"Hellstorm": Thomas Goodrich on WWII Anti-German Holocaust

I’m reposting my March 6, 2015 interview with Thomas Goodrich, along with a rough transcript, to accompany the new Alan Sabrosky interview, which will be posted shortly. -KB

Thomas Goodrich, author of Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944—1947, argues that the REAL “holocaust” of World War II was not the Nazi killing of 6 million (or was it .6 million) Jews, but the deliberate and militarily useless Allied mass murder of millions German and Japanese civilians by firebombing; the murder of more than a million German POWs who were either slaughtered by the “take no prisoners” Allies or deliberately starved to death; the Morgenthau plan to kill tens of millions of Germans (which was partially implemented, then withdrawn); and the mass rape (often followed by the murder) of millions of German women by Russian and, yes, American soldiers. (That’s why your great-uncle or grandpa would never talk about the war.)

Maybe it’s time to convert Holocaust museums to “Anti-German Holocaust” museums?

Transcript

We're going to talk this hour about a very controversial topic, which is World War II revisionism. People talk about Holocaust revisionism. But personally, I think Holocaust revisionism is kind of limiting in that World War II was a lot bigger than any one Holocaust. The official narrative of the Nazi killings of various groups may need to be reread and adjusted. But there's a whole lot about World War II that we're not hearing in the dominant narrative that we get in our schools and in our media. Obviously, the victors always write history. And in this case, I think they've mythologized history to try to make it look like World War II was "the good war."

But there are all sorts of aspects that don't really fit the narrative. And one of those aspects is the horrific treatment of Germans by the victors. There were not only things like the starvation by General Eisenhower of many hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war, but the even worse atrocities committed on the Eastern Front.

My guest this hour, Tom Goodrich, has written a book called Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, which is quite hard to read. It's every bit as horrific a list of atrocities as you're ever going to get from somebody cataloging "Nazi atrocities." And Tom might make the case that, in fact, if you were going to have a balancing of the atrocities in World War II, it might actually be the Allies who would be the masters of atrocities.

It's a fascinating book, and it's certainly telling a side of the story that doesn't get told much. So let's hear about it from the author himself. Welcome, Tom Goodrich. How are you?

Hi, I'm very good. Thanks for having me, Kevin.

Well, it's good to have you, Tom. Your book, Hellstorm—I found it really hard to read. And the thing is, I can't just dismiss it and say, oh, well, Tom Goodrich is some kind of Nazi sympathizer, and he's probably distorting things. Because I've heard about this stuff before. I mean, it's not like the orthodox historians haven't heard of this. I heard about it when I had a slightly unorthodox political science professor at the University of Wisconsin who talked about these out-of-control atrocities on the Eastern Front towards the close of World War II. How did you find out about this and end up writing a book about it?

Well, first of all, I want to say thank you to that college professor of yours who had the guts to say such things in a classroom, a college classroom here in Marxist America, because I hope he still has his job, or I hope at least he had a chance to retire with his pension intact.

Well, he did. Back in those days, I think things were better.  You could get away with telling these unpleasant truths. Today, take it from me, you can get yourself in trouble by telling unpleasant truths in the university.

Yeah, well, you sound like the voice of experience. But anyway, Kevin, how I got caught up in this book…I knew some of the outline of it, of course. I knew something about Dresden (from reading) David Irving's wonderful detailed description of the firebombing of Dresden.

I was aware of certain aspects of this book well before I started researching it. But I think all my life I've been working toward this book. I've written a lot of books about the Civil War which are controversial, especially the treatment of the South after the Civil War.

There's a parallel there, isn't there?

There is a parallel.

The myth is that the Civil War, like World War II, was the good war. It was a war for liberation. With Civil War, it was a war to save African Americans. World War II was a war to save the Jews. It's almost the same narrative.

You're absolutely correct. There is a parallel. It's to a much smaller degree, thank God, than it is with World War II. But this Moonlight Magnolia nonsense about U.S. Grant and Robert E. Lee sealing the deal at Appomattox and the nation's one again is…well, it's fanciful, to put it mildly.

But, yes, there is a parallel. But I think I've been leading toward this book, Hellstorm, all of my life because you're either born with a curiosity gene—I call it a historical gene, actually, that seeks out the truth—or you're not.

Some of us aren't born with it, unfortunately, but I was. And so I've always went for controversy, because there's so much that has been either covered up in American history or world history, or not covered at all. And this was certainly one of those books, one of those events in world history, World War II. And so once I began digging and researching and doing interviews with people who were in their eighties who did survive. A story started started developing.

