"Father, shoot me"

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Roberto
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"Father, shoot me"

#1

Post by Roberto » 20 Aug 2002, 20:01

The following is my translation of an article that appeared in a recent special issue of the German news magazine Der Spiegel on the flight and expulsion of ethnic Germans at the end of World War II.

Given the length of the article, I will post the translation in several parts.

PART 1
“Father, shoot me”

Millions of people – women, children, old men – fled from the Red Army in the last months of the war. For hundreds of thousands the trek west ended in hell – they drowned, were shot or raped.

In Nemmersdorf no one lives any more who can still remember. The place is now called Majakovskoje, Russians are now living in the small houses with gray roofs. Of the bridge across the Angerapp river only some stones and one of the pillars remain.
Who could fled in time back then – or at least thereafter.
Thereafter? Was there even a thereafter?
On 21 October 1944, when an advance unit of the Red Army fell over the East Prussian village of Nemmersdorf, history ended for millions of Germans. The massacre of Nemmersdorf was the premonition of flight and expulsion, which led everything to fall apart into hate, hunger, humiliation, fear. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even two million, did not survive the catastrophe.
When on 21 October the morning mist was still lying over the East Prussian landscape, the Soviet tanks of the 2nd battalion of the 25th tank brigade rolled down the Gumbinnen alley. The exhausted Red Army men had been fighting for days on end. The Wehrmacht was stubbornly defending the eastern borders of the Reich.
For more than three years the Landser had conducted Hitler’s war of annihilation on Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and Latvian soil – and been thrown back. Now Stalin’s troops for the first time entered German settlement areas.
At Nemmersdorf, before the Soviet tanks on the small dike leading to the bridge across the Angerapp, there crowded the carts of peasant families who had fled from the surrounding farms and communities. The way west led across the river.
When he saw the bridge, the commander ordered full speed. At 7:30 it had been taken, the tanks leaving behind on the dike a mess of horse cadavers, the wood of the carts and probably also human bodies.
Gerda Meczulat lived on the other side of the river. Her father Eduard, 71, had decided against fleeing. The Meczulats didn’t have a cart. Together with other villagers they procured shelter in a cellar.
What happened there has not been completely clarified until the present day. Gerda Meczulat later reported that the first Russians entered the cellar in the early afternoon. They searched the hand luggage, but were unexpectedly friendly. One even played with the children. But in the evening an officer appeared and in a harsh tone ordered the Germans outside.
“When we came out there were soldiers on both sides of the exit with rifles ready to fire. I fell down because I have polio, was dragged up and felt nothing more in all the confusion. When I recovered my senses I heard children scream and rifle shots. Then it was quiet.”
Gerda Meczulat survived heavily wounded, because the soldier who wanted to shoot hear aimed inaccurately. She was the only survivor.
When the Wehrmacht took back the community of 637 souls on the next day, they found at least two dozen corpses of women, children and elder men. Red Army soldiers had shot them or bashed in their heads.
How many women were raped? Is it true that people were nailed naked to a barn door? Or was that just the propaganda of Dr. Goebbels, who quickly blew up the massacre into proof that the Soviets were “wild beasts”?
About the details of the horrible events at Nemmersdorf historians and expellee politicians are arguing to this day, often with rage. Deniers? Revanchists? Nemmersdorf has become a symbol of German suffering.
One thing is certain: On 21 October 1944, in the fourth year of the war against the Soviet Union, Nemmersdorf showed that the people of perpetrators had become a people of victims.
Yet at this moment of German history the catastrophe could still have been stayed. Mass panic, death marches, frozen babies eaten by hungry rats, hundreds of thousands of raped women, more than 33,000 people drowned in the Baltic – all this horror came upon the population only because Adolf Hitler and his unscrupulous warlords and Gauleiter still rambled about the final victory.
Defending every square meter of ground in the East to the last breath: this phrase became a reality in the most terrible way.
What would have been, if …? 2.5 million Germans lived in East Prussia, 1.9 million in East Pomerania, 4.7 million in Silesia. There would have been many weeks time to bring them into safety, before the oncoming of that murderous winter which became so cold that exhausted refugees simply froze to chunks of ice by the side of the road.
