Ethnic Cleansing

Part of the mythology of the “Good War” (WWII) is that after the defeat of Germany and Japan the U.S. rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan.  The two years following the defeat of Germany and the implementation of the Marshall Plan are completely ignored.  Another aspect of the “peace” plan totally ignored is the ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe.  There are subject that are best ignored by historians.  To fabricate a story about what happened is courting trouble.  Andrew Bell-Failkoff, a Phd and an apparent expert on ethnic cleansing wrote:  “It goes without saying that the transfer has to be conducted in a humane, well organized manner, like the transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia by the Allies in 1945-47.” Ethnic Cleansing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 230, 220

 The decision to move the German frontier west was probably made as early as 1943 at the Tehran Conference.  Here Churchill recorded in his Triumph and Tragedy how he illustrated with the use of three match sticks his idea of moving Poland’s borders to the West. By October, 1944 when the Russian forces captured the town of Nemmersdorf the western leaders must have known what “orderly and humane” meant.  This period still arouses passion so any account must be viewed with skepticism, but the overwhelming evidence shows that it was far from orderly and humane.  The Nazi massacre at Lidice is well known.  It is even the subject of a movie.  On 10 June 1942, all 173 men over 15 years of age from the village were executed.  184 women and 88 children were deported to concentration camps.  After the war ended, only 153 women and 17 children returned.  This does not necessarily mean the missing women and children were killed, only that they were the only ones to return.  How many people know about Horni Mostenice?  On June 18–19, 1945 Slovakian soldiers removed 71 men, 120 women and 74 children from a train and made them dig their own graves.  They did not transport the women and children to camps.  Like the men they were shot in the back of the head.  Remarkably this is mentioned in Wikipedia.  There are no accurate figures on the number of people who perished during this process.  The level of barbarism in this ethnic cleansing compares with the atrocities committed by the Nazis.  The records of the wartime conferences have been bowdlerized and much of the documentation that was not purged in the beginning has disappeared, a la Sandy Berger.