Stalingrad Survivors

I'm the first to criticise the Wehrmacht and it's treatment of prisoners however your assertion that only 15% of German prisoners died in Soviet hands is overly generous to Stalin and his cronies. Whilst many historians agree the Soviet records prove about that number died there are still 700,000 German soldiers missing (according to Overmans) a good proprtion who could have died in POW camps, the German Red Cross believe the missing figure to be even higher at about 1.3 million.

 

Timothy Snyder author of Bloodlands writes that 363,000 German soldiers died in Soviet captivity.

 

About the Stalingrad prisoners...

I can understand that they were in poor shape, and it was mid-winter...

But with the stated good treatment of POWs, why were these men MARCHED on foot to whatever destination. If the 14.9% mortality and good rations and treatment holds true, why march these poor bastards all the way to the camp?

95% mortality for these people. The Italians were canabalizing corpses, so what were the Germans reduced to?

Most of those 2 million prisoners were captured in the last six months of the war. Prior to that, the eastern Soviet soldier was not known for taking prisoners alive. If you were captured by Siberians, you got the 'treatment' as well.

So lets not get all gooey over the great treatment of German prisoners.

 

Why were they marched on foot ? Because no trains were available .

 

Crap, Lj. There was more rolling stock and locomotives in that part of the Soviet Union than anywhere else. They had the rolling stock to service both "Operation Uranus" AND "Little Saturn", running into millions of effectives.

Fact is, they walked to PUNISH THEM.

Pure murder. And Slonik raves on about great treatment and good food? Bullshit!

Reminds me of a certain Sven Hassel novel, "Legion of the Damned". Svens unit are out of their vehicles and in a trench system on a part of the front that has solidified. The soviets set up a screen where the men of Sven's trench system can clearly view it. The movie purports to show german prisoners in a Soviet prison camp. "It's like a hotel", says Titch. "Oh Mother of Kazan, look at the FOOD", moans the eternally hungry Porta. Sven tries not to look at the screen, but when he does, its a shot of the prisoners eating chicken. They hold up the leg for the camera, so that it looks bigger. Sven looks back at the members of the unit, and sees every man jack of them chewing their cheeks. The soundtrack has the usual calm and inviting Soviet voice...."Cross over to the paradise of workers and peasants. Look at how these prisoners eat a nightly meal. The food is plentiful and the girls are willing...."

Their follows a sequence of pornography, "So explicitly filthy, that even Porta, the whores best friend, looks away in revulsion."

Yep....fiction that may be, but it reminds me so much of Slonik at the moment, "Oh yes, prisoners in the Soviet were well treated. Returning soldiers were suprised....etc etc etc."

More Stalinist regression and CRAP.

 

Sven Hassel: now we know the source for your statements .

 

The Stalingrad prisoners were actually split. A small group, officers maybe, were put on a train to Moscow and paraded through the streets of the city, while a hissing and spitting crowd of muscovites lined the streets. The rest were marched ON FOOT to a camp in the Godforsaken interior of that damned country, where they were split into ethnic groups.

I could go and get the details from my book collection, but I won't. Off the top of my head, the italians ended up canabalizing their own dead. Forget what happens to the germans, but it certainly wasn't nice. Slonik has told us in the past that they did not last long, but he blamed the weather and their emaciated, lousy, battleshocked condition, stating that disease finished most of them.

I don't care what was done to Soviet prisoners by the germans. The Soviets were claiming the morale high ground right through the GPW. Incidents like this one put them on the same level, lower even, than their Nazi counterparts.

Why lower? Well, they could have taken the morale high ground and kept it after the suprise attack. But, after many years of internal brutality, old habits die hard, don't they?

 

Lj, you arent going to get away with your shit here. that source was none other than ENEMY AT THE GATES, which i have in hard cover.

Your'e a horrible little man, aren't you?

 

Go on, try something else. You've got nothing here, so push off. sheldrake wiped the floor with the likes of you, and now you turn up here casting dispersions again.

Push off!!

.

 

First :Sven Hassel, now : Enemy at the Gates . ts,ts

 

Not correct : German POW parade through the streets of Moscow on 17 july 1944 (some 60000) :most of them were taken POW during Bagration .On that day, most of the Stalingrad POW were already dead .

BTW :I like to see the pictures of hissing and spitting Muscovites.Probably this is one of the stories from Sven Hassel .

 

No...enemy at the gates for the prisoners and the camp conditions.

I can make errors too. I should ahve got the book out.

WTF do you want Mr?

Sven was in relation to what SLONIK was dooing, assuring us that German prisoners got good treatment.

EATG was for the actual prisones themselves. thats where i learnt about canabalization in the italian compound.

Walk through moscow, my mistake, and my own fault for not grabbing the book as i first thought.

