sid guttridge wrote:Hi J. P. Slovjanski,
The number of Soviet POWs taken is irrelevant as far as German obligations to keep them alive are concerned. One man or ten million - German obligations to keep them alive were the same.
And so what if Stalin regarded and treated them as traitors? This doesn't in any way lessen German responsibility to keep them alive
And do you really think that Soviet air strikes killed a significant proportion Soviet POWs? If this killed all the Soviet POWs who died in German hands, it would have finished of at least twice as many people as the entire Western Allied strategic bomber offensive.
Cheer,
Sid.
Hi Sid,
The Soviets are not signatory to the 1929 Geneva Convention on POWs so technically, Germany had no legal responsibility of taking care of Soviet POWs .
Beevor wrote that Uncle Dzugashvilli ordered every Soviet soldier taken as POW by the Germans are subjected to interrogation by NKVD once they were 'liberated'.
However numerous anecdotes and photographs tell us of a typical German soldier's (even from the so-called Waffen SS fascist beasts) kindness for a simple typical Russian soldier who is not a Bolshevik.
But despite those anecdotes, no one can deny that Russian soldiers suffered extreme brutality in German POW camps especially during the 1941-1942 especially those captured by the German 6th Army under command of Field Marshal von Reichenau who foolishly gave orders to mistreat captured Soviet soldiers and even to shoot Russian gunwomen who surrendered. (Beevor, Stalingrad, 1998)
However, the situation for Russian soldiers captured by units commanded by old-school Prussian commanders were not that extreme. Far-sighted German commanders like von Manstein, Oskar Niedemayer, Hans-Gunther Seraphim were prepared (even behind the Fuehrer's back) to raise anti-Bolshevik units from captured Soviet troops (especially those from non-Russian ethnicities).
After the destruction of the German 6th Army in 1942, numerous German generals and officers began to realised that their struggle is for Europe and Germany and actively seeks the cooperation of captured Soviet troops in fighting the Bolshevik disease that is engulfing Europe and the world. This is why the heroic and courageous Cossacks, Armenians, Georgians, Caucasians, Kalymucks, Azeris, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and even anti-Bolshevik Russians joined their comrades from all over Europe from the Iberian peninsula to the Aurora lights of Scandinavia to fight to the very end from the endless steppe of Russia to the smoking ruins of Berlin.
Panzermahn