We love to judge. Each at his own level. Simply because it is inherent in human nature. Show yourself and others that you also have an opinion, you can reasonably evaluate facts, and so on. But lately, I have increasingly come across attempts to judge our past. And these attempts, or rather attempts, cause disgust with their content. And I will try to give my assessment to some of the facts.
So, on September 2, the Second World War ended. Naturally, there were both winners and losers in it. And, accordingly, immediately after the end, the first began to judge the second. Three trials were carried out: Nuremberg (November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946), Tokyo (May 3, 1946 to November 12, 1948) and Khabarovsk (from December 25 to 30, 1949).
I brought the Khabarovsk trial only because war criminals were tried there. But our bloody butchers of Stalin were judged, therefore, apparently, no one was sentenced to death.
Next, let's look at the main points of accusations against war criminals.
1. Murder and ill-treatment of civilians in the occupied territories and on the high seas.
2. The withdrawal of the civilian population of the occupied territories into slavery and for other purposes.
3. Murders and cruel treatment of prisoners of war and servicemen of countries with which Germany was at war, as well as with persons who were sailing on the high seas.
4. Aimless destruction of cities and towns and villages, devastation not justified by military necessity.
5. Germanization / Japaneseization of the occupied territories.
The points are absolutely fair, the punishments suffered by the accused, too. This is indisputable and I do not intend to discuss it. However, I really want to give a list of events that, in a certain scenario, could be discussed not by opponents of the Axis countries, but, on the contrary, by their participants.
For what? But for what. There are a lot of resources on the Internet where the atrocities of the Soviet army are excitedly discussed. Here are examples of war crimes taken from the Internet using a basic search. I entered the search for "War crimes of the USSR" and looked at what was imputed there.
1. Katyn. Massacres of captured Polish army officers and citizens, carried out in the spring of 1940. According to the released archival documents, a total of 21,857 Polish prisoners were shot.
2. Massacre in Naliboki - the massacre committed by Soviet partisans over the civilian population of the Belarusian village of Naliboki (in Nalibokskaya Pushcha, now the territory of Belarus) on May 8, 1943. The massacre killed 128 people, including three women, several teenagers and a 10-year-old boy. The reason for the attack was the cooperation of the local population with the Polish Home Army.
3. "Mefkura" - Turkish two-masted sailing-motor schooner, capacity 53 brt, displacement 120 tons, was built in 1929. During the transportation of Jewish refugees from Romania on August 5, 1944, she was sunk in the Black Sea by a Soviet submarine, 315 Jews out of 320 were killed.
4. Massacres in Pszysovice - an event in the village of Pszysovice of the Geraltovice commune, when from January 26 to January 28, 1945, dozens of villagers were killed by soldiers of the Red Army.
According to a number of modern Polish researchers and publications, based on the findings of an investigation launched in 2005 by the Polish Institute for National Remembrance, this event is a war crime. Various information is reported on the number of victims, which ranges from 52 to 60 or possibly 69. There are 44 names on the memorial plaque installed in 2005.
5. Massacre in Kanyukai - the massacre of the Soviet partisans over the Polish population of the village of Kanyukai (Polish: Koniuchy: Grooms) January 29, 1944. On that day, a group of Soviet partisans led by G. Zimanas entered the village and perpetrated reprisals against the local population, killing 46 a person of Polish nationality, including 22 minors. All those killed were local residents, whom the guerrillas accused of collaboration.
How do you like it? Me too. The list can be continued, but I do not see the point, because for some reason there are no thousands of digits there.
I have already written about the "successes" of the Japanese in this field, now I would like to look at our allies. Moreover, I will try to do it fairly impartially. For example, I do not consider the American infantrymen who captured Dachau to be war criminals, and, having seen what was happening there, simply soaked all the guards. I will repay, no more. But there are points worth paying attention to.
Go.
1. Fight in the Bismarck Sea.
A Japanese convoy from Rabaul was spotted by Allied aircraft on March 1, 1943, and was attacked first on March 2. As a result, one transport was sunk, and two more were damaged. On March 3, massive attacks by Allied aircraft were repeated. This time they were more successful, only four Japanese destroyers managed to avoid damage, four more destroyers and all the remaining transports were sunk or heavily damaged. On the night of March 3 to 4, 8 torpedo boats approached the site of the defeat of the Japanese convoy, which found and sank the burning transport. On March 4, aviation finished off two seriously damaged Japanese destroyers.
