Harry;

As this is a forum on the Great War, I felt that the topic was "a bridge too far", allthough I am a master of the Off Topic comment. It also is a topic that is personally sensitive to myself for several reasons. As you have brought it up, and possibly kindled some curiousity in some Pals, I will mention what I mentioned to you, although I do not think that this Forum, or at least this sub-forum, is the right place to discuss this.

I had mentioned to Harry that, at the conclusion of WW II, I understand that 1.8 million German servicemen survived the war with their units, but never got home alive. Among these men were members of my family. I don't recall if I also mentioned it, but the death rate (people killed per year) in my family was about 60 times as high during the six months following the cessation of hostilities and during the six years of the war; the latter deaths from both soldiers killed at the front and civilian family killed in bombings. (I must state that in the above business, both on the global scale and on the level of my family, the Brits behaved relatively very well.)

The other reason I am sensitive about this was that I mentioned this on another forum in a fashion that was On Topic, on a forum that did cover WW II, and my post was moved from a war sub-forum to the Holocaust sub-forum (which I had never visited) and I was in essence put on trial, and like the fool that I am I defended myself and my information, and I was found guilty (of something ?) by a self-appointed jury of American super-patriots who were not even capable of arithmetic. The experience was so bitter that I rarely since have visited that forum, despite some "outreach" by a moderator.

I want to mention that my family almost never spoke of these matters, certainly to me, and when they ever spoke of these times they recounted affectionate anecdotes and jokes, not bitter stories.

Bob Lembke



Harry;

As this is a forum on the Great War, I felt that the topic was "a bridge too far", allthough I am a master of the Off Topic comment. It also is a topic that is personally sensitive to myself for several reasons. As you have brought it up, and possibly kindled some curiousity in some Pals, I will mention what I mentioned to you, although I do not think that this Forum, or at least this sub-forum, is the right place to discuss this.

I had mentioned to Harry that, at the conclusion of WW II, I understand that 1.8 million German servicemen survived the war with their units, but never got home alive. Among these men were members of my family. I don't recall if I also mentioned it, but the death rate (people killed per year) in my family was about 60 times as high during the six months following the cessation of hostilities and during the six years of the war; the latter deaths from both soldiers killed at the front and civilian family killed in bombings. (I must state that in the above business, both on the global scale and on the level of my family, the Brits behaved relatively very well.)

The other reason I am sensitive about this was that I mentioned this on another forum in a fashion that was On Topic, on a forum that did cover WW II, and my post was moved from a war sub-forum to the Holocaust sub-forum (which I had never visited) and I was in essence put on trial, and like the fool that I am I defended myself and my information, and I was found guilty (of something ?) by a self-appointed jury of American super-patriots who were not even capable of arithmetic. The experience was so bitter that I rarely since have visited that forum, despite some "outreach" by a moderator.

I want to mention that my family almost never spoke of these matters, certainly to me, and when they ever spoke of these times they recounted affectionate anecdotes and jokes, not bitter stories.

Bob Lembke

Sorry. Damn my computer in its present crippled state.

Bob

Bob, if you find this figure credible, what do you suspect happened to these men and where?

Hello Bob .

I would imagine that very large numbers of people died moving from the East and that this movement would have continued after the end of the war . Many of them must have disappeared on the journey .
I remember refugees arriving until the Berlin wall was built .
What proportion of the deaths occurred amongst those who were held in Russia for several years ?

POW's held in the UK didn't return home until after 1948 .

I've also seen accounts of the horrifyingly cold winter after the war , in which , again , many must have died .

The third topic is one that I hadn't heard about until I got access to all the TV history channels . Apparently , some of the most fanatical Nazis trained terrorists to carry on fighting after the war . They were dropped behind the lines of the advancing British and Americans and many did manage to carry on isolated attacks for a couple of years , often targetting Germans .


I have German friends who lost family in the last 3 days of the war , but it took months and years to discover what had happened to them . So much of Europe ended the war scattered apart , and in the wrong place . How anyone ever found their family again mystifies me .

There must also have been many atrocities .

And , does anyone know how many "disappeared" to South America ?

Regards,
Linden

Phil;

This is a tough one to research. The western Allies, or at least the Americans, did not keep files or records of individual prisoners. In other words, the actual identity of men in an American POW camp was not kept, I believe. The author of a book mentioned below states that he has an affidavit from a US military archivist that says when the war-time records from Europe were moved to the US he and others went thru 17 1/2 miles of files to remove and destroy all documents touching on these events. A Canadian journalist wrote a book about this. He was researching the life of a remarkable French Resistance hero, who saved over 1000 Jews, literally one by one, while he was the major of a small French town during the war. While working in the mayor's files, the writer found a set of post-war postcards from two Germans. Puzzled, he asked the mayor, and it turned out, the mayor had saved not only 1000+ Jews during the war, but also saved two German POWs after the war. Intrigued, the writer first wrote a book about the post-war prisoner question, and then returned and wrote a book about the French mayor.

