Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics-Information Bulletin.

The following note was issued by Vyacheslav M. Molotov, People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the U.S.S.R., to all ambassadors and ministers of countries with which the Soviet Union maintains diplomatic relations. The note was made public in Kuibyshev January 7, 1942.


http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1942/420106b.html

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

No comments.

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Bah!

Yes, know it from before.

Anyway:

Every step of the German fascist army and its allies on captured Soviet territory of the Ukraine, Moldavia, Byelorussia, Lithuania Latvia, Estonia, and Karelian and FINNISH territory and Russian districts and regions involves the devastation and destruction of innumerable material and cultural values of our people, loss by the noncombatant population of their property accumulated by persistent labor, institution of a regime of forced hard labor, famine and bloody massacres, before the horrors of which the most terrible crimes ever known in human history fade into insignificance.

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Does this also mean the area The USSR captured in Winter War and recaptured by Finns in autumn 1941 during which the Finns burnt the houses built by Finns and killed people previously citizens of Finland??

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wow! that's horrible! i am starting anew book today, War on the Eastern Front, but I really know nothing of the atrocities the Germans committed there.

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Members of the Dutch Resistance with 101st AB, Eindhoven. Operation Market Garden.

Scott

With the note being made public in 42' and with all of its contents, it makes one wonder as to what it might have contained if it had been written several years later.

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

Back in 1940 Molotov seems to enjoy his time in Berlin, then again....

YouTube - Molotov in Berlin 1940

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This is mainly propaganda, there is a lot of exaggeration in it. German Werhmacht troops were not inhumane to the people around them for the most part. Some things you must consider is the enviornment of war, I have seen pictures of devastated villages east of the city of Smolensk. This area is where the Germans and the Russians fought it out for several months over a large heavily populated area. When you have armies of 10s of thousands of men moving across the landscape with tanks and thousands of pieces of artillery trying to get at each others throats it can't be a good place to be a civilian.

People could not get in the harvest, they could not go to other places to get what they needed. Many people did live in holes in the forest because it was safer than the villages. Unfortunately the Russians did not have time to move the civilian population before the Germans arrived and they were caught in the middle. It was the same in the Volkhov region south of Leningrad and many other areas. The system the peasants depended on was broken.

I am not trying to discount such things as Mansteins order that doomed almost all of the people of occupied Russia proper to starvation in favor of his occupying forces, this killed 100s of thousands that could not flee or the atrocities of certain volunteer brigades made up of Finns, Estonians and downright riff raff. NE of Moscow and in the region of Tula they were especially brutal seemingly taking out their frustrations with Stalin on the local populations.

Not all German soldiers were inhumane sadists, some did horrible things just to survive, things that they would not even contemplate in other circumstances. Such things as this are part of war, it is our leaders that begin them that must be punished.

From what I understand, Ribbentrop in turn enjoyed his time in Russia? In fact him and Molotov had a pretty good relationship?
While Molotov's letter was obviously written to benefit the Russians, im not so sure that its filled with as much propoganda as you may claim. Most, if not all of his information claimed has been varified. In fact later in the years even worse tails came to light.

I dont by the notion of Germans treating the civilian population in the east humainly for a second. This was afterall a sub-human race which they were dealing with. Germans held their rule with an iron fist of cruelty and fear upon the populations which fell under their control. "Reichenau Order" and the 900 day siege are just a couple of examples.
Also the burning of entire villages and killing of the population as the Germans fled, does not qualify as combat casualties in my book either.

If your claim of "they were just casualties of war" is true, then wouldnt the German civillian population have suffered the same fate under the Russians, when they came through?

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler