After its defeat, Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich was coaxed back to life by the very forces that once conspired to defeat it.
From left: French Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and American Foreign Minister John Foster Dulles meet in Paris about the rearmament of West Germany, Oct. 20, 1954. (Bundesarchiv/Wikimedia Commons /CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de)
Germany today has dangerously embarked on a rearmament campaign to prepare for a supposed Russian threat. New Chancellor Frederich Merz told the Bundestag in May Germany would become the “strongest conventional army in Europe,” adding 100,000 troops as “quickly as possible.”This has been accompanied by a repression of free speech in Germany, especially the freedom to criticize Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
After defeat in the First World War, Germany rearmed in violation of the Versaille Treaty. After defeat in the Second World War, Germany rearmed with the help of the United States in response to a supposed Soviet threat. The author looks back on how that was done.
By Scott Ritter
Real Scott Ritter
After the end of the Second World War, Germany was divided into four occupation zones, involving U.S., British and French troops in what was known as the western zone of occupation and Russian troops in the eastern zone of occupation.
In 1949, confronted by the collapse of the wartime grand alliance and the emergence of what Winston Churchill called an “iron curtain” separating the Western powers from Russia, the western zones of occupation were consolidated into what became known as the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany.
Under the terms of its unconditional surrender, Germany was prohibited from rearming. However, the NATO alliance, in the aftermath of the Korean conflict, perceived a Soviet threat in Europe which could not be countered with the military capability existent in Europe sans Germany.
While the idea of the rearming of West Germany, inclusive of rebuilding Germany’s military industrial potential, was widely opposed both in and out of West Germany, in the end the wants and desires of the NATO militarists prevailed and May 6, 1955 — literally a decade after the defeat of Nazi Germany — West Germany was admitted as a member of the alliance.
NATO histories like to emphasize how West Germany began its journey of re-militarization with “literally zero military personnel.”
This is, of course, absurd.
West Germany was home to millions of demobilized former soldiers of the Third Reich.
These soldiers were men without a place in West German society, disgraced by their participation in Hitler’s wars of conquest and the underlying policies of racial discrimination and murder these wars empowered.
But like the good militarists they were, these defeated minions of the Third Reich weren’t satisfied with simply being allowed to escape the gallows or prison.
They yearned to become relevant to their society.
To regain their lost “honor”.
And to resume their wartime mission of facing off against the Soviet enemy.
In 1950 — five years after the defeat of Nazi Germany — a group of former senior Nazi officers gathered in secret at the Himmerod Abbey, a 12th century monastery located in the Rhineland-Palatinate region of West Germany, to chart a path toward the rehabilitation and resurrection of the German military.
An honors ceremony at the Federal Ministry of Defense, the Bundeswehr, in Bonn in 2002. (Bundeswehr-Fotos/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0)
They met with the approval of the new West German government.
The central theme of the Himmerod gathering, as set forth in an eponymously named memorandum, was the restoration of the honor of the defeated Nazi army. The former Nazi officers believed that they could not build a new German military on a foundation of shame. As such, they insisted that before the rearmament of West Germany could proceed, the Western allies would need to release all German soldiers who had been convicted of war crimes.
Moreover, they demanded that the defamation of the Nazi soldiers, including those who served in the Waffen-SS, cease. All of this would be done under the cloak of a concerted public relations effort in the West to end the war-time prejudices that had accrued against the German soldier and to delink the performance of the Nazi military during the war from the issue of “war crimes.”
Collective Amnesia
The Western allies were overcome with collective amnesia about the true nature of the enemy they had vanquished a mere five years prior. “To achieve the extirpation of Nazi tyranny,” Winston Churchill had famously declared, “there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go.”
“God, I hate the Germans,” General Dwight David Eisenhower wrote in a letter to his wife in September 1944. Eisenhower didn’t just hate the German soldier — he hated the German people. Eisenhower, if he had his way, would have executed the entire German General Staff. It was his objective to kill as many German soldiers as possible.
