Post-War Treatment of German Forces?

World War II German Military
#41

It might not be me who has stepped over a line of historical rationality, or who is unable to accept critical thinking, but the modern Russian state.

Russian historian arrested in clampdown on Stalin era

Authorities seize research into Arctic gulags in latest move to suppress evidence of political repression

Luke Harding in Moscow
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 October 2009 18.38 BST

A Russian historian investigating the fate of Germans imprisoned in the Soviet Union during the second world war has been arrested, in the latest apparent clampdown on historical research into the Stalin era by the Russian authorities.

Mikhail Suprun was detained last month by officers from Russia’s security services. They searched his apartment and carried off his entire personal archive. He has now been charged with violating privacy laws and, if convicted, faces up to four years in jail.

Suprun had been researching Germans sent to Russia’s Arctic gulags. A professor of history at Arkhangelsk’s Pomorskiy university, his study included German prisoners of war captured by the Red Army as well as Russian-speaking ethnic Germans, many from southern Russia, deported by Stalin. Both groups ended up in Arkhangelsk camps.

“I had been planning to write two books. I need another two or three years before I can finish them,” Suprun told the Guardian today. The historian – who described his arrest as “absurd” – said he had signed an agreement with local officials not to talk further about his case.

But the arrest has provoked outrage in Germany and among leading historians. It comes amid Kremlin attempts to rehabilitate Stalin and to clamp down on independent historical research – with political repression during the Soviet era and victims of the gulag system now taboo topics.

Today the historian and writer Orlando Figes described Suprun’s arrest as unprecedented, and part of a “Putinite campaign against freedom of historical research and expression”. Figes, professor of history at Birkbeck college, London University, added: “[It’s] potentially quite alarming, if it means that the regime intends to clamp down on the collection of personal data about the Stalin terror.”

Suprun’s project was done in collaboration with Germany’s Red Cross. The organisation is still trying to establish the fate of thousands of Germans transported to Soviet Russia as prisoners during the war – many of whom never came back. The German Red Cross today said it was baffled by the historian’s arrest. It was “completely unacceptable”, Erica Steinbach, a rightwing German MP, added.

Russia’s FSB intelligence agency also arrested a police official who handed Suprun material from the local interior ministry archive. It includes a list of 40,000 German gulag victims between 1945 and 1956, deported to the Arkhangelsk region. It details which camps they were sent to and whether they survived. The official, Col Alexander Dudaryev, is accused of abusing his position.

“What we are seeing is the rebirth of control over history,” said Rauf Gabidullin, of Arkhangelsk’s movement for human rights. “The majority of Russians don’t have any idea of the scale of Stalin’s repression. Those in power are from the KGB. They don’t want people to know what their KGB predecessors were doing, or its huge scope.”

Asked what life was like in Arkhangelsk’s freezing gulags, overlooking the White Sea, he said: “Terrible. The winter was extremely long. The conditions in the barracks were appalling. The German prisoners who were lucky enough to survive chopped wood. In other parts of the Soviet Union they constructed buildings, including Moscow state university.”

The Arkhangelsk camps also contained Poles, Greeks, Tartars and other non-Russian ethnic groups. By the end of the war 11 million Germans were in allied prison camps. More than a million perished. Soviet prisoners of war fared even worse. Of the 5.7 million taken prisoner in Germany 3.3 million died – more than half.

The second world war remains a source of major tension between Russia and its post-Soviet neighbours. Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, has repeatedly accused Ukraine, Poland and other eastern European countries of distorting history for political purposes and in May set up a new state commission to prevent what he called the “falsification of history”.

Over the summer Moscow reacted furiously when the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s parliamentary assembly, led by the Baltic states, passed a motion equating Nazism with Stalinism. The Kremlin has also defended the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact – under which Stalin and Hitler carved up eastern Europe – describing it as a tactical agreement no different from other western accommodations with the Nazis.

Today Allison Gill, the director of Human Rights Watch in Moscow, described the Suprun case as “very troubling”. “It’s part of an attempt to provide a single narrative about what Russia was, and what it means today. It denies the full complexity of Russia’s history and the fact that individuals had vastly different experiences. I don’t like it at all,” she said.

