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Jasta Boelcke
went online the first time in 1998 as I started playing
the awesome classic sim "Red Baron II". I wanted to play
online with a squadron based on a historical squadron that
really existed. So I was choosing the German Jasta Boelcke,
because I liked the painting scheme... I read about the
squadron's history, started collecting old German books
published about its pilots, and started writing about these
men. After a few years, the interest into the game faded with
more and more people not participating in our online wars
anymore, so I dropped the game part and continued with the
historical part. And I deepened my research, especially
regarding the
Battle of the Frontiers,
where Boelcke's pupil Manfred von Richthofen participated as a
Uhlan. That way I learned a lot about the unbelievable war
crimes the Germans committed against more than 5000 innocent
Belgian civilians as well as countless French POW they made
during that battle. This
made me think a lot, and it sensitized my conscience.
While Oswald Boelcke himself was just a pilot and nothing but
a pilot, Manfred von Richthofen fought the ground war in a
battle that went out of control of the German supreme command
with the result of reprisal action justified by ridiculous
reasons. Apart of the action ordered by their commanders, the
marauding German invaders plundered, burned, raped, murdered
at will and later they executed captured French POW and burned
wounded ones alive in an ambulance. They shelled ambulances
clearly marked with big red crosses and they executed all the
men and boys from a village after they had cleared the
battlefield of fallen French soldiers. I found evidence for
all of this. The famous book written by Manfred von Richthofen
(or his ghost writer) and published in 1917, is a book of
lies, heavily falsified by the German military censorship. But
this is understandable at some level, because it had been
published during the war. But since almost all German units
that participated in the invasion of Belgium also participated
in reprisal action I
doubt if the noble Prussian really was that noble.
His 1st Uhlans fought side by side with the 19th Uhlans and I
found reports about members of the 19th Uhlans who randomly
killed Belgian youngsters just for fun. For that reason it is
hard for me to believe Manfred von Richthofen was kept
completely out of this. I seriously doubt he was the noble man
many people see in him today, especially because of his
perversion to shoot his opponent down in flames if ever
possible. No, the troops of the Emperor hadn't been better
than the Nazi troops that returned 16 years later. In WWI they
burned the Belgian village of Ethe like they burned
Oradur-sur-Glane in France in 1944. And like they burned
civilians alive in Oradour-sur-Glane, they did this already in
Ethe as they pushed civilians back into their burning houses,
or shooting them randomly as they tried to extinguish the
fires. Ethe was burned as a reprisal action against the
civilians because the Huns believed they had been ambushed by
civilians as they marched through the village while in fact
regular French infantry hid under the roofs of the houses,
firing from well hidden positions underneath loosened roof
tiles on the Germans. The list of German war crimes from
August-September 1914 is endless. This
and more gnaws on my conscience. I cannot continue to
publish articles about people of whom many had been monsters. I don't want
to worship criminals! The war is long since over. But
the scars remain as one can still see today in Belgium. But what
really bothers me is the growing Neo-Fascism in Germany in
combination with the
also growing Neo-Imperialism of people who now wish the old
Empire back again. I only can shake my head when I
hear modern Germans saying they wish the Kaiser would return,
or when they say at times of the Kaiser everything was better
than it is today. Will
they ever learn from their history? I now doubt it.
But I am also happy to know a lot of Germans who clearly
reject fascism as well as imperialism. My beloved German wife
is one of them. Gaston
Graf, February 1st, 2012 |
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