The State of the Ostheer - May 1942

[TheMarcksPlan]

So where is the reference to people dying in the specific factory under discussion? Indeed nothing quoted mentions people dying at all, only being in various stages of starvation, and never says if they died or recieved enough food to survive.

I already addressed that in this reply: viewtopic.php?f=76&t=246246&start=210#p2249399

As Georg notes, my book provides ample documentation of the fact that starvation-induced mortality caused 30-50% of adult deaths (varying by region) and that overall adult mortality during 1943 was 3-7 times higher than in 1940.
In addition, I have provided a chart showing that starvation caused up to 40% of lost workdays at Nizhny Tagil Tractor Factory.

The book does not provide specific mortality statistics for every individual factory.

We know that starvation at the factory was a serious problem and that workers everywhere in the SU were dying of starvation. In order to believe that none of the factory's workers died, you would have to believe that Nizhny Tagil's medical staff were miracle workers. You would have to believe that the factory worked/starved many workers into sickness, but that none of them died. I find that completely ridiculous.

[TheMarcksPlan]

and never says if they died or recieved enough food to survive.

Also from page 320-21:

At least up through 1943, factory doctors tended to mistake signs of advanced starvation— lethargy, inability to stand, loss of vision, incontinence, bradycardia, and hypothermia—as symptoms of its earlier stages. Because they were already under pressure to avoid signing workers off work, when finding patients with these symptoms, they tended simply to place them on lighter work or assign them bed rest at home. This was insufficient, because at this stage of starvation, patients needed not just rest, but re­ feeding. What this means is that many cases that in 1943 would have been treatable if detected early, instead led to long­-term morbidity and/or death

I already provided this quote upthread.

What it shows it that, by the time Soviet authorities were letting people off of work due to starvation, it was often too late and the patients died. That started to change in 1944 as doctors learned.

So, given that I've provided direct evidence that starvation caused up to 40% of sick-days at Nizhny Tagil, and given that many patients let off work for starvation later died (until later in the war), it is IMO that a logical certainty that at least some of the workers who went off sick from Nizhny Tagil did in fact die.

---------------------------------

Did you read Georg's following statement about allegations that I didn't provide sources, in which he corrects that impression? Or are you also under the mistaken impression that I did not provide sources?

IMO this is holding me to an unusual standard. I have provided more evidence than anybody in this thread. I should be free to make logical inferences based on well-documented research by published authors.

[Ружичасти Слон]

IMO this is holding me to an unusual standard. I have provided more evidence than anybody in this thread. I should be free to make logical inferences based on well-documented research by published authors.

I thought history standards are about relevance not quantity. Accuracy not conjecture.

You made claims about peoples being worked to death and peoples starving to death at one specific factory. You did not give any evidence to prove this is true. You just give conjecture and evidence of something else. Literally and conjecture are most different things.

But that do not truely matter. The point you want to make is that the Soviet economy in 1942 was on the brink of total collapse. Your conjecture that some dead i understand. For conjecture to be relevant the numbers dieing have to be so big as to hurt production and economy. But you do not have proofs of one single death like you wrote. So let us dismiss this now.

Now to big claim. The Soviet economy in 1942 was on the brink of total collapse.

Everybody know that Soviet economy did not collapse. (Do i have to give evidence for that or is it accepted truth?) You claim it is on brink if total collapse.

Evidence you give says some sectors is starting collapse. But that did not give total collapse. Why is that? How did Soviets fix problem? Was it easy and quick fix or long and complicated?

Your claim that total Soviet economy is on brink of total collapse is from your conjecture

If basic subsistence items are starting to collapse, those items are on the brink of total collapse.
If basic subsistence items do in fact collapse, the rest of the economy will collapse with them.

This is my opinion, based on the foregoing reasoning and other factors.