Suprun’s research is similar to several other projects carried out over the past two decades by the Russian human rights organisation Memorial. Memorial has collected the names of tens of thousands of gulag victims, publishing their details in public “memory books”. Last year police raided Memorial’s office in St Petersburg office, seizing material used by Figes in his book on family life in Stalin’s Russia, The Whisperers. They later returned it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/15/russia-gulag-historian-arrested

#42

The Deutschlanders who came to America as POWs were really allowed a lot of freedom.
In the movie Tuskegee Airmen it was portrayed that when some of the volunteers made a stop in Hillsboro, TX that they had to give their seats to German POWs because THEY were African Americans. That is a true incident and was not added for political correct-
ness. As far as Germany goes Gen. Patton got in trouble as Procurator of Bavria because he was using the Germans to run public services. Also he wanted to incorporate the SS and Wehrmacht POWs into the US Army and attack Russia. So they
did OK as POWs.

#43

“Deutsche”, please. “Deutschländer” are sausages!:smiley:

#44

That may have been his point. :wink: :smiley:

#45

I’ve never heard of that specific Tuskegee Airmen incident. But the German POWs generally ate much better than most Americans and even received BEER RATIONS leading to resentment by both civilians and US military personnel. The US Army largely took a hands-off approach to the POW Camps and even let the Germans largely run their own affairs. They were paid for their labor and generally worked no harder than a typical US construction worker with set hours and they were also allowed to put on plays, hold cultural classes, and even play Fußball. All of this of course led to the hardcore Nazis and SS personnel taking things over and enforcing discipline to German soldiers --as the MPs largely were ordered to stay out of their affairs and those German POWs that expressed dissatisfaction with the Nazi regime in Germany were in turn “dealt with”. This meant of course that there were a inordinate number of “suicides” by hanging in some barracks.

Of course, after the War ended, this all changed and POWs were place on half-rations (of the generous portions they had previous enjoyed during the War) and a rigorous de-Nazification program was instituted in which the tables were turned and the camp “leaders” were “dealt with.” Also, a more rigorous regime of hard labor was enforced with long hours and few days off.

#46

Right about that, things changed with VE day. German POW’s reasoned this with the fact that the US didn’t have to bother about their own men in German captivity no more. On the other hand it was also assumed that the liberation of the concentration camps and the horrible sights the US forces encountered there did their part.

#47

The above is correct. I would add to that though that there was a general feeling that certain parts of the US Army were institutionally incompetent and senior officers that were relieved on the battlefield were often sent to perceived “soft,” lessor important stateside duties to be commandants of camps and training schools. This was done of course as to not embarrass the Army and said officers and the overall War effort. At the end of the War, I think some were finally pushed out of the Army to make way for the ones who had proven themselves and wanted to stay in. I think there was also a general resentment of the populace who thought that while it was commendable that the Germans were treated very well by WWII standards (and it worked out in the long run), stories of Nazis still running things in the camp periodically surfaced and incidents of dead German POWs committing “suicide”–despite the fact that they were obviously beaten up prior to death–were not possible to completely hush-up. And yes, the atrocity stories contributed to a harder line of “De-Nazification” and a more rigorous screening of suitable candidates who would inevitably have to run what became of West Germany…

#48

Within the de-nazification process I read that there were lively discussions between the POW’s and their American educators about the USA’s race politics. I should add that the major part of the camps was below Mason-Dixie.
I certainly have to re-check about the convinced Nazi influences inside the camps.

#49

It was very significant in some camps in the US, to the extent that the Nazis in some camps ruled the roost and at times killed their opponents. I read a well documented book about it some time ago but I can’t recall the title or author. I’ll post it if I can track it down.

I recall some reading about the same effects in Australian camps holding German POWs, although not to the same effect. Perhaps because they were much smaller camps and perhaps because a proportion of the German prisoners here came from different sources to those in America, such as the crews of commerce raiders.

#50

Well, he hasn’t been arrested and has’t been charged with anything. Yet.
Next time he and his accomplice should be more carefull (or at least discreet) in breaking laws and regulations for money. :slight_smile:

#51

Here is an first hand details of fighter ace Erich Hartmann :-

http://www.hotlinecy.com/hartmann.htm

This is what he said :-

Q: What was it like for you when you surrendered?