(I have not looked at the book in years, and the title and author do not immediately come to mind, and the book is not in my WW I library, which is the room I am in and in the hallway outside, but rather in an office that I have largely abandoned, partially due to piles of books that make it hard to reach.)

Now, the story the Canadian told jibed with the story of my cousin Siegfried in Wisconsin, and so I sent him a copy, and he read part of it, and stopped, and I beat him with a stick, and he supposedly finished it. He said that he was in a number of the camps described, that everything that he read was accurate, except that some of the daily death rates cited were too low, and I got some other detail. Then he clammed up, and has not discussed the topic since. He is afraid of the US government, and when we talk and I criticize the fiasco in Iraq he gets upset; he is afraid that the FBI or someone is listening. I visited recently and brought a tape recorder (more for family history, not this stuff), and his family told him not to even let him know that I have a tape recorder. Incidentally, almost the entire family of his wife was killed after the war; her father, a POW, died in a camp.

Basically, as far as I know (no one knows this accurately, not by accident) the conditions for most POWs in the west were, after the war, roughly sub-Andersonville, and many of those in these camps died. The French asked for 1 1/4 million slave laborers, but were only sent 900,000. Having no experience with slave labor, they seem to have killed about 300,000 in a year with little work produced. My cousin and my father's best friend (not a soldier) was sent to France as labor, and both got back, my cousin almost dying, but saved by a French officer who had been a POW of the Germans for five years and who told his POWs that he had been treated perfectly correctly as a POW and what was happening to them was a war crime, and who worked hard to save them, even taking them on route marches to improve their condition once they were fit for it.

Western people looking at this question (the few) said, basically: "Yea, lots of people died, but it was those brutal Ruskies." Well, when the Soviet Union fell people were able to get into their files, and they did keep records on their POWs, typically 20 to 200 pages per POW, and it seems that their death rate, terrible during the war (as was the death rate among Russian POWs of the Germans), was perhaps a tenth of the average across the western Allies. The Russians have a vast experience with slave labor (supposedly the Gulag at its peak held 24,000,000 prisoners, its area greater than the area of the US), and they knew how to keep valuable skilled slave labor alive and productive. So although they generally kept their POWs 10 years at hard work, relatively, they didn't kill that many.

On a personal level of cover-up, I have a friend which whom I have had dinner once a week for the last 30 years, when he is in the US. He is a retired Military Intelligence LTC. We ourselves have dueled on this, him trying to convince me that it didn't happen, but have not mentioned it in years. Once a mutual friend, who was in Military Intelligence in Europe at the end of the war, and who was 90, gave him evidence of this stuff to bring to me (they lived in adjoining apartments), and he never gave it to me. (She later gave me a second set of the material.) Once my friend got extremely angry, discussing this, and shouted: "Yes, we killed them. We killed them because they lost the war!" He then stormed out of my house. He then spent a couple of years trying to convince me that he had not said that.

The small Canadian publishing house which published the original book was immediately closed, as it was profitable, but a subsidiary of an American company. (I asked a publisher of militaria and he told me that in the trade that instant closing of a profitable publisher was widely interpreted as a warning. The writer has written another book on the topic but had it published in the UK.) The author claims to have been harrassed, and he detailed how the French mayor (94 years old and a decorated hero) has been harrassed by the French secret services, and how a major US informant, a colonel in Allied HQ, in his 80's, has been harrassed by people from the Pentagon, who lectured him on what a memo that he wrote in the HQ actually meant.

Is this a can of worms, or what?

Bob Lembke

Any evidence, Bob?


Cheers - salesie.

Having listened to programmes about the UK immediately post war I imagine that anyone in the British sector will have had very little food or heat . The UK was about to go bankrupt just as the Marshall plan was introduced and only finished repaying war debts last year (is that right?). The rationing was more severe than during the war , in order to begin to feed people on the Continent , and the programme quoted WW2 soldiers talking about how helpless they felt seeing so many freezing to death during the cold winter .

If you watch "Germany Year Zero" , a film by Rosselini , you wonder how there was any discipline or order at all .

I would also imagine that men who liberated the death camps might have found it difficult to restrain their shock and anger .

There must have been millions across Europe who had many civilian relatives to avenge .
The hatred and revulsion in 1945 has to have been very strong .

I'm not sure that this happened to German POWs in the UK , did it ?

