Of 120,000 soldiers from 6th army captured, only 5000 return

ncrecon1 · Post by **ncrecon1** » 29 Oct 2005 07:07

My grandfather was one of the 5000 to make it back from stalinbrad.i have his picture he was in a panzer unit .No food and fought all the way back,im trying to find more info on him but dont know how, can anyone help (Gerhard Zaeske)

nny · Post by **nny** » 29 Oct 2005 08:27

Its sad. Alot of people are able to dismiss what happened to a horrendous number of German troops because of what certain Germans did to Soviet troops. What these frontline Germans had to do with the Germans who committed atrocities has never been adequately explained to me. It is either "Stalin and His Hangmen" by Donald Rayfield, or "Gulag: A History" by Anne Applebaum which describes a Jewish woman exclaiming to her captors in the Gulag that she is Jewish, not German and how she is spared 'their' fate. Those who would like to portray the Gulag as some sort of 'unviersal' experience are usually the same people who would like to portray Stalin as a 'big pussycat'. Depending on the political climate, people were treated differently in the Gulag, this is true of the Germans, Ukrainians, Crimeans, and the Jews. Steven Ambrose mentions the chasm evident in the POW survival rates during WWII, he suggests that the Germans falling into Soviet hands stood a 1 in 5 chance of surviving (80% would die) and that Soviets in German hands would stand a 1 in 3 chance of survivuing (66% would die) (Citizen Soldiers). The general argument goes "The Germans murdered Soviet POWs, so the German POWs don't mean that much". But as time goes by, and the 'closeness' of WWII fades, a murder becomes a murder, and because 2 out of 3 Soviets died in German captivity doesn't exonerate 4 out of 5 Germans dying in Soviet captivity.

David Thompson · Post by **David Thompson** » 29 Oct 2005 10:03

nny -- You wrote:

Steven Ambrose mentions the chasm evident in the POW survival rates during WWII, he suggests that the Germans falling into Soviet hands stood a 1 in 5 chance of surviving (80% would die) and that Soviets in German hands would stand a 1 in 3 chance of survivuing (66% would die) (Citizen Soldiers). The general argument goes "The Germans murdered Soviet POWs, so the German POWs don't mean that much". But as time goes by, and the 'closeness' of WWII fades, a murder becomes a murder, and because 2 out of 3 Soviets died in German captivity doesn't exonerate 4 out of 5 Germans dying in Soviet captivity.

I don't think these figures for German POW deaths in Soviet custody are correct, whether or not Ambrose gave them. Current estimates for German POW deaths in Soviet captivity during and after WWII range from 11.8% (Overmans) to 35.6% (Maschke Commission).
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 238#709238

For more information see Roberto Muehlenkamp's detailed post at: http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 327#112327

michael mills · Post by **michael mills** » 30 Oct 2005 12:44

One needs to distinguish between Germans captured by Soviet forces in the course of the war, and those who went into Soviet captivity in the final months of the war and after the German surrender, the second group constituting the great majority of the total number of German POWs in Soviet hands.

The death rate of the first group was very high, as much as 90% in some cases. The death rate of the ordinary soldiers taken prisoner at Stalingrad (but not of the officers!) was typical for most of the war. The one-in-four chance of survival given by Ambrose most probably refers to Germans taken prisoner from the beginning of Barbarossa until the last months of the war.

The death rate among the second group, comprising the majority of the German POWs, was much lower, mainly because the fighting had ceased and better care could be taken of the prisoners. When the two groups are taken together, the death rate for all German POWs was of the order of the 35% given by Maschke, which obscures the much higher death rate among the Germans captured during most of the course of the war.

I do not know where Overmans' figure of 11.8 % comes from. Perhaps it was derived by excluding from the calculation all German soldiers listed as missing in action, on the assumption that they were killed in action and not taken prisoner only to diue in captivity, and only taking into account those German POWs who were officially advised to the ICRC by the Soviet authorities (possibly only a minority of total prisoners taken). However, that is only a surmise.

WalterS · Post by **WalterS** » 31 Oct 2005 22:44

One should also make a distinction between the Germans, who invaded the Soviet Union with the intent of murdering or enslaving its population, and the Russians, who didn't.