A: Graf, Grasser and I surrendered to the 90th Infantry Division, and we were

placed in a barbed wire camp. The conditions were terrible. Many men

decided to escape, and some were assisted by the guards. We went eight days

without any food, and then were told we were to be moved. All of us, even

women and children were taken to an open field. The trucks stopped and there

were Soviet troops there waiting for us. The Russians then separated the

women and girls from the men, and the most horrible things happened, which

you know and I cannot say here. We saw this; the Americans saw this, and we

could do nothing to stop it. Men who fought like lions cried like babies at the

sight of complete strangers being raped repeatedly. A couple of girls managed

to run to a truck and the Americans pulled them in, but the Russians, most

were drunk pointed their guns at the allies and fired a few shots. Then the truck drivers decided to drive away quickly. Some women were shot after the

rapes. Others were not so lucky. I remember a twelve year old girl whose

mother had been raped and shot being raped by several soldiers. She died from

these acts soon afterward. Then more Russians came, and it began all over again and lasted through the night. During the night entire families committed suicide, men killing their wives and daughters, then themselves. I still cannot believe these things as I speak now. I know many will never believe this story, but it is true. Soon a Russian general came and issued orders for all of this to stop. He was serious, because some of the Russians who did not stay away and came to rape were executed on the spot by their own men by hanging.

Q: What was your internment like in Russia?

A: Well, I was somewhat famous, or infamous, depending upon your perspective,

and the Soviets were very interested in making an example of me. I was never

badly beaten and tortured, but I was starved and threatened for several years.

The interrogations were the worst. I know that you have interviewed several

Germans who experienced the same thing. The stories are pretty much the same, so I won’t go into details. The first thing they did was give us physical exams to determine how fit we were for hard labor. Then they put us on a train which was diverted from Vienna to the Carpathians in Romania. We were placed in another wired prison with Romanian Communist guards. This lasted a week and then we boarded another train. There was no room in these small train cars, so not all could sit, so we took turns. Finally we arrived near Kirov and disembarked in a swamp. This was our home for a while. Of the 1,500 POWs who were dropped at this place about 200 lived through the first winter. This I know from some who survived. They were not fed, just worked to death. I was sent to Gryazovets where Assi Hahn was already. He had been a POW since 1943.

Q: Which camp were you in as a POW?

A: I was in several camps, Shakhty, Novocherkassk, where they kept me in
solitary confinement, and Diaterka. I had gone on a hunger strike to protest the

slave labor conditions and the fact that the Soviets were simply working men

to death out of spite. I was ironically placed in a camp at Kuteynikovo where

my squadron had been based in 1943.

Q: Which camp had the revolt?

A: That was Shakhty. This was when I and others refused to work, invoking the

Geneva Convention. They placed me back in solitary. This was a work camp

for mining and many men were tired of it, and I think my being gone started

the problem. Within a few days the POWs jumped the guards, cornered the

camp commandant and freed me. It was quite exciting. Then they sent me to the other camps, and at Diaterka there 4,000 men there.

Q: Describe a camp, how was it laid out?

A: A fine example was Diaterka. There was a high fence, then a dead zone with a

walkway for guards and dogs, then another fence with watch towers with more

guards and machine guns. There were long rows of barracks which were not

insulated against the cold, and the winters were quite cold I can tell you. Each

barrack held between 200 and 400 prisoners depending on its size, and there

were rows of wooden bunks in tiers of three to four. The camp was divided

into maximum and minimum security sections, with us being in the most

secure section. The ultra maximum security section housed elite members of

the Third Reich and special Soviet political prisoners, which was another

section even within our part within its own wired enclosure. This was where

Hitler’s SS adjutant Otto Gunsche and Count von der Schulenburg were held,

among others. I stayed there until 1954 when I was sent back to Novocher-

kassk. This was my last camp.

Q: Did the Soviets try and recruit you, as they did others?

