Sid Guttridge wrote:Hi Jesk,
You write, "It is worth noting that the allied armies which captured the 2.8 million German soldiers up to April 30, 1945, while Adolf Hitler was still alive and resisting as hard as he could, comprised at their peak 88 divisions,[11] which amounted to roughly 1.2 to 1.4 million men. The casualties suffered by the western allies in making this contribution to the defeat of the Wehrmacht were relatively light, 164,590 killed and 78,680 taken prisoner,[12] a total loss of 243,270 to inflict a loss of 2.8 million on the German army."
Yes, and have you wondered why?
Could it be that it was because the Red Army inflicted 80% of all German battle casualties and had ripped the guts out of much of the German Army by the time the Western Allies landed?
Could the high number of prisoners left in Western Allied hands also owe a lot to the fact that the German armies in the East deliberately tried to surrender en mass in the West?
Germans on the eastern front from June 1941 to May 1944, before the opening of the second front, lost 1.5 million soldiers killed and missing. That's not a lot. Only young ages that have reached 18 years, per year in Germany were 500 thousand. Soldiers born in 1924-1926 fully compensated for the irretrievable losses of the Wehrmacht in the east. The real defeat began in June 1944. The Allies took more prisoners. They had better operations on the environment.
The British actually had the highest number of German prisoners at the end of the war but, even as a patriotic Brit, I would not contend that this was a true reflection of the British contribution
There is no contribution of Russians, Americans or Britons. Hitler made mistakes. The appearance of German soldiers from Norway, Yugoslavia, Courland, Italy radically changed the situation. This is a dishonest fight. Germany without Hitler could not lose it.