Review: ‘Hellstorm’ by Thomas Goodrich, The Shocking Secrets Of WWII & Allied Atrocities Covered Up To Fit A Narrative

 

 “It was the most deadly and destructive war in human history. Millions were killed, billions in property was destroyed, ancient cultures were reduced to rubble–World War II was truly man’s greatest cataclysm. Thousands of books, movies and documentary films have been devoted to the war. There has never been such a terrible retelling of the story, however, as one will find in Hellstorm”.

In a chilling “you-are-there” style, the author places the reader at the scene, in the moment. Throughout this book readers will see what Allied airman saw as they rained down death on German cities; or the reader will experience what those below experienced as they sat trembling in their bomb shelters awaiting that very same death from above.

The reader will view up close the horrors of the Eastern Front during the last months of fighting and through the mud, blood and madness of combat they may come to understand how the same German soldiers, who only moments before had destroyed an enemy tank, could now risk their own lives to rescue the trapped Soviet crew inside.

Readers will witness for themselves the fate of German women as the rampaging Red Army raped and murdered its way across Europe–all females, from “eight to eighty” feared the dreaded words, “Frau Komm.” The worst nautical disasters in history which claimed thousands of lives, the greatest mass migration known to man in which millions perished, the fate of those wretched victims in post-war death camps and torture chambers, these and many other dark secrets of World War II now come to light in Hellstorm.

 

Hellstorm Book Review

The book Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947 by Thomas Goodrich documents the Allied atrocities against Germans toward the end of World War II and during its aftermath. The rape of German women is graphically described. For example, when a German counterattack temporarily recaptured the town of Neustettin, a German soldier describes what he saw in houses where Russian soldiers had raped German women:

Naked, dead women lay in many of the rooms. Swastikas had been cut into their abdomens, in some the intestines bulged out, breasts were cut up, faces beaten to a pulp and swollen puffy. Others had been tied to the furniture by their hands and feet, and massacred. A broomstick protruded from the vagina of one, a besom from that of another….
The mothers had had to witness how their 10 and 12-year-old daughters were raped by some 20 men; the daughters in turn saw their mothers being raped, even their grandmothers. Women who tried to resist were brutally tortured to death. There was no mercy….
The women we liberated were in a state almost impossible to describe….[T]heir faces had a confused, vacant look. Some were beyond speaking to, ran up and down and moaned the same sentences over and over again. Having seen the consequences of these bestial atrocities, we were terribly agitated and determined to fight. We knew the war was past winning; but it was our obligation and sacred duty to fight to the last bullet.[1]

Goodrich also documents the terror bombing of Dresden and other German cities toward the end of the war. Evidence of the ruthless mass bombings of congested German cities was provided by many of the British bomber crews themselves. The almost total lack of German opposition to the British bombings toward the end of the war made the bombing of cities less like war and more like murder. While open criticism of government policy was not allowed, the guilt of young British flyers occasionally surfaced. One British crewman confessed:

“There were people down there being fried to death in melted asphalt in the roads, they were being burnt up and we were shuffling incendiary bombs into this holocaust. I felt terribly sorry for the people in that fire I was helping to stoke up.”[2]

After Dresden, Joseph Goebbels angrily urged Hitler to retaliate by abrogating the Geneva Convention. However, Hitler and his military staff continued to abide by the Geneva Convention throughout the war. As a result, Goodrich states that almost 99% of Allied prisoners of war survived the war to return home.[3]

The Allies required the Germans to perform forced labor after the war. The rape of German women continued unabated. A German woman from the Soviet zone stated:

      We had to build landing strips, and to break stones. In snow and rain, from six in the morning until nine at night, we were working along the roads. Any Russian who felt like it took us aside. In the morning and at night we received cold water and a piece of bread, and at noon soup of crushed, unpeeled potatoes, without salt. At night we slept on the floors of farmhouses or stables, dead tired, huddled together. But we woke up every so often, when a moaning and whimpering in the pitch-black room announced the presence of one of the guards.[4]

As this woman and others make clear, German women could be raped even when performing forced labor for the Allies. As one German woman who worked at planting potatoes said,

“If they wanted a girl they just came in the field and got her.”[5]

Goodrich also documents the brutal denazification process in Germany. For millions of Germans the worst part of the denazification process came after a 12-page questionnaire had been completed. After reviewing the questionnaire, Allied intelligence officers would frequently visit German homes for additional examinations and interrogations. Many of these intelligence officers were Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi persecution in the late 1930s with old scores to settle. The additional interrogations were often structured to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible, and often resulted in internment or even death.[6]

hellstorm image review
Both the book and the documentary are available in multiple languages. Watch: http://www.hellstormdocumentary.com/watch/

Goodrich also documents that the Red Army began the plundering of Europe as soon as it entered Germany in 1944. The Soviet looting in the Russian zone became prodigious after the end of the war. Factories, refineries, processing mills, and other heavy industries were taken apart and sent east to the Soviet Union to be reassembled. All secondary rail lines, electric and steam locomotives and their rolling stock were sent to the Soviet Union. The plants that were left in Germany were operated by Germans solely for the benefit of the Soviet Union.[7]

While the United States did not take German plants and factories, Goodrich states that it did take its share of German treasure. Billions of dollars in gold, silver, currency, priceless paintings and art works were stolen from their hiding places in caves, tunnels, and salt mines throughout Germany and shipped to the United States.[8]

Germany also experienced “mental dismantling” in that hundreds of German scientists were compelled to immigrate by the victors. One U.S. government agency quietly admitted that Operation Paperclip was the first time in history where conquerors had attempted to confiscate the inventive power of a nation. Life magazine added that the real gain in reparations of this war was not in the confiscated factories, gold, or artworks, but in the German brains and the German research results.[9]

Goodrich states that the destruction of the German infrastructure during the war had made it inevitable that some Germans would starve to death before roads, rails, canals, and bridges could be restored. However, even when much of the German infrastructure had been repaired, the Allies deliberately withheld food from Germany. Continuing the policy of their predecessors, U.S. President Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee allowed the spirit of Henry Morgenthau and the Yalta Conference to dictate their policies toward Germany. The result was that millions of Germans were doomed to slow death by starvation.[10]

Goodrich discusses in Chapter Eight the mass starvation of German prisoners of war by the Western Allies after the war. Goodrich also documents in Chapter Ten the horrific torture and death of Germans after the war in former German concentration camps. In Chapter Eleven Goodrich briefly discusses the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland and other Eastern European countries, resulting in the deaths of millions of ethnic Germans. I wish Goodrich would have discussed these postwar Allied atrocities in more detail. However, if he had gone into more detail, his book probably would have been too long and cumbersome for many people.

Hellstorm is an important and very disturbing book concerning the end of World War II and its aftermath. I highly recommend this well-written book to anyone interested in World War II and its aftermath.

Readers can visit Thomas Goodrich’s website here.

ENDNOTES

[1] Goodrich, Thomas, Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, Sheridan, CO: Aberdeen Books, 2010, p. 159.

[2] Ibid., p. 38.

[3] Ibid., p. 127.

[4] Ibid., p. 298.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., pp. 299-303.

[7] Ibid., pp. 280-282.

[8] Ibid., p. 282.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., pp. 287-293.

Spread the love

You may also like...

14 Responses

  1. WakeyWakey says:

    Its quite astounding, when one reads all this murder and sadism inflicted upon millions of German men, women and children AFTER the war had ended, and despite all these real atrocities mentioned above and far more, the world is fed only a fictional little mini-drama called
    “World War II was Solely About the Murder of the 6 Million” fullstop!

  2. larryzb says:

    The real holocaust was what was done to the Germans both during and after the war. Goodrich’s book ought to be widely read. It is the kind of work that ought to be required reading. But, just as western historiography has its entrenched biases, so does the modern university (academia) in the West suffer serious problems. Thus, this book will likely not find its way into any college libraries anytime soon.

  3. Bob Bowen says:

    I received my copy of this book on February 5, 2016, and received the Dennis Wise produced DVD “Hellstorm” shortly after it was released. My wife read her Spanish (her first language) version of “Hellstorm” a few months later and we read the books and watched in horror the DVD. In addition to “Germany’s War” I also bought and read “The Myth of German Villiany” by Benton L. Bradberry after listening to his interview with Jeff Rense on the Rense Radio Network.
    I also highly recommend you read the work of Canadian author James Bacque as he described the evil acts of “the winners” after the end of WWII. Bacques two books are “Other Losses” & “Crimes & Mercies”. I read “Other Losses” finishing the book on June 8, 2016, but just received a copy of “Crime And Mercies” directly from the author on May 10, 2019.

    If you are in the learning mode now, I highly recommend that you read the book I am just now finishing “The World Conquerors, The Real War Criminals” published in 1958 by Hungarian author Louis Marschalko. I recently purchased two more copies to give to my best childhood friend in California and a copy for my oldest son also living in Califormia. I have a feeling that Wakey Wakey & larryzb have already read most, if not all, of the work I have described in this post. You two guys are the best ! You Rock !

    • chasmark says:

      Thanks for mention of a book by a Hungarian author. The role of Hungary is intriguing: Theodore Herzl, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Louis Brandeis — three major protagonists of what W H Auden called, “the whole offense” — had Hungarian roots.

      I just started to learn about Hungary’s history back to the Hussites . . .
      Much to learn.

      • Bob Bowen says:

        chasmark: I have a special interest in the welfare of the Hungarian people as my step-grandfather, Josef Ignacz left Hungary when Bela Kun made his bid to turn Hungary into a communist country as WWI was winding down. I discussed this with British Author Andy Hitchcock when he invited me on his Radio Show that was broadcast on April 12, 2018. I also was on his show January 4th & January 25th, 2018. You can listen to those interviews on his website at:

        http://www.andrewcarringtonhitchcock.com/

        On his Home Page at the top right is an icon of a magnifying glass which is for “Search.” Click on that icon, then type in my name Bob Bowen and links to my three interviews will pop up. The most recent of the three will be first, so you can listen to the interviews chronologically by starting with the January 4th show whereby one show leads to the next, if you are only interested in the Hungary one it is right there at the top. Each show is just short of an hour.

  4. J says:

    Mr. Goodrich will release an audiobook of ‘Hellstorm’ this month:

    https://hellstormaudiobook.com/

    The prologue is downloadable now.

    http://thomasgoodrich.com/

    http://www.hellstormdocumentary.com/

  5. chasmark says:

    re:

    “Billions of dollars in gold, silver, currency, priceless paintings and art works were stolen from their hiding places in caves, tunnels, and salt mines throughout Germany and shipped to the United States.”

    from “Capturing the German Eye,” by Cora Sol Goldstein [a chilling — because it is written with such cool triumphalism — account of US occupation forces psychological warfare that “de-Nazified” the German people, down to their very souls]:

    “In Germany, the U S Army designed the “atrocity propaganda policy,” an exercise in politics and punishment through visual means. Through photography, film, and forced visits to the camps, Germans were made to see Nazi crimes. A central goal was to replace the image of the Third Reich constructed by the Nazi propaganda machine with the image of mass atrocity. Months later, the material gathered at the camps — films, photographs, and objects — as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. The photographic image of the concentration and extermination camp system became, RETROACTIVELY, the defining representation of the Nazi genocidal project.

    Once Germany was occupied, the U S Army, and then OMGUS, conducted a massive campaign of iconoclasm targeted at eliminating the legacy of the Nazi regime from the visual realm. Visual remnants of the Nazi era — paintings, monuments, statues, emblems, and military symbols — were eliminated from public view. More than eight thousand works of art were removed from museums and government buildings, classified as Nazi or militaristic, and sent to the United States to be stored in military depositories . . .”

    “Nazi” film received similar treatment.

    “OMGUS” replaced Nazi and German film, art, statues, music, with “Modernist” art, etc.

    One more thing Goldstein mentions: US military leaders and US congress were opposed to the harsh treatment and psychological warfare tactics of “OMGUS”. Goldstein notes that “U S Military was deeply antisemitic.”** The tactics of psychological warfare that Goldstein discusses were carried out, in very many cases, behind- and around the wishes and structures of US leaders, by private groups dominated by Jewish persons.

    ** see, i.e. The “Jewish threat” : anti-semitic politics of the U.S. Army / Joseph W. Bendersky.

    • larryzb says:

      As always, we must be very skeptical and circumspect when the old canard of “anti-Semitism” is hurled by Jews. It effectively means anyone who dares to oppose or criticize the Jews and their actions for any reasons. And, as many have pointed out over the past quarter century or more, “anti-Semite” has come to signify someone whom the Jews hate.

      Yes, this occupation of Germany was used to destroy and erase (or expunge) much of German cultural identity and the German consciousness of their achievements. I think on this blog sometime back there was a post about the London protocols from August, 1945. Udo Walendy wrote on this in one or more of his books. Sadly, the Allies were quite successful as we can see the Germans are now a rather demoralized people. And, it does not help the Germans that Angela Merkel has opened the flood gates for migrants and refugees into Germany. She is even angry with those who do not wish their countries to be overrun , such as Hungary’s current leader, Viktor Orban. (The Hungarians suffered terribly late in the war and after the war. They also had suffered earlier under the murderous regime of Bela Kun (Cohn) in 1919. Those familiar with Judeo-Bolshevism and its terrible crimes resisted and fought against the Soviets during the war.)

Leave a Reply to J Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.