A: Yes, they offered me the opportunity to return home if I worked as an agent

for them, which was out of the question. They did not like this either. I was

assigned kitchen duties as an inducement to become a converted Communist. I

think that if they could get us high ranking and highly decorated officers to

convert their job would be made much easier. They converted Graf, which was

a shame, but he did not embrace Communism. He looked at it as a pragmatist-

it was either the western way or Soviet way, and he was already there. They

did release him in 1950, but I would not be so lucky. Those of us who resisted

were punished much longer. They wanted me as an informer and even gave

me a list of names of officers they wanted information on. They promised me

early release if I did this. I refused. They placed me in solitary a few times, for

a long time.

Q: How did you maintain your sanity when others did not?

A: I thought of my Ushi. She kept me going, and the thought of my family

waiting for me. They threatened to kill my wife and son, or forcibly bring

them to Russia, and they spoke about doing terrible things. All of this was to

break you down.

Q: Did you have mail or communication with Germany?

A: We were allowed only twenty-five words on a post card to send out, some-

times a lot less, and this was not often. The letters I smuggled out with

returning POWs provided the information they needed. I received about fifty

letters from Ushi in the ten and a half years, but she wrote over 400. Getting a

letter was the greatest morale boost you could imagine.

Q: You and Graf had a parting in Russia. Why was that?

A: Well, we had agreed never to surrender our Diamonds to the Soviets. My

originals were with Ushi, and a copy was taken by an American, and another

copy I had also. I threw them away, although they were worthless, rather than

surrender the, Graf and had given his, and they were on the table of the NKVD

officer when I was called in. He wanted mine also. He did not get them. They

also wanted detailed information on the Me-262, which they had several

captured machines they wanted to evaluate. I did not help them.

source http://www.hotlinecy.com/hartmann.htm

#52

I read parts of this text in Russian some time ago.
It is captioned as the last interview of Hartmann before his death. The question is who and when took this interview? Where was it published?

#53

Yep. They look just like American women. Hairstyles and all. However they are pretty as
most of the Scythian women are.

#54

I recomend the relevant chapters of:

Siegfried Knappe ‘Soldat’

Werner Adamcyzk ‘Feruer’

Sajer ‘The Forggoton Soldier’

All three describe their experience after the the surrender of 1945.

Knappe, a officer of the Gerneral Staff was taken prisoner by the RKKA. He spent over a year as a Soviet prisoner, then was sent back to Germany & released. Went back to work in the family business soon after release.

Adamcyk was taken prisoner by the British, held prisoner for several months & released to a work program cleaning up bombing damage. Paid in food ration tickets for that work. Within the year he returned to work as a production manager of a soap factory near Hamburg

Sajer also taken prisoner by the British was released after several months & sent back to his home in Alsace. This province was returned to France, so Sajer was required to enter the French army as a conscript.

#55

What the nazis got away with in these camps varied widely with the leadership of the guards. Some quickly came to understand the nature of the nazi leaders and segregated them. It became general policy to seperate the fanatic nazi leaders in their own camps, but doing so required a time consuming search of records and interrogations. People qualified to do those tasks correctly were usually assigned to more important tasks far away from the PoW camps. So, segregation of the nazi leaders was never complete. I have read newspaper storys of German prisoners hanged for murder, but have no idea how many or where.

#56

I guess my remark should have been “sausages”, perhaps Mettwurst or Bratwurst. Well at any rate my point was that here in the states the “Bratwursters” did alright. They weren’t treated like THEY treated innocent and helpless people who happened to be of a different kind. Hitler and all of his perverted criminals and henchmen were insane and under the control of the devil. No sane human being would do what that “paper hanging
SOB” did.

#57

The book is Arnold Krammer’s “Nazi Prisoners of War in America” http://www.amazon.ca/Nazi-Prisoners-America-Arnold-Krammer/dp/0812885619

Here’s a couple of Amazon reader reviews which indicate the breadth and detail of the book.

By SereneNight (California, USA)

I found Nazi Prisoners of War to be a fascinating look into the little known (and explored) history of American POW camps. This book really put a human face on the soldiers of Germany who weren’t always Nazi sympathizers. I felt the author presented quite a balanced view of both the anti-Nazi prisoners and the pro-Nazi officers and enlisted men.

Of particular interest was the discussion of how the camps were run, the photographs of the prisoners and the stories of their escapes. Also, some stories were quite humorous: the story where the Americans tell the Germans to clean their barracks/common rooms and the German POWS refuse. The Americans perform a trick by telling them a high-ranking German officer would be imprisoned there to get them to comply without the use of force. This was quite clever.On the flip-side I found it disturbing that the American army officials preferred to supervise hard-core nazis in prisons because they were easier to manage, rather than anti-nazis. At times these officials encouraged nazism!

I recommend this book for a different and balanced look into the past.
http://www.amazon.ca/Nazi-Prisoners-America-Arnold-Krammer/dp/0812885619

By Joseph Haschka (Glendale, CA USA)

At age 55, I’ve finally learned something about an American experience that ended two years before I was born. About time, don’t you think?

NAZI PRISONERS OF WAR IN AMERICA is a concise and (apparently) comprehensive overview, which describes the incarceration of the roughly 375,000 captured members of the German military in 500+ camps and branch camps thoughout the United States from May 1942 to July 1946. The book’s eight chapters summarize the process from initial capture and dispatch westward across the Atlantic through repatriation and return to Europe. In between, author Arnold Krammer depicts the general layout of the camps, the life behind barbed wire, the work and re-education programs, the escapes, and the ideological tensions between the ardently Nazi minority and non-Nazi majority that generally resulted in internal control of a camp’s inmate population by the former prisoner group. Each chapter has a 4 to 8 page photo section relevant to its topic. The 44 pages of notes, based on a 15-page bibliography, indicate a commendable and thorough level of research.

As an informative exercise about an interesting topic, I can’t find fault with NAZI PRISONERS OF WAR IN AMERICA. As a work of popular history for one casually interested in the subject, it’s completely satisfying in all respects.

At times, there’s even humor of a sort. In the chapter “Escapes”, the author relates the incident wherein three U-boat submariners fled into the hills of Tennessee, where one was subsequently shot dead by an old granny defending her water pump. When told by the local deputy sheriff whom she’d killed, she broke down saying she’d never have fired if she’d known the men were Germans. Asked who she thought the intruders were, she replied:

“I thought they wuz Yankees.” Bobbie Lee would have been proud.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nazi-Prisoners-America-Arnold-Krammer/dp/0812885619

#58

You assume that every German POW was some sort of Nazi beast.

They weren’t, and perhaps most weren’t even Nazi supporters, as you’ll find if you read the book in my last post.

Would any sane human being launch an atomic bomb on defenceless civilians, or would those defenceless civilians be sane if willing to defend themselves by pitting their women and children with bamboo spears against the best military weaponry and troops of the time?

How about we just accept that in extreme circumstances people do extreme things?

However, if you want to introduce the devil into human affairs, he must have been pissing himself laughing when Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo created his inferno on earth, not to mention the ovens at Auschwitz etc. But, unlike the (supposed) real hell, those infernos consumed countless innocents. While the (supposed) real God, omnipotent and omnipresent and the fount of love for all humans which He created in His image, let it happen, as He does every day in Rwanda, Kampuchea, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Sudan, and the endless list of places where brutality and inhumanity plumb new depths of depravity.

So how about we just leave your devil and his counter-God and every other god, goddess, God, Allah, Yahweh, Shiva, and every other non-existent fucking deity and devil out of attempts at an informed and rational discussion about the actions of human beings in history?

#59

This information is helpful–I thought two years were too long for a regular German soldier. I am surprised that Knappe spent just over a year in the USSR–seems, it usually dragged on for a decade, when they survived.

A large POW camp was once situated in what is now the Phoenix, Arizona, city limits. All traces, of course, are long gone. The Germans actually received better rations and medical treatment than their families in the beleaguered Reich, and many applied for U.S. citizenship after the war.

Once upon a time, I recall reading a book entitled something like The Swastika and the Cactus–some of you might be familiar with it. A couple of young Germans escaped from a camp (Phoenix?) and made their way to an Indian reservation. They were smitten with Wild West and Indian lore. As was Hitler, I guess, because of his favorite author, Karl May. I always intended to read some of these books, but they’d probably be as outdated as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan books. Burroughs never sat foot in Africa. Did May in America, the west or otherwise?

#60

5 year, not 10.
99% of German POWs were repatriated by Dec 1949.
Those who were released in 1946 were released on the ground of poor health conditions.