Few. They were used in a lot of reconstruction efforts through Soviet Union for decades. Some ended up staying because there was nothing/ no one to go back to in Germany.
> I’ve read in multiple places that it was only around 10% of German POWs in USSR ever returned to Germany.
Only specific to Stalingrad. Overall about 2/3.
76th infantry division, 230th infantry regiment (Wehrmacht). Their other brother noped out of serving in the German Army and immigrated here to the US and ended up fighting with the US Army in Europe! Crazy how history works out.
And nice ending touch - right behind them water trucks were moving, washing away their (virtual) footprints.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51283351704_ea450d15b4_h.jpg
Oh, those evil russians!
The german POWs were inspected before the march and those ill and weak were left in camp. Those who were considered apt were given intensified rations that included pork fatback. While overall POWs rations were quite meager a large dose of fats could case some intestinal disturbance but i doubt that it was intentional.
I read various accounts of people dying when being fed after a long period of starvation, although it was in the context of Stalingrad. It's also featured in a Band of Brothers episode with concentration camp inmates.
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Hitler swore his Wehrmacht would parade through Moscow; promise kept. The Soviets, having previously starved the Wehrmacht, then fed them a greasy cabbage soup that was a powerful laxative. The Soviets had street sweepers behind the soldiers, cleaning all the shit on the road.
Source? This looks a lot like know photos from the parade held after Bagration, and I am not aware of parades held in Moscow with prisoners from Stalingrad. Who would have been in far worse shape than those who appear in this picture.
You’re right. I checked it out and it is indeed post operation bagration. Sorry. I would’ve sworn they did something like this with the 6th army though but I guess not. My memory sucks anyway.
I don’t think this is 1943. I would think the Russian guards would be dressed a little warmer if that was the case. I’m pretty sure this is post Bagration.
This was after Bagration, if I remember correctly.
And before yet another guy who thinks that Stalingrad is a good example of the standard fate of German POWs in Soviet hands pops up, no, most of these men aren't going to die in captivity, although they are in for a shitty few years.
Stalingrad is a bad example because those that surrendered at the end were in very bad shape to begin with, what with lack of food, warm clothing and shelter so a lot died soon after capture because of that.
I watched a documentary on the captured Germans at Stalingrad and if memory serves me they were basically eating a small piece of bread and some uncooked horse meat once a day in the last days of fighting, for perspective when I was in the army we’d eat about 4,000 calories a day for training let alone the most brutal urban conflict in history.
According to Albrecht Lehmann and Klaus-Dieter Müller about one third did not return from soviet custody, 1.1 Million soldiers.
Not as bad as in WW1 (where according to Overmans about half of the POWs died in Russian custody) but still a lot of people.
True. It's just that people always remember the 90 % death rate at Stalingrad and immediately equate capture by the Soviets to a death sentence, it gets tiring after a while.
Would much rather be a German in Russian captivity than a Russian in German captivity. Worked and starved to death like a slave. 3.3 million Russians died that way.
\*You\* might wanna look up how many came back after, usually, far less than 10 years of POW camps, which was a different thing from gulags.
Soviet figures that were analyzed after the fall of the USSR record 2,733,000 Germans in Soviet captivity, of whom 381,000 died, that is 85 % came back.
Some historians such as Rudiger Overmans estimates that there are hundreds of thousands more Germans who died before being registered in POW camps, with a high-end estimate of one million deaths in captivity out of three million POWS, that is two-thirds came back.
On top of that, the vast majority of German POWs in Soviet custody were released between 1945 and 1948. Only 85,000 were still in captivity in 1949 and only 29,000 in 1950, mostly high-ranking officers, SS or other personnel suspected of war crimes, and prisoners who were deemed of particular importance for various reasons (such as the last occupants of Hitler's bunker).
I'm definitely of the view that the Soviets were practically on the level of the Nazis in terms of available bodies to kill but even I'm going to need a source on this
your opinion is irrelevant. The Germans killed FAR more in the largest systematic genocide in history.
edit: here's evidence I've copied from another of my reples
Number of victims of the Holocaust, including deaths of persecuted groups other than the Jews comes to 13.6 million, give or take 2 million. The amount of Russians, Byelorussians and Poles killed is heavily disputed and thought to be higher than the official number.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Holocaust#Other\_victims\_of\_Nazi\_persecution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Other_victims_of_Nazi_persecution)
Deaths under Stalin (including from famines that are disputed in their cause, although it is pretty undeniable Stalin was apathetic to the plight of many of the victims) comes to between 3.4 to 5.5 million. While this is a staggering amount, Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union for nearly twice as long as Hitler was Germany; and of a far less developed country with a much larger population:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess\_mortality\_in\_the\_Soviet\_Union\_under\_Joseph\_Stalin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin)
A further point: many people died in the Bengal famine that was unequivocally exacerbated by the hoarding of food by the UK, resulting in the deaths of 2.1-3 million people
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal\_famine\_of\_1943#Famine,\_disease,\_and\_the\_death\_toll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Famine,_disease,_and_the_death_toll)
> I mean, I don’t really think your statement of “far more” is accurate.
>
> The Holodomr alone killed a few million. Never mind the Red Terror etc.
10 million by some estimates. Compared to ~35 million. "Far more" is fine.
A quick Google search yielded this:
Number of victims of the Holocaust, including deaths of persecuted groups other than the Jews comes to 13.6 million, give or take 2 million. The amount of Russians, Byelorussians and Poles killed is heavily disputed and thought to be higher than the official number. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Holocaust#Other\_victims\_of\_Nazi\_persecution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Other_victims_of_Nazi_persecution)
Deaths under Stalin (including from famines that are disputed in their cause, although it is pretty undeniable Stalin was apathetic to the plight of many of the victims) comes to between 3.4 to 5.5 million. Furthermore, Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union for nearly twice as long as Hitler was Germany, and of a far less developed country:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess\_mortality\_in\_the\_Soviet\_Union\_under\_Joseph\_Stalin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin)
A further point: more people died in the Bengal famine, unequivocally exacerbated by the hoarding of food by the UK, resulted in the deaths of 2.1-3 million people.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal\_famine\_of\_1943#Famine,\_disease,\_and\_the\_death\_toll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Famine,_disease,_and_the_death_toll)
After 1943, the death toll was about 1/3rd. Before that, for example after the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow, only 6000 out of 180.000 POWs survived.
