From: mstern@wam.umd.edu (Michael Stern)
Subject: Re: Jews For Germans
Organization: University of Maryland, College Park
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 16:59:42 GMT

During the course of following this "Jews vs Germans" thread I've
noticed the following: much rhetoric has been generated without
mentioning specific examples and attributable sources.  For example,
when the subject of soldiers raping women was mentioned, much heat was
generated, yet no one actually quoted any published example of either 
Russian or German soldiers raping anyone.

Thus, in order to bring some light into this thread, and to offer
documented FACTS, rather than hearsay stories being presented by either
side, I have decided to post the following excerpts from reputable
and scholarly works:

1. on who actually pertertrated atrocities against Jews iin Russia
   (SS vs regular army vs dregs of society), I quote from Raul
   Hilberg's "The Destruction of European Jews" (Quandrangle Press:
   Chicago, 1961):

	"The German army was followed very closely by four 
	"Einsatzgruppen", mobile killing squads, with between
	500 and 900 men in each.....Most of the "Einsatzgruppen:
	...were professional people in civilian life - lawyers,
	physicians, even opera singers and a Protestant minister
	....These men were in no sense hoodlums, delinquents,
	common criminals, or sex maniacs...Most were intellestuals.
	By and large, they were in their thirties and fourties."

2. on the nature of atrocities committed by these units between
   1941-1943, I quote Ilya Ehrenburg's "The Black Book" 
   (Holocaust Library: New York, 1980):

	"In Borki [Byelorussia - MS], the Germans forced the
	young Jews to dance at the edge of an open grave and
	the old to sing songs...After this sadistic mockery
	they forced the healthy to carry the feeble old people
	and cripples into the pit and lay them down.  Only
	after this were they to lie down themselves, and then
	the Germans methodically and calmly shot everyone....
	The murders were preceded by unimaginable torture:
	people were sawed in half, teeth were pulled, nails
	were driven into the victims' heads, people were kept
	naked in the freezing cold and soaked with water,
	beaten with sticks and rifle butts until they lost
	consciousness..."

   also from "The Vilna Ghetto" by A. Sutzkever (Paris, 1946)
   a letter found by a Polish woman on Grodno Bouldevard in
   Vilnuis, Lithuania, the street that led to the Ponary 
   death camp:

	"Dear Brothers and Sisters, we turn to you with a big
	request.  First of all, please forgive us if we have
	wronged you in any way. We don't know why our lives are
	being taken.  That they are killing us is already nothing.
	[But] our children are being tortured in a most bestial
	way.  They force eight-year-old girls to have sexual relations,
	and the mothers are forced to to stand by and make sure that
	the children would not cry out.  Later, they made the 
	mothers stand naked against a wall, hands up and tied,
	while they tore hair out of their bodies.  They stabbed
	stretched out tongues with needles.  They cut off fingers and
	toes. It was forbidden to bind wounds, so blood poured out
	without a stop.  We were tortured in this way for for four
	days and then sent to Ponary....I'm throwing this letter
	out on the road to Ponary so that good people will give it
	to the Jews....If they would hang just one of them for us,
	112 Jews, it would be a mitzvah for our people...With
	tears and blood in our eyes, we beg, Revenge! Revenge!..."


3. on whether the Germans were the only ones responsible for
   committing acts of barbarism toward the Jews, I quote Zvi
   Gitelman's "A Century of Ambivalence: (Schocken Books:
   New York, 1988):

	"They [the "Einsatzgruppen" - MS] had the assistance
	of Ukranian, Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian "militia"
	recruited to the Nazi cause.  Some of the Germans' allies -
	Hungarians, and especially Romanians - joined in the mass
	murder of Jews in those areas that they occupied. In Odessa
	the Romanian army shot 19000 Jews in the harbor area on 
	the single night og October 22-23, 1941.  Another 40000
	Jews were dispatched to a nearby collective farm, where
	they were shot in anti-tank ditches....This the Romanians
	managed themselves, with no German assistance. In fact, 
	the brutality of the Romanians annoyed their German
	partners, who regarded it unseemly that these acts were
	carried out in the form of spontaneous atrocities rather
	than as methodical operations..."

::
Well, I hope that the above citations shed some light on what it
is exactly that we are talking about.  Not everything is black-or-
white, but conversely, truth cannot be hidden by familiar and
comfortable euphemisms.  These are the facts, band both nationalities
would be better served if they looked at the facts more, and follow
ideology less.



* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
*								      *
*	Michael Stern	mstern@wam.umd.edu -or- stern@bhnrc-usda.gov  *
*								      *
*	Department of Chemistry		Nutrient Composition Lab      *
*	and Biochemistry		U.S. Dept. of Agriculture     *
*	University of Maryland		Agric. Res. Serv. - BHNRC     *
*	College Park, MD 20742		Beltsville, MD 20705          *
*								      *
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