From: fr@compu.com (Fred Rump from home)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.german,soc.culture.jewish
Subject: Re: Germans and Jews
Date: 27 Jan 93 21:40:34 GMT
Organization: CompuData Inc.

abkevich@husc3.harvard.edu writes:

>In article <dieter-250193104759@frueh-koelsch.informatik.rwth-aachen.de>,
>dieter@informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Dieter Kreuer) writes:
>> Recently, mass graves of German soldiers have been found in ex-GDR,
>> (Poland, too?) and Russian historians have admitted that mass executions of
>> German soldiers have been committed by the Red Army on German ground.

>These murders should be investigated but there were probably some "reasons" for
>them. As I said from Soviet point of view by 1945 all SS members should be shot
>without any further investigation. Or people who looked like SS member, or was
>suspected in being interested in SS membership... I am not going to say that
>Stalin was interested injustice. He never was. However for Red Army was quite
>unusual to murder German prisoners (otherwise Germany losses would be much
>higher). On the other hand most part of Russian prisoners didn't survive. They
>were rarely shot - most part died from starvation).

This post...  no, let me be kind and not say it.

Let me rather attempt to keep facts on the table and attempt to assume the 
above is simply too much naivete about history.

First let us talk about German military losses.  In round numbers 4,600,000
husbands, fathers and sons lost their lives during WWII. Of those 2/3 were 
killed in the East, mainly the USSR. At the end of the war, excluding 
Volkssturm and other temporary 'passthru' prisoners, there were 11,100,000 men 
in allied POW camps. Of those roughly 3,100,000 were being held in Russia.

35.8% of these died in those camps. That is 1,100,000 POWs. They were simply 
worked to death as our correspondent says, as bullets were a needless expense.
The first significant number of POWs came into Russian hands in Jan '43 after 
Stalingrad. But these were still small numbers compared to what happened after 
the collapse of the Central Army group in mid '44.  The bulk of the POWs were
taken at the end of war as surrender arranged at the top. The entire Kurland 
Army Group surrendered virtually in tact on May 18th, 1945 and was shipped to
Siberia and into the camps of the Urals as a imminent 1 out of 3 death
sentence.  This is after hostilities had ended.  Since the actual number of
prisoners is not exact as many may have fallen just before capture, the
percentage of POWs who died in captivity is often estimated as being around 1
out of 2.  But we will be kind and assume the lower number.  At the foreign
minister's conference in 1947 Molotov claimed that 890,532 POWs were still
being held in Russia.  It means that almost a million soldiers died after the
war was over.

On the other hand Russian POWs were taken from the first days of the invasion 
of the USSR in vast numbers.  They too died in huge numbers of starvation and 
the actions of the Einsatztruppen. There can be no excuse for even one POW to 
be purposely killed, yet the German troops in the east were starving 
themselves. The problem with supplies was the problem that finished the war 
and ended in defeat for Germany.  On the eastern front food for POWs would
certainly have become available only after the army had eaten.  This happened
rather rarely. The result was that almost 80% of Russian POWs died over the 
course of the war.  It is a sad statistic that took 4 million Russian lives.

When such numbers are added to the 20 million that the Russians themselves 
killed plus all of the KIA during the war, it cut a swath thru just about
every Russian family just as it did just about every German family.

But now let us look at the behavior of the Red Army. Comparison with other 
armies is left to the individual. M. Koriakov wrote in his book 'I'll never 
look back' where he recounts his experiences during the war that upon entering 
Silesia (and collecting cattle from German farms for shipment to the rear), a 
lieutenant took out his knife and killed a cow. He said: 'My father wrote that 
they had taken a cow from us. Now we are even.' 

Under the guidance of Ilya Ehrenburg millions of leaflets were dropped for the 
advancing Russian forces. "Soldiers of the Red Army! Kill the Germans! Kill 
the Germans! Kill! Kill! Kill!" they said. And the army went to work.

The German Wehrmacht in no way can be compared with the actions of the 
advancing Russian troops. The Einsatztruppen and certain SS Divisions yes, but 
not the army in general.  Even the best trained and elite armored spearheads
took up the call for genocide against the Germans.  It was not just the often
drunk Mongolians or other low-grade rear echelon troops.  That Russian tanks
made a sport of shooting up Red Cross trains and that armored columns would
simply drive thru miles of refugees on the roads in front of them while
machinegunning those who were able to run away, is nothing new to report here.
Even the Russian marshals became appalled at the slaughter.  Konev in his
order of Jan 27 cited a long list of such happenings and sent scored of
commanders into his feared penal battalions.  Again, Koriakov reports that
many tanks were so filled with loot that they couldn't be driven and that
drunken tankers got so confused that they started attacking their own lines.

To say that Russian army was in any way more humane then the worst of the
German groups is a at best an expression of naivete and more typically an 
outright lie.

The difference in cost to human life can hardly be measured on both sides. 
German resistance to every Russian attack was basically a fight to the death 
or at best a fight to delay so that refugees, women and children, would have a 
chance to escape. From the first reports coming from Nemmersdorf in East 
Prussia (Oct '44) were a captured German town was retaken by the Germans and 
the result of the Russian carnage was photographed, there was to be no 
surrender to a people who nailed kids to walls, cut out tongues and basically
behaved in a way that Germans did not think possible. Yes, they did not know 
what those Russians may have known. 

What was being revealed again and again after a successful German 
counterattack was that surrender was impossible to the hordes from the East. 
The Volkssturm, the old and the young, the burned out veterans who long ago 
knew it was hopeless, all turned to fight an enemy that savagely killed for
the fun of it.  The Russian propaganda to kill was working only too well until
finally Stalin put a stop to it as the army was losing control over its own
people.  Then a counter terror started which put many Russian soldiers in
front of a firing squad for even minor infractions.  Life was very cheap.

I have no doubt that a drunken Russian soldier who tried to shoot an 8 year
old, namely me, was then spotted by the roaming military police and was taken
away, was shot for the offense.  We could hear shooting in the Kommandantura
all the time.

This not is not an attempt to make the Russian people into monsters. It is 
only an attempt to show that hatred, vengeance and propaganda can make people 
behave in ways that under more normal circumstances are unthinkable among 
human beings. Yet they happened. Most of the victims were the innocent who 
simply were in the wrong place at the wrong time or prayed to God in some 
other way or not at all.  There is no sense to it, yet it happens among all
peoples.

On the other hand, a different Russian soldier, a doctor, may have saved my 
life by giving me a blood transfusion from himself. That too happens among all 
peoples.

Fred









-- 
W. Fred Rump 	office:	   fred@COMPU.COM     "A man's library is a sort of 
26 Warren St.   home: fr@icdi10.compu.com 	harem" - Emerson (1860) 
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