If there are documents in the US , aren't they now open to the public ?
Linden

There is a lot of evidence, but also problems looking into this. If I can reach my abandoned office I could look at a shelf and give you a short reading list. The first book by the Canadian had a foreward by a US colonel (Ret.), who was a Historian in the US Army. I first heard of it when I saw him being interviewed on US TV when the book came out. Not a lot of people want to look into this particular can of worms, in particular the German government, I am afraid. I have spoken to several people who were there, so to speak; of course they are now dead or will be so soon. Congress was to finally probe some related war-time abuses, and then 9/11 happened, and the appetite for probes of US war crimes or crimes against humanity vanished to zero. I believe Sen. Feingold of Wisconsin was sponsoring the proposed probe. His press aide is a good childhood friend of my wife's, I could ask him about the proposed investigation.

This whole business seems to have been largely run on verbal orders, as we saw how dumb the Germans were to run a death machine and document it with millions of pages of carefully organized documents.

An interesting question is why. The author of the two books (his second included more material and had a somewhat wider scope) suggests several possible reasons. Right after the war the Morgenthau Plan still had wide appeal, and any fool would know that that could only work if 10 or 20 million Germans would conveniently dissapear. Germany was kept on an official national ration of 800 calories for a year or two, which in some cases dipped down to 500 calories, and that probably got rid of another couple of a million people.

An interesting detail was the involvement, or lack of same, of the International Red Cross, which as you know is a Swiss organization. Hearing that there was a severe famine in POW camps, and having a great surplus of food parcels made surplus by the end of the war, they sent a trainload of food, and proposed more; the Americans sent it back, with a warning to never try something like that again. There is only one known instance in which a Red Cross delagation actually made it into a camp; the officials were so shocked that they supposedly stripped off their outer clothing and gave it to prisoners and drove away in their underwear. They never were allowed to enter a a camp again, which was against international law. The press was also carefully controlled, but generally did not care anyway.

Another way to look at this, given the lack of documents and cooperation, is a demographic study. This has been done, and indicates millions of missing people.

Another way would be to conduct a sampling survey, similar to the John Hopkins School of Public Health/Columbia University/ Baghdad University study of about 1 1/2 years ago, which concluded that, at that time, about 667,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the little adventure. A month or so ago a Brit sampling study company conducted a similar study, using a very large sample size, and they came up with a figure of 1,200,000, with a statistical confidence level of 2.4%. Such a study could still be conducted in Germany, with statistical controls for death of witnesses, etc., but the German police would snap you up in a second, or otherwise manage the situation.

Bob Lembke

PS: The bottom line is that interest in these types of issues is highly selective. On this forum the "rape of Belgium" comes up frequently, and the basic question is arguing over how many of the 6000 or 6500 dead Belgian civilians were murdered and how many shot for unlawfully firing on German troops. Meanwhile, a few decades before the King of Belgium killed an estimated 10,000,000 Congolese on his private African estate, and absolutely nothing was written about it for over a hundred years. (The author of the second book was on my radio station a few hours ago.) I could give many other examples of our selective amnesia.

I am not sure how much further to go with this. Harry is our Fuehrer here (oops!), perhaps he could guide us.

Hi, linden;

So there is no real evidence then, Bob? Only hearsay fuelling conjecture.

Of course, the main problem you have, Bob, is that most people in the countries that suffered at Germany's hands believe the German people got exactly what they deserved, especially after being let off the hook the first time round. I for one go along with that, and, even if your rantings are true, I would not be unduly concerned - after all, if they'd stayed at home the German soldiers you wring your hands over would have been perfectly safe and the civilians they left behind in the Fatherland would not have been harmed. Thanks, but I'll save my sympathies for the victims of the murdering, raping, pillaging hordes that swept out of your ancestral homeland.

Here's a poem, written by Robert Ernest Vernede - a man who fell leading his platoon in an attack on Havrincourt wood, 9th April 1917. It is very prophetic in its warning about Germany's fate, but, funnily enough, not in the war he was writing about and died in.


MENE, MENE

In that green land behind you
The well-loved homesteads stand
Quiet as when you left them
To spoil a little land.
And still your busy housewives
Sit knitting unafraid
And still your children play as once
The Flemish children played.

In that green land behind you
Whence you went forth to kill
Your maids await their lovers,
With hope their bosoms thrill.
Oh lips too sweet almost to kiss,
Oh eyes grown bright in vain—
So waited many a Flemish maid
Whom none shall kiss again.

In that green land behind you,
Heard you a bugle call?
See you in dreams a writing form
On every homestead wall?
What is yon cloud that grows and grows?
The Cossacks ride that way—
Pray that their hearts be not as yours—
If Gods be left you, pray!



Cheers - salesie.

