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To: robertpaulsen
I mean, no one worried about violent actions taken against innocent Germans.

All things considered, the Germans got off easy.

23 posted on 02/16/2004 7:45:32 AM PST by dfwgator
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To: dfwgator
All things considered, the Germans got off easy.

Actually, Germany was divided for 40 year, with half the population out under the vice of communism.

29 posted on 02/16/2004 7:55:30 AM PST by aimhigh
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To: dfwgator
All things considered, the Germans got off easy.

Yes, real easy.

Their agriclutural & industrial base was destroyed, millions were displaced from their homes and dispossesed of their personal property, their country was occupied and divided, with portions parceled out to other nations and nearly 1/3 of the country enslaved by Soviet communisim.

On a more personal level, my father's family was a pacifist, German Mennonite farming family living in the East Prussian province of Germany (now Poland). My four great-uncles were conscripted against their wishes and religious convictions into the Bundeswehr and killed during the war.

As the Soviets advanced, my father's family fled their farm abandoning their home, nearly all of their possessions and remaining livestock and produce (whatever hadn't already been pillaged by the retreating German army). As my family fled on back country roads the German army shanghaied my grandfather, who was 38 years old and just 4'10", not to be seen or heard from again for nearly 3 years.

After the Russians rolled through, resident Poles attacked all German civilians. My grandmother and her 4 children were beaten by these resentful Poles and had their remaining horse, wagon and personal possessions stolen and/or destroyed.

With little money and just the clothes on their backs, my grandmother and her 4 children - aged 2, 3, 7 & 9 - traveled across hundreds of miles of battle-scarred German countryside on foot. She worked day labor jobs wherever she could or begged for food for her children. She has only hinted at improper things she may have done to feed and house her children (and I really don't want to ask). They slept in ditches, sheds or barns for more than 2 months before reaching a relative's home for shelter in what became the Western occupied zone.

Like tens of thousands of homeless German civilians, my family was eventually relocated to a Displaced Persons camp run by the US Army, where my grandfather found them a year later.

So other than the deaths, the loss of real estate, all personal possessions, personal liberty and possibly virtue, the beatings, the starvation, the family separation, the poverty and illness - yes, my German family got off pretty easy.

Think next time before you say something galactically stupid.

50 posted on 02/16/2004 8:48:46 AM PST by Sideshow Bob
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To: dfwgator
All things considered, the Germans got off easy.

You do know what the Russians did to the ethnic Germans in East Prussia and other germanic enclaves throughout Eastern Europe in 1944-46, don't you? If not, look it up.
102 posted on 02/16/2004 11:03:16 AM PST by Antoninus (Federal Marriage Amendment NOW!)
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To: dfwgator
>>>All things considered, the Germans got off easy<<<

Eight Million Germans died in the Second World War.

If anything, it is Americans who got off easy over their treatment of the Cherokee and slavery.
179 posted on 02/16/2004 5:20:56 PM PST by ComtedeMaistre
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