Posted on 03/10/2018 3:14:49 AM PST by NorseViking
Of the 108,000 soldiers of the Sixth German Army capitulating in the winter of 1943 at Stalingrad, only 6,000 returned home in 1955. What has led to such incredible losses?
he attitude of the German soldiers who fought on the eastern front was unequivocal: "Russians do not take prisoners", they believed. This fear of captivity was the result of Nazi propaganda, which was constantly subjected to soldiers - mostly young people. But maybe it was not just this?
The facts are as follows: from the Wehrmacht soldiers captured in the Soviet captivity, their number is estimated at a minimum of 108 thousand and a maximum of 130 thousand people - only 5 thousand or 6 thousand returned to Germany or Austria alive. Many of them did it only in the mid-50's. Thus, the losses from the total number of prisoners amounted to approximately 95%, which is much larger than in any other battle.
Does this mean that the Red Army really did not take the Germans into captivity? Rüdiger Overmans, a military historian and best specialist in both the narrow field of studying losses in the Second World War and this topic as a whole, writes: "In unprecedented quantitative scales, Soviet soldiers shot German prisoners of war, whether from bitterness and thirst for revenge, reluctance to mess with the transportation of the wounded or from the desire to rid the unnecessarily suffering of the seriously wounded, who could not help one way or another.
(Excerpt) Read more at welt.de ...
My wife’s great uncle was a WW1 vet. In late 1944 at age 65 he was drafted and crewed a flak 88 in Berlin. His 19 year old son was killed at Stalingrad and wife raped when Soviets entered Berlin. Both survived and lived well into their 80’s.
“If you give mediocre people power and status you can get them to do anything. Anything. “
Chapter 10 in F.A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is Why the Worst Get on Top.
see:
https://fee.org/resources/the-road-to-serfdom-chapter-10-why-the-worst-get-on-top/
> By driving out the Jews, Hitler ensured that Germany wouldn’t develop the Bomb <
Yep. Einstein’s famous equation E=mc^2 was the theoretical foundation for the Bomb. But the Nazis called Einstein’s work “Jewish science”, and not worthy of study.
Good post.
“Strong centralized governments use every tactic to increase their power from using propaganda against internal or external foes, to scientific studies, to urging temporary actions are needed to protect the homeland, the children, or mother nature. Why people think, this time government will get it right, or it will be great if our party wins, is beyond me.”
Kinda like our government!!
“They and their parents voted Hitler and the Nazi party into power in German in the late 20s and early 30s. Hitler had the full support of the German people when he launched the war in Europe.”
They didn’t have a crystal ball and it was a choice between NSDAP and communists. We voted for Obama twice and DID have a crystal ball...FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORM AMERICA INTO COMMUNISM.
“Once you begin viewing your enemy that way, anything is possible.”
As curren6ly between normal people and democrats.
IMO, while those two were whoppers, the Mother of all was declaring war on the greatest industrial power in the world, when he didn't have to, was the nail in the coffin.
I read where DeGaulle in exile was in conference with other officers when someone broke in and yelled "Hitler declared war on America!" DeGaulle turned to the others and said, "We have won the war.", well aware of our manufacturing prowess.
They probably had a higher survival rate than Soviet POWs who returned to the Soviet Union after the war, see Operation Keelhaul.
Thank you for posting. This is FR at it’s best.
Hayek’s observations are brilliant.
The totalitarianists become ruthless.
He did not see the logical outcome of this.
They start to use this ruthlessness to serve themselves instead of the revolution.
They come to realize that socialism/communism will never work. They are then ruthless and depressed.
So they do a 180 flip and put their energy and ruthlessness to work to serve themselves.
Look at the Clintons and Obama. Look at Venezuela and Cuba.
A Russian co-worker who remembered the invasion told me they refused to fight the Germans at first because they thought they were there to rescue them from Stalin. Only once they saw the SS in action did they start to really fight back.
Stalin, for his part, killed literally millions of Russians. Why would he not kill German POW’s?
In fact, Russian POW’s returning from captivity in Germany were routinely killed by Stalin. So again, its amazing that any German POW’s survived Russian captivity.
Separate from that, I remember reading about German POW’s working in our area. The story was that one farmer with a shotgun would guard a hundred Germans while they worked the field. When he had to use the restroom, he’d hand his shotgun to one of the Germans to hold for him. I read about another German who lived with a farm family, eventually married the daughter and stayed on after the war.
As a general rule, if you have the choice between capture by Americans or Russians, go with the Americans.
Stalin actually hoped the Nazis would have razed Leningrad to the ground. He always was suspicious of Russia’s Second City, and after the war most of the heroes of Leningrad were killed by Stalin.
Some military guy wrote that near the end of the war, they were sending out the bombers not only to hit whatever was left, but to lure out the Luftwaffe so the P-51s and P-47s could wipe them out. They did that job very well.
A German General early in Operation Barbarossa, observed the T-34 Tank for the first time, and remarked that if Russia could figure out how to build them on an assembly line that Germany would lose the war.
Thanks in part, to the Polish Pilots of the 303rd RAF Squadron.
Add to that the US produced around 14,000 P-51s in a short time span.
an assembly line for tanks is something that the Germans never figured out.
The World Wars did not result in a fundamental change in the nature of the Germans, in their national character, degree of bellicosity, etc. - Rather, the Denazification Process and re-education of the German people by the Allies and the Soviets in the years after WW II were responsible for the Germans becoming a race of defeatists, pacifists, and self-haters.
Regards,
Industrial output - and especially the production of armaments - didn't really hit its stride until 1943 and '44. I believe that it continued to rise practically up to capitulation. I know that sounds unbelievable, but it's true.
The loss of civilian life did not cause the Nazi defeat - Hitler would have happily accepted 10 million German civilian deaths, if it had helped him win the war. Rather, it was the loss of the Rumanian oil fields that did them in.
Regards,
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