Salesie;

The primary book that I mentioned, whose title and author I will happily cite once I can mount an expedition to my "lost office" (I have to be careful, it is literally dangerous to enter the room, and I busted up a rib last week), has about 150 pages of text, and about (from memory, not having opened it for years) 30 pages or more of footnotes. With such explosive allegations, the Canadian author seems to have formally footnoted and documented every significant assertion. Of course, since you have not seen the book, you know that its assertions are "only hearsay fueling conjecture".

I foolishly tried to assist you yesterday, but I have generally learned that it is pointless to respond to your predictable mix of venom and illogic. I have no intention to trade insults with you.

Bob Lembke

Some time ago while surfing the Interenet came across a photograph/postcard of a British Soldier killed in last German Offensive in 1918. According to Strory with picture-it was found by a German soldier after he had the deceased soldiers {among several others} reamins moved off a road-the picture was sent to widow after World War I in 1920's-she later remarried. Anyone come across this story or smiliar ones like it?

the book you wnat is Called "Other Losses" by James Baque, out of print, but you shoudl fine a copy or two on abbooks.

http://www.amazon.com/Other-Losses-James-B...e/dp/1551681919

What Bob is talking about did indeed happen.

However this is not a WW I topic and we are in danger of lossing an otherwise interesting thread germaine to WW I, I'd suggest PM's from now on about this WW II topic.

Cheers,

Scott

Actually, the last few posts are entirely relevant to World War I.

Europeans are still finding mass graves from 1914-18, so I'm assuming somebody has unearthed the bones of at least a few of the 1.8 million German POWs we Americans murdered in our death camps sixty years ago. I mean, everybody's hated the U.S. since we brought so much horror to Europe, so you'd think that during the last six decades an anthropologist with a burning desire for justice would unearth some of these corpses so that we Americans could get our comeuppance for this appalling crime.

Saddam wasn't able to hide his mass graves. There have to be a couple of photos showing rows of skeletons in rags of Wehrmacht or SS uniforms, don't there? How about just one?

It's also odd that a German soldier would survive an American death camp and then move to the U.S. and become an American citizen, where he has to live in constant fear of the FBI and other jackbooted thugs breaking down his door and hauling him off to God-knows-where for daring to express dissent against the government.

Maybe he's an adrenaline junkie.

PFF;

I have to look this up, but a junior German officer, I think it was von Brandeis, the "official" conqueror of Fort Douaumont at Verdun, who found the effects of a noble French officer on the battlefield of Verdun. He sent them to his wife (von Brandeis's wife in Germany), who then made contact with the French officer's widow through Switzerland, and eventually was able to get the effects to the widow in France through Switzerland. Nice story.

Bob Lembke

I agree. We should throttle this back, and put the baby to bed. Perhaps tomorrow I can put a short reading list together. I posted this stuff at the request of Harry, with considerable misgivings.

Bob

"Edward J.";

Yes, mass graves have been found. Read Baque's book. I will PM you about your comments about my family.

Bob Lermbke

PS: Come on team, let's throttle back.

I agree. As Bob said I asked him to post it. He PBId me about it and I assumed that this thread which is, of course, about battlefield dead might benefit from its inclusion. As others have pointed out, it's difficult in some cases to separate the two world wars.

Harry

Unfortunate choice of words there, Bob? Would it have been smart to run a death machine without documentation? But I take your point - questionable acts don`t often leave a paper trail. Unfortunately, there are folk who think that, if there`s no overt evidence, it didn`t happen.

Conspiracy theorists, of which there are many, rely entirely on no overt evidence being readily available. A lack of evidence helps those with agendas of their own to feed the mind of the gullible and/or fanatical, and to profit greatly from selling more books and television programmes. Is the fact that only one book has been published on this particular "war crime" and, it would seem, no TV documentaries broadcast at all, not give us enough evidence to doubt the scale of this so-called atrocity?

If any real evidence were available would there not be a feeding frenzy by the media? Would those who readily write books and make television programmes, with very little evidence to feed this highly lucrative market, not be churning out their wares and filling their pockets? It seems to me the answer to both questions is a resounding yes - consequently, in my opinion there is enough evidence to say that James Baque (there are criticisms in the reviews of his book as well as praise) is probably from the same mould as David Irving.


Cheers - salesie.

"Arry" its called PMing NOT PBIing....Yours Pedanticaly PBI....

Your suspicions may be well founded, Salesie. I`m not proposing gullibility, just open mindedness! But back to the topic....

"Arry" its called PMing NOT PBIing....Yours Pedanticaly PBI.... .I get the Disitinct Impression that this Thread is rapidly moving off Topic away from the Primary Subject.

Thank you Rus. I'd like to be able to say that my current state of health (a lousy dose of flu) is responsible but I'm on the mend so it must be age.

