There was an old fella called Viktor who owned a TV repair shop in our small rural town near the Welsh border. He lived with his wife above the shop. It was only fairly recently that I learned he had arrived from Latvia during or just after WW2. It turns out that he was there during the Nazi occupation but escaped because he didn’t want to fight for the Nazis nor live under Soviet occupation, and he made his way across Europe mostly on foot by night. He lost all contact with his family & friends but by some sheer fluke after reaching a safe area of Western Europe he came across the girlfriend he had become separated from in Latvia who had somehow also managed to escape. They were reunited and married, and there they were, 50+ years later, as an elderly couple running our local TV repair shop in this quiet little town on the Welsh border. After what they’d been through it seems like they needed a lifetime of quiet rural life together. I have two takeaways from that: the strength of the human spirit, and that youngsters should remember that the “boring” elderly folk around them were also young once, and in many cases overcame challenges that they could hardly imagine let alone have to experience for themselves.
Good story! I knew a Pole, who as a boy was sent to Siberia in 1940, freed to Palestine in 1941 or 42, joined the Polish army, and was parachuted into German in 1945 with a radio beacon for bombers, and orders to guard it until bombers had passed. With RDF ( radio direction finding ), this was tantamount to suicide. He was 16 years old. /
beautiful fairy tale, True, Latvia was never under Soviet occupation. Latvia was part of the Russian Empire, then after the Russian Civil War it became a separate country, and in 1940, after the struggle of the pro-fascist party bloc with the pro-Soviet party bloc of Latvia, the pro-fascist one won, which banned socialists, communists, etc. in the country, in response to this the USSR issued an ultimatum demanding the restoration of the rights of the communists. To which the President of Latvia agreed, and then the local communists came to power in Latvia, and then voted to join the USSR, where they were completely equal in rights with all other peoples. This cannot be called an occupation at all. And after the German invasion, some Latvians believed Hitler’s lies about the exclusivity of the Aryan race, and that Latvians, together with the Germans, should rule over the lower peoples, and some local Nazi collaborators began to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, and Communists; there are still monuments to concentration camps in Latvia. So your Victor most likely was a Nazi collaborator, participated in crimes, and then was afraid of justice, which is why he fled.
@@Quintus_Sertorius What nonsense, Latvia was under the control of various foreign powers (the State of the Teutonic Order, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden & Russian Empire) for centuries before gaining its independence in 1920 following the War of Independence. It was recognised as a sovereign state by Soviet Russia in 1920, by the international community in 1921 and adopted its own constitution in 1922. It was a sovereign state when in was occupied by Soviet Russia and incorporated into the USSR in 1940. It was then occupied by the Germans when they invaded Russia,, and seized back by the Soviets later in the war, in whose hands it remained until 1991 and the collapse of the USSR. You know absolutely nothing about the person I wrote about, who was just a teenager at that time, and your insinuations regarding his actions and motives are baseless and irrelevant, and twisted to support your own narrative.
@@justinneill5003 learn history. Latvia never led a war for liberation, and for centuries was part of the Russian Empire, it became independent during the German invasion of Russia in World War I, while Russia was in civil war. The German occupiers demanded the independence of Latvia, to which the USSR agreed; the Germans were going to create a pro-German puppet out of Latvia and rename it the Duchy of Courland. But the Latvians, friendly to the Russians, rebelled and eventually created Latvia, friendly to the USSR. Read about the "Latvian riflemen". Latvia was an ally of the USSR. Then, before World War II, under the influence of Hitler and his ideology, pro-fascist parties began to form in Latvia, which came to power through terror and force, banned all left-wing parties, and began political purges. The USSR put forward an ultimatum, to which the Latvian president agreed, and the left began to participate in the elections, and came to power, and then officially voted to join the USSR. You just need to read the history. What occupation are you writing about, read the definition of the word “occupation”. Latvians had equal rights with any other people of the USSR, had their own government, like all republics of the USSR, this can never be called the definition of “occupation”. Occupation is, for example, the seizure of Palestine by Israel, or when Poland occupied part of Ukraine and Belarus, the population there had fewer rights than the occupiers. I really don't know anything about that man, and I apologize for making wild assumptions about his motives. It was too hasty on my part.
My father told me a story once of my Uncle Viktor , he was captured in Poland when the Russians invaded in 1939 and sent to a camp in Russia , he escaped from the camp with a few other Polish men .They made there way down through Russia and Georgia and out to the middle East living off the land and finally joined the Free Polish Army where he fought against the germans for the rest of the war. He was a big strong man , very very quiet though after the war , just wanted to live the rest of his life in peace. RIP uncle Vik.
