Posted on 06/05/2014 1:37:27 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Good. Better dead Germans than Dead Allies.
Also, when we celebrate D-Day, let's spare a thought for the 10,000 or so French civilians killed in Allied bombing raids before the landings.
We won. Good for us. But all recollections of war, win or lose, should be somber affairs.
And many of them served as Hitler’s willing executioners in the “wild east”...Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estomis, and White Russia....side by side with the Einsatzgruppen.
When we went to Germany in 1979 we lived in a small village in the Saarland. I made friends with my neighbor who could speak very good English. He told me he learned to speak English in a British POW camp and that he was captured by the French partisans a couple of weeks after D Day. He thought the French were going to kill him but instead turned him over to the British. He also told me that on D Day he was assigned to a coastal artillery unit on one of the British beaches. Just like the German officer in “The Longest Day” who looks out his bunker to see the Allied ships from horizon to horizon, my neighbor had the same view. I recall him telling me that he was very scared. It was very interesting to listen to him tell his stories. We got to be pretty good friends and would sit in his garden and have a couple of beers. I always had the impression that he had never talked about his experiences to anyone. I didn’t pass judgment but rather just listened to him.
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