Himmerod Abbey, where postwar rearmament was agreed. (Christoph Lange/Wikipedia)
As the war approached its end, Eisenhower ordered that captured German soldiers be designated “Disarmed Enemy Forces” and in doing so ensured millions of German soldiers who surrendered would not be afforded the protections and rights of prisoners of war. In the months after the war ended, more than 1.7 million German soldiers died in the custody of the United States, treated as animals by a military that viewed them with disdain and hatred. [NOTE: The figure of 1.7 million comes from Canadian writer James Bacque, whose claim has been challenged by mainstream historians.]
And yet, soon after the Himmerod Agreement was finished, Eisenhower, who was by this time serving as the supreme allied commander in Europe, having been briefed on the agreement by the Nazi officers who had drafted it, issued a declaration in which he noted,
“I have come to know that there was a real difference between the German soldier and Hitler and his criminal group…for my part, I do not believe that the German soldier as such has lost his honor.”
Eisenhower then directed that U.S. Army historians begin working hand in glove with their former Nazi foes to whitewash the history of the German Army in World War II, helping create the myth of the “clean Wehrmacht,” a prerequisite for Americans and Germans to be able to stand side by side as allies against the Soviet threat.
This reshaped the West’s perception of the Nazi war effort and led to Wehrmacht’s eventual rehabilitation in the eyes of the public and the Allied authorities.
Churchill, too, apparently forgave those whom he deemed no amount of violence a burden to destroy. While declining health prompted Churchill to resign as prime minister in April 1955, he worked closely with Lord Ismay to ensure that Germany, far from being kept down, was allowed to stand again on its own two feet. [Churchill had wanted to use the defeated German army to fight the Soviets immediately after the war ended in Operation Unthinkable.]
Within a decade of being given the green light to reconstitute its military strength, the West German Army numbered more than 450,000 men. Moreover, German factories began production of the Leopard main battle tank that same year — a tank whose design and performance drew directly upon Germany’s experiences during World War II.
Leopard 2A7+ battle tank made by Munich-based arms company KMW at the military trade show Eurosatory 2010. (CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The rehabilitation of the former Nazi officers and soldiers led to German officers rising to command NATO forces. By 1957, one of the principal architects of the Himmerod Agreement, General Hans Speidel, was put in command of NATO ground forces in the center of West Germany.
General Hans Speidel
Speidel was an attractive candidate for the position; the former Chief of Staff of Field Marchall Erwin Rommell, Speidel was implicated in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944. He was later arrested and interrogated. Marked for death, Speidel escaped custody near the end of the war, and turned himself in to allied authorities.
A career military man, Speidel joined the Imperial German Army in 1914, where he served with distinction on the western front, fighting in the battle of the Somme. He was one of the 100,000 German soldiers who remained in the German Army in the interwar years and played an important role in the rebuilding of the German military into the force used by Hitler in his drive to conquer Europe.
Speidel participated in the invasion of France in 1940 and, following the surrender of the French in June 1940, Speidel was appointed as the chief of staff of the military commander in France, during which time he was involved in organizing and facilitating mass executions and deportations of Jewish and Communist hostages as reprisal for the actions of the French Resistance, as well as similar reprisal activities against civilians in Albania, Yugoslavia, and Greece.
In March 1942 Speidel was transferred to the eastern front, where he was appointed chief of staff of the V Army Corps in Russia. Part of the German 17th Army, Speidel and the V Corps protected the army’s northern flank during the German spring offensive.
In January 1943, at the height of the Stalingrad crisis, Speidel was temporarily assigned as chief of staff to the Italian Eighth Army and helped organize a failed effort to relieve the German 6th Army, which was surrounded in Stalingrad.
After Stalingrad fell, Speidel organized the staff of an ad hoc Army-sized formation known as Detachment Kempf. Speidel played a significant role in helping stabilize the German southeastern sector after the Soviet breakthrough at Stalingrad and then launch the German counterstroke at Kharkov that halted the Soviet advance in February 1943.
Speidel served as Detachment Kempf’s chief of staff during the Battle of Kursk and, after the battle ended in a German defeat, Speidel was promoted to major general and appointed as the chief of staff of the Eighth Army, which was formed from the formations that had been operating under Detachment Kempf. Speidel received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his services in Russia — one of the highest military honors — and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general in January 1944.