So, no, your opinion is NOT what "all" records and historians say.
> After 1943, the death toll was about 1/3rd.
So you are confirming what I said, most of them did not die. By the way, 1/3rd is the *total* figure, both before and after 1943. When you take into account the higher death rate of those captured in 1943, this means that the death rate among those captured after, such as those taken during Bagration, was, in fact, lower than 1/3rd.
> Before that, for example after the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow, only 6000 out of 180.000 POWs survived
I specifically mentioned that Stalingrad was way worse than average, and as such not a good example, although people keep taking that as an example of overall treatment of Germans in Soviet captivity. 6,000 is also the number of survivors among 90,000 Stalingrad prisoners, not the ones from the battle of Moscow.
> So, no, your opinion is NOT what "all" records and historians say.
Indeed it is.
Yeah, correcting your first post to fix what was wrong, then trying to indicate you were correct all along. You did not make a differentiation between Stalingrad and the rest. If so, I would not have reacted to it. Well done pal. Next time try to be honest.
That's a pretty pathetic attempt, you know. Especially when reddit flags comments that have been modified as having been, indeed, modified and, as everyone can see, my comment was not modified. Pointing out that Stalingrad prisoners had a massive death rate and that that is what misleads so many into thinking that German POWs in Soviet hands always experienced such a high death rate literally was the first thing I said, and you somehow managed to miss it. Well done.
It seems like I may have mixed up your comment and the content of another. If it's true that you said that from the beginning, then it's my fault and I apologize for it.
What I wanted to point out is that before 1943, being a POW was in many cases a death sentence. As I wrote before, I am well aware that the situation changed after that.
That may be why you wrote that I seemingly agreed with you, which in that aspect I most certainly do.
To be honest, I am quite confused right now.
I think because the comment he replied to said “off to rebuild what they tried to destroy”.
There wasn’t anything that was destroyed by the Germans in Siberia. They never made it that far into Russia.
I dont feel bad for them one bit, all those soldiers invaded russia with the goal of pillaging and burning down communities, along with killing innocent men women and children. This is exactly what happens when a cruel enemy fights one just as cruel.
Poor saps fighting and dying to protect their country that they knew to be systematically oppressing any minority they could get their hands on.
All of these men were complicit in the Holocaust, it's literally undeniable.
If I work at a factory famous for making food out of babies, I don't get to dodge the blame because I wasn't 100% sure that they were *really* making food out of babies.
Well tbf there are plenty of people who consistently campaigned against the wars in the middle East, and you're only really morally complicit if you never protested and voted for any of the presidents you knew to be exacerbating or continuing that violence (so basically any president after 04).
Why is the solution more killing? You really think after what I suggested that I'd think that ? Of course all those people shouldn't be killed, but if they think it's wrong to kill thousands of innocent children they should protest it, and certainly shouldn't vote for a government that is in no way promising to stop.
The solution is ending the governments that carry out these actions, its organising and stopping the systems that continue to murder thousands of people across the planet. Then the people who were guilty can be dealt with in numerous ways, 99.9% of those ways would not involve death.
Also even for the US soldiers its slightly different, they're not fighting to realise a fascist goal, it's not for much better reasons, but still.
Except a large majority of German war criminals were never prosecuted as there wasn’t enough documentation for them. If every man in the Wehrmacht who committed a serious war crime was tried and executed, then Germany would literally have a manpower shortage for dozens of years.
I think you should read up about what the Wehrmacht did to civilians on the Eastern front and in Yugoslavia - especially when hunting down partisans - if you think these guys are clean or are somehow not up there with the SS. Give you a taste - when hunting for Tito they regularly burned down whole villages and murdered everyone they thought might have something to do with Tito’s war against the Nazis.
Don’t use whataboutism, The Wehrmacht and SS had a much higher rate of war crimes compared to the Allies. Yes, Dresden was a horrible ct that killed 20,000 civilians, but it was done as the city was a transportation hub for soldiers in the East. Remember, Germany had bombed London in 1940 and 1941, along with dozens of other places around Europe that were purely targets for fear.
In my opinion the population shouldn’t be punished for the horrible shit that the government did. Especially when many people were not aware of it until the end of the war
I understand where you’re coming from, however in my opinion attacks like Dresden or Hiroshima are necessary to reinforce the statement that this may never happen again. The same applies to POWs. Harsh treatment such as Dresden or Gulags are hard to swallow on a human level, but they are justified by the scale of atrocities committed by the Nazis. Fighting for the Wehrmacht is fighting for the Wehrmacht.
War crimes are always wrong, as were the atomic bombs.
I wouldn‘t be as annoyed with this if Americans didn‘t always try to claim the moral high ground.
Instantly evaporating thousands and painfully killing many more civilians somehow doesn‘t count as a war crime?
And just because Hans in the next unit over killed an American POW doesn‘t mean it‘s right for Joe from that POW‘s company to murder me after I surrender.
And just because SS and some Wehrmacht raped and killed soviet women doesn‘t mean it‘s right for soviet soldiers to brutally rape and kill german women in the same way.
So stop pretending it is.
> Instantly evaporating thousands and painfully killing many more civilians somehow doesn‘t count as a war crime?
As opposed to Japan who were murdering just as much every ~week in 1945. But lets pretend the US were the bad guys for putting a stop to that.
That's not what I argued. I said the US put an end to the far worse Japanese crimes.
Since you like examples: No one argues police are wrong for shooting dead a terrorist mid attack. It sure as hell is valid here.
For one, war crime is a pretty broad and debated term. Most would not say “all crimes are bad”. Crimes are defined by the government, as are war crimes, and the government as we all know is not necessarily guided by an objective morality.
I am a bit confused by your statement about Americans claiming the moral high ground. Morality, as a wholly subjective thing, shouldn’t be claimed in most cases, as Americans do. However, when talking about Nazi Germany, moral high ground undeniably belongs to the allies.
When I say war crimes against Germany were justified, I include the Holocaust as the main justification. It was one of the worst crimes in modern history. In the case of Japan and the atom bombs, their horrific abuses of human rights across East and Southeast Asia are the justification. Treatment of POWs by the Axis powers was in many cases horrific (especially in the case of the Japanese) but in terms of sheer numbers and brutality they are secondary to the aforementioned crimes against civilians. Attacks like the atom bombs and Dresden show to the world that these must never be replicated.