Since this thread is discussing the treatment of prisoners, here is what historian Antony Beevor says about German treatment of Soviet prisoners.

It should not be forgotten that 600 Soviet prisoners of war were gassed in Auschwitz on 3 September 1941. This was the first experimentation there with Zyklon B.

For those [Soviet prisoners] who reached prisoner-of-war camps alive, the chance of survival turned out to be not much better than one in three. Altogether, over three million Red Army soldiers out of 5.7 million died in German camps from disease, exposure, starvation and ill-treatment. The German Army itself, not the SS nor any other Nazi organization, was responsible for prisoners of war. Its attitude was reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm II's remark in 1914 that the 90,000 Russian prisoners captured at Tannenburg 'should be left to starve.'

Beevor: Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-43, p.59

nny wrote:

Its sad. Alot of people are able to dismiss what happened to a horrendous number of German troops because of what certain Germans did to Soviet troops. What these frontline Germans had to do with the Germans who committed atrocities has never been adequately explained to me.

Obviously, nny's understanding of what the war in the east was all about is incomplete. nny is either ignorant of, or chooses to ignore, the complicity of the Wehrmacht, "these frontline Germans," in the mass murder that was Nazi policy in the east.

The idea of Rassenkampf, or 'race war,' gave the Russian campaign its unprecedented character. Many historians now argue that Nazi propaganda had so effectively dehumanized the Soviet enemy in the eyes of the Wehrmacht that it was morally anaesthetized from the start of the invasion. Perhaps the greatest measure of successful indoctrination was the almost negligible opposition within the Wehrmacht to the mass execution of Jews, which was deliberately confused with the notion of rear-area security measures against partisans. Many officers were affronted by the Wehrmacht's abandonment of international law on the Ostfront, but only the tiniest minority voiced disgust at the massacres, even when it became clear that they belonged to a programme of racial extermination.

ibid, p. 15

To further assist nny in understanding the nature of the conflict in the east, and the Wehrmacht's role in the Nazi policy of mass murder, I would recommend a compilation of essays by Prof David Cesarani, "The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation."

In one of the essays, "German Public Awareness of the Final Solution," Prof David Bankier writes:

The widely discussed issue of what the German public knew of the Holocaust has been dealt with by recent historical literature. Scholars who examined this topic have shown that the main source of information on the mass shootings were soldiers on the Eastern Front who witnessed or particioated in them. For example, in a letter that reached the Security Service after it was sent to Ribbentrop's wife in November, 1944, a private from Saxony asked, inter alia:

do you really think we soldiers don't know what bestial murders have been perpetrated by our SS in Russia? Where, for example,are the 145,000 Jews of Lemberg who were there when they were transported little by little on trucks and shot not far from Lemberg?

Cesarani, "The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation," p. 215

michael mills · Post by **michael mills** » 01 Nov 2005 23:05

It needs to be borne in mind that there appear to be no generally agreed figures for the total number of Soviet POWs in German hands or the number of them that died in captivity.

Here is an excerpt from a post by Qvist on 19 July this year in the thread "POWs from Stalingrad". As Qvist is a member of the Forum staff, his words no doubt have divine authority.

These are the figures that can be found in some of the key research on the subject:

1. Number of POWs:

- Krivosheev gives a total of 4.1 million Red Army servicemen in German captivity
- Martin [sic!: His name is "Christian"; my comment] Streit states that 5.7 million Red Army personnel were in German captivity, from an overview produced by Fremde Heere Ost as of 31 January 1945.
In a footnote, Streit furthermore quotes the figures from two other German works:
- Joachim Hoffmann: 5,245,882 (in Das deutsche Reich und zweitem Weltkrieg, bd IV, based on unnamed documents)
- Alfred Streim: 5,163,381 ("Fall Barbarossa", based on an overview by Abt.Kgf. in OKW from late '44)
- Gerd Überschar; 5.16 million

The contrast is between Krivosheev and the other figures, and may at least in part be due to a more restrictive understanding of the category "Soviet servicemen" on his part than in the German documentation.

