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to e-BooksThe Big Three Deportation Crime
By Austin J. App
First published as a Letter to the Brooklyn Tablet, May 25, 1946
Dear Sir,
Regarding the present war criminal proceedings, the Holy Father in his Christmas Eve allocution said pointedly,
Anyone, then, who exacts the expiation of crime through the just punishment of criminals because of their misdeeds should take good care not to do himself what he denounces in others as misdeeds or crimes.
The most shocking mass atrocity in the history of Europe, is, of course, the violation of an estimated million German, Austrian and Hungarian women, including nuns, by the Russians, which moved the Holy Father to lament:
The base injuries and misadventures which German women and girls have had to suffer.
But while this mass orgy against Christian women was committed without American protest, it did not have official American endorsement.
To all humane persons the most abominable official, planned and approved Big Three atrocity has been the brutal expulsion and utter robbery of twelve million people, fathers, mothers, children, from Eastern Germany and the Sudetenland. As to vastness of scale, this makes all other recorded atrocities in the whole of human history look like minor league stuff. The previous world-shaking mass exodus, that of the Jews from Egypt under Moses, was "about six hundred thousand men on foot beside children" Exodus, 12:38.
To see how enormous a crime our expulsion of twelve million Germans and Sudetens is, let us mark how it would have looked to us if the Nazis had done something as big. If the Nazis, when they occupied Norway (2.937.553 people) had under pain of death ordered every last Norwegian and every last Belgian, 8.386.553 of them, to get out of their countries immediately, on foot, and to leave their homes, cattle, furniture, even their jewel and personable valuables behind as loot for the invaders, then the Nazis would have committed a large scale atrocity not quite as vast as that which the Big Three ordered at Potsdam and have since executed!
When the Allies leaders ordered such a tragedy on a prodigious scale, as Churchill * has since called it, some people might like to argue that these leaders, having perhaps been deprived of Catechism training in their youth, did not know any better! But an AP Dispatch, dated Nuremberg, Jan. 16, shows that they know very well that the expulsion of peoples is a war crime deserving of the death penalty.
At Nuremberg, an American assistant prosecutor asked for the death penalty against Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler's youth movement, "for deportation to Poland of 60.000 Vienna Jews". The American prosecutor charged that "as Nazi district leader of Vienna he had driven tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of Jews into the Ghetto of the East".
Now what is to be done to the American, British, Russian statesmen who deported not merely tens and tens of thousands of peoples, but twelve million of them - utterly robbed, starved, and drove them from their lands? Will these enormous war criminals be brought to book on this earth - or will their case wait until the Last Judgement?
* In Missouri, March 5, 1946, he said, "the Russian-dominated Polish government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale Grievous and undreamed of are now taking place". Previously, British Foreign Secretary Earnest Bevin, after seeing what the Allies were doing in Germany to "some 15 million German 'displaced persons", pillaged and driven from their homelands, exclaimed in Parliament, "I felt, my God, that is the price of man's stupidity ... it was the most awful sight" (Time, Nov. 1945). But so far Mr. Stalin, and Mr. Morgenthau, and Mr. Truman have not expressed any awe about it!