Our fellow member Rising Sun* wrote in an other thread:
Everybody knows how brutal many Germans, or Nazis if you prefer, were in Russia, and how badly they treated Russian POW’s (which the Russians repaid many times over, but that’s another thread).
I would like to hear form the members of our great internet community they opinion. Preferably provide a reliable source when stating numbers.
Thank! And looking forward to exciting discussion! :roll:
What stimulated that [off the cuff] comment is that my recollection is that something like 90,000 to 100,000 Germans were captured at Stalingrad and maybe 5,000 survived captivity, which I think was until they were released some time in the early or mid-1950’s.
My friend, it’s all fine that you had this comment. I know it is a common understanding in the West that German POW in USSR were eliminated and USSR did everything to kill them and give hard time. It is fine you mention it here.
So lets discuss it now.
Any specific numbers out there?
You are wrong mate.
We discussed this simular thread early. The total average death rate of Germans POWs were no more 15% for the period 1942-53. For the compare the death rate of soviet POWs in Germans camps were 60%.
So accorging the Rising Sun infor the soviets repaid many times over for the bad treatment of the soviet POWs.
As we know from the Germans henocide perished about 2,5 mln of soviet POWs.
So how many were Germans POWs killed by the NKVD ( many times more!!!) -5, 10,15 mln?
Concur. I simply do not think the Soviets could have possibly repaid the Germans in full for the crimes they committed in the areas they occupied. There were after all live Germans left in the Soviet area of occupation afterwards…
Pdf27, but there were plenty of Russian survivors after the Germans left unless you count the completely demolished Stalingrad and even there there were civillian survivors.
Egorka does the count of dead, rape and pillage count of the mayhem left by the Red Army all the way into Berlin count into this? Not that I have numbers just interested in some if available.
Having one’s country occupied and much of their land stolen may be viewed by many as a far greater offense than the murder of civilians.
The thing I don’t understand is why the Germans fought in the first place if they didn’t truly believe in their cause.
If the Germans were really dedicated they would have resorted to guerrilla warfare when foreign troops entered their country rather than simply giving up.
The point is that the Germans had a deliberate policy of committing genocide to depopulate Russia. This is a documented fact - documented by the Germans themselves, and dating to before the launch of Barbarossa. They simply decided that their logistics system could not supply both the war material and the food their armies would need to keep all the Russian civilians in conquered areas alive. They then decided - deliberately - to starve as many Russian civilians to death as necessary to continue supplying their armies.
Next we come to the German anti-partisan tactics. Again, the German solution was simple depopulation. In places like Belarus, the typical response to partisan activity in the area would be to burn the nearest village to the ground and kill anyone they caught in the area. This caused the death of approximately one civilain in three over the roughly three years it was occupied.
Wehrmacht - not even SS - involvement in atrocities was extreme. At one point one of the army group commanders was forced to issue an order forbidding soldiers from assisting at Einsatzgruppen murders without authorisation from their commanding officer. The rationale was nothing to do with morality - rather he felt that they were too tired after helping with the executions and this was affecting their performance.
Yes, and again it is a small number compared to the amount of rape, murder and pillage committed by the Germans in the occupied Soviet territories. Germany had a substantially smaller population base than the Soviets. If they had been repaid exactly in kind, the Germans of the Soviet zone of occupation would have become virtually extinct. As it was the Soviet actions were limited to a number of low-grade war crimes (refusing to accept surrender, rape, etc.) and the ethnic cleansing of east Prussia (modern day Kaliningrad, more or less).
Some did. The Allies caught them and executed them.
One of the reasons for this is simply that the Germans didn’t realise how leniently they would be treated by the Allies after the war. Compared to WW1, the Germans had behaved in an absolutely bestial manner. The Treaty of Versailles was widely thought to have been rather harsh. Thus, they had (so they thought) good reason to expect to be treated very badly postwar - and took the allied insistence on “unconditional surrender” as an indicator of this. A common German saying of 1945 was apparently “we may as well enjoy the war, as the peace will be terrible”.
When - at least after the initial phase of the Russian invasion - the more extreme allied suggestions like the Morgenthau plan were not carried out and the Germans were generally treated decently, this whole plank of their resistance fell away. Coupled with the Nuremberg trials which publicly exposed just how evil the Nazi regime had been, the entire German population suddenly decided that they had never been Nazis after all and were in fact “good Germans”. In reality of course outside of some courageous movements such as the White Rose (who were almost universally wiped out during the war) there was no such thing.
Of the 95,000 German POWs captured at Stalingrad, only 5,000 survived to return home. Of the dead, some forty thousand did not survive the march from Stalingrad to the Beketovka camp, where 42,000 more perished of hunger and disease. Particularly murderous treatment was inflicted on SS POWs, many of whom, along with remnants of the Vlasov forces, were imprisoned and died on Wrangel Island.
By the war’s end, the USSR held 3.4 million German soldiers prisoner. Under the provisions of the Yalta Agreement, the U.S. and U.K. had agreed to the use of German POWs in the Soviet Gulag as “reparations-in-kind.” Thus, rather than repatriate them to their homeland, Stalin began incorporating this captive human booty into the work camps in the summer of 1945. … Nonetheless, between 1941 and 1952, almost a million German POWs died in the camps. The last of the surviving POWs (10,000 men) were released from the Soviet Union in 1955, after a decade of forced labor. Approximately 1.5 million German soldiers from the Second World War are still listed as missing in action. Of an additional 875,000 German civilians abducted and transported to the camps, almost half perished.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v21/v21n1p39_michaels.html
That quote, which summarises what I’ve read in various publications, reflects my general understanding of the events which stimulated my comment.
How is it wrong?
to Riding Sun*:
That quote, which summarises what I’ve read in various publications, reflects my general understanding of the events which stimulated my comment.
How is it wrong?
So what is the mortality rate of German POWs in USSR?
Dead_German_POWs / All_German_POWs = ???
Can you put the numbers for the equation above, please?
.
Guys!
Please this thread is ONLY about the fate of the German POWs in USSR captivity.
Please keep rape and other crimes out of scope of this discussion. It deserves an other thread (I actually think there is one there already).
Thanks!
Even the British WIKI gives the fugures of 824 000 from 5 450 000 of he Germans POWs i/e/ about 15%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)
Approximately 1.5 million German soldiers from the Second World War are still listed as missing in action. Of an additional 875,000 German civilians abducted and transported to the camps, almost half perished.
May be here is the answer
http://www.jewwatch.com/jew-atrocities-world-war-two-killing-surrendered-german-soldier.html
Cheers.
Very good post pdf
This is very close to the true i/m absolutly agree. i like is , especially
If they had been repaid exactly in kind, the Germans of the Soviet zone of occupation would have become virtually extinct.
But what do you mean as ethnic cleansing of east Prussia? Est Prissia bacame the part of Poland after WW2 far as i know.
On reflection, my comment quoted in the first post may have been careless, so far as it related to POW’s. It was based upon a generalised recollection of Soviet punishment inflicted upon Germans after the war and a specific recollection of the Stalingrad POW figures. Note that I did not limit my comment to POW’s.
I may well be wrong on POW’s.
I’ve been trying to think why I had that generalised impression. I recall reading many years agi in several places that there were disputes about the number of German POW’s killed but I can’t recall any specific sources.
I’m not sure that Chevan’s figure of only 15% German mortality is right.
It’s about 30% for military POW’s on the quote that Egorka wanted me to calculate, and about 50% for German civilians.
It’s over 95% on the Stalingrad figures.
I suspect that the reason I’m having difficulty with the 15% or even 30% figure is that the Stalingrad figures in the representative quote I used lost half of them before they reached the camp, and about another 45% after they reached the camp.
My recollection is that there was a problem in Soviet administration so that POW’s generally weren’t counted by the POW / gulag administration (?GPIVU? or something like that). Prisoners who died before then, like the 50% or so of the Stalingrad prisoners who died on the march, weren’t counted.
I also have a recollection that there were something like ?1,000,000? out of 3,000,000 Germans uncaccounted for. That is just way beyond any other MIA rate that I can think of, a good part of which might be accounted for by the POW’s who died before reaching the camps and being counted.
My recollection is also that German deaths were 85% ?? at Stalingrad, which is hardly consistent with one MIA for every two KIA / DOW.
There is the separate issue that the USSR kept the prisoners as slaves for up to ten years after the war, which as far as I know no other Allied did anything remotely similar.
I confess that I’m relying on hazy memories of, and a few facts that stuck in my mond from, stuff I read a long, long time ago so I’m still quite happy to concede that I’m wrong on POW’s. When I’m convinced that I am.
Note however, while my comment was stimulated by a recollection of the Stalingrad POW’s as representative of Soviet treatment of Germans, my comment was that the Soviets repaid the Germans, not just German POW’s, many times over. I had in mind the treatment of German civilians as well as military during the German advance into and occupation of Germany. Much as Egorka may want to limit this to POW’s, that’s not what I said and issues such as rapes and other mistreatment of Germans from 1945, along with stripping German assets and sending them back to the USSR, are part of the 'repayment" I had in mind in my generalised comment.
In his own work on the occupation of Eastern Germany, for example, Naimark was astonished to find in the Russian Communist Party archives confirmation of widespread and brutal rapes of German women by occupying Russian soldiers and of the imprisonment of at least 100,000 young German men and women, one third of whom died in captivity.
The rapes of what appears to be at least hundreds of thousands of German women by Russian soldiers - estimates range up to 2 million - is now getting public attention in Germany, where it is the subject of a new movie and book. The archives indicate the rapes were not ordered or condoned from the top, Naimark said, but were instead fueled by “deep and complex desires for revenge” among the ranks.
In the archives, “you have reports from local Soviet officers in little towns of Germany complaining about the fact that the army camp has gone wild,” he said.
Local Soviet political officers also sometimes complained about the disappearances of young Germans at the hands of the secret police, whom they could not control and who were largely unaccountable to anyone in the Soviet hierarchy, Naimark said. Eventually, the army was brought under tighter control and moved to isolated barracks and bases, where soldiers remained separated from the German populace until 1990 when the withdrawal of the troops started, he said.
I’ve found various things on the internet which confirm my recollections on some of these numbers but I’ll ferret around a bit more to see if I can dig up whatever it was that created my expressed impression. I have a feeling that it’s been dealt with in some detail in maybe only one or a few books.
No offence, but Wikipedia is about as reliable for accurate information as are politicians and criminals. Except criminals at least have a code of honour. 
Particularly as it says 5.45m German POW’s when the official Soviet figure is only 2.4m. Maybe Wiki knows more than everyone else and the other 3m are the ones that weren’t counted before they reached the camps.
Enemy POWs never returned:
Brzezinski: 1,000,000 total d. (incl. 357,000 Germans, 140,000 Poles)
Davies: 1,000,000 d.
Richard Overy, Russia’s War (1997): official figures released under glasnost
Germans: 2,388,000 POWs taken, of which 356,000 died
I’ve come across that site before.
The linked page just confirms my view that it’s run by a prejudiced and totally unrealiabe nutcase.
For refutation of those idiotic claims, which comes from Bacque’s disreputable book Other Losses, see Bischof & Vila’s comments here http://hnn.us/articles/1266.html and Günter Bischof and Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower and the German PoWs: Facts Against Falsehood, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1992
That’s right Rising Sun the most unprinciple criminals are the politics;)
Particularly as it says 5.45m German POW’s when the official Soviet figure is only 2.4m. Maybe Wiki knows more than everyone else and the other 3m are the ones that weren’t counted before they reached the camps.
Where do you see the “official” soviet figure is only 2,4 mln peoples?In the British dooks?
Brzezinski: 1,000,000 total d. (incl. 357,000 Germans, 140,000 Poles)
You only forget to add the Hoebbels with his “figures”.
The all figures today are widely known. But in 1997 it was perhaps more clear ,who is know