Exactly. 
Hard not to agree.
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.
What “returning POWs” do you mean?
May be the former Vlasovs’ colloborationists who run away to the Western zone and have been later passed to the Soviets ?
From Alan Clarke in ‘‘Barbarossa’’
…the obsessive German passion for carving notches on their guns has left us with a specific record of the treatment according to pow’s. Recorded deaths in pow cages and compounds, 1,981,000. In addition to this is the sinister heading ‘‘deaths and disappearances in transit’’ with the total of 1,308,000. When these figures are augmented by the very large [but unverifiable] totals of men who were simply done to death on the spot where they surrendered, without ever passing through the prison cages…along with the mass murders and deportations, was the ‘‘deliberate starvation of prisoner cages’’
This is excellent book of Alan Clarke.
Can you link it in english?
Not in book form, just reviews.
I bought it in a reprint about 10 years ago, and as you say, it’s an excellent read.
My understanding was that Stalin was concerned that just about all returning POWs might have been contaminated by Vlasov or were otherwise potentially untrustworthy, so he had most of them arrested on their return, whether or not they were part of Vlasov’s army.
My understanding is that it was unpatriotic and criminal to surrender.
There´s the well known story of a Soviet POW who stole a He 111 and flew himself and other POW´s back to the USSR, only to be imprisoned until after Stalin´s death for example. Later he got the Hero of the Soviet Union medal.
Seems they were treated as traitors.
Interesting story.Have you link on it?
I mean i am interested of English version. What were the other POWs?
Can´t find any of “my” sources, but Googled it right now…
http://minaev.blogspot.com/2008/02/february-8-in-russian-history.html
From this he was released in November 1945, and if correct, this is many years earlier than have been stated in what I´ve read…
Anyway, it´s a good story.
(Some British POW´s managed to hijack an Italian aircraft while airborne. Those are the only two cases of succesful POW hijacked aircraft in WWII).
I agree with most of the above assessment. Unfortunately the French leadership was very uneven and their initial counter-thrust into German was poorly thought out. But Verdun may have been the single biggest factor in the defeat of the German Army in WWI.
The British offensives were ever important. But we cannot forget that the American contribution is what drove the Germans to launch a desperate offensive in 1918 in order to knock France out of the War before the US could overwhelm them. In a sense, even the threat of US arms haunted German commanders and forced desperate gambles that caused them to attrit their forces. Despite fumbling badly as far as tactics (US commanders often arrogantly dismissed British advice), the Belleau Wood (showing that even green US Marines could quickly match German experience with higher morale and the blissful ignorance of the horrors of War) and the sheer exuberance of fresh US soldiers and Marines demoralized the Germans, whose soldiers had been ground down by fours years of near constant battle.
Also, it should be noted that German advances in 1918 were severally hindered not just by Allied resistance, but by the fact that their own Army was becoming unglued and German soldiers began to ignore orders and gorged themselves on foodstuffs and alcohol in captured French towns as the typically disciplined, well trained German Army devolved into a looting mob at times preventing them from exploiting breakthroughs. I think this was no small problem according to some historians as the British, French, and certainly the US troops were much better fed and it was noticed that while German soldiers were certainly not emaciated, the blockade had no small effect on the overall poor nutrition and redundant diet of German soldiers, and certainly of German’s overall…
Good question.
What did convert the WWI Germans into Nazis with their anti-Semitic and Lebensraum and anti-Eastern European views?
There’s no connection between Western Front experiences of the likes of Hitler and Goering and their later genocidal obsessions.
Deserves a separate thread.
Definitely.
If are you ready to discuss the very thin anti-semitic question mate?
You might start new thread about it.
Or to ask a Nick?..
Soviet frontline “justice”, applied by red army soldiers, stalinist stile, images of Germany and East prussia ( todays Poland), taken by the weekly newsreel after a sucessful german counterattack, march 1945.
What do those pictures prove?
Anyone can put captions on pictures of corpses.
Let’s accept for the purposes of debate that Soviets, which comprised Russians and many other Eastern European ethnic groups across a range to Mongols, did terrible things to people in the war.
Let’s also recognise who started it, and who started abominable assaults on people in the East because they were untermensch or were in the way of getting some lebensraum.
What do we end up with?
Both sides did bad things.
If we are barracking for one side we will see all that they did as evil, and what the other side did as just.
And vice versa.
I’m not barracking for either side, so I see that they both did bad things.
But, for what it’s worth, I reckon the aggressor who loses a gutter fight has no grounds for complaining about how he lost the fight he started. If you can’t handle defeat, however it came about, don’t start the fight. Don’t whinge that you got your balls cut off when you were only kicking your opponent in the balls.
That’s no consolation to the poor bastards on the defeated aggressor’s side caught up in the fight who wanted no part of it, but if they have any complaint they should direct it to their people who started the fight.
The Soviets wouldn’t have been in Germany in 1945 if the Germans hadn’t gone into Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland years earlier, regardless of the division of the east between Germany and the USSR in some of those events.
It’s the same as the Japanese whingeing about being nuked. It would never have happened if they didn’t start the war.
