Torture

[stg 44]

I've been reading some first person accounts on the fighting on the Eastern Front from the German side and they all mention torture meted out by the Soviets on German PoWs and apparently the Wehrmacht had a branch dedicated to investigating this stuff, substantiating a lot of it. David Glantz even cites a document that was a discussion between Zhukov and Stalin about a German deserter with information about a German offensive in 1941 and Stalin told Zhukov to be less trusting and torture the man to death to get the 'real' information out of him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wehrm ... _1939-1945
But it would seem about half the records are missing, primarily those dealing with Soviet war crimes. How prevalent was torture/mutilation on the Eastern Front? It is talked about quite frequently in the 1st person narratives, sometimes in quite gruesome detail.

[Denying-History]

Torture wasn't common against normal troops but wasn't exactly awful as for the eastern front most likely most people who surrendered to the Soviets were shot, with the exceptions of the surrender of entire armies. As can be seen with any records when it came to taking prisoners only high ranks would be tortured while for ether side on the eastern front the average soldier would be sent to a concentration camp with a form of some kind of harsh conditions for soviets while mostly germans captured on Russian soil were sent to the Gulag. As for others they were placed in harsh condition labor or provisional pow camps for time being before they would be put in a more suitable pow camp.

[htk]

You you mean torture as a measure from intelligence people to extract information or ad hoc torture/mis treatment by soldiers on POWs ?

[Denying-History]

Yeah, the torture of higher ranks was for the gain of information. Such as battle plans and or strategies used, as well mistreatment did exist... a bit to much for both soviet and German POW from the eastern-front... It can be seen with the death rates of the POW.


Russian POWs held by Germans: 57.5%
German POWs held by Russians: 35.8%
American POWs held by Japanese: 33.0%
German POWs held by Eastern Europeans: 32.9%
British POWs held by Japanese: 24.8%
British POWs held by Germans: 3.5%
German POWs held by French: 2.58%
German POWs held by Americans: 0.15%
German POWs held by British: 0.03%

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ary_Defeat

The Germans deliberately murdered Soviet POW's rather commonly within their concentration camps... There's quite a lot behind it but long story short on the Eastern front it was majority of the time Torture for Information... and the people tortured were higher ups.

I do have some records from Majdanek of the Germans Torturing Soviet POW's to death but this was not for Information. It was only for sadistic fun.

[Larry D.]

While there is a lot of published material on this subject in the German language, there is very little in English that is both comprehensive and authoritative. Here is one of the few exceptions:

de Zayas, Alfred M. The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989. ISBN: 0-8032-9908-7. Pb. 364p. Illus. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

According to the author, most or much of the investigative files for the Eastern Front did survive the war and they are indeed grisly. So it may be a matter of the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg withholding them from researchers for political reasons.

IMO, anyone pursuing this subject needs to read this book before commencing their research.

L.