I've put a note in huge block capitals above my desk Not PBIing, PMing !!!!!!

Harry

I have found that Salesie is rarely wrong but please everyone let's get back to WW1.

Bob, a lot has been said about the way British 'tommies' took the collection of battlefield souveniers seriously. What was the situation in this respect on the German side?

Harry

Lay Off of the Night Nurse and Benylyn Harry.

One`s tempted to think that the Germans must have been as keen on a souvenir as the Tommies, but you never know. We`ve seen lots of photos of British troops showing off their gains but I`ve never seen a German equivalent. Perhaps Bob`s got one tucked away?

My grand-father's letters from Belgium and Russia openly mention Beute, or "booty", and is buttressed by the family oral history. About December 1914 his army corps was rushed east after taking Antwerp to help stem the Russians pouring into East Prussia, but the invading armies had been shattered at Tannenburg and the Masurian Lakes by the time it got there. Upon arrival he wrote my father and said that there was nothing to collect in Russia/Poland at all. He was stunned by the debased conditions there, and also quickly contracted malaria. He stated in a letter that you do not have to lie down, one only has to enter a room and look at a bed and you are covered with lice.

One of my grand-father's letters from Belgium was written from a cloister, where his HQ was situated. (I am currently looking at them trying to puzzle out where he was when in Russian Poland in 1915.) In a letter he said that "the nuns are very nice". In his oral history, my father told me that grand-father had developed a little crush on a nun, but then one day she was walking down a corridor, g-f was walking down the corridor as well, and the nun absent-mindedly reached down and scratched her butt, and g-f's crush instantly evaporated.

One day in Berlin just after the war there was a knock at my g-f's door, and there was a man, a wealthy Russian he had become friends with in Russia. He had been able to flee the Reds and excape Bolshevik Russia, and was there penniless at the door. My g-f took him into his house and gave him a room. Some time later there was another knock at the door, and when answered revealed a wild-looking man wearing an incredibly savage-looking bulky coat. It was the overseer of the Russian's country estate. After the Revolution he pretended to be Red-friendly and when he saw his chance he bolted for Berlin himself, clearly by pre-design.

The incredible shaggy coat was a coat made from three layers of sable, sewn into a coat inside out, with the skins on the outside. (I can remember 20 or 30 years ago reading that a sable coat could cost $50,000.) They went into the billiards room, and the overseer fished about in his layers of chothes and fished out a little soft leather sack. He dumped it on the table, and it was the Russian's jewelry, a pile of wonderful stones, which the overseer had buried at the onset of the Revolution. He had traveled across Russia and Poland, breaking off the gold and platinum settings to buy/bribe his way west, retaining the jems.

Suddenly the penniless Russian was very rich indeed. He pressed my g-f to take his pick of the jems, but g-f refused. Finally, he did not take a jem-stone, but chose a very large natural pearl. He had it made into a stick-pin. He was a cynic, and he wore that stick-pin and another one with a much smaller cultivated pearl on alternate days. (I understand that he was at the berlin Stock Exchange at that time.) He took secret satisfaction in how people complemented him on the small stick-pin, but never mentioned the giant perfect pearl, thinking it was a gaudy piece of plastic or something.

Bob Lembke

Just saw your questions. Pop never mentioned military souveniers per se, except for an instance a few days after arriving in France in mid-1916, the French bombed the barracks at night, and Pop obtained a jagged bomb splinter and fashoned it into a letter opener for his Father and mailed it to him.

The men were paid a bounty for every French light machine gun of a certain type which his flame company encorporated into their own weapons, as they wanted to use far more light MGs in their flame companies than the few MG 08/15's that the Army allocated to them. The bonus was paid into the company welfare fund.

Pop was an avid organizer of food raids, both on the enemy and the German Army. The storm troops were 20 miles behind the lines, were at loose ends most of the time, were smart and aggressive, taught to think for themselves, so a side effect of their existance was that they were quite a handful to deal with. (I have many amusing anecdotes, but i have good reason to believe that my stories are being collected and I may see them in print. For the third time.) As I have posted, he kept both sides of his family in Germany better-fed by smuggling captured choice delecacies, like big tins of coffee, to them, which they then sold and bought staples. Unfortunately, my father's letters were obsessed with food, not war. My g-f himself had trouble being fed, he was on detached staff duties after being weakened by malaria, and he would just drop in on a local unit and chow down with the men, who could scarcely refuse a staff officer. He had been raised a peasant, was down to earth, and probably would have good rapport with the men. He was a former artillery NCO raised to an officer due to his talents, certainly not the norm.

