Stephen Hand:
The book Gruesome Harvest, should be on the mandatory highschool and college reading list for history and sociology. It is one of the few books that are available in English that address the murder of millions of non-combatant German civilians and German prisoners of war from 1944 to 1950 as a matter of deliberate allied policy not inefficient logistics as it is most often presented in school text books. It is important because this book was written as it was still happening and includes comments from eye witnesses in the same time period. The book is not politically correct and shocked me because it speaks in a such a predudicial fashion about persons of the black race. That however in this point makes it useful to sociologist and historians because it correctly reflects widely held opinion at the time within U.S. society. As to the correct observation that allied policy was to reduce the German population through murder in multiple forms, slave labor, and starvation, and destroy the fabric of the society through mass rape of the female population, other authors are critized for saying the same thing but only decades later. Fact is there is a great effort to keep this information from the public because it shows that the victors of WWII incorporated not only military strategy and tactics but also the NAZI ideology of racial hatred and a policy of extermination and discrimination for one people.
It is published by Liberty Bell Publications -- the same as the company mentioned in this wiki entry? Is the book suspect (neo-Nazi or anti-semitic?), or does it give evidence for its historical claims? What was done by the victors after the end of the Second World War?
Amazon recommends these other books:
A Terrible Revenge, Second Edition, Fully Revised and Updated: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans by Alfred-Maurice de Zayas (Author)
Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950 by James Bacque (Author)
After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh
No comments:
Post a Comment