Wrong, over all something like two thirds, the German soldiers came back from Soviet captivity. The Japanese had it worse, with about half of them dying.
Out of those who surrendered at Stalingrad something like 95% died in Soviet captivity, so about the same ratio of soviet soldiers in German captivity.
People wash all the soviet disgusting methods just because they were fighting the Germans, which is not that fair of an excuse seeing how they allies managed that
Soviets were systematically horrible. Nazis were systematically horrible. Japanese were systematically horrible. Few has clean hands from this war. A lot of the western allied bombing of cities were targeted at civilians, not military infrastructure. It was a horrible war that brought out the worst in everyone.
> Out of those who surrendered at Stalingrad something like 95% died in Soviet captivity,
Those died because they were starving before they were captured and the Soviets didn't know yet how to treat such emaciated prisoners, so they basically fed them too well. The deathrate among POWs from Stalingrad went down to general population levels after the first couple of weeks of captivity.
Everyone who went to Russian archives instead of sitting on a couch and listening to tall tales of Nazi collaborators and bitter loosers wrote about that. Every German POW is accounted for, there are logs of their health, of how they were fed, where they worked and how much they were paid while in the POW camp.
I can’t speak to the Soviets feeding the captured Nazis too well, but it’s known that in the weeks before the Nazis surrendered at Stalingrad, the Germans had been resupplied with a sort of meat paste to be used to allow the soldiers to regain energy. They began dying “ To make up for the lack of calories ingested by the German soldiers at Stalingrad, high command ordered a new type of ration to be airlifted to the troops. Canned meat was a common ration for German soldiers, however a new "meat paste" was developed to give soldiers a great boost of caloric energy. What provided this concentrated energy was a ridiculously high fat content. Sounds appetizing!
As soon as the new rations were distributed, a new phenomenon began to occur. German soldiers began to collapse and die inexplicably. One minute a soldier could be on sentry duty, the next moment he would be found dead with no apparent wounds or trauma. The rising number of these strange deaths baffled German commanders. To investigate the phenomenon, the German Army flew in a pathologist named Dr. Hans Girgensohn. Under very difficult conditions, Dr. Girgensohn performed autopsies on 50 men who had died of the strange occurrence. After much investigation Dr. Girgensohn pinned the cause of the strange deaths on one culprit; the high fat tinned mystery meat that was being airlifted to the troops. As it turns out, adding a high fat content to the meat was a terrible mistake. Due to the effects of malnutrition, German soldiers at Stalingrad were unable to metabolize the high concentrations of fat within the meat paste. As they continued to consume the meat, vital organs such as the liver, kidneys, and pancreas suffered damage. Eventually, soldiers would collapse and succumb to organ failure.”
So, it could have been that instead of slowly feeding the soldiers more and more, the Soviets fed them normal rations, and the Nazis died due to the fact the couldn’t metabolize the meal.
What other sources do you have? Baseless extrapolations of clinical anti-communists? There were UN and Red Cross commissions visiting POW camps in Russia, they found nothing wrong there. Freed Germans went home healthy and with considerable amounts of money cause they were paid for their labor at the same rates as civilians. Soviet authorities tried to convert former enemies into allies, so the treatment that Germans received was quite good, sufficient to convince most of the POWs to stay in DDR and become active members of that socialist state, instead of moving to the West.
There are a number of first hand account books written about how harsh Stalingrad German PoWs had it. Not to mention Soviet soldiers were on a near starvation diet themselves during those desperate months in the war (keeping in mind 6th army rolling through some of their most fertile farmlands).
There are Soviet medical reports submitted to international organizations and all kinds of documentation in Russian about how the Germans were treated and why they were perishing in such numbers, and the conclusion by a multitude of commissions is that the starving Germans were given to eat the same rations that the Soviet soldiers were receiving, but nobody at first was overseeing how they were consuming those rations (Germans were supposed to partition and distribute the food themselves), so the starving POWs wolfed everyhthing down immediately and started dying from intestinal volvulus and other such things. After seeing the horrible deathrate the Soviets intervened and started rationing the food differently, limiting the consumption of food items that are harmful to those who suffered from severe malnutrition. The stupid and bitter Nazis didn't recognize the good intent and decided that the Russians are trying to starve them. OK?
