The Forgotten Genocide of Ethnic Germans by Jews: A Book Review of J. Otto Pohl's ‘The Years of Great Silence'

A Book Review of J. Otto Pohl, 2022, ‘The Years of Great Silence: The Deportation, Special Settlement, and Mobilization into the Labor Army of Ethnic Germans in the USSR, 1941–1955’, 1st Edition, ibidem Verlag: Stuttgart

J. Otto Pohl is a name that should be wider known in academic circles and but unfortunately Pohl – who I am honoured to count as a friend and colleague – was booted headlong out of academia for daring to criticise the claims of the doyen of ‘Holocaust and Genocide Studies’ Deborah Lipstadt – who let’s be honest hasn’t written any remotely original or research-based that I’ve ever been able to find – and has after a period of extreme hardship found his feet again as a historian and translator of rare ability.

Pohl’s last scholarly book before he departed from mainstream academia is his 2022 publication ‘The Years of Great Silence: The Deportation, Special Settlement, and Mobilization into the Labor Army of Ethnic Germans in the USSR, 1941–1955’ and in many ways it is a book that deserves to be on every nationalist’s book shelf along with Thomas Goodrich’s ‘Hellstorm’, Giles MacDonogh’s ‘After the Reich’, Miriam Gebhardt’s ‘Crimes Unspoken’ and Alfred de Zayas’ ‘A Terrible Revenge’.

It is to de Zayas’ ‘A Terrible Revenge’ that Pohl’s ‘The Years of Great Silence’ is a worthy successor to since de Zayas’ book was originally published in 1986 and while it is historically sound; its great deficit was that it was focused primarily on specific events and while it mentioned the scale it didn’t have sufficient detail (and de Zayas didn’t have access to then closed Soviet archives) nor did it tell the backstory of the systemic Soviet repression against the Germans under its rule that began long before 1941, but it is from 1941 that it becomes truly monstrous and genocidal.

It is from 1941 that Pohl begins his quest for the true persecuted minorities of Second World War and focusing in on what was done to the German diaspora by the Allied powers but also on what happened to Germans in historically German lands.

He writes how:

‘German minorities in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Estonia, and Latvia were largely erased as well as much of the German community of Hungary. These minorities totalled over four million people. The eastern territories of Germany itself including East Prussia, Silesia, and Pomeria were also ethnically cleansed of their former German inhabitants. The Germans inhabitants of areas of eastern Germany annexed to Poland and the USSR number another eight million plus people. This large-scale violent eviction of millions of ethnic German civilians from their homelands is largely unknown in the English speaking world. The uprooting and dispersal of over one million ethnic Germans from the western USSR to Siberia and Kazakhstan is even less well known than the larger expulsions of Germans from what is now Poland and the Czech Republic. Close to a quarter million of the Russian Germans died prematurely as a direct result of the brutal treatment they received from the Soviet government during 1941 to 1948.’ (1)

Pohl is also at pains to point out that this was but the largest of the deportations targeting ethnic Germans undertaken with 200,000 Volhynian Germans being deported by the Russian Empire and then the nascent Soviet Union during the First World War and the Russian Civil War that followed on from it as well as significant losses being incurred during the 1921-1922 Soviet famine and another 60,000 German ‘kulaks’ being targeted and deported/murdered by Stalin during 1930-1931, while another tranche of ethnic Germans died in the 1932-1933 famines across the Soviet Unions and yet another 46,000 ethnic Germans were shot by Stalin during the Purges between 1937-1938. (2)

This cannot be understated as Pohl points out since between 1944 and 1945 alone over 12 million Germans were ethnically cleansed from Central and Eastern Europe by the Allied powers and the Soviet Union with the death toll put between 400,000 and 2.2 million. (3)

Pohl’s work is not for the fainthearted but does it make easier reading than the testimonies compiled by De Zayas in ‘A Terrible Revenge’ and it is written in an approachable but yet very academic style so that the reader is left understanding that Pohl is writing purely to document the facts of the genocide committed against the German people by the Soviet Union with the connivance of the Western powers not because he has an ideological axe to grind.

Indeed, Pohl rightly points out that many Anglophone writers have supported Stalin’s atrocities against the Germans by their ‘moral ambiguity about Soviet crimes that would never be tolerated regarding Nazi atrocities’ (4) but what Pohl doesn’t say – and largely I think because to paraphrase him it ‘would not be tolerated’ – is that many of those who carried out, oversaw and justified these crimes were jewish and like Joachim Hoffmann in ‘Stalin’s War of Extermination’ Pohl realises that this is simply too controversial a subject to touch but leaves it to the reader to put two and two together.

A good example is found in Pohl’s observation that the NKVD ‘shot around 55,000 Russian German men in 1936-1938, and the sent another 20,000 to GULag camps’ (5) but what Pohl can’t mention because it simply too controversial is who was responsible for that.