My questions
If it was so much close to total collapse as you say why did it not have total collapse in history?
How did Soviets make solution so quick?
You can not make more basic subsistance appear from nothing.
How long from start collapse of basic subsistance to total collapse of basic subsistance?
How long from total collapse of basic subsistance to total collapse of total economy?

If your conjecture is correct there must be evidence of how close it was and how Soviets made such miracle solution.

Only relevant evidence can prove your conjecture not big quantities of not relevant evidence.

Just to remind. I am not writing that your conjecture is right or wrong. I am asking for relevant evidences that prove the claims you make are valid and helping understanding of history.

[Max Payload]

You're ignoring the fact that I've repeatedly suggested reinforcing Norway with more divisions from France to replace assets shifted to Barbarossa.

You are correct. You made three references to this and I failed to acknowledge it.

[Ружичасти Слон]

I am new to forum and i am very confused by what rules are enforced and which are not. And now i am much more confused by the standard of evidence.

I started to write in topic after i read

Yeah it's simply astounding. Imagine working 12hrs/day in arguably the country's most important factory (70% of T-34 production in Nizhny Tagil Tractor IIRC) and being fed so poorly that young male coworkers are literally dying. And still showing up day after day until you cannot stand - literally - anymore.

This specific claim is used to give proof of big claim the Soviet economy in 1942 was on the brink of total collapse.

When i ask for evidence of claim he double down to me and others.

In addition, I have provided a chart showing that starvation caused up to 40% of lost workdays at Nizhny Tagil Tractor Factory.

From first moment i saw a problems with specific claim
1. Data from themarksplan evidence is for days lost to temporary disability. There is no data on people dieing.
2. It is data for Vysokogorskii Machine Factory. It is ammunition factory. It is not data for tractor factory and not the country's most important factory (70% of T-34 production.


Perhaps it is not important that themarksplan got the wrong factory and the wrong data in his claim. Perhaps what is important is relevance to big claim. Is this evidence that the Soviet economy in 1942 was on the brink of total collapse?

I did some checking of source. I was lucky and found relevant pages of book Hunger and war page318,319,320 on internet here https://books.google.ca/books?id=nQzxCA ... ry&f=false

1. Author says data is probably extreme example. So average or normal data is lower.
2. Author explains why data is presented. It is trend. Trend is going up.
3. Author explains what data is presented. Line 2 and 6 represent total days lost per 100 workers.
4. Data is for 1943 and 1944

If we look at extreme of extreme (july 1944) 102.9 total days are lost to temporary disability concerning starvation and semistarvation per 100 workers. To analyse. In july 1944 100 workers have total 3.100 days. Is 102.9 days lost from 3.100 a big or small number? Is it proof of the Soviet economy in 1942 was on the brink of total collapse?

Remember this is extreme of extreme number.
Remember this is for july 1944 in data table of trend going up.

It seems to me that if total economy did not collapse in july 1944 at point of extreme extreme then this is not relevant evidence of brink of collapse in 1942 when numbers must be much lower.

Please can somebody tell me if this is correct standard for giving evidence for to prove claim.

Thank you

[TheMarcksPlan]

You're ignoring the fact that I've repeatedly suggested reinforcing Norway with more divisions from France to replace assets shifted to Barbarossa.

You are correct. You made three references to this and I failed to acknowledge it.

No worries. I muddied the waters a bit by discussing how a Norwegian campaign would play out. That discussion convinced me that my initial suggestion of substituting more bodenstandige divisions would in fact be mandatory.

[Aida1]

You're ignoring the fact that I've repeatedly suggested reinforcing Norway with more divisions from France to replace assets shifted to Barbarossa.

You are correct. You made three references to this and I failed to acknowledge it.

No worries. I muddied the waters a bit by discussing how a Norwegian campaign would play out. That discussion convinced me that my initial suggestion of substituting more bodenstandige divisions would in fact be mandatory.

You ignore that the OKH had also to take in account potential threats to France, Spain and Portugal and make contingency plans for these and have forces available to deal with them.

