Over the last  three or four weeks I received many varied questions from my readers and tried to answer each and one of them individually.

However,  Ms. Bunny, asked several questions  which might be  of interest to many, if not all of my readers. The answers might shock a few people who never read international accounts of that time. Let’s see if I am able to do this in a neutral and balanced way.. First of all the personal questions which are easy to answer.

1) Do I know what happened to my grandfather? No, All I knew that after his wife, my grandmother died, he was unable to keep his mouth shut and I think that this was the reason for his arrest by the SS. These prisoners, as well as homosexuals, were used as cannon fodder, Meaning they were sent to the front line. The line of the first defenders to catch the brunt of the advancing enemy.

2) Was it difficult to stay in touch with Harold due to the iron curtain? No, not at all, because Harold always found a way. Due to his incredible language skills he served on several occasions as a translator with Khrushchev’s team, including his historic visit to the United Nations  in New York where the Russian premier took of his shoe and banged on the speaker podium. Remember this? He was outraged about our U 2  observation flights over Russia.  Most of my future books will follow Harold as he proceeded with his own agenda. The future books will therefore also follow Kommissar Godunov and his political ambitions.

3) Do I still have family in German? No. But I still have a few friends who are, like me, in the middle 80s and consider me nuts, trying to write about times nobody in Germany wishes to remember.

4) How many civilians were killed during the time frame I am writing about?

Well, here is where it gets a bit difficult. But, besides Ms. Bunny’s question I received a few other likewise ones. My first response is: Nobody knows. Eight to ten days after Germany surrendered the Russians were still counting their own military deaths. In my own experience there was no effective way or method to tally the German civilian casualties. The Russian authorities reported  about close to two million civilian casualties in the general area between Warsaw, Poland and Berlin. My question is: Did this include the casualties in the refugee trains? I mean the many trains filled with civilians fleeing from the Soviet onslaught. The common practice was that the Soviets raped all the women and girls and then burned the trains, filled with refugees, to ashes. Flamethrowers are a terrible weapon in combat. Used on helpless civilians…..your call.

Now, how many trains were there? Who did the counting? There was a report in a British paper where the reporter estimated that this alone amounted to over 20,000 casualties. The Russian papers estimated that the civilian casualties during the last week in Berlin exceeded 160,000. The German estimates were considerably higher. Again, who did the counting?

George Kennan, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union (at that time)  summed it up, and I quote:

“The Russians swept the native population clean in a manner that had no parallel since the days of the Asiatic hordes.” 

Let me, please, add an undisputed fact which I remember from my assignments to the KLV camps in 1943.  An average air raid  (in 1943)  killed between 1,000 and 2,000 civilians. In addition, each of these attacks always rendered at least 20,000 homeless. It was because of these figures that  the KLV camps became mandatory with the terrible result that when we returned the children from the ‘”safe” camps, nobody had any idea where the relatives where or if they were still alive. I know for a fact that in the end thousands of children went unaccounted for. It is anybody’s guess how many found their home or their relatives, or got adopted, or simply died. No school kept a record. It was no big deal at that time, the children had ‘no voice’, nobody cared, unless it was a parent looking for his child.

I tried in my books to write from my own young perspective, and avoided, on purpose, statistics. I mean I could, it would be a simple task.   Which brings me to a question of my own:  Should I write a small statistical follow up book? I mean no personal involvement. But, there were countless books written about figures and samples of atrocities.  So, why add to the gruesome stories? My original agenda was to give a voice to our generation.  Thankfully, some of the responses I get are telling me that I am succeeding.

Horst