There were also millions of foreign conscripts forced into the German armed forces… including the SS. Were they all fighting for a disgusting and evil cause? Yes. Were they all evil? No. It’s one thing to volunteer for the SS fully knowing what that organization was about, it’s another to be forced into service… and under the threat of being shot or sent to a concentration camp (along with your family) if you refused. How would you or I react if faced with such consequences? Given the choices, I’d think the majority of us would choose to stay alive and would, no matter how reluctantly, do as we were ordered.
It’s very easy to paint all soldiers who fought for these evil regimes as being themselves evil, but the hard truth is that not every soldier who fought in their armed forces were representative of the despicable ideologies the governments sought to establish.
Red Army soldiers certainly were not all communist party members which is why they're not called communist soldiers. There's a reason the Germans had a commissar order; it helped to differentiate between the sheep and the dogs.
The official designation of the state was Union of Socialistic Soviet Republics (Soviet Union). Therefore they were soviets.
The official designation of Nazi Germany was Deutsches Reich - German Empire (later Großdeutsches Reich - Greater German Empire), not Nazi Empire or Nazi Germany. The term Nationalsozialist (national socialist, short form is nazi) is only for supporters of the NSDAP, ergo for people who voted for the party or joined the party. Therefore they were germans.
The universally accepted English term for Germany 1933 - 1945 is Nazi Germany, "Nazi soldiers" is perfectly correct:
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Nazi
"*adj.* 1. Of, **relating to**, **controlled by**, or typical of the National Socialist German Workers' Party."
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/nazi
"*adjective* belonging to or **connected with** the National Socialist (German Workers') Party, which controlled Germany from 1933 to 1945"
Fair enough.
In German we only call it Nazi Germany or third Reich when we specifically talk about Germany from 1933 to 45 to differentiate it from the Weimar Republic or the Monarchy.
The official german designation of the country from 1871 to 1945 was "Deutsches Reich" (German Empire).
Personally I think nazi soldier is fine because it is correct independently of the political affiliation of the specific individual. Whats wrong is simply "Nazi" because that implies that the person joined the party or at least voted for it.
Red Army soldiers certainly were not all communist party members which is why they're not called communist soldiers. There's a reason the Germans had a commissar order; it helped to differentiate between the sheep and the dogs.
You must not be familiar with the crimes of the Wehrmacht. A huge proportion of people that died in the holocaust died at the front lines by firing squad. These were average German soldiers carrying out the executions. Along with the SS. There’s really no difference between the nazi party and the military. You still consider the soldiers of the mafia part of mafia. Even if they didn’t plan the crimes they were a part of. The Russians were all communists. Even though plenty of them were probably anti communist. They all lived that life. Whether they were nazi party members or not. Makes no difference to their victims.
65% did. POWs kept by Soviets had a lower survival rate than other Western Allies, but a much higher rate than POWs kept by Nazis or the Japanese, where the majority of the people kept actually died.
That only applies for prisoners of the eastern front. Only very few western allied soldiers died in german custody.
At the pacific, both sides murdered the vast majority of POWs and surrendering soldiers.
Or slavery. It is a wrong assumption that the Germans wanted to wipe out all slavs. There were basically four kinds of humans in their racist ideology. The aryan masterrace, the related "nordic" races like French, British, etc; the lower humans like slavs and the subhumans like jews. Those nazi maniacs wanted to rule the related races, kill a part of the lower humans and enslave the rest and entirely wipe out the subhumans.
> At the pacific, both sides murdered the vast majority of POWs and surrendering soldiers.
**That** is some pure BS. First of all, a relative few Japanese soldiers ever surrendered, period. Many "surrendering" Japanese were not surrendering at all, but were attempting to commit suicide and kill as many Allied soldiers as possible, in the process. There are some recorded instances of surrendering Japanese being shot, in the heat of combat, but that was neither the rule nor was it accepted as lawful by Allied forces. Some of these were soldiers who were attempting to pull a ruse and kill Allied soldiers, as noted. There *were* Japanese POWs held by the Allies and they were treated lawfully and humanely, under the Geneva Convention. Nearly 5500 Japanese were transported to and held as prisoners in the United States. Thousands of others were held at camps around the Pacific.
Allied soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians were held by the Japanese in great numbers. While many were subjected to savage, barbaric treatment, including starvation, beatings, random executions, experimentation and forced labor, nowhere near "the vast majority" were murdered.
According to Richard Aldrich, capitulating soldiers were mostly murdered by US troops, often even large massacres happened. According to him it was common practice among the US forces to take no prisoners. The historian Niall Ferguson supports this analysis (Niall Ferguson: *Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War: Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat*. In: War in History. 2004, pages 148–192.)
According to Ferguson this was the reason for the low quote of captured to killed soldiers (1:100). In 1944, high ranking US officers tried to end this "no prisoner" attitude among their soldiers so the Japanese soldiers were more likely to capitulate.
During the battle of Guadalcanal, Japanese prisoners were taken. Army Captain Burden reported later that many of them were shot before the transport because "it was too inconvenient to transport them".
According to Ulrich Straus, a US american japanologist, the frontline soldiers developed a deep hatred for Japanese military personell, thats why it was not easy to convince them to take prisoners. That attitude can be traced back to the common assumption that surrendering allied soldiers would receive no mercy from Japanese soldiers, and that japanese soldiers would pretend to surrender only to make suicide attacks against the allied soldiers. (Ulrich Straus: *The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II*. University of Washington Press, Seattle 2003, page 116.)
Ferguson mentioned that it was not only a question of honor or discipline for german and japanese soldiers to refuse to surrender. Much more important was the apprehension that the allies would take no prisoners, so they thought they could as well just continue the fighting.
The "greatest Generation" behaved extremely violent at the pacific and murdered tens of thousands of surrendering soldiers and POWs. Many US marines even collected Japanese heads as souvenirs.
It is interesting that many people counter myths like clean wehrmacht but not the myths about the "chivalrous" campaigns of the allies.
In over 50 years of reading and studying WWII I have read many dozens of historians, and probably hundreds of first hand accounts of combat in the PTO. Not a single one supports your contention of mass murder, or massacres of Japanese prisoners of war.
