#24 Enemy, Prologue: Enemies of All Mankind

This is Darrell Cooper, and you're about to hear episode 24 of the Marta-made podcast.

“This is the first episode of a new series called Enemy, The Germans War.”

And as the title implies, we're going to be exploring the deep history of the Second World

War through the eyes of the people who lost it. As many of you know, I got into some hot water recently for discussing this topic on the Tucker Carlson show. If you are new to the show and haven't heard, there was about a week long freak out in 2024 throughout the Western press that culminated in my being denounced by name in an official

statement from the Biden White House. I have been warned by people who would know that I should probably avoid traveling to several European countries due to the possibility that I'll be arrested when my plane lands.

What did I say that got people so riled up?

The just of it was that the Second World War might have been avoided if the allies in particular Britain had taken a different approach to the belligerence of the Third Reich, and that the allies helped create the conditions that allowed the Hitler regime to justify the atrocities committed by German forces during the war. I hadn't planned on talking with Tucker about World War II, and I admit I went off a little

half-cocked, allowing people many of them in bad faith or ignorance, but some not. See here things that I wasn't saying, specifically that the Germans were innocent bystanders, and that the allies were to blame for all the bad things that happened from 1939 to 1945.

Never mind that I said at the time that I specifically was not saying that, still.

I knew I was walking on sacred ground with my shoes on, so I can't object too strongly when some people complained that I was tracking mud through the cathedral. In any case, 20 minutes or so of an interview that up to that point had been focusing

“on entirely different topics was not the best way to engage with that topic.”

So here we are. We're going to go very deep in this series as usual, and we're not going to stop until we understand how a man like it off Hitler was formed. How he was formed from the raw material of what was once an innocent child. We're not going to stop until we understand why the people of Germany would listen to him.

And what were the historical circumstances that made following him seem like the most reasonable of the available options at the time for millions and millions of people? In short, what did the Germans believe they were doing? We all know our side of the story. An evil man captivated to people who temporarily lost their minds.

He led them on a bloody quest for world domination, and humanity was saved by the effort and sacrifice of the greatest generation of the enlightened nations of the world. But history is a story lived and written by men and women, not by angels and demons. When angels and demons start creeping into your narrative, you might be doing something

“important and worth doing, but you're not doing history.”

The historian Timothy Snyder was one of the mainstream academics, tried it out to attack me in the press after my appearance on the Tucker Carlson show. So it's safe to say that he's no fan of mine, but I don't mind admitting that his book Bloodlands Europe between Hitler and Stalin was an excellent read. And in that book, Snyder says something with which I agree wholeheartedly, and which

will be sort of the guiding light of this entire series. Speaking of both Germany, under Hitler, and the Soviet Union, under Stalin, Snyder writes, quote, ideology, when stripped by time or partisanship of its political and economic connections, becomes a moralizing form of explanation for mass killing. One that comfortably separates the people who explain from the people who kill.

It is convenient to see the perpetrator just as someone who holds the wrong idea, and is therefore different for that reason. It is reassuring to ignore the importance of economics and the complications of politics.

their actions.

“It is far more inviting, at least today in the West, to identify with the victims, than”

to understand the historical setting that they shared with perpetrators and bystanders. The identification with the victim affirms a radical separation from the perpetrator. The Troblinka Guard who starts the engine, or the NKVD officer who pulls the trigger is not me, he is the person who kills someone like me. Yet it is unclear whether this identification with victims brings much knowledge, or whether

this kind of alienation from the murderer is an ethical stance. It is not at all obvious that reducing history to morality plays makes anyone moral. Unfortunately, claiming victim status does not itself bring sound ethical choices. Stalin and Hitler both claim throughout their political careers to be victims. They persuaded millions of other people that they too were victims of an international

capitalist or Jewish conspiracy.

“During the German invasion of Poland, a German soldier believed that the death grimace”

of a poll proved that polls irrationally hated Germans. During the famine, a Ukrainian communist found himself beleaguered by the corpses of the star of his doorstep. They both portrayed themselves as victims. No major war or act of mass killing in the 20th century began without the aggressors or perpetrators,

first claiming innocence and victimhood.

The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe that their victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence. The Austrian policemen shooting babies at Mejilio, imagined what the Soviets would do to his children. The victims were people.

A true identification with them would involve grasping their lives, rather than grasping at their deaths. By definition, the victims are dead and unable to defend themselves from the use that others make of their deaths. It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims.

It is less appealing but morally more urgent to understand the actions of the perpetrators.

The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim, but that one might

be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. Outstanding politicians and intellectuals, for example, Edvard Benesch and Ilya Aaronberg yielded to this temptation during the war. The Czechoslovak president and the Soviet Jewish writer were justifying revenge upon the

Germans as such. People who called others subhuman were themselves subhuman. Yet to deny a human being, his human character is to render ethics impossible. To yield to this temptation, to find other people to be inhuman, is to take a step toward not away from the Nazi position.

To find other people in comprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding and thus to abandon history in quotes.

“The Second World War is the worst thing that ever happened, at least quantitatively speaking,”

at least in modern history.

60 million people dead, entire nations destroyed.

All sides engaged in the wholesale slaughter of enemy civilian populations, and of course the nuclear demon unleashed upon the world. The entire world, including the quote-unquote good guys, lost its mind for a few years. The main lesson taken from the war that sometimes a bad guy pops up and starts causing trouble and we just have no choice, but to tool up and do whatever's necessary to take him out.

That has turned out to be a convenient justification for pretty much every war the United States has fought since 1945, and the official narrative surrounding World War II has been protected in large part to protect that justification. But what if that's not the right lesson? When I was nearing the end of the Jones Town series, I managed to get my hands on a stack

of police reports of incidents involving someone usually a husband or father, holding his

Most of the incidents involve drugs and the overwhelming majority of those involved methamphetamines,

“and for each incident I read about in the reports I found but I could newspapers and”

other media sources. Some of these incidents ended peacefully. Others ended with the death of the hostage taker at the hands of police, but nearly half ended when the man murdered his family and then killed himself. Jim Jones, as those of you who have listened to the Marta Made Series God Socialist, no,

was hopped up on amphedamines pretty much every day for about 10 years leading up to the murder suicide in Guyana.

I had read enough about the delusional and often violent paranoia, often caused by long-term

infetamine use, that I expected to learn something from those police reports about what happened at Jones Town in 1978, and I was read, I did.

“One of the things I learned from those reports that influenced the way I understood the”

Jones Town's story was that the behavior of the police was not the same in every case. Some clearly understood the explosive and unpredictable nature of the circumstances they were in, and they did their job by trying at every point to deescalate the situation. Other police were clumsy and out of their depth, but in some cases there was simply no getting around the fact that in a standoff with a psychotic man, delusional man threatening

to murder his family, the police acted in ways that made the situation worse.

They used threats, they used pressure tactics, some even insulted, or tried to humiliate the man inside the house with a gun. Maybe just hoping to shake him up and get him to expose himself, maybe just because cops or human beings too, and they were tired and frustrated and angry themselves.

“Whatever the reason, you read through the reports and they clearly acted in ways that made”

the situation more dangerous, often with catastrophic consequences. Now the cops who behaved this way, responsible for the tragedies that followed, obviously they were not holding the family hostage, and they did not pull the trigger on the murder weapon. So in that sense, no, obviously they were not the ones responsible.