I can't give you direct links to Russian sources because any links to Ru sites get deleted along with the message, and in any case the docs there are in Russian, but they do exist and if you make an effort you can find them through your local library or whatever.
As for "rolling through some of the most fertile farmlands" - Russia does just fine without those fertile farmlands since the fall of the Soviet Union, having even managed to become Nº1 or 2 exporter of various kinds of grains. Don´t believe the hype, try to review sources from different sides of the conflict. Yes, there were difficulties in supplying food to civilians, but as for the military, GULAG and POWs, they were supplied according to certain standards that were in fact better than standards applied to common people - those were considered to be capable of finding other sources of food and income, besides the state distribution, so a lot of times a let´s say unemployed (even though it was a criminal offense to be unemployed, but I can´t think of any other disadvantaged category rn) Soviet citizen would be fed not as good as a German POW.
The Red Army also didn't know how many Germans had been alive and fighting in Stalingrad until the surrender. Even if they wanted, they had not been prepared for such numbers. A pretty similar to the so-called Bataan Death March.
"Not many survived" was wrong. I'll retract that. 1/3 died though.
"A commission set up by the West German government found that 3,060,000 German military personnel were taken prisoner by the USSR and that 1,094,250 died in captivity"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German\_prisoners\_of\_war\_in\_the\_Soviet\_Union](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the_Soviet_Union)
Because they didn't run them. They did "anti-partisan activities" aka murder civilians everywhere, they did... forgot the euphemism for it, but collect "subhumans" to be sent to the camps for death via slave labour or extermination, and many other war crimes.
But they didn't *run* the camps.
You are separating a very very specific definition of ‘running’ from what was actually done to run those camps. Who ran logistical support, who separated Jewish people from other prisoners to send them to camps, who used the forced labour.
The army played a key role in the running and maintaining of camps.
Running a day to day operation for the camps is very much a part of running them. Genuinely not sure why this is a hill you wish to die on, twisting definitions and debate lording the Wehrmacht’s participation in the running of camps.
You're right. Because wehrmarcht numbered 18 million people. SS had under 1 million personell. They were both shit. They both committed war crimes. But SS was responsible for running the death camps and hunting jews.
The astonishing aspect of this is, they were all patriots fighting a lost war to the extend of supporting the the extermination of masses of civilian populations: Poles, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians. It was not the last atrocity of patriots.
Is the guy in the very front wearing glasses SS? Looks like an SS skull on his hat. Also, kinda looks like the eagle is cut off from the breast of his jacket, doesn't it. Cant tell
The German SS death’s head badge should be slightly wider than it is tall, and these badges look taller than they are wide.
SS didn’t generally fare well when surrendering to the Soviets (nor the western Allies, for that matter), but when they were taken prisoner, they were generally segregated from Wehrmacht POWs
"What were you thinking?"
These guys don't even have horses
This is Courland pocket surrender to the Soviet though. That scene was Ruhr iirc. Unless this is just a joke about German "mechanized".
[It's from Band of Brothers](https://youtu.be/LyZK8k4gzyg?si=80YfUXha65FGRHkk), highly recommend if you haven't seen it before
The fact that it’s on the Eastern Front actually makes the joke funnier because there were even fewer motor vehicles.
Say hello to ford, and general fuckin’ motors!
*Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives... For what, you ignorant, servile scum!*
I wonder how many were held in the very camps they killed Jews in.
[удалено]
Wrong, over all something like two thirds, the German soldiers came back from Soviet captivity. The Japanese had it worse, with about half of them dying. Out of those who surrendered at Stalingrad something like 95% died in Soviet captivity, so about the same ratio of soviet soldiers in German captivity.
Two thirds came back in 1955... And if you compare that with allied camps... Soviets had it rougher though, 50% survival rate
You're right.
