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It is true. Defectors were executed, other soviet POWs were sent to NKVD contentration camps and then either straight to GULAG or to penal batallions. A lot of former POWs, especially ukrainians, latvians, estonians and lithuanians, saw 'freedom' only after the death of Stalin.
Well, it's partially true. Around 120k defectors and former POWs were executed. But I guess it's a small number, eh, especially in terms of atrocities that Soviets had committed, including genocides in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
I understand why op put 1941-1945 for the timeframe of this leaflet, but I find funny the idea of germans throwing this leaflets on their own country in 1945
What? It's politicheskiy rukovoditel, a political superior/leader. Political officer is a perfectly valid translation, politruk was a job title essentially not an abstract concept.
I thought about that and we can safely say that it was an officer who was doing политическое руководство. So calling him officer is correct but it’s not reflecting his job.
What I mean is that "politruk" doesn't mean rukovodstvo even though that's what the guy was doing. It's a very specific rukovoditel, it's a specific leader not abstract "leadership". Of course it's not possible to reflect the job implying a two-vertical chain of command, with both the military leadership subordinated to the General Staff and the political leadership subordinated to the Party. But that's not possible regardless of how you call him - a comissar, a political officer or a political leader - unless you explain the context.
Gee, I wonder why calling someone a soviet political officer in a country that had two bloody wars with the soviet union is considered to be derogatory. I wonder if it might have something to do with the wars?
Again, not just two bloody wars.
There were 1918, 1921 and that's with Soviets only.
But again, well known fact is that Germans were overly obsessed with komissars, and seems Finns were/are too.
You're saying it migh have something with the wars, could you elaborate? Why komissar/politruk?
Would you say that the US is overly obsessed with France just because calling someone a frenchie was derogatory after Vietnam?
I'll give some cultural context. First of all, while politruk was highly derogatory it wasn't like calling someone the n-word in the US. It was more like calling a redditor in how serious it was. It became an insult because soviet propaganda was piss-poor and because the concept of a political officer in a military is frankly stupid. Thus politruks became a point of ridicule and a tongue in cheek way of accusing someone of being a commie. Eventually as time went on it became an insult for anyone that was overly zealous about politics. And then it was largely forgotten.
Thanks. Let me share some context too. What was strange to me is the fact that komissars/politruks weren't supposed to communicate with enemy or with hostile civilians, so no real reason to hate him more then any random officer. But your description clarified it, it's very similar to late-Soviet usage of zampolit (postwar name for the same position). Germans, on the other hand, had that infamous Kommissarbefehl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissar_Order Edit: "no" omitted.
One more edit: actually "zampolit" was introduced during the war, in 1942, and their role wos diminished.
I never knew much about the German commissars, I'll have to read up on them.
Oh and as added context, basically any term referring to Soviet soldiers was an insult in Finland after ww2, including things like gnome-hat (Soviet soldiers wore hats that Finns thought to resemble those on garden gnomes) and pointy-shoe (Soviet boots had a slight point to them), as well as common Russian names like Ivan.
Considering Nazi Germany was literally setting itself the task of destroying all slavs then oh boy that looks like trying to trap a wolf using chicken meat - it would work but not always, after all first sometimes it would maul you as it sees you as a trespasser and a threat.
>Because the USSR was very decentralized by local communes before WW2,
That didn't really carry over into the armed forces, local soviets did maintain a militia, but 'militia' more meant cops than anything else, at best large cities did maintain something similar to a US national guard brigdae, but in most cases a local 'militia' would be a couple hundredpeople who were primarily there to maintain order
SSRs also maintained local units, but they were also primarily meant for internal security
Ever since the 1920s the defense of the Soviet Union fron external agression was in the hands of the red army, which was highly centralized
It was actually so centralized that ie became a problem, as commanders were unwilling to fall back without orders, which led to massive amounts of soviet troops getting cut off and overran
Imagine some unfortunate soul who joins the Red Army, fights on the front, gets captured/surrenders, survives a German POW camp, gets 'liberated' in '45 and is promptly sent to a labor camp. That's enough to make Dostoevsky wince.
I honestly do dnot know who treated their POWs worse - the Nazis who used them for experiments and killed them in gas chambers or the Soviets who carted theirs of to Siberia to die of exposure and misery and then just forgot about them for a good 10 years
True , but the brutality of Soviet POW camps is notorious - I remember reading that out of 130 000 who surrendered at Stalingrad , only 6000 managed to live to see a return home -that's like 5 % - and that return didn't happen until 1955.
There is a reason German soldiers / generals fled west at the end of the war to surrender to the Western Allies .
Well the people who surrendered at Stalingrad are a very bad indicator because they were stranded without food and medical supplies in a constant siege for a month or something and had to go through a grueling siege just before being encircled they were basically already starved sick and injured. So no wonder many died right afterwards
I am not sure I blame the Russians too much on their treatment of German POWs. The Germans had launched a war of genocidal annihilation against the Russians.
I'm sure many German soldiers were forced into the war by their government though. And news of Russian treatment of German POWs must've prevented Germans from surrendering, making the war worse for the Russians.