We don't know what would have happened if the cops had taken a more deescalatory approach. It's certainly possible that things would have ended the same way. Still, when the worst possible outcome occurs, it would be totally inappropriate for the police to throw their hands up and say there's nothing we could have done. Sky was crazy, he was going to do what he was going to do, and any discussion of what

we might have done differently really just deflects blame away from the real culprit. Even if that's true, a responsible police department would study every single action and its officers took, playing out every counterfactual to try to understand what happened. For understandable reasons, only one counterfactual is usually permitted in polite discourse when something like this happens, namely that of the cop who was saying all along, that

the murder suicide might have been prevented. If only people had listened to him and sent the SWAT team in right away. In World War II, in that version of this story, that cop is Winston Churchill, and he might have been right. Once the man inside kills his family, anyone arguing that the police should have been more

conciliatory is not going to find very many sympathetic years. But the lessons we take from the last crisis inform our response to the next one. In two often, our pride and our need to rationalize our decisions causes us to learn the wrong lessons. The lesson taken from Jones Town, for example, was that the tragedy might have been averted

if the authorities had taken harsher and more decisive action. And this lesson shaped the catastrophic official response to the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas 15 years later. World War II has cast a similar spell on us for 80 years. Again, virtually every war on which the US has embarked in the years since has been justified

to fight him now or to fight him later when he's even stronger and more dangerous.

“You can be Winston Churchill or you can be that cowardly, sniveling, Neville Chamberlain.”

Advocating de-escalation is just naive appeasement that inappropriately humanizes and legitimizes a monster. It's a very clever rhetorical jujitsu that frames the people advocating for peace as the ones who are actually advocating for a bigger and more violent war. The Pundit Berry Weiss called Tulsi Gabbard and Assad Toady on the Joe Rogan Experience, attacking

her moral character, but also effectively accusing her of treason simply because Tulsi was advocating for de-escalation of the Syrian Civil War. When Dr. Ron Paul pointed out that Osama Bin Laden's own words confirmed that US military

“intervention in the Middle East was fueling Al Qaeda's hostility toward us, Rudy Giuliani”

called Dr. Paul Dangerous, accused him of blaming America rather than the terrorists for 9/11. These tactics work less and less often, and most of you will have seen through the cynical abuse of language by Weiss and Giuliani in these examples, but they were main powerful when it comes to World War II, the ear myth of the American-led global order. In the early days of the war, the BBC broadcast or serial jode was discussing with a friend

whether Britain ought to accept Hitler's offer to come to the table to talk peace, author Nicholson Baker writes, quote, "Siro asked whether his friend thought Chamberlain should have negotiated after Hitler's peace offer." "Yes, of course," said his friend, "War should

never be begun, and as soon as they were begun, they should be stopped." He then listed

off many war evils, the physical and moral mutilation, the intolerance, the public lying,

“the enthronement of the mob. Once a war has started, he said, "The only thing was to get”

it stopped as soon as possible." Consequently, I shouldn't negotiate with Hitler. Jode said, "Ah, but you couldn't negotiate with Hitler, because you couldn't trust him. Hitler would break any agreement as soon as it benefited him to do so." Suppose you're right, said his friend, "Suppose that Hitler violated the peace agreement

and England had to go back to war. What had they lost? If wars comes to worst, we can always

begin the killing again. Even a day of peace was a day of peace. Jode found no ready answer for that." And, quote, "I'm not going to spend this series preaching to you about peace. This is a series about war. About a titanic conflict, the likes of which the world had never seen and probably will not see again for another thousand years. It's a story that will be told through the eyes of those who planned it and carried it out and of those who suffered

its consequences. I'd like to thank everybody who stood by me during the fewer, no pun intended,

that erupted after my appearance on Tucker's show. You never want to put your friends

and supporters to a loyalty test, but sometimes one is forced on them and I have to say it was very gratifying to learn that all of my friends really are in fact my friends. Not a single person with whom I had even a passing relationship spoke ill of me, even though there were rewards to be had for anyone who wanted to grab them. And I especially want to thank people like Jocco, somebody who has businesses and employees who depend on him and did not

ask for the drama brought by his association with me after that interview. But it had been very easy for him to disobey me. And given his responsibilities, I would have understood if he did. But he didn't. Neither did Tucker, neither did anyone else. And that's something I won't ever forget. Finally, this is where I make an appeal for your support. The forces that came after me in the wake of the Tucker interview were pretty daunting. And

the only reason, the only reason I was able to survive it and continue to speak my mind is you. My subscribers, for just a few dollars a month, sent a message to the people who

as they used to. So please, take a few minutes before you start this episode. And go subscribe

“to the Martyrmade Substack, which you can find at subscribe.martermade.com. And there'll”

be a link in the show notes. Subscribers get access to a members only feed with dozens of exclusive essays and podcast episodes as well as interviews, Q&A's, and the ability to participate in discussions about the topics we cover on the show. It's just fog bucks a month or 50 bucks a year. But for the two weeks after this episode is released, anyone who signs up will lock it in for $4 a month or $40 a year for as long as they remain

a subscriber. I don't run ads on this podcast. If I did, they would have all pulled out last year after my Tucker interview. And I probably wouldn't be making this series. The show is 100% listener supported. I worked for you and only you. And that is the way it

will always be. So head over again to subscribe.martermade.com and help me continue to do this.

Those of you who are already subscribers, you know how I feel about you. And all I can say is thank you. Thank you. Thank you. But enough of that. You're about to hear the prologue to enemy the Germans wore. Here we go. I intend to die for my beliefs. So cut off

“my head. And make me a martyr. The people will always remember it. No, they will forget.”

It is a part. God is an idea. It is a place. It is somewhere. But it's a reference to something a trans sentence. The following passage is from a book written by a Jewish American publisher named Theodore Kaufman. It was published in March 1941. Three months before Germany invaded the Soviet Union and began its career of atrocities on the eastern front. And nine months before the Pearl Harbor attack that drew the United States into the war. Kaufman's

book was called Germany Must Parish. And it begins like this. Quote. Today's war is not a war

“against Adolf Hitler. Nor is it a war against the Nazis. It is a war of peoples against peoples.”

Of civilized peoples envisioning light against uncivilized barbarians who cherished darkness. It is a struggle between the German nation and humanity. Hitler is no more to be blamed for this German war than was the Kaiser for the last one. Nor Bismarck before the Kaiser. These men did not originate or wage Germany's wars against the world. They were merely the mirrors, reflecting centuries-old inbred lust of the German nation for conquest and mass murder. This war is being

waged by the German people. It is they who are responsible. It is they who must be made to pay

for the war. Otherwise there will always be a German war against the world. For not only must

there be no more German wars in fact, there must not even remain the slightest possibility of one ever again occurring. A final halt to German aggression, not a temporary cessation, must be the goal of the present struggle. This does not mean armed mastery over Germany, or a peace with political or territorial adjustments, or a hope based on a defeated and repentant nation. Such settlements are not sufficiently conclusive guarantees of no more German aggressions.

This time Germany has forced a total war upon the world. As a result, she must be made to pay a total penalty. And there is one and only one such total penalty. Germany must perish forever. In fact, not in fancy. No, the problem of Germanism must not again be passed along to the next

Ours is the problem. Ours is the solution. We must bring ourselves to realize that no

“leader can govern Germany at all unless in some manner he embodies the spirit and expresses the war”

soul existent in the majority of her peoples. Majority is used advisedly for in speaking of the mass which composes a nation. It must be impartially conceded that some fraction of that mass must perforce vary from it. Consequently, no unfair intention is here being made that everyone in Germany is guilty of its heinous offenses against the world. In fact, we shall, in pursuing our point, favor Germany by allowing that as much as 20% of her population is entirely

guiltless of complicity in her crimes, as well as being foreign to any share of her war soul.

