Trying to find information about German POWs in Russia prior to the internet was almost impossible.
I had always been interested in what happened to the millions of Germans who were sent East after the war. Treatment, conditions, deaths etc.
There was testimony made by a former Russian prisoner of the gulags to congress back in the 1970s. He stated that after the 1956 release of German POWs there were still many in Russia. Quite a few on Wrangel Island.
But that may have just been rumor. Who knows.
On the contrary, 24 of the 26 German Generals that were captured and inturned after the battle of Stalingrad survived and were released.
I was a close friend of a German survivor on the Eastern Front who spent a year in a Soviet Gulag. He was released from the camp and told to go home. He walked with some compatriots across Poland, back into Germany, finding out all along the way what the Nazis had been doing to the country.
Upon arriving in Stuttgart, found his wife, they both went north to Bremerhaven, got on the first boat to America they could, and then renounced their German citizenship.
Years later, I was stationed in Stuttgart, and asked if he wanted a round trip ticket to come there and spend some time with me. I wanted to hear old tales of the city. He refused and told me that as a Christian, he could never go back to that place of such evil memories.
I told my children that during their life, they would meet many people who claimed to be tough. None of them would ever be “cross the country you destroyed on foot and survive” tough.