There are many, many similar stories of the Poles during the war, and most will never be told. I had a Polish friend, naturalised British, who was lucky to have been interned in Austria, and then escaped down the Danube, and to England via the ME, but his sister and mother were arrested by the NKVD and deported to some God-forsaken place, and then separated. His sister was eventually repatriated, but no longer of sound mind. His mother? He never discovered what happened to her.
It's very doubtful that he managed to escape from a Soviet camp, when Nazi Germany attacked USSR in June 22, 1941, on the following month, the relations between Polish Gov in exile in London and the Soviet Gov "warmed up", Soviet authorities released many thousands Polish soldiers or officers, they had 3 oprions : 1) Join the Red Army 2) Join First Polish Army (backed by the Soviet) 3) Join Ander's army (Backed by the British). Your Uncle likely choose the 3rd option
I talked with a former German pilot who was three years a P.O.W. in Russia. He said that most German prisoners died in his camp. He was spared because he, as some others, fought in a German uniform but were from other countries. He said he survived because he was Hungarian.
My friend's father was a German POW in the care of the Russians until 1953. He told me that their guards were just as hungry as they were. This man was only about 5'7", but as tough as a £2 steak. He was moderately prosperous, and died at the age of 96. One of the finest people I have ever met. At the time, my German wasn't good enough to go into much detail.
Canadian here. In the early 1960's we had a German student in our grade school. He was mercilessly mocked and physically abused by other students, simply for being German. I won't go into details, but I hope to this day that he is happy and loved.
Canadian schools were really atrocious for bullying then, I don't know what they're like now but Polish jokes were common and after school fights were normal. The garbage they taught is pathetic and the apartheid system is more racist than anywhere else I can think of. Indoctrinated Canadians will try to defend the current segregation but they've been conditioned by propaganda their whole lives. I've found German people and culture far better in all regards.
My mother was a 13 year old refugee forced from her home in Silesia and made to go to The West her home having been taken over by Poles who had themselves been displaced in what was eastern Poland now Soviet Russia. On this forced march she witnessed thousands of German Soldiers some just mere boy being machine gunned into ditches. The Russians were very harsh victors and lets not forget they executed their own ex soldiers, the ones captured by the Germans. Stalin having deemed them traitors they were often sent to a gulag or shot outright.
I've read often of the execution of Soviet soldiers who had been prisoners of the Germans. Stalin declared them to be traitors for they had been captured instead of fighting to the death. It's just as horrible as the first time I heard about it. Russians didn't get to celebrate their victory over Germany for long with Stalin ruling the country.
My great grandfather died in a Russian prison camp in WWII. When some men came back to the town he was from in Austria they told my great grandmother that he died of dysentery in the camp.
@@brycebell122 My original post went into more detail, but the channel censored it. Even so many years later it is still a touchy subject. There is limited information available on the internet on how the Russians dealt with German POWs.
Yes your uncle was a Nazi or was forced into it. Unfortunately during war the truth becomes very clouded and irrelevant. We all lost family members who were killed by the orders of others. When we view today’s America Republican view points the same thing can happen again but this time our children will be conscripted and lead to their deaths for the MAGA few in power. Don’t be a fool and back the hidden agendas just like 80 years ago.
2.8 million pow. 12 million served in German army. 4 million kia. These are impressive numbers. Keeping in mind that the world population back was 1/4 of what it is now
There was a story of 3 Soviet POWs working in Germany along a railway embankment taking a break from their forced labor duties. A Reichsbahn railway engine was nearby idling in the switchyard. Nightfall began the small group of Soviets had little in terms of rations and huddled with each other to stay warm as night was approaching. Suddenly food started to be thrown to them from the railway engine. The engineer could be seen from the window crying and threw them the remainder of his food. It could be most likely assumed the engineer had lost his son on the Eastern front and wanted to do something correct and not witness any more suffering. He had already lost someone, possibly it was time for other parents not to lose theirs, The war had taken so much from so many no matter what the nationality.
I went out with a German woman whose grandfather was the head of all railroad transport in Germany during the war. They knew exactly what they were doing, transporting people to Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
This was not only humane but also brave by the engineer. My grandpa also shared his food rations with POWs forced to work in Germany. He was denounced and barely survived the ordeal that followed.
My mother had 2 cousins who fought in Stalingrad. One died in battle, the other survived Stalingrad and being a Soviet POW being repatrioted to Germany in 1955.
My grandfather was captured outside of Stalingrad and taken to Siberia. He received extra rations because he spoke 5 languages including Russian and always found a way to bribe the guards. Released in ‘51 he immigrated to America and become a successful real estate investor. He always spoke that the fat German officers died first and the thin, wiring men like him survived.
