How Historically accurate is "Hellstorm-Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947" by Thomas Goodrich. It backs up all its claims with large amounts of detailed proofs, citations, sources on each and every page. However a lot of people call it Neo Nazi propoganda to gain sympathy for Nazi. What is the truth

It is a piece of Nazi propaganda, plain and simple.

The problems with this book start right in the text describing it: It talks about the millions who perished in the greatest mass migration known to men, meaning the flight and forcible expulsion of Germans from the Red army and from Eastern Europe, the "post-war death camps" and "torture chambers", and calls these all "dark secrets".

From this short description alone, several things can be gleaned:

The book plays hard and lose with facts and interpretations: It mixes flight and forcible expulsion of German populations from Eastern Europe and claims it was "the biggest mass migration known to man", when in fact the extend of both phenomena, which are distinctly different (one being voluntary flight, one being forcible expulsion of a population by a state) affected the same number of people the Nazi forced labor program did, about 12 million people. Coupled with the German policy of ethnic expulsion and forcible resettlement in Eastern Europe, whose victims also number in the millions, this moniker Goodrich is trying to impose here shows in which direction he is heading with his book.
In the same vein and reinforcing this direction is the use of the term "post-war death camp". Nazi death camps such as Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno were camps designed to kill hundreds of thousands of people in little through gassings and shootings. In Treblinka alone 900.000 people were killed. Equating this with the – at times very unpleasant conditions – in Allied POW and war-criminal camps does not capture the historical reality of the latter (where due to initial problems with supplying food and water in April and May 1945 and the food shortage imposed supply of 1200 to 1500 calories per day – Nazi concentration camp prisoners receiving 700-900 calories per day – resulted in the death of 3000 to 5000 German POWs in 1945).
Calling the above "dark secrets" is like almost any book claiming to write the "dark" or "secret" history of something implying a huge revelation. This is not the case with Goodrich's book and tells us something about his very political intentions. Both the expulsion and flight of Germans from Eastern Europe as well as the death rate in Allied POW camps are facts that have been known for a long time. From the political power lobby organizations of those who fled and were forced out of their homes in 1945 developed in West-Germany to the report of the Maschke Committe on Allied camps in Germany in 1972, there is no "dark" or "secret" history to uncover here.

Rather, what is happening here is typical for Neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers: Citing incomplete facts and narratives or refusing to contextualize them, they seek to either negate the historical record or impose a new narrative. Goodrich is trying very hard in his book to create a moral equivalent between Allied policies and events from post-war history and the Holocaust, essentially arguing that the latter wasn't that bad in light of what the others did.

Furthermore, Goodrich has no real interest in the explaining or even showing the full extent of the history he portrays in his book. While ostensibly adhering to the standards of the profession by supplying citations, he purposefully leaves things out in order to fit his narrative of the Germans being the real victims of WWII because of Allied policies.

Let's take a look how he does this:

The book starts out in the prologue with building up Erich Koch, former head of the civil administration of occupied Byalistok and Reichskommissar of Ukraine and responsible for – among other things – killing thousands of Poles and Jews. He is built up as heroically mounting a last line of defense in Eastern Prussia against an "onslaught of hostile Slavs" in 1944. Though he justifies Koch's harsh measures in his defense, which included shooting civilians trying to flee the advancing front line, he also claims they were not necessary because – paraphrasing – Prussians laughed in the face of the dangers of the advancing Red Army.

Enter Nemmersdorf: Goodrich describes with glee what happened in the first village beyond the border of the then Reich. He cites extensively from documents describing the alleged horrors inflicted by the Red Army upon the villagers of Nemmersdorf, including how the Soviets allegedly nailed women and children to barn doors. Now, Nemmersdorf is not just an obscure example: It is well known among historians for what happened there and especially for the controversy that ensued from it, and for what people like Goodrich like to use this example.

What we know is that in Nemmersdorf on October 21, 1944, between 23-30 German civilians were killed. At least 13 of them were shot by a Soviet unit after having been discovered in a German bunker. For the other 10 to 17, the cause of their deaths remain unclear as do the motives of the Soviet troops who shot the 13 civilians in the bunker.

When the Soviets had to retreat from the place shortly after and it was taken back by the Germans, Goebbels ministry of propagnda manufactured evidence of Russian atrocities and enhanced the death toll greatly. As we know now through extensive research conducted in the early 1990s, the sources Goodrich cites in his book about Russians nailing Germans to barn doors were made-up by the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter in order to motivate the German populace to resist more fiercely. They neither match the recollection of survivors of Nemmersdorf nor the official and initial Wehrmacht and NSDAP reports from Nemmersdorf in 1944.

Long used as a symbol for Soviet atrocities, the history of the massacre in Nemmersdorf has since been greatly revised and re-interpretated though the exact reason for shooting 13 civilians still remain unclear.

But Goodrich isn't interested in that and despite having had access to all this research when he wrote his book, neglects to mention any of it. Rather, he is trying to built a politicized narrative of "tu quoque", which portrays the Allies in a negative light in order to rehabilitate the Nazis.

Goodrich isn't really interested in the story behind the Nemmersdorf massacre or in painting a historically accurate picture of it, the expulsion of Germans, or the conditions in Allied POW camps. All the people he cites describing bad conditions, their experience of sexual violence on the hands of the Soviets or their expulsion from their homes are just arguments to build his narrative of a victimization of Germans with the intention of relativizing the Holocaust and German war-crimes and thus rehabilitate Nazism.

Through purposely omitting and changing facts, sources and interpretations, he shows that his real interest lies not in these stories and unraveling them historically by contextualizing them but in writing his version of a fantasy history that takes suffering from the people forced from their homes and subjected to violence to portray Nazism as a positive thing.

Rather than treating history with the seriousness and professionalism it deserves, he just peddles Nazi propaganda, going so far as alleging (also in the prologue), an Allied intention driven by Jews to commit genocide against the Germans. Again, taking stuff out of context or citing it not in full, he twists and turns history to fit his ends and blame Jews. He essentially makes demonstrably false Nazi propaganda his main source.

This is a typical endeavor of Holocaust deniers and neo-nazis and goes to show that just because a book cites something, it is necessarily true or has the meaning it assigns to it.