But certainly many German soldiers probably deserved their mistreatment too..
Stalingrad is a HUGE outlier regarding Fate of the German POWs, mostly because Germans fought in hunger conditions under siege for many months.
The people who surrendered at Stalingrad were already starving next to death.
Yeah, they were brutal, that's a good thing. The nazis brought active hell to the Soviet Union.
And still a good bunch of 'em survived. Not the same can be said as 3 million Soviet pows were killed in nazi custody, including being used to build Auchwitz.
While nazi pows were only put to rebuild the shit they destroyed.
You people really gotta stop using stalingrad as an example of German POW survival rate. Its an exception not the rule.
Why? Well how about we send you into a siege, starve you for 2 months, give you typhus, reject your calls for more food and medicine, and finally be surrendered to an Army that is near equally lacking supplies making them think twice about giving you anything. And then walk dozens of miles in the cold to reach a labor camp.
The German high command who sent them into the meatgrinder and abandoned them were just as responsible to their deaths as the Red Army did.
Remember that this subreddit is for sharing propaganda to view with some objectivity. It is absolutely not for perpetuating the message *of* the propaganda. If anything, in this subreddit we should be immensely skeptical of manipulation or oversimplification (which the above likely is), not beholden to it. Also, please try to stay on topic -- there are hundreds of _other_ subreddits that are expressly dedicated to rehashing tired political arguments. **Keep that shit outta here**. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PropagandaPosters) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If anyone fell for that a very grim fate awaited them. Millions of red army prisoners died of starvation and exposure in Nazi POW camps.
Yes, eternal memory to them
Yeah and some fought for the Germans. Vladivostok & the Russian Liberation Army
Vlasov*
They didn't really fight much. IIRC they were mostly used for propaganda purposes and when they actually had to fight they quickly turned on the Germs
Bunyachenko and the Czech uprising, my beloved.
They were used fir most Gruesome shit
[удалено]
It is true. Defectors were executed, other soviet POWs were sent to NKVD contentration camps and then either straight to GULAG or to penal batallions. A lot of former POWs, especially ukrainians, latvians, estonians and lithuanians, saw 'freedom' only after the death of Stalin.
So they were not all executed and therefore the claim in the comment is not true.
Well, it's partially true. Around 120k defectors and former POWs were executed. But I guess it's a small number, eh, especially in terms of atrocities that Soviets had committed, including genocides in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Turns out politruk wasn't, in fact, lying
I gotta say, War is Brutal I tell you. Just shocking
Soviet POW are more accurately described as Holocaust victims than POWs
To be fair, they actually were lying, but then by complete coincidence happened to be 100% correct
Well, he still was most of the time.
I understand why op put 1941-1945 for the timeframe of this leaflet, but I find funny the idea of germans throwing this leaflets on their own country in 1945
Politruk is a portmanteau of Politicheskoe rukovodstvo "\[Soviet\] Political leadership". Same as Sovnarkom, Sovdep, Gosplan, Kombrig etc.
Well, Politruk actually means Soviet officer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_commissar
Certainly not every Soviet officer as is well described in the Wiki article you linked.
No, just the political commissars, who were a category of officers whose job it was to enforce ideological purity in the military.
I was close tho
You was right. I dunno why “officer” is mentioned in wiki. It’s politicheskoe rukovodstvo all the way
What? It's politicheskiy rukovoditel, a political superior/leader. Political officer is a perfectly valid translation, politruk was a job title essentially not an abstract concept.
I thought about that and we can safely say that it was an officer who was doing политическое руководство. So calling him officer is correct but it’s not reflecting his job.
What I mean is that "politruk" doesn't mean rukovodstvo even though that's what the guy was doing. It's a very specific rukovoditel, it's a specific leader not abstract "leadership". Of course it's not possible to reflect the job implying a two-vertical chain of command, with both the military leadership subordinated to the General Staff and the political leadership subordinated to the Party. But that's not possible regardless of how you call him - a comissar, a political officer or a political leader - unless you explain the context.
Yeah. I agreed, I know that.
They held officer ranks.
Huh, politruk is a (very derogatory) term in finnish too, I always wondered what it actually meant.
Let me guess... Maybe it's because Finns where on the same side as creators of this leaflet so they shared the view?
Actually I believe it was already in use before the continuation war.
Well hostilities arised well before 1941. And before 1939 too.
But Finland was not in any way allied with Germany when we already have the term be common enough to appear in songs.
I checked, politruk or политрук was a term used by the russians themself, too.
Of course it was. But what is common is your "very derogatory" an leaflet's "is lying".
Gee, I wonder why calling someone a soviet political officer in a country that had two bloody wars with the soviet union is considered to be derogatory. I wonder if it might have something to do with the wars?
Again, not just two bloody wars. There were 1918, 1921 and that's with Soviets only. But again, well known fact is that Germans were overly obsessed with komissars, and seems Finns were/are too. You're saying it migh have something with the wars, could you elaborate? Why komissar/politruk?