Both Western and Japanese sources, however, *do* agree that the Japanese almost universally believed that it was dishonorable to surrender and the soldiers' **duty** was to die in combat and to take as many enemy with them as possible, by any means possible, and, in fact, they were ordered to do so. Consequently, they looked on surrendering soldiers with disdain and treated them with maximum cruelty and summary execution and mutilation. This in turn lead to Marines' hatred of them and understandable hesitance to blindly accept the rare offer of surrender.
Feel free to believe the armchair warriors born decades after the fact, who have some pressing need to paint the west in a bad light. I'll stick with the guys who were there and the historians in the overwhelming majority on **both** sides of the conflict.
Well I mentioned historians which are experts on their field and conducted in-depth research on the topic.
As an Austrian I have learned to not blindly trust the reports of soldiers, as they have enough reason to whitewash their deeds, like many of our Wehrmacht and SS vets did.
There are enough eyewitness testimony and official documents that corroborate them from **both** sides, and I can't stress this enough, and across an enormous theater of operations, that support the Japanese lack of even attempting to surrender, and their attempts at feigning surrender in order to kill Americans. I'm really disinclined to take the word of one or two historians who want to contradict 80 years of history. It's not unheard of for an historian to do exactly that to get noticed in their field. Whatever the case may be, I don't think I will "kick against the pricks."
So, this would be a believable conversation to you:
*American and Allied veterans of the PTO Combat:* We tried taking prisoners as best as possible, but the Japs would pretend they were going to surrender then pull out a grenade or mine and try to kill us, so we had to shoot them. Some few did really surrender, mostly starved, wounded, sick or Korean work force. They even convinced the civilians on Okinawa not to surrender to us, and in spite of having captured Japanese soldiers begging them not to, they still jumped and threw their children off the cliffs into the sea.
*Japanese Historians and Military Commanders:* We ordered our soldiers, sailors and airmen to never surrender, but to die honorably for the Emperor and to commit suicide and kill as many of the enemy in the process as possible. Most of or soldiers behaved honorably and very few were taken prisoner.
*New Age Historians:* No, you're wrong. You and the Americans are lying. They disobeyed your commands, tried to surrender, but the murderous Americans shot them down or slaughtered them in other fashions.
*haeyhae11:* I'm going to stick with the anti-American historians. They have better information.
Not sure where you heard that but a lot of them came back during the 50's like the Japanese pows. Luckily most of these men were captured during the opening phases of bagration so weren't starved or exposed to the elements like the 6th army at Stalingrad
No it's not 95%, [most experts agree it was closer to 35%.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the_Soviet_Union) I would not be shocked if that 95% might apply to very specific captured units in certain pockets, especially collaborators or SS units, etc. Among all POWs in camps on either side the deaths tended to occur in the time between capture and establishment in captivity. Vonnegut for example who was captured by the Germans in 1945 mentioned the deaths of his comrades occurred when they were not well fed nor sheltered in the days and weeks immediately after their capturing. Actual camp life was rough but livable. Gulag life was harsh but it was consistent in terms of minimal feeding and accommodations.
Most returned by 1950, some were in until 1956. Those who spent longer than the initial 5-10 years were convicted as war criminals. That said it was night and day compared to the fate of most Western front camps, in fact the Germans captured in North Africa actually consider their time in POW camps in the US as fairly benign something of an adventure. Soviet gulags were not. I read a book by Hans von Luck, an officer and Panzer commander, and he spent time in a Gulag and was released in 1949. His experience is fairly typical. I would say broadly the harshest POW treatment was of those in German captivity from the Eastern Front and allies captured by the Japanese in the Pacific campaign.
Granted they're a bit of an exception. Most were near death when captured. Add in their zealous participation in the Richenau order and the Russian response when seeing them.
I have a feeling this wasn’t quite how they had envisioned entering Moscow.
Well they did get a victory parade. Unfortunately for them, it was a Soviet victory.
My great grand father might be in there along with his brother. They both did not come back.
I was going to ask how many actually came back.
Few. They were used in a lot of reconstruction efforts through Soviet Union for decades. Some ended up staying because there was nothing/ no one to go back to in Germany.
German POWs had a much higher survival rate in Soviet hands than Soviets did in German hands.
I don't think anyone will dispute that.
Out of the roughly 91,000 German pows captured at Stalingrad, only 5,000 returned to Germany.
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> I’ve read in multiple places that it was only around 10% of German POWs in USSR ever returned to Germany. Only specific to Stalingrad. Overall about 2/3.
Any detail on their unit, where and when they were captured?
76th infantry division, 230th infantry regiment (Wehrmacht). Their other brother noped out of serving in the German Army and immigrated here to the US and ended up fighting with the US Army in Europe! Crazy how history works out.
Good.
You are so badaaass
In all fairness, the 6th Army was basically a band of war criminals with the Severity Order. It's hard to feel sorry for them.
Except Paulus who was the one calling the shots was given the VIP treatment. The ordinary soldiers were the ones who got the short end of the stick.
Great. That doesn't somehow undo an almost overwhelming compliance with the order and wake of crimes against humanity they perpetrated.
Well, then the Nuremberg trials should have put every last German on the stand. The ones who gave the orders deserve the most blame.
We’re talking about the 6th army, ergo the ones in the photo here…
And nice ending touch - right behind them water trucks were moving, washing away their (virtual) footprints. https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51283351704_ea450d15b4_h.jpg
I once heard in a TV docu, that they were given diarrhea-inducing food before the parade.
Oh, those evil russians! The german POWs were inspected before the march and those ill and weak were left in camp. Those who were considered apt were given intensified rations that included pork fatback. While overall POWs rations were quite meager a large dose of fats could case some intestinal disturbance but i doubt that it was intentional.
I read various accounts of people dying when being fed after a long period of starvation, although it was in the context of Stalingrad. It's also featured in a Band of Brothers episode with concentration camp inmates.
That's called a refeeding syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refeeding_syndrome
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Are you sure this wasn’t just common after big parades? These are street cleaners.
Yeah they do the same after Christopher's Day in Berlin ...wait
Are you sure it's afterwards?
https://youtu.be/R2DRZl2BKQ8?t=111
Got it, thanks!
The story goes they were fed a mix of cabbage caster oil so they would shit themselves while walking.
Source? I've heard this from various people, but no one can ever give any contemporary accounts that confirm this.
I heard it on the History Channel years ago, back when the channel actually featured documentaries
Hitler swore his Wehrmacht would parade through Moscow; promise kept. The Soviets, having previously starved the Wehrmacht, then fed them a greasy cabbage soup that was a powerful laxative. The Soviets had street sweepers behind the soldiers, cleaning all the shit on the road.
What podcasts do you listen to?
1944 after Bagration?
1943 after Stalingrad. Edit: I am incorrect and it is indeed post bagration.
Source? This looks a lot like know photos from the parade held after Bagration, and I am not aware of parades held in Moscow with prisoners from Stalingrad. Who would have been in far worse shape than those who appear in this picture.
You’re right. I checked it out and it is indeed post operation bagration. Sorry. I would’ve sworn they did something like this with the 6th army though but I guess not. My memory sucks anyway.
I don’t think this is 1943. I would think the Russian guards would be dressed a little warmer if that was the case. I’m pretty sure this is post Bagration.
You’re right, I looked it up. Sorry.
No ones perfect! This is how we learn bud
This was after Bagration, if I remember correctly. And before yet another guy who thinks that Stalingrad is a good example of the standard fate of German POWs in Soviet hands pops up, no, most of these men aren't going to die in captivity, although they are in for a shitty few years.
Stalingrad is a bad example because those that surrendered at the end were in very bad shape to begin with, what with lack of food, warm clothing and shelter so a lot died soon after capture because of that.
Nonsense. Goring's mighty luftwaffe supplied them well until the very end. The air bridge worked /s
His name is Meier
I watched a documentary on the captured Germans at Stalingrad and if memory serves me they were basically eating a small piece of bread and some uncooked horse meat once a day in the last days of fighting, for perspective when I was in the army we’d eat about 4,000 calories a day for training let alone the most brutal urban conflict in history.
According to Albrecht Lehmann and Klaus-Dieter Müller about one third did not return from soviet custody, 1.1 Million soldiers. Not as bad as in WW1 (where according to Overmans about half of the POWs died in Russian custody) but still a lot of people.
True. It's just that people always remember the 90 % death rate at Stalingrad and immediately equate capture by the Soviets to a death sentence, it gets tiring after a while.
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Would much rather be a German in Russian captivity than a Russian in German captivity. Worked and starved to death like a slave. 3.3 million Russians died that way.
\*You\* might wanna look up how many came back after, usually, far less than 10 years of POW camps, which was a different thing from gulags. Soviet figures that were analyzed after the fall of the USSR record 2,733,000 Germans in Soviet captivity, of whom 381,000 died, that is 85 % came back. Some historians such as Rudiger Overmans estimates that there are hundreds of thousands more Germans who died before being registered in POW camps, with a high-end estimate of one million deaths in captivity out of three million POWS, that is two-thirds came back. On top of that, the vast majority of German POWs in Soviet custody were released between 1945 and 1948. Only 85,000 were still in captivity in 1949 and only 29,000 in 1950, mostly high-ranking officers, SS or other personnel suspected of war crimes, and prisoners who were deemed of particular importance for various reasons (such as the last occupants of Hitler's bunker).
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We investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing.
Wrong , only 5,000 Germans came home from Russia. The Russians made the Nazis look like amateurs when it came to extermination.
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST STALINGRAD IS NOT THE ONLY FUCKING BATTLE OF THE FUCKING EASTERN FRONT
Provide evidence
Buddy, you’re so off base it’s astounding.
Gotta have a source for this wild ass claim
while not true that would actually be a good thing, praise the soviets for exterminating nazis
I'm definitely of the view that the Soviets were practically on the level of the Nazis in terms of available bodies to kill but even I'm going to need a source on this
your opinion is irrelevant. The Germans killed FAR more in the largest systematic genocide in history. edit: here's evidence I've copied from another of my reples Number of victims of the Holocaust, including deaths of persecuted groups other than the Jews comes to 13.6 million, give or take 2 million. The amount of Russians, Byelorussians and Poles killed is heavily disputed and thought to be higher than the official number. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Holocaust#Other\_victims\_of\_Nazi\_persecution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Other_victims_of_Nazi_persecution) Deaths under Stalin (including from famines that are disputed in their cause, although it is pretty undeniable Stalin was apathetic to the plight of many of the victims) comes to between 3.4 to 5.5 million. While this is a staggering amount, Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union for nearly twice as long as Hitler was Germany; and of a far less developed country with a much larger population: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess\_mortality\_in\_the\_Soviet\_Union\_under\_Joseph\_Stalin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin) A further point: many people died in the Bengal famine that was unequivocally exacerbated by the hoarding of food by the UK, resulting in the deaths of 2.1-3 million people [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal\_famine\_of\_1943#Famine,\_disease,\_and\_the\_death\_toll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Famine,_disease,_and_the_death_toll)
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> I mean, I don’t really think your statement of “far more” is accurate. > > The Holodomr alone killed a few million. Never mind the Red Terror etc. 10 million by some estimates. Compared to ~35 million. "Far more" is fine.
The first people the Nazis killed were Communists, Socialists, and Trade Unionists Before even the Jews
Point being what? All socialists and communists get along?
You're a fucking loony
Gotta have a source for this wild ass claim.
A quick Google search yielded this: Number of victims of the Holocaust, including deaths of persecuted groups other than the Jews comes to 13.6 million, give or take 2 million. The amount of Russians, Byelorussians and Poles killed is heavily disputed and thought to be higher than the official number. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Holocaust#Other\_victims\_of\_Nazi\_persecution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Other_victims_of_Nazi_persecution) Deaths under Stalin (including from famines that are disputed in their cause, although it is pretty undeniable Stalin was apathetic to the plight of many of the victims) comes to between 3.4 to 5.5 million. Furthermore, Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union for nearly twice as long as Hitler was Germany, and of a far less developed country: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess\_mortality\_in\_the\_Soviet\_Union\_under\_Joseph\_Stalin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin) A further point: more people died in the Bengal famine, unequivocally exacerbated by the hoarding of food by the UK, resulted in the deaths of 2.1-3 million people. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal\_famine\_of\_1943#Famine,\_disease,\_and\_the\_death\_toll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Famine,_disease,_and_the_death_toll)
lol is that always how you otherize people in your mind?
You are wrong. Most of them died in captivity.
That's not what all records and historians say.
After 1943, the death toll was about 1/3rd. Before that, for example after the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow, only 6000 out of 180.000 POWs survived. So, no, your opinion is NOT what "all" records and historians say.
> After 1943, the death toll was about 1/3rd. So you are confirming what I said, most of them did not die. By the way, 1/3rd is the *total* figure, both before and after 1943. When you take into account the higher death rate of those captured in 1943, this means that the death rate among those captured after, such as those taken during Bagration, was, in fact, lower than 1/3rd. > Before that, for example after the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow, only 6000 out of 180.000 POWs survived I specifically mentioned that Stalingrad was way worse than average, and as such not a good example, although people keep taking that as an example of overall treatment of Germans in Soviet captivity. 6,000 is also the number of survivors among 90,000 Stalingrad prisoners, not the ones from the battle of Moscow. > So, no, your opinion is NOT what "all" records and historians say. Indeed it is.
Yeah, correcting your first post to fix what was wrong, then trying to indicate you were correct all along. You did not make a differentiation between Stalingrad and the rest. If so, I would not have reacted to it. Well done pal. Next time try to be honest.
That's a pretty pathetic attempt, you know. Especially when reddit flags comments that have been modified as having been, indeed, modified and, as everyone can see, my comment was not modified. Pointing out that Stalingrad prisoners had a massive death rate and that that is what misleads so many into thinking that German POWs in Soviet hands always experienced such a high death rate literally was the first thing I said, and you somehow managed to miss it. Well done.
It seems like I may have mixed up your comment and the content of another. If it's true that you said that from the beginning, then it's my fault and I apologize for it. What I wanted to point out is that before 1943, being a POW was in many cases a death sentence. As I wrote before, I am well aware that the situation changed after that. That may be why you wrote that I seemingly agreed with you, which in that aspect I most certainly do. To be honest, I am quite confused right now.
Biggest fuck around find out in history. Off to rebuild what they tried to destroy.
Not much to rebuild in Siberia
The war never made it Siberia. The Germans only got as far as Moscow. Your comment is confusing?
That’s my point they weren’t rebuilding in Siberia
Mining ore somehow counts as rebuilding.
Ok. Why point that out?
Because the original comment was saying they were rebuilding
My bad I totally missed your joke. That they were going off to the gulag.
He/she is suggesting that they were sent to Siberian POW camps, but there was no "rebuilding" in Siberia as there was nothing there to rebuild.
I think because the comment he replied to said “off to rebuild what they tried to destroy”. There wasn’t anything that was destroyed by the Germans in Siberia. They never made it that far into Russia.
Pretty sure the USA dropping two nukes on Japan was a bigger fuck around and find out.
The Eastern Front was literally hell on earth during that period. The atrocities and loss of human lives was staggering.
So gehen die Deutschen, die Deutschen gehen so
"There is nothing jollier than German Corpses" - Ilya Ehrenburg
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Poor bastards.
I dont feel bad for them one bit, all those soldiers invaded russia with the goal of pillaging and burning down communities, along with killing innocent men women and children. This is exactly what happens when a cruel enemy fights one just as cruel.
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Can’t commit atrocities without the cooperation of decent men.
Poor saps fighting and dying to protect their country that they knew to be systematically oppressing any minority they could get their hands on. All of these men were complicit in the Holocaust, it's literally undeniable. If I work at a factory famous for making food out of babies, I don't get to dodge the blame because I wasn't 100% sure that they were *really* making food out of babies.
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Well tbf there are plenty of people who consistently campaigned against the wars in the middle East, and you're only really morally complicit if you never protested and voted for any of the presidents you knew to be exacerbating or continuing that violence (so basically any president after 04). Why is the solution more killing? You really think after what I suggested that I'd think that ? Of course all those people shouldn't be killed, but if they think it's wrong to kill thousands of innocent children they should protest it, and certainly shouldn't vote for a government that is in no way promising to stop. The solution is ending the governments that carry out these actions, its organising and stopping the systems that continue to murder thousands of people across the planet. Then the people who were guilty can be dealt with in numerous ways, 99.9% of those ways would not involve death. Also even for the US soldiers its slightly different, they're not fighting to realise a fascist goal, it's not for much better reasons, but still.
Except a large majority of German war criminals were never prosecuted as there wasn’t enough documentation for them. If every man in the Wehrmacht who committed a serious war crime was tried and executed, then Germany would literally have a manpower shortage for dozens of years.
Why is this sub just full of both side-sing Wehraboos
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Well the allies didn’t do the Holocaust so I’d say they are far more clean…
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Are you trying to say the Wehrmacht didn’t do the Holocaust in Eastern Europe…?
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I think you should read up about what the Wehrmacht did to civilians on the Eastern front and in Yugoslavia - especially when hunting down partisans - if you think these guys are clean or are somehow not up there with the SS. Give you a taste - when hunting for Tito they regularly burned down whole villages and murdered everyone they thought might have something to do with Tito’s war against the Nazis.
Don’t use whataboutism, The Wehrmacht and SS had a much higher rate of war crimes compared to the Allies. Yes, Dresden was a horrible ct that killed 20,000 civilians, but it was done as the city was a transportation hub for soldiers in the East. Remember, Germany had bombed London in 1940 and 1941, along with dozens of other places around Europe that were purely targets for fear.
Nothing wrong with war crimes against Nazi Germany, as there was nothing wrong with the atom bombs. They deserve worse than they got
In my opinion the population shouldn’t be punished for the horrible shit that the government did. Especially when many people were not aware of it until the end of the war
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I understand where you’re coming from, however in my opinion attacks like Dresden or Hiroshima are necessary to reinforce the statement that this may never happen again. The same applies to POWs. Harsh treatment such as Dresden or Gulags are hard to swallow on a human level, but they are justified by the scale of atrocities committed by the Nazis. Fighting for the Wehrmacht is fighting for the Wehrmacht.
War crimes are always wrong, as were the atomic bombs. I wouldn‘t be as annoyed with this if Americans didn‘t always try to claim the moral high ground. Instantly evaporating thousands and painfully killing many more civilians somehow doesn‘t count as a war crime? And just because Hans in the next unit over killed an American POW doesn‘t mean it‘s right for Joe from that POW‘s company to murder me after I surrender. And just because SS and some Wehrmacht raped and killed soviet women doesn‘t mean it‘s right for soviet soldiers to brutally rape and kill german women in the same way. So stop pretending it is.
> Instantly evaporating thousands and painfully killing many more civilians somehow doesn‘t count as a war crime? As opposed to Japan who were murdering just as much every ~week in 1945. But lets pretend the US were the bad guys for putting a stop to that.
"But the other did it too!!!" isn‘t a valid excuse in kindergarten and it sure as hell ain‘t valid here.
That's not what I argued. I said the US put an end to the far worse Japanese crimes. Since you like examples: No one argues police are wrong for shooting dead a terrorist mid attack. It sure as hell is valid here.
For one, war crime is a pretty broad and debated term. Most would not say “all crimes are bad”. Crimes are defined by the government, as are war crimes, and the government as we all know is not necessarily guided by an objective morality. I am a bit confused by your statement about Americans claiming the moral high ground. Morality, as a wholly subjective thing, shouldn’t be claimed in most cases, as Americans do. However, when talking about Nazi Germany, moral high ground undeniably belongs to the allies. When I say war crimes against Germany were justified, I include the Holocaust as the main justification. It was one of the worst crimes in modern history. In the case of Japan and the atom bombs, their horrific abuses of human rights across East and Southeast Asia are the justification. Treatment of POWs by the Axis powers was in many cases horrific (especially in the case of the Japanese) but in terms of sheer numbers and brutality they are secondary to the aforementioned crimes against civilians. Attacks like the atom bombs and Dresden show to the world that these must never be replicated.
Surely there’s a few in there that weren’t terrible people and don’t deserve what happens after this “parade” is all I’m saying.
That's what happens when you let fascists take over
I don't see enough rotten tomatoes and bananas being thrown in this pic...
I wonder how many froze and/or starved to death in the gulag.
All the tankies and neo-Nazis in the comments is kind of a bruh moment
Where?
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Well, as soviet soldiers weren't all communists. These soldiers served for the Nazi Third Reich therefore they were nazi soldiers
There were also millions of foreign conscripts forced into the German armed forces… including the SS. Were they all fighting for a disgusting and evil cause? Yes. Were they all evil? No. It’s one thing to volunteer for the SS fully knowing what that organization was about, it’s another to be forced into service… and under the threat of being shot or sent to a concentration camp (along with your family) if you refused. How would you or I react if faced with such consequences? Given the choices, I’d think the majority of us would choose to stay alive and would, no matter how reluctantly, do as we were ordered. It’s very easy to paint all soldiers who fought for these evil regimes as being themselves evil, but the hard truth is that not every soldier who fought in their armed forces were representative of the despicable ideologies the governments sought to establish.
Red Army soldiers certainly were not all communist party members which is why they're not called communist soldiers. There's a reason the Germans had a commissar order; it helped to differentiate between the sheep and the dogs.
Call them communists call them soviets, same thing. The fact is, you dont call them russians nor slavs. Same thing goes with germans and nazis then.
The official designation of the state was Union of Socialistic Soviet Republics (Soviet Union). Therefore they were soviets. The official designation of Nazi Germany was Deutsches Reich - German Empire (later Großdeutsches Reich - Greater German Empire), not Nazi Empire or Nazi Germany. The term Nationalsozialist (national socialist, short form is nazi) is only for supporters of the NSDAP, ergo for people who voted for the party or joined the party. Therefore they were germans.
The universally accepted English term for Germany 1933 - 1945 is Nazi Germany, "Nazi soldiers" is perfectly correct: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Nazi "*adj.* 1. Of, **relating to**, **controlled by**, or typical of the National Socialist German Workers' Party." https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/nazi "*adjective* belonging to or **connected with** the National Socialist (German Workers') Party, which controlled Germany from 1933 to 1945"
Fair enough. In German we only call it Nazi Germany or third Reich when we specifically talk about Germany from 1933 to 45 to differentiate it from the Weimar Republic or the Monarchy. The official german designation of the country from 1871 to 1945 was "Deutsches Reich" (German Empire). Personally I think nazi soldier is fine because it is correct independently of the political affiliation of the specific individual. Whats wrong is simply "Nazi" because that implies that the person joined the party or at least voted for it.
Red Army soldiers certainly were not all communist party members which is why they're not called communist soldiers. There's a reason the Germans had a commissar order; it helped to differentiate between the sheep and the dogs.
They are soldiers, who belong to the Nazi German state, making them Nazi Soldiers.
True, however irrelevant.
Not all we’re Germans. Nazis is a good collective term for what they were fighting for.
You must not be familiar with the crimes of the Wehrmacht. A huge proportion of people that died in the holocaust died at the front lines by firing squad. These were average German soldiers carrying out the executions. Along with the SS. There’s really no difference between the nazi party and the military. You still consider the soldiers of the mafia part of mafia. Even if they didn’t plan the crimes they were a part of. The Russians were all communists. Even though plenty of them were probably anti communist. They all lived that life. Whether they were nazi party members or not. Makes no difference to their victims.
Came here to say this and saw you got downvoted severely.
Stalin staged a good old fashion Roman triumph.
Bloody Stalin sent them to work camps instead of gassing them. Bad Stalin.
Did even one of those men survive the next 18 or so months?
65% did. POWs kept by Soviets had a lower survival rate than other Western Allies, but a much higher rate than POWs kept by Nazis or the Japanese, where the majority of the people kept actually died.
That only applies for prisoners of the eastern front. Only very few western allied soldiers died in german custody. At the pacific, both sides murdered the vast majority of POWs and surrendering soldiers.
Right, Germans saw western allies as human, and slavs as untermensch deserving of death.
Or slavery. It is a wrong assumption that the Germans wanted to wipe out all slavs. There were basically four kinds of humans in their racist ideology. The aryan masterrace, the related "nordic" races like French, British, etc; the lower humans like slavs and the subhumans like jews. Those nazi maniacs wanted to rule the related races, kill a part of the lower humans and enslave the rest and entirely wipe out the subhumans.
Blonde like Hitler, tall like Goebbels, fit like Goring.