Speidel was transferred to France in April 1943, where he was made chief of staff for Field Marshall Erin Rommell, who was preparing to defend France from allied invasion. Speidel was heavily involved in planning and executing the German defense of Normandy.
Speidel with Rommel, April 1944. (Bundesarchiv/Jesse / Wikimedia Commons/ CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de)
Somewhere between his transfer to France and the invasion of Normandy, Speidel was contacted by disgruntled German officers who were plotting to kill Adolf Hitler and take over control of Germany.
Following the failed assassination attempt on Hitler, on July 20, 1944, Speidel — who had not been informed about the planned assassination — did attempt to persuade General Field Marshal von Kluge, who had taken over command in France after Rommell was wounded in an allied air attack, to implement certain pre-arranged measures that had been agreed upon in the event of Hitler’s death.
Speidel remained on duty with the Wehrmacht, involved with the defense of France. Speidel famously refused to obey Hitler’s order to destroy Paris before it fell to the allied forces in August 1944.
But his connectivity with the anti-Hitler plotters caught up with him, and Speidel was eventually arrested in September 1944 and subsequently interrogated, during which time he revealed the involvement of Field Marshall Rommel in the plot against Hitler, resulting in Rommell being compelled to commit suicide or else face execution.
Speidel himself avoided execution only by the narrowest of margins, escaping Gestapo custody in the final days of the war and successfully evading capture until taken into custody by French troops.
After the war Speidel, now a prisoner of the Americans, found himself and 11 other former Nazi officers before what was known as “Military Tribunal V.” The tribunal was convened on June 28, 1947, to try the defendants on four counts involving
“the murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians of Greece, Yugoslavia and Albania by troops of the German Armed Forces; participation in the plundering and looting of public and private property, the destruction of cities, towns, and villages, and other acts of devastation in Greece, Yugoslavia, and Albania by troops of the German Armed Forces; participation in the initiation and drafting of secret orders denying enemy troops quarter and denying them the rights of POWs, and orders commanding that surrendered troops of countries at war with Germany be executed; participation in the murder, torture, imprisonment in concentration camps, use for forced labor, and deportation for slave labor of civilians of Greece, Yugoslavia, and Albania by the German Armed Forces.”
Hans Speidel and seven of his co-defendants were found guilty, and Speidel himself was sentenced to a term of 20 years imprisonment.
Whitewashing the Wehrmacht
Shortly after the Second World War ended, William J. Donovan approached Franz Halder, the former chief of the General Staff of the Wehrmacht, and two former Wehrmacht field marshals, Walther von Brauchitsch and Eric von Manstein, to prepare a document which would outline a historical narrative which could be used to separate the Wehrmacht from the Nazi leadership of Germany.
Donovan, who served as a deputy prosecutor at Nuremberg, was the ringleader of a few other senior U.S. officials who believed that the military potential of Germany should be preserved and aligned with the Western allies to contain and confront the Soviet Union. These officials believed that the Nuremberg trials should not proceed.
Defendants at Nuremberg guarded by American Military Police, 1945. (Raymond D’Addario, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)
Donovan asked Halder and the other German generals to prepare a document, which was titled “The German Army from 1920 to 1945,” which had as its purpose the whitewashing of the crimes committed by the Wehrmacht.
This document would be used to portray the German Wehrmacht as an apolitical institution of military professionals who were innocent of the crimes committed by their Nazi masters. The irony here is that Halder was one of the biggest war criminals of them all, having drafted both the Commissar Order (issued on June 6, 1941) and the Barbarossa Decree (signed on May 13, 1941) that allowed German soldiers to execute Soviet citizens free from the fear of prosecution.
Halder’s paper was later used by Hans Laternser, the lead counsel for the defense of senior Wehrmacht commanders at was known as the High Command Trial, the 12th and last of the Nuremberg trials.
Of the 13 German high-ranking officers on trial, 11 were found guilty of crimes and given sentences ranging from three years to life. But German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Bundestag weighed in on the side of the defendants, citing the information contained in the Halder document.
