The cruelty of the Germans always surprises

The ignorance of what the Germans did is very great and since they are the first interested  that is not known, was tried to hide for several decades since the end of WWII, it helped the USA and the United Kingdom complicity in to use Nazi assassins for their spying tasks against the Russians and on space missions, as well as to help them escape from Europe, so that these countries were not interested in letting the world know what the Germans really did.Anyone who studies this subject is more and more surprised by the many crimes that the Germans made about the most defenseless beings, civilians, women, children, war prisoners, and so on.Below are two stories that appear from a horror movie but are real, very real and still live some of those who saw it.The first case is the kidnapping, and later murder of Jewish children of a Guetto in Lithuania.The second is the murder of 9,000 young Jews while being pushed to a cliff in Oriental Prussia, now Kaliningrad province.Both cases are hard to believe, but they are as real as life itself.

The first case happened in the Guetto of Kovno in 1944 :

 In Kovno, on March 27, all remaining children up to the age of thirteen were seized by the SS, thrown into trucks, and driven off to their deaths. Thirty-seven Jewish policemen, among them the commander of the Jewish police and his two deputies, refused to take part in this round-up of children. They were shot on the spot. 15 The ‘children’s action’ in Kovno took two days to complete. Several thousand children were rounded up, driven off in trucks, and shot. Only a tiny fragment survived, among them the five-year-old Zahar Kaplanas. This young boy was saved by a non-Jew, a Lithuanian, who smuggled him out of the ghetto in a sack. Later Kaplanas’s parents were both killed in the ghetto. Zahar survived the war. 

 In a desperate act, as the search intensified, some parents poisoned their children, and then committed suicide. Dr Aharon Peretz, who witnessed the events of March 27, later recalled: 

I saw shattering scenes. It was near the hospital. I saw automobiles which from time to time would approach mothers with children, or children who were on their own. In the back of them, two Germans with rifles would be going as if they were escorting criminals. They would toss the children into the automobile. I saw mothers screaming. 

Kovno Guetto

 A mother whose three children had been taken away— she went up to this automobile and shouted at the German, ‘Give me the children,’ and he said, ‘How many?’ and the German said, ‘You may have one.’ And he went up into that automobile, and all three children looked at her and stretched out their hands. Of course, all of them wanted to go with the mother, and the mother didn’t know which child to select, and she went down alone, and she left the car. 

 

Monument of Kovno Guetto ( very small, don´t you thing it ? )

And a second mother just hung on to the car and didn’t want to let go. And a dog bit her; they set a dog against her. Another mother with two children, a girl and a boy— I saw that from my window— went and pleaded, and begged that the Germans should return one child, so he took the girl by her shoulders and threw the girl down to her. ‘Such scenes’, Dr Peretz recalled, ‘repeated themselves all day.’

The second case is related by a survivor Celina Manielewicz in the book of Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust (pp. 781-782).

 This case is interesting not only by the cruelty of German soldiers but also by the civilian Germans cruelty..

 In East Prussia, where Soviet forces were driving toward the sea, the many labour camps in the Danzig and Königsberg regions were evacuated, many by sea. More than six thousand women and one thousand men, all of them Jews, were driven from these camps towards Palmnicken, a small fishing village beyond Königsberg, on the shore of the Baltic Sea. During the march to the sea, more than seven hundred were shot. Most of the marchers were women. ‘Every time somebody bent down to scoop up a little snow to drink water,’ Celina Manielewicz later recalled, ‘the guard simply shot him dead.’ In Palmnicken the Jews were lodged in a deserted factory. The manager of the village, hearing of their arrival, ordered each of the marchers to be given a daily ration of three potatoes. ‘We heard that he was a humane man who had objected to us prisoners remaining in his town under inhuman conditions. A few hours later a rumour circulated that the Nazis had shot him.’ 

One evening the Jews were ordered out of the factory building and lined up in rows of five. They were then marched in the direction of the Baltic Sea. During the march, some three hundred men hurled themselves at the SS guards with bare hands. They were all machine-gunned. The surviving marchers continued towards the sea. Celina Manielewicz later recalled the sequel, as she marched with her three friends, Pela Lewkowicz, Genia Weinberg and Mania Gleimann: 

In addition to rumours of our embarkation for Hamburg and of the approach of the Russians, other rumours also reached us: people marching ahead of us in the front ranks were murdered along the shore and thrown into the sea. We were so starved, weak and demoralised that death seemed to us a merciful relief— and yet we lacked the courage to stoop down on the way, because of a glimmer of hope that at the last moment our life would be saved by a miracle. Yet in view of the approaching end we four friends said goodbye to each other. 