We therefore grant for argument's sake that some 15 million Germans are absolutely innocent.

But shall polls, checks, slowbox, Austrians, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, Frenchmen, Greeks, Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen, Canadians, Australians and Americans for we too may ultimately feel the spike of the German boot. Shall all these peoples, numbering some 300 million of the most civilized, most in the light and on earth, suffer constantly and face unnatural death every generation, so that some

“small part of Germany's populists may continue to exist? Are those 15 million Germans so valuable?”

So indispensable to mankind, that 300 million guiltless men, women and children shall fight a war

with Germany every time she so chooses? Shall perpetual struggle against the German be the only future facing civilized peoples? Why breed children while Germany breeds war? For quite patently, to fight once more in democratic defense against Germany with any goal and view saved the country's extinction, constitutes even though it lose the war, a German victory. It is a definite obligation which the world owes to those who struggled and died against

the German yesterday and to those who are fighting him again today, as it is the bound duty of the present generation to those yet unborn, to make certain that the vicious fangs of the German

“serpent shall never strike again. And since the venom of those fangs derives its fatal poison”

not from within the body, but from the war soul of the German, nothing else would assure humanity safety and security, but that that soul should be forever expunged, and the diseased carcass which harbors it before ever removed from this world. There is no longer any alternative. Germany must perish. I feel no more personal hatred for these people than I might feel for a herd of wild animals or a cluster of poisonous reptiles. One does not hate those whose souls

can exude no spiritual warmth. One pities them. If the German people wished to live by themselves in darkness, it would be strictly their own affair. But when they make constant attempts to enshroud the souls of other people in those fetted wrappings which cloak their own, it becomes time to remove them from the realm of civilized mankind, among which they can have no place or right to existence. They have lost the wish to be human beings. They are but beasts,

and they must be dealt with as such. For to reiterate, the German idea of world dominion and enslavement of its peoples is no political belief. It is a fierce and burning gospel of hate and intolerance, of murder and destruction and the unloosing of a sadistic bloodlust. It is in every

literal sense, a savage and pagan religion which incites its worshippers first to a barbaric

frenzy, and then prompts them to vent their animal ferocity in the practice of every horrible, ruthless and unmentionable atrocity upon innocent men, women, and children. Such are the true Germanic virtues. In the world will feel their sting so long as they continue to tolerate Germany and her peoples on the earth. For those Germanic traits are the same as those which emanating from the German soul, animated the Germanic tribes of your, end quote.

The final chapter of Kaufmann's book is titled "Simply Death to Germany," quote. When an individual commits premeditated murder, he must be prepared to forfeit his own life in consequence. When a nation commits premeditated murder upon its fellow nations, it must be

and I for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. But what is the law of man or God to Germany? Nothing. She recognizes only German law. So be it. It must then be German law, if such a law there be, which decrees her penalty, the penalty of death.

“There remains now but to determine the best way, the most practical and expeditious manner in which”

the ultimate penalty must be levied upon the German nation. Quite naturally, massacre and wholesale

execution must be ruled out as impractical when applied to a population of some 70 million.

There remains then but one mode of reading the world forever of Germanism. And that is to stem the source from which issue those war-listed souls, by preventing the people of Germany from ever again reproducing their kind. This modern method, known to science as eugenic sterilization, is at once practical, humane and thorough. Steralization has become a byward of science, as the best means of ridding the human race of its misfits, the degenerate,

the insane, the hereditary criminal. Steralization is not to be confused with castration.

“It is a safe and simple operation, quite harmless and painless,”

either mutilating nor unsexying the patient. It's effects are most often less distressing than vaccination and no more serious than a tooth extraction. Two, the operation is extremely rapid, requiring no more than 10 minutes to complete. The patient may resume his work immediately afterwards. Even in the case of the female, the operation, though taking longer to perform, is as safe and

simple. Perform thousands of times, no records indicate cases of complication or death. When one realizes that such health measures is vaccination and serum treatments, are considered as direct benefits to the community. Certainly, sterilization of the German people

“cannot but be considered a great health measure, promoted by humanity to immunize itself forever”

against the virus of Germanism.

The population of Germany, excluding conquered and annexed territories is about 70 million,

almost equally divided between male and female. To achieve the purpose of German extinction, it would be necessary only to sterilize some 48 million, a figure which excludes because of their limited power to procreate, males over 60 years of age and females over 45. Concerning the males subject to sterilization the army groups as organized units would be the easiest and quickest to deal with. Taking 20,000 surgeons as an arbitrary number and on the assumption

that each will perform a minimum of 25 operations daily, it would take no more than one month at the maximum to complete their sterilization. Naturally, the more doctors available, and many more than the 20,000 we mentioned would be available considering all the nations to be drawn upon, the less time would be required. The balance of the male civilian population of Germany could be treated within three months. In as much as sterilization of women needs somewhat more time,

it may be computed that the entire female population of Germany could be sterilized within a period of three years or less. Complete sterilization of both sexes and not only one is to be considered necessary in view of the present German doctrine that so much as one drop of true German blood constitutes a German. Of course, after complete sterilization, there will cease to be a birth rate in Germany. At the normal death rate of 2% per annum, German life will diminish at the rate of

1.5 million yearly. Accordingly, in the span of two generations, that which cost millions of lives

in centuries of useless effort, namely the elimination of Germanism and its carriers, will have been an accomplished fact. By virtue of its loss of self-propetuation, German will will have atrophied and German power reduced to negligible importance. Reviewing the foregoing case of sterilization, we find that several factors resulting from it firmly established its advocacy. Firstly, no physical pain will be imposed upon the inhabitants

of Germany through its application. It decidedly more humane treatment than they will have deserved. Secondly, execution of the plan would in no way disorganize the present population, nor would it cause any sudden mass upheavals and dislocations. The consequent, gradual disappearance

gradual disappearance of the Indians upon this one. Thus shall we throw Germany into the oblivion,

“which she would have visited upon the world. In quote. Kaufmann's book received little attention”

from the American general public, but it was reviewed by Time Magazine, the New York Times, many other major publications. In fact, the Washington Post said the book advocated a provocative theory interestingly presented. The book was passed around and discussed in some circles within Roosevelt State Department and other federal agencies that were in favor of war with Germany. Of course, the book soon made its way to Germany and Joseph Gerbels, the propaganda minister

of the third Reich, read it a few months later. Although he was outraged by it, he recognized

immediately the book's propaganda value, writing in his diary that Kaufmann could not have done a better service for German propaganda if Gerbels had commissioned the book himself.

“And so immediately he planned to print millions of copies of this pamphlet to distribute to the”

public, as well as to soldiers at the front, to drive home to the German people and soldier the stakes of the present conflict. In the summer of 1941, as German armies were racing across the Russian step toward Moscow and Kiev, Gerbels showed the book to Hitler, who partly as a reaction to it, approved the requirement that Jews and Germany, don the notorious Yellow Star Arm Band.

The book was cited as a primary justification for the eviction of Jews from the city of Hanover.

