Posted on 05/01/2015 4:20:22 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
That’s the news business for you though. lol...
I have a feeling that news is going to overshadow just about everything else for a day or two at least.
Don't worry about it. Happens all the time. I just want a mention in your Pulitzer prize acceptance speech.
You got it. And you mention me when you get your Nobel Prize for Peace. :-)
The Nazi horror is finally grinding to a close.
The Soviet horror begins....
http://www.stiftung-bg.de/gums/en/geschichte/speziallager/spezial01.htm
The Soviet special camp No.7 / No. 1 1945 - 1950
In May 1945 the Soviet secret service began the construction of 10 special camps in the Soviet occupied territories. Special camp No.7 was constructed in Weesow near Werneuchen and was moved in August 1945 to the site of the National Socialist concentration camp Sachsenhausen. In the summer of 1948 the camp was renamed special camp No.1. Until its closure in March 1950 more than 60,000 people had been held there, at least 12,000 of which died due to the catastrophic prison conditions, hunger and psychological or physical exhaustion.
In contrast to British, US and French camps, the vast majority of the prisoners held in the Russian camps were NSDAP functionaries, a review of an individual’s guilt did not take place. From 1948 most of the prisoners had been sentenced by the Soviet military tribunal for acting against the Soviet occupying forces. Often the arrests occurred arbitrarily or after a denunciation and many prisoners confessed only after being tortured. German prisoners of war, recently released from allied P.O.W. camps, were held in Sachsenhausen special camp as were members of the red army, awaiting repatriation to the USSR accused of desertion. Part of the camp was used as a special hospital to care for red army soldiers with sexually transmitted diseases.
The special camp was almost completely isolated from the outside world. Families were not informed of the whereabouts or the fate of the prisoners. The special camps were not labour camps and so differed to the Soviet gulags. They also differed greatly to the National Socialist concentration camps as there was no intent to exterminate the internees and the camp personnel rarely assaulted the inmates.
The camp was closed in 1950, but only not all of the prisoners were set free. The majority of the prisoners sentenced by the Soviet military tribunal were sent to East German prisons. Some of the internees were tried during the Waldheimer cases in the GDR and soviet prisoners were deported to camps in the USSR.
With a torn picture of his Führer beside his clenched fist, a dead major of the Volkssturm,Walter Doenicke lies on the floor of city hall, Leipzig, Germany. He committed suicide rather than face U.S. Army troops who captured the city.
A wave of suicides was now hitting Germany. Those who identified most closely with Nazism were not just fearful for the future but despaired of a life without the Nazi regime. There were suicides on the western front because people feared the arrival of the Americans. The circumstances in the east, where there were fearsome stories spreading about the behaviour of the Red Army, many of them substantiated by fleeing refugees, were even more desperate.
The suicides involved the young and the old as well as whole families. For teenagers whose whole life had been dominated by the Nazi ethos the collapse of the regime seemed to be the end of the world. The news of Hitler’s death was the final straw for many more.
Martin Borman’s 15 year old son, also called Martin, had been at an elite Nazi school. He and others had recently been given false papers and helped to flee. Years later he told Gitta Sereny:
It was a small inn and a very small Stube [parlour]. We sat on benches tightly packed together. It’s impossible now to convey the atmosphere. The worst moment was when, at two o’clock in the morning on May 1, the news of Hitler’s death came through on the radio. I remember it precisely, but I can’t describe the stillness of that instant which lasted . . . for hours.
Nobody said anything, but very soon afterwards people started to go outside, first one, then there was a shot. Then another, and yet another. Not a word inside, no other sound except those shots from outside, but one felt that that was all there was, that all of us would have to die.
(Picking up a gun, Martin walks outside.) My world was shattered; I couldn’t see any future at all. But then, out there, in the back of that inn, where bodies were already lying all over the small garden, there was another boy, older that I: he was eighteen. He was sitting on a log and told me to come sit with him.
The air smelled good, the birds sang, and we talked ourselves out of it. If we hadn’t had each other at that moment, both of us would have gone; I know it.