But in Hitler’s Germany it was forbidden to run away in that golden October of 1944. At a Gauleiter seminary in Posen Himmler had announced that an expansion of the Germanic empire to the East was of course imminent. “It is for certain that we are here creating the plantations of Germanic blood in the East.” What an image.
It was thus a certainty for the East Prussian Gauleiter, Erich Koch, that preparations to flee could only be a particularly infamous kind of sabotage. Civil servants and mayors of the Gau got instructions to report anyone who planned anything in this direction.
And there was the hope, against all reason, that it wouldn’t get all that bad. Nemmersdorf, after all, had been retaken. Air attacks there had been hardly any here in the East – and wasn’t it an autumn of splendid beauty?
“The light so strong, the sky so high, the distance so mighty”, thus the physician Hans Graf von Lehndorff described in his notes from that October the mood in his home, the land of amber.
And yet everyone knew that it was all over. Never again would they see the storks that in these days flew away from East Prussia in southerly direction.
Premonition of a catastrophe: Ownerless animals threaded the meadows, coming from farms further to the East which had already been abandoned by their owners. On the fields at Preußisch Holland there were strange constructions under a makeshift camouflage of canvas.
Here were the lands of the young Marion Countess Dönhoff, who secretly had horse carts equipped for the flight west.
In the bureau of Dr. Wander, the mayor of Insterburg, the letters from the superior entity at Königsberg piled up: top secret and to be placed in a safe. Only when the code word “lemon butterfly” was issued, these letters were to be handed to craftsmen and representatives of the economy in Insterburg: they contained the instruction to send machines and supplies – but not people – to the west.
When the mayor on the day after the events at Nemmersdorf asked the Gau leadership in Königsberg to send transportation trains for refugees from the east who were already crowding the station, he was mockingly asked if he had a fever.
The nagging sensation, even when decorating the Christmas tree, that life was coming to an end and all would go down, started proving accurate shortly thereafter: On 12 January 1945 Russian tanks entered East Prussia, and there was no stopping them. No more time for “lemon butterfly” – now the people were fleeing westward in panic. The trains leaving Königsberg station were overloaded already on the first day.
It was mostly women and children who left their houses and farms in a hurry. The men were either serving at the front, or the were considered, under the supervision of the NSDAP, as indispensable for the “Volkssturm”, the last defense contingent.
Three days later almost nothing functioned anymore. The snow-covered streets were crammed with refugee treks, a long line of canvas carts drawn by horses or people, and thickly dressed figures who had departed from their homes with their most important possessions, a few bags and buckets full of food.
All they owned they had left behind, the houses unlocked, the cattle unbound. And whatever little they brought along they would also lose in time.
No chance to overtake. The treks dragged along slowly, the horses slipped on the frozen streets. Waiting for hours on end at railway crossings, where military transports – from the front, to the front? – barred their way. Standing for hours on end in the icy night. In the backs of the panje carts the elder, wrapped in blankets, had frozen to death already during the first nights. The goal: the Vistula crossings at Marienburg and Dirschau. For to the Vistula, so a wild hope went, the Russians wouldn’t make it.
Fear of the conquerors blew across the hills with the biting northeast wind, from East Prussia to Silesia. East of the Oder special trains were bringing masses of people to the apparently protecting city of Breslau. The last transport made it through on 18 January, from then on people had to go by foot there as well.
18 January: On this day Russian tanks were already rolling through the Warthegau, formerly Poland, recently annexed to Germany. On the previous evening a train with women and children departed westward from Posen, but as the evacuation started much too late, the refugees were now stepping on their frozen feet. The treks were standing on the street, with the refugees fearfully listening to the typical noise of tank tracks – the Russian ones.
With the horses up to their bellies in the snow some families tried to get out of the queue through the fields. They got stuck, tried to survive the night in a barn, but soon the frozen pampers of the babies were frozen. Then the children died. They could not even be buried, because the earth was frozen rock hard. Wild animals took them from the sides of the road. And the snow kept falling.