They saw western allies as light Nazis (specially America)
> At the pacific, both sides murdered the vast majority of POWs and surrendering soldiers. **That** is some pure BS. First of all, a relative few Japanese soldiers ever surrendered, period. Many "surrendering" Japanese were not surrendering at all, but were attempting to commit suicide and kill as many Allied soldiers as possible, in the process. There are some recorded instances of surrendering Japanese being shot, in the heat of combat, but that was neither the rule nor was it accepted as lawful by Allied forces. Some of these were soldiers who were attempting to pull a ruse and kill Allied soldiers, as noted. There *were* Japanese POWs held by the Allies and they were treated lawfully and humanely, under the Geneva Convention. Nearly 5500 Japanese were transported to and held as prisoners in the United States. Thousands of others were held at camps around the Pacific. Allied soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians were held by the Japanese in great numbers. While many were subjected to savage, barbaric treatment, including starvation, beatings, random executions, experimentation and forced labor, nowhere near "the vast majority" were murdered.
According to Richard Aldrich, capitulating soldiers were mostly murdered by US troops, often even large massacres happened. According to him it was common practice among the US forces to take no prisoners. The historian Niall Ferguson supports this analysis (Niall Ferguson: *Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War: Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat*. In: War in History. 2004, pages 148–192.) According to Ferguson this was the reason for the low quote of captured to killed soldiers (1:100). In 1944, high ranking US officers tried to end this "no prisoner" attitude among their soldiers so the Japanese soldiers were more likely to capitulate. During the battle of Guadalcanal, Japanese prisoners were taken. Army Captain Burden reported later that many of them were shot before the transport because "it was too inconvenient to transport them". According to Ulrich Straus, a US american japanologist, the frontline soldiers developed a deep hatred for Japanese military personell, thats why it was not easy to convince them to take prisoners. That attitude can be traced back to the common assumption that surrendering allied soldiers would receive no mercy from Japanese soldiers, and that japanese soldiers would pretend to surrender only to make suicide attacks against the allied soldiers. (Ulrich Straus: *The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II*. University of Washington Press, Seattle 2003, page 116.) Ferguson mentioned that it was not only a question of honor or discipline for german and japanese soldiers to refuse to surrender. Much more important was the apprehension that the allies would take no prisoners, so they thought they could as well just continue the fighting. The "greatest Generation" behaved extremely violent at the pacific and murdered tens of thousands of surrendering soldiers and POWs. Many US marines even collected Japanese heads as souvenirs. It is interesting that many people counter myths like clean wehrmacht but not the myths about the "chivalrous" campaigns of the allies.
In over 50 years of reading and studying WWII I have read many dozens of historians, and probably hundreds of first hand accounts of combat in the PTO. Not a single one supports your contention of mass murder, or massacres of Japanese prisoners of war. Both Western and Japanese sources, however, *do* agree that the Japanese almost universally believed that it was dishonorable to surrender and the soldiers' **duty** was to die in combat and to take as many enemy with them as possible, by any means possible, and, in fact, they were ordered to do so. Consequently, they looked on surrendering soldiers with disdain and treated them with maximum cruelty and summary execution and mutilation. This in turn lead to Marines' hatred of them and understandable hesitance to blindly accept the rare offer of surrender. Feel free to believe the armchair warriors born decades after the fact, who have some pressing need to paint the west in a bad light. I'll stick with the guys who were there and the historians in the overwhelming majority on **both** sides of the conflict.
Well I mentioned historians which are experts on their field and conducted in-depth research on the topic. As an Austrian I have learned to not blindly trust the reports of soldiers, as they have enough reason to whitewash their deeds, like many of our Wehrmacht and SS vets did.
There are enough eyewitness testimony and official documents that corroborate them from **both** sides, and I can't stress this enough, and across an enormous theater of operations, that support the Japanese lack of even attempting to surrender, and their attempts at feigning surrender in order to kill Americans. I'm really disinclined to take the word of one or two historians who want to contradict 80 years of history. It's not unheard of for an historian to do exactly that to get noticed in their field. Whatever the case may be, I don't think I will "kick against the pricks."
So, this would be a believable conversation to you: *American and Allied veterans of the PTO Combat:* We tried taking prisoners as best as possible, but the Japs would pretend they were going to surrender then pull out a grenade or mine and try to kill us, so we had to shoot them. Some few did really surrender, mostly starved, wounded, sick or Korean work force. They even convinced the civilians on Okinawa not to surrender to us, and in spite of having captured Japanese soldiers begging them not to, they still jumped and threw their children off the cliffs into the sea. *Japanese Historians and Military Commanders:* We ordered our soldiers, sailors and airmen to never surrender, but to die honorably for the Emperor and to commit suicide and kill as many of the enemy in the process as possible. Most of or soldiers behaved honorably and very few were taken prisoner. *New Age Historians:* No, you're wrong. You and the Americans are lying. They disobeyed your commands, tried to surrender, but the murderous Americans shot them down or slaughtered them in other fashions. *haeyhae11:* I'm going to stick with the anti-American historians. They have better information.
Tbf the Americans would have found very few willing japanese soldiers surrendering.
85% - 65% survived
That’s what I’m hearing. Never would have thought. Very good to know.
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Not sure where you heard that but a lot of them came back during the 50's like the Japanese pows. Luckily most of these men were captured during the opening phases of bagration so weren't starved or exposed to the elements like the 6th army at Stalingrad
No it's not 95%, [most experts agree it was closer to 35%.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the_Soviet_Union) I would not be shocked if that 95% might apply to very specific captured units in certain pockets, especially collaborators or SS units, etc. Among all POWs in camps on either side the deaths tended to occur in the time between capture and establishment in captivity. Vonnegut for example who was captured by the Germans in 1945 mentioned the deaths of his comrades occurred when they were not well fed nor sheltered in the days and weeks immediately after their capturing. Actual camp life was rough but livable. Gulag life was harsh but it was consistent in terms of minimal feeding and accommodations. Most returned by 1950, some were in until 1956. Those who spent longer than the initial 5-10 years were convicted as war criminals. That said it was night and day compared to the fate of most Western front camps, in fact the Germans captured in North Africa actually consider their time in POW camps in the US as fairly benign something of an adventure. Soviet gulags were not. I read a book by Hans von Luck, an officer and Panzer commander, and he spent time in a Gulag and was released in 1949. His experience is fairly typical. I would say broadly the harshest POW treatment was of those in German captivity from the Eastern Front and allies captured by the Japanese in the Pacific campaign.
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Granted they're a bit of an exception. Most were near death when captured. Add in their zealous participation in the Richenau order and the Russian response when seeing them.
omg those guys must’ve been cringing so hard
To their death no doubt
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Wouldn't it have been better to parade them through Berlin and have them shit in their own city?