2. Deaths among POWS.

- While Krivosheev does not give a specific total figure for POW deaths, his discussion of the subject suggests a total of perhaps somewhat less than 1.5 million (673,000 according to German records, plus "over half of the remaining 1,100,000" )
- Streit: 3.3 million
- Streim: "At least" 2,530,000
- Hoffmann: "roughly" 2 million
- Überschar: ~2.75 million

The basis for Streit's figure:
- 930,000 POWs were known to be alive in POW camps in early 1945
- A maximum of one million men had been released, including HiWi volunteers
- Around 500,000, according to contemporary German estimates, had escaped or been liberated
- This leaves 3.3 million presumed dead.

Streim's figure is apparently fairly similarly based, but since he assumes a lower number of total POWs, his death figure is also lower. Streit is very critical of Hoffmann's figure.

Given the enormous range beween the different estimates for the number of Soviet POWs who died in German captivity, from a low of 2 million to a high of 3.3 million, and bteween the estimates of the total number of POWs (not to speak of definitional problems!), it would seem to be nonsense to use such terms as a 2-in-3 chance of a Soviet POW dying in German hands.

The same consideration applies to the chances of a German POW's dyiing in Soviet captivity, since both the total number of German servicemen taken prisoner by the Soviets and the total number of such prisoners who died are known for certain.

As to the total number of Soviet POWs who died in German captivity, I see no reason for postulating any figure higher than that claimed by Soviet sources such as those used by Krivosheev. The Soviet Government would surely have had no reason to minimise the number of its men who died at the hands of the "Fascist barbarians".

michael mills · Post by **michael mills** » 01 Nov 2005 23:10

A further comment:

If the proportion of German POWs who died in Soviet captivity was indeed 35%, that is almost the same as the proportion of Australian POWs who died in Japanese captivity.

The high death rate of Australian and other Allied POWs in Japanese captivity is generally regarded as one of the major examples of Japanese "barbarity".

No doubt a similar consideration should be applied to the similar death rate of German POWs in Soviet hands.

Kunikov · Post by **Kunikov** » 02 Nov 2005 00:29

michael mills wrote: No doubt a similar consideration should be applied to the similar death rate of German POWs in Soviet hands.

Not when you compare the situations on the home fronts for both countries.

Oleg Grigoryev · Post by **Oleg Grigoryev** » 02 Nov 2005 01:16

belongs to "that (admittedly off-topic) experiment"

Peter H · Post by **Peter H** » 02 Nov 2005 06:29

michael mills wrote:A further comment:

If the proportion of German POWs who died in Soviet captivity was indeed 35%, that is almost the same as the proportion of Australian POWs who died in Japanese captivity.

The high death rate of Australian and other Allied POWs in Japanese captivity is generally regarded as one of the major examples of Japanese "barbarity".

No doubt a similar consideration should be applied to the similar death rate of German POWs in Soviet hands.

Agree in part but I also don't know if the postwar death rates of former German Pows tallies with that of those who experienced Japanese captivity--US medical studies show that 90% of the American Bataan Death March survivors were dead by 1955.A similar Australian study indicates that 70% of the Australian survivors of Japanese captivity were dead by 1965.

One Soviet view expressed on the Stalingrad Pows is that their weakened state contributed to their high death rate.The refusal of accepting the 'honorable' Soviet surrender terms in early January is stated as being one cause of this.A German counter argument could be that the later treatment of the Pows was somewhat vindictive because of this earlier refusal to lay down arms.Claims that the Soviets weren't prepared for the large Pow numbers I find difficult to fully endorse because the earlier surrender proposal(if taken at its word) would have catered for the health needs of the prisoners.

A tit for tat policy on treating Pows is only possible to claim in hindsight.I don't know if word on the fate of the Soviet prisoners of 1941 was available to Soviet authorities in 1942.The Japanese treatment of their Pows only became known to the Allies in late 1944 after Australian Pows were picked up by a US sub after it had sunk their transport ship.