Very interesting. Crazy to think that a POW was in a position to bribe anyone, but it's also not hard to believe that the Soviet guards were also not well taken care of.
@@frogstomp427Russia has always been a brutal wasteland where people are reduced to rabid junkyard dogs fighting to the death over a scrap while the czars live in their mansions and exploit them all.
One note to add. While the Soviets were by no means kind to prisoners the Stalingrad prisoners had a particularly high death rate because those that were captured had nearly starved before being captured.
Yep, germans themselves wrote about it. Colourful picture can be found in Welz H. Verratene Grenadiere. Most of the Stalingrad pows were at the verge of death already.
Exactly. The Soviets were facing a manpower shortage across the country. They wanted to save as many prisoners as they could. The problem was that Germans in the city were on half rations from AUGUST!! They were starving throughout the fall. When they went into captivity the had no fat reserves and most importantly no potassium in their bodies. They could not digest what little food they had nor what they were given. The Soviets realized this in Kazakhstan and tried to stop the process but most were so far gone they simply died no matter the measures taken.
@@WillyEckaslike There's a Ytuber called TIK who did an extensive series on Stalingrad. Good binge watching. Anyway, what do you expect them to say upon returning? I don't know what to think myself but I don't think the Soviets were nice in many cases. Considering what the Germans did to Soviet prisoners earlier what were we to expect?
Out of 5M the Wehrmacht took about 4M died in camps cause German leadership regarded them by ideology as Untermensch and so there was no need to feed them well. While on the other hand the Soviet captivity killed about 400K out of 4M German POWS they can consider this merciful act
@@gunchuikov9845 It is wonderful to talk with people from all over the world and seek the truth. What we can learn from the past, if we can learn at all, is that wars must be avoided and, yes, and, There is a yes, the political decisions that will, in the short or long run, lead to war. We are seeing, today, the youth of Russia and Ukraine die. Also, the initiation of a new conflict in Gaza, with terrorism, such as taking out a baby from a women's womb, while she was alive. Humanity can do better. There is a God. Threre is truth. There is a Natural Law.
@@gunchuikov9845 Not true. 3.3M Soviet soldiers died in German captivity out of 5M captured, still a horrific number but not 4M. Where did you get 400k deaths from? The accepted figure is 1.1M German soldiers dying in Soviet captivity, excluding Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, Finns, etc.
The percentage of men of 6th Army who died in Soviet captivity was extremely high, but this was not solely the Soviets' fault. Most of these men were severely malnourished upon capture, suffered from typhus, and other diseases and were completely exhausted from months of fighting. It has been concluded that Stalingrad aside, about 20% of German POWs were actually executed by the Soviets during and after the war, most of whom were Waffen SS. This number is actuay far lower than the number of Soviet POWs that were deliberately starved by the Germans, which was around 60%. If the Soviets had made the Germans pay back in full, not a single German POW would have have seen his homeland again. Not trying to paint a better picture of the Soviets here, they were absolutely brutal, but we should always try to get to the truth. (The percentages I named aren't pulled out of my ass btw, these are the numbers mentioned by Rudiger Overmans, a German historian who specialized on the eastern Front and David Glanz, an American Historian, who is an expert on the Soviet side of the war and who came to a similar conclusion as Overmans.)
To add to the picture, the Wehrmacht was utterly unprepared for the huge numbers of Red Army captured in the the first year of Operation Barbarossa. Care of prisoners was mostly nonexistent because of lack of supplies,.
Barbarossa was launched because the Russians had amassed huge amounts of supplies and troops along the German border and Germany calculated the Russians were just days away from launching their invasion into Germany. There’s always key items an analyst will look for to determine if the enemy is preparing an invasion force or or otherwise so there was no doubt that a large invasion was coming which is why Germany had no other option but to strike first before the Russians could organize their forces. Germany’s preemptive attack worked and caught Russia completely off guard which saved millions of German civilians lives. Germany never wanted a war with Russia but the communists wanted all of Europe and saw Germany as the one country they had to defeat first and the rest of Europe would be easier to conquer. Finland and Spain managed to preserve their countries but it took a huge toll.
Yeah, the holiday camp where you chopped wood 12 hours a day in -30 or +30 degree weather, slept on a straw mattress in a freezing wooden hut with only a small fire for heating and ate rotten fish soup and stale bread every day.
