Article I wrote on war crimes against Germans

[Lieutenant S. Chuikov]

I wrote this article about the war crimes that were committed against Germans. Did I do a good job and is it accurate?

http://en.lexipedium.org/wiki/War_crime ... tern_Front

[durb]

I think that the basics were largely correct, but these are controversial matters. When it comes to claims to the rape of German women of older age (70) by Red Army soldiers, I remember to have read that this indeed occurred sometimes. It is also known that the famous general G. Zhukov took measures to prevent forced or unforced sexual relationships between Red Army soldiers and German women. Stalin was known to think that the soldiers had some right to "pleasure" after all the hard fighting. It of course stopped when they started to build the more regular administration on the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany - at that point Stalin decided that soldiers had already enough "pleasure" and no more. Raping had to stop before the communist system could be built in East Germany. The order to stop raping was taken seriously by some Red Army officers and some rapers were executed.

Another thing is also the treatment of German PoW´s in Soviet Union. IIRC, the death rate of German and Finnish war prisoners was about 30-40 % in Soviet PoW camps - comparable to death rates of Allied PoW´s in notorious Japanese PoW camps. Most deaths were caused by malnutrition, bad housing conditions, unhygienic conditions etc. Italian PoW´s (there was a Italian army at German Eastern Front) had it worst - probably the harsh winter conditions caused a death rate of 50 %. It is also known that "brain washing" methods were used regularly against PoW´s to convert them in communism. Soviets kept PoW´s in their camps many years after the war - some prisoners were released as late as in mid and late 1950´s.

There is also the issue of Allied bombing campaigns against Germans. The destruction bombing of German cities was of the same nature as the German bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam, London etc. Civilians were the real targets of these bombings of "strategic nature". It is also known that Allied (and I mean RAF and USAAF) fighters attacked trains transporting only civilians - and these were probably not the only civilian targets strafed by Allied fighters.

[David Thompson]

No-content posts from Hawkwind and Karelia were removed by the moderator -- DT.

Gentlemen -- We're looking for fact-based analysis here. If you don't have any, don't bother to post.

[Cerdic]

Good article. I'd question one part though:

The Nazis, in a final act of betrayal, were responsible for intentionally contributing to the suffering of Germans and the extent of mass murder and rape.

The rest of the text doesn't prove to me the Nazis intentionally took actions to increase the suffering of the German people. Refusing to evacuate people from certain areas sounds unintentional in that respect, as the intention was apparently something else (the will to keep on fighting, etc.)

[steve248]

I notice that your article quotes the PhD dissertation of Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen (University of MInnesota and USHMM Fellow) for the rapes in the Soviet Union by Germans. I could only find an abstract on-line of her dissertation and broadly speaking she has two lines of research for the sexual violence; (1) documented use of women in military brothels in the Soviet Union and Poland, and (2) mainly eyewitness and hearsay evidence for rape outside the brothels. In both cases she mentions Jewish and non-Jewish women as victims of rape.

Obviously the on-line abstract did not give the footnoted sources to her dissertation but I am familiar with Robert Sommer's book, "Das KZ-Bordell. Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern", Schoningh/Paderborn, 2009, which also devotes a section to military brothels (not KZ) in the east, and well sourced to archival references. The women forced to work in these brothels were not Jewish as Nazi racial propaganda had pictured all Jewish women as diseased. There were exceptions reported but in the main Jewish women were not involved in the brothels. From my own research into Einsatzgruppe D activities in the south, the idea of "taking" Jewish women for sexual purposes appears to be strictly taboo. Non-Jewish women were taken.

I am therefore somewhat puzzled over why there is an over emphasis on Jewish women being raped or used in brothels when most evidence points the other way. Especially when you consider that most towns and villages had been made "Judenfrei" by mass executions.

The non-evacuation of civilians in the face of advancing Soviet troops and suicides among those who chose to remain can be refuted in part. Making their way west from Poland into Germany were thousands upon thousands of civilians, especially the ethnic Germans who had been brought from the Soviet Union to resettle in Poland. As late as the summer and autumn of 1944 trains brought ethnic Germans from southern Ukraine to Poland and dumped them them there. Soviet advances decided them to keep moving west on foot, with horses and carts. Once through the Wartheland into Germany proper draft-age men were picked out to join the fighting. The same went went for German men capable of fighting who were older and resident in eastern Germany and the borderlands. Women and children, the really elderly were allowed to keep moving west. Some of the elderly decided they did not want to go and many, many of these did commit suicide. Some younger people also. But there will always be problems with the numbers involved.

Overall I thought you article informative and judging by my comments above, thought provoking.