Oleg Grigoryev · Post by **Oleg Grigoryev** » 02 Nov 2005 19:50

belongs to "that (admittedly off-topic) experiment"

Oleg Grigoryev · Post by **Oleg Grigoryev** » 02 Nov 2005 19:55

belongs to "that (admittedly off-topic) experiment"

nny · Post by **nny** » 04 Nov 2005 10:52

WalterS wrote:One should also make a distinction between the Germans, who invaded the Soviet Union with the intent of murdering or enslaving its population, and the Russians, who didn't.

Is this to be allowed? What about the millions of Poles deported by Soviet troops? Did every soviet soldier invade poland with the intent of murdering / enslaving the polish population? Or were they perhaps simply soldiers following orders? What about the racial selection involved in the deportation of the Chechyns or the Crimean Tartars?

There were a huge number of German troops, are you suggesting that every one of them was involved in the extermination programs of the Nazis? What about the 600 Soviet prisoners gassed at Auschwitz? Do you have proof that the Soviets knew of these experiments and decided to treat their German prisoners in kind? This is out of line in the same way as if I tried to claim that all Germans knew of the Poles fate at Katyn and responded in kind. Katyn happened before Barbarossa, is everything the Nazis did justified because of this? Of course not, to cite Nazi treatment of Soviet prisoners as an excuse is transparent at best.

For those [Soviet prisoners] who reached prisoner-of-war camps alive, the chance of survival turned out to be not much better than one in three. Altogether, over three million Red Army soldiers out of 5.7 million died in German camps from disease, exposure, starvation and ill-treatment. The German Army itself, not the SS nor any other Nazi organization, was responsible for prisoners of war. Its attitude was reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm II's remark in 1914 that the 90,000 Russian prisoners captured at Tannenburg 'should be left to starve.'
Beevor: Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-43, p.59

This may shock you, but I don't claim to justify the horrific treatment of Soviet POWs by the Germans either, that they had horrific death rates does not justify the horrific death rates of German POWs in Soviet hands. Also, isn't Beevor one of the few adherants to the 9 million number in regards to rapes committed by the red army?

nny wrote:

Its sad. Alot of people are able to dismiss what happened to a horrendous number of German troops because of what certain Germans did to Soviet troops. What these frontline Germans had to do with the Germans who committed atrocities has never been adequately explained to me.
Obviously, nny's understanding of what the war in the east was all about is incomplete. nny is either ignorant of, or chooses to ignore, the complicity of the Wehrmacht, "these frontline Germans," in the mass murder that was Nazi policy in the east.

The idea of Rassenkampf, or 'race war,' gave the Russian campaign its unprecedented character. Many historians now argue that Nazi propaganda had so effectively dehumanized the Soviet enemy in the eyes of the Wehrmacht that it was morally anaesthetized from the start of the invasion. Perhaps the greatest measure of successful indoctrination was the almost negligible opposition within the Wehrmacht to the mass execution of Jews, which was deliberately confused with the notion of rear-area security measures against partisans. Many officers were affronted by the Wehrmacht's abandonment of international law on the Ostfront, but only the tiniest minority voiced disgust at the massacres, even when it became clear that they belonged to a programme of racial extermination.
ibid, p. 15

*GASP*, it was a race war? I didn't know! That justifies everything the soviets did during WWII! Thank you for that incredibly condescending post, since you have obviously never read any of my other posts, I can see how you may misunderstand my moral outrage at the high death rates of German troops as some sort of ignorance in regards to the holocaust. Fortunately, I have read a number of your posts, including the quote you just posted at :

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... &start=105

and :

What does all this mean? It means that every opportunity is taken to show two things, namely (1) that the German "officer corps", whatever that may mean, was not only shot through with criminality, but (contrary to what we have all learned about them) technically incompetent as well, and (2) that the Wehrmacht was just as guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, perhaps more so, than the Einsatzgruppen.

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... c&start=45

In the same thread.

You have a number of other threads, one where you accuse the German Navy of being the worst of the war, and in another you accuse Ireland of being selfish / greedy (without following up my questions of how they were being selfish or greedy and profiting from the war) for not helping defeat the Germans in the Atlantic. One where you barely conceal your outrage at the Rotterdam attack, but vehemently deny that Dresden was 'terrorism from the air'. This may seem off topic, but it is a definate bias that is apparent in a number of your posts and I am not at all shocked by your input on this topic.