At first glance, it was an ordinary battle, very successful for the allies and ending in disaster for the Japanese. Where are the war crimes here? I will quote the official American historian, Harvard University professor Samuel Eliot Morison. With the support of the President of the United States F. D. Roosevelt and having access to any archives, he wrote the fundamental work "History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II", considered one of the best and most detailed studies of the actions of the US Navy and the forces that support it. In the sixth volume, describing the events that took place on March 4-5 in the Bismarck Sea, he writes: “Meanwhile, aircraft and torpedo boats were engaged in the destruction of the surviving Japanese who were on rafts, boats and shipwrecks. The fighters mercilessly fired at all that was on the surface in low-level flight … The torpedo boats fired their guns and dropped depth charges into three boats, which sank with more than a hundred people on board. " The losses of the Japanese amounted to more than three thousand people. Today it is probably no longer possible to calculate how many people they lost in battle, and how many died during the cruel and contrary to international law, the destruction of people fleeing from sunken ships.
If this is not a violation of clause 1 of the Nuremberg list, I apologize.
But this is me … for a seed.
2. Dresden.
A series of bombing raids on the German city of Dresden by the Royal Air Force of Great Britain and the United States Air Force on 13-15 February 1945 during World War II. As a result of the bombing, about a quarter of the city's industrial enterprises and about half of the remaining buildings (urban infrastructure and residential buildings) were destroyed or seriously damaged. According to the US Air Force, traffic through the city was paralyzed for several weeks. Estimates of the death toll ranged from 25,000 in official German wartime reports to 200,000 and even 500,000. The bombing of Dresden was used by Nazi Germany for propaganda purposes, while the death toll was overestimated by Goebbels to 200 thousand people, and the bombing itself seemed absolutely unjustified. In the USSR, an estimate of the victims was accepted at 135 thousand people. Data from the International Red Cross from 1946 (Report of the Joint Relief 1941-1946) indicate 275 thousand deaths.
Is this not a crime under item 4?
3. Hamburg.
A series of carpet bombing raids on the city by the Royal Air Force of Great Britain and the US Air Force from 25 July to 3 August 1943 as part of Operation Gomorrah. As a result of the air raids, more than 50 thousand people were killed, about 200 thousand were injured.
4. Tokyo.
The bombing of the Japanese capital by the US Air Force on March 10, 1945. The air raid involved 334 B-29 strategic bombers, each of which dropped several thousand tons of incendiary bombs and napalm. As a result of the resulting firestorm, fires quickly spread in residential areas built up with wooden buildings. At least 80 thousand people died, the more likely death toll was over 100 thousand people.
5. Hiroshima.
The death toll from the direct impact of the explosion ranged from 70 to 80 thousand people. By the end of 1945, due to the effects of radioactive contamination and other post-effects of the explosion, the total number of deaths ranged from 90 to 166 thousand people. After 5 years, the total death toll, taking into account deaths from cancer and other long-term effects of the explosion, could reach or even exceed 200,000.
6. Nagasaki.
The death toll by the end of 1945 ranged from 60 to 80 thousand people. After 5 years, the total death toll, taking into account deaths from cancer and other long-term effects of the explosion, could reach or even exceed 140,000.
So, dear. Isn't Truman worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And Lemey for Tokyo? And Harris for Dresden? Quite worthy, these peacemakers respected by history. Honor and praise to them, oblivion from Nuremberg and The Hague.
But all this pales in comparison with the last point.
7. Heilbronn, Koblenz and many others.
Oddly enough, there is almost complete silence on this topic. Well, it was not, even though you crack! We are talking about the dead German prisoners of war in the allied concentration camps for the Wehrmacht.
