The Unforgiving War: Brutality on the Eastern Front

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#41

as early as Novemebr 1941, given the impasse on the Eastern Front, Hitler had taken the decision to that Soviet prisoners of war were to be employed, not only in the rear areas, but in Germany itself. Hundreds of thousands of men were shipped to Germany over the following months, but the mistreatment continued, resulting in mass deaths in prisoner of war camps in Germany itself, and a continued wastage of labour power.

-Adam Tooze, Wages of destruction

The value of labour power contradicting the indoctrination about the worth of the eastern untermenchen, the lives of the Soviet POW´s hanging in the balance.

What happened to German POW´s in USSR?
Why did the Soviets keep many of them for so long?
(Fighter ace Erich Hartmann fx. was only released in 1955).

#42

Actually ‘all’ russian POWs were fed. matter of fact there exist no documents that advise german army as to the starvation of the russian POWs, furthermore Germans did not know how many prisoners they were going to take, they were NEVER expecting this much.

Also Germans did not fail to feed or house POWs since they were processed into Stalags at first possinble opportunity, there they were used to work and work hard but they were fed adequately.

Yes civilian population was starved but not the POWs.

#43

Excuse my failing logic, but then why did Soviet POWs actually die?

We learned from you that they were not shot and treated humanly hence they were not killed.
Then you shared your wisdom that they were neither starved - so they obviously did not die of hunger, right?
So what do we have left? Illnesses?

So what was the cause for the death of «2 out of 3,35 million POWs in the period between 22 june 1941 and 1 February 1942»?

By the way, that is a quote from “Breve fra Østfronten”, 2006 which in its turn refferes to "Streit, Keine Kameraden, 1978, p.128-191. So much for your “the casualities you forward are mostly from russian sources”.

And one more quote on this matter from the book “Breve fra Østfronten”, page 160:
«In Ukraine the German occupation administration counted for harvest of 5,2 million tonns of grain. But the harvest came out to be only 1 million tonns.
Out of this amount 250 thousands went to the Wehrmacht, 50 thousands was send to Germany and 600 thousands was deposited in reserves for the German market. This, practicaly speaking, left almost nothing to the local population of Ukraine.» [refference 470: Müller, Das Scheitern der wirtschaftlichen “Blitzkriegstragedie”, 1991, p.1180.]

And one more quote Goebbels diaries:
[i]1 may 1941 (Thu)
«Backe gives me report on the food situation. Meet is going to have to be cut by 100 grams per week from 2 June. The Wehrmacht is too well off and is using up too much of the available ration. Per head, three times that allowed to the civilian population. We can hope to get by so far as bread is concerned, as long as there is no problem with the harvest. Fat is still in reasonable supply. If we have to go through a third year at war, then we shall consume the last reserves of bread. But nevertheless we are better off than England in many respects. But our situation is no means rosy. I now face the question of how I am to put this over to the public. I shall wait for the most favourable moment possible and then take the announcement.»

6 may 1941 (Tue)
«Backe describes the food situation. Along the same lines as his report to me a few days ago. A few extra details, which give reasons for optimism. All we need is a good harvest this year. And then, of course, we intend to be firmly established in the East.»

26 may 1941 (Mon)
«An other little strike in Brussels. The people are starving there. All they want is food, but we cannot give them any. Let them complain to the English about their blockade. Not that one can expect starving people to understand such things.[/i]»
I.e. the provision extortion from the East to Germany was preplanned before the attack on USSR and was one of the reasons to attack.

And one more… Here is the quote from the directive of the German ministry of “War Economy” writen in February 1942:
«Today’s problems with work power whould not happen if we would had involved the soviet POW in due time. We had 3,9 million in our disposal. Now we have only 1,1 million left. Only in December 1941 died half a million.»

#44

Where the hell do you get this idea from, the Joseph Goebbels publishing company?

