Crimes and Mercies (22 page)

Painting by prisoner Kurt Spillman of the French camp at Thorée-les-Pins, near La Flèche, in early spring 1945. ‘We arrived about 6 a.m. in a snowstorm. The dead lying on the right are comrades who suffocated during the journey. US soldiers look on as we are beaten by the French support troops.’

US soldier guarding camp at Sinzig, on the Rhine near Remagen, spring 1945. Millions of Axis prisoners were herded into open fields and kept for months without sufficient food, water or shelter.

Aerial view of the infamous Russian camp at Vorkuta, two thousand miles northeast of Moscow, between the Barents Sea and the northern peaks of the Urals.

On these tiny pages the names of dead Austrian prisoners were written. Rudolf Haberfellner (now of Toronto) risked his life to smuggle this notebook out of his camp at Novo Troitsk, USSR.

The Allies deprived Germany of chemical fertilizers, so this farmer near Bamburg uses liquid manure. The cows drawing the wooden tanks also provided milk and, when too old to work, meat for the hungry.

April 1946: German engineers are forced to dismantle a power-plant at Gendorf for shipment to Russia as reparations.

January 1946: civilians in Kiel clean up rubble in front of the Empire Building used by the British for their Army Welfare Service.

Demonstration in Kiel against the excessive Allied regulations, which helped cause food shortages in 1947. Signs read: ‘We demand control over food distribution’; ‘Severe punishment for black marketeers’; ‘We demand sufficient food for all’; and ‘End dismantling. We want to work’.

Hamburg, 1946: a barefoot German boy scavenges for food.

The British philanthropist and publisher Victor Gollancz denounced Allied crimes in passionate prose. He is seen here during his 1946 visit to Düsseldorf, in the British zone.

A British nurse in Berlin helps three German refugee children expelled from an orphanage in Danzig, Poland. The boy on the left, aged nine, weighs 40lbs and is too weak to stand. The boy in the centre, aged twelve, weighs just 46lbs, and his eight-year-old sister, right, weighs 37lbs. This picture was first published in
Time
magazine on 12 November 1945.

Seven starving babies in the Catholic children’s hospital in Berlin, October 1947. The infant on the right is near death.