A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans

A Terrible Revenge is an important and balanced work about the Expulsion of the Eastern Germans and the abuses these people encountered under the occupation of the Soviets and their puppets. I find Dr. DeZayas to be an eminently fair and decent man, and a brave one to tackle a subject like this which tends to bring out a great amount of rage, vitriol and abuse. Yet, one should not read a book like this without first reflecting on entrenched American attitudes towards Germans. The German people are not a popular people, and this is understandable given the terrible crimes that were committed by them during the Holocaust.However, the Holocaust is not the only explanation for negative attitudes towards Germans and why this subject (the violent expulsion of the Eastern Germans) has been kept in a historical blackout. A second element not mentioned in A Terrible Revenge is that Germans have also been subjected to intense propaganda for 100 years in the United States. During and after WWI, the British indoctrinated the American people with anti-German idiocy; Hollywood too has produced an endless onslaught of negativity towards Germans for the past 75 odd years, including countless portrayals of negative stereotypes - Germans as Nazis, terrorists etc., often in silly movies that have nothing to do with World War II.Lastly, I suspect one more element as to why this topic of the violent expulsion of the Eastern Germans has been kept in the dark to most Americans is because it reflects badly on a beloved American president, and the cult of personality built around him. It seems (most) Americans are incapable of properly assessing any of the bad decisions (Yalta ,for instance) made by Roosevelt. Aside from the crimes against humanity detailed in this book, this "friendship" between FDR and Stalin resulted in the stationing of nuclear missiles in the ice-free port of Konigsberg/Kaliningrad (ethnically cleansed part of East Prussia), missiles aimed at the United States and Western Europe. Thus, a former part of Germany became a closed military zone to be used against American and Western European interests.Reading the various reviews and comments about this book, I have to wonder if the negative comments were written by people who ever bothered to open up this book. One person mused whether DeZayas wanted to give back the Sudetenland and Breslau to Germany. I believe the answer to this can be found on pages 146-147 of a different book of DeZayas,  The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace , in which DeZayas writes the following; "Among those human rights that Europeans hold dear is the right to one's homeland. This very right, which the German expellees invoke for themselves and which is a central demand of their 1950 charter, also applies to the two generations of Poles and Czechs who have been born in and have cultivated the lands that were formerly the homeland of East Prussians and Sudetenlanders. The right to the homeland of these Poles and Czechs must be respected...it is important to stress that no leader of the German expellees has ever proposed an expulsion of Poles or Czechs from the territories in question."Another criticism is that DeZayas does not put the expulsions into historical context. This is laughable. DeZayas explains context in Chapter 2 (The Expulsion Prehistory; Interbellum Years and World War II), including how 2 million Germans wound up in Poland after WWI as second-class citizens, and also details President Wilson's assistance in creating the insane borders of Czechoslovakia which was 28% German-speaking (German-speakers treated as second class citizens). While this does not excuse the crimes of the Nazis, the blunders and not-forward thinking of Wilson and the others at Versailles created a powderkeg that blew up 20 years later. It is also important to know that Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia, a man whose ideas resembled those of Adolph Hitler, had plans from before WWII to expel the population of Germans in Czechoslovakia.DeZayas should have mentioned that the Russian involvement in the First World War had everything to do with their territorial ambitions in the case of East Prussia in general and Konigsberg in particular. This process of Russian empire-building was completed by Stalin (along with his swallowing up of all of Eastern Europe into the greater Soviet Empire). Poland too had territorial ambitions (which included a take over Konigsberg which they called Krolowiec in spite of the fact that virtually no Poles lived there). One cannot deny that these issues, along with expulsions of Germans from Alsace, Memel, Silesia etc., as well as the "population transfers" of Greeks & Turks following the First World War laid the groundwork for what is contained in this book.Some reviewers criticize DeZayas for not blaming the Nazi leadership for what occurred. This is sheer nonsense. On Page 17, DeZayas writes "The expulsion of Germans from their ancestral homelands belongs to the history of a war unleashed by Hitler, a war that eventually turned back upon Germany." He writes on Page 34, "Besides the expulsions for the Lebesnraum policies, millions of non-Germans were deported to the Reich and made to work in the war industries. They were often treated as sub-humans who were meant to work for the "master race." Their accomodations were inhuman and degrading. And then there were the concentration camps." DeZayas also takes to task the incredibly stupid, selfish, evil Gauleiter of East Prussia Erich Koch, and how this man caused much of what befell East Prussians by not evacuating sooner. On Page 54 DeZayas writes " Of course, it must not be forgotten that the Local Nazi Party officials bore a large part of the responsibility for the catastrophe, often blocking timely evacuation of civilians until it was too late to proceed in an orderly manner."I had previously read some of the accounts included by DeZayas in A Terrible Revenge, but the most appalling of all is what happened in Poland to Marie Neumann (pages 54-65). Repeated rapes, whippings, lynching of her entire family including children, beatings, both by Russians and the worst of it by the sick-minded Polish communists. This account is not for the faint-hearted.On Page 3, DeZayas writes forcefully "Is there a scapegoat, a collective guilt for these calamities? No.! Collective guilt is a non-historical, inhuman and unchristian concept. There is however, a collective morality to which we must all subscribe. All victims of injustice deserve our respect....In judging these events, the nationality of a victim must not matter; pain and suffering have no nationality. Nor does murder. Every crime is reprehensible, regardless of the nationality of its victim-or of the victimizer." I agree completely.DeZayas also points out the hypocrisy of the allies on Page 37 "The anomaly remains that while the Nuremberg trials were in progress, millions of Germans were being drive from their homelands, based on decrees, or at least under the sanction of the same powers whose prosecutors and judges were condemning the mass deportations perpetrated by the Nazis."He comments on the psychotic maltreatment of German women by the Soviets on Page 47 "For reasons best explained by a psychologist, one of the aberrations practiced by the soldiers was to take victims, mostly female, strip them naked and nail them to barn doors in cruciform fashion. " Other Soviet/Polish/Czech etc., war crimes included raping women to death, forcibly inserting broomsticks, metal bars, telephone receivers etc., into their vaginas and cutting their breasts off, some of which is detailed in this book and other books such as Soviet dissident Lev Kopalev's  No Jail for Thought .DeZayas also also writes about the demonic propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg, a Stalinist version of Julius Streicher, and how his hate propaganda incited much of the rape, sexual torture, and murder of German women. Lev Kopalev had no use for Ehrenburg as is detailed in his excellent aforementioned book. And yet, later in life, Ehrenburg had the absolute "balls" to write the following about Stalin as quoted by Richard Wurmbrand in  Tortured for Christ  on page 66 "...if Stalin had done nothing else in his life than to write the names of his innocent victim, his life would not have been long enough to finish the job." Perhaps Ehrenburg should have looked in the mirror and thought about his own victims, the ones discussed in this book. His life too wouldn't have been long enough. The textbook definition of chutzpah is the boy who murders his parents and then pleads with the judge for mercy because he's an orphan. More need not be said. Such is the pathology of modern day Germans that there is an Ehrenburg Strasse in a city in eastern Germany, which is akin to having a Beria Street in Warsaw. I hope that I am correct in assuming that the Germans who live in that city have no idea who Ehrenburg was. I'd hate to think otherwise.To close, if you already know everything you need to know about WWII, or if you have no liking for Germans, I would like to spare you further annoyance and recommend that you do not read A Terrible Revenge. However, if you are interested in learning what happened to the Eastern Germans after WWII (supposedly) ended, I would recommend this book highly. It will give you a perspective that you might not find elsewhere.