A good example of the way the Germans treated Russian PoWs was the camp at Novo-Alexandrovsk. 18,000 prisoners on a bare patch of earth surrounded by barbed wire, in winter. Food (boiled rotting horseflesh) for 1,200 at a pinch. In the end there were around 700 survivors, and the Red Army doctors who examined them after they were liberated were convinced that a number of them only survived by eating the flesh of the dead (apparently the skin develops a peculiar reddish tinge).

Another example of the attitude of the Russian soldiers at the front line - who had seen what the Germans did firsthand - came in 1945 when the Russian state was trying to cool things down in preparation for the peacetime occupation of Germany. Ilya Ehrenburg earlier in the war been writing his propaganda pieces describing exactly what the Germans had done to Russia, and to counteract this there was another piece called “Comrade Ehrenburg Oversimplifies” (I assume Ehrenburg had been muted by this point). The reply (an anonymous letter, using one of their very precious free letters home) came back “No, he doesn’t”.

#45

I don’t know about specifics. But the UPA vs. Red Army/NKVD feud was a blood one…

Actually no, NKVD carried out criminal executions mostly but these were quite orderly, it is the common russian citizen ( or comrade ) thats responsible for the most disgusting heinous acts.

Such behaviour was a rule, in fact it was far rarer to find a “civilized” russian unit than to land in the midst of the horde of savage animals, there were a lot of reasons for that and it’d require an entire new thread to ponder on the “why”, its not as simple as "Germans screwed us over so now we screw them, and everyone in between. "

But yet it is hard to come up with concrete numbers for these acts. Certainly there were a large numbers of rapes in the Red Army’s wake. And some murders. But we should also acknowledge that it was the rations of the Red Army that prevented Berlin and many East European nations from falling into starvation…

And one can say what one wants about the Red Army. But their nation was raped collectively and suffered a horrendous number of dead.

That was the least of the worries of occupied people.

Yes with typical russian imaginative approach they shot soldiers, often not the perpetrators just random soldiers blaimed for it as an “example” and then done nothing.

Tell my why american or british armies, french and polish forces didnt rape, heck the Poles had as many reasons to hate Germans as the Russians did yet when the polish army took back its lands or entered Germany you didnt hear about rapes and murders.

Scale makes all the difference, especially if its your mother/sister/fiancee/wife.

They didn’t rape on the scale, but as I wrote following this, there were examples of French (continental) officers turning a blind eye to extensive, premeditated raping and looting of the already victimized Italian civilians by their colonial North African troops. And BTW, Germans weren’t exactly running to the French zones of occupation after the collapse of the Nazi regime either…

And there were units of US Army troops that rampaged in North Africa, firstly against the occidentals, then the continental French and Jewish women. The accusations were largely buried and not thoroughly investigated and the only resulting actions taken were threats of prosecution for further acts only after the French Gendarme made formal complaints and threatened to go to the US press…

And of course scale makes a difference. But then, the average Red Army rapist thought he was being entirely more merciful to his victims that some Germans had been to his family…

#46

Um, exactly how does my thread say that?

#47

Um, no. No one disputes that at least four million Soviet POWs were essentially murdered by the Nazi regime…

The German inattention to the feeding and housing of these men was a deliberate policy of neglect and a warcrime by any definition…

Check Nizkor…

#48

Oh that’s nice.
We have one more REVISIONIST here:)
May be you are going to say that the GErmans were as human toward the soviet POWs as toward the Jews?
And the 80% of Jews died from starvation, becouse human Nazic were unable adequately feed them?:slight_smile:

Chevan, everyone who doesnt conform to your “russian pride” is “rusophobic” the fact is that you’re a limited nationalist who desperately tries to defend his country.

Everyman will defend HIS country.
Just idiots will not…
And you as a f…ng stoopid rushophobian, who constantly demonstrated hatred to the all Rusian ( whatever they were soviet or not) have to use it.
My Granddad died in 1942 and other millions of simple russian people.
They died becous such as…ls as you , who believed in 1941 that NAzy were “more human” then the Soviets and joined to the Hitler in his Barbarossa ( the New Crusade to the East).
Bet you belong to the “small rat slav” nation that has been joined to the Axis.

