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 ...
And 100% of the American POWs kept by the communist bastards.
Those are the MIAs who were in German camps overrun by the Russians. They even prevented the planes sent by the American military from landing to pick the American POWs up.
They became MIAs. And not one came back.
The key to the graph is, I think, not the wording but the thickness of the line. The thicker the line, the larger Napoleon’s force was at that point.
So at a glance the user can tell how quickly the French army fell apart.
The Germans deserved everything they got. Damned murderers.
I was in high school in late 70’s. A friend of mine invited me to his house for dinner.
His dad was an American GI who served in Germany (retired) and married a German woman while there.
We were sitting at the dinner table, eating dinner - not talking when out of the blue she announced “Hitler was not such a bad man”.
> those studying the feasibility of Japan or Germany surviving a long war with the US said the capability of the US for war production would bury both countries <
On some level the German and Japanese leadership probably knew that. But they were hoping for quick, early victories, followed by a favorable negotiated peace.
And that was a reasonable assumption. Most European wars before that time ended that way. Fight for awhile, then gain or lose a few provinces.
(Perhaps Hitler and Tojo should have studied the US Civil War more carefully. That war was the harbinger of things to come.)
Back in the mid-1970s when I was in the Army in Germany, one of our gun section staff sergeants was named Emmerich. His father’s story was similar to the stories you related. His father was captured in North Africa and sent to a POW camp in Alabama. He worked for a farmer and at the end of the war wanted to stay in the US, however he had to be repatriated back to Germany. He went back and returned to the US as soon as he could. He returned to the Alabama farm and married the farmer’s daughter.
1. The United States was reported feeding a large portion of Soviet forces at this point in the war. I don’t imagine there was a whole lot of food left to feed POW’s.
2. I’m also imagining a kind of winter “Bataan Death March” to get the prisoners to the nearest functioning rail head.
3. We know the Soviets used slave labor (Siberia) every bit as much as the Nazis.
Add it up. The attrition would have been tremendous. Shooting people on after a formal capitulation wouldn’t have been required to achieve those kinds of losses.
That said, both sides basically didn’t take prisoners during combat operations. It was the same between US/Allied & Japanese forces in the Pacific.
I’ve read several accounts of German soldiers wandering around the central United States & Canada during WW2. Just walked away from POW camps, more or less.
Astounding.
The stupidity of Hitler is what cost the Germans during WWII, but the Russians bore the brunt of the fighting and destroyed the heart of the German military. Most of the best units of the Wehrmacht were destroyed on the Eastern front after Hitler diverted his armor south to take the oil fields instead of allowing them to take Moscow. Hitler himself snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with his ridiculous strategic orders. His biggest blunder on the Western Front was not destroying the British Army at Dunkirk and having no plan to invade Britain right away (no ships). He then assumed England would join his cause, but there was this pesky man named Churchill......
However, you are right to laud the P-51 as a decisive point in the battle and it greatly aided the Russians as well by destroying what was left of the Luftwaffe and allowing our strategic bombing campaign to be far more effective. What an incredible plane it turned out to be! Still to this day the best combat aircraft in history by any measure.
We could build so much stuff so much faster than Germany, Japan, and Italy combined.
For example....aircraft production:
US produced 324,000 planes of all types.
The Axis powers....222,235.
We simply overwhelmed them.
Also, consider the US, through Lend Lease, aided the UK and the USSR.
It is estimated we fed half of the Soviet Union.
In addition, we were the only country to develop the Bomb....in addition to everything else we manufactured.
The US Army in the late ‘30’s made a decision to limit the US Army to 100 divisions. Think about that. Just 100 divisions to fight a major 2-ocean war. The cream of the manpower went into the Navy and the USAAF because of the technical skills required. If not for the 100-division limit, the US couldn’t have invested so much in Strategic Bombing.
Even at 100-divisions the Draft was scraping the bottom of the manpower pool by 1944. The percentage of draftees declared ‘unfit’ was very large.
I don’t think that this was unique to the United States. Germany kept many invalids in uniform because they simply didn’t have the manpower. We’ve all seen pictures of the Voksgrenadier divisions in ‘45 that were simply Old Men & Boys.
And food, oil, and oh yes, their cities were leveled by the 8th AF.
Sherman said it best, war is hell.
Lovely story!
Hitler had bigger fish to fry in the east (Soviet Union). He didn’t expect France to fall in a matter of a few weeks, either. Finally, there was a feeling, initially, that Hitler could ‘do a deal’ with the Brits. Churchill wouldn’t have it. The air battles of the Battle of Britain kind of showed that maybe Hitler should have rolled the dice with a Channel crossing while the Brits were still disorganized.
Polish pilots too.
By driving out the Jews, Hitler ensured that Germany wouldn't develop the Bomb - which, as we know, they had made very little effort towards even researching. However, since we got all the scientists, the US would have still had the A-bomb by the summer of '45.
“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 didnt see them working on her farm though she knew others who had their labor.”
They had them at Camp McCoy, WI. When I was there in early ,70’s there were still German words carved in the walls. Sort of a German version of “Kilroy was here”.
Another Sherman quotation. “War is the solution our enemies have chosen, and I say lets give them all they want”
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