You mentioned how difficult it is to read. Imagine how difficult it was to research and read the words of the people and listen to the details of the interviews and then to sit down and write this book and then rewrite it and rewrite it again. Of course that's what you do with a book. It becomes so much a part of you that you feel like, well, I've said this before. It sounds melodramatic, but it's true. I feel like I died a thousand deaths. I have always been invested in the people I write about, whether it's the American Civil War, whether it's the Lincoln assassination.

And so when you become invested in a woman, a man, I'm thinking of this couple right now in Independence, Missouri, that I interviewed over their very humble breakfast table one morning. Very quiet, very polite people. But they looked like they had died and come back to Earth. And then they came back to Earth alive, but not quite. They just weren't quite alive. And they told me their story in a very matter-of-fact way.

She, of course, was raped numerous times. I mean, hundreds of times. She wasn't counting. Quite honestly, she was raped that much by the Red Army, as was virtually every other woman in the East, every other German woman. And she, at the end of the war, the so-called peace, war by other means, ended up crossing an estuary on the Baltic coast to dig potatoes with her bare hands in winter. And you might imagine what kind of winters there are in the Baltic states. To dig little potatoes that had been left behind. That was how she passed the post-war years.

Her husband, her later husband, had been captured by, I believe, the Americans or the British, and had been a slave for the next, I think it was ten years, a virtual de facto slave, somebody who works for 20 cents an hour and the owner gets a dollar or something.

And so when I started digging into this and finding out these abominable things, I realized that this is not out there. It has never been out there. And now it is out there, at least with my book.

Let me say this, Kevin, before I go any further. There have been some wonderful, wonderful books on subjects that I cover in my book, Hellstorm. For instance, David Irving’s Firebombing at Dresden. I don't know how many people knew in the English-speaking world knew of Dresden before David Irving.

There have been other accounts. I learned about it in high school when I read Kurt Vonnegut's book, Slaughterhouse-Five. He was a prisoner of war in Dresden. And he was held underground with a lot of stone between him and what happened to that city. And he talks about coming up out of the dungeon afterwards, and the whole city has just been—the men, women, children, the whole city is just gone. It's been burned.

Fortunately there were people like Vonnegut and David Irving who told us the story about Dresden. Otherwise, I don't know if we would have still heard about it to this very day. Despite the fact that there have been various authors writing about aspects of this, the world's darkest and best kept secret, they had never covered it in its totality. In other words, they had never tried to bring all the monstrous war crimes together in one volume, which I have done.

And people tell me the same thing you did. It's one of the most difficult reads, they say.

In fact, people have told me that they avoid certain passages in it. A person hearing us speak right now without even seeing the book may think I'm sensationalizing this. I'm not. I'm trying to be as graphic as I possibly can because I personally don't believe a person appreciates what happened unless it is graphic, unless it is detailed, unless they know exactly what a person looks like when they've went through a fire bombing,

how they shrivel up on the sidewalks, like about the size of a dog, or when they get caught in asphalt because it's so hot in that city the asphalt is actually melting, and then, burst into flames as they're trying to get out of there.

Or when you're trying to clean up after a firestorm like Dresden or Hamburg or Munich…I can name a dozen towns that suffered the same fate as Dresden, but they're just not known. And Dresden, of course, was the most egregious as far as the deaths.

And what you need to emphasize here, and of course you make this very clear, is that these firebombings of German cities were not militarily useful. They were just punishing the civilian population. The policy of intentionally going after the German civilians and slaughtering them en masse was supposedly decided upon because, well, that's going to make them want to surrender. And we now know that such things don't make people want to surrender. So it was militarily counterproductive, and yet... hundreds of thousands of people were just murdered. If the definition of terrorism is intentionally targeting civilians, the Allies during World War II were some of the worst terrorists in history.

Correct. The Allies themselves, the American Air Force Airmen and the British RAF, called it saturation bombing or carpet bombing—they had various names for it. But the people who suffered, the Germans down below, mostly women and children and old people—they called it by its more accurate name, terror bombing. And eventually some Americans and British themselves, who knew what they were doing, actually called it terror bombing.

Kind of like what the Israelis are still doing in Gaza. They call it mowing the lawn. Every couple of years they mow the lawn in Gaza. Isn't that nice and tidy? Isn't that sweet and clean? And yet the Holocaust museums we have, the vast majority of them are for the one side of this conflict. And we have much larger Holocaust right here in America with blacks and with Indians and on and on and on. And yet we've got this one holocaust narrative that dominates everything. And then when you start looking closely at what happened in world war II and you read books like Hellstorm you see that this is every bit as much of a holocaust as any. In fact it's more of one, because holocaust means burnt offering and that's what these were these fire bombings were: classic holocausts in every possible sense of the term, intentional mass murders inflicting horrible suffering on civilians.

