Lt. Col. Max Klaar (left) Bundeswehr (retired) embraces Merrit P. Drucker, retired US Army major at a ceremony in Washington. Photo: Monica Frim.
World War Two stopped in 1945, but it did not end.
The death rate among soldiers and civilians in Germany increased. No peace treaty was signed between Germany and its former opponents. And according to many Germans, there is still no real peace either, because the country is occupied and lacks a treaty.
It is identified by the United Nations as a “Hostile State;” the propaganda which helped to start the war still goes on against Germany; the conquerors have never been called to account for the atrocities they inflicted on their German prisoners of war, or for the deaths by forced starvation of millions of German civilians. Thuggish fascists still threaten freedom of speech. Thousands of political prisoners have been sentenced to jail in Germany for expressing opinions tolerated among the conquerors.
All that has suddenly started to change because a retired US Army officer, Merrit P. Drucker, read my book entitled Other Losses, which describes in gruesome detail the dying agonies of a million German prisoners of war in American and French camps after World War Two. Drucker, who had been posted to Rheinberg in 1989, investigated the book’s claims in archives in Germany and the USA to ascertain its veracity, and has now written a letter of apology to Max Klaar, Chairman of German Soldiers Association and formerly a lieutenant colonel in the Bundeswehr, apologizing for the fate of German prisoners of war in US Army camps in 1945.
“Starting in April, 1945, the US Army and the French army casually annihilated about one million captives, most of them in American camps,” said Army Senior Historian Col. Ernest F. Fisher (retired) in his foreword to the book.
Fisher was present on October 31 2011 at an emotional ceremony in Washington launching the new American edition of Other Losses. The book has been a world-wide best-seller for 22 years, but according to a Washington bookseller, was “deep-sixed” in the US when a small edition appeared here two decades ago.
Accepting the apology in Washington, Klaar presented a 14-point proposal to end the war both formally and prasctically. According to Klaar, Germans are today a “nation of wounded souls” constantly suffering the war-guilt and shame of a criminal past which the conquerors are constantly re-inflicting on them.
Anyone in Germany who speaks today of the crimes inflicted on Germans themselves after the war, is shouted down by the Anti-Fascist movement, which threatens violence against owners of venues where opponents are scheduled to speak out against political correctness. This fascistic Anti-Fa movement is scarcely known outside Germany but it has attained powerful control over public expression there. Many are silenced, many are arrested and many jailed for speaking out on the subject of allied atrocities which are deemed by Anti-Fa reasoning to diminish German guilt. Political correctness in Germany as in many other countries dictates that only the Germans were the criminals of World War Two; but in Germany itself, to say that they too were victimized courts violence, criminal prosecution and a jail sentence.
Drucker’s apology derives from a sense of the injustice of the US behavior, and a determination “to see this thing right,” by which he means making amends as far as possible for the horrors inflicted on the prisoners themselves and their families. I started research for the book because, by chance, working on a book about the French Resistance, I saw the silhouette of a terrific and half-known story that had to be revealed. Many times I was told by Germans who were in the allied death-camps, “Thank you. No German could have told this story.”
