World War II

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World War II

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  1. From the third year on, the strength of the British and American fighting power grew. Their fighter planes greatly outnumbered the German fighter planes. From the third year of the war on, the German people began to discover what it meant to be following their murderous leader. His darkened, bloodthirsty mind was abandoned to a wild savagery that discarded all sense of humanity. And this forced his enemies to abandon their humanity likewise and to act as he did. The British and the Americans began to avenge the destruction of Polish, Dutch and English towns that had taken place in the first and second year of the war. American and British fighter planes set out to smash every factory in Europe that was making weapons for the German army. And as they flew over the cities of Germany day and night and dropped thousands of bombs, they smashed not only the armaments factories. They struck seemingly innocent people together with those seen to be guilty of helping the murderer who ruled over Germany. The German cities went up in flames; hundreds of thousands were buried under the ruins of these cities. And all of them died because people had not seen or had not wanted to see the symptoms in the man called Hitler.
    The planes of death raced across the German skies day and night and the people hid under the ground. When daybreak came, the survivors looked at the wasteland and at the smoking ruins of their homes and their factories. They gave no thought to the shattered homes of the Jews, smashed by German bands of murderers at a time when the German nation looked on as the Jews were being dragged out of their dwellings. Indeed, in comparison with the cities destroyed, the destruction of the Jewish homes was minuscule. And the Germans did not see that that minuscule destruction had led to the present, vast destruction. And they did not know that destroying justice leads to the death of the one who destroys it. And they did not see that ten thousand murderers, allowed to perpetrate their evil doings by an entire nation, make that entire nation guilty before the highest law. Nor did they know that the entire nation is yet more guilty if it deliberately links its fate to the fate of a ruler who destroys justice.
    And the nations which were sending their troops and their planes to grind down the cities of Germany believed that they were acting in the name of justice, that theirs was the execution of the laws of justice and of necessity. And they did not know that those who carry out the laws of justice are not always themselves just, that also the guilty are instrumental in the execution. And they did not know that those who are guilty according to the laws of justice may not always be guilty before those who are themselves guilty according to the laws of justice. Darkness and confusion was in all and they did not see that even when an entire nation is guilty before the highest law, all life there cannot be declared guilty by those who do not themselves speak in the name of the highest law. The Allies’ fighter planes killed the innocent together with the guilty. The bombs hit indiscriminately factory workers forced into service, those who were instrumental in tortures, those who worshiped the murderer who ruled Germany as well as his prisoners, those who slaved for him, the pregnant women and the infants. And they killed those who served the man called Hitler, not on account of what these people had done, but because of the threat to themselves and their power. And when their power was endangered, the nations remembered the injustices and the wrongdoings committed by those who served the man called Hitler. And they said: ‘We are fighting against injustice and wrongdoing and we are avenging innocent blood’. And they were. But it was not because they chose to do so.


  2. In the fifth year of the war, the British and American forces pushed slowly North through Italy, and by the end of that year they reached the city of Florence. After bitter fighting, they drove the German troops out of the whole of Italy as far as Florence and cleared the land of Germans. In the tenth month of that year they liberated the city of Rome.


  3. In the same year, the massed Russian forces also won battles against the German armies. In the third month of the fifth year, the Russians liberated Kiev and made it free of German soldiers and murderers. The German hordes hurled themselves with animal fury and despair against the Russians near Kiev. And once again, the herds that had trampled on justice in all the lands of Europe were shattered by the iron defenses of the Russians and were forced to retreat in disarray. The Russians began to clean their lands of the seasoned German bands of robbers. These tried to make a stand against the advancing Red army behind the mighty river Dnieper. For the third and fourth time, battles raged near Korsun and near the Crimean peninsula. At Korsun, the Russians encircled ten divisions of ten thousand men each and killed fifty-two thousand German soldiers. They defeated the Germans behind the Dnieper and drove them out of Crimea. The Germans lost over a hundred thousand men. They lost so much life that they were forced to retreat to the Western shore of the Black Sea in the south. The Russians cleaned almost all their lands of the invader hordes and then began to cross the frontier between Russia and Poland in the South. Then the Russian armed forces poured out and tore from the hands of the Germans the whole land of Rumania, the first country to be taken out of German occupation. Rumania was a long standing enemy of the Jews, who were living there when the land was under Turkish rule. The Germans found many willing helpers there when it came to murdering the Jews. The Rumanian murderers of Jews now had to seek asylum in lands still held by their German friends. Many were taken prisoner and the land surrendered to the Russians. At the end of the fifth year of the war, the Russians stood from near the Gulf of Riga in the North all the way South, to the foot of the Carpathian mountains.