The American journalist Howard Case Smith was in Germany when this book appeared in that country, and he wrote, quote, "No man has ever done so irresponsible a disservice to the cause, his nation is fighting and suffering for the Nathan Kaufmann. His half-baked brochure provided

“the Nazis with one of the best light artillery pieces they have. For used as the Nazis used it,”

it served to bolster up that terror, which forces Germans who dislike the Nazis to support, fight, and die to keep Nazis alive." Now, Gerbels may or may not have known better, but many leading national socialists in Germany,

who were already convinced that the war was being forced upon them by an international

cabal of Jewish financiers and media magnets. Many of them believe that their paranoia was being confirmed by the appearance of a book like this, written by a Jewish author and reviewed in Jewish-owned newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Propaganda newspapers and magazines in Germany were filled with quoted passages from the book, as well as other anti-German articles and statements in the British and American press.

The German public, even that portion of it still skeptical about Hitler and his party, already believed that losing the war would likely result in a piece even more punitive than the hated Versailles treaty. But now, many of the more forced to admit that the party may not have been exaggerating when it claimed that the Allied War aim was the total destruction of Germany and its people. Party propaganda has found no shortage of anti-German vitriol on the British and

American press, and they filled their newspapers and magazines with excerpts and commentary. Typical was a letter to the editor of a British newspaper from August 1940, which read, quote, "To be frank, I favor exterminating every living creature in Germany, man, woman, and child, bird, and insect. I would not leave even a blade of grass. Germany must become more desolate than the Sahara." And quote, "The German people, as well as much of the leadership, who were

accustomed to the idea that the press was a tool of the ruling regime, it seemed obvious that such a statement, although it was presented merely as the thoughts of one man, would not have been printed in a national newspaper unless it reflected the sentiments that the enemy regime wanted to instill in its people." In June 1941, days after the German invasion of the Soviet Union was launched, the English writer Francis Partridge and her husband Ralph got a letter from an old

friend and fellow writer Gerald Brennan. In the letter Brennan was complaining about pacifists who were advocating for peace with Germany, writing that they were unable to even grasp simple arithmetic, since, quote, "Every German woman in child killed is a contribution to the

German defeat at Stalingrad were becoming clear, and German cities were being subjected to wholesale

“incineration by British and American bombers. Goobles wrote the following article for his weekly”

newspaper, "That's right." The naivete not to mention ignorance, with which certain European circles see the Jewish question in the fourth year of this gigantic struggle is astonishing. They cannot or will not see that this war is a war of the Jewish race and its subject people against Western culture and civilization. Everything that we Germans and Europeans defendors of the principle of a moral world order hold dear is at risk. The above mentioned circles are too inclined to see the

Jewish question as a humanitarian issue. They make their judgments on the feelings of the moment rather than on the knowledge and insight resulting from clear and calm reason. It is clear that if during this war we show the least weakening of our determination to resolve the Jewish question,

“the result will be the greatest danger to our people and right and all of Europe.”

Jewry wanted this war. Whether one looks to the plutocratic or the Bolshevist side of the enemy camp, one sees Jews standing in the foreground as instigators, rabble routers and slave drivers. They organize the enemy's war economy and encourage plans to exterminate and destroy the access powers. England and the USA recruit from among them the bloodthirsty and vengeful agitators and political lunatics and they are the source of the terror commissars of the Soviet

GPU. They are the mortar that holds the enemy coalition together. In the national socialist right, they see a power that resists their drive for world domination both militarily and intellectually. That explains their rage and deep hatred. Do not think that the old testament

“tirades of their newspapers and radio are merely political propaganda. They would carry it all out”

to the letter, should they have the opportunity. Our state security requires that we take whatever measures seem necessary to protect the German community from their threat. That leads to some difficult decisions but they are unavoidable if we were to deal with the threat. This war is a racial war. The Jews started it and they directed. Their goal is to destroy and exterminate our people. We are the only force standing between Jewry and world domination. If the access powers lose the

war in Europe, no power on earth could save Europe from the Jewish Bolshevist flood. It may seem surprising that such a small minority possesses such great power and is such a deadly danger. But it is so. International Jewry uses certain criminal methods to gain world domination that are not evident to uneducated nations. The same is true in private life. The Jews do not enjoy economic success because they are more intelligent than non-Jews rather because they follow

a different moral code. They attempt to conceal their methods for as long as possible until it is too late for the affected nation to defend itself. Then it takes a revolution to dislodge them. We know how difficult and tiresome that is. None of the viewers prophetic words have come

so inevitably true as his prediction that if Jewry succeeded in provoking a second world war,

the result would not be the annihilation of the Aryan race rather the end of the Jewish race. This process is a vast importance and will have unforeseeable consequences. But it can no longer be halted. It must only be guided in the right direction. One must also be sure to strike the weapon of public deception from Jewry's hands, which it is desperately using to save its skin. One can already see that in the face of approaching

catastrophe, the Jews are shrinking into the background. They send their pet goi to the fore. And it will not be long before they do not want to do it any longer and wash their hands in innocence. The Jews will have to answer for their countless crimes against the happiness and peace of mankind. And one day the whole world will give them the penalty that they are suffering today in Germany. We speak without resentment. The time is too grave to spin naive plans of revenge.

This is a world problem of the first order that can be solved by the present generation and must be solved by them.

Sentimental considerations will have no part here. We see Jewry as the embodiment of a general

When dealing with the Jews, there were only two choices to surrender to them or to fight them.

“We have chosen the latter. Is our enemy attacks without mercy? So do we.”

The future will prove who is right. Development so far, however, seemed to be more in our favor than the enemies. Opposition to the Jews, not friendship with them, is growing around the world. We are convinced that at the end of the war, Jewry will face a humanity that fully understands the Jewish question. One has to grant that extraordinarily clever tactics

are being used, and that it takes some intelligence or sound instincts to see behind the Jewish facade. But here too, the jug carries water until it breaks. International Jewry's attack on the cultural and moral order of the world is cleverly concealed,

“but not cleverly enough so that it cannot be seen through.”

One must keep it their heels and give them no rest when they begin to tire. They are virtue-osos at the art of transformation. They can appear in a thousand forms,

yet are always the same. If one has caught them, they claim injured innocence and send

their guard of pity on a head to beg for mercy. But if one extends them even a finger of pity, they chop off the whole hand. They must therefore be kept in the fear of the Lord. We know that they hate us from the depths of their souls. We take pleasure in their hatred. There is nothing that they would not do to us if they had the power. We cannot therefore give them even the slightest bit of power.

“More than that, it is our duty to tell the world of their nature and their depravity.”

We must again and again prove their sick role in beginning and carrying on this war. We must attack them incessantly, accuse them without pity of the crimes of which they are guilty until the nations begin to wake up. That may take a long time, but it is worth it. We are dealing with the most dangerous enemy that ever threaten the life, freedom and dignity of humanity. There can be no mercy. We have pity only for the countless millions of our own people,

and those of the other European nations who will be given over to the hate and destructive will of the devilish race if we become weak and give up the battle. Those Philistines who today are so

eager to protect the Jews would be their first victims. We must all keep alert. We must be on guard

against the insidious cleverness of the international world enemy. In the depths of his soul, he realizes that this war that he so frivolously began, expecting it to be the last step towards world domination, has instead become a war for his racial existence. He desperately seeks to stop the inevitable march of events. It will do him no good. We will keep at him. In the end, the Führers' prophecy about World Jewelry in 1939, which they laughed at then,

will come true. The Jews laughed in Germany, too, when they first saw us. They are not laughing any longer. When they planned a war to totally destroy the German nation, they signed their own death warrant. Here, too, history will be the world court, end quote. War is a great evil, not only because of the destruction of human lives in property. His catastrophic is these losses are, and at the risk of sounding insensitive to those who have suffered through war,

populations in property can be replaced and rebuilt. Often more lasting is the devastation war inflicts on the souls of those under its spell. The rhetoric of Gerbel's and Kaufman is not remarkable because it was unique or even rare. But because this is how people at war, who are seeking war, talk about each other. When he'd only look at the rhetoric from both sides of the Israeli Palestinian conflict since the attack of October 7, 2023, people often ask me

why that conflict gets me more animated than say a civil war in Sudan. There are several reasons, such as the fact that I just know a lot more people involved in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. And I know more about the conflict itself. And of course, the fact that my own country has a great deal of, I would say, negative influence in that conflict. But one of the most visceral reasons is that the Israeli Palestinian conflict is the only one that reliably turns many people I know,

and humane people, making excuses for the indiscriminate terrorism of Hamas.

