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 ...
The Texas German communities (Rockne, Bastrop, Castroville, New Braunfels, Schulenberg, etc.) had several German POW camps also: My uncles were in the army out of state, my mom didn’t see them working on her farm though she knew others who had their labor.
Agree Somewhat. But, nothing compared to what the Japs did.
On the other side of the war I don’t think being a Russian prisoner taken captive by the Germans was any picnic either.
Like my wife always says, read before posting/sending/mailing, etc.
(sound of hand smacking forehead)
Interesting story. I’ve read that there were as many as 400,000 German POW’s in the US, a lot of them working on farms. I read one German POW’s story about working for a farmer who used to occasionally tell the POW’s that if they worked really hard that day, they would have ice cream that night. The POW said the POW’s would really go at it when he told them that so they would get ice cream.
This one of the unforeseen consequences when you start a major war, then lose it. Zero sympathy for the plight of the Germans at the hands of the Soviets or any of our other allies.
Imagine -- being rushed into combat in a human wave with no gun, pistol wielding NKVD behind you to put a bullet in you if you move too slowly, rushing head-on towards positions armed with the best machine guns in the world at the time, somehow surviving to be captured, watching millions of your comrades starve to death around you, surviving to return home...And getting rounded up and shot by your own people after it all.
"Communism has never been given a fair chance!" ~ college student.
One of my uncles by marriage ended his WWII service as an NCO guard at one of the main POW camps. Born into a German-speaking farm family in eastern Iowa, he spoke the language well enough to converse with the prisoners and picked up some of the more colorful idioms in common use by German soldiers. When I was a very young boy, at family get-togethers he would occasionally teach me some atrocious German expletive, which caused the men to roar with laughter, but infuriated my mother. All these years later, I can only recall one common profanity.
He and another of my uncles who had extensive contact with German POWs were impressed with the discipline and work ethic of most of the prisoners. The other uncle had a couple of Germans he "kept on the company's payroll" doing vehicle maintenance.
During their invasion of Poland and Russia, mechanized Wehrmacht forces encircled and captured literally millions of Russian/Soviet POWs. They put the prisoners in vast wire stockades without shelter, adequate food, sanitation, etc., and the Russian POW’s died like flies. No “Stalag 13” style camps for them. The Germans then destroyed, burned, killed, raped, and stole throughout the western parts of the SU in a genocidal fury. Some individual German POWs might not have deserved the ill treatment they got, but as a whole, German activities in Russia were a gigantic crime against humanity, not normal military operations. What had the Germans done in Russia and to “Slavic untermenchen” to merit even a glimmer of humanity in return?
What an amazing story
Ya, the war was over right when it began. It’s terrible that it took 6 years for everyone to get the memo.
What utter stupidity. The smart play is to treat your prisoners the best you can so giving up and surrendering is an option. Have ever read the Art of War?
Their ‘fixation’ is mostly all based on the fact that they live in some village, town or city where the cops could be called and react in five minutes or less. Up until the last couple of years, you never had to worry about break-in’s or burglary events...course that’s changed since 2013. If you took the national population and did the statistical review over murders, there just aren’t numbers like you’d see in Baltimore or Memphis. So they attempt to view the US issue via their own lenses.
On the other hand...they also have a law or two which says if you are ‘nuts’ (good example of paranoid schizophrenic) and present a threat to the public...they do lock you up and you don’t ever get out.
The guys doing to the shooting and dying and suffering are almost always the least to blame for what started the conflict in the first place. My grandmother's cousins didn't start WW2 then lose it, they got drafted. They weren't SS or fanatical Nazis, they were young men who wanted to be alive. I don't know how you could not separate their lives and actions from those in power who actually started the conflict.
Fighting on 2 fronts
Hitler was no military genius
Not making a deal with England to form a european power bloc vs the US was a blunder
But a lucky one for us
Stalinists are in our government now. Weird, eh?
We treated German and Italian POWs relatively well in comparison to the Soviets. The Germans treated Brit, French, and Americans prisoners close to the requirements of the Geneva convention. The Germans violated every chapter, line and verse of the Geneva Convention when it came to dealing with the Soviet POWs. Why should I be sorry for the plight of German POWs in the hands of the Soviets. Maybe your comment should apply Wirz at Andersonville.
In 1955, German chancellor Konrad Adenauer asked the Soviet Communist Party boss Nikita Khrushchev what had happened to more than a million German POW’s that had not returned home. Khrushchev replied, “they’re in the ground. They’re in the cold Soviet ground.”
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