LOL! I don't "like big numbers", and while it's important to consider Soviet figures, pre-1990 numbers, ESP. from the 40-ies and 50-ies are often tainted by politics and propaganda.thom wrote:So you like big numbers, and Soviet numbers of course. How about this one, from the Soviet Extraordinary commission (in million): 3.912 on the occupied Soviet territory, 0.808 on Polish and 0.340 on German territory = 5.060 million dead Soviet POWs in total.
Very interesting. But both of those figures are substantially lower than more reliable Russian post 1990-figures, which shows that 5,7 million Soviet soldiers were captured between 1941 and 1945, and more than 3.5 million died in captivity.And how about the figures of the Soviet repatriation authorities? They give us the year of capture for 1.570 million out of a total of 2.016 million POWs who were registered for repatriation after the war.
This of course also includes POWs that died as slavelabour, which German statistics may count as "released" because they were transfered from POW facilities. Slave-labor, which obviously is just a different form of captivity.
If we take the 5,7 million number from the Soviet archive as the most accurate, since it's also close to the German figure of almost 5,2 million (from here http://ww2stats.com/pow_ger_dead_sov.html), and subtract the 930 thousand that the German army reported in German custody in January 45, as well as the half million that the Red Army had liberated, and about one million, who were released as HIWIs and other formations, we're left with 3,3 millon dead POWs, a deathrate is almost 60%. (In reality the deathrate was even higher, because of the million HIWIs.)
Well, let's assume that the above figure is reliable. The Soviet repatriation authorities also dealt with POWs who were released from POW-camps because they entered service under German Authorities, as for example HIWIs, concentration camp guards or national regiments (The Armenian legion or Russian Liberation Army, for example). A substantial amount of those 753.000 might have been captured in 41, but at a later point entered service in the Wehrmacht, and therefore can't be considered POWs. in 45. And no, 750.000 Soviet HIWI's of one kind or another isn't too high a figure. According to Beevors Stalingrad, for example, HIWI's added up to a quarter of the 6th armys frontline strength.According to this incomplete data 753,000 of the POWs who were repatriated in 1945 were captured already in 1941.
I never said that German documents were unreliable or inaccurate, just that they shouldn't stand alone, and that you have to consider Soviet sources as well, to get an accurate picture.Goldhagen is surely not an expert on POW matters. And btw, his figure of 2.8 million comes also from a German document.
And what else would it be? Germany had only started their systematic programs to use POWs as slave labour at this point, so it's highly unlikely that that's where 2,8 million people went. Perhaps they just went home, is that what you suggest?But this document, from the rather less informed Ministry of Employment, states on 20th Feb. 1942 only that 1.1 million Soviet POWs remained from a total of 3.9 million captured. It is not stated anywhere in this document that the difference is the number of dead POWs.
That all depends on what exactly that number of 500.000 is, and how it was reached. I wouldn't be surprised, if the ministry only counted the number of dead within its own domain, for example.Instead, the document states that 500,000 POWs died between November 1941 and January 1942. So if you follow Goldhagen's logic you have to conclude that 2.3 million POWs died until October 1941 which is pure nonsense because the situation for Soviet POWs started to deteriorate only after that time.
Or starved to death, or transfered to concentration camps. According to "War against subhumans: comparisons between the German War against the Soviet Union and the American war against Japan" by James Weingartner, about 10% of all Soviet POWs were turned over to the SS-Totenkopfverbände concentration camp organization or the Einsatzgruppen death squads and murdered, between June 1941 and May 1944.The German POW figures which were in 1941 largely based on estimates were corrected at the end of 1941 down to 3.35 million. Hundreds of thousands of POWs were already released or escaped by that time.
Yes, but those stats wouldn't include the number of POWs who were shot after they surrendered, but before they were registered in POW-camps. It's difficult to estimate that number, but we can try by taking the 5,7 million POWs from Russian archives, and deduct the 5,1 million POWs that German authorities report as captured throughout the war in 1945. That's a difference of close to 600.000, a staggering, but not at all unrealistic number.The Chef Kriegsgefangenenwesen who was surely the best informed source on POW matters established the number of dead at 1.34 million until 1st Feb. 1942. This does not include those POWs who were selected and shot by the security police (16,000 until 5th Dec. 1941).
In Guido Knopps book "Hitler's Wehrmacht" a former German soldier tells how he discovered 4 months into Barbarossa, that a fellow soldier from his platoon was killing the POWs that he was supposed to be walking back to headquarters. It was usually him that got that task, but instead of taking them there, he'd wait till he was far enough away, let the POWs walk ahead, and then throw a grenade or two. Was it common practice? No, but it wouldn't have to be, to get a number that high. 600.000 prisoners killed after surrendering is only about 1000 men pr. division pr. year.