[ljadw]

It is admitted by most historians that official figures ( not only Soviet ones ) about food supply during the war are notorious unreliable : most of the time, official rations were not available because of transport problems. This was so in occupied Belgium, and it was so in the SU . If everything was going according to the plan of the bureaucrats ,there would be no black market ,and the inhabitants of the cities would not go to the country searching for food .

[Avalancheon]

Themarksplan does not give evidence for his claim that peope were literally being worked to death! .

Themarksplan does not give evidence for his claim Imagine working 12hrs/day in arguably the country's most important factory (70% of T-34 production in Nizhny Tagil Tractor IIRC) and being fed so poorly that young male coworkers are literally dying.

The evidence themarksplan gives does not prove his claim that the Soviet economy in 1942 was on the brink of total collapse.

TheMarcksPlan has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was widespread starvation taking place within the Soviet Union at this time period. From this, we could reasonably extrapolate that there was also starvation taking place in the Nizhny Tagil factory.

Maybe he can't find a specific document saying that this was the case. But thats losing sight of the big picture. The USSR was clearly having major difficultys feeding its people. Its not much of a stretch to imagine that men may have been worked to death (at least in some of the harder hit areas).

Giving evidence for some thing is not the same as evidencing some very specific claims.

You are trying to pigeonhole him into a very narrow trap. He made an offhand claim that starvation was taking place at a specific factory, and you have spent the last 3 or 4 pages trying to hold his feed to the fire and yelling 'Citation Needed!' ad infinitum.

You are not arguing in good faith. How would you like it if someone combs through your posts, looks for a very specific claim you made, and then harangues you for citations?

Lets say that you made some offhand remark about the workers at Nizhy Tagil scratching their noses. And then someone comes in and demands that you provide a peer reviewed paper with primary sources proving that the workers at Nizhny Tagil scratched their noses? Would that be fair?

[Terry Duncan]

Themarksplan does not give evidence for his claim that peope were literally being worked to death! .

Themarksplan does not give evidence for his claim Imagine working 12hrs/day in arguably the country's most important factory (70% of T-34 production in Nizhny Tagil Tractor IIRC) and being fed so poorly that young male coworkers are literally dying.

The evidence themarksplan gives does not prove his claim that the Soviet economy in 1942 was on the brink of total collapse.

TheMarcksPlan has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was widespread starvation taking place within the Soviet Union at this time period. From this, we could reasonably extrapolate that there was also starvation taking place in the Nizhny Tagil factory.

Maybe he can't find a specific document saying that this was the case. But thats losing sight of the big picture. The USSR was clearly having major difficultys feeding its people. Its not much of a stretch to imagine that men may have been worked to death (at least in some of the harder hit areas).

Giving evidence for some thing is not the same as evidencing some very specific claims.

You are trying to pigeonhole him into a very narrow trap. He made an offhand claim that starvation was taking place at a specific factory, and you have spent the last 3 or 4 pages trying to hold his feed to the fire and yelling 'Citation Needed!' ad infinitum.

You are not arguing in good faith. How would you like it if someone combs through your posts, looks for a very specific claim you made, and then harangues you for citations?

Lets say that you made some offhand remark about the workers at Nizhy Tagil scratching their noses. And then someone comes in and demands that you provide a peer reviewed paper with primary sources proving that the workers at Nizhny Tagil scratched their noses? Would that be fair?

In general I would agree with this. TheMarcksPlan has provided quite a lot of detail to suggest deaths were indeed likely, but when two posters are seemingly arguing past each other sometimes it is best for a third party to seek clarification at which point the matter can be put to rest. I would suggest that unless credible evidence that the workers at Nizny Tagil were for some reason receiving better rations than workers at other similar factories, then the matter can be left as reasonably established and supported.