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#2

Post by Poxsellis » 20 Aug 2002, 22:42

A both interesting and horrible article, which has been printed recently in the "Spiegel". I assume you have bought also the special magazine about the german expulsion, Roberto? Nice job from you, to translate it!


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#3

Post by Alex F. » 21 Aug 2002, 01:15

Yes, this fits well in this forum.

Horrible.

:(
Alex

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#4

Post by Dan W. » 21 Aug 2002, 06:18

It has been close to 60 years since these events took place, and many of these stories have been repressed for decades. Many, probably most, took them to their grave. If any more develop I hope someone shares them here. However painful to read we must not remain ignorant to this brutality.

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#5

Post by Roberto » 21 Aug 2002, 15:47

Poxsellis wrote:A both interesting and horrible article, which has been printed recently in the "Spiegel". I assume you have bought also the special magazine about the german expulsion, Roberto? Nice job from you, to translate it!


Image
Thanks. The article can be found on pages 10 to 18 of that issue.

PART II
On 19 January, 8 o’clock in the morning, the village teacher in the East Prussian town of Groß-Nappen, county of Osterode, came to Lilly Sternberg and raised the alarm.
“The time has come, prepare your trek.” Like hundreds of others, the East Prussian lady wrote down the story of her suffering in the 1950’s for a documentation about flight and expulsion. This work, which covers thousands of pages, was put together by historians on behalf of the Expellees’ Ministry. Most accounts are sworn and constitute one of the most impressive collections about the misery at the end of the war.
“Depart immediately! Only with hand luggage!”, Mrs. Sternberg wrote down. “Soon we were on the village street, which was full of wailing women.” The departure: “The children thought it was wonderful.”
“Mother, the Russians, what will they do with us”, one of the children asked Lilly Sternberg. “Nothing, I say, while I’m shaking all over, nothing, and I put my hand on my lips.”
The Russians, what will they do? The worst rumors are not true – the truth is worse. Medical student Josefine Schleiter, trying to get away in the same area, saw how tanks raced into her trek.
“The carts were thrown into the ditch, horse cadavers were lying around, men, women and children lay dying.” The student heard a wounded girl say: “Father, shoot me!” Her brother also asked: “Yes, father, I’ve got nothing to expect anymore.” The father, crying: “Wait a little longer, children.”
Then it was her turn. “Three tall fellows grabbed me and threw me onto their car. The car started moving, and I stood on top of it, watched by a Russian’s marauding eyes. Icy cold. I had not eaten since noon. One of the fellows grinned: ‘Cold?’ There followed the most humiliating moments of my life, which cannot be described.”
When the car stopped, the student jumped down and fled into the woods, running, running, running.
There was a method behind all this. Rapes were a terrible weapon of the Red soldiers, a means of terror like torture, murder and arson.
In East Pomerania a train with refugees was stopped by Russian soldiers, the locomotive shot apart. “Everyone out!” Women and children fled across the snow over the fields. In the village of Dornitz their pursuers caught up with them. “Frau, komm!”, was the dreaded order. The girl Gabi Knopp, who ZDF – historian Guido Knopp mentions in his reports about “The Great Flight”, did not yet know what this order meant for her. She had not yet been taught the facts of life.
Who did not come had to count on being shot. A Russian soldier coming upon frightened refugees in Polish Groß Dasekow pointed to the youngest. Her sister reported: “When she didn’t immediately get up, he went over to her and held a machine pistol to her chin. All of us screamed out loud, only my sister sat there silently and couldn’t move. Then he shot her.”
Those who remained behind in the villages because they could not or did not want to flee were often treated no better by the conquerors than the victims of Nemmersdorf. When the Federal Archives in the mid-1970s evaluated the reports of witnesses, the scientists counted around 3,300 so called crime sites east of the Oder and Neiße where German civilians had been beaten to death or shot, raped to death or burned alive. The Federal Archives concluded that at least 120,000 Germans had died on the flight.
How many people in total fell victim to flight and expulsion has not been clarified. In the 1950s the Federal Statistics Bureau simply estimated the number of Germans who before 1945 had lived east of the Oder and Neiße and therefrom deducted the number of those who after the war were living in the German Federal Republic, Austria or the German Democratic Republic. The difference was more than two million.
That this order of magnitude must be too high became apparent at the time already from lists of missing civilians; only about one-tenth – ca. 200,000 people – were being searched by relatives and friends. So far however only the Danube Svabians [ethnic Germans of Yugoslavia, translators’ note] made the effort to individually document all victims – and halved the estimates of the Federal Statistics Bureau for their region.
