DESPATCH BOX: FINEST HOUR 126, SPRING 2005
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MEMO: FROM BOSTON TO GERMANY
Mr Ebert (Despatch Box, FH 124) is factually incorrect from two perspectives. The first is his assertion that the 3.5 million Germans who were slaughtered in the war was “the biggest ethnic-cleansing in the history of mankind.”
His personal memory (but fortunately not the collective memory of his fellow countrymen) needs refreshing. By almost double that figure, the Nazi regime effectively, efficiently and in cold blood “ethnically cleansed” much of Europe of six million Jews, besides the many hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, homosexuals, and certain Catholics. Furthermore these were all civilians—men, women and children. There is no debate even as to whether this bestiality might have promoted a more rapid conclusion to the Second World War.
Secondly, he mentions the destruction of millions of cultural assets as a result of the Allied bombings of German cities. Well, what about the destruction of virtually their entire civilization—cultural and physical—that the Nazis perpetrated on the Jews of western, central and eastern Europe?
This was a magnificent, intellectual, artistic and educational culture that had developed over nearly two thousand years of a Jewish presence in Europe. It was wiped out in less than ten years.
Sir Martin Gilbert has adequately documented that this was occurring, that Churchill and Roosevelt knew it was occurring, and that Winston Churchill addressed it in meaningful and practical ways. (See Proceedings of the International Churchill Societies 1992 1993). — CYRIL MAZANSKY, NEWTON CENTRE, MASS.
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