Too Close to Home

Ethnic Cleansing In Eastern Europe Post WWII

Eastern European nations in the post World War II period harbour lots of dirty secrets.  The victorious Western allies allowed a process of ethnic cleansing, during which mainly German folk were forcibly repatriated back to Germany.  In many cases they had lived outside Germany for generations.  The victorious Allied nations at best turned away.  At worst, they helped facilitate the ethnic cleansing. 

R. M. Douglas has written a scholarly tome exposing and addressing the evil madness.  [R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).]  Benjamin Schwarz, writing in The Atlantic said of Douglas's work:

The most thorough study available of the largest expulsion of a people in human history and by far the most horrific instance in post-war Europe of what is now called ethnic cleansing.

Douglas writes:

The moral and ethical questions raised by the population transfers are exceptionally complex and difficult, and it is not possible to deal with them exhaustively here.  But it is clear that many among the Allied leaderships and peoples derived a degree of vicarious satisfaction from the anguish the expellees were undergoing.  They also regarded the deliberately cruel way in which the expulsions were often conducted as not only forgivable but cathartic for the expelling societies themselves. . . .

(As David Curp has written) there is no doubt . . .  that the spectacle of "the Herrenvolk themselves (or at least their women, children, and elderly) being driven from their homes in misery provided a certain grim satisfaction for many Poles who had endured years of racially motivated contempt (punctuated by terror and grief) from their Nazi occupiers."  But grievously as these societies had been physically and psychically wounded by their experience of Nazi occupation, the suggestion that they could recover their collective self-esteem only by way of a display of their own capacity for violence and injustice is both psychologically unsound and ethically bankrupt.  [R. M. Douglas, p. 369-370.]

Surely this must leave a very sour taste in the hearts and minds of the victorious Allies. 

Forced Repatriation in Eastern Europe

Complicit in Evil

We have been reading one of those books which is more a duty than a pleasure.  Written by R. M. Douglas, it's title is Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).  It concerns the forced exile of Germans (mainly women and children) from countries surrounding Germany back to their (alleged) homeland within Germany.  Much much later similar atrocities were dubbed with a new name: ethnic cleansing.

[One reviewer (Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic) actually made this connection. He writes that the book is "the most thorough study available of the largest expulsion of a people in human history and by fr the most horrific instance in post-war Europe of what is now called ethnic cleansing."]

The key protagonists were Czechoslovakia and Poland.  It was supported by the Soviet Union, the US, and the UK.  The vast majority of those afflicted were females and children--in other words, non-combatants.  Plans were laid during the early forties by governments-in-exile; as the Third Reich crumbled in the east, the expulsion and relocation of ethnic German non-combatants began in earnest. 

The tale is long, sordid, and horrific.

Lest We Forget

Inexplicable Courage

We recently read Alex Kerwhaw's Avenue of Spies: A True Story of Terror, Espionage, and One American Family's Heroic Resistance In Nazi-Occupied France.  (New York: Crown Publishers,  2015.)

The tale rightly can be described as incredible.  It concerns the labours of one heroic family, Sumner and Toquette Jackson, and their son, Phillip.  Sumner Jackson was a veteran of WWI, a highly skilled surgeon, who managed (with the help of colleagues) to keep the American Hospital open and functioning throughout the years of the Nazi occupation of Paris.

Both Sumner and his wife, Toquette became active participants in resisting the Nazi's and their hated occupation of Paris.  Even more peculiar was that they lived in a street surrounded by houses occupied by the Gestapo.  Here is the blurb:

The leafy exclusive Avenue Foch was Paris's hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers, and Vichy collaborators.  So when the couple at number 11--American physician Sumner Jackson and his Swiss-born wife, Toquette--joined the French resistance, they knew the stakes were extraordinarily high.  They would be risking not only their lives but also that of their only child, twelve-year-old Phillip.  There was no more dangerous place in all of occupied Europe than their street: diehard Nazis had commandeered almost every building.  At number 31 was the "mad sadist" Theodor Dannecker, charged with deporting French Jews to concentration camps.  And number 72 housed the Parisian headquarters of the Gestapo, run by the most effective spy hunter in the Third Reich.

As their Nazi neighbours rounded up French Jews and ruthlessly destroyed all opposition to German rule, the Jacksons stepped up their own private war against Hitler.  From his office at the American Hospital, Sumner smuggled fallen Allied crewmen safely out of France.  And Toquette agreed to allow the Geoletter network of the resistance to use the family's home as a drop box for vital information en route to Britain.  Meanwhile, just yards away, the screams of captured resistance members drifted down to the street from the open windows at number 84, where Allied spies were also tortured.  As D-Day neared, the noose began to tighten for the Jacksons as well: when the family's secret was finally discovered, they were forced to undertake a journey into the black heart of the war-torn continent from which there was little chance of return. 