  4. In that same year, the American army that had come across the ocean to Britain increased to a million men. A strong British army also stood ready and the British Isles bristled with troops, weapons and equipment. Everyone, friend and foe, wondered how that army on the British Isles would be able to reach the German troops in order to engage them. And everyone thought it impossible or almost impossible. For even the best army is considerably weakened if it has to come across the sea or the air facing the enemy and fight on territory on which the enemy is well defended. When the Allied armies had crossed the sea from Africa and landed in Italy, no one had seen this as an impossible task; people knew that the Germans could not guard the entire coastline of Africa and Europe. Many Germans believed that it was not necessary to guard that whole coastline; for, if the enemy landed in Italy or in one of the Balkan lands, high mountains would bar the way to the heart of the German territory. But there was one coastline from which a road led directly to the heart of the German territory. That was the coastline of France, directly facing England. And the generals of the ruler of Germany knew this as well as their enemy did. And so the Germans were ready with massed troops and powerful weaponry, ready to drive back into the sea any who dared to land on the Northern shores of France. The man called Hitler poured scorn on his enemies and shouted:’ They will count themselves lucky if they can hold as long as nine hours before the Germans hurl them all back into the sea’.


  5. The American and British troops on the British Isles continued to increase. They knew that, if they were unable to land on French soil, they would not be able to break the power of the ruler of Germany. They needed to assemble ten thousand ships in British ports and to bring together huge stores of weapons and supplies in the South of England. And if a single German spy plane of all those that came over the English shores and ports were to see even a part of the vast collection of these ships or part of the huge store of armaments, the British and American forces would be unable to effect a landing. For the German would then be able to station his divisions and his weapons on the spot where his enemies across the water planned to come ashore.


  6. Lengthy waiting and uncertainty caused the German alertness to become routine. But routine is the enemy of true alertness. True alertness looks for the unexpected and expects that. The German generals expected that advance enemy troops would first have to storm one f the ports, so that the army that followed and its heavy equipment could be brought ashore with speed. So the strongest German defense force was stationed in the ports along the Northern coast of France.


  7. In the summer of the fifth year of the war, America and Britain decided that they would take the risk of sending their troops across the sea to France. That particular month, there were rainstorms on the sea. And the Germans thought that a great army would not dare to risk a crossing in rainstorms. It would be difficult to land on an exposed shore in a storm. But the British war technology experts had constructed an artificial, floating harbour and transported it across the water. The rainstorm was not so violent that it would destroy the artificial harbour before it could be set up on the other shore. However, once the harbour was set up, the storm became stronger that any there had been in decades. Ships could certainly not have landed without the harbour. And no German spy plane saw the massed fleet of American and British ships when there might still have been time to fend them off.


  8. On the sixth day of the tenth month in the fifth year of the war, American and British forces stepped on to the open shores of France facing England. And ten thousand ships crossed the sea from England. And the mighty German army was unable to overcome the armed forces that landed first while these were still few and weak. Despite their alertness, the Germans had got it wrong. Their enemy had come at a different time and at a different place and with different means than they had expected. The strength of the American and British forces grew by the hour, as did their foothold on French soil. And that which people had thought to be well nigh impossible was achieved.