Ralph Franklin Keeling - Gruesome harvest
The costly attempt to exterminate the people of Germany
Introduction By Dr. Austin J. App.
In 1947, when the Morgenthau Plan for the killing off of the German race was still official U.S.·Allied policy, someone in Chicago had the Christianity to write and to cause to be published a book entitled, Gruesome Harvest: The Costly Attempt To Exterminate the People of Germany. Ralph Franklin Keeling was the courageous author; and the Institute of American Economics published it and got it copyrighted in 1947. It was an attractive book of 140 pages, with a gripping picture on its cover of a Gern'lan family being driven from their homeland-somewhere in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, the Sudetenland-into bombed out, dismantled, rump Germany. The courageous and generous patron who subsidized the book appears to have been Mr Arthur Koegel, chairman of the Koegel Coal Company, 921 Agatite Avenue, Chicago. Gruesome Harvest has the honor of being the first book that tried to blast the conspiracy of silence which the victors clamped on the greatest atrocity in European history: the expulsion and total robbery and partial rape and murder of fifteen million Oder-Neisse and Sudeten Germans.
Gruesome Harvest is still one of the most graphic, most gripping, most" informative accounts of 'mass evacuation by terror, and the methodic starvation, and 're-education.' When it was published, however, and for a decade or more after, this dynamite of a book was mostly stored away from the public in warehouses. When finally some of us learned of it, and that the German American National Congress (D.A.N.K.) could supply it, there has been an unpublicized but steady demand for Gruesome Harvest.
Alas, now however the first edition· of 1947 is totally vergriffen, is all gone. But this book has so much vitality, and continues to be called for, that Liberty Bell Publications, Reedy, West Virginia, 25270, has volunteered to underwrite another printing. After having consulted with everyone, especially with D.A.N.K.; who might have an interest in a new edition, such an edition can now be considered authorized. This brave and courageous - pioneering - book should not go out of print-not at least until the East Prussians are back in Koenigsberg, the Pomeranians in Stettin, the Silesians in Breslau, and the Sudeten-Germans in Carlsbad !
April 1978.