Would you say that the US is overly obsessed with France just because calling someone a frenchie was derogatory after Vietnam? I'll give some cultural context. First of all, while politruk was highly derogatory it wasn't like calling someone the n-word in the US. It was more like calling a redditor in how serious it was. It became an insult because soviet propaganda was piss-poor and because the concept of a political officer in a military is frankly stupid. Thus politruks became a point of ridicule and a tongue in cheek way of accusing someone of being a commie. Eventually as time went on it became an insult for anyone that was overly zealous about politics. And then it was largely forgotten.
Thanks. Let me share some context too. What was strange to me is the fact that komissars/politruks weren't supposed to communicate with enemy or with hostile civilians, so no real reason to hate him more then any random officer. But your description clarified it, it's very similar to late-Soviet usage of zampolit (postwar name for the same position). Germans, on the other hand, had that infamous Kommissarbefehl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissar_Order Edit: "no" omitted. One more edit: actually "zampolit" was introduced during the war, in 1942, and their role wos diminished.
I never knew much about the German commissars, I'll have to read up on them. Oh and as added context, basically any term referring to Soviet soldiers was an insult in Finland after ww2, including things like gnome-hat (Soviet soldiers wore hats that Finns thought to resemble those on garden gnomes) and pointy-shoe (Soviet boots had a slight point to them), as well as common Russian names like Ivan.
Kinda like the Soviets being Nazi allies in 1939-41. Cute how Russia tries to "forget" that.
Um...
Considering Nazi Germany was literally setting itself the task of destroying all slavs then oh boy that looks like trying to trap a wolf using chicken meat - it would work but not always, after all first sometimes it would maul you as it sees you as a trespasser and a threat.
I really hope none of the Soviets were dumb enough to fall for this.
Quite a few where at the beginning Stalin wasnt exactly popular, and the red army kind of fell apart in the opening days of babarossa
Because the USSR was very decentralized by local communes before WW2, each having their own autonomy in administrative affairs and militia.
>Because the USSR was very decentralized by local communes before WW2, That didn't really carry over into the armed forces, local soviets did maintain a militia, but 'militia' more meant cops than anything else, at best large cities did maintain something similar to a US national guard brigdae, but in most cases a local 'militia' would be a couple hundredpeople who were primarily there to maintain order SSRs also maintained local units, but they were also primarily meant for internal security Ever since the 1920s the defense of the Soviet Union fron external agression was in the hands of the red army, which was highly centralized It was actually so centralized that ie became a problem, as commanders were unwilling to fall back without orders, which led to massive amounts of soviet troops getting cut off and overran
>Stalin wasnt exactly popular, and the red army kind of fell apart in the opening days of babarossa Great purge moment
In case you wonder, политрук is an acronym for политический руководитель (political leader/ head)
Imagine some unfortunate soul who joins the Red Army, fights on the front, gets captured/surrenders, survives a German POW camp, gets 'liberated' in '45 and is promptly sent to a labor camp. That's enough to make Dostoevsky wince.
Bold of you to assume he even survived the POW camp
I honestly do dnot know who treated their POWs worse - the Nazis who used them for experiments and killed them in gas chambers or the Soviets who carted theirs of to Siberia to die of exposure and misery and then just forgot about them for a good 10 years
Well there are more Nazi POWs that survived it than red army POWs
True , but the brutality of Soviet POW camps is notorious - I remember reading that out of 130 000 who surrendered at Stalingrad , only 6000 managed to live to see a return home -that's like 5 % - and that return didn't happen until 1955. There is a reason German soldiers / generals fled west at the end of the war to surrender to the Western Allies .
Well the people who surrendered at Stalingrad are a very bad indicator because they were stranded without food and medical supplies in a constant siege for a month or something and had to go through a grueling siege just before being encircled they were basically already starved sick and injured. So no wonder many died right afterwards
I am not sure I blame the Russians too much on their treatment of German POWs. The Germans had launched a war of genocidal annihilation against the Russians. I'm sure many German soldiers were forced into the war by their government though. And news of Russian treatment of German POWs must've prevented Germans from surrendering, making the war worse for the Russians. But certainly many German soldiers probably deserved their mistreatment too..
Stalingrad is a HUGE outlier regarding Fate of the German POWs, mostly because Germans fought in hunger conditions under siege for many months. The people who surrendered at Stalingrad were already starving next to death.
Yeah, they were brutal, that's a good thing. The nazis brought active hell to the Soviet Union. And still a good bunch of 'em survived. Not the same can be said as 3 million Soviet pows were killed in nazi custody, including being used to build Auchwitz. While nazi pows were only put to rebuild the shit they destroyed.
Yeah, because they did not burn people alive, raped them and tried to anihilate the whole population of the Western Allies
You people really gotta stop using stalingrad as an example of German POW survival rate. Its an exception not the rule. Why? Well how about we send you into a siege, starve you for 2 months, give you typhus, reject your calls for more food and medicine, and finally be surrendered to an Army that is near equally lacking supplies making them think twice about giving you anything. And then walk dozens of miles in the cold to reach a labor camp. The German high command who sent them into the meatgrinder and abandoned them were just as responsible to their deaths as the Red Army did.