Now, for a demonstration of how the scars of the European war have long been healed: 
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1k7U-_tJVmw
Another classic Wochenschau massacre at Lyov ( Todays Poland, near the border the former USSR)
Die Deutsche Wochenschau No. 566. July 9, 1941. German units advance upon Lemberg (L’vov).
- Those are Soviet roads. Lemberg, the city shows the signs of heavy battle.Bavarian mountain troops, the same troops who in the fall of 1939 fought for this city, have captured it again this time.
- The Ukrainian population heartily greets the German troops as their liberators from the bloody terror of Bolshevism. The Jewish agents of the GPU had slaughtered countless Ukrainian nationalists just prior fleeing the city. Thousand of innocent men and women were victims of the Bolshevik bloodbath. Here the bestial cruel murders took place.And they set fire to the evidence of their indescribable crimes at the prison, which has been captured by German troops. The fire has already been put out. And thus ceaselessly come out these monstrous criminal discoveries. The victims of these bestial murders are dragged out to be identified.Men and women, children and the elderly, none escaped this example of inhumanity. With knives,axes, hand grenades and machine pistols were these innocent victims slaughtered and martyred by the Bolshevik murderers.
PZ if you will use a “classic Wochenschau” as a reliable source you soon should learn that the Falkland Island belongs the Agrentina:)
As for the Lvov ( not Lyov) - this city TODAY ( and ALWAYS) was Ukraininan since the 1918 , except the period of Polish occupation 1920-1939.
The Jewish agents of the GPU had slaughtered countless Ukrainian nationalists just prior fleeing the city.[/b] Thousand of innocent men and women were victims of the Bolshevik bloodbath. Here the bestial cruel murders took place.And they set fire to the evidence of their indescribable crimes at the prison, which has been captured by German troops. The fire has already been put out. And thus ceaselessly come out these monstrous criminal discoveries. The victims of these bestial murders are dragged out to be identified.Men and women, children and the elderly, none escaped this example of inhumanity. With knives,axes, hand grenades and machine pistols were these innocent victims slaughtered and martyred by the Bolshevik murderers.
Therefore the liberators have started the OWN terror after the capturing of Ukraine.
In lvov they start to kill immediatelly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Lviv_professors
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union started in June 1941, Lviv was captured on June 30. Along with the Wehrmacht, a number of smaller Abwehr units entered the city.
During the Nazi occupation almost all of the 120,000 Jewish inhabitants of the city were killed. All that survived at the end of the war were 200-800 Jewish inhabitants.
Members of other ethnic groups also suffered. In order to control the population, prominent citizens and intellectuals were transported to known execution sites such as the Gestapo prison on Pełczyńska Street, the Brygidki Prison, the former military prison at Zamarstynów and to the fields surrounding the city: in the suburb of Winniky, the Kortumówky hills and the Jewish Cemetery. Many of the people killed were prominent Polish politicians, artists, sportsmen, scientists and priests.
According the Wochenschau just “REVENGE” to Jews for the killed nationalists :shock:
There was no “Germans succesfull countreattack” in march 1945 in Eastern Prussia.
Probably this is the october-december 1944 , near Nemmersdorf ( Mayakovskoe carrenty)
Nazic excedeed the Red Civil terror in handreds of times.
In Kiev they immediatelly after the cupturing of city started the Ethnical mass execution in sadly know place- Babi Yar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar
The massacres of September 29-30, 1941
On September 28, leaflets in Russian, Ukrainian and German languages were posted in Kiev. The Russian announcement read:
(From the Russian translation) All Jews[7] of the city of Kiev and its environs must appear on Monday, September 29, 1941, by 8:00 AM on the corner of Melnіkov and Dokterivsky streets (near the cemetery). You are to take your documents, money, valuables, warm clothes, linen etc. Whoever of the Jews does not fulfill this order and is found in another place, shall be shot. Any citizen who enters the apartments that have been left and takes ownership of items will be shot.[8]
Public announcement of September 28, 1941 in Russian, Ukrainian and German.More than thirty thousand of Kievan Jews gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be loaded onto trains for deportation. The commander of the Einsatzkommando reported two days later:
Because of ‘our special talent of organisation’, 'the Jews still believed to the very last moment before being executed that indeed all that was happening was that they were being resettled.[9]
The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children could not have known what was happening until it was too late: by the time they heard the gunfire, there was no chance to escape. According to the testimony of truck driver Hofer:
I watched what happened when the Jews - men, women, and children - arrived. The Ukrainians led them past a number of different places where one after the other they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes and over-garments and also underwear. They also had to leave their valuables in a designated place. There was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly and anyone who hesitated was kicked or pushed by the Ukrainians to keep them moving.
Victims were then ordered to undress, beaten if they resisted, and then shot at the edge of the Babi Yar gorge. According to the Einsatzgruppen Operational Situation Report[11], 33,771 Jews from Kiev and its suburbs were systematically shot dead by machine-gun fire at Babi Yar on September 29 and September 30, 1941.
All the propaganda in WW2 both allied and Axis is a mixture of true and lies, the german Wochenschau is not the exception to that rule.
The hard thing is to be capable to recognize the truth even in this staged films, but the truth is there if you are intelligent enough.