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Eastern Front vs Western Front...a comparison

Discussion in 'Western Europe' started by PzJgr, Jul 24, 2009.

  1. Sloniksp

    Sloniksp Ставка

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    The Germans taken at Stalingrad were in horrific condition, virtually every 6th army soldier was wounded, straving, frosbitten, shell shocked or simply exhausted beyond comprehension. To use these men as an example to generalize the German POW casualty rate in Russian hands is simply not fair; many died on the way to the camps or a few months in captivity. The Germans paraded in Moscow who were captured from Bagration were not in the same abysmal state. How many of them saw home?
     
  2. Triple C

    Triple C Ace

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    I don't know how to explain it, but among the primary sources Max Hasting quoted in Armageddon a captured German medic said the Russian required no rest. He described the Russian soldiers whom he observed worked relentlessly and single-mindedly, as if the job at hand is they only reason they exist. Actually, there was never rest, and not even a moment of quiet. The propaganda radio was always on blaring at maximum volume. If I have to guess, it's the Soviet life-style of zero toleration for failures. Bad things happen to people who did not meet their quota, and I have no doub the schoolmasters did not spare the rod...
     
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  3. kimpunkrock

    kimpunkrock Member

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    My fathers father was a German POW of the Russians and didnt make it home until the 50's. I dont know too much of his experiences there because he died when I was a little girl. But one would think that the Russians treated their POW's worse than anyone else because of their track record of treating prisoners like crap. This blows my mind that they treated them better than the Germans treated theirs.

    In another note my grandfather, before he was transferred to the Russian front ran a POW camp for Russian soldiers. He was stripped of his rank and sent to the Russian front for treating the prisoners too good. I find all of this highly ironic.
     
  4. Fury 1991

    Fury 1991 New Member

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    Wish I could have met some of my German ancestors who served.
     
  5. igorfazlyev

    igorfazlyev recruit

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    The German leadership at the time required that Russian POW's be treated like scum because officially, according to the Nazi doctrine, all slavs, including Russians, were regarded as subhumans.
    To add insult to injury: Stalin and his cronies also officially regarded all POW's as traitors and subhumans, thus often times when a Russian POW managed to escape german captivity and return to the Russian lines they'd be interrogated, then put in jail and finally sent to a penal battalion where they would have to pay for their crime of 'betraying their motherland' with blood, literally - the only way to get transferred out of a penal battalion was to get wounded. It was a really crazy system.

    So all in all the Eastern front was totally no holds barred, it was all about killing the enemy at any cost with no rules whatsoever because on the one hand there were the Nazis with their crazy ideology according to which all the jews had to be eliminated while all the Slavs had to be enslaved and worked to death and the population of the USSR at the time basically consisted primarily of Jews and Slavs. It's ironic that initially people, especially in villages and small towns sometimes even welcomed the Germans because they thought they were there to liberate them from the Bolsheviks but as the German rear echelon SS troops moved in and started implementing their crazy plan Ost (kill all the Jews, enslaved and work to death all the Slavs), the locals began to realise the Germans were actually the worse evil than Stalin, thus less than a year into the invasion the Germans had to contend with mass insurgency in their rear, especially in Belarus where there's lots of forests and swamps along the Pripyat river and then towards the end when the Soviet army retook the territory that had been occupied by the Germans and saw what the Germans had done there, all those villages that had been burnt down together with the people etc, all of a sudden Germany was now facing a huge army of people the vast majority of whom now had a personal score to settle, thus the ferociousness and barbarism of the Eastern front, which actually escalated towards the end of the war.
    In the west the campaign was led primarily by the Americans who had no personal scores to settle with the Germans, they were simply doing a job.
     

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