In 1949, shortly after the High Command Trial concluded, President Harry Truman sent John McCloy, an influential American lawyer who had served as a senior defense official during the war, helping oversee among other things the Manhattan Project, to Germany to succeed General Lucius Clay as military governor.
The following year McCloy was appointed U.S. high commissioner. One of McCloy’s first acts was to convene a review panel chaired by Judge David Peck of New York and, on its recommendation, reduced the sentences of High Command defendants who were still in prison.
Hans Speidel was a beneficiary of the “McCloy touch” and never served a day in prison despite his conviction of numerous war crimes. As part of the whitewashing of the German war record that was taking place under the guidance of the U.S. Army, Speidel wrote a book, Invasion 1944, which was a history of the Normandy campaign as seen from the German perspective.
One critic of Speidel’s work wondered if General Speidel was not a little too impressed by the chivalry of many officers and a little too blind to their tolerance of Gestapo atrocities. But this didn’t stop Speidel from gifting a signed copy of his book to McCloy in 1951, after Judge Peck’s panel had cleared Speidel’s name and those of the other German Generals who had committed war crimes under Nazi rule.
When, in 1955, the allies decided to rearm West Germany, General Speidel was one of two Hitler-era generals invited to help plan the new army. Over five years, in a delicate process that was watched with resentment by many Europeans, he negotiated terms of West Germany’s military force in the framework of a European army.
The New German Army & the Schnez-Truppe
The core of the German soldiers recruited by Speidel into the new German Army were drawn from a secret military organization organized and overseen by Speidel and other former Nazi officers in 1949, known as the “Schnez-Truppe” (named after the brainchild of the effort, a former Wehrmacht colonel named Albert Schnez), comprised of some 2,000 former Nazi officers who were organized into battle staffs around which another 40,000 former Nazi soldiers would rally around if the Soviet Union were ever to invade West Germany.
This unofficial West German fighting force, organized to the company level and intended to function as four armored divisions, was intended to reinforce allied efforts to repel any attack by the Soviet Union or East Germany on West Germany.
In 1955, the “Schnez-Truupe” was renamed the Bundeswehr. And thus was born the German Fourth Reich, a direct descendant of Nazi Germany unencumbered with any cloak of guilt for the crimes committed by the German soldiers who now stood side by side with the western allies who once fought against them.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.
This article is from the author’s Substack.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Members of species Homo Sapiens Sapiens never learn from the prior behavior of other members of species Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
The „Third“ Hitler‘s designation of his dictatorship had no real relationship withe preceding German state(s). Neither the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (a multi ethnic political structure) nor Bismarck‘s creation of a federal German state in 1871 can be compared to Hitler‘s twelve year dictatorship. What came after 1945 was a political entity that was made on the basis of USA political dictates – an American vassal that never had any real autonomy and still hasn’t. What happened after 1949 was not what most Germans wanted. I know the period from having experienced the development during my childhood and youth. I know how many Germans felt of my parents generation. Everyone knew who was the real powers directing the affairs of the country and is still doing it. The current German politicians are mostly in service to the USA. American administrations change, the policies do not. I won‘t get into the tangled topics of war criminals; neither side was clean. Maybe more important would be to raise the issue of motivations. Americans have forgotten evidently Harry Truman‘s statement of June (?) 1941 after Operation Barbarossa started. My paraphrase of the NYT quote: „If the Germans win we ought to support the Russians. If the Russians win we should support the Germans and let them kill as many as possible,…“ In addition it should be remembered that Churchill was directing his military to study the possibility of a surprise attack against the Soviet Union in May 1945 with the help of the Wehrmacht known as Operation Unthinkable.
And it appears the Anglo-American powers-that-be have done a good job in keeping that relationship hidden behind the curtains when it results in some rather vocal commentators, especially those on the Russian(-speaking)* internet who should otherwise know better, acting as if Germany were a sovereign nation doing what it has done so far with Ukraine or Israel on its own accord. Even Mr. Ritter himself, with all due respect, believed some years back that Germany being kept divided by the US/UK was to prevent it from starting another world war** – I don’t know if he still thinks that.
