[The following takes place during the last days of the Second World War in Europe.]
The results of this quasi-judicial murder campaign frequently were displayed for all to see.
[…]
In the east it was no different. For example, in Stargard in Pomerania on 17/18 February, shortly before the town was conquered by the Soviet Army, the last ever edition of the Stargarder Tageblatt announced in a banner headline, which could serve as an epitaph for the Third Reich, ‘On Adolf-Hitler-Square the hanged are swinging in the wind’.
Over 60 years later (in the interview in which he revealed his membership, as a 17-year-old, in the Waffen-SS) Günter Grass recalled: ‘The first dead that I saw were not Russians, but Germans. They were hanging from the trees, many of them were my age.”
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “Murder and Mayhem.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 61. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Quoted in Hans-Martin Stimpel, Widersinn 1945. Augstellung, Einsatz und Untergang eines militärischen Verbandes (Göttingen, 1998), p. 68.
‘Warum ich nach sechzig Jahren mein Schweigen breche. Eine deutsche Jugend: Günter Grass spricht zum ersten Mal über sein Erinnerungsbuch und seine Mitgliedschaft in der Waffen-SS’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 Aug. 2006, no. 186, p. 33.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...