“Returing on the Israelis as leading cabinet ministers in that country compare Palestinians”

to Amalek, the Old Testament tribe whom the Israelites were commanded to wipe out down to the last infant. And when these people are confronted about it, supporters of both sides, when they're not simply lying about what their own side has done, they offer the same excuses. The crimes of the other side are so barbaric that they have forfeited membership in the human race, and so the normal rules don't apply. We don't want to do this, but they give us no choice. And when confronted

with atrocities too glaring to talk their way around without putting themselves in an impossible position, they say, well, of course I don't like or approve of that kind of thing, but given the situation, how do you expect people to react? And they have a point. The Israelis have suffered brutal terrorist attacks since that country was founded. What do you expect? The Palestinians had their country

“taken from them by force, and have been under military occupation for 60 years. What do you expect?”

Theodore Kaufman was an American Jew reacting to the openly anti-Semitic regime in Germany. What do you expect? Red Army soldiers who raped and murdered their way across Eastern and Central Europe had seen their country destroyed by the German invasion. What do you expect? We expect the same thing. When people are embroiled in what they're told by trusted authorities is an existential conflict against mindlessly hateful aggressors. This kind of thinking can

escalate until every atrocity. Up to an including genocide is sincerely felt to be a heroic act of self-defense or justified vengeance. Every school child is familiar with the consequences that followed from the kind of thinking durable demonstrates in the article I just quoted. But we're less familiar with the consequences visited on Germany and ordinary German civilians,

including millions of Germans who had never lived in Germany. We're been a part of the right,

both during and after the war, as a result of similarly dehumanizing hate propaganda in the Allied countries, and especially those countries more directly affected by the war in Europe. This series will try to understand the German experience of the Second World War, which means we will spend a lot of time plumbing the inhuman depths to which German forces sank as the war dragged on. But it also means we will look to the experience of ordinary,

innocent German people, who suffered atrocities at the hands of others who themselves were infected by the same kind of hate propaganda flowing out of Berlin. World War II was a total war in which whole societies mobilized seek the destruction of whole societies. I remember when I was a kid, I used to play this old World War II submarine game on my cousin's PC. You capped into an American sub around the Pacific theater, evading destroyers and ducking

depth charges, and racking up points based on the tonnage of ships that you managed to sink. It didn't strike me as that strange at the time. I was just a kid playing a game where you killed the bad guys, you know, they could have been Japanese ships or orcs or aliens. It was all the same to me, which probably tells us something important in itself.

“But the whole thing, as I remember it now, definitely hits different when I remember that the game”

did not distinguish between the type or purpose of the ships I was hunting. If it flew the flag of the rising sun, it was a target. I got points for sinking battleships, I got points for sinking merchant ships carrying food and medicine. Because that's how it was. Kill the enemy to stop him from killing you. Kill his family so he feels the consequences of his aggression.

Destroy his land to make him too weak to threaten you. Make him suffer. As he would make you suffer, if given a chance. That's total war. In his haunting book, Human Smoke, author Nicholson Baker writes about a memo distributed by the British

Air Staff on March 6, 1941 titled Chemical Board Crop Subcommittee. First report.

Such attacks might have a moral effect on the German population. It was contended.

Another idea was to kill crops or stunt their growth using substances developed by imperial chemical industries. The English company that made bombs and room call brand sprayable mustard gas. ICI's Chemical 1313 acted on wheat and other grains. While chemical 1414 ravaged root crops. In 1941, they're used by aerial distribution over Germany was in visit, a later memo said and quote. At same day, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met with air marshal Charles Portal,

“Chief of Staff of the Royal Air Force. Churchill by this point knew that the only way Britain had a chance”

of winning the war was if the Americans could somehow be drawn into it. And to that end,

he told his cabinet explicitly that he was actively seeking ways to provoke the Germans to drastic action against Britain. Germany by this point was beginning to focus on the east and not to abandon the war in the west, but it was certainly deemphasized. And Churchill believed that the propaganda effect on the American public of German atrocities against Britain would be a greater gain than whatever was lost to the German attacks. Baker writes quote.

Churchill asked Portal to see if he could try something a little different, using some special weapons. They tried it before, back in the summer, just after France fell, but it hadn't worked all that well. Maybe they should give it another chance. The weapons to be used weren't bombs, exactly. They were leaflets without words. The British called them calling cards. They were about the size of a playing card, maybe a little smaller, and they were made of a

phosphorus wafer held between two layers of moist fabric. When the fabric dried out in the sun, the phosphorus caught fire. There were other shapes and configurations, sometimes they were coated with a plastic substance that cracked when it dried. When it cracked,

“the wafer burned. What might these fire sandwiches set a light?”

Grain? They tried that already. Churchill's thoughts turned to the black forest. In fact, why not burn down all the forests of Germany? They began on a Monday night, September 2, 1940, but the air ministry held back the news for two days. Woods are bombed, was the headline in the New York Times. RAF bombers have unleashed a devastating attack with incendiary bombs on the famous black forest east of Bodden. The dense woods of the Oberhars

mountains, the forest district of Greenwald on the outskirts of Berlin, and forests in Thurinja, said the paper. Fires were still burning in the black forest a day afterward. The pine trees of the Hars Mountains blazed up like Tinder. One returning pilot recognized one of the peaks in the Hars Mountains. He'd stayed near their once on a holiday. On this mountain he remembered, lived a legendary giant. I was telling the other chaps in my plane about it as we were flying over it.

He said near the railway line that went up the giant's mountain, bomb started a nice new little patch of fire about a mile square, the pilot added. Given its ubiquity throughout human history, it is hard to say that war is unnatural. And if it is natural, then the demands it places upon us

“must in some way be natural too. But I think it's safe to say that when you've descended to the”

point of trying to burn down ancient forests, more or less out of spite, that something essential in

your humanity has been sacrificed on the bloody altar. Before Pearl Harbor discredited the American Peace Movement, anti-war advocates in the United States made the case that however bad Hitler in the Thurv Reich might be, we had no business involving ourselves in a conflict in which both sides were already engaged in such want and violence. That however noble our intentions might be, and whatever the outcome of the conflict, we could only disgrace ourselves and muddy our spirits

by participating in something like this. But soon of course we were in it. And along with everyone else, we submitted to the logic of a conflict in which whole peoples were considered acceptable casualties in pursuit of victory. This is from W. G. Sebald's Great Book, a natural history of destruction.

