Prologos: The generation that rembers the Brest - Litovsk line is dead, the generation that remember the 1945 lines is almost gone too, nostalgia, longing for the old places* deadened. If someone would put up the maps of the incredibly shrinking germany, you could see the pain that all these expulsion caused, but at least, looking from afar there seem to be no mood, sentiment for righting the wrongs of that latest round in ethnic cleansing.
Good points, but only some forget, other's DO NOT FORGET. For example, Australians have forgotten Japanese atrocities against Aussie soldiers in WW2, but Koreans and Chinese have not forgotten Japanese atrocities such as the massacre of Chinese civilians following the Japanese capture of Nanjing.
Western governments want to keep reminding the world of Tiananmen square, but never mention the far worse massacre of Taiwanese, by their mate, Chiang Kai Shek, a massacre in which more than 20,000 (mostly males) were rounded up and butchered over a few nights in what is known now as the 228 incident. ( Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/228_Incident )
And then, some terrrible atrocities - such as the vengeful attacks on German civilians, after 1945, by Americans, Englishmen and French, seem to never get a mention. I wonder ....!!!!
An 'Unknown Holocaust' and the Hijacking of History
An address by Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, delivered at an IHR meeting in Orange County, California, on July 25, 2009. (A report on the meeting is posted here.)
We hear a lot about terrible crimes committed by Germans during World War II, but we hear very little about crimes committed against Germans. Germany’s defeat in May 1945, and the end of World War II in Europe, did not bring an end to death and suffering for the vanquished German people. Instead the victorious Allies ushered in a horrible new era of destruction, looting, starvation, rape, “ethnic cleansing,” and mass killing --one that Time magazine called “history’s most terrifying peace.” / 1
Even though this “unknown holocaust” is ignored in our motion pictures and classrooms, and by our political leaders, the facts are well established. Historians are in basic agreement about the scale of the human catastrophe, which has been laid out in a number of detailed books. For example, American historian and jurist Alfred de Zayas, along with other scholars, has established that in the years 1945 to 1950, more than 14 million Germans were expelled or forced to flee from large regions of eastern and central Europe, of whom more than two million were killed or otherwise lost their lives. / 2
One recent and particularly useful overview is a 615-page book, published in 2007, entitled After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation. / 3 In it, British historian Giles MacDonogh details how the ruined and prostrate German Reich (including Austria) was systematically raped and robbed, and how many Germans who survived the war were either killed in cold blood or deliberately left to die of disease, cold, malnutrition or starvation. He explains how some three million Germans died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities -- about two million civilians, mostly women, children and elderly, and about one million prisoners of war.
Some people take the view that, given the wartime misdeeds of the Nazis, some degree of vengeful violence against the defeated Germans was inevitable and perhaps justified. A common response to reports of Allied atrocities is to say that the Germans “deserved what they got.” But however valid that argument might be, the appalling cruelties inflicted on the totally prostrate German people went far beyond any understandable retribution.