I wonder, Tom, do you think that the Germans today who will arrest you if you go over there and question aspects of World War II history are still suffering from some kind of PTSD from this? Is that why they're so irrational about locking people up for doing revisionist history?

There has never been a war like World War II, and there's never been a defeat like World War II. Certainly, it was thorough. It was more Carthaginian than the Carthaginian so-called peace of Rome and Carthage. This was a total defeat. By total, I mean, yes, they basically had the memory of anything prior to World War Two extirpated from their brains. And now they have become basically dutiful slaves, dutiful robots. They do exactly what they're told. And that's the price of losing a modern war. You’re brainwashed to the point that you hate your own parents, that you despise and will protest against your parents, even when you find out your parents were victimized.

Well, I don't know what to call it. It's like this book. I couldn't find a word to describe it. Hellstorm was as close as I could come to it. Even the peace was a hellstorm. In fact, a lot of this book takes place after the war.

As far as the terror bombing…I’m going to hit a point that you mentioned there about the Jewish Holocaust, so-called. When you own the media, and they have for the last 100 years, you're the only game in town. You can be the only Holocaust in town, too. I'm here to tell you, and I'll tell you straight, that what the Germans suffered during and after the war was infinitely worse than anything suffered in the so-called Jewish Holocaust.

I'm telling you that straight. When they talk about thousands, I'm talking about millions. When I talk about millions of German women being raped, I mean millions of German women being raped millions of times over and over and over. I didn't know women could be raped that many times. And when I say women, I'm using that phrase loosely. Anything from 8 to 80 was the going rate of exchange with the Soviet soldiers coming through.

And by the way, it was also happening on the Western Front with the Americans. As one sergeant said, we were also “an army of rapists.” Everybody knew the Americans were doing this.

My professor said that it was on a much, much smaller scale on the Western Front.

I’m not sure. We had a very good propaganda mill running on our side. Bad things really didn't get out over there. We had some of the best Jewish writers in the world on our side. So you're not gonna hear much about that. Even Ernie Pyle didn’t...he had some innuendo. He went over to japan. He saw what was going on over there, which is almost a mirror what was happening in Europe. By the way, I’m working on a similar book…

But the air raids, you know, this book actually starts out with the air raids because you're right. You mentioned that there was no point in this other than sadism, because by 1944 there were no longer any real military targets that warranted a thousand plane raid.

And the book actually begins with the terror bombing, the fire bombing of Hamburg. Nobody that I knew had even heard of that. And actually, it was every bit as bad as Dresden. Only fewer people died. The official accounts say I think it's 40,000 to 70,000 so we could probably double or triple that. Because right now there's a – people are trying to diminish the death toll at Dresden. Even to this very day, they're saying, well, maybe 30,000 died at most. Even the International Red Cross, after the firebombing in Dresden, estimated that there were somewhere around 250,000 to 275,000 people who died there. That was their estimate. Later, functionaries, bureaucrats from Berlin, came down to assess it, talked to the police, talked to everybody they knew, tried to – you know how Germans are. They're very thorough, and they want to know things. And so they finally came up with anywhere between – it was anywhere between 250,000 and 400,000 people who died in Dresden.

And I'm not going to say differently because of the demographics in Dresden that night when the air raid began. Because it was a city already about the size of Pittsburgh, PA, 600,000 people. But on this night, their Mardi Gras, by the way, something called Fashing, there were roughly 600,000 more people there in Dresden that were refugees fleeing the Red Army to the east. So you've got a city just packed to the brim with refugees, women and children mostly, and old people. And then the other people in their costumes trying to relive one more Mardi Gras before the war ends.

So I think you put all this together. Winston Churchill, author, bomber, bomber Harris, the air chief of the RAF, the air butcher…the RAF sent their thousand planes in. First, it was a typical firestorm raid. As they’d tried it on Hamburg, so they tried it on Dresden. Send in planes, blast the city to smithereens. I mean, just blow it to splinters. Destroy buildings, centuries-old cathedrals, museums, art galleries. Dresden was known as the Florence on the Elba. It was known as one of the wonders of the world because it was so beautiful and ornate.

And we're told by Hollywood with films like Monuments Men, which was about the guys who were supposedly making sure the Allies didn't harm any important buildings or cultural artifacts, that this was the good war in the sense that they were so careful and so delicate about making sure they didn't hurt anything that they didn't need to hurt.

Yeah, well, Dresden didn't do okay with that, I'm going to tell you.

Monuments Men must have forgotten about Dresden.

Yeah, it's fanciful stuff. Of course, it's just eyewash. But anyway, Dresden was blown to bits. A thousand planes came in and just destroyed a magnificent medieval city. And then when the people are coming out of their holes trying to understand what has happened.