But as for trinkets, captured enemy kit, etc., my father never said or wrote anything. But I have seen pictures of German storm troopers marching back from an attack, with some of them wearing Brit helmets, not their own "coal scuttles". But I am sure that they were eventually systematically collected for the metal content and used for the war effort.

Bob Lembke

I have a RGA Gunners brodie with an old german museum tag, it was purported to have been a souvenir taken during the spring 1918 offensive.

The Household Cavalry where every NCO is a member of the Corporal's Mess - a very civilised group of men - having done my training with the Junior Leaders RAC I know how confusing it was to come across Corporal Majors/Staff Corporal Majors/Squadron Quartermaster Corporal Majors - I could go on but then I will bore you

Chris

Just to add my bit about souvenirs I must admit to my parents having quite a bit of relations artifacts from the Great War laying around - the odd thing that has struck is that it is all British material not a thing of the enemy's at all

Chris

Bob

I have photos of piles of British helmets being dumped by their former owners following the March offensives before they are marched off to captivity & also the helmets being crushed by a steamroller so I would consider your statement is correct particularly considering the parlous state of the German economy at that time

With regard to German prisoners also I have seen pictures of mass captures where they are being stripped of all field equipt etc before being marched off - I wonder what use the allied troops would make of all this

Chris

Cut The Quotes !!! read Chris Bakers recent Posting as to why quotes should be kept to a Bare MINIMUM !!

Have you ever had the "night nurse" rub your chest Russ ? I guess not. If you had experienced that pleasure you wouldn't be suggesting I lay off it !!!!!

Harry

Precisely Phil, that's why I posed the question. I can't remember seeing a German showing off his souveniers like some "tommies" did.

Harry

I have been following this Topic with Great interest,i was thinking that up until fairly recent Times Soldiers were not Paid much,if at all so the Lure of Plunder and Booty must have been a Great Incentive for them to Fight Harder..and if an Enemy would not part with His Possessions,it was simplicity itself to Kill Him and take said Possessions,or simply to loot the Dead,there are Ample Accounts of Both.I think in the majority of Situations that it would have been uneccessary to kill a Defeated Enemy to get at His Possessions,Threats or gestures would surely have been enough.To Sum it Up "To The Victor The Spoils"..Many Officers turning a Blind Eye to anything that went on "That Wasnt Cricket"...maybe Many Officers saw Souvenering as a Way for the O/Rs to let Off Steam after an Action ?...If Indeed Officers were really bothered after a successful Action.Enemy Corpses would simply Thrown over the Parapet..after having been "Searched" for valuables,Ciggies,and anything else that the Searcher would have thought Worth taking,or if Time permitted maybe the Fallen Enemy would have been piled into Shell Holes and Covered over.C,est La Guerre".

Morning Harry,i thought you had been beamed up or summat,i posted as Well but thatwent off into the Ether.Back to Business,yup sure seems thatWe have come Full Circle on the Thread..Still its a really interesting Subject,and everyone has their own views and Opinions.On that Note Harry i must away to the Pub,and to post off Yer DVD...Merry Christmas (Hic)...

Of course Russ and that's the great thing about The Forum. Everyone can have their say and express their opinions without anyone taking offence. It's also a great place to make friends like you. Enjoy your lunchtime glass (or two) and make this the best Christmas you've had in years.

Kind thoughts,

Harry

Harry, been doing a bit of research on this topic and it would seem that British soldiers were actually ordered to search the dead for "souvenirs".

From a book on my bookshelf, Armour Against Fate, British Military Intelligence in the First World War, by Michael Occleshaw:

"Private papers and diaries could be just as useful. Sir George Aston remarks that: An astounding amount of information about the situation of the reserves behind the German front-line was obtained from captured documents, mostly private papers. News was thus obtained about divisions in the back areas where men belonging to them wrote to their friends in the trenches announcing their arrival. Private papers frequently disclosed the location of units. Picture postcards sometimes gave uniform details from which the regiment could be established and thereby the division. Examination of such correspondence was of value in a number of other respects. It provided information not only about the morale of the soldiers, but about their families in Germany who were suffering under the blockade and losing faith in their leaders. Censorship of letters and postcards from home seems to have been unaccountably lax on the German side.

As well as letters, the diaries of German soldiers were eagerly sought not only for the details they recorded but because, according to Major-General Thwaites: 'The German soldier always wrote down the names of his leaders in his diary, especially the names of his corps and divisional commanders.' Once these names were known it was a simple step to recognize which division he served in, which was a contribution to the build-up of the Order of Battle. Maintaining a diary seems to have been a universal habit amongst German soldiers, and the damage resulting from these falling into Allied hands was serious enough for the German command to try and break it. Kirke recorded in his own diary that the 'Germans have prohibited diaries owing to the amount of information given to the enemy by them.'

