A Terrible Revenge

"Ethnic cleansing." A polite way to say genocide without uttering that terrifying word. the Kosovars and Bosnian Muslims of former Yugoslavia are not the first victims of ethnic cleansing in the 20th Century. Armenians, Jews, and many others came before them. Long before the term "Ethnic Cleansing" became associated with the brutal horrors which occurred in the Former Yugoslav republics of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and little Kosovo, 15,000,000 Ethnic Germans were the victims of an ethnic cleansing campaign the world has seldom seen before or since.

Drawing from primary sources, including first person accounts in the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, Professor Alfred-Maurice de Zayas paints a horrorifingly graphic picture of the brutal efforts to evict ethnic Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia following the end of World War Two. As many as 2,000,000 farmers, small merchants and their wives and children were murdered for no reason other than the fact they were German. Few Poles, Russian, Jews, or Czechs have any sympathy for what happen to these Germans after the close of the Second World War. Their story has largely been ignored by the world for over half a century. Many believe the Germans simply " got what they deserved," or received a "just" punishment for what the Nazis did to other peoples.

Dr. de Zayas refuses to lay collective guilt at the feet of the East European Germans. Instead, he tosses aside such ridiculous positions and weaves together a dark story of millions innocent and some not so innocent Germans who suffered a tragic fate at the hands of callous foreign political leaders and a multitude of angry East Europeans hell-bent on revenge or plunder. De Zayas has revealed the Germans as humans guilty only of being German. He restores a measure of dignity to a people dispossessed and long ignored. The reader will walk away from the book with a sense of revulsion at what happened between the closing months of World War II and 1950. Most of us believe the Second World War ended in 1945. The relatives and descendants of 267,000 Sudenten Germans murdered in Czechoslovakia after the shooting stopped may disagree with us. Hundreds of thousands of other Germans were murdered or died after hostilities in Europe ended.

Terrible Revenge is not a book for those with a weak stomach. The testimony of Marie Naumann of Baerewalde, East Prussia is a heart rendering account of unspeakable cruelty inflicted on her family by Red Army soldiers and Poles. Frau Naumann was repeatedly raped in front of her husband and children before someone took them to their barn and hung the adults and strangled the children. She survived the hanging only to suffer far more rape, abuse, physical and mental torture over the next several months. Despite the horrors, Marie Naumann survived her ordeal at the hands of rapists and sadists (many of whom no doubt are still alive today in Poland and Russia). She immigrated to America, remarried and had a child. Her story is a testament to the human spirit and a reminder of the unspeakable acts humans are capable of committing. De Zayas weaves these sad stories together and creates a compelling narrative. A Terrible Revenge is a work long overdue.

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