I am also not surprised at all that there are a number of readers (not the least yourself) who believes the German soldiers at Stalingrad 'got what they deserved'. If we are to take the Nazis behavior during WWII as our example, then anything is acceptable, but thankfully, some of us have higher moral standards, and do not adhere to the 'eye for an eye' motto, and are not influenced by the propoganda that the average Wehrmacht soldier was more guilty of crimes than the average member of the Einsatzgruppen. A huge number of Jews were exterminated in the Death camps, a huge number by the Einsatzgruppen, the Order Police the Sipo and Gestapo and by the Non-German Auxilleries, to say that every Werhmacht soldier took a personal hand in the extermination after the aformentioned Jews had been murdered is news to me and surely worthy of an upward revision of the victims of the holcaust.

Kunikov · Post by **Kunikov** » 04 Nov 2005 17:27

nny wrote:
Is this to be allowed? What about the millions of Poles deported by Soviet troops? Did every soviet soldier invade poland with the intent of murdering / enslaving the polish population? Or were they perhaps simply soldiers following orders? What about the racial selection involved in the deportation of the Chechyns or the Crimean Tartars?

Those actions were done by the NKVD not the Red Army.

There were a huge number of German troops, are you suggesting that every one of them was involved in the extermination programs of the Nazis? What about the 600 Soviet prisoners gassed at Auschwitz? Do you have proof that the Soviets knew of these experiments and decided to treat their German prisoners in kind? This is out of line in the same way as if I tried to claim that all Germans knew of the Poles fate at Katyn and responded in kind. Katyn happened before Barbarossa, is everything the Nazis did justified because of this? Of course not, to cite Nazi treatment of Soviet prisoners as an excuse is transparent at best.

First, the 'nazis' or German Army did not care about the fate of Poles, considering what they did to them throughout the war. Secondly, Soviet troops knew about the mistreatment of the Red Army and their population after the Moscow Counter-Offensive in 1941 when they liberated villages only to find civilians hanging in the streets, etc.

This may shock you, but I don't claim to justify the horrific treatment of Soviet POWs by the Germans either, that they had horrific death rates does not justify the horrific death rates of German POWs in Soviet hands. Also, isn't Beevor one of the few adherants to the 9 million number in regards to rapes committed by the red army?

The number is '2 million' and it is without a viable source. Secondly, there was no 'horrific death rate' among German POWs.

*GASP*, it was a race war? I didn't know! That justifies everything the soviets did during WWII! Thank you for that incredibly condescending post, since you have obviously never read any of my other posts, I can see how you may misunderstand my moral outrage at the high death rates of German troops as some sort of ignorance in regards to the holocaust. Fortunately, I have read a number of your posts, including the quote you just posted at :

Then you are simply showing ignorance by what you've written above and what I've corrected you on?

I am also not surprised at all that there are a number of readers (not the least yourself) who believes the German soldiers at Stalingrad 'got what they deserved'. If we are to take the Nazis behavior during WWII as our example, then anything is acceptable, but thankfully, some of us have higher moral standards, and do not adhere to the 'eye for an eye' motto, and are not influenced by the propoganda that the average Wehrmacht soldier was more guilty of crimes than the average member of the Einsatzgruppen. A huge number of Jews were exterminated in the Death camps, a huge number by the Einsatzgruppen, the Order Police the Sipo and Gestapo and by the Non-German Auxilleries, to say that every Werhmacht soldier took a personal hand in the extermination after the aformentioned Jews had been murdered is news to me and surely worthy of an upward revision of the victims of the holcaust.

It is common knowledge that the Wehrmacht was as implicit in war crimes as the SS, refer to "The Wehrmacht and Genocide" for all your needs, if you need more sources I'll provide them, but do your own research before you preach what you don't know anything about. By the way, the 6th Army helped in the Baby Yar massacre outside Kiev, just as an example.

David Thompson · Post by **David Thompson** » 04 Nov 2005 18:13

Everyone -- Please drop unnecessary personal or taunting remarks when posting.