Interesting post, thanks.
But if there were no direct instructions to kill prisoners of war, why were the losses among the Germans taken captive at Stalingrad an incredible 95 percent? This circumstance requires at least an explanation.
It is absolutely certain that after the end of the battles in the vicinity of approximately 91,000 Wehrmacht soldiers began to be counted prisoners of war. Thus, from 17 thousand to 40 thousand soldiers in the official statistics did not even hit.
There were many reasons for this: after an eight-week stay in an environment without a normal supply of food, all German soldiers suffered from exhaustion. The first deaths from hunger were recorded before Christmas, there were even several cases of cannibalism. Nevertheless, many soldiers supported life in their illusory hope that they would be rescued from the "cauldron". However, when they realized that these hopes were futile, their desire to survive was extinguished.
Of course, among the soldiers there were also wounded men, who lived in improvised shelters until the end of January 1943, but who no longer had the strength to go into captivity. It is not possible to determine their exact number, especially since it is not known at all when and how many Wehrmacht soldiers have definitely surrendered. Beginning on January 22, 1943, when the Soviet troops broke through the last German lines of defense, the waves of the advancing troops simply rolled through a huge number of German soldiers. Disarmed and at best only formally guarded, they waited several days for the end of the battle.
But why is it still less than 10 percent of those 91,000 servicemen who actually got into Soviet captivity? The main reason was that there were no prepared camps for prisoners of war, there were no places in which there were any conditions for life created. In fact, in January 1943 only two transfer camps were equipped with the command of the Red Army near the battle-fought city - in Beketovka and Krasnoarmeysk.
The first camp was just a village with resettled residents surrounded by a fence, the second consisted of several buildings, some of which had no roofs and absolutely no windows and doors. Sanitary conditions for tens of thousands of people were practically absent, there was not the most necessary in the medical posts, it was not possible to heat these premises.
At least six cases of cannibalism
The supply in both camps was catastrophic. In Beketovka, at least six acts of cannibalism were noted, but it probably happened much more often.
Since the supply of Soviet soldiers guarding the prisoners was also bad, some of the already meager supplies of food for prisoners were leaving "to the left." They say that military doctors worked in Krasnoarmeysk, who treated the sick only for remuneration, although this contradicted their professional, professional and human duty. However, there are no reliable and documented proofs of such reports.
The consequences of all of the above in both camps were catastrophic: by June 1943 in Beketovka more than 27,000 people died, that is, more than half of all prisoners. According to other data, the death toll was at least 42,000. It is likely that the picture was not better in Krasnoarmeisk, as the total number of prisoners of war taken prisoner under Stalingrad and killed in the next four months amounted to two-thirds of the total number of prisoners of war.
Not only ordinary soldiers were injured: out of 1,800 German army officers imprisoned in one of the former monasteries in Yelabuga, nearly three-quarters of the deaths occurred during the same period.
A different situation was observed with 22 captured German generals. Of these, four or five died in the Soviet captivity (the data vary), the rest survived and were released between 1948 and 1955.
In the spring of 1943, the Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internal Affairs of the USSR People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs began to transfer the Germans from Stalingrad's relocation camps to other places of detention. The Germans fell into special zones on the edge of the Gulag complex - as a rule, in Siberia or in other areas poorly adapted to life. Only a small number of prisoners were left near Stalingrad, where they were used to disassemble the ruins.
Transportation of prisoners was carried out, as a rule, in unheated wagons, food was provided irregularly. This caused another wave of deaths: of the 30,000 displaced prisoners of war, only half came to the new camps-now stationary ones.
A noticeable improvement in the situation of prisoners of war occurred, according to Rüdiger Overman, only in the summer of 1943, when food and other assistance from the United States began to arrive in the Soviet Union, some of which was distributed among German prisoners of war. However, by the time of the 91,000 people captured by Stalingrad, only 20,000 remained alive. In the second half of 1943, the Office of Prisoners of War received orders to provide 50,000 people for work - but in fact, only 5,200 able-bodied men were able to collect.
Many of the German soldiers who were captured at Stalingrad were not treated in the USSR as normal prisoners of war. After the inter-allied conference in Moscow, they were sent back to their homeland between 1947 and the end of 1948. By this time about 1.1 million German soldiers were released from the USSR, about 900,000 remained in various camps, from 1.2 to 1.3 million people were killed in custody.
However, some of the survivors of the battle of Stalingrad were classified as war criminals, these people continued to be held captive, many of them were convicted by Soviet military courts. To get into this group could be both real war criminals, and completely innocent people. Several thousand representatives of this category of prisoners, including a number of generals, were able to return home in 1955-1956, thanks to the agreements reached by Chancellor Conrad Adenauer during his visit to Moscow in 1955.
Interesting post, thanks.
My wife is German. So she had two grandfathers who both went off to war. The first guy was drafted off into the Army in 1939, and survived until the last week of December 1944, as he covered the retreat of the Germans from Russia. No grave, just a brief note by the German military of his passing. The second guy was one of those who was captured (former carpenter shot through both hands upon capture), and released around 1948-1949 timeframe. In his case, he came back to find his wife assumed he never come back and had taken up with some local guy. The German authorities did him right, and found a good decent job in the region for the guy.
I would generally suggest that a grave amount of damage had been done to the German society upon the end of World War I, and it simply repeated twenty years later with World War II. So if you walked around today....everyone has gotten rid of this attitude of defending or acting militarily upon anything.