Items of enemy uniform and equipment were also of use in building up the picture of the enemy's Order of Battle: distinctive German shoulder straps, or field caps with a man's name and regiment inside were keenly sought by Intelligence as a means of identifying enemy units. The men who had to retrieve these articles were not always so keen. Personal papers and items of uniform could be taken from the bodies of enemy dead, but even this was not as easy as it sounds. It usually involved going over the top and thereby being exposed to the enemy's fire and it is unsurprising to find this task was not always performed as conscientiously as might have been desired.

A common experience was that of Leading Seaman Murray during the Battle of the Ancre in November 1916. Murray was in charge of a section of Lewis guns in advance of the main body of the infantry, and which destroyed a German counter-attack. Murray was instructed to take a small party forward to secure identifications from the dead Germans. Describing the haste with which this was accomplished, Murray recounts: 'You'd pick, because you were in the open, and in a minute you expected to be fired on, so what you did was to grab hold of anything, you know, you grabbed hold of his cap if you could find it ... that would have been something, you see. This haste was fully justified since this was done in broad daylight! Broad daylight! So there, you see, we were walking about in the open and we weren't very pleased about it you know.'

As Rackham explains: 'We were always told to get anything of value, get hold of it and send it back.' Despite the risks, soldiers would often hunt for souvenirs, pocketing items of enemy uniform and equipment to sell to non-combatant soldiers in the rear areas, like the Army Service Corps or Royal Army Medical Corps, or to bear them home as trophies to their families. Consequently, Intelligence never had the opportunity to assess such findings. Apart from the Order of Battle, much of what was found was of little value to Intelligence, but it had to be collected nonetheless, for amongst the dross there might be one or two nuggets of gold, the pieces of information that justified the time, the effort and the risks, as was the case in February 1918 when the discovery of a new-issue gas mask helped Intelligence to determine the date and location of the German spring offensive. Such a coup was, however, a rare event..."


Cheers - salesie.

I have a collection of about 50 letters from or in a few cases to my family from the time of the war, the vast majority being letters between my father and grand-father from their respective fronts. There are at least two examples of what might seem to be almost astonishing lapses of security.

My grand-father's army corps (III. Reservekorps) was reinforced from its traditional two divisions to a strength of 5-6 divisions, mostly with third-rate units and in one or two cases divisions that had literally been formed a few days before (certainly the Naval Division, and probably the 4. Ersatz Division). Thus reinforced, it was still facing numeric odds of 2 1/2 or 3 to 1. My g-f considered one of the divisions (5. Reserve Division) as "my division", as he called it, as he had served in it as a NCO 30 years before, and his family had served in its Ulan regiment for generations. He also referred to the two original divisions (5. Reserve Division u. 6. Reserve Division) as "my divisions" in his letters. He was the Id, the head of one of the four sections of the operational section of the corps' HQ, his section being the section responsible for the supply of artillery and infantry ammunition. In one letter, he wrote to my father, then still a school-boy, "I am worried sick, one of my divisions is almost out of ammunition." Can you imagine how much the Belgians or British that he was facing would liked to have gotten hold of that letter?

There are two explainations that come to mind. It was the opening days of the war, and perhaps things, including censorship and informational security, simply had not been set up. Also, it would not have been surprising if the mail of the Generalkommando was handled with especial care and security. One also could ask who would censor the mail of the head of one of the sections of the HQ. General von Beseler? My g-f did exercise some caution; for example, in writing about the 30.5 cm mortars and 42 cm howitzers with which they were shattering the Belgian forts (some of the letters were written from the batteries of these great guns as they fired on the forts), g-f never mentioned the exact caliber, but described them generally, giving the approximate shell weights.

The other surprising letter was written by my father the night before his most momentious flame attack, in which he saved the life of an infantry officer, and a few minutes later received his worst wound of the war, which kept him in and out of hospitals for a year, and which spit bone fragments for over 10 years. He was left in a captured French dugout for three days, as the shell burst that wounded him also wounded his entire Flamm=Trupp, and his comrades could not handle getting him back from no-man's-land as well as themselves, due to their own wounds.

I have four letters from my father describing the attack, and one was a letter written the night before the day of the attack. In it he described, for his father, the entire plan of the attack, the jumping-off time, the width of the attack front, the period of time that the flame troops were going to spend in the French positions before being relieved, etc. As I have a great deal of other material on the attack, I know that what he wrote was the actual plan of the attack. This is not surprising, as it was a very important attack, and they had built replicas of the French positions to be captured, and had rehearsed the attack on those replica fortifications repeatedly.