Russia’s name in WW2 is tarnished by unspeakable crimes only slightly less serious to these of Germany and soviet barbarism is well documented not by “Goebbels” but by countries like Poland, Baltic Republics, Hungary, Romania … source materials are abundant so it doesnt matter how many accusations you make, facts are facts.

All those states, exept Poland, have a long list OWN crimes in Ukraine,Belorussia and Russia.
But you Nazis s…ker don’t know about this of couse.

#49

That is just absurd.

Never mind arguing about biased commentators, just go to the thousands of personal accounts of British, American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand POWs of the Germans who witnessed, and were appalled by, the vastly worse treatment dished out by the Germans in the Russian compounds. They were always given much worse rations than the other Allied prisoners, if they got any rations at all, to the extent that other Allied prisoners on many occasions threw food to them and nearly caused a riot because the Russians were starving. Disgust at the appalling treatment of the Russians gets a mention in many recollections of other Allied troops who were held in camps which had Russian compounds.

The Germans were not humane towards Russian POWs. They were outrageously and criminally inhumane. Unlike you, the Germans at the time didn’t even claim to be humane and they were in a better position to judge their own conduct.

From the very beginning, German policy on the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) was determined by Nazi ideology. German political and military leaders regarded Soviet POWs not only as racially less valuable but as potential enemies, obstacles in the German conquest of 'living space." The Nazi regime claimed that it was under no obligation for the humane care of prisoners of war from the Red Army because the Soviet Union had not ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, nor had it specifically declared its commitment to the 1907 Hague Convention on the Rules of War. Technically both nations, therefore, were bound only by the general international law of war as it had developed in modern times. Yet even under that law, prisoners of war were to be protected.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007183

Read any half way balanced histories and this is what you’ll find.

Because the targeted group consisted for the most part of soldiers in a bureaucratically-run modern army, the gendercide against Soviet prisoners-of-war is one of the best-documented of these case studies. Daniel Goldhagen, in Hitler’s Willing Executioners (p. 290), gives the astonishing figure of “2.8 million young, healthy Soviet POWs” killed by the Germans, “mainly by starvation … in less than eight months” of 1941-42, before “the decimation of Soviet POWs … was stopped” and the Germans “began to use them as laborers” (emphasis added). There is good reason to think that this rate of killing exceeds even the worst period of the Holocaust against the Jews, although the total number killed was lower, and the Soviet victims were drawn from a much larger population base. Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint write in Total War that “The total number of prisoners taken by the German armies in the USSR was in the region of 5.5 million. Of these the astounding number of 3.5 million or more had been lost by the middle of 1944 and the assumption must be that they were either deliberately killed or done to death by criminal negligence. Nearly two million of them died in camps and close on another million disappeared while in military custody either in the USSR or in rear areas; a further quarter of a million disappeared or died in transit between the front and destinations in the rear; another 473,000 died or were killed in military custody in Germany or Poland.” They add that “This slaughter of prisoners cannot be accounted for by the peculiar chaos of the war in the east. … The true cause was the inhuman policy of the Nazis towards the Russians as a people and the acquiescence of army commanders in attitudes and conditions which amounted to a sentence of death on their prisoners.”

These losses must be placed in the context of a war that killed as many as 40 million Soviets, including large numbers of non-combatants apart from the POWs. Nonetheless, Alexander Werth writes that “Next to the Jews in Europe, six million of whom perished at the hands of the Germans … the biggest single German crime was undoubtedly the extermination by hunger, exposure and in other ways of … [Soviet] war prisoners” (Russia At War, p. 634). Given that the bulk of the gendercide took place in just eight months, it was, together with the genocide in Rwanda, the most concentrated mass slaughter of all time, eclipsing the most exterminatory months of the Jewish holocaust. It was also without doubt the greatest single act of gender-exclusive killing in human history.

An important group of Soviet victims is also left out of these calculations: namely, those soldiers who never even reached captivity after surrendering. According to Ward Churchill, “perhaps as many as a million troops … were simply executed by Wehrmacht and Waffen SS units rather than being taken prisoner in the first place.” (Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide [City Lights Books, 1997], p. 48.)
http://www.gendercide.org/case_soviet.html

P.S. It’s bad form to pick up people, and particularly non-English speakers, on their English. It’s also very embarrassing for the critic when he makes basic mistakes himself in delivering the criticism.