(* Just how well-known in Russia is Germany’s status as a US puppet state? The presence of US military bases on German soil? German gold reserves in the USA’s possession? The Chancellor Act? And NSA wiretapping? And I thought Westerners had a reputation for being uninformed…)
(** Check my previous comment to see why I find such a rationale to be hypocritical. Not to mention Stalin wanted a reunited Germany in 1952, but the Anglo Alies refused.)
And judging from commentary from a vocal part of the the Russian(-speaking) internet acting as if Germany were an independent, sovereign nation doing what it has done so far on its own accord, I’d say the Anglo-Zionist powers-that-be have done a fine job of concealing this master-slave relationship. Because the presence of comments saying with a straight face that e.g. Stalin should have wiped the German nation off the face of the earth suggests how easily the Anglo-Zionist puppeteers can get off scot-free while their puppets get so much flak.
I have a story to tell about a small city in Michigan that I live close to. It was home to a German POW camp during WWII.
The area was initially settled largely by German immigrants. It was and remains largely agriculture. The POW’s would work the fields, and the farmers treated them with respect, inviting them into their homes for meals. Some of the local girls even fell in love with them, claiming they “were better gentleman than American boys”.
The farmers viewed these soldiers as human beings who had little choice but to serve in Hitler’s armed forces.
In germany, 80-90% of criminal manhunts are ARABS/ Foreigners.
hxxps://www.berlin.de/polizei/polizeimeldungen/gesuchte-personen/
My dear old dad, who served in Germany after the war, always said Germany would rise again and that he never found a German who admitted supporting Hitler.
Another friend who served various tours in Germany in the 60s, said the Germans were very friendly and would invite troops into their homes for tea and cakes and invariably there would be pictures of the family in their best Nazi regalia proudly displayed on the mantlepiece.
This is another problem the USA has yet again created which we at some point will have to clean up.
To make matters worse, the US (or so I’m told) had certain episodes in its history such as ‘Manifest Destiny’ and ‘Jim Crow’ that inspired the German Nazis to enact similar policies (some say these were toned down when compared to their original US iterations). Then, industrialists like Henry Ford supported Hitler early on, and parts of the US government were even in on it too (something to the effect of “If Germany is winning, we must support Russia [and vice-versa]”). Once the US entered the war, it remained relatively unscathed throughout, and the rest was history.
Germany (originally the Western part, and eventually the whole country after reunification) is now a puppet of that same exact USA, as we can see in Scholz’ silence toward the Nord Stream bombing, the NSA’s wiretapping of Merkel’s phone, and Germany’s gold reserves remaining in the USA’s custody. Would a nation be independent or sovereign if it had another country’s military bases on its soil?
Gregory Docherty and James Macgregor wrote a book titled “Hidden Histories” that reveals that Germany didn’t start the first World War – England allegedly wanted to take Germany down as an economic competitor, finding its industrial prowess (and any potential alliance with Russia) to be a threat to the British Empire’s dominance. If there was no WWI, there wouldn’t have been a WWII, would there?
Well that was most interesting reading. I do know that many German scientists were taken to America because of their knowledge about the v bombs they used to bomb England as well as their heavy water experiments.
We’re you born yesterday ?
Nation/States are about who gets what.
It bothers me that when discussing or portraying WWII the term “Nazis” is often used when talking about Germans in general. As my dad used to say, “It was awfully hard to tell the difference, whether it was a Nazi or a German that was shooting at you”.
Similar problems exist today in the ME !
Oh my,
reading this suddenly a wild fever hit me, could not decide if i were going to faint or vomit. what an utter horror, NOTHING learned from all that carnage. in a box we children found photos my father had taken as a young frontlines soldier but never once spoke of, images no one should ever see, piles of photos showing mounds of leg bones, mounds of skulls, great mounds of other bones all carefully stacked. this young soldier suffered shock long after his return and then THIS….i cannot bear to complete reading this nightmare of history, i will try again tomorrow.
when will we ever learn when will we everrrrr learn….
thank you dear Scott Ritter for your courage and integrity
I found in the CIA’s reading room site that it was John J McCloy who introduced Eisenhower to Adolf Heusinger, who was subsequently named NATO’s Chair of the Military Committee, despite his having initialed the Commissar Order.
