Richard Overy, Russia’s War (1997): official figures released under glasnost
Germans: 2,388,000 POWs taken, of which 356,000 died
From the last quote block in my last post.
Do you have different official figures?
Bacque subsequently revised his book after gaining access to secret Soviet-era archives. He stands by his account.
Right becouse the soviet archive datas did not contained the figures about “lost million” of Germans POWs.The all NKVD datas very was enough accurate ( even when they shot the people - the lead exact statistic).
So where is the “lost million”?
Cheers.
Ha hA
mate GLASTNOST was in Gorbachev period i.e. 20 years ago.
The figures are obsoleted and not full 
Here is the more detailed analys of loses of Germany and its satellites in the fight with USSR.( and the datas of cuptured POWs )
http://www.soldat.ru/doc/casualties/book/chapter5_13_11.html
This soure give us 3,7 mln of all of germans (and its allies in the Europe) POWs . But besides it was about 600 000 of Japane pows cupturing in the China and Korea in aug-sept 1945.
Cheers.
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.
and further on…
Rising Sun* and Others,
I underdand that you might have ment any oppression / crimes by RKKA against German population. Since in the first half of your sentece you reffered to POWs so we started with POWs. We can take other issues (like rape) after we clear out this one. OK?
But in this thread we take it step by step. We start with POW. OK?
So do you agree in general with the following calculation:
[b][u]POW held by USSR [/u](until 1955):[/b]
[u] Death Rate [/u] [u] Dead [/u] [u] Total [/u]
Germans 14,6% = 400.000 / 2.750.000
Other Axis 14,4% = 120.000 / 835.000
[u] Other None Axis 14,4% = 72.000 / 500.000 [/u]
[b] Total 14,44%[/b] = 592.000 / 4.085.000
[b][u]POW held by Germany:[/u][/b]
[u] Death Rate [/u] [u] Dead [/u] [u] Total [/u]
[b]Soviet 62,5%[/b] = 4.000.000 / 6.400.000
Shell we agree on these numbers: 14,5% versus 62,5%?
.
Ok, so what are the comparative numbers?
Not all of it - a part is currently in the Russian Federation. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaliningrad_Oblast
Guys! Vukodlak, Pdf27 and others!
Do you agree with my post #24? Lets finish with POWs first.
.
Not yet.
I think the following sources, or other reviews and discussions of Karner’s book, or something similar are probably what were in the back of my mind. Read the full reviews in the links as there is room for debate, but they confirm my recollection that there is an argument that Soviet numbers refer only to those who died in permanent camps (strictly GUPVI, not GULAG, during the war) and not those who died before reaching them.
It is generally believed that roughly 1.5 million German prisoners died in captivity in the Soviet Union, the vast majority between capture and arrival at “permanent” prisoner of war camps. Arrival at an exact estimate is complicated by the chaotic nature of the immediate postwar months; the fact that official Soviet pronouncements on the matter frequently changed and were thus unreliable; and the until- recent inaccessibility of Soviet archives Karner’s archival research, which deals only with GUPVI (which administered the permanent camps as well as temporary collection points at the front) cannot shed any light here. The registration of prisoners did not occur until they had reached the permanent camps, so Karner can only provide the official GUPVI figure of 356,687 German prisoners who died from illness and other causes while in the permanent camps (79). This figure leaves roughly a million missing soldiers.
Review of Stefan Karner’s Im Archipel GUPVI: Kriegsgefangenschaft und Internierung in der Sowjetunion, 1941-1956. Munich, Germany: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995.
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=9539851382536 [EDIT: I’ve just remembered that H-Net is a subscriber site to which WW2 in Color members mightn’t have access, so I’ve posted the page in my following third, fourth, and fifth posts in case the link doesn’t work] I haven’t read the book as I can’t read German.