But as you’re being a smartarse in picking up Chevan on his English, note for future usage that in your quote its should be it’s as it’s a contraction of it is and not a possessive of it.

.

#50

It’s not honest…
But why did you not teach the english lessons for me befor?:slight_smile:

#51

Because it would be easier to teach an ape to be a computer programmer. :smiley:

Although Microsoft seems to have tried that with some of its software. :wink:

Mate, seriously, your English is understandable (most of the time, anyway:D), where people like Warpig have better English but with thinking which nobody can understand.

Better to be historically knowledgeable and understood in English than to be fluent in English but still historically ignorant. :wink:

#52

None of the following accounts are from people likely to have been infected by any supposedly distorted Soviet version of history.

From New Zealand

Russian POW’s began to arrive at Stalag XVIIIA soon after Germany invaded Russia in 1941. These men were in a very poor state, most having traveled more than a thousand miles with very little food. Unfortunately they brought typhus into the camp and many prisoners died of the disease before it could be brought under control by the British doctors.

Russia was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention and so these prisoners received no Red Cross parcels or gifts from home. Every day a sack would be circulated around the British compound for any food that could be spared but this was far too little for so many.
http://www.angelfire.com/nd/domneal/powar.html

From America

There were thousands of Russian prisoners at the camp and those that assisted us when we arrived said that the showers we used were the same ones that many Jews had been put to death in. At one time the Russians were lined up in ranks for days at a time in the cold month of March. They were being starved to death in an attempt by the Germans to force them to volunteer for the German army. Most of these men were Mongolians and Ukrainians. I have one remembrance when many of them fell to the ground after a long time of standing in ranks and were left where they lay. We heard machine gun fire during the night and in the morning there were dozens of them hanging in the wire and electric fence. They must have attempted escape by crawling through the barbed wire fence that surrounded all of us. The Nazi guards seemed to take special delight in this “sport”. The British soldiers in the camp informed us that a few of the Russian men who previously did give in, were provided food, German uniforms and a propaganda speech before being shipped out and placed on the anti-aircraft guns that ringed the large cities being bombed. During the heavy air raids wave after wave of allied bombers blasted these positions and destroyed them completely. Germans considered Russian converts expendable.
…

One day during an air raid, the German guards left the compound and took refuge in an air raid shelter in the camp. With no guards present some of us, curious of conditions and concerned about our fellow prisoners were able to enter the barracks in the Russian compound about 50 yards away and were horrified at what we saw. Dead bodies were everywhere. Men were so weak from starvation they could not stand and there were many of them on the floor where they had fallen. There was no medical aid whatsoever for any Russians. On rare occasions the German’s would provide substantially more rations than normal and the starving prisoners would rush to get at the food. German guards, losing the slightest control at this point would bayonet these Russians, killing some, in order to maintain control. One has to wonder if this was a planned act.
http://carol_fus.tripod.com/army_hero_arthur_gage.html

From the New Zealand official history

Probably the greatest threat to health came from typhus fever, to which thousands of Russian prisoners and many German soldiers fell victim. Typhus fever raged through the Russian camps from November 1941. Two New Zealanders, Captain Foreman and Private Butler, NZMC, who, with Captain Stevenson-Wright, volunteered to go and assist at the hospital at the Russian camp at Neuhammer, developed typhus in March 1942, but both recovered. The sick at this hospital came from the 60,000 Russians in the nearby camp, where conditions were deplorable. Most of the cases treated in the hospital were suffering from starvation associated with hunger oedema, tuberculosis, dysentery, and typhus. The daily diet in the camp consisted of no more than 1200–1400 calories, and the diet for the sick Russians in hospital was 250 grammes of bread, 10 grammes of margarine, 10 grammes of sugar, and swede soup morning and evening. The hospital of twenty wooden barracks, each housing 100 patients, was overcrowded; there was no soap, medical supplies were very inadequate, and there were no laboratory and surgical facilities. There were 100–200 typhus cases in hospital at one time, and 80–90 Russians died each day. As far as typhus was concerned, good nursing was the only possible treatment. This description of the conditions of the Russians gives an indication of what could have been the fate of our own prisoners of war.
http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-WH2Surg-pt1-c27-6.html

A British view

There were French, Yugoslavian, Greek and Russian troops in the camp with us — 5,000 in all.