8 Army Air Force flew a series of raids over Hamburg. The aim of Operation Gamora, as it was called,

“was to destroy the city and reduce it as completely as possible to ashes. In a raid early in the”

morning of July 27, beginning at 1 AM, 10,000 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on the densely populated residential area east of the Elb, comprising the districts of Hammerbrook, Homm Nord, and Homm Sood, Bill Verde Auschwug, and parts of St. Georg, Hilbeck, Barnbeck, and Vansbeck.

A now familiar sequence of events occurred. First, all the doors and windows were torn from their

frames and smashed by high explosive bombs weighing 4,000 pounds. Then the attic floors of the buildings were ignited by lightweight incendiary mixtures, and at the same time fire bombs weighing up to 15 kilograms fell into the lower stories. Within a few minutes, huge fires were burning all over the target area, which covered some 20 square kilometers, and they merged so rapidly,

“that only a quarter of an hour after the first bombs had dropped, the whole airspace was a sea of”

flames as far as the eye could see. Another five minutes later, at 1.20 AM, a fire storm of an intensity that no one would ever before have thought possible arose. The fire, now rising 2,000 meters into the sky, snatched oxygen to itself so violently, that the air currents reached hurricane force, resonating like mighty organs with all the stops pulled out at once. The fire burn like this for three hours. At its height, the storm lifted gables and roofs from buildings,

flung rafters and entire advertising billboards through the air, tore trees from the ground, and drove human beings before it like living torches. Behind collapsing facades, the flame shot up as high as houses, rolled like a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of over 150 kilometers

“an hour, spun across open squares and strange rhythms like rolling cylinders of fire.”

The water in some of the canals was ablaze. The glass in tram car windows melted, stocks of sugar boiled in the bakery sellers. Those who had fled from their air raid shelter sank with grotesque contortions into the thick bubbles thrown up by the melting asphalt. No one knows for certain how many lost their lives that night, or how many went mad before they died. When day broke, the summer dawn could not penetrate the lead and gloom above the city.

The smoke had risen to a height of 8,000 meters, where it spread like a vast, animal-shaped cumulonimbus cloud. A wavering heat, which the bomber pilots said they felt through the sides of their planes, continued to rise from the smoking, glowing mounds of stone. Residential districts so large that their total street length amounted to 200 kilometers were utterly destroyed. Horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere. Blueish little phosphorus flames

still flickered around many of them. Others had been roasted brown or purple and reduced to a third

of their normal size. They lay doubled up in pools of their own melted fat, which had sometimes already congealed. The central death zone was declared off limits in the next few days. When punishment labor gangs and camp inmates could begin clearing it in August after the rubble had cooled down. They found people still sitting at tables, or up against walls, where they had been overcome by monoxide gas. Elsewhere, clumps of flesh and bone, or whole heaps of bodies

had cooked in the water, gushing from bursting boilers. Other victims had been so badly charred and reduced to ashes by the heat, which had risen to a thousand degrees or more, that the remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away in a single laundry basket. The exodus of survivors from Hamburg had begun on the night of the air raid itself. It started as Nasek writes with, quote, "Constant movement in all the neighboring streets,

going no one knew where." The refugees, numbering one in a quarter million, dispersed all over the Reich, as far as it's outer borders. Under his diary entry for August 20th, 1943, Friedrich Rekk wrote, "And now this is me talking, Friedrich Rekk, Malachew, and who will be hearing

a lot from throughout this series, was a conservative German who was very critical of the

hit origin, and who actually would die in a concentration camp after refusing to keep his

and I'm going to quote the passage more fully, so now this is Friedrich Rekk, quote.

The news from Hamburg is simply beyond the grasp of the imagination. Streets of boiling asphalt into which the victims sank and were boiled alive, veritable cities of ruins, which cover the dead and surround those still alive, like some jagged stone martyr's crown. The talk is of 200,000 dead. I am not one who believes everything is told. I much prefer seeing the thing for myself,

“and I think that in this case what I have seen with my own eyes suffices.”

I've heard a great deal about the completely wild and disoriented behavior of people in Hamburg

is the city burned. Stories of amnesia, stories of people wandering through the streets and the

pajamas they had on when they fled from their houses, crazy-eyed, carrying an empty bird cage, with no memory of a yesterday and no idea of a tomorrow. And now this is what I saw on a burning hot day and early August at a little rail road station in Upper Bavaria, where 40 or 50 of these miserable people were milling about, scrambling, despite the angry roars of the station master, into a car through a window they had broken,

pushing, kicking, yelling, accustomed by now to fighting for space. What happened then was inevitable. The suitcase, a miserable lump of cardboard with edges broken

“off, missed the target, fell back onto the platform and broke open revealing its contents.”

There was a pile of clothes, a manicure kit, a toy, and there was the baked corpse of a child, shrunk to the proportions of a mummy, which the half crazed woman had dragged along with her. The macabre mains of what only a few days before had been a family. Cries of dismay, disgust, roars, historical outbursts, the snarles of a small dog,

until finally an official took pity on all of them and had the thing disposed of.

Another report I heard was that the firestorm created by the immense complagration sucked up into it all the oxygen, suffocating people who were far away from the actual flames, and that the rain of phosphorus broiled the corpses of grown men and women into tiny, child-sized mummies, so that countless women are now wandering about the country, their homes in ruins,

“carrying with them these ghastly relics, and quote, "These raids were referred to by the”

people planning and carrying them out as morale bombing." Others called them terror bombing. They had no direct military purpose. All the men of fighting age were at the front, and the bombing runs were so indiscriminate that we cannot take seriously the old post-talk justification of reducing the industrial capacity of Germany's military machine. When one city was destroyed, the homeless survivors would pack into the next city

until it too was burned up, and we chased these refugees from city to city with our bombers until every single German city with the prewar population of 50,000 people or more, and countless smaller towns and villages were completely annihilated. Until the campaign climaxed in the total destruction of the ancient city of Dresden. Hundreds of thousands of women, children, and elderly refugees had packed into Dresden like sardines, hoping that even after everything that had happened,

maybe the allies would stop short of attacking a city that obviously had no military value, and which was not only a German, but a European cultural heritage site. But Dresden was utterly destroyed in February 1945, just two months before the end of the war, with German forces and full collapse and allied forces already racing across German territory toward Berlin from both East and West.

After American forces liberated the Dockhau concentration camp, just one week before Germany's unconditional surrender. Our soldiers rampaged through the camp, murdering dozens of surrender German soldiers. For several days, the camps, former inmates were given free reign to torture, humiliate, and murder the Germans that they could lay their hands on, often with the participation and assistance of the Americans.

An American soldier named Jack Hallett remembered, quote, "The men were deliberately wounding the guards that were available, and then turned them over

picture where one of the soldiers gave one of the inmates a bandit and watched him behead the man.

“It was a pretty gory mess. A lot of the guards were shot in the legs so they couldn't move,”

and that's about all I can say, in quote. Not only soldiers in guards, but mechanics, secretaries, supply personnel, and others like that were shot in the legs by American soldiers who watched as former inmates beat, tortured, hanged, and burned them alive. Millions upon millions of Germans, many of them civilians, and many of those not even Germans from Germany, but who were just ethnic Germans who had

happened to live in surrounding countries were enslaved by the Allied countries long after the war. And forced not only to perform cleanup and military support labor, but to handle corpses without sanitation equipment and to clear minefields without safety gear, which was tantamount to an execution

“without trial. In Britain and France, the governments claimed ownership of their German slaves.”