Since to quote Timothy Snyder in ‘Bloodlands’:

‘When the show trials began in 1936, the heights of the NKVD were dominated by men whose own origins were within the Soviet national minorities, Jews above all. About forty percent of high-ranking NKVD officers had Jewish nationality recorded in their identity documents, as did more than half of the NKVD generals.’ (6)

Put another way: the massacre of ethnic Germans in the Purges was a profoundly jewish-driven phenomenon and nor was this in any way limited to Russia itself with the massacres and mass deportations of ethnic Germans in Hungary enacted by Hungarian Communist Party where – in 1945 – over 4,000 of its 12,000 members were jewish (i.e., a third) and another 6,000 (out of 110,000 in Hungary so 10,000 in total) jews joined the Hungarian Communist Party in the next six months. (7)

This is after between 50,000 to 200,000 Hungarian women were raped by the Red Army during the Soviet invasion of Hungary (8) and promptly installed a Soviet puppet govern where to quote Kelemen:

‘The internal security apparatus, which was entrusted to the HCP by the Soviet army, recruited a considerable number of Jews. A former chief of police in a remote county in eastern Hungary recalled that in rebuilding the local police force the party relied on recruits who had recently returned from concentration camps. They had professional skills and were politically uncompromised, but some of them joined up because they saw it was a way to recover their stolen belongings. Gyori Szabo cites research that suggests that as many as 70-80 percent of the top echelon and the officers of the feared secret police (AVO) were by 1949 Jewish. In relation to their proportion, which was about 1.5 percent, Jews were also overrepresented in other state organs.’ (9)

Meanwhile in Poland where similar ethnic cleansing and genocide against ethnic Germans was the order of the day; the same policies were implemented and overseen by four powerful figures within the Polish Communist Party: Boleslaw Beirut, Jakub Berman, Stanislaw Radkiewicz and Hilary Minc. (10)

Berman and Minc were jewish.

But what of their minions and apparatchiks on the ground?

Similarly despite attempting to downplay it Knebel records that 526 out of the 4,669 employees of the Polish internal security service (the UB) between 1945 and 1956 were jewish (as well as that this is likely an significant underestimate to the tune of between 10 to 15 percent) which is 11 percent of the total (11) when in 1945 jews were 0.4 percent (circa 100,000 jews out of an estimated Polish population of 24 million in 1945) of the population of Poland.

Knebel also documents that this wasn’t some weird aberration either when she writes how:

‘Paczkowski (2008) referred to a report of October 20, 1945 by Nikolay Selivanovsky, the chief Soviet adviser at the Ministry of Public Security. According to this report, Jews made up 18.7% of the ministry's workforce, and held half of the managerial positions. I am using this report’s results for do a comparative analysis with the results of the IPN tables. The IPN Tables include all the MBP sections: Central Ministry departments (later converted to the Committee), the local Provinces, and Prisons and Camps in Poland. When taking into account the Ministry of BP as a whole system, my calculation shows, in the MBP management cadre in 1945, Jews constituted only 12% (142 Jews in the MBP out of all 1194 MBP employees). However when calculating only the numbers of participants in the Central Ministry departments, we see that there was a participation of 42.86% Jews. Out of the 42 employees in the Central Ministry, 18 were Jews. (16 plus additional two that were identified as Possibly Jews). Soviet participation was at 26.19%.’ (12)

These facts are part of a wider trend that Pohl doesn’t document – for the reasons previously cited – but never-the-less what Pohl has done in ‘The Years of Great Silence’ is document in horrific detail the crimes of the Soviet Union and all you need to do to realise who is responsible is add in the fact that the post-1945 Soviet satellite regimes were – as we have seen - notoriously dominated jews so you read in Pohl’s work has one principal villain and one alone.

The jews who willingly served and murdered for Stalin.

That is why you should get Pohl’s book because what you are looking at it is not ‘Stalinist atrocities’ but rather a genocide and ethnic cleansing of the ethnic Germans by predominantly carried out by jews in Stalin’s name.

References

(1) J. Otto Pohl, 2022, ‘The Years of Great Silence: The Deportation, Special Settlement, and Mobilization into the Labor Army of Ethnic Germans in the USSR, 1941–1955’, 1st Edition, ibidem Verlag: Stuttgart, pp. 7-8

(2) Ibid., p. 9

(3) Ibid., p. 20, n. 14

(4) Ibid., p. 28

(5) Ibid., p. 34

(6) Timothy Snyder, 2010, ‘Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin’, 1st Edition, Basic Books: New York, p. 93

(7) Paul Kelemen, 2012, ‘The Hungarian Communist Party, ethno-nationalism and antisemitism’, Twentieth Century Communism, Vol. 4, p. 206

(8) Ibid., p. 207

(9) Ibid., pp. 207-208

(10) Lukasz Kaminski, 2010, ‘Stalinism in Poland, 1944-1956’, p. 89 in Kevin McDermott, Matthew Stibbe (Eds.), 2010, ‘Stalinist Terror in Eastern Europe: Elite Purges and Mass Repression’, 1st Edition, Manchester University Press: Manchester

(11) Batya Knebel, 2016, ‘Revisiting Jewish Role in Polish Security Service, the UB: Between Soviet Communist Rule and a Hard Place’, Published Masters Theses: Duke University, p. 58

(12) Ibid., p. 60