Finally, late at night we came to the coast. We found ourselves on high ground beyond which cliffs descended steeply to the shore. A fearful vista presented itself. Machine-gunners posted on both sides fired blindly into the advancing columns. Those who had been hit lost their balance and hurtled down the cliffside. When we realized what was happening, we and people in front of us instinctively pushed to the back. The commanding SS man, Quartermaster Sergeant Stock, picked up his rifle and came cursing towards us, shouting, ‘Why don’t you want to go any further? You’re going to be shot like dogs anyway!’ He forced us forward to the precipice saying, ‘A waste of ammunition,’ and fetched each of us a terrible blow round the head with his rifle butt, so that we lost consciousness.

I don’t know what happened to me; suddenly I felt something cold on my back and when I opened my eyes I beheld a mountain slope down which ever more blood-streaked bodies were rolling. I found myself in the foaming, roaring sea in a small, partly frozen bay on a pile of dead or injured, and therefore still living, people. The whole coast, as far as I could see, was covered with corpses, and I, too, was lying on such a mountain of corpses which slowly sank deeper and deeper. Close beside me lay Genia Weinberg and Mania Gleimann and at my feet Pela Lewkowicz. Badly injured, she suddenly stood up and shouted to a sentry standing a few metres away from us on the shore, ‘Herr Sentry, I’m still alive!’ The sentry aimed and shot her in the head— a few centimetres away from my feet— so that she collapsed. Suddenly my friend Genia, who had also recovered consciousness in the ice-cold water, pinched me and whispered, ‘Don’t move.’

So we lay for some time, I don’t know how long, almost completely frozen. Suddenly SS men appeared and shouted, ‘Raise your heads!’ Some of the injured who were still alive and capable of obeying this order were shot immediately. Then the SS men left. Thereupon Genia said, ‘It is so quiet!’, got up carefully and waded to the shore. She tore some clothes and blankets from the corpses that were lying around and tied them into a rope, with the aid of which she pulled us on shore. 

We tried to move our limbs and began climbing the mountain slope with great difficulty. Genia was the one who hadn’t lost courage yet. Half-way up she told us to wait, she wanted to go down again and see if there were any survivors. But after some time she came back alone. We felt very sick because we had swallowed a lot of sea water; in spite of this Genia kept driving us forward. At last we came to the top of the cliff which had been entirely deserted by the Germans. 

It was twenty-five degrees below zero. We were covered with a layer of ice and unable to go any further. Genia told us over and over again, ‘We’ve got to go on!’ Then, after an hour’s staggering about in the snow, we suddenly saw smoke. The three women found refuge with a farmer called Voss. Later, when Voss tried to turn them over to the Germans, they were saved by two other villagers, Albert Harder and his wife, who fed and clothed them, and pretended that they were three Polish girls. One day a German officer asked Frau Harder for permission to take them out. It would have roused too many suspicions to refuse. Celina, now known as Cecilia, later recalled her evening with the officer: 

He led me to the spot along the seashore where I had endured the worst night of my life and said: ‘In this place our people murdered ten thousand Jews. It is terrible that Germans were capable of such a thing.

I can only tell you that if the Russians march in, which is only a question of days or weeks now, they will do the same to us as we have done to the Jews. A German will dangle from every tree. The forest will be full of German corpses!’

 I felt faint and lost consciousness. When I had recovered we walked back to the Harders’ in silence. On the way back the officer also told me that two hundred Jews had survived the night massacre, but had been handed over to the Gestapo by the population of the surrounding villages among whom they had sought asylum. They had all been killed. 

He continued to pay court to me, assured me that I looked like his sister, and made a few attempts to go out with me. The night before the entry of the Russians, I remember him coming to Frau Harder with a suitcase at 11 p.m. in a state of great excitement. He had to speak to me at all costs— it could not wait till next morning. When I stood before him in my nightdress and dressing gown he opened the case and produced a mass of tinned preserves he had procured for family Harder from the officers’ mess. 

Memorial statue of Frank Mayslerato to the victims

The German officer tried to persuade Celina to leave with him, ‘for woe betide you if the barbaric Russians get hold of you here’, but she persuaded him that she had to stay. Celina, for her part, urged the German to desert, and to throw away his uniform. ‘I cannot do that,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to play out this bad game to the bitter end.’ 

The German left. The Russians arrived. Celina and her two friends were saved. But none of the Russians, even a Yiddish-speaking Red Army officer, a Jew, could believe that they were Jews. ‘The Jews have all perished over there,’ they said, pointing to the sea. Only the emergence from hiding of ten other survivors of the massacre gave credence to the story of their survival. 

Of nine thousand and more marchers brought to the sea at Palmnicken, only thirteen had survived.
When you see a German, you think he's the son or grandson of murderers.