Replies

To Stalin, the German soldiers were criminals; vandals who invaded his country and destroyed it. They were more or less under a criminal sentence in his gulag. It took his death and a special visit to Moscow by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1955 to get them released. Of the 85,000 German POW’s at Stalingrad, only 5,000 returned home. You will note that neither Wilhelm Pieck nor Walther Ulbricht of what became the DDR went to Moscow to secure the release of their fellow countrymen.

As for the Soviet POW’s, I cannot imagine a more grim fate than to be a Jewish soldier in the Red Army who fell into German capitivity.

I have always been fascinated by the “War in the East” and its aftermath. Most Americans only have a superficial understanding of this aspect of World War 2, but the bitter brutal struggle between Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union was really the hub of the war; all of the other conflicts basically revolved around what happened on the “Eastern Front.”

I read a recent book called Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. It is a grim account of the mass slaughter that occurred in Central and Eastern Europe from the time Stalin took power through the years after the war. It is a chilling study in democidal contrasts, and during the war years there is a lot of focus on deportations, genocide and partisan resistance.

To Stalin, the German soldiers were criminals; vandals who invaded his country and destroyed it. They were more or less under a criminal sentence in his gulag.”

Soviet POW camps were Boy Scout camps compared to the German POW camps on the Eastern Front. The Germans purposely let the Russian POW’s die like flies from starvation and exposure. They died by the millions.

I agree the decisive action in the European Theater was in the Eastern Front. Tying up so many German divisions was what allowed us to get away with not mobilizing all men of military age and fighting in both theaters at the same time.

Do you think Stalin would have eventually attacked Germany if Hitler had stopped with Poland and not invaded Russia?