It is difficult to express how much the reading of this book would have provided understanding during my formative years as immediate family members shared first-hand accounts of their trials in former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, history such as that presented in this work has only started to trickle into the mainstream. Regardless of the fact that the vast majority of East European ethnic Germans discussed here had no connections with or sympathy for the political establishment of the state of Germany during World War II, the problem is that much of what has been associated with Germany in subsequent years is tied to the fact that Germany lost the war to the Allies. While I highly recommend "Barefoot in the Rubble" and "German Boy" (see my reviews for these books), the difference with this work is that it lays out much of the history behind the ethnic cleansing of East European Germans. In addition, rather than focusing on a single individual or a small group of individuals, "A Terrible Revenge" shares dozens of accounts, including excerpts from official reports, along with footnotes. In addition, the appendix to this book shares high-level quantitative population tabulations for the 1939 to 1950 time period that help underscore the great losses of ethnic Germans outside of Germany. A warning to those who are considering to read this book: many horrors of life during the five year period following World War II are shared, including vivid accounts of rapes and the manners in which individuals were murdered by the hoards of Soviet armies that descended upon the Germans of East Europe. While my initial interest in reading this text revolved around its discussion of Donauschwabens (Danube Swabians), many more ethnic Germans were affected. About 15 million found themselves on the wrong side of the new postwar borders within Europe. For readers who are unfamiliar with this part of history, please bear in mind that in no way is "A Terrible Revenge" unsympathetic to other populations affected by World War II and its aftermath. The introduction to this work presents 6 considerations, which include: "all victims of war and tyranny deserve respect and compassion", "the expulsion of the Germans is a legitimate subject for scholarly research", "historians are bound by a scholarly and moral obligation to research and present historical events, to determine the facts and organize them into the greater historical context", "the expulsion cannot be regarded as a question of crime and punishment", "a principle of collective guilt cannot be applied to the expulsions, just as there can be no collective guilt for war", and "the tragic experience of the German expellees could have served as a warning to spare other nations the traumata of expulsion from homeland, heritage, and pride". With this last consideration, the author notes that: "Alas, for decades the facts of the expulsion of the Germans were systematically ignored by the media and even by professional historians, whose function was and remains to do proper research, to chronicle events and to put them in perspective. No wonder that the ethnic cleansing of the 1990's in the former Yugoslavia was presented by the media as unprecedented. The expulsion and spoliation of the Germans remains an important subject for study in the high schools and universities. We owe this recognition to the victims - as we owe the truth to ourselves."

