Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947

Hellstorm by Thomas Goodrich documents the Allied atrocities against Germans toward the end of World War II and during its aftermath. The rape of German women is graphically described. On page 159, for example, when a German counterattack temporarily recaptured the town of Neustettin, a German soldier describes what he saw in houses where Russian soldiers had raped German women:Naked, dead women lay in many of the rooms. Swastikas had been cut into their abdomens, in some the intestines bulged out, breasts were cut up, faces beaten to a pulp and swollen puffy. Others had been tied to the furniture by their hands and feet, and massacred. A broomstick protruded from the vagina of one, a besom from that of another…. The mothers had had to witness how their ten and twelve-year-old daughters were raped by some 20 men; the daughters in turn saw their mothers being raped, even their grandmothers. Women who tried to resist were brutally tortured to death. There was no mercy…. The women we liberated were in a state almost impossible to describe….Their faces had a confused, vacant look. Some were beyond speaking to, ran up and down and moaned the same sentences over and over again. Having seen the consequences of these bestial atrocities, we were terribly agitated and determined to fight. We knew the war was past winning; but it was our obligation and sacred duty to fight to the last bullet.Goodrich also documents the terror bombing of Dresden and other German cities toward the end of the war. Evidence of the ruthless mass bombings of congested German cities was provided by many of the British bomber crews themselves. The almost total lack of German opposition to the British bombings toward the end of the war made the bombing of cities less like war and more like murder. While open criticism of government policy was not allowed, the guilt of young British flyers occasionally surfaced. One British crewman confesses on page 38: “There were people down there being fried to death in melted asphalt in the roads, they were being burnt up and we were shuffling incendiary bombs into this holocaust. I felt terribly sorry for the people in that fire I was helping to stoke up.”After Dresden, Joseph Goebbels angrily urged Hitler to retaliate by abrogating the Geneva Convention. However, Hitler and his military staff continued to abide by the Geneva Convention throughout the war. As a result, Goodrich states on page 127 that almost 99% of Allied prisoners of war survived the war to return home.After the war the Allies required the Germans to perform forced labor. The rape of German women continued unabated. A German woman from the Soviet zone states on page 298: "We had to build landing strips, and to break stones. In snow and rain, from six in the morning until nine at night, we were working along the roads. Any Russian who felt like it took us aside. In the morning and at night we received cold water and a piece of bread, and at noon soup of crushed, unpeeled potatoes, without salt. At night we slept on the floors of farmhouses or stables, dead tired, huddled together. But we woke up every so often, when a moaning and whimpering in the pitch-black room announced the presence of one of the guards." As this woman and others make clear, German women could be raped even when performing forced labor for the Allies. As one German woman who worked at planting potatoes said, “If they wanted a girl they just came in the field and got her.”Goodrich also documents the brutal denazification process in Germany. For millions of Germans the worst part of the denazification process came after a 12-page questionnaire had been completed. After reviewing the questionnaire, Allied intelligence officers would frequently visit German homes for additional examinations and interrogations. Many of these intelligence officers were Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi persecution in the late 1930s with old scores to settle. The additional interrogations were often structured to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible, and often resulted in internment or even death.Goodrich also documents beginning on page 280 that the Red Army began the plundering of Europe as soon as it entered Germany in 1944. The Soviet looting in the Russian zone became prodigious after the end of the war. Factories, refineries, processing mills, and other heavy industries were taken apart and sent east to the Soviet Union to be reassembled. All secondary rail lines, electric and steam locomotives and their rolling stock were sent to the Soviet Union. The plants that were left in Germany were operated by Germans solely for the benefit of the Soviet Union.While the United States did not take German plants and factories, Goodrich states on page 282 that it did take its share of German treasure. Billions of dollars in gold, silver, currency, priceless paintings and art works were stolen from their hiding places in caves, tunnels, and salt mines throughout Germany and shipped to the United States.Germany also experienced “mental dismantling” in that hundreds of German scientists were compelled to immigrate by the victors. One U.S. government agency quietly admitted that Operation Paperclip was the first time in history where conquerors had attempted to confiscate the inventive power of a nation. Life magazine added that the real gain in reparations of this war was not in the confiscated factories, gold, or artworks, but in the German brains and the German research results.Goodrich states on page 287 that the destruction of the German infrastructure during the war had made it inevitable that some Germans would starve to death before roads, rails, canals, and bridges could be restored. However, even when much of the German infrastructure had been repaired, the Allies deliberately withheld food from Germany. Continuing the policy of their predecessors, U.S. President Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee allowed the spirit of Henry Morgenthau and the Yalta Conference to dictate their policies toward Germany. The result was that millions of Germans were doomed to slow death by starvation.In Chapter 8 Goodrich discusses the mass starvation of German prisoners of war by the Western Allies after the war. Goodrich also documents in Chapter 10 the horrific torture and death of Germans after the war in former German concentration camps. In Chapter 11 Goodrich briefly discusses the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland and other Eastern European countries, resulting in the deaths of millions of ethnic Germans. I wish Goodrich would have discussed these postwar Allied atrocities in more detail. However, if he had gone into more detail his book probably would have been too long and cumbersome for most people.Hellstorm is an important and very disturbing book concerning the end of World War II and its aftermath. I highly recommend this well-written book to anyone interested in World War II history.

I have had to nibble away at this book for over 2 weeks due to the amazingly horrible accounts of horrendous violence and malice perpetrated against the German people during the final chapters of WW2. Much if not all of the accounts were completely foreign to me. I encourage everyone who stumbles upon this book to read it thoroughly. Never let history be forgotten!

