Associate Professor Michael Walsh

The Red Brigands Associate Professor Michael Walsh

When the Reich yielded on May 8 1945, the assets of Germany, second only to the United States, fell into the hands of the victors. Within 36 months, the time taken for Hitler to create the world's wealthiest nation, Germany was reduced to a shell. Everything from a wristwatch to ocean liners, entire contents of factories, tens of thousands of cars, homes, the world's most precious artworks, and 10 million slaves, were distributed among the British, U. S and Soviet Empires. Such was scale of looting that it would have been difficult to find a bicycle in looted Germany. The victors were equally blameworthy but the USSR benefited the most. Given a free hand by Churchill and Roosevelt the Soviet Union took the lion's share of plunder from the defeated Reich. The greatest irony is that Poland was one of the 21 nations gifted to the USSR as plunder, the country for whose territorial integrity the war was started.