The Dulles brothers had a great deal to do with the rehabilitation of Nazi spies and officers. Allen Dulles helped Reinhard Gehlen and his spies come to the United States and infect the CIA with fascistic aims. Allen Dulles was a traitor and Eisenhower was a dunce. Read the book “The Devil’s Chessboard”, an excellent and stunning expose of the crimes of the Dulles brothers.
“‘We’re fighting the wrong enemy.’
Allen Dulles, the Swiss director of the US Office of Strategic Services (the OSS), came to this conclusion at the close of 1942, when the German infantry remained mired in the mud and snow of the Russian steppes. He had received word via Vatican messengers from Schutzstaffel (SS) chief Heinrich Himmler and Walter Schellenberg, head of the Sichterheitsdienst (the SS foreign intelligence service), that the Nazi government wished to establish a separate peace with the United States. Such reconciliation would enable the Third Reich to turn its undivided attention to pulverizing the Soviets. When Dulles expressed his openness to discuss the proposal, the German High Command sent Prince Max von Hohenlohe, a Prussian aristocrat and businessman, to meet with him in Bern. Hohenlohe was surprised to learn that Dulles not only endorsed the Nazi proposal, but also maintained that a strong Germany was necessary as a bulwark against Bolshevism, the Leninist branch of the Communist Party that had seized control of Russia in 1917.”
Source:
“Chapter One: The Stay-Behind Units,” in Paul L. Williams, “Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia” (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2015), summarizing information from Stephen Dorril, “Inside the Secret World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service” (New York: Touchstone, 2000), p. 168.
For additional details on the 1942 Himmler-Schellenberg overtures to Allen Dulles via Prince Max von Hohenlohe, including photocopied primary source documents, see “The Wartime Adventures of Prince Max Hohenlohe,” Christos Military and Intelligence Corner (Blogspot), Jan. 15, 2015.
That being said, it may also be worth mentioning that the US/UK/West Germany-facilitated efforts to reintegrate or utilize former Nazi officials, servicemembers, and scientists (even some of the most unrepentant ones complicit in war crimes and human rights abuses) via the Himmerod memorandum, the Alsos Mission and Operation Paperclip, the Gehlen Organization, the post-war ratlines, etc. had Soviet and East German equivalents within roughly the same timeframe (even if the latter were not necessarily as systematic), such as the rehabilitation of Vincenz Müller (two-star general partly responsible for the modernization and expansion of the German military under the Nazi regime, and a major commanding figure in Operation Barbarossa) and Ernst Grossman (Sudeten German actively involved in the Sudetendeutsches Freikorps who later became an NCO in the Schutzstaffel, even being part of a guard unit at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp), alongside comparable efforts to gather expertise from German scientists (see [Jeffrey Epstein-connected] Pavel V. Oleynikov, “German Scientists in the Soviet Atomic Project,” The Nonproliferation Review, Summer 2000, and Anatoly Zak, “German A-4 Team in Moscow,” RussianSpaceWeb).
I believe the US and Europe were hoping the Nazis would defeat the Soviets. The Russians proved too tough for them though they paid an extraordinarily high price for their victory. If the Western imperialists think Russia can be defeated this time, they are even more delusional than last time. The Russians have no illusions about the same criminals attempting the same objective of global domination. Should we be surprised that the CIA armed and trained Nazis in Ukraine and sent them to kill ethnic Russians to piss off Putin? Nothing has changed except the sophistication of our weapons.
Under a “lend lease” arrangement similar to the one used to assist Great Britain, the United States sent significant material aid to the USSR in its fight against Nazi Germany. The aid included 400,000 vehicles, 14,000 aircraft, 13,000 tanks, 8,000 tractors, 4.5 million tons of food, and 2.7 million tons of petroleum products, as well as millions of blankets, uniforms, and boots, and 107,000 tons of cotton. This assistance began in 1941 but rose to significant numbers in 1942 and 1943. Josef Stalin acknowledged that the US aid had been decisive in helping the Soviets turn the tide of the war against the Nazis, saying as much in 1943 at the Tehran Conference.