Another review of the same book http://www.stormfront.org/solargeneral/library/www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/HnetPrisoners1.html [EDIT: I’ve just remembered that H-Net is a subscriber site to which WW2 in Color members mightn’t have access, so I’ve posted the page in the next two posts in case the link doesn’t work] which refers to the explanation for the missing million or so that they died in American and French camps in 1945 as Bacque alleges, which I’ve already referred to a couple of posts ago as having been refuted by other work.
I’d be interested if anyone (especially Egorka or maybe Chevan who might have access to the necessary Soviet sources) could find out what the original GUPVI or NKVD records show for deaths among the roughly 90,000 to 95,000 (figures vary) of German prisoners from Stalingrad. If they show about 85,000 to 90,000 deaths in captivity then the Soviet figures are accurate. If they show about 35,000 to 40,000 deaths in captivity then they’re ignoring deaths before reaching permanent camps. While it wouldn’t prove what happened in every case, if the records show about 85,000 to 90,000 deaths I’d certainly be prepared to accept it as a strong indication that Soviet records of deaths in captivity are accurate. For the time being, I don’t accept them as accurate as there is too much uncertainty about the reliability of the Soviet figures.
[H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine]
What happened to Stalin’s German prisoners-of-war?
H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers <drogers@jaguar1.usouthal.edu>
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 07:41:58 -0600
EDITOR’S NOTE: Below is a review submitted by H-German subscriber Paul Boytinck. While we are happy to provide information on this book to the H-German community, we should also note that the review is not part of our H-German book review project and was sent totally at Mr. Boytinck’s initiative. We should also strongly caution those who might be considering replies or comments on this review that we aired a variety of opinions on this subject in May 1995 and we will not be reopening debate on it. You may review past comments on the subject by using your WWW browser to go to this URL: gopher://h-net.msu.edu/11/lists/H-GERMAN/discuss/ve
Submitted by: Paul Boytinck <BOYTINCK@flint.bucknell.edu>
A R e v i e w of
Karner, Stefan. Im Archipel GUPVI; Kriegsgefangenschaft und Internierung in der Sowjetunion 1941-1956. Wien; Muenchen: Oldenbourg, 1995.
This book details the capture, executions, treatment and eventual release of German prisoners of war in Russia. It is based on materials found in different Soviet archives which, formerly classified top secret and barred to public scrutiny, have been declassified since the year 1990. It is the first of several projected volumes to be published under the aegis of the Ludwig Boltzman Institut fuer Kriegsfolgen-Forschung located in Graz-Wien. The author, Stefan Karner, is a Professor at the Institut fuer Wirtschafts-und-Sozial-Geschichte of the Karl-Franzens Universitaet located in Graz, Austria.
We must first distinguish between the GULAG archipelago made infamous by Solzhenitsyn and the GUPVI archipelago described by Professor Karner. The first acronym stands for Glanoe Upravlenie LAGerie (Hauptverwaltung fuer Lager=Central Administration of the Camps) while the second refers to Glavnoe Upravlenie po delam Voennoplennych i Internirovannych (Hauptverwaltung fuer Angelegenheiten von Kriegsgefangenen und Internierten=Central Administration for Affairs relating to Prisoners of War and Internees). Both of these administrative units were, of course, subordinated to the dreaded NKVD.
At the heart of the matter is a great and engrossing mystery: the virtual disappearance, without a trace, of 1,400,000 German prisoners of war after the end of World War II; and, if this otherwise admirable book has a fault, it is that the statistical scope of the issue, with all its potential for emotional tumult, is not properly set and defined.
You can get a better sense of the overall issue by studying the local memorials to be found all over West Germany. The small, North German town of Friesoythe includes the total of 76 missing and presumed dead. The equally small town of Nellingen, near Stuttgart, gives the total of 44 men who are missing as a result of World War II operations. The Mahnmal located in the larger town of Kempten gives astounding totals which effectively stopped me in my tracks on a recent visit. It included the totals of 224 dead and 650 missing and presumed dead. By comparison, the total of American MIA’s in the Vietnamese Conflict has been officially set at more than 2,200 for the whole of the continental U.S.A.–and the hubbub and occasional recriminations fill the airwaves to this day.