It’s utterly disgusting what happened to the people of Germany after the war. Women, grandmas and children who were innocent were tortured and rap*d to death simply for being German. Their are things in this book the media will never dare mention because the people couldn’t handle the truth of what happened but it must be told so it cannot be repeated and I have said it many times and will say it again “The victors of war write the narrative they wish you to believe”. Upon seeing the savagery committed post war patton even said we fought the wrong enemy and he was killr* off for doing so. The only downside I see with this book is if you believe in God before reading it, you might not after!!

Being an avid history buff, I found HELLSTORM extremely fascinating (why I gave it only four stars will be addressed later).Years ago, I wrote a term paper during my senior year in college (US Merchant Marine Academy; 1986). In a nutshell, the main subject of my paper dealt with how Roosevelt “was suckered” by both Stalin and Churchill at Yalta in 1945, there-by setting the stage for what was to follow politically. The main point of my paper regarding Stalin was that he couldn’t be trusted; regarding Churchill was that he wanted to keep the British Empire alive. This was back in the day when footnotes and a bibliography had to be included.Interestingly, my professor (who retired at the end of my senior year) was a survivor of the Holocaust. He did not have any hatred towards the German People, but obviously against the Nazi Regime. This was discussed many times during our classroom sessions.In the book, the point is stressed how the average German did not bear any malice towards the “enemies” of the Third Reich. But how does one “survive” in their homeland if under certain conditions; could we, as Americans, be thinking along the same lines in today’s political atmosphere?In HELLSTORM, the political ramifications are discussed and well-presented. The “after the war” plan, The Morgenthau Plan, left me speechless. Again, being a history buff, I am embarrassed to admit I did not know the extent of The Plan. I can’t comment (because I don’t know) if the War was dragged on purposely or not by Eisenhower (as mentioned in the book). But remember, during his IKE’s presidency (1953), the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was carried out by the CIA. This being done because when he was elected Prime Minister in 1951, one of his goals was to nationalize oil production in the country -- a move that would have been a serious blow to the United States and Britain and a win for the Soviet Union.On a personal note, my parents’ best friends (1974-current) were both children who lived in Germany during WWII. Mr. “K” (born 1935) lost his father at the Battle of Stalingrad; Mrs. “K” (born 1942) and her family survived the Dresden fire bombings. Growing up, Mr. “K” told me many ways he had to survive and keep food on the table for his family both during the War and when Germany had surrendered to the Allies. “Luckily”, the family home, although damaged, was in relatively good shape and his family occupied the bottom floor while the upstairs was a brothel. As a result, he was able to provide for his mother and sisters. This being realized, I can understand how “The Plan” forced many German civilians to survive by any means.In any war, regardless of the participants, there will always be “good” and “bad” soldiers. In this respect, the reason for my rating of four stars was that the characterization of most allied soldiers was likened to that of being nothing more than a Neanderthal with a rifle (particularly the Americans). My criticism of HELLSTORM is the downplaying of “Willie and Joe’s” (Bill Mauldin’s famous WWII cartoon characters) role during the course of the entire war. One only has to view the numerous grave-sites at The Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer to appreciate the true character of the American sacrifice.

This is a difficult subject to read about but so very important. This was an attempted genocide of the German people by God's enemies. Sadly, kinsmen of the German people were eager to please God's enemies for some reason. NSDAP was the political party btw.

And these are the countries that feel they have the right to judge the others? and To define the concepts og justice, peace, democracy, and human rights? Shame on you!

Well researched book is not for those uncomfortable with facing facts that one would rather not know. Some would prefer not to know hard and terrible truths but here they are, confronting the history we were taught, the movies we’ve seen etc. Though horrible, I would rather know the truth than be duped by immoral politicians and those who are total hypocrites.

The popular perception of WW2 in Europe is a picture painted by the Allies immediately after the war, to both justify their actions during the war and to suit their political objectives: in brief "the Germans were the villains who committed the Holocaust" and deserved to be punished. This dangerously simplistic view conceals a far more complex history, which deserves much wider publicity.As one example, historians generally accept that the US's conventional and atomic bombing of Japan, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, was carried out because they "could do rather than needed to do" to win. The US also treated post-war Japan with compassion, because that suited that political aims. In contrast, the Allies killed just as many German civilians, with negligible military benefit, and treated post-war Germany vindictively, yet popular history still perceives this as having been justified.More specifically, the "war crimes" committed by the Russian forces across eastern Europe and Germany defy belief, yet these were known about by the western Allies and ignored, Even worse, the western Allies actually cooperated with the Russians to force Germans into areas of Russian occupation, knowing they were being sentenced to forced labour and death. All because America was content to sacrifice eastern Europe and most of Germany to Russia, in exchange for Russia paying the blood price for defeating Germany.Hellstorm seeks to highlight these disparities and injustice. Whilst the author sometimes gets carried away with his own arguments, adding unnecessary exaggerations, the thrust of his arguments are valid and justify wider publicity. Indeed, it is only recently that the Germans themselves have been able to come out of the shadow of the Holocaust and discuss their enormous suffering during and after WW2.A good follow-on read is Savage Continent - Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe, which takes a wider look at the sea of ethnic, religious and civil wars that raged across Europe before, during and after WW2.If we are to learn the lessons of history, we need a full understanding of WW2, from all perspectives.

We all know less about this half of the truth of WW2.... this book was very educating,although , not the easiest to read !!