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Big boy pants's avatar

The rest not being behind your paywall as well as his seems like a party foul.

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Dawn Hoff's avatar

This was really excellent Darryl. My husband is from Eastern Gernmany, but his mother was born in Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, and they were expelled after WW2. Absolutely ethnic cleansing, no ifs no buts. Even crazier is that my husband's granmother's maiden name was Rosenberg ie. she was Jewish. And even as the Red army comes in and rescue the Jews - German Jews were still thrown out of their homes, made to walk from Königsberg, through Polan, to Leipzig. And I know in Denmark, if anyone helped German refugees after the war (and there were many in Denmark), they ran the risk of being prosecuted as collaborators, and in the past couple of years it has come out that yes, many many German children died, from hunger or lack of medical care in Danish refugee camps. Imagine how conditions were on this walk through Poland? My mother in law told stories about how it was customary for the Russian soldiers to rape women in the refugee camp she arrived in when they arrived in Germany - and she and her sisters only excaped that bc. their dad was alive (bc. he was so old he had retired from the army where he was an officer before the war).

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