I ordered 2 copies of this book, one for myself and one for a relative whose family left Silesia. I had previously ordered a copy for another friend. The book is fascinating and provides insight into a chapter of history that isfrequently deliberately ignored. Who wants to read about Allied crimes against humanity?! The author has researched the material exhaustively and presents it skillfully in a highly readable form without neglecting any sigfinicant aspects of this horrendous period of European history. While covering a painful subject, A Terrible Revenge is not as painful as the more detailed examination of the Allied Occupation covered by "After the Reich."However, one very significant problem was that there are 32 pages missing in the book, pages 23 through 54. Thechapter "Expulsion Prehistory" is almost entirely missing and much of the chapter "War and Flight" is also missing.A further annoyance is the fact that page 86 is followed by page 55, so you get an extra 30 pages without anything new. A Terrible Revenge is an important, highly informative, well-written work poorly printed.

A Terrible Revenge exposes the facts concerning the outrageous treatment of Germans from 1944 through 1949. These innocent Germans, mostly women, children, and older people were living in their ancestral lands. The WWII allies redrew the boundaries so that these lands no longer belonged to the Germans. The ethnic people to whom these lands were assigned beat, robbed, raped, and murdered the Germans living there. This is history that is little known to people and that is not taught in school. This book and others like it should be widely read.

O livro chegou bem como o esperado

Contains very shocking first hand accounts from those oppressed. One could hardly imagine the level of brutalities and exacted revenge by the Soviets and the Poles on these ethnic Germans. A German friend of mine whose parents & grandparents were the very 'expellees' mentioned in the book, told me about the expulsions and his dad refusal to talk about it though his mum did. Clearly his dad was traumatised by the events then.

A well documented book. It shows that history has manu faucets and what we are taught is not always factual

Finally a great book that provides evidence of this human tragedy. As the author points out, we are well aware of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but nobody knows about the atrocities committed against the German people after the war.

Perfect !