Historians estimate at 1.4 million the number of women who were raped back then. Many of them thereafter took the lives out of revulsion or horror. Months later, witnesses reported, children who arrived safely in the West were still playing “Frau, komm!” in the refugee camps.
The Red Army had never been especially disciplined, and besides it had been savaged by the war. There was no home leave, young men had to enter enemy dugouts with flame throwers or watch the entrails coming out of the bellies of wounded comrades without ever being given a chance to process such experiences. “Right after an attack you better don’t look into their eyes”, wrote a Russian field medic, “there’s nothing human therein.”
The annihilation of millions of people, which Hitler had planned for the Russians, Stalin had not foreseen for the Germans. But when the Red Army had reached the western border of the Soviet Union, many were tired, and in order to lift up morale Stalin’s generals loosened the controls that even in war keep soldiers from becoming murderers.
More then a thousand army newspapers had sown the hatred that was now necessary to win. For example Ilya Ehrenburg’s proclamation: “If during the day you haven’t killed a German, your day is wasted. Don’t count the days, don’t count the versts, count only one thing: the Germans you have killed. Kill the Germans.”
The order of the day of the 1st Belorussian Front before the attack on the Reich read as follows: “The time has come to settle accounts with the German-Fascist hangmen. Great and burning is our hate. We will take revenge for those burned in the hell ovens, for those choked in the gas chambers, we will take cruel revenge for everything.”
It seems that Stalin’s generals underestimated the effects of their propaganda. A little plundering, a few excesses, was what they had in mind.
But the waves of murder and destruction in East Prussia and Silesia apparently also frightened the Russian leadership.
On the tenth day of the winter offensive in the Vistula bend the high command of the 2nd Belorussian Front ordered the suppression of “robbery, plunder, arson and mass drinking orgies.” The hate propaganda, however, Stalin had cancelled only when his troops had crossed the Oder and Neiße and reached the ground that the Kremlin leader intended to leave to the Germans in the future – the later GDR.
What came upon the Germans in the East had indeed not occurred in Central Europe since the peace of Münster and Osnabrück in 1648. Back then, after the end of the Thirty Years War, the commanders had succeeded in making their bloody business a fairly orderly matter. Since then it was usual to wage wars between states and their trained soldiers, preferably somewhere far out where civilians would not be disturbed and molested.
In the following centuries war was civilized into a cabinet war, and even the weapons and means of waging it were established contractually – rape was not part of it. War, that was the important aspect, had a goal, and that goal was peace, albeit at the victor’s conditions.
But now all barriers inside which war had been “hedged”, as the Berlin politologist Herfried Münkler put it, had been torn down. The wild war, the total war: that was the war of Adolf Hitler, the war of unlimited violence. Total annihilation, not peace, was its goal.
Already in May 1941 Hitler’s bureaucrats had issued the dreaded “military justice decree”, which allowed German soldiers to kill Soviet civilians free of punishment. About 11 million civilians died from the consequences of the war in Stalin’s empire.
Hitler’s commanders were the ones who had invented this: to turn people into war material, into soulless units like anti-tank barriers and howitzers, only cheaper and available everywhere.
Completely unfortified cities like Breslau in Silesia were pronounced fortresses, consisting of nothing other than masses of people. An East Wall made of human bodies was to stand up against the Bolshevik tanks. “Every block of houses, every village, every farm, every ditch, every bush”, declared Heinrich Himmler, “will be defended by men, boys, old men and – if necessary – by women and girls.” Breslau with its 630,000 civilians was to withstand the Red Army; cannon were to be placed everywhere.
First of all the women and children useless for defense went on a foot march to Oppau as ordered by Gauleiter Karl Hanke. For there were no vehicles, and at Freiburg Station, from where trains departed to the West, there had already been a mass panic. The railway police collected hundreds of trampled little bodies when the train had finally departed.
“The people went about headless in the streets. Many women broke down crying. The streetcars were overfilled, everyone rode for free in these last days.” Thus remembered Elisabeth Erbrich, who on the following day, it was her 20th service anniversary at the country peasant association, also went on her way. “This day became the hardest in my whole life.” She wore her underwear and as many clothes as she could put on, carried a backpack and cooked chicken in a handbag. Leaflets were raining from the sky: “Germans, surrender, nothing will happen to you.” Elisabeth Erbrich, however, had to join the endless trek westward through the snow, together with hundreds of thousands of other women and children, at temperatures of 16 degrees centigrade below zero. Thousands lost their lives on this march from Breslau. On the following day BDM – girls from the city were ordered to the site of the trail of tears to “collect the dolls along the way”.
What dolls? They were all babies frozen stiff, who had been left behind by their mothers.