My two uncles died within months in autumn of 1942. Still recall the notification by the Nazis. We had no phone, a female neighbour called in and told my mother there was a phone call for her at the mixed business some 10 mins walk distant. We never had a message like this and I think my mother knew what was up. The first uncle died somewhere on the 'Ostfront' - Russia. From this report one might say he was lucky not being captured. Don't think a grave exists. He was an Austrian champion skier and mountaineer, friends with Heinrich Harrer, part of specialist troops, called 'Gebirgsjaeger', trained in mountain warfare, used as cannon fodder. The other uncle, very young, a mere 20, died in Norway. 6 years old at the time, I still remember my mother's expression when she went to take the phone call and when she returned. 2 months later - again. She then had to go and tell our grandmother.
My old boss had an Austrian uncle who was with Paulus. He was wounded and got put on a flight out of Stalingrad. He went on to survive the war. Very, very fortunate.
My grandfather, Rudolph Ziegler, was captured in Stalingrad. He was a sniper-- the Russians were going to execute him on the spot, but my grandfather spoke fluent Russian so was spared for whatever reason. He became a POW and survived the ordeal. He was a small. wiry man. When he was released and returned home, my father (just a young boy) said he looked like a walking skeleton. No one recognized him. My father said he was a changed man, very harsh and violent in his upbringing of the children-- and rarely smiled or laughed. He refused to talk about his POW experience, and became very angry when asked questions about it.
Several Germanic immigrants to western Canada that i have worked with or friends parents came from the German areas of Poland or Russia ,started around 1918 then more in the 40s,Germans pushed west,Some spoke more then one language that was a great benefit to them.
@@paulwiegerinck528 This is interesting. I don't know a lot about my father's ancestors... have always wondered why my grandfather was fluent in Russian. Maybe this is a plausible answer. Thank you for your reply.
My Grandfather came from the Russian side of Poland. All my life I thought I was of Polish decent , until when I was.in the Army with some German soldiers who were with us for training and one tapped my name tag and said " Russian" and I said no Polish and he said ( much to my surprise) " No you are Russian.
All the Soviet people were starving and working hard during WW2 and years after that. Do you think there was enough food for those who survived? My parents were kids then, and all that they remember from their childhood was hunger.
What is not taught in Russian schools is that food was plentiful in the USSR. The Germans occupied only the European part of the country, while the vast remaining areas of the Soviet Union were far from the war. There, agricultural production was at a sufficient level. Even in Leningrad, party members had huge supplies of food, but they did not want to give it to the population, because hunger was supposed to motivate the citizens to defend themselves fiercely - because the people had nothing to lose. There are interesting and shocking studies on this subject by historians, books and memoirs also written by Russians.
@@charlesgrant-skiba5474 do you think soviet people had fields in Siberia? And there were a lot of tractors or horses which could be used for agriculture? And millions of strong men to grow crops? No, thousands of villages were destroyed, women and kids were working hard but food was the biggest problem.
@@charlesgrant-skiba5474 which party members had food, are you a liar? How could hunger force the townspeople to defend themselves if thousands of them fell and died of hunger every day? liar, soldiers on the front line of defense were given 500 grams of bread per day; hot shop workers - 375 grams; other workers and engineers - 250 grams, employees, dependents and children - only 125 grams of bread the highest party member in Leningrad, Zhdanov, received 400 grams of bread per day. American Harrison Evans Salisbury, who spent most of his career working for the United Press and the New York Times, came to Leningrad in 1944, he has a book about it.
We had an old Russian soldier who was captured by the Germans that lived in our neighborhood on Long Island NY. Once the war ended he was going to be sent back to Russia where Stalin had them sent to Gulags as punishment for surrendering. Luckily he was able to convince US solders he was Polish because he spoke that language too. Ended up going to the US. He told my dad he was able to talk himself out of a death sentence. MR. SMEARMO was a real nice guy to everyone. RIP.
War is hell. But for the vanquished, post war is triple hell. On our street in Dartmouth lived an English retired couple whom were missionaires in the Dutch East Indies in WW2. Somehow they both survived thier horrific treatment in a Japanese prison camp. They never ever spoke about it. I only came to this info after both had passed away in late 1970s. Sad.
As humans, especially from that era, they were far more likely to bury misery and horrific experiences than we are today. Of course, there are exceptions from either time period but in general that is fact. I had a relatively large morning paper route from around 9 to 17 years old. I had many vets among my customers. I even had the brother of a WW1 veteran. Even as a young kid I could stark differences among the various men. It wasn't until many years later that I was able to better understand each of them as I'd learn a little more about them, usually from their families. I still have the greatest respect for those guys, and they all treated me very well. My first and only hero was Don Soucy, the Vietnam vet whose family's yard butted up against the back of ours. His mother would babysit me when I was still in diapers. Everyday Terry would sit me down in the living room of their small cape. There, up on the fireplace mantle towards the right, was the formal service photo of Don before he shipped out. I stared at that picture every day. It was the earliest memory in my life and to this day, