Between city and wall fresh blood flows.
Eighteen years now this flood has raged, So heavy with corpses it drags along
I'm silenced to think how grim death by starvation must be
(Oh Straßburg, how well you must know)
So much of the spiritual treasury swept away in haste.

Mourning for a Devastated Germany, Andreas Gryphius 1637
The Cultural Destruction of Germany
We are no longer whole. We reek the stench of decay.
Hostile clouds envelop us and trumpets blare, Cannons thunder;
so little acquired, so much thrown away.
Courtly virtue and honor have perished. The churches have been destroyed.
Protectors of innocents gutted, maidens defiled...
Fire, pestilence, murder, death. The tactics of siege warfare deployed.
The Expulsions and Refugees in Several Parts:
Five times as many Germans, both civilians and soldiers, perished in the first year after World War
Two than died during the hell of the entire war. They died directly at the hands of others as a result
of revenge policies: exile, murder, starvation, freezing, forced "atonement" marches and slave labor;
Seven million homeless people, many half-insane from shock and grief, rotting human bodies dotting
the roadside and paper-thin orphans wandering aimlessly through the charred and broken remnants
of mercilessly bombed cities were the sights in post-war Germany and Austria which our media has
thus far neglected to show us.
"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.."