Ownership was the word they used, and made billions of dollars renting out their labor to private companies. Conditions in POW camps run by the western allies were so abominable that Germans were dropping like flies from typhus, dysentery, and starvation. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Germans died in British, French, and American captivity within a year of the end of the war. In many prison camps, Germans were forced to go

days without water. One man, a mechanic, remembered his time in an American camp, quote, "We would drink our own urine, it tasted terrible, but what could we do?" Some men got down on the ground and licked the ground to get some moisture. I was so weak that I was already on my knees when we finally got a little water to drink.

“I think I would have died without the water, but the Ryan River was just outside the wire."”

In, quote, "When an American camp commentant was asked why the prisoners were being made to suffer such inhumane conditions, he did not claim helplessness, but admitted that it was to break their spirits," or in his words, so that they will lose their joy of soldiering once and for all. In the formerly occupied countries, local civilians, with a more or less explicit blessing from the Allied authorities, launched a continent-wide pogrom against ethnic Germans.

15 million people whose families had been living in other countries for hundreds of years had their

property seized and were forced march to one of the German occupation zones with nothing but the clothes they wore. Many were beaten, raped, and murdered on their way out, and some two million ethnic Germans were killed in a very short period of time. Edward Venice, the exile president of Czechoslovakia, returned to Prague in May 1945, and in his first speech told the Czech people that not only Nazis, not only citizens of the

Reich, but all people of German descent were responsible for the actions of the Hitler government, and deserved, quote, "the limitless contempt of all mankind." Venice's Minister of Justice, Prokop de Tina, said that the Germans in their midst were a foreign ulcer in our body, and that there are no good Germans, only bad and even worse ones. Similar sentiments were echoed by officials up and down the Czech government.

Venice ordered the expropriation and expulsion of nearly three million people,

and effectively declared open season on ethnic Germans. Men were beaten, tortured, and often killed, women, and sometimes children were raped. An engineer named Kurt Schmidt remembered, quote, "If any man had tried to protect his wife, he would have risked being killed. The Russians, and the Czechs as well, did not even trouble to take the women away. Amongst the children, and in view of all the inmates of the camp,

they behaved like animals. During the nights one could hear the moaning and whimpering of these poor women. Day and night there was no peace for our nerves, and it was as if we had entered hell." A German woman from another Czech prison camp recalled that, quote, "The mob in the streets behaved even worse than the guards, especially the older women excelled themselves and had

Some of us were beaten so badly that they collapsed and were unable to get up again.

“The mob broke through, and we were again exposed to their maltreatment without any protection.”

Some of my fellow sufferers jumped into the mold down their desperation, where they were immediately fired at. One of the Czechs had a large pair of scissors, and one after another of us had her hair cut off. Another Czech poured red paint over our heads. I myself had four teeth knocked out. Rings were torn by force from our swollen fingers. Others were interested in our shoes and clothes, so that we ended up by being almost naked, even pieces of underwear had been torn from our bodies.

Young lads and men kicked us in the abdomen. In complete desperation, I also tried to jump into

the river, but I was snatched back and received another beating, and quote.

Keith Low in his book, "Savage Continent, Europe in the aftermath of World War II,

“after recounting the chaos in the Czech capital wrote that, quote, "The situation for Germans in”

Prague is broadly representative of the rest of the country." Hundreds of Germans civilians at a time, and at least thousands more likely tens of thousands in total were simply rounded up in shot, either by mobs or by Czech army detachments with orders to cleanse the region of Germans. In one incident near the Moravian town of Prerov, a Czech military unit stopped the train full of Slovakian Germans that was passing through. They pulled the people off the train,

and shot 71 men, 120 women, and 74 children, and dumped the bodies into a mass grave. The units commander justified killing the children by saying, "What was I supposed to do with them after we shot their parents?" Of course, every terrible thing that happened in the Western Occupation Zones were reflected in even greater scale and severity in the territory conquered by the Soviet Union. From Norman Namarks, the Russians in Germany, a history of the Soviet zone of

occupation, 1945 to 1949, quote. A terrible rampage of rape and pillage followed the Soviet seizure of Budapest in February 1945. It was impossible, wrote Julius Hay, to spend a day or even an hour in Budapest without hearing of brutalities committed by Russian soldiers. Hungarian girls were locked in Soviet quarters on the Buddha side of the city, where they were repeatedly raped and sometimes killed. Even the Swedish litigation was attacked by rampaging red army soldiers,

who stole possessions and raped women regardless of their nationality. The serious problem of rape by Soviet soldiers in eastern Europe turned out to be a pale foreshadowing of what was to face the German population when Soviet armies initially marched into German territory.

“Reading the Soviet hate propaganda could lead one to believe that it was as important for”

the Soviets to humiliate the German population as it was to defeat the German army. Front newspapers encouraged soldiers to recite the harm done to themselves and their families, and to keep a book of revenge that would remind them of the need to repay the Germans for their evil. Iliya Aaronberg's chance of ritual hatred for the Germans were so often printed and repeated that they became national slogans. We shall not speak anymore. We shall not get excited. We shall kill.

If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day. If you kill one German, kill another. There is nothing funnier for us than a pile of German corpses. Hang them and watch them struggle in their nooses. Burn their homes to the ground and enjoy the flames. These were the messages that permeated the last years of the war. Marshall Zhukov's orders

to the first Belarusian front on the eve of the January 1945 offensive into Poland did little

to dampen the Soviet soldiers lust for revenge. Woke to the land of the murderers the orders stated. We will get our terrible revenge for everything. A veteran of the East Prussian campaign described the national hatred that fed the Soviet march. As the front drew closer to the borders of Germany, the propaganda of hate not only of the German army, not only of the German people, but even of the German land itself took on a more and more monstrous character.

The final directive from the main political administration of the army on the eve of crossing the borders of East Prussia said that, "On German soil there is only one master, the Soviet soldier,

There are the families of the killers and oppressors. It was not untypical for Soviet troops

“to rape every female over the age of 12 or 13 in a village, killing many in the process.”

To pillage the homes for food, alcohol and loot and to leave the villages in flames. The reports of women subjected to gang rapes and ghastly nightly rapes are far too numerous to be considered isolated incidents. Love, copalove, then a captain in the Soviet army tried to stop a group of rampaging soldiers and was accused of having engaged in bourgeois humanism. Alexander Solgenytsin, who was also an officer in East Prussia, provides a fitting testimonial

to what he witnessed in that region in his poem, "Prussian Knights." "Zwion Zanzig,

Harringstrasse." It's not been burned, just looted, rightfold. A moaning, by the walls half

muffled, the mothers wounded still alive, the little daughters on the mattress, dead. How many have been on it? A platoon, a company, perhaps? A girl's been turned into a woman, a woman, turned into a corpse.

“Continued rape and plunder drove the Germans to desperate actions.”

As a state security officer in East Prussia coolly reported back to Moscow, the suicides of Germans, especially women, have become more and more common. Even after German troops were thoroughly defeated and East Prussia was under occupation,

the threat of rape continued to plague German women.

Herman Matskowski, a veteran German communist, and newly appointed local mayor of the District of Königsberg, reported that one of the only sources of food in town after its fall in early April 1945 was horse meat from the veterinary hospital on the outskirts of the city. Of those women who went to fetch the meat, barely one half returned unscathed. Many were raped, some did not return home at all.

“The only Germans in Königsberg who were well fed, Marimotskowski continued,”

are women who have become pregnant by Russian soldiers. Six months after the end of the war, on November 6th and 7th 1945, Red Army Day, the mayor wrote. Russian soldiers actually seem to have permission for every kind of transgression against the Germans. Men were beaten, most women were raped, including my 71-year-old mother, who died by Christmas.