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#6

Post by Roland » 21 Aug 2002, 15:52

Roberto!

Thank You!

Roland.

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#7

Post by Roberto » 21 Aug 2002, 15:56

Roland wrote:Roberto!

Thank You!

Roland.
You're welcome.

It's definitely more interesting than discussing whether and to what extent the Nazis made their victims' dead bodies into soap.

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#8

Post by Roland » 21 Aug 2002, 16:23

:? :? :?

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Roberto
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#9

Post by Roberto » 21 Aug 2002, 16:41

Roland wrote::? :? :?
Sorry. An allusion to a pointless discussion currently going on under

http://www.thirdreichforum.com/phpBB2/v ... c6cd127edb

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#10

Post by Ebusitanus » 21 Aug 2002, 16:56

Historians estimate at 1.4 million the number of women who were raped back then. Many of them thereafter took the lives out of revulsion or horror. Months later, witnesses reported, children who arrived safely in the West were still playing “Frau, komm!” in the refugee camps.
8O ...That many? What historians are those? I thought when he had discussed these matters a while ago that Roberto said that those figures were ridiculous and grossly exagerated. Is Der Spiegel changing this view?

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#11

Post by Roberto » 21 Aug 2002, 17:06

Ebusitanus wrote:
Historians estimate at 1.4 million the number of women who were raped back then. Many of them thereafter took the lives out of revulsion or horror. Months later, witnesses reported, children who arrived safely in the West were still playing “Frau, komm!” in the refugee camps.
Ebusitanus wrote:8O ...That many? What historians are those?
The original German text reads "Historikerinnen", which means "female historians". You may ask the magazine who those ladies are.
Ebusitanus wrote:I thought when he had discussed these matters a while ago that Roberto said that those figures were ridiculous and grossly exagerated.
If I well remember, I asked Mr. Wildboar to put some legs under his contention that the Soviets raped over two million women.

Such legs, as it seems, now exist - thanks to Antony Beevor's recent book on the battle of Berlin. Which I have not read yet, but intend to read.
Ebusitanus wrote:Is Der Spiegel changing this view?
In regard to what previous assertions of theirs would such a change have occurred?
Last edited by Roberto on 21 Aug 2002, 17:19, edited 1 time in total.