I should say Dresden had only suffered a few small raids prior to this. It was as if the city was being set up. And as you mentioned, Kurt Vonnegut was there along with other allied POWs. It was known as the hospital city because lots of people were there in their hospitals. And so when they came in and blew it to bits, they knew exactly what they were doing: “to hell with the POWs.”

And that's probably why Kurt Vonnegut came back from the war horrified that the Allies would care so little about those POWs.

But anyway, the town is blown to bits. People are coming out of their holes, out of their – Because there were no air raid shelters even in Dresden. They just thought that they were impervious to this because of its reputation as a world treasure with no military significance. They didn't even have any air protection. There was no risk at all to the flyers. But as soon as the people came out and saw their city destroyed, I'm sure that many would just wish they'd been killed because just imagine, I mean, a beautiful city.

But the bad part is that that was just the beginning. About three hours later, in came another wave of planes, I believe it was the Americans this time, came armed not with explosives but with fire sticks. That's phosphorus bombs, fire bombs, to drop down on all these splinters, these old wooden splinters that had been blown to bits, and start this conflagration. As they learned from Hamburg and many other cities in Germany, throw the matches down on this kindling, and it will ignite almost like powder. And it went up in a puff. Snd suddenly you've got this center of the city that has turned into a fiery tornado, a vortex of flame, drawing, sucking everything in with hurricane-strength wind, pulling streetcars along, pulling roofs off buildings, dragging people, screaming into the firestorm center itself, 1500 degrees.

Those who weren't swept in were generally the people who got stuck in the asphalt because it melted also. People who did escape this disaster of fire and wind were killed because of the copper roofs heating up and melting and dripping down on them. It was truly…it truly was a hell storm.

But it it even gets worse. You would think this cannot get any worse. But the people had gone back into their holes to escape the second wave of planes. Of course that's the worst thing they could have done when a raid starts with fire bombs because their havens turn into ovens and they get baked alive in there and if that didn't happen then

their steam pipes break and scald them to death.

The next day when the survivors finally collected themselves and got out of there they all tried to reach safety in either the huge Central Park or along the Elba River. Here we've got some green space, some blue sky, and maybe you can find your little children that got lost in the tumult, or your husband, whoever.

Well, guess what? The Americans send in their P-fighter pilots and start gunning down people in these open places. Beautiful, sunny day. Most of the smoke had already dissipated. The Americans can see exactly what they're doing. They're shooting women and children that are running with their packs through the parks. They're coming in very low, sometimes less than

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feet, and gunning them down with machine-gunning cannons. Even zoo animals who had escaped the night before this horrible fire event were run down by pilots and shot. Strafing killed one zookeeper cried when he saw his last giraffe shot down.

That is pretty grim. The book begins with the terror bombing firestorms. Like you said, there was no military value. It's very much the same as what was going on in Japan toward the end of the war, even when the Japanese were trying to surrender. I believe it was well after the first Japanese hint to surrender that they firebombed Tokyo for crying out loud,

dead women and children later,

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And so it was a program, a plan, obviously, of the American Air Force, the Air Force in Europe and the – I forget the nomenclature for the American Air Force in Japan. And so we've got basically people just taking the gloves off, throwing away the rules, the hell with Geneva Convention land rules.

I'm outraged that this happened in my name as an American. I'm totally outraged. Nonetheless, it behooves me as a historian to tell the story as honestly and as accurately as I possibly can. Otherwise, I'm doing a disservice to everyone. I'm doing nothing but passing on propaganda, as the Allies have done for the last years, by the way. And this is significant, not only to establish historical truth. but also to influence our present behavior.

You know, Tom, I strongly encourage World War II revisionism of all kinds, all forms of truth-seeking and myth-deflating, because I think that World War II is still driving us to commit atrocities. William Blum, in his book, Killing Hope, argues that many, many millions of people have been murdered in U.S. military and CIA intervention since World War II. Some folks like Andrei Vltchek put the number at close to 60 million people killed and hundreds of millions of lives ruined.

And why are we doing this? Well, World War II changed America's character. We had a few imperial adventures before, but post-World War II, we were convinced that we had to be the world's policeman. The total war of World War II seemed to somehow change the nature of the country, and a new myth developed—the myth that if we tried to just mind our own business like we did before Pearl Harbor, something terrible like Pearl Harbor could happen to us.

So it changed us. And even to this day, post-“new Pearl Harbor” (which is what 9/11 was) the myth of the good war is still driving bad behavior. You make a very good point there.