[ljadw]

I do not believe the figures from Cherniavskii given on post 223 ,for the following reasons
1 Most important, and I am stupefied that no o ne has mentioned this : these figures are dated from 1964 ,and in 1964 the Communists were still ruling the SU and they said that they feeded during the war the population adequately . Does anyone think that in 1964 a Soviet author would have been able to write that the state failed to feed the population during the war ?
2 How could Cherniavskii know what the amount was of the private gardens, of how much food people received from the state ?
3 The Soviet regime was unable to feed the population before and after WWII, thus how was it possible that it could do it during WWII ?

[ljadw]

Other point : one can not say ,as do the authors of Hunger and War,that the state was the main source of food, and at the same time say that the food situation was very perilous, using as proof that in some factories workers were dying from hunger, and conclude that the economy was almost collapsing .
If people were dying from hunger, that proves that the state was unable to feed the population .Especially if members of privileged groups died from hunger .
And, as factory workers were a privileged group, why were the other groups, those from the county side,not dying massively ?

[Max Payload]

There are several threads at play here.
Has any convincing evidence been presented to support the claim that the Soviet war effort in 1942 was on the brink of collapse due to starvation in 1942? I would say not. In fact from the book being so extensively quoted one datum point that deserves to be highlighted is from table 5.2 relating to January 1943. If things were dire in 1942, it should be expected that in the middle of winter, when more of the daily calorific intake would be required to maintain body temperature, they would be even worse, but in Jan’43 the days lost and attributed to starvation per 100 workers at the Vysokogorsky location was three. Assuming 26 working days that month, that equates to little more than one tenth of one per cent of working days lost due to starvation.
However, things had clearly deteriorated by 1943 when 10-20% of male deaths in the age range 20-60 in two home-front regions were attributed to starvation. Yet for the Vysokogorsky factory even at the 1943 peak, when 26% of lost days were due to starvation, that only represented less that 2% of working days lost to that cause. As regards possible under-reporting of malnutrition in 1943 as a cause of absenteeism, total absenteeism in January was 4%, in October it was 8% and by December is was back down to 5.7%, around the same level it had been in March. Productivity must have been significantly affected in such an environment, but that is far from being a dire threat to the factory’s output.
One of the points made in this thread is that had the Ostheer achieved more in the south in 1941, the near collapse of 1942 in the OTL would have been an unavoidable collapse in the ATL. A simplistic response to that is - a near collapse in 1942 has not been demonstrated and since no collapse occurred in 1943/44, why would it have occurred in 1942 under the ATL?

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi ljadw,

You post, "It is admitted by most historians that official figures ( not only Soviet ones ) about food supply during the war are notorious unreliable....."

Who are these "most historians" and where did they say it?

The only thing that can be said with reasonable certainty is that there was almost always more food than officially recorded, but how much more is a moot point because the black market, by definition, went unaudited.

(As an aside, one of the justifications one poster has used here on AHF for the Germans giving Jews in the ghettos below starvation rations was that they could always get more on the black market. This, of course, presumed that (1) they had access to it and (2) that they had the resources to pay inflated black market prices. In their very particular circumstances, neither was necessarily the case.)

Cheers,

Sid.

[ljadw]

If one can say with reasonable certainty that there was more always more food than officially recorded, that proves that the official figures are unreliable .
exemples of the unreliability of official Soviet figures
JSTOR 1953 : Lazar Volin : Agricultural statistics in the SU : their usability and reliability
CIA 1961:Current problems of Soviet Agriculture :
P 24 : reliability of statistics on agricultural production : the few published statistics on production,especially on grain,during this period, 1933-1958,were unreliable .
P 25 :falsification of statistics on agricultural production was the official Soviet policy from 1933-1953
the figures of the census of 1937 were ''corrected '' and '' adapted.'' The responsibles for the 1937 figures went to the Gulag and a new census was organised .
This is not limited to the SU : would you believe the figures of an official report from the British government, without checking them, not twice, but trice ?
There is a proverb that says : never believe something, til it is denied by the government .