Back in the 1970s, I worked with a man who was drafted into Hitler’s army at age 16. After a few weeks of training, he was sent East into Russia. He was soon captured and found himself in a queue to be executed with hundreds of other captured German infantry. They were lined up in front of a ditch, about 20 at a time, and shot into the ditch.
Before his turn came, a British officer came into the scene and started shouting at the Russian officer overseeing the executions. He understood enough Russian to hear the Russian officer’s explanation that they had no food to feed the prisoners, whereupon the British officer said, “Give them to me.”
In a few weeks, this man found himself at Ft. Riley, Kansas, where he was well-treated, and well fed. There was no security to speak of, so one day he just walked off the work detail and ambled down the road a few miles.
He stopped at a farmhouse and asked in his thick German accent if they had any work for him. They hired him, and he was able to enjoy American farm life until the MPs caught up with him when he was in town running some errands for the farm.
At the end of the war, they started rounding up the POWs for the trip back home. He did not want to go. He liked it here. He was told it was a treaty obligation to send all the POWs back to their country of origin.
When he got back to his town, it was utterly destroyed. Everybody he knew and loved was dead, and it was occupied by Russians, whom he feared and hated. He fled to Berlin and applied at the US embassy for asylum, which was granted.
When he got back to the States, he married, had kids, and started a business, leading a typical American life.
An amazing story.
Another interesting look at German prisoners is the book Other Losses:
OTHER LOSSES: The Shocking Truth Behind the Mass Deaths of Disarmed German Soldiers and Civilians Under General Eisenhower’s Command by James Bacque.
This book came out in 1994, and you can get a used copy at Amazon.
My family had German POWs working on their farmland here in SC during the war. My mother would tell me stories of them working in the fields, driving tractors, and building barns, porches, etc. She and her sister were tasked with taking the soldiers drinks and snacks during breaks, she would allays say they were very nice and thankful for their treatment on my grandparent’s farm. My grandfather, on the other hand (whom I never got to meet because he died when my mother was in high school) couldn’t stand the Germans and only agreed to accept them on his property because so many of his workers had gone off to war and they needed the labor. He himself was a military man and I believe he had fought in Germany in WWI. He could speak German and my mother would say every time he walked out the back door the POWs would immediately come to attention and drop whatever they were doing. She said they were terrified of him (he was a big man too- he stood at 7’1”- big enough to scare off local Clan members who came to threaten him in the early 50’s for allowing blacks to shop in his stores, but that’s a story for another day) but she never could understand why, but she knew it had something to do with whatever he would say to them in German. Apparently he was the only one around who could speak their language.
Pathetic third Reich soldiers, the battle of Stalingrad was bloody.
People are subjected to propaganda. Propaganda is not subjected to people.
I’m hoping this was just an error in translation from German.
When the German Military units surrendered in Yugoslavia, ..Tito ordered them rounded up and marched from one end of the country to the other, endless days that led into weeks of marching...Some reports say 80-100,000 plus POW’s died..during the marches..Some accounts have survivors of the marches less than 20,000 that returned to Germany.
One of my Dad’s friends was a German who ended up in an English POW camp near the end of the war—he ended up later becoming a US citizen and lived out the rest of his life in Ithaca, NY. He said, after learning there was a US camp a few miles down the road, he and a few others actually escaped and turned themselves in there. He said the US treated them better and that the food was way better.
He said that when the end of the war was becoming obvious, most of his fellow soldiers were trying avoid surrendering to the Polish or Russians because they would treat them no better than unwanted animals waiting for slaughter.
The lucky ones got captured by the US or Britain.
The Russians as Marxist were worse than the Germans were. Though the Germans were awful especially toward Slavs. And of course SS units were inhuman toward everyone.
In the end we should have joined forces with the remaining German armies and destroyed the Soviets. As Patton wanted. But somehow he was killed
On the other side of the war I don’t think being a Russian prisoner taken captive by the Germans was any picnic either.
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.
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?
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.”
4 later
In the 1840 many of the German Lutheran farmer came over for a new life. When the Bismarck started sending young men to the front line for cannon fodder many came to America instead including our presidents grandfather Frederick Trumpf who joined relatives already here. His son (uncle John) was instrumental in the development of radar for Great Britain (and is responsible for early development in the radiation we now use in cancer treatments).
My German ancestor predate the revolutionary war. They signed the Bradford accord and served under George Washington. Weren’t about to let some English king tell them how to live their lives. Primarily farmers in Pennsylvania, they came here because of religious persecution including from their own government. One of the daughters married a Trump
HItler was not the first ruler to be cruel to his own people.
It goes without saying that ANY German soldier found to have the least relationship with the SS was killed on the spot as a matter of routine. Having a Hitler Youth knife in your ruck could get you killed.
In the book BARBAROSA the author points out that of the multiple millions of soldiers in the Russian western armies few if any didn't have a friend or family member killed by the Germans. That is a fantastic amount of “Payback” the Germans had amassed.
Do not be fooled, both the German Army and the German population as a whole knew what was coming and why.
It's hard to get your mind around sitting here warm and fed 75 years later.
Where is the gif of the Asian girl crying crocodile tears?
The history of the 20th century should have taught everyone that strong, centralized government are a danger to mankind be it Germany, Russia, China, Ukraine, Laos, North Korea, etc.
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.