The impetus to write this book is so that this never happens again. Once I found out what we did in the name of democracy, freedom, liberation, all the wonderful buzzwords—when I found out what we had done and how they had covered this up, I looked around and I agreed. I said, well, hey, the Muslims are just the new Germans. This is what we're doing right now to them. It's what we did to the Germans. We do it. Why? And nobody's going to stop us. You you might call it one thing. I call it bullying. I call it being a big bully. And let's call him what he really is, a sadistic bully. And yes, I was in the military at one time. If we've got any buddy out there who thinks I wasn't, I was. I'm ashamed. I'm absolutely, totally ashamed of what this country did in World War Two. And it's the way they did it. It's the way they acted afterwards. I've got some real choice words. I won't say them right now, but it's this bogus B.S., about the greatest generation, fighting the so-called good war, when basically it was an army of thieves, rapists… and we've got this ideal of a good-natured G.I. on the hood of a Sherman tank rolling through some French or German village, throwing Hershey bars at the little kids at the side.

That's what Wolfowitz said would happen in Iraq.

Well, I mean, that's the program. It still works, so why not go with it? Why invent something when the old one still works?

I'm not saying that there weren't some good people. I'm not going to say that at all. I had two fathers that fought in that war, one a biological, one an adoptive father, one in the ETO, European Theater of Operations, the other an island-hopping Marine.

That said, still, you know, we always hear this about, oh, Grandpa doesn't want to talk about the war. He saw so many bad things. And you hear stories like that. Finally, it's occurred to me, no, I know why Grandpa don't want to talk about the war. It's the things he did in that war. He finally grew a soul when he got back here, a soul and a conscience, and realized that raping and murdering, gunning down the Volkssturm, that is, the militia, old men and boys, when they hold their hands up and walk forward, gunning them down or “sending them to the rear,” which was a euphemism to just kill them. They weren't taking any prisoners.

Steven Spielberg, the Jewish producer, got one thing right in Private Ryan when he showed the Americans gunning down the defenders there at Normandy. What he didn't say and what he didn't show is that they were gunning the Germans down all the way to Germany and into Germany and beyond. And even after the war, they weren't taking any prisoners. When they started really taking prisoners was when the war finally ended, when Germany absolutely capitulated, unconditional surrender. And suddenly you're left with millions of disarmed German prisoners. So you can't really slaughter a million without somebody finding out about it.

There is the thing right now about Eisenhower's death camps.  I grew up in Kansas, and that's where Eisenhower comes from. I grew up loving Eisenhower. My parents were Republicans through and through, and I grew up that way myself, loving Ike. I mean, he was one of us. He was there. He was always smiling in the pictures.

Just imagine, Kevin, my disappointment. That's not the word. But just imagine my stunned chagrin when I realized that Eisenhower was responsible for the murder of millions of helpless, disarmed German OWS who had fought as well as they possibly could for their country. But that's the way he treated them. How did he do that? How did he get by with that, with the International Red Cross, with the Geneva Convention still in effect? Simple legerdemain. He chose a new designation. Instead of POWs, it became DEFs, disarmed enemy forces. That little sleight of hand, at least in Eisenhower's mind, allowed him to do one of the ugliest and most vicious depraved crimes in world history, in my opinion.

They have a secret silent massacre of millions of Germans. Eisenhower was a noted German-phobe. He hated Germans. He wrote, “God, I hate the Germans.” I think he wanted to take it out on them. But he advocated, even before the war was over, killing  German officers and Nazi party members. They didn't just mow them down, although some of these German prisoners were shot and killed. But most of them were starved to death, even though there was a bounty of food just across the border in neutral Switzerland which the International Red Cross would have been more than happy to bring over, and tried to bring over.

Those Germans were dying of starvation. But many men also died from dehydration for lack of water. They would be forced to drink out of puddles you can imagine hundreds of thousands of men in these open fields of puddles filled with feces and urine, drinking that, or drinking their own urine. And all this, keep in mind, when the River Rhine or other streams are right beyond the perimeter of the fence, where they can see it. That's sadism. That's sadistic.

Others, as I said, died from disease, died from neglect. It's a horrible slaughter to read about. And Eisenhower never lost any sleep over it. Now, why did he hate Germans so much? I don't know. The Germans themselves said he was Jewish.

Ike was Jewish?

I've heard that. I've heard that he was a Swedish Jew, but I'm not sure. But why he hated them so badly…I mean, and you've got Eisenhower hating them terribly. But Patton actually admired them. Now, there's another story. And, of course, t's a big deal right now about Patton, “who killed George Patton,” because he was causing some waves. He didn't like what was going on. He said “this revenge stuff is Semitic.”