This account appears in Gitta Sereny: Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth
3,881 people were recorded as committing suicide during April in the Battle of Berlin, although the figure is probably an underestimate. More would die now that Hitler was dead – but it would be difficult to determine how many people died given the desperate conditions inside the capital. Conditions were by now so chaotic that many people did not hear the radio announcements.
Claus Fuhrman was hiding in a cellar in Berlin and describes the last days:
The scourge of our district was a small one-legged Hauptscharfuhrer of the SS, who stumped through the street on crutches, a machine pistol at the ready, followed by his men. Anyone he didn’t like the look of he instantly shot. The gang went down cellars at random and dragged all the men outside, giving them rifles and ordering them straight to the front. Anyone who hesitated was shot.
The front was a few streets away. At the street corner diagonally opposite our house Walloon Waffen SS had taken up position; wild, desperate men who had nothing to lose and who fought to their last round of ammunition. Armed Hitler Youth were lying next to men of the Vlassov White Russian Army.
…
We left the cellar at longer and longer intervals and often we could not tell whether it was night or day. The Russians drew nearer; they advanced through the underground railway tunnels, armed with flame-throwers; their advance snipers had taken up positions quite near us; and their shots ricocheted off the houses opposite.
Exhausted German soldiers would stumble in and beg for water — they were practically children; I remember one with a pale, quivering face who said, “We shall do it all right; we’ll make our way to the north west yet.” But his eyes belied his words and he looked at me despairingly. What he wanted to say was, “Hide me, give me shelter. I’ve had enough of it.”
I should have liked to help him; but neither of us dared to speak. Each might have shot the other as a “defeatist”.
An old man who had lived in our house had been hit by a shell splinter a few days ago and had bled to death. His corpse lay near the entrance and had already began to smell. We threw him on a cart and took him to a burnt-out school building where there was a notice: “Collection point for Weinmeisterstrasse corpses.” We left him there; one of us took the opportunity of helping himself to a dead policeman’s boots.
The first women were fleeing from the northern parts of the city and some of them sought shelter in our cellar, sobbing that the Russians were looting all the houses, abducting the men and raping all the women and girls. I got angry, shouted I had had enough of Goebbels’ silly propaganda, the time for that was past. If that was all they had to do, let them go elsewhere.
Whilst the city lay under savage artillery and rifle fire the citizens now took to looting the shops. The last soldiers withdrew farther and farther away. Somewhere in the ruins of the burning city SS-men and Hitler Youth were holding out fanatically. The crowds burst into cellars and storehouses. While bullets were whistling through the air they scrambled for a tin of fish or a pouch of tobacco.
On the morning of 1 May our flat was hit by a 21-cm. shell and almost entirely destroyed. On the same day water carriers reported that they had seen Russian soldiers. They could not be located exactly; they were engaged in house-to-house fighting which was moving very slowly.
This account appears in Louis Hagen (ed): Ein Volk, Ein Reich: Nine Lives Under the Nazis.
Leipzigs Deputy Mayor and Municipal Treasurer Dr. Lisso, at desk, his wife Renate, in chair, and their 20 year old daughter Regina Lisso, after committing suicide by cyanide in the Leipzig New Town Hall (Neues Rathaus) to avoid capture by American soldiers of the 69th Infantry and 9th Armored Divisions as they closed in on the city. Regina Lisso wears the armband of the German Red Cross.
Whoops. Forgot the link for my last post:
http://ww2today.com/1-may-1945-more-suicides-as-the-berlin-battle-continues
Of interest only to me and one other guy, when I saw the cite was from Yale, I was with a guy from our unit returning to the States. He said he was going to return to Yale and write his doctoral on the f word. He thought this to be the most flexible word in any language. It could be used as any part of speech from subject to verb and on and on. So wherever you are, let me call you Doctor. If you are, as we say, Over the Rainbow, then God Bless.
I know enough German to know that “Aldershorst” is the incorrect spelling. It should be “Adlershorst”, a simple transposition error, but not one that I would expect from Stephen Ambrose.
It’s worth viewing many times. In fact, run it daily!
Bet it felt really, really good to him, though.
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