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.
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Top reviews from other countries
mastix
Muy recomendable para aprender sobre una parte de la historia que se ha obviado
Reviewed in Spain on October 2, 2021
SL
Very shocking indeed...war is truly terrible with the civilians bearing the brunt of it.
Reviewed in Canada on April 20, 2013Roderick Mason
Thought provoking, this book told peoples stories that the world needs to hear
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2008