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#12

Post by atkif » 21 Aug 2002, 17:15

Quote:"Historians estimate at 1.4 million the number of women who were raped back then"
Just a question - what methods historians could use to estimate the number of the raped women ?
The number of victims murdered is very difficult to determine (as the
ongoing comtroversy about the number of victims of Holocaust shows).
But still I can approximatly understand what means are being used - for example the census changes comparisons( of certain areas) might be used.
What about the rapes ? Does it mean that every alleged victim claiming to be raped by the Russians is to be trusted ?And who was registering the
number of rapes?Where are the documents with the numbers?
I doubt that there were many medical expertises conducted after the
rapes in those years .
Could we admit the possibility that the number of the raped is greatly exaggerated ?

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#13

Post by Capitán » 21 Aug 2002, 17:51

Thanks Roberto.

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#14

Post by Ebusitanus » 21 Aug 2002, 23:30

@atkif

Not only can those numbers be grossly exagerated but as someone posted here a while before, most of these woman were actually giving it away willingly in exchange for some canned foods. :roll:
But your question is still valid, how could a feasible count be taken of such matters? The text gives also civillian casualities in the millions, how many of those were actually deported east or stood put instead of killed as this magazine claims?

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#15

Post by Roberto » 22 Aug 2002, 00:27

Ebusitanus wrote:@atkif

Not only can those numbers be grossly exagerated but as someone posted here a while before, most of these woman were actually giving it away willingly in exchange for some canned foods. :roll:
But your question is still valid, how could a feasible count be taken of such matters? The text gives also civillian casualities in the millions, how many of those were actually deported east or stood put instead of killed as this magazine claims?
I presume the passages you are referring to is the following:
How many people in total fell victim to flight and expulsion has not been clarified. In the 1950s the Federal Statistics Bureau simply estimated the number of Germans who before 1945 had lived east of the Oder and Neiße and therefrom deducted the number of those who after the war were living in the German Federal Republic, Austria or the German Democratic Republic. The difference was more than two million.

That this order of magnitude must be too high became apparent at the time already from lists of missing civilians; only about one-tenth – ca. 200,000 people – were being searched by relatives and friends. So far however only the Danube Svabians [ethnic Germans of Yugoslavia, translators’ note] made the effort to individually document all victims – and halved the estimates of the Federal Statistics Bureau for their region.


There was indeed an estimate made by the German Federal Statistics Bureau in the late 1950's that over two million ethnic Germans had perished during the flight from the Red Army at the end of the war and the postwar expulsions from Germany's former Eastern territories and various countries of Eastern Europe, mainly Poland and Czechoslovakia.

This estimate, which in the second paragraph is referred to as being well above the mark, has recently been challenged by German historians, for example by Rüdiger Overmans, author of Deutsche Militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Overmans writes the following (my translation):
The deaths during flight and expulsion concerned the Germans in the immediate postwar period as much as the fate of the missing soldiers, and similar efforts were made to clarify the fate of the missing civilians or bring families together. A huge scientific project reconstructed the events historiographically, the Federal Statistics Office (Statistisches Bundesamt), the refugees’ associations and the clerical search service did a lot with the financial support of the Federal Government to quantitatively assess the fate of those expelled as accurately as possible. The result can be summarized in the conclusion that about 2 million Germans had been killed during flight and expulsion - not including those from the respective territories who had died during military service.

These casualty figures, however, which for decades have been an integral part of the respective serious literature, are the result not of a counting of death records or similar concrete data, but of a population balance which concluded that the fate of about 2 million inhabitants of the expulsion territories could not be clarified and that it must therefore be assumed that they had lost their lives in the course of these events. In the last years, however, these statements have been increasingly questioned, as the studies about the sum of reported deaths showed that the number of victims can hardly have been higher than 500,000 persons - which is also an unimaginable number of victims, but nevertheless only a quarter of the previous data. In favor of the hitherto assumed numbers it could always be said, however, that the balance didn’t say that the death of these people had been proven, but only that their fate could not be clarified.


As also pointed out in the Spiegel article, the ethnic Germans of Yugoslavia have been the only ones so far to prepare a detailed documentation of their losses during the war and postwar period, resulting in a figure half the estimate of the Federal Statistics Bureau. According to another article published in the same feature, a total of 48,447 ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia lost their lives to privation, disease and violence between 1944 and 1948.

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