As now , in some aspects , having nato buy / sell / middleman to support our
poor poor weapons mfgs.
The shoemaker did well back then ?
Buy stock in the “Shock Market” ? and “Awe” in delight .
Any advise besides investing in “Buttcoin” or maybe Elon can devise / discover the holy grail , known as “Epsteinium” mined using AI from the Epstein database using his expertise and experience from his days as Captian of the good ship “Doge”
A small batch of Epsteinium , maybe 60% pure , could fuel a self driving bus ,
filled with the toxic tailings that are dredged out and travel all the way to Mars without refueling ?
A new third party or forth reich ?
Elon’s “Grok 4” vs. Trump’s “Clam Bondi”
Somewhat like a collision test of a “Tesla Tub” loaded with the dummy “Krash Patel” ?
Did I read that correctly?
“In the months after the war ended, more than 1.7 million German soldiers died in the custody of the United States . . . “.
Wow.
“In custody” means these men were prisoners, regardless of what Ike may have wished to declare them.
I have had 70 years giving up piece by piece the precious darling image of the Marshall Plan with which people in my part of the world were inculcated. I am sorely tempted to believe Scott Ritter at face value here, but I am sorry; an observation of this gravity merits a citation and sourcing.
I see that FDR baited the Japanese to take Pearl. I have read about Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that the worry in the States was more that Japanese might have surrendered to the Russians. I know that Churchill wanted to gas his subjects, that US “intelligence” conspired to kill JFK and RFK and MLK and probably quite a few others. I think we can see that it muffed a shot at Trump–colossally, for whatever that’s worth. But this figure comprises most of two million war crimes back to back within a few months, almost a third of the vaunted holocaust, and not under any special duress, but after the war had ended–at least in Europe, though I suspect that most of this must have happened while fighting continued in the Pacific.
I have been reading Ritter for almost 25 years now; I suspect that he knows his source. Can we have it? My mother died just shy of 100 years old this year, and she was one year too young to be sent into the active war as a nurse. I suppose judgment lies with those who might have more details, but it would seem that at this point no one is likely to get prosecuted for these doings. Can we not have the source?
The figure of 1.7 million comes from Canadian writer James Bacque, whose claim has been challenged by mainstream historians.
hxxps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Losses
Ritter writes, “In the months after the war ended, more than 1.7 million German soldiers died in the custody of the United States, treated as animals by a military that viewed them with disdain and hatred.”
I had not read this before, and wonder if anyone can provide references.
In any event, it seems the mad dogs in Washington are determined to start WW III, which could prove to be the final one.
The figure of 1.7 million comes from Canadian writer James Bacque, whose claim has been challenged by mainstream historians.
hxxps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Losses
Neoconism, Zionism and fascism all share a similar mindset and the ideology of zero/sum. See how they all gather together under US sponsorship and funding. To which we can add the Banderite neo-fascists in Ukraine. And yet, we (the US) are the “good guys.” Thus we understand the emphasis by Russia on de-nazifying Ukraine as part of a permanent peace agreement. Seems like good sense to me. Perhaps the EU and the US could use that too.
And today Germany is chock-full of stubborn rabid Russophobes who are completely brainwashed against anything Putin or Russian. When will they ever learn?
This reminds me of something I heard professor Grover Furr say several years ago during a talk. He said we’re going to have to once against fight the fascists. He said it in a direct way as if it was simply a most obvious truism.
once again not once against
The editor regrets the error.
Does this not also mean, though, that many of us will fight for them?
Good question.
From all the anti Russia hysteria emanating from all across the West since roughly 2010, yes, many in the West will probably be fighting for a contemporary version of Russophobic fascism.
You are probably correct, but it has been manufactured since much earlier than 2010. Remember the popular Reagan era movie “Red Dawn”? Just a tiny example.