We are talking neither more nor less, about a million. Although, of course, this figure has been repeatedly challenged. And maybe not quite true. But, having delved enough into the history and facts of the Second World War, I definitely take it for granted. And that's why:
Canadian writer James Buck in his book "Other losses" stated: in April - September 1945, the Allies starved to death MILLION German prisoners. This accusation caused a flurry of criticism of "negligence and falsification." At the same time, Buck's harshest critics admit that the camps were poorly supplied with food. The ration of a US soldier was 4 thousand kilocalories a day, and a captured German - only 1, 2 thousand kilocalories, that is, three times less. Although this norm was not met: the prisoners did not receive food and water for 3-4 days. At the same time, the warehouses of the US Army in Germany were overstocked with food: corn and canned food were sent back - with the postscript: "We have no place." This fact gives Baku the right to assert: the allies killed captured Germans deliberately - especially since, according to the new status of DEF ("disarmed enemy forces"), they did not fall under the Geneva Convention - the Red Cross was not allowed to them and strictly prohibited the reception of food parcels. The official biographer of the Commander-in-Chief of the US Forces Eisenhower Stephen Ambrose (died in 2002) admitted in his interviews that the prisoners were starving, and there was food in the warehouses. “But we were afraid of more severe hunger and cannibalism in Germany, so we took care of food,” he gives an absolutely fantastic excuse. Ambrose said the US Army has confiscated 13.5 million tons of food from Red Cross warehouses. Where they went is not clear - the Germans did not receive … a single gram.
“We were only guarded,” recalls a former Wehrmacht soldier Michael Priebke in an interview with Gennady Zotov (AiF). 65 years ago, he ended up in a camp near Koblenz. - All the prisoners slept in the rain, in the wind, lying in the mud like pigs. True, they feed the pigs! Sometimes they brought food - they gave one potato a day. Later I met my uncle, and he told me - you know, in Berlin the Russians fed the Germans with porridge from their field kitchens! This surprised me a lot."
All survivors in the special camps of the US Wehrmacht in Germany, with whom Zotov managed to communicate, argued that the mortality rate in captivity was very high, and the official figures of 10 thousand dead prisoners were complete nonsense. Even the Weekly PW & DEF Report for September 8, 1945 (it is stored in the archives of Washington) publishes other figures of the reports: in the first week of autumn alone, 13 051 German prisoners died in the camps.
In addition, there is a letter from the head of the Red Cross, Max Huber, to the commander-in-chief of the US forces, Eisenhower. Huber asks permission to bring canned food to the camps, which is followed by a refusal: "You are forbidden to give food to your enemies." “From hunger in May - December 1945, many prisoners and civilians of West Germany died - which was not observed in the zone of occupation of the USSR,” writes historian Richard Dominic Wiggers. - I cannot say whether it was organized by the US occupation authorities. Perhaps the chaos is to blame. " Military experts from Germany said: the figure of a MILLION German dead can be disputed, but the rigging of the data by the US army is a fact that is beyond doubt. Konrad Adenauer (Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949-1963) raised a question in the US State Department: where did the 1.5 million prisoners go? He received no answer. American historian Albert Cowdrey, criticizing Buck's findings, cites a figure of 56,285 German soldiers who died of starvation. But even they are five and a half times higher than the official ones!
Note that this is not written by the Germans. Not Russians. Mostly Americans write this. Who had their own concepts of honor and conscience. Who had their own view of the war. If it was written by a German, I would have thought. But when the Anglo-Saxons write about themselves like that … I spread my hands.
From an interview with M. Priebke (held in Heilbronn) to G. Zotov: “I think everyone in Russia has seen the filming of the SS concentration camps. The Germans treated the Russians in an inhuman, monstrous manner. And I can understand your soldiers, if they didn’t mingle with us. But what have we done to the Americans if they simply starved us like rats?"
According to statistics, 57.5% of prisoners from the USSR died in Nazi captivity. 35.8% of Germans did not return from our camps. We are often reproached for this in newspaper publications. There, of course, it is not mentioned that the bulk of the Nazis were captured in 1941-1944, in the most hungry time, and most of the Germans remained in the USSR until 1953. The Nazis were not starved to death - the diet of prisoners in the USSR was 2,533 kilocalories: twice as much as in US camps. And if you believe the evidence of the author of "Other losses", then in American captivity in just six months, as many Germans were buried as we have in eight years!
Strange, isn't it?
Propaganda is a great thing. We do nothing but justify ourselves for the Victory. In the war that surpassed all previous ones in cruelty, anything happened. But when you don't even open it, but just look at the facts, you see - those who teach you morality, condemn, behave with prisoners and civilians even worse … This is not only about the British and Americans, there are many others who can be hooked on (and I will definitely do it). And then it is immediately heard: "It was a long time ago, it is not confirmed by documents, why bother stirring up the past?" Indeed, absolutely useless. For them, rewriting history, is brazen and unprincipled. But there are still those who have been stirring up, stirring up, and will continue to stir up the past, for the edification of the future.
And it is not always necessary to judge only the defeated.
Yes, it’s a little messy, but here’s how it turned out.
