Posted on 02/28/2005 12:08:23 PM PST by lizol
Brought to you by that loveable Uncle Joe Stalin and his Soviets. In many ways he was worse than Hitler.
Godless socialism kills...whether wearing a Nazi or a Soviet uniform...
The Polish people endured unimaginable grief in the last century.
I pray that the freedom they now enjoy will last a very long time.
Here is another one:
'Atrocities' trial shakes Poland's victim image
Source: UK Times
Published: 06/14/01
Author: ROGER BOYES
FROM ROGER BOYES IN OPOLE, POLAND
GERMAN women were drowned in latrines and prisoners were buried alive during post-war internment in Poland, according to witnesses at the trial of a Polish camp commandant.
Czelaw Geborski, a stooped, snowy-haired pensioner of 76, is accused of murdering German women who, after the Second World War, were herded into deportation camps prior to being expelled from Silesia.
His trial is the first to be held in post-communist Europe for crimes committed against Germans. About 14 million of them were expelled from territory that is now part of Poland and the Czech Republic; two million died mainly of hunger, exhaustion and disease as they trekked westwards.
The revelations, coupled with the disclosure that Polish villagers took part in a bloodthirsty massacre of Jews during the war, have forced Poland to reassess its image of itself as one of the primary victims of Hitler.
The Silesian atrocities occurred in 1945 and 1946, after the end of the war. The Soviet Union laid claim to what was once eastern Poland and in return Poles gained territory in the west. Germans living there were thrown out. Once resettled in Germany they formed powerful political associations that kept alive memories of camps such as Lamsdorf (now known as Lambinowice) 30 kilometres from Opole.
Mr Geborski, sitting in the dock next to his often embarrassed lawyer, interrupts loudly as the witnesses try to reconstruct everyday life in the camp. “It was like a holiday camp!” he barks out, banging his stick on the floor. “They all had their own beds and three modest meals.”
The fact is that in the autumn of 1945 most Poles were in no mood to treat the Germans generously: five years of occupation, a comprehensive system of labour and concentration camps, and executions on street corners made the activities behind the high fences of Lamsdorf camp seem like small beer.
Nonetheless, more than 1,000 people are said to have died there and some of the stories emerging from the witness stand are horrific. If the queue for the women’s latrines was too long the guards would simply shoot the waiting women with a machinegun. Babies were separated from their mothers and allowed to starve. The mothers were chased with sticks around the periphery of the camp.
The charges against Mr Geborski have been narrowed down to the night of October 4, 1945. Fire broke out in barrack room 12. Women prisoners struggled to throw sand on the flames. Uniformed Poles, according to witnesses, shot at them and pushed them into the blaze.
“I can hear their screams even now,” said Helmut Gerlitz, now 62, who as a six-year-old boy stared out of the window of his hut. At least three women died, and others were seriously wounded and mutilated.
Mr Geborski claims that the prisoners started the fire themselves to stage a diversion and escape in the chaos. He merely used his right to order shots to be fired at escaping prisoners. Witnesses say, however, that graves were dug in advance of the blaze, suggesting that the incident was planned by the camp administration.
Strictly speaking much of what the witnesses say amounts to hearsay. At any kind of factual mistake, Mr Geborski interrupts and demands clarification. He does so in the strident tone of someone who spent much of the 1950s and 1960s working for the communist secret police.
Mr Geborski has been charged twice before. Each time the proceedings were dropped because he enjoyed high political protection. The Polish Minister for Recovered Territory - Mr Geborski’s ultimate political boss - was Wladyslaw Gomulka, like Mr Geborski an ex-partisan. The charges against Mr Geborski were dropped in 1958: by then Gomulka had become Poland’s Communist Party chief.
The German authorities, too, did not push very hard for a trial. To support openly the cause of the expelled Germans was to risk being branded a nationalist, someone intent on challenging the legitimacy of the German-Polish border.
So Mr Geborski has benefited from the long silence of politicians. His defence lawyer wishes on him a similar silence: Mr Geborski is not shy about denouncing what he says is the absurdity of a Pole being punished for crimes against Germans after a long and bloody war.
For medical reasons Mr Geborski is allowed to sit in court for only three hours a day. The result is slow proceedings.
The trial continues.
I read that Stalin wanted all Russium emmigrants returned to Russia to prevent an uprising from the outside. Roosevelt was a party that agreed to this, and in encompassed most of Europe. I think I read this in Solzhenitsyn's books.
Here's a discussion thread on another site:
http://www.russia.com/forums/showthread.php3?threadid=18012
Stalin was far worse than Hitler. By far the most evil man of the 20th century. The crimes Stalin and his thugs committed in the East are for the most part unknown in the West. I have a very young brother who is in his first year of High School. None of this is ever covered in his Honors history class.
Bump.
Socialist and Communists have been responsible for the murders and deaths of more people than had been killed in all the wars before the 20th century.
And that is what Bill Clinton, John Kerry and Teddy Kennedy want for America.
I just finished a book on Stalin by an English writer named Martin Amis. He opines that the only thing Stalin had over Hitler was time - he had a lifetime to slaughter whereas Hitler only had 12 years. Essentially, his point is that their two forms of evil are so bad as to make them indistinguishable.
That was basically a result of the Soviet Union bodily moving Poland West of where it actually should be.
I think he was responsible for many more deaths than Hitler was. I also have heard Chairman Mao had even more blood on his hands than both of them.
In our MSM soviet = good. That's why WWII is reffered to as the last "good" war because we were allied with stalin. When we stood up to communisiem and other tyrants things changed and our MSM brande us baby-killers.
I wouldnt put it past him. Roosevelt was enamored with Stalin.
Now this really burns me up, something fierce.
Of course there were atrocities and other bad things committed by both sides during that war--as there always have been, are now, and always will be.
But it is a matter of proportion.
Sometime in late 2001, I purchased a book, "The German Century," written by a German who apparently was trying to be politically-correct.
The book is mostly photographs, only about half of it text, and covered Germany from 1901 until 2000.
It dedicated two long paragraphs to the slaughter of the Jews 1933-1945.....and three medium-sized paragraphs to the "atrocities" of the Czechs and the Poles to Germans as populations were shifting in mid-1945.
Yes, yes, yes, it is too bad these Germans were mistreated and all that--it is however a perfectly understandable reaction--but where is the sense of proportion?
What are a few tens of thousands of Germans deprived of property and physically abused, as compared with 6,000,000 Jews deprived not only of property but of life? Or all the Poles? Or all the Ukrainians?
To adequately cover the crimes of the Czechs and Poles against Germans, as compared with the crimes of the Germans against the Jews and the Poles (and many others); three medium-sized paragraphs for the German victims seems appropriate.....as compared with shelves and shelves of entire books, miles of shelves, in small print, for the Jewish, Polish, and other victims.
Not according to a New York Times reporter.
Good post. Soviet atrocities - including those they visited upon the Poles - are too often overlooked.
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