When Nazi Germany was in its final death throes and being overrun by the victorious Allied Powers, there was a massive westward migration of Germans fleeing before the Soviet Red army. Ordinary German families abandoned their homes and workplaces, fearing murder and almost automatic rape at the hands of the Soviet troops, whose reputation for generally drunken and merciless debauch went before them. The tide of German refugees was a pathetic and even disturbing sight for the US, French and British soldiers who had to cope with their headlong flight from the feared Russians. At the end of a bitter war in which neither side had given any quarter, the consequences of complete defeat, the tidal wave of human misery, caused the armies advancing from the west much heartache as well as administrative problems. The fully justified fear was that hiding within the hundreds of thousands of terrified refugees were important Nazi officials seeking to merge anonymously with the almost unmanageable flow of genuine refugees. Today, Germany has a new wave of refugees seeking shelter and protection from evil regimes. The majority of these fearful people are from war-torn Syria and despotic and dirt-poor regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Compared with the millions who fled eastwards before the Soviet army, the 800,000 refugees that Germany is taking seems a relatively small amount. Yet neo-Nazis, followers of the same perverted creed that brought disaster and partition upon Germany in 1945, regard this new wave of helpless refugees as an affront to German nationalism. A sports hall in a town called Nauen, to the west of Berlin, which had been earmarked as a reception center for refugees was burned down this week in an attack which is being blamed on neo-Nazi thugs. These morons have learned nothing from history. That tsunami of human misery even saw German refugees appear in France and Holland and Belgium, countries that only weeks earlier had been subject to ruthless Nazi occupation. It would be saying too much to state that these unfortunate civilians were welcomed with open arms. There were some murderous attacks upon them. Yet at a time of crisis, when the surprised host countries had little enough to survive on themselves, there was a grudging acceptance, if not an actual welcome, to these Germans who were themselves victims of the bloodthirsty Hitler regime and its demented dreams of conquest. The refugees currently coming to Germany may have a different skin color, may have a different religion and almost certainly, currently flounder when speaking even the most rudimentary words of German, but they are every bit as human and desperate as the people who fled before the Soviet army steamroller in 1944 and 1945. On that basis alone, they deserve more than the hate-filled protests of halfwitted nationalists. The grandparents of some of those protesting the arrival of these asylum seekers, these desperate immigrants, were very possibly themselves once in full flight in fear of their lives and virtue. It is shameful that chauvinists, not just in Germany but in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and the UK are resisting the call of common humanity to help these luckless and desperate refugees. Inconceivable as it may be, one day the populations of these selfsame countries could find themselves in similar dire straits. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, no Germans ever imagined that within 12 years their comfortable world would be blasted apart and that they would be fleeing for their very lives.