Professor Karner believes that the 1,400,000 Germans died chiefly on the Russian front. The problem is that at least one of the central documents culled from the Soviet Archives, the statistical report of Colonel Bulanov, Chief of the Prison Division of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, clearly states the total number of German prisoners (2,388,443) and the total number of the German dead (356,687) along with the capture totals and mortality figures of Hungarians, Rumanians, Austrians, etc. (p. 79).
If the number of Germans missing and presumed dead stands at 1,400,000 and the highest possible Soviet source gives the total number of the dead at 356,687 then clearly somewhat in excess of a million dead Germans seem not to have died in the Soviet Union but may have died, as James Bacque has contended, on the Western (not the Russian) front as captives of the French and the Americans.
Karner deals with this possibility by arguing that the Bulanov report is exclusively devoted to stationary camps, hospitals and prisons within the Soviet Union, and that the missing Germans died in that hellish interval between their capture and their final transport to the 4,000 camps of the GUPVI scattered throughout the length and breadth of the Soviet Union.
He cites two top secret reports, one by Lavrentia Beria dated December 30, 1942 (p. 40) and one by Lt. Col. Dmitriev dated May 4, 1943 (p. 41) to support this contention. In the first document Beria, the Commissar of Internal Affairs, gives the reasons for the high death rates among the Germans. They often suffered from hunger before their captivity, or they were forced to march two to three hundred kilometers to the next railway station without adequate care and provisions, or the sick and the wounded were, contrary to the existing Soviet regulation that they were to be cared for in front-line hospitals before their departure, were often forced to march in their weakened state, with the result that one shipment of Germans from the Don Front to the interior suffered “approximately 800 deaths.” (p. 40)
Colonel Dmitriev cites the mortality figures suffered by 8,007 German POWs, of whom 1,526 died in the course of transport, while an additional 4,663 died in the camp itself in the ensuing six weeks from the consequences of dystrophy (4,326), typhus (54), frost (162), wounds (23) and other causes (98). (p. 41)
Karner contends that the existence of numerous NKVD reports and eyewitness accounts confirm that, despite standing regulations to the contrary, the sick and the wounded were transported over long distances–and that this factor is one of the causes of the high death totals PRIOR TO REGISTRATION (p. 39, emphasis supplied.] It should be pointed out that this Russian practise, if true as alleged, was not confined to the Russians alone.
Numerous German eyewitness accounts–if not official American reports–record that it was American practise to take many classes of sick and wounded German POWs out of hospitals, including the sick, the blind and the amputees, and dump them in open air POW cages. An open air field devoid even of tents is no sanatarium even for veteran soldiers in otherwise good health. There are reports, by entirely credible observers, of the presence of blind and amputated Prisoners of War, including even amputees with bloody stumps, in Ebensee, Helfta and Rheinberg. It therefore follows that very vulnerable prisoners were also found in American POW cages; that they were exposed to the elements in early spring; and that many of them died miserable deaths from the complications of old wounds, exposure to the elements, extremely low calorie diets and a polluted water supply.
It is Karner’s belief that that approximately half of all German Prisoners of War in Soviet hands never reached the permanent camps of the GUPVI.
Mit der entscheidenden Wende des Krieges in Stalingrand und dem sukzessiven Rueckzug der Deutschen Wehrmacht und ihrer Verbuendeten 1943 nahm die Zahl der aktenmaessig feststellbaren Kriegsgefangenen rapide zu, obwohl etwa die Haelfte der Kriegsgefangene in den stationaeren Lagern gar nicht mehr registriert werden konnte: Sie waren zwischen ihrer Gefangennahme und der Registrierung im stationaeren Lager, also noch im Eingangsbereich des Archipel GUPVI, ums Legen gekommen, verhungert, erfroren, total erschoepft, schwerst verwundet oder weil die entsprechende kaempfende Einheit der Roten Armee keine Gefangenen machte, kurzerhand erschossen worden. (58)
http://www.stormfront.org/solargeneral/library/www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/HnetPrisoners1.html
The book includes, on a quick count, some 81 pages of illustrations; but there are not, needless to say, illustrations of soldateska executing the German Landsers. We have, however, a tendentious paragraph from Harrison Salisbury, the Russian war correspondent of the NEW YORK TIMES, which proves that the killings occurred–but under special circumstances.
German prisoners with dead eyes stumbled among the corpses [in the Crimea], carting them off to endless trenches under the tommy guns of sullen Red Army men. I could not tell whether either Russians or Germans knew what they were doing. [?] The Germans moved like sleepwalkers. The hardest thing, they told us, was the moment of surrender. Unless you were in a big group, a hundred or a thousand, you didn’t have a chance. The Soviet tommy gunners just mowed you down. The Nazis had been waiting for the boats to take them off, the boats that never came. This was war and now I understood it. War was the garbage heap of humanity. It was shit and piss and gas from the rump; terror and bowels that ran without control. Here Hitler’s Aryan man died, [sic] a worse death than any he devised in the ovens of Auschwitz, anus open, spewing out his gut until a Red tommy gunner ended it with a lazy sweep of his chattering weapon. – Salisbury, Harrison E. A JOURNEY FOR OUR TIMES; A MEMOIR. (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 264.
Febrile journalism makes for feeble analysis. The impassioned journalist has undone the thinker. For Salisbury has not witnessed war but a war CRIME, and he cannot distinguish the one from the other without the help of a nearby court. No self-respecting bartender would concoct such nonsense. However, one of the points about the passage is that it makes clear that these executions–and war crimes–occurred under special conditions. They were not inevitable.
Karner, who has perhaps heard similar reports of drumhead executions of German POWs by certain Soviet soldiers from German and Austrian survivors, comes to the conclusion that 356,687 Germans died in the coils of the GUPVI along with another 161,793 Hungarians, Rumanians, Austrians, Czechoslovaks, Poles, etc. More momentously, however, he also concludes that the forces of neglect, cruel indifference and disregard for the laws of war, led to the deaths of an additional 500,000 to 1,000,000 Germans in Russian captivity before these men (and women) reached the (relative) safety of the GUPVI. (p. 178)
It appears, then, that Karner is in the anomalous position of assuming the existence of a DUNKELZIFFER [an estimated number of unreported or unrecorded cases] to make his point that Soviet forces killed, not the 356,687 of Colonel Bulanov’s summary, but one million men (and women) more than this total. Given the somewhat limited evidence that Karner cites, the one memorandum by Beria and the one telegram by Colonel Dmitriev, it is not clear to me that the DUNKELZIFFER has any credibility. In any case, these archives were SECRET, and they recorded the deaths of some 350,000 or so Germans. Why should the Soviets have been reluctant to adduce proof of the existence of still another 1 million dead Germans? when the proof would merely moulder in another archive declared off-limits for all time and never see the light of day?
The book, considered as a physical object, is magnificent in every way. It is printed on photographic plate paper, and the signatures are gathered and properly bound as once ordained by Gutenberg. It is perhaps even comparable to that other work on the fate of German POWs, JAHRE IM ABSEITS by Ernst Helmut Segschneider (Bramsche: Rasch, c1991). The numerous photographs and facsimiles are utterly marvellous. They demonstrate that the coils of the GUPVI were multifarious. Here we see German officers, heads shorn and bald as billiard balls, attending a meeting of the Antifa, and every face is uniformly wary, glum and expressionless.
Here we see some of the buildings put up by the German prisoners: the Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius; apartment blocks in the Urals (Revda, Asbest, Sverdlovsk/ Ekaterinburg); passport photographs of poor Margarethe Ottilinger, the Austrian accused of espionage and sentenced to 25 years of forced labor–and her later return to Austria in 1955 on a train and on a stretcher; photographs of German prisoners, heads shorn, at work and even at play; photographs of numerous barracks and perhaps even more numerous graveyards with individual graves; photographs of Cossacks consigned to the untender mercies of Soviet forces marching and riding on the long bridge at Judenburg, Austria; photographs of Germans who, convicted after certain show trials, of war crimes, strung up on the gallows (Karner memorably remarks that German soldiers were similarly convicted of the crime of killing the Poles at Katyn, when we now know with certainty, after Gorbachev’s admission, that the crimes were committed by the NKVD); but there are no photographs of the serried ranks of the German, Hungarian, Rumanian, Austrian and other dead.