 Standouts include:

The irrepressible courage of the Jacksons, including their son Phillip.

The iniquity of the Nazi occupiers of France and their collaborators.  It begs the age-old question: how could men and women be so evil, so depraved?   

Yet these were ordinary human beings until they began to believe demonic doctrines and principles.  It is a shocking description of humanity's indwelling evil which can emerge so easily, so unexpectedly.  It reminds us so vividly of the indictment of Scripture: "the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick.  Who can know it?" [Jeremiah 17:9].

One final comment: the Jacksons were not doing what someone else ordered them to do.  They were true volunteers, moved by a higher, deeper rationale.  They were prepared to lay down their lives, and, indeed, Sumner Jackson did--literally.  Wife Toquette and son Phillip came desperately close.  But their actions presuppose belief in a higher good, a higher truth, a higher Being.  For, were this not the case, how else can their actions be explained and justified, let alone understood?

Jean-Pierre Levy provides a brief summary of the times:

We lived in the shadows as soldiers of the night, but our lives were not dark and martial. . . . There were arrests, torture, and death for so many of our friends and comrades, and tragedy awaiting all of us just around the corner.  But we did not live in or with tragedy.  We were exhilarated by the challenge and rightness of our cause.  It was in may ways the worst of times and in just as many ways the best of times, and the best is what we remember today.

Revising The Official Story

Things Are Not As We Have Been Led to Believe

We didn't win the war! Like us all, Peter Hitchens grew up on stories of Britain’s heroic victory over Hitler... but now, without questioning the bravery of our troops, he’s written a book challenging all we think about WW2


By Peter Hitchens
Daily Mail


In a chilly, high-ceilinged room in a Sussex preparatory school in the winter of 1959, I work intently on my model of the destroyer HMS Cossack. Such models come in lurid cardboard boxes illustrated with pictures of aircraft, tanks and warships, amid scenes of fiery melodrama, guns emitting orange streaks of flame, and the smoke of battle. With these and our imaginations, we seek to recreate the thrill of the war we have just missed, in which our fathers fought and our mothers endured privations.

This is a war just over the horizon of time in which we wish we had taken part, and which dominates our boyish minds above all things. Courage in pursuit of goodness, in the face of a terrible enemy, was what we most believed in.  Even the Crucifixion grew pale and faint in the lurid light of air raids and great columns of burning oil at Dunkirk.

But the Second World War, like all events that have become myths, has become a dangerous subject. As a nation, we are enthralled by the belief that it was an unequivocally ‘Good War’, a belief that has grown with extraordinary speed. Yet I did not have to look far to see a rather different picture. My parents were brought together by the tempest of that war and were marked by it for the rest of their lives.

My father, Commander Eric Hitchens, who served in the Royal Navy for 30 years, was never wholly sure who had won. He neither felt he was living in a victorious country nor felt it had rewarded him justly. I remember well how, sometimes, late in the evening, he would look thoughtfully into the middle distance and say: ‘Ah, well, we won the war… or did we?’

A Different Time, A Different World

Roddie Edmonds, late WWII U.S. veteran, is 1st soldier honored for saving Jews

Washington Times

By Aron Heller - Associated Press - Wednesday, December 2, 2015

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Nazi soldiers made their orders very clear: Jewish American prisoners of war were to be separated from their fellow brothers in arms and sent to an uncertain fate.  But Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds would have none of that. As the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer held in the German POW camp, he ordered more than 1,000 Americans captives to step forward with him and brazenly pronounced: “We are all Jews here.”

He would not waver, even with a pistol to his head, and his captors eventually backed down.
Seventy years later, the Knoxville, Tennessee, native is being posthumously recognized with Israel’s highest honor for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II. He’s the first American serviceman to earn the honor.

“Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds seemed like an ordinary American soldier, but he had an extraordinary sense of responsibility and dedication to his fellow human beings,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and memorial. “The choices and actions of Master Sgt. Edmonds set an example for his fellow American soldiers as they stood united against the barbaric evil of the Nazis.”

It’s a story that remained untold for decades and one that his son, the Rev. Chris Edmonds, only discovered long after his father’s death in 1985. 

Edmonds was captured with thousands of others in the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944 and spent 100 days in captivity.