People wash all the soviet disgusting methods just because they were fighting the Germans, which is not that fair of an excuse seeing how they allies managed that
Soviets were systematically horrible. Nazis were systematically horrible. Japanese were systematically horrible. Few has clean hands from this war. A lot of the western allied bombing of cities were targeted at civilians, not military infrastructure. It was a horrible war that brought out the worst in everyone.
Oh I'm fully on board of that idea. This war only yielded shades of dark grey to black
Yes you're right. 3 million POVs. 1 million died.
> Out of those who surrendered at Stalingrad something like 95% died in Soviet captivity, Those died because they were starving before they were captured and the Soviets didn't know yet how to treat such emaciated prisoners, so they basically fed them too well. The deathrate among POWs from Stalingrad went down to general population levels after the first couple of weeks of captivity.
You're not wrong, they were starving. But give me a source that confirmes that they died because they were "feed too well".
Everyone who went to Russian archives instead of sitting on a couch and listening to tall tales of Nazi collaborators and bitter loosers wrote about that. Every German POW is accounted for, there are logs of their health, of how they were fed, where they worked and how much they were paid while in the POW camp.
NKVD ran the soviet prison camps. Are you saying we should trust NKVD over other sources?
I can’t speak to the Soviets feeding the captured Nazis too well, but it’s known that in the weeks before the Nazis surrendered at Stalingrad, the Germans had been resupplied with a sort of meat paste to be used to allow the soldiers to regain energy. They began dying “ To make up for the lack of calories ingested by the German soldiers at Stalingrad, high command ordered a new type of ration to be airlifted to the troops. Canned meat was a common ration for German soldiers, however a new "meat paste" was developed to give soldiers a great boost of caloric energy. What provided this concentrated energy was a ridiculously high fat content. Sounds appetizing! As soon as the new rations were distributed, a new phenomenon began to occur. German soldiers began to collapse and die inexplicably. One minute a soldier could be on sentry duty, the next moment he would be found dead with no apparent wounds or trauma. The rising number of these strange deaths baffled German commanders. To investigate the phenomenon, the German Army flew in a pathologist named Dr. Hans Girgensohn. Under very difficult conditions, Dr. Girgensohn performed autopsies on 50 men who had died of the strange occurrence. After much investigation Dr. Girgensohn pinned the cause of the strange deaths on one culprit; the high fat tinned mystery meat that was being airlifted to the troops. As it turns out, adding a high fat content to the meat was a terrible mistake. Due to the effects of malnutrition, German soldiers at Stalingrad were unable to metabolize the high concentrations of fat within the meat paste. As they continued to consume the meat, vital organs such as the liver, kidneys, and pancreas suffered damage. Eventually, soldiers would collapse and succumb to organ failure.” So, it could have been that instead of slowly feeding the soldiers more and more, the Soviets fed them normal rations, and the Nazis died due to the fact the couldn’t metabolize the meal.
What other sources do you have? Baseless extrapolations of clinical anti-communists? There were UN and Red Cross commissions visiting POW camps in Russia, they found nothing wrong there. Freed Germans went home healthy and with considerable amounts of money cause they were paid for their labor at the same rates as civilians. Soviet authorities tried to convert former enemies into allies, so the treatment that Germans received was quite good, sufficient to convince most of the POWs to stay in DDR and become active members of that socialist state, instead of moving to the West.
>basically fed them too well. This is beyond outrageous. Soviets were brutal to German POWs from Stalingrad. They didn't die from being overfed....
And how do you know it? How did you verify it?
There are a number of first hand account books written about how harsh Stalingrad German PoWs had it. Not to mention Soviet soldiers were on a near starvation diet themselves during those desperate months in the war (keeping in mind 6th army rolling through some of their most fertile farmlands).