Paul Boytinck
Postscript. The greater issue, and one we should perhaps discuss, is the effect the opening of the Soviet archives has had–and will have–on various facets of German history.
[H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine] Send comments and questions to H-Net Webstaff Copyright © 1995-98, H-Net, Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine Click Here for an Internet Citation Guide
http://www.stormfront.org/solargeneral/library/www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/HnetPrisoners1.html
Stefan Karner. Im Archipel GUPVI: Kriegsgefangenschaft und Internierung in der Sowjetunion,
1941-1956. Munich, Germany: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995. 236 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. DM
48 (cloth), ISBN 3-486-56119-7.
Reviewed by Jay Lockenour, Franklin and Marshall College.
Published by H-German (April, 1996)
Stefan Karner’s 1995 work, Im Archipel
GUPVI: Kriegsgefangenschaft und Internierung in
der Sowjetunion 1941-1956 contends that recently
opened Soviet archives shed new light on the
experiences of German prisoners of war and
civilian internees in the Soviet Union by
elucidating the intricate structure of the camp
system as well as the daily sufferings of the
prisoners, the Soviet justice system in which they
were entangled and the contributions which those
prisoners made to the Soviet economy during the
first post-war decade. Published under the auspices
of the Ludwig Boltzmann-Institut fuer
Kriegsfolgen-Forschung in Austria, whose archives
Karner also uses, the book serves as a useful and
concise, if only slightly updated addition to our
knowledge of the prisoner of war experience which
until now has primarily been derived from the
immense efforts of the Maschke commission
during the 1960s and 1970s, which were produced
without the benefit of access to Soviet sources.
The book’s early chapters provide a dense
yet brief description of the structure of GUPVI (
Glavnoe upravlenie po delam voennoplennych
iinternirovannych – Central Administration for
POW and Internee Affairs) and the various
classifications of prisoners: POWs, “mobilized and
interned Germans”, and civilian internees (
Zivilver- schleppte ). The fate of the first group, by
far the largest, naturally occupies center stage, but
for reasons relating to his thesis on the
contributions of imprisoned Germans to the Soviet
economy, “mobilized and interned Germans” also
play a key role. These include “Volks”-Deutschen
who happened to be in areas of Eastern Europe
overrun by the Soviets, political prisoners from the
Soviet occupation zone in Germany, and women
who had served as Wehrmachthelferinnen or even
(so it was rumored) Red Cross nurses (25). The
first chapter also deals briefly with Cossack units
which had fought for the Germans and other Soviet
citizens who either collaborated with the Germans
or had the misfortune of being captured by the
Wehrmacht and subsequently repatriated, then to
be labeled as deserters or traitors by Stalin.
Chapter Two briefly details the origins and
development of the camp administration and the
material conditions endured by the inmates. The
“reeducation” efforts, hunger, sickness, and death
– all familiar to anyone who has read the Maschke
series – are present here as well. When possible
Karner provides augmentation from the Soviet
archives. Yet the basic outlines are little changed
from what Erich Maschke, Kurt Boehme, Kurt
Baehrens and others presented over twenty years
ago.
More informative are Karner’s sections on
Soviet justice as it impacted the prisoners and on
the contributions by prisoners to the Soviet
economy in first postwar decade. Thanks to Soviet
archives, Karner describes the workings of the the
“special commission” (OSO, Osoboe sovescanie )
and other military tribunals which between 1942
and 1953 sentenced some 30,000 German and
Austrian prisoners to 25 years imprisonment or, in
the case of 262 people, to death (176).
