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.
If my lurking on 4chan is any indication the Germans remaining today are pretty neutered. There seriously have trouble comprehending our fixation on the 2nd Amendment for the most part. It is very interesting. One would think if there were a group of people who would “get it” it would be them.
The Soviets simply murdered them: BY starvation, BY neglect (no housing, unheated train cars for days traveling to Siberia), BY medical malpractice and deliberate actions), BY shooting on capture (”both hands shot” on capture), BY working conditions in the camps and mines in Siberia and between Stalingrad and Siberia, etc.
It was as deliberate as the millions of rapes and assaults in 1944-1945 on the German civilians as they came back to German soil.
The writer breaks out the different conditions as if to say “the Soviets didn’t kill the Germans - but the Germans simply died in captivity due to other things and in other categories of death than murder. See, here are 17,000 who were not counted, so they were not murdered.”
My wife’s great uncle was a WW1 vet. In late 1944 at age 65 he was drafted and crewed a flak 88 in Berlin. His 19 year old son was killed at Stalingrad and wife raped when Soviets entered Berlin. Both survived and lived well into their 80’s.
The World Wars did not result in a fundamental change in the nature of the Germans, in their national character, degree of bellicosity, etc. - Rather, the Denazification Process and re-education of the German people by the Allies and the Soviets in the years after WW II were responsible for the Germans becoming a race of defeatists, pacifists, and self-haters.
Regards,