Several very interesting things about this. First of all, a buck private knew the entire plan of the attack, in detail, including the minute of the assault. This gives an interesting insight into the manner in which storm troops prepared for an attack. I do not think that that was the usual case in most armies, but some Allied forces also did this occasionally later in the war. Secondly, that Pop was allowed to write a letter detailing these details, before the attack. Here I think that the men were allowed to write letters just before the attack, they were not closely censored, if at all, but that the letters were carefully embargoed until after the attack occurred; probably locked up in a HQ somewhere until after the assault took place.

In all of these letters I have only noticed one example of what was probably censorship. (Of course, I do not know if entire letters were simply siezed, but I do not think so.) In a bitter letter from Bavaria, where the food was better than in Prussia, describing Bavarians that Pop thought were war profiteers eating luxurious food in public, someone took a pen and crossed out "cherry cake" in a phrase that described "coffee and cherry cake" being eaten. This would have been done by Bavarian personnel or mail officials. The ironies is that the coffee was the great luxury, not the cherry cake, unless the coffee was actually roasted chestnuts or some other substitute, and that the words seemingly being censored were still readable. My father, for example, never actually mentioned "flame throwers" in a letter, but alluded to them, for example mentioning the nuscance of getting oil on uniforms and possessions.

This seemingly careless lack of censorship may have been careless, or it may have been a calculated risk. I have seen, in a British publication, a photograph of a form postcard supposedly given to wounded soldiers in hospital, where they were to check off one of two or three printed blocks of text; one was, sort of: "Mum, I am fit as a fiddle.", another was: "Mum, I am a bit sick/wounded, but I will be as fit as a fiddle in no time." There also was a warning that if anything else were written on the card the card would be destroyed. This suggests that if a soldier was wounded and he knew that he was going to die (for example, he had bad gas gangrene, which killed many slowly), and tried to write a last letter home on this PC, the PC would be destroyed. Perhaps dying men were encouraged to write private sealed letters, perhaps not. But the PC that I saw seemed very callous. It does seem, to me (a notorious Tutophile), that the Germans tried to manage their men more by positive inducements than by threats and punishments. (We have discussed this before in the form of the rates of the various armies shooting their men; I have just worked up some statistics indicating that the Allied armies shot their men for military offensives on average at a rate 26 times as high as in the German Army.) Perhaps the German leadership thought that the risk of intelligence leaks would be balanced by better morale. I might also speculate that detailed diaries were both a bigger intelligence threat, and less of a morale issue; prohibiting men keeping diaries at the front would not be as generally offensive as impeding the ability of men to correspond with their family and friends.

Military mail is a fascinating topic, but probably is drifting a bit Off Topic.

Bob Lembke

As a former infantry officer, I am know that many of my former men would happily rob civilians and soldiers blind if they ever got the chance.

Thieving is ruthlessly dealt with in the Army, but kit theft is rife.

Combatents have always looted their enemy, it is a fact of war. My brother still has an Iron Cross 1st class robbed from a corpse in Gallipoli by an ancestor. The moralities of stealing from your enemies are pretty academic when life is cheap. For a soldier at the sharp end it can also be extremely lucrative, with a thriving demand for souvenirs from rear echelon troops. The Great War infantryman was not a well paid man. Beer money after a period at the front was a neccesity.

Many pictures taking of dead in WW2 show corpses littered with worthless papers, and their pockets turned inside out. Few of us are truly in a position to judge?

As regards civilians and their property, what was the attitude to taking their goods? I can imagine a group of soldiers happening across an abandoned farmhouse and helping themselves to food and drink. I haven't heard of civilians being murdered by front-line troops in search of plunder so I'm assuming it was a rare event.

Des, on this site there's a list of crimes that a British soldier could be charged with, amongst them are:

Committing an offence against the person of a resident in the country in which he was serving. Penalty: Death

Breaking into a house in search of plunder. Penalty: Death

Seeing as death is listed as the only penalty, it would seem that a very dim view was taken of such offences. The article also states that of the men tried by British courts-martial some 271,000 were convicted, and the page lists, after purely military crimes, 15% were for drunkenness and 19% for various other crimes - presumably, any convicted of the above two offences fell into the 19% but it doesn't say if any were charged, convicted and executed for these two specific crimes.


Cheers - salesie.

salesie, The Army Act, Part I, section 6 lists the offences you've mentioned but there was no mandatory death penalty for those convicted. They could be executed but a court-martial had the discretion to pass a lesser sentence.

I can think of one soldier executed for the murder of a French civilian and one member of the Chinese Labour Corps who was shot at dawn for the killing of a French family of four. Only two civil offences carried a mandatory death sentence: murder and treason. The court had no option in these matters but a recommendation to mercy could be made, however the condemned man's fate then rested with the reviewing officers and, ultimately, the Commander-in-Chief.

Regards - Des