Karner also provides specifics on the labor
performed by prisoners of war while in the camps.
The unifying element for the entire Soviet
internment policy, he claims, was the intent to use
prisoners as a form of reparations and thus make
good the damage done by the Wehrmacht. The
Soviets always wished to make the camps pay for
themselves (which almost never occurred) and to
maximize the proportion of healthy, productive
prisoners within the total population of internees.
As a result, sick or handicapped prisoners, to the
extent that they survived, were generally
repatriated much earlier than healthy ones.
Furthermore, of the 187,042 “mobilized and
interned” Germans held in December 1944,
115,086 were between the ages of 16 and 50 (25)
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=9539851382536
– proof of the Soviet desire for the largest possible
number of arbeitsfaehig prisoners. Between 1943
and 1949, Karner calculates, foreign prisoners
performed a total of 1.08 billion man-days of labor,
two- thirds of which was attributable to Germans
or Austrians (142). This amounts to between eight
and ten percent of the total effort expended in
accomplishing the first postwar Five Year Plan (9).
Karner’s work is especially unique for its focus on
Austrian nationals held in the GUPVI camps.
This, together with discussion of postwar Austrian
governmental efforts to secure the release of
prisoners, are both lacking in the Maschke
volumes. In his final chapter Karner also hints at
the difficulties which Austrians and Germans had
in integrating into postwar societies, which had
changed dramatically since the soldiers or
internees had last seen them.
Overall, however, Karner’s work is better at
supplying specific numbers and corroborative
proof of conclusions already reached by Erich
Maschke and his research team. While he does an
admirable job of detailing the structures and
practices of the Soviet leadership, the basic
outlines of these elements and the suffering
endured by prisoners are already well known. In
fact, the Maschke series, which relied more heavily
on the testimony of released prisoners and could
afford to devote an entire volume [III], for
example, to the " Factor: Hunger ", provides a far
more complete account of life in captivity than
does Karner’s book. Yet Karner’s contributions are
several. The author had access to sources of which
Maschke could only have dreamt, and it is
testimony to both his and Maschke’s diligence that
those archives yielded further proof of the
conclusions reached in the 1960s and 1970s.
Karner’s work is also an admirable condensation of
the findings of the Maschke commission. Im
Archipel GUPVI’s 236 pages (which includes 136
pages of photographs, tables, charts, and
documents) contrasts favorably with the Maschke
series’ twenty-two volumes, seven of which were
specifically devoted to the situation of prisoners in
the Soviet Union. Karner’s ability to provide a
concise overview of the POW experience, his
contribution on the particular Austrian response to
captivity, his work on Soviet justice and his
research on prisoners’ contributions to the first
postwar Soviet Five-Year plan, make this book a
meaningful and useful work.
A final note regarding the unsolicited review
submitted to H-German by Paul Boytinck in
January 1996: That review gives a skewed
impression of Karner’s book, which deals only
tangentially with the problem that preoccupies
Boytinck – the issue of POW deaths. It is
generally believed that roughly 1.5 million German
prisoners died in captivity in the Soviet Union, the
vast majority between capture and arrival at
“permanent” prisoner of war camps. Arrival at an
exact estimate is complicated by the chaotic nature
of the immediate postwar months; the fact that
official Soviet pronouncements on the matter
frequently changed and were thus unreliable; and
the until- recent inaccessibility of Soviet archives.
Karner’s archival research, which deals only with
GUPVI (which administered the permanent camps
as well as temporary collection points at the front)
cannot shed any light here. The registration of
prisoners did not occur until they had reached the
permanent camps, so Karner can only provide the
official GUPVI figure of 356,687 German
prisoners who died from illness and other causes
while in the permanent camps (79). This figure
leaves roughly a million missing soldiers.
Boytinck argues that if 1.5 million Germans
had died in Soviet captivity instead of only
350,000, then Soviet officials would have certainly
recorded it. “These archives,” writes Boytinck,
“were SECRET, and they recorded the deaths of
some 350,000 or so Germans. Why should the
Soviets have been reluctant to adduce proof of the
existence of still another million dead Germans
when the proof would merely moulder in another
archive declared off-limits for all time and never
see the light of day?” Yet if the so-called “missing
million” did not surface in Karner’s archives, then
no one aware of the bureaucratic procedures
(however chaotic) which must have prevailed
within an organization like GUPVI should be
surprised. It was unprepared for the massive
number of prisoners it was forced to register and
maintain. Those million(s) simply fell outside of
the jurisdiction of GUPVI bureaucrats and
therefore were never entered into their registers.
Thus Karner is forced to rely on the same evidence
that other historians have used (accounts of both
German and Soviet eyewitnesses and knowledge of
the situation at the time) to conclude (quite
correctly, I believe) that the missing prisoners died
from exposure, neglect, murder and chance, en
route to the camps where the official registration
took place. To draw more sinister conclusions
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=9539851382536
from the absence of any official Soviet
documentary evidence that so many prisoners died,
as Boytinck does, is hardly justified; and if he is
trying to resurrect the sensationalist theories of
James Bacque (which claim that if the prisoners
did not die in the USSR then they must have died
in the camps of the Western Allies – as he seems
to attempt in the fifth paragraph of his review),
then he is standing on shaky ground indeed.
Guenther Bischof, Steven Ambrose, and others in
Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against
Falsehood have effectively disproven Bacque’s
shoddily researched conclusions.
Karner’s position on this issue is by no
means “anomalous,” nor do his conclusions
regarding the so-called Dunkelziffer lack
credibility. If anything, Karner does not go far
enough to remind readers of the Dunkelziffer
Library of Congress call number: D805 .S65 K37 1995
Subjects:
• Archipel GUPVI
• World War, 1939-1945 – Prisoners and prisons, Soviet
• Forced labor – Soviet Union
• Prisoners of war – Soviet Union
Citation: Jay Lockenour. "Review of Stefan Karner, Im Archipel GUPVI: Kriegsgefangenschaft und
Internierung in der Sowjetunion, 1941-1956, H-German, H-Net Reviews, April, 1996.
URL: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=9539851382536.
Copyright © 1996 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this
work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date
of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed
use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=9539851382536
Rising Sun*, I will try to get the figures more presize for you. But tell me, please, 2 things:
[ol]
[li]Please give your low and high end estimates for the both Soviet and German POW death rates. So that we can compare result of your calculation.[/li][li]Tell me, do you understand, that even if we admit this fictious missing 1 million the death rate for Axis POWs would still lower than for Soviet ones? That is long way to “many times over”.[/li][/ol]
Thanks.
But tell me, please, 2 things:
[ol]
[li]Please give your low and high end estimates for the both Soviet and German POW death rates. So that we can compare result of your calculation. [/li]
I’m not trying to avoid your question, but I don’t have a firm high and low figure. There are all sorts of figures available, to some of which I’ve already referred, confused by occasional improbable theories based on poor research like Bocquet’s.
I’ll accept any figure that, at a given time, is the best evidence without other evidence which casts reasonable doubt upon it. I don‘t have such a figure at the moment.
[li]Tell me, do you understand, that even if we admit this fictious missing 1 million the death rate for Axis POWs would still lower than for Soviet ones?[/li]
No. The missing million is German. Not Axis. There were more Axis prisoners in Soviet hands than just Germans.
That is long way to “many times over”.
[/ol]
No offence, but given your mathematical background I think you tend to look for what seem to be clear arithmetical or mathematical answers as if they give a conclusive answer to every issue. My original comment about ‘many times over’ was using a common phrase without carefully calculating the numbers beforehand. I have already conceded that I was careless in this as the basis for determining that the Soviets punished the Germans an exact number of times for each offence.
However, as is clear from my full comment, I was thinking about things much wider than just POW’s. It wasn‘t intended to be interpreted in the punctilious sense to which you have limited it in this thread. [You might like to look back over your own posts in various threads. I could give you a thorough bollocking on numerous points were I minded to be half as punctilious as you have been here.]
By themselves, figures rarely prove anything outside arithmetic or mathematics. Without knowing the detail behind figures, they are meaningless. Nor can intangibles be given mathematical values.
For example, if we go past the simple figures on just POW’s, how do you give a mathematical value to other relevant factors in the “USSR v. Germany World Cup Final for the Worst Bastard / Biggest Victim in WWII” such as :
- What proportion of USSR GDP was produced by German (and many other) POW’s in the USSR after the war? (I think I saw a figure of up to 10% in one of the sources I was chasing up for this thread.)
- How many USSR POW’s did Germany hold on to in each year from 1945 to 1955 (nil in each year) to balance those held by the USSR and working productively for the USSR during the same period?
For mathematical purposes, should there be a balancing factor for Soviet bastardry for things such as
- Executions and prison sentences for large numbers of the poor bloody Soviet POW’s returning from German captivity after the war?
- Trying to starve Berlin into submission in 1948, leading to the Berlin Airlift?
If so, what values do you give them in the mathematical equation? What are the criteria you use in determining those values?
The problem with the purely numerical or percentage approach is that we just construct a league table of who had the worst death rate. So someone ‘wins‘. In the end, it doesn’t mean much unless you’re barracking for one team or another. Everybody suffered badly.
Off Topic
I have not been entirely comfortable about pursuing this thread.
In some respects I think that by focusing on numbers, as if the highest number or percentage or rate of death ‘wins’, this thread is an obscene disrespect to the dead upon whose deaths it is based.
If we’re going to focus just on figures, then Australia and Britain probably hold the record for the worst POW camp with a 99,75% death rate at Sandakan. So what does saying this prove? Absolutely nothing.
Except that we are engaged in ‘proving’ some ultimately insignificant point in cyberspace by offering a further insult to those who died, and the many more distressed relatives who survived them, by using their deaths to lever our nation up the meaningless league table of misery in which everybody suffered.
Which is why I think that it is better to look at factors of more substance than just who got the most points in the indecent league ladder of unbridled brutality and inhumanity which we are constructing here to dispute what amounts to the ultimately indefinable phrase ‘many times over’ applied to the worst forms of inhumanity.
That is not to say that there is no historical value in getting the right figures. There is. But not for the purpose of using the number of a nation’s dead or POW’s to make it more worthy than other nations.
Hi Rising Sun*,
I first wanted to answer your post bit by bit, but then changed my mind because what ever I say you will be able to twist inside out. You are a lawyer and that is says it all! You trained and live by talking your way out of the situations. I am not match for you, I admit it clearly. So this is what I tell you:
Until you give us you figures for the death rate of the POWs I will not discuss any thing else here with you!
It is not an ultimatum, just that one can not just critisize other’s information without giving his own input.
Good luck! Enough bla-bla-bla, we are all waiting for your numbers in the form similar to my post #24.
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An extraordinarily well-balanced, incisive, carefully considered, highly intelligent, concise and most persuasive contribution to the topic.
I am prostrate before your eternal intellectual radiance.
It’s not hard to see how Zhukov brought the Germans to their knees when faced which such resolution. He shall never die while you live.
Purely for the purpose of keeping this scintillating thread alive, the figure you want is in The Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything divided by Care-Factor Zero, which produces the number 42.
42 is the number!
Behold the number 42, for it is the number, yea and verily, being 40 and 2, or 2 and 40.
42 is the number!
Behold the number, for it is 42!
Or maybe it’s zero.
Still, now that I’ve given a figure as demanded by Egorka, who rather enjoys making imperious demands in his threads, and no matter how wrong I may be, I’m sure Egorka will shower us with his mathematical brilliance to produce the correct number.
Although I’d be somewhat more impressed if he focused on the POW issue and number he started.
I say! This is rivetting stuff!
Don’t stop now chaps. This forum is, after all, World War 2 … not the Cold War!