And you talk about the modern equivalent. What's going on right now? Let's just use Abu Ghraib for an example. That ugly, vicious, depraved, stupid, hillbilly nonsense, torturing these poor devils.

That whole sexual torture thing at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere seems like it was driven by Israeli expertise. The Israelis have a long history of expertise in sexual torture of Palestinians, and so they sent their experts over there.

Yeah, I've heard that Hebrew, that's the language of choice in all these torture pens around the globe where the Americans house these people. And, of course, they probably got their head start in World War II because at the end of the war – Oh, my God. I mean, sometimes just going over this again and again.

At the end of the war, U.S. Army Intelligence came in. And it was peopled mostly by the Jews who left Germany during the persecution when Hitler came to power. And then they came back with the Americans, of course, with hell on their neck. They spoke good German. They understood the culture. And they hated the Germans with a passion. And so these people made expert inquisitors—torturers, that is.

Now, the torture was torture for torture's sake. They were not getting any information. I mean, how much information can you get out of a really small-time Nazi flunkies or a small lieutenant in the Wehrmach. You're getting nothing. But you're getting the extreme pleasure of seeing that sucker wince and be tortured and scream like an animal with his foot caught in a trap, smashing a man's technicals.

You know, there is the Nuremberg trials. Those weren’t the only trials going on, the only venue at least. There were trials all over Germany. And there was one, some German defendants, that were accused of something, this or that, I don't know what. They had their testicles smashed when they showed up in court.

Everybody went through torture. Leni Riefenstahl, one of the greatest filmmakers and probably the greatest female filmmaker of all time, just a terribly talented young woman, not a Nazi—though Hitler admired her, and that, of course, drew Allied attention—but she was arrested something like nine times. Tortured, raped, turned every which way but loose.

Nobody escapes this. It's like the rapes in the eastern parts. Now, Americans and British rape, it's true. However, it wasn't sanctioned. In other words, you could rape because you know that it's generally the rear echelon that commits the majority of the crimes. It's been that way in every army I've ever researched. It seems to always be the supply side that comes through that has nothing, that’s not at any risk at all and can do all the missions they want.

The combat troops, they're too busy trying to stay alive to do a lot of terrible things. But on the East Front, and this is an aspect of the book that seems to permeate it. And by the way, the book's...You might kill me, the messenger. I'm just a person, just a writer, just telling a hidden story. It's pretty difficult to kill the message when it's in the words of the people themselves, and that's what this is. It's a you-are-there first-person approach. It's people describing what it's like to go through a firestorm. describing it to the nth degree. Or women describing what it's like to be raped 100 times a night, hundreds of times per week. It sounds preposterous. It's true, though.

It seems like we almost need some kind of public tribunals to deal with this situation because this is so suppressed. And, you know, in other situations with these kinds of abuses, there have been public airings. But, of course, who in power has a motive to do something like that?

Well, yeah, you're right. A start would be just to apologize to Germany for the excesses, the crimes committed against Germany. And irregardless of any crimes attributed to Germany, true or false, even if they did it to the last degree, it still warrants an apology from the rest of us for what we did to Germany. Because there's just no way I can describe everything in here.

But let me say this, on the Eastern Front, rape was sanctified. It was, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian writer and dissident, said, rape was almost a combat distinction. And once you raped a woman, you could kill her.

Ilya Aremberg was a mouthpiece of Stalin. He was a Jewish writer, probably the most popular writer in Russia at the time. And, of course, he hated Germans with all his being. And so when the Russians were on the verge of breaking into Germany, entering greater Germany, Ehrenberg was in the habit of showering down from airplanes pamphlets and leaflets and flyers to the soldiers below to remind them what they were supposed to be doing once they got to Germany.

Here's an example of one of those flyers. This is a quote: “Kill them all, the men, old men, children and the women, after you have amused yourself with them. Kill. Nothing in Germany is guiltless, neither the living nor the yet unborn. Break the racial pride of the German women. Take her as your legitimate booty. Kill, you brave soldiers of the victorious Soviet army. Kill.”

What does that say to your average 20-year-old Soviet soldier who's fought all the way from Moscow and St. Petersburg? That's telling him, “There are no laws. You do what you want. Have a good time.”

In fact, it's more than that. It's almost a demand that you do as much damage, as much harm, and create as much agony as you possibly can. That's what it's almost saying. Anybody who could resist that…let's put it this way. I was in the military once.  I know what it's like to be in the military. Even if you've got a soul, it's not fully developed. Young guys can do the most damnable things in war. I can tell you that. And then, of course, they live to regret it because suddenly they develop a full conscience in their 20s and 30s. And that's why grandpa doesn't talk about (his war experiences), because the conscience intrudes upon his happy time.

