Thursday, November 10, 2011  First Paragraph  The storks were
already migrating as the first Germans began to flee East
Prussia. This was in the late summer of 1944. By the following
January, with the temperature twenty degrees below zero, more
than three million refugees and their animals were trudging
westwards to escape the vengeance of the Red Army. For mile
after mile they shuffled through the snows, clogging the roads
while the retreating German troops tried to force their way
through. The last civilian trains were crowded with "huddled
shapes, rigid with cold, barely able to stand up any more and
climb out; thin clothing, mostly in tatters, a few blankets over
bowed shoulders, gray, hollow faces'. As the front came closer,
the concentration camps were emptied as well, and their
surviving inmates were marched deeper into the Reich; their
guards shot the stragglers and left their bodies by the
roadside.  - From Hitler's Empire by Mark Mazower   Post a
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