The Russian prisoners of war and civilians had been in the cattle trucks for weeks under terrible conditions. They were looked upon as vermin. A lot of the Russians had died, but as the ground was very hard and frozen, they were all stacked up ready to be buried by us when the ground thawed. Due to this, Typhus broke out, but the British were given vaccines supplied by the Red Cross.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/75/a7695075.shtml

#53

Without Russian POWs, some Germans had to live in their own shit.

Moorehead accidentally found himself amidst a debate between a German pastor and an American officer who was trying to find in a bomb shelter occupied by German civilians some space for refugees. The pastor agreed to help and show vacant premises.

‘I was in England before the war,’ the pastor said. ‘I had many friends there. This is the room for the air raid sirens. We were very much relieved when the bombers came and then passed on to some other place.’ He was making a big effort to speak English slowly and carefully. ‘Here is the first-aid. Here the ventilator room.’ In each room the attendants jumped up when we entered and stood to attention.

‘I must apologize for the lavatories,’ the pastor said. ‘Since the Russian prisoners went there has been no one to keep them clean.’

I asked why the Germans themselves could not clean their own lavatories, but he apparently did not understand and went on with some other subject. After half an hour I for one could stand no more, and we moved through the lower decks of the shelter towards the entrance.
http://www.argo.net.au/andre/Moorehead_2_ENGL.htm

#54

Yeah, a quote truly deserving of the Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” award…

The “humane” Ostheer and SS that would routinely strip Russian civilians of their winter clothing, and throw them out of their flats into subzero temperatures to die of exposure, must surely have treated their ‘guest’ Red Army soldiers to candy and tea!

#55

Warpig might be one of the pigs who subscribed to Orwell’s Animal Farm motto:

‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ :wink:

#56

Maybe he’s Squealer, rewriting the rules as needed on the wall. Much like his history…:wink:

I would suggest to him to read Anthony Beevor’s “Stalingrad.” A book that avoids neither the Red Army’s embarrassing breakdown of discipline and Stalin’s blunders. Nor does it spare the wanton brutality of the German’s conducting a pitiless War against both the military and civilian populations of the Soviet Union; and their use of food, the the lack of it, as a weapon of this War…

At the end of the day, for all the outrages of Soviet soldiers in Eastern Europe and Germany, the death toll is telling, and the Soviets is far higher than anyone’s. Save perhaps Poland’s if we count statistical proportion…

#57

Yes.

And their experience is something that none of us in the West can begin to comprehend.

The nearest thing anyone in the English speaking world experienced was the American Civil War, which was very gentle in comparison.

One advantage of being an outsider is that we can see the crimes of both sides without, as we often do with the crimes of our own side, having our national blinkers on.

But when it’s all weighed up, the Nazis started a vicious campaign of indiscriminate racial butchery and extermination and they reaped as they sowed.

It doesn’t make later Soviet actions right but, by Christ, it makes them bloody understandable!

On the other hand, the appalling Soviet treatment of their returning POW’s, the few that survived, is a disgrace and another blot on the conduct of those running the workers’ paradise.

#58

what did exactly happen to them?

#59

A substantial number of released Soviet PoWs (although probably not as many as popularly believed in the west) were shipped straight to the Gulag.

#60

So sorry we’re talking about a photo of a German soldier possibly throwing a grenade at an armoured car where there may be wounded crewmen ? It’s hardly the war crime of the century is it ? I’ve looked at the photo and I’d say its a staged one, if I’m 5 feet from an armoured car and 10 from a KV2 I’d not have my rifle on my shoulder.