he was able to lie about his age
> and, with all the prisoners under sixteen, he returned to Soviet-occupied
> Germany, working in Berlin for two years. Less lucky ones were to remain
in
> prison until released a few years later, while others, never permitted to
> leave, were resettled in Siberia, where most of them perished. It was not
> until 1949 that my father found and rejoined the surviving members of his
> family.
>
> Excerpt from _Apocalypse Recalled: The Book of Revelation After
Christendom_
> by Harry O. Maier, 2002 (available from Amazon.com)
>
>
> ==============================
> Gain access to over two billion names including the new Immigration
> Collection with an Ancestry.com free trial. Click to learn more.
> http://www.ancestry.com/rd/redir.asp?targetid=4930&sourceid=1237
>

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