So, two out of three aint bad. It doesnt invalidate the fact that those prisoners could easily have been placed on a train and treated with the common decencey of POWs everywhere. The soviets had the opportunity to show what a compassionate society they lived in. But, they did not live in a compassionate socety, and 95% of them died with a few short months/weeks, who knows.

So now you got the facts in front of you, what exactly is it that you are trying to say? You made no statements other than to declare that there were no trains, which was crap.

Man, are you all aboutinflating your head? Feel pretty big do you? Sailing around this website like some professor of conflict studies?

In fact, thats what i personally am going to refer to you as...HEY EVERYONE, THE PROFESSOR HAS GOT SOMETHING TO SAY,....(klaxon goes off)

Take it away, Mr. Professor.....

 

Christ...i would have thought someone with over 2000 posts would have more to do on a site like this than head inflation.

Anything concrete to add? Of course...no-one has made another post for you to impress everybody by pulling down. And you dont seem to make many assertions of your own, do you?

Bloody hell, i started out really appreciating your posts as well. more fool me. You showed me what a bighead you can be.

 

Enemy at the Gates is not a historical work, it's totally out dated, the competence of the author is more than questionable : he was talking about von Paulus . If he knows even not his basics, what would be his knowledge of the Battle of Stalingrad ?

 

I think you both need to chill.

LJAd needs to be far more constructive in his criticsism, and more careful in reading. Instead of being such an acerbic, arrogant besserweisser buzz-kill. IMO, it wouldn't hurt if he was correct more often than not too... but that's another story altogether.

Christopher47, you need to lay off caps, and check your sources. This site is not very tolerant of common misconceptions. Pulp fiction and games just doesn't cut it in the "preferred reading" list of most members here (just a head's up).

Sloniksp is correct, when he describes the Soviet treatment of PoWs. The "harsh treatment" was generally due to the pitiful humanitarian situation in the Soviet Union in general, not organised acts of deliberate cruelty. The rations of the Soviet guards was generally not better. Obviously, though, a guard has better access to black market goods... The difference between the Soviet's and the Nazis, was the level of effort and focus from the upper echelons: in one, the utter destruction of the untermensch, in the other, a generic lack of interest in saving human lives.

Sometimes, getting rid of previous misconceptions and ingrained attitudes can be painful. Remember that it's not just the basic knowledge that needs to be aligned, but also the relative value assigned to each piece of information. <= Applies to All Parties.

I think it's happened to everyone here. There's still plenty of room for discussion and discourse.

 

The pulp fiction was to illustrate Sloniks attitude, like the Soviet narrator in the film Sven and co were watching. There was no connection whatsoever to anything to do with history, as I stated. the mere mention of Hassel doesn't automatically invalidate every other aspect of the post.

Don't tell me that those poor buggers from Stalingrad got great treatment. When you walk many , many miles across a frozen steppe, with no hot food, (we assume), and likely not much in th way of shelter, your wounded or shocked, and half starved already, people are goingt to start dropping like flies nearly straight away.

I am willing to concede that famine conditions applied right across the non occupied regions of the SU between early 1942 and early 1944, (two years.) I have successfully argued as such on the thread "Breaking Down Soviet Losses". I firmly believe the true figure for Soviet war dead is much higher than 28 million. I honestly feel the figure is closer to 45 or even 50 million people, with around 25 million people starving to death in the interior.

Go to our post for that...meantime, on that basis, I am willing to see that the captured of Stalingrad were not having much chance, when their captors are on starvation rations and in the grip of famine.

If the situation was not this way, then their treatment qualifies as yet another Soviet atrocity. As I explained, with all the publicity from Stalingrad, the soviets had a golden chance to treat these prisoners like captured British and american flyers, in camps with some food, sports equipment, books, Red Cross parcels...you get the picture. Much goodwill to the west could have been, and many german soldiers might have gone over to the soviets. there were precious few as it was.

The fact that these desperately sick and battleshocked, half starved wretches were marched along, rather than put in the many trains in the region, shows what a similar society they had been captured by. A brutal regime, one that needed to realise thatconscription in germany meant many of these men were not there by choice.

 

Why so intense? Are you aware that you're talking to a friend, a member of this nice community?

 

People should read more carefully to understand. The majority of the German army marched on foot, with their supplies transported on horse drawn carts. The Russian soldiers walked too. So, I don't know why the Russians should give preferential treatment to German "comrades" who invaded their country and plundered, murdered, destroyed, raped, interrogated and again murdered with no mercy and respect for human life... Why?

What the German POW at the Stalingrad battle got was just an equal treatment.

 

Come now Tamino, you know it wasn't all strolling around in the sunshine and green grass.


Besides, the Germans did have motor vehicles too....




HIghly efficient "Mudcars" listed at 25 manpower, sometimes, even more...