How about the studies that show infantry soldiers’ reluctance to kill? The situation you're describing kind of conflicts with the research of S.L.A. Marshall, who found that only five or 10 percent of the infantry actually tried to kill anybody. The rest would fire over their heads or intentionally avoid killing people. And supposedly this research has been supported with battlefield archaeology from other wars as well.

Yes, and the same with the Civil War, too. All the mini balls are flying way over everybody's head generally. But there's always that one or two in a company that is aiming right for the eyeballs.

Yeah, those are the psychopaths, the ones who actually enjoy killing people.

Yeah, you know, the Soviet soldier—this is something, every part of this book was a revelation to me. I knew so very little about this war. But here's something that amazed me. Most of the Soviet shock troops, even that late in the war, were white soldiers. Russians or Belarus, Belarusians or Ukrainians. These were the hard bitten tough guys you always see with the Tommy guns running through with the padded uniforms. These guys did some terrible things. I'm going to tell you what. But for by and large, for the most part, they were white guys. And as I said, shock troops everywhere, whether they're American, British, Russian, French, whatever, are much more concerned about survival. As they're going through a town, they don't know if they're going to have a black hole put right between their eyes the next second. So they're very cautious, kicking in doors, making sure nobody's there to put a bullet in the back of your head when you're moving on.

Things like souvenirs, things like beating somebody up or killing somebody innocent or raping, for God's sakes, that doesn't weigh as heavy on their mind as surviving. So these guys, as bad as it is, and time and time again the people themselves say the same thing, that “we were pleasantly surprised because the shock troops came and we thought they might even kill us. But no, they were helpful, as a matter of fact, time and again.

The problem came with the rear echelon of troops, the second group coming in. And these up and down the line were generally Mongolians or other Asiatics. Even Russian officers and the typical soldier would tell the people who were terrified, saying, we're tough guys. We fight hard. But these next ones coming up, they're animals. You go quick. Go quick. Because they knew what was coming.

Well, see, a lot of those guys, a lot of those Asians in the Russian army didn't want to be in there. They were terrified, dragooned into this army that they didn't relate to. They were colonized peoples themselves who didn't particularly like the Russian occupiers. So when they got dragged into the Russian army, they were not normal sort of patriotic soldiers who were fighting for an army that they believed in. They were kind of slave soldiers who'd been dragooned into something that they didn't relate to at all. And I think possibly that may have influenced the terrible behavior.

Maybe, but time and time again, these guys were absolutely merciless. The women talk about the slant eyes. They talk about the Mongolians, how cruel they were. A lot of folks, when we talk about rape, a lot of folks think that uh... rape is uh... you know it's we we don't have a proper appreciation for what rape is rape is not just vaginal and rape doesn't have to just be vaginal or anal or oral rape is…It's biting. It's bruising. It's cutting. It's urination. It's spitting. It's so gross and disgusting. But these are the things that some women mentioned when they're talking about rape.

Living after Ilya Aronberg's demand, his decrees that they kill the people, the women, through amusing themselves with it…Not every woman... Well, lots of women actually were raped to death. And as foolish as it may sound, there's too many times it happened for it to be anomaly, the men would continue to rape, even rape the corpses, even in broad daylight, even in the street. They would continue and stand in line laughing to rape a corpse. I'm not making this up. They would even go in. Now, put it put it this way. When a guy is drunk on perfume or straight alcohol or brandy or wine, whatever, I mean, drunk. So drunk that they can hardly walk. I suppose they'll do all sorts of things, including raiding nursing homes and raping the 80-year-old women in there.

Time and time again, it happens. It's not an anomaly. It's not an aberration. It happens over and over, this ghoulishness. But let's just assume that the women survive, although many died. How does a woman – it's a spiritual massacre of German women. That's what Ilja Ehrenberg wanted the most, I think. I think killing them first if you wanted to, and then just rape her and abuse her so badly that she's been massacred spiritually. What do I mean by that? What if you're a schoolteacher in a village, and one day I heard a company of stinking Mongolians come in there and force you to give each and every one of them oral sex in front of your class. The class can't leave. They've got to stay there and watch it. That's another ghoulish aspect of this. They wanted these Jewish commissars that were traveling with them, wanted everybody to see this.

And in churches, too. Same place, raping nuns. How does that woman who's being raped or sodomized in front of her class or in the park on her hands and knees, how does she get back to being a woman if she survives this? How does she go back to teaching school? Next day or next month or next year? Or how does a woman go back to being a mother and a husband and a wife after her husband and children have watched her be raped times on the kitchen table one night? I mean, that's what I mean by the spiritual massacre.

And so in that sense, people who survived, they may look like they're alive, but they have been actually murdered in their soul and spirit. And that's like the woman I was talking about over the breakfast table who had this almost dead attitude about everything, it seemed. But unfortunately, that's what the book is about. It's about this graphic nature, and I'm leaving lots of stuff out because I don't want to go over it again. It's so terrible.

And you point out how some of this came out of the very extreme vitriolic hate propaganda against Germany that didn't begin with the war.

You know, the usual narrative is that the Germans started the war. But, of course, there was hate propaganda against Germany, just as in Germany there was hate propaganda against Jews. There was Jewish hate propaganda against Germany long before the war started. I suppose it started with World War I, although I am not in World War I probably there. I'm not sure. Another subtitle, Kevin, for this book, instead of The Death of Nazi Germany, could have been The Powerful Price of Propaganda. Because propaganda got millions killed, it got millions raped, it got millions tortured, and it got tens of millions of people enslaved. That's the powerful price of propaganda. Because you've got American soldiers coming through, killing everybody in sight. People try to surrender. I mean, SS, you're dead immediately. There's no screwing around there. People kind of doubt the extremity of this. They should... Check out the Morgenthau Plan.

That was another thing that Professor John Armstrong brought up. He opened my eyes in a lot of ways. At the time, this was late 70s, I was just kind of a typical sort of post-hippie-ish, left-leaning 20-year-old, and he's a conservative Catholic political science professor from South Carolina teaching at the University of Wisconsin. And this stuff was very eye-opening for me. He was going into these aspects that you never hear about, including the Morgenthau Plan, which was a plan to basically massacre a sizable portion of the German nation after the war. Tell us a little bit about that plan.

Actually, it was Henry Dexter White, his suborn, that came up with the idea. Morgenthau was the Jewish Treasury Secretary under F.D.R. And Morgenthau, of course, he had a...

just an off-the-charts hatred of Germany. And the Morgenthau Plan was basically a chance to end Germany for all time. That's what I'm calling the death of Nazi Germany, basically. A plan to pastoralize Germany, Germany being one of the industrial giants of the world, probably the industrial giant. So basically just destroy all the cities and just let everybody starve as they try to claw potatoes from the ground.

But more than that, it's like the Russians dismantling every factory in their sphere of influence in the Russian zone and taking it back to the last nut and bolt, back to Russia to reassemble. Or the Americans blowing up mines, destroying factories in their area that weren't important to their own occupation, or stealing everything. Basically, things like Operation Paperclip, not just stealing equipment, tangible material things, but stealing humans, stealing the genius of the German people.

We usually hear about this as though the evil Nazi scientists corrupted the good CIA people who kidnapped them and brought them to America. Well, when you win a war, you can do anything you want. Basically, yes, you write the history, and you can vilify the victim, the people who lost, forever. Until somebody stands up and says, no more. No more. We're tired of the lies.

So that's the terrible price of losing a modern war, is that the enemy controls everything, including the history books. It’s a terrible thing for people like me who actually grew up loving Eisenhower to find out that Eisenhower was one of the greatest mass murderers in history.

For me it's been interesting to rediscover Ezra Pound. When I was studying literature they always said that Ezra Pound was this crazy fascist. Where did he get these bizarre economic ideas? After decades, I’ve finally done some research and discovered that Ezra Pound wasn't so crazy. They basically sentenced him to the insane asylum because he was uncommonly sane in a lot of ways. He saw through a lot of this nonsense, saw through some of the economic roots of it, the domination of international finance by the group of people responsible for these wars. That's another great story. It sounds very Orwellian, too, to be put away in a nuthouse for being sane, as well as the greatest poet of your time.

Yes, and so I should say this, that the book is about the crimes committed against Germany. But I also have that one year of the war in here. And I found out so many things about the war, especially on the Eastern Front and the Western Front. But I don't think ever any people have ever fought so heroically and, of course, lost. The German Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS on the East Front. It was one of the most incredible heroic efforts ever. And that was all about a fight of European nationalism versus Jewish Bolshevism from Russia. And they lost, of course, the war.  Americans threw their hat in the ring. FDR got us in through the back door with the attack at Pearl Harbor.

Today, the post-Bolshevik Russians still are pretty much in denial of their own World War II crimes, still totally focused on the German crimes.

Yeah. I was in Russia, in St. Petersburg, about three months ago. And I really sense it. It seems like the freedom there is what America used to have. We don't have that anymore. But there seems to be an unbridled love affair right now with freedom and freedom to say what they feel like. I didn't see anybody looking around. I've been behind the Iron Curtain many times before it came down. People whisper and people just ignore certain subjects. In Russia, there seems to be renewed vigor, renewed hope. Probably thanks to Putin.

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