Thank You

...for featuring my adopted mother's story on your front page of your recent e-mailing about the "Golden Years".  We just talked last night about something she brought to my attention that few people ever heard about or would understand.  

After her father's Berlin coffee factory was bombed he joined the Luftwaffe as a ground support landser and right after he left, their home was also destroyed by the allied terror bombings of neighborhoods.  My mother along with her sisters and her mother moved to the family farm just outside of Berlin to seek safety.  The fascinating part of the story is that several allied POWs were assigned to her parents farm to work the land to produce food for both the war effort and their own needs.  My mother's family was told by the German government to house the POWs in their home and that they would work the farm with her family.  The POWs and my mother and her sisters all worked together on the farm.  The POWs were sheltered and fed inside my mother's home.  These POWs were Polish, French, Russians and others she did not know the nationality.  The fascinating part of the story is that there were no guards assigned to them nor did my mother's family have any requirements to watch them other than house and feed them.  The Wehrmacht simply told the POWs that this is where they will stay and that they had to be accountable for their whereabouts when inquired.  So they were allowed to go off the farm to shop or visit other people but always came back that day.  It was safer to be on this farm working than back on the front and they were treated just like family.  The incredible end of this story was after the war, my adopted mother's father returned to their plot of land only to find that before he could return to rebuilding his life and home, he was charged with having slave labor at his farm and he was sued by several of the POWs that worked his farm for past wages!!  He was arrested by the allies for having POWs as well. Incredible...he was not even there at the time.  First of all, he did not assign them to be there; the German Army did.  Second, they lived in his house with his wife and daughters and ate what they ate, and worked side by side with his family in the fields and had their own beds. Third, there was not any forced labor, because there were no guards to force them to work.  My adopted mother's father was cleared of the law suit by one of the POWs that came forward in his family's defense to state that he was never treated bad, nor was he forced to work.  Besides, the farm was operated just by my mother, her sisters, and her mother.  How could these women force soldier POWs to do anything?  They ate at the same table as my mother.  They could have escaped anytime they wanted but elected to stay where it was safe.  My mother told me that this was very common place on the farms around her community.  

History is always written by the victors and this piece of info will be hard for some folks to believe but no one ever needs to alibi the truth.  The truth stands on it's on. Hopefully more people will come forward with their stories of the horrific tragedies
of WWII from the eyes of civilians before that generation dies off and the liberal revisionists solidify their self serving agenda with lies that serve history to repeat itself. 

Thanks and God Bless... John L.

P.S.  You are very bold and kind to publish the truth.  I was talking to her again last night, and it is so sad how she never got to live the dream and ambitions of a noble society.  Her youth was filled initially with a government that put the volk first, the family structure supreme, the pursuant of excellence in education, science, and medicine a major priority as well as the security of it's culture....then the contrast of a young girl on the run from terror bombings, living in shelters, bleeding ear drums from the concussion of the explosives, the daily smell of death, relocation from her destroyed home to the accusation of holding POWs for slave labor at her family farm.