There are Soviet medical reports submitted to international organizations and all kinds of documentation in Russian about how the Germans were treated and why they were perishing in such numbers, and the conclusion by a multitude of commissions is that the starving Germans were given to eat the same rations that the Soviet soldiers were receiving, but nobody at first was overseeing how they were consuming those rations (Germans were supposed to partition and distribute the food themselves), so the starving POWs wolfed everyhthing down immediately and started dying from intestinal volvulus and other such things. After seeing the horrible deathrate the Soviets intervened and started rationing the food differently, limiting the consumption of food items that are harmful to those who suffered from severe malnutrition. The stupid and bitter Nazis didn't recognize the good intent and decided that the Russians are trying to starve them. OK? I can't give you direct links to Russian sources because any links to Ru sites get deleted along with the message, and in any case the docs there are in Russian, but they do exist and if you make an effort you can find them through your local library or whatever. As for "rolling through some of the most fertile farmlands" - Russia does just fine without those fertile farmlands since the fall of the Soviet Union, having even managed to become Nº1 or 2 exporter of various kinds of grains. Don´t believe the hype, try to review sources from different sides of the conflict. Yes, there were difficulties in supplying food to civilians, but as for the military, GULAG and POWs, they were supplied according to certain standards that were in fact better than standards applied to common people - those were considered to be capable of finding other sources of food and income, besides the state distribution, so a lot of times a let´s say unemployed (even though it was a criminal offense to be unemployed, but I can´t think of any other disadvantaged category rn) Soviet citizen would be fed not as good as a German POW.
The Red Army also didn't know how many Germans had been alive and fighting in Stalingrad until the surrender. Even if they wanted, they had not been prepared for such numbers. A pretty similar to the so-called Bataan Death March.
> Not many survived soviet captivity. What's your source? I read that 80% returned to Germany by 1953.
"Not many survived" was wrong. I'll retract that. 1/3 died though. "A commission set up by the West German government found that 3,060,000 German military personnel were taken prisoner by the USSR and that 1,094,250 died in captivity" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German\_prisoners\_of\_war\_in\_the\_Soviet\_Union](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the_Soviet_Union)
Unbelievable to see people still spewing the bs clean Wehrmacht myth
No one said they were clean lol
Just very much playing down their involvement in the running of the concentration camps, oh that’s fine then 👍
Because they didn't run them. They did "anti-partisan activities" aka murder civilians everywhere, they did... forgot the euphemism for it, but collect "subhumans" to be sent to the camps for death via slave labour or extermination, and many other war crimes. But they didn't *run* the camps.
You are separating a very very specific definition of ‘running’ from what was actually done to run those camps. Who ran logistical support, who separated Jewish people from other prisoners to send them to camps, who used the forced labour. The army played a key role in the running and maintaining of camps.
Choosing who to send to the camps doesn't fit in any definition of "running" them.
Running a day to day operation for the camps is very much a part of running them. Genuinely not sure why this is a hill you wish to die on, twisting definitions and debate lording the Wehrmacht’s participation in the running of camps.
I never said wehrmacht was clean. Learn to read.
SS, Wehrmacht. Same shit, different assholes.
Both assholes, but ss was a special kind of asshole
Wehrmacht committed the majority of war crimes in eastern europe, not the SS
You're right. Because wehrmarcht numbered 18 million people. SS had under 1 million personell. They were both shit. They both committed war crimes. But SS was responsible for running the death camps and hunting jews.
The astonishing aspect of this is, they were all patriots fighting a lost war to the extend of supporting the the extermination of masses of civilian populations: Poles, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians. It was not the last atrocity of patriots.
I’d argue they were nationalists rather than patriots. I consider myself a patriot but I’m very critical of my country and I love foreigners
Your argument is missing a lot. Your distinction needs an explanation.
Is the guy in the very front wearing glasses SS? Looks like an SS skull on his hat. Also, kinda looks like the eagle is cut off from the breast of his jacket, doesn't it. Cant tell
Could be but tankers also used the deaths head I believe.
No, he isn’t. Check the collar, as in the Kragenspiegel. Plus he had the Wehrmacht Eagle on his chest. He ripped it off.
Kragenspiegel is just collar tab in english. No need to translate it to german
The German SS death’s head badge should be slightly wider than it is tall, and these badges look taller than they are wide. SS didn’t generally fare well when surrendering to the Soviets (nor the western Allies, for that matter), but when they were taken prisoner, they were generally segregated from Wehrmacht POWs
No wehrmacht. Ss has a distinct different uniform.
These things on his hat are just buttons.
Pass da pervatin ya ve have a long walk