60 years on.The European media have been full of articles, documentaries, recollections to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II--perhaps because this is one of the last anniversaries with large numbers of the participants still around to tell their tales. And at last we can start to recognize the terrible suffering of the Germans: the flattening
The flattening, ellipticity, or oblateness of an oblate spheroid is the "squashing" of the spheroid's pole, down towards its equator. of most of their cities, in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions Geneva Conventions, series of treaties signed (1864–1949) in Geneva, Switzerland, providing for humane treatment of combatants and civilians in wartime. , signed by the British and the Americans; the hundreds of thousands of refugees, and the rubbing out of thousand-year-old Germanic cultures in many parts of Eastern Europe Eastern Europe The countries of eastern Europe, especially those that were allied with the USSR in the Warsaw Pact, which was established in 1955 and dissolved in 1991. . Thousands of German women were raped by Russian soldiers; German prisoners of war prisoners of war, in international law, persons captured by a belligerent while fighting in the military. International law includes rules on the treatment of prisoners of war but extends protection only to combatants. were shipped off to Siberia, many never to return--for these German prisoners there were no Red Cross visits, as the Soviets had not signed the Geneva Conventions. Few countries have worked so hard to come to terms with their past, to repair, to restore. I look forward to visiting the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. ANDREW STALLYBRASS IN GENEVA Geneva, canton and city, Switzerland Geneva (jənē`və), Fr. Genève, canton (1990 pop. 373,019), 109 sq mi (282 sq km), SW Switzerland, surrounding the southwest tip of the Lake of Geneva. |
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