The dreadful disorder resulting from the East Prussian campaign did not make enough of an impact on the Red Army hierarchy to institute the kinds of punishment that might have prevented further rape, as Soviet armies pushed beyond the vestula into Cylisia and Pomerania, was to become Western Poland. Once again, the road signs urge Soviet soldiers to hurt the German people. Soldier, you are in Germany, take revenge. The German social Democrat August Sandor, collected

eyewitness accounts of the Soviet takeover of this region that document the fate of countless German women. Soviet soldiers again took out their revenge on helpless women and girls, often as in East Prussia, while under the influence of alcohol. One German village captured on February 26th 1945 was systematically plundered, and virtually all of the women were raped. The screams of help from the tortured could be

heard day and night. The epidemic of rape continued long after the war was over. American military intelligence obtained and translated many reports from the Soviet occupation zone. A sampling of reports over a period of just a few weeks from one German refugee camp reads like an outrageous drum beat. 8 June 46, mistreatment, rape of a 14-year-old child, pregnant and with VD, shooting, even of a Frenchman who stood up for a German, rape and impregnation

of the daughter of the man who had been shot. Daughter died 19 September 46 from the consequences of mistreatment. 14 June 46, rapes won 1,5 times within 2 hours, 15 June 46, rapes up to 80 years old, escape of women who jumped out of windows, breaking feet and legs, raping in presence of husbands, looting, mistreatments shooting, more looting, more rapes, women whipped in spite of being sick. 22 June 46, looting, rapes, herself rape three times in succession, once more the same day,

the next day rape three times, 25 June 46, rapes, herself rape twice once and four times, age 16 years,

All across the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Those of you who have the stomach for it can

“learn all about the Soviet conquest of eastern and central Europe in the Martyrmaid episode 19,”

the AT humans. Now, if you're like most westerners raised on the regular diet of postwar propaganda, you probably have two voices battling for space in your head right now.

One of them says that raping over 2 million women and incinerating whole cities full of refugees

and executing children on moss is bad. But the other voice says, well yes, but they were Germans. That second voice applied in the years since to Koreans, Vietnamese, central and South American peasants, Palestinians, Iraqis, Russians, countless others is the same voice that once whispered into German years. Well yes, but but they were Jews. That voice is not your voice. It is made to sound like your own voice is if you're having a debate with yourself about an issue

“with two sides. When the truth is that your inborn humanity is arguing against inhuman forces”

that are entirely outside yourself. These prologues I do for each series are intended as framing

devices. I don't want to give the impression that this whole series is going to be a recitation of atrocities carried out against Germans in an effort to somehow, even the score. The goal is not to get you to sympathize with the Germans, much less the national socialist regime. The goal is to understand and if a side effect of understanding is sympathy, then so be it. Court historians and the post-war years have often shied away from seeking true understanding

for that very fear. For the fear that treating the Germans as human beings with human hopes and fears and weaknesses, that that risks them being tired as sympathizers. A label which only ruins your life in the United States, but in many other countries will result in your arrest in criminal prosecution. World War II was the war in which the United States and our allies conquered the world. It was the victory out of which the current global order was founded.

And it has been the justification for the often brutally violent defense of that order and its supporting values. In other words, when someone does World War II history, they're not doing normal history. How could it possibly be normal history when you can be charged

“with a crime for challenging the official narrative? They're taking hold of the most important”

load-bearing myth of our civilization and people learn to tread carefully around myths like that. In this series out of respect for the dead and for those who suffered, I will try to be careful but I will be honest and I will treat the Germans like human beings, not like demons who are beyond the pale of our understanding. Most importantly, I want to understand how the war looked from the other side. It's inconceivable to anybody raised on the court history of the Second World

War that the Germans could have sincerely believed that they were the ones under attack. That the war had been forced on them against their will and that the crimes they committed were only fair given the savagery of the enemy they were facing. In other words, that the Germans saw

themselves in the same position in which the Allied countries have always seen themselves.

It is inconceivable, but it is true. From Hitler down to ordinary Germans, whether supporters, neutrals or critics of the Hitler regime, most Germans sincerely believe that an existential war had been forced on them by an implacable and overwhelmingly powerful enemy. We need to understand how that's possible. If we have any hope of understanding why the war happened and what it was like to be on the losing end of it.

This is not something that's only relevant to historical debates. It's long been observed that Americans, the American people, I mean, cannot really be riled up to go to war unless we believe

modern enemies, from Osama bin Laden to Vladimir Putin, from the Israelis to the Palestinians,

“depending on what side of that question you take? How often have we been told that they have no”

case to make? They have no rational demands, they have no reasonable fears or concerns. They are just bloodthirsty barbarians who hate us for our freedom and only understand the language of violence. To ask what we might have done differently to avoid or deescalate the conflict is tantamount to treason. It makes you a sadama-polegist, Gaddafi sympathizer, and a sadist, a supporter of Hamas terrorism or Israeli apartheid, a Putin-stuge. To suggest that they might

have any legitimate interests or concerns worthy of our respect or that we might have done things that from their perspective back to them into a corner is just a parrot enemy propaganda.

“The fact that such offensive arguments are taken seriously by otherwise sober and well-meaning people”

is one of the consequences of the Second World War. In his great series about the Mongol

invasions, Dan Carlin asked us to imagine a future in which people spoke about Hitler in the third Reich, with the same detached objectivity that we now speak about Genghis Khan and his hordes. Dan series about Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars in which Caesar's forces killed and enslaved millions of Gauss and all but wiped out that ancient people was called the Celtic Holocaust. We're not accustomed to thinking of Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar or Alexander of Macedon,

in the same way we think of Adolf Hitler, nor of the people who followed those other tyrants,

“the same way we think of Germans in the 30s and 40s.”

In previous Martyrmade series, I've asked you to try to see yourself in the shoes of Zionist terrorists and Palestinian militants. I have tried to humanize the men who perpetrated the Meal Eye Massacre. I've done the same with Jim Jones in the cultists who committed mass suicide with him at Jones Town. All that feels like a warm-up for this series and there will be those of you who followed me into the dark depths to try to comprehend those people I just mentioned,

who will find this one to be a step too far. Hitler has taken the place of the devil in our modern secular world. His followers are his legion of demons, Auschwitz is his kingdom in hell. A devil is the source and cause of all evil in the world. The deepest moral of this beneath which it is impossible to descend. But we live in a world today where Satan has lost his menacing aspect. It becomes something of a comic figure. Kids who want to shock their parents and rebel

against the conventions of our society, they don't flash a pentagram. That's cringe. They read mind-conf and wear a swastika and say, "Mom and dad, what do you think of this?" They do that because years of conditioning by the educational system and media propaganda and social pressure

has taught them that it isn't the gospels anymore. But the official narrative of the Second World

War that is the real symbolic nerve center of our society. When I decided to take on this subject, many people who care about me lined up to express their concern. Many of them to try to dissuade me. And failing that to ask me, "Please, please, please be careful." And I told them what I tell everyone. My audience trust me to be honest with them. And even when they disagree or get uncomfortable, they will give me the benefit of the doubt

that I am coming from a place of empathy and a desire to genuinely understand people at the extremes of human experience. And I do not intend to abuse that trust. We're going to do this together. So buckle up. Because no matter how many books have been written or documentaries made or

discussions had about the Second World War, I promise you, you've never heard a story like this.

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