WearsWar Fireside Chat #3 With John Wear About Auschwitz Survivor Encounters, Dresden Remembrance 2018, Lady Renouf & Monika Schaefer’s Letters

Dresden Firestorm: ….it was possible for the RAF’s Chief of Staff Charles Portal to suggest that the RAF hoped to kill 900,000 German civilians… Somehow bombing created a moral blind spot that allowed airman to do to the enemy population what soldiers could not.

Lady Renouf’s speech, Dresden 17 February 2018, quoting  Marshal of the Royal Air Force Charles Frederick Algernon Portal, 1st Viscount Portal of Hungerford, KG, GCB, OM, DSO & Bar, MC, DL (21 May 1893 – 22 April 1971) a senior Royal Air Force officer.

 

Editor: Several people have asked if John Wear is your real name.

John: Yes, my real name is John Thomas Wear and I reside in Dallas, Texas.

I talked to Mark Weber a few months ago and the first question he asked me was if John Wear is my real name. This was surprising to me since I live in the United States where we enjoy First Amendment rights. While some people might consider what I write to be controversial, I always attempt to write in a respectful and dignified manner. I have no reason to hide my real name.

I also take full responsibility for everything in my book “Germany’s War” and on my website. I carefully review everything on my website before it is posted. Any mistakes appearing on this website are my own.

The fact that so many authors who analyze the events of WWII feel the need to use pseudonyms to protect themselves and their families does, in my opinion, invite even more curiosity about those historical events. I am unaware of authors feeling the same pressure when analyzing the events of the Vietnam War, Korean War or even WWI for that matter. Censorship implies suppression of information and oppression for openly debating it; this does not sit well with many people. The escalation of laws criminalizing debate and censuring internet users appears to be having the reverse effect.

Many of my readers are surprisingly young and remarkably well informed. As Alfred Schaefer, brother of Canadian Monika Schaefer imprisoned in Germany, recently stated,

‘tell a child not to open a particular door or cupboard, and it is the first thing they will do when you leave the house. Instinctively they want to know why not?‘

I find this to be particularly encouraging. If the works of myself and others are shut down, I know they will reappear elsewhere.

 

Editor: February 13, 2018 marked the 73^rd anniversary of the Dresden Firestorm, known widely now as “Hellstorm” due to the works of Thomas Goodrich, Kyle Hunt and others.

John: I have written in Germany’s War and in two articles about the Dresden bombing, published on this site and in The Barnes Review. Dresden exemplified the extent of the saturation bombing inflicted on Germany over several months while General Patton was held back from taking Berlin.

A reader of WearsWar and others thanked those who commemorated February 13. The reader’s mother survived the Dresden Hellstorm as a child. She referred to it as a “massacre” and had a terrible fear of basements and small spaces throughout her life.

Dresden Rescue Team Survivor Finding A Charred Corpse In A Basement

An acquaintance attended the Dresden ‘Firestorm’ memorial in Dresden, Germany this year. The event was attended with a large police presence. While the police provided a barrier from the rowdy and aggressive Antifa protesters, they appeared more focused on those gathering to mourn and remember. There are many laws and regulations governing Germans to suppress this type of gathering. For example, the height flags are raised, words that may allude to ‘inviolable people and events’, uniform-style clothing, footwear and more. It was believed the police presence included a legal expert to detect breaches of these laws and rules.

Lady Michele Renouf attended and gave a speech via an interpreter. Her speech “broke every law and by-law” in Germany and so the meeting was closed early by the police. While the crowd waited to be certain the meeting was closed they began to sing a forbidden verse from the German National Anthem at which point the electricity was turned off and the microphones silenced.

The police then spent more than an hour ‘processing’ the attendees, searching their papers and asking questions. A small gathering was planned at one of the speakers’ hotel that evening. However, the hotel owners were warned not to allow it and, out of the fear of the consequences, the hotel owners cancelled the meeting. I was informed that Lady Renouf had been detained at a police station until midnight.

 

There is a concerted effort to hide and diminish the sufferings of Germans prior, during and post-World War II as I have documented in Germany’s War and numerous articles on WearsWar. Almost a million Germans were starved post-WWI by the naval blockade designed to change the terms of surrender. Few historians today claim that Germany was solely and wholly responsible for WWI. This false claim of German responsibility for WWI was used by the Allies to justify the extraordinary viciousness of the Versailles Treaty.

Far more Germans died post-WWII than during the war in what has become known as ‘History’s Most Terrifying Peace’. While the exact number of casualties will never be known, the number of German military and civilian deaths during World War II is approximately 6.5 million. The total number of German postwar deaths from 1945 to 1950 almost certainly exceeds 9 million. Few acknowledge the incredible death toll amongst the elderly and young after more than 16 million Germans were expelled from their homes and home lands, nor the fate of those who were trapped in the Allied-run concentration camps. Some people are aware of the plight of millions of German POWs in Eisenhower’s death camps and elsewhere. However, few people know that 95% of German children born in occupied Berlin in the summer of 1945 perished.

It would be hard to overstate the postwar suffering of Germans after World War II. German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s biographer David Cassidy writes:

Heisenberg returned in January 1946 to a Germany on its knees. Bombs and artillery had reduced nearly every city and hamlet to heaps of rubble. Roads, railway lines, river passages, and bridges had been severed or destroyed altogether; gas, water, and electric lines had been cut. Nearly a quarter of German housing was lost, and industrial and agricultural production was at a standstill. Severe shortages of food, clothing, and shelter engendered fears of starvation and epidemic. Everywhere children begged for food while their parents rummaged through garbage for whatever they could find.

As Germany’s economy and infrastructure lay in ruins, her population increased dramatically. Millions had been lost to death or were in Allied captivity, but many millions more had arrived in Germany—former slave laborers and those who had fled or been expelled from Eastern countries under Soviet domination. “[The Germans] are immeasurably depressed,” Max von Laue wrote to his son in Princeton after returning to Germany. “The complete suffering of war makes itself felt only now.”[i]

Edward Teller, who earned his Ph.D. in physics under Werner Heisenberg’s tutelage, deserves credit for doing his best to help German physicists after the war. German physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker was touched by Teller’s kindness in sending him a package after the war of much-needed food and clothing. Teller also let Weizsäcker use his office in Chicago while Weizsäcker gave a lecture at the University of Chicago. What Weizsäcker encountered from virtually all other physicists in the years after the war was a preoccupation with how guilty the Germans were.[ii]

Edward Teller, who regarded Werner Heisenberg as a great physicist and the brightest man in Germany, never lost respect and admiration for Heisenberg. At Heisenberg’s request, Teller arranged to send Heisenberg copies of the American publication Physical Review after the war. On meeting Heisenberg in Göttingen in 1948, Teller wrote: “He thanked me for the journals I had been sending, and I left, saddened by his weary reserve.[iii]

 

Editor: You mentioned in a recent article The Contradictory Testimony of Jewish Survivors & Other Eyewitnesses At Auschwitz-Birkenau: Should They Be In Jail With Monika Schaefer? Why Not? that you have encountered a few former inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

 

John: I have had three separate encounters with Jewish survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau. These are as follows:

1) After graduating from the University of Texas Law School in December 1977, I took a two-week Transcendental Meditation course in the Austin, Texas area. Interestingly, the lead teacher of this course was John Gray, who later wrote the international best selling book “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus”. I made friends with a lady on this course from Fort Worth, Texas named Patti Peters. I saw Patti on a regular basis when I moved to Fort Worth after taking the Texas bar exam. Her husband was a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the time I had no interest in the subject of the “Holocaust”, so I did not ask Mr. Peters any questions about it. I will say that Patti told me that her husband was quite angry about his experiences in the German camps during World War II.

2) During the later part of 1995, I saw a 30-minute local television program in Dallas with a Jewish lady interviewing three “Holocaust” survivors. I thought the lady did an excellent job of asking the questions, and the elderly survivors all seemed very sincere. The survivors said things such as they almost starved to death, but none of the survivors mentioned anything about homicidal gas chambers or mass executions. I wondered after the show if this Jewish lady really believed in the official Holocaust story.

I got my answer later that year when I heard her talking to some Jews in a Dallas health club. She said she worked for an organization promoting awareness of the “Holocaust”, but was frustrated that most people were not interested in hearing about the subject.

One of the Jewish men she was talking to said he was a survivor of Auschwitz. I found it odd she was frustrated, because the Holocaust story was in the news constantly in 1995. Not only had she gotten 30 minutes of free air time on a local television channel, but every time dates of the liberation of camps such as Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, etc. occurred in 1995, the mass media would always point out that it was the 50th anniversary of the liberation of each camp. I decided not to tell the lady that many of us did not believe in the official Holocaust story, as I didn’t think she would be open-minded enough to listen to anything I said.

3) In May 1999, I went on a Baltic cruise out of London with my father. My father, who died in October 2005, was in declining health, and I traveled with him mainly to help carry luggage and otherwise help with his travels. Seated at our dinner table was a couple in their sixties from Fort Lauderdale, Florida who had previously lived in Fort Worth, Texas. They were very good conversationalists, and they seemed like a very normal couple. During our first land stop in Berlin, I was on the same tour with the husband, whose wife Frieda had stayed on the cruise ship. I asked the husband why Frieda did not make the excursion with him to Berlin.

It was then that I learned from the husband that Frieda as a young Jewish girl from Poland had been in Auschwitz and three other German camps. She barely survived Bergen-Belsen, where she contracted typhoid and was very close to death when the British army took control of the camp. Her experiences in the camps had been so traumatic that she still had major psychological damage from her internment 54 years after the war was over. Her husband said that sometimes just seeing a train could set her off. Frieda did not take the tour in Berlin because she still had very bad feelings toward Germans and did not want to be around them. As I wrote on page 385 of my book “Germany’s War”:

“She was living proof both that Germany did not have a program of genocide against European Jewry, and that living conditions in the German concentration camps were extraordinarily harsh.”

The final months of WWII were brutal due to the saturation bombing of every German town and city and the needless prolonging of the war as General Patton bitterly proclaimed. The suffering of millions of German men, women and children was combined with the suffering of millions of other civilians who were simply given to the brutal Soviet regime with clear knowledge of the Gulags and Holodomors.

 

Tinfoil hat time! The top four plans to genocide Europeans & Germans do not really exist, they just match reality… how odd?

[i] Cassidy, David C., Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and the Bomb, New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2009, p. 390.

[ii] Powers, Thomas, Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, pp. 457-458.

[iii] Teller, Edward, Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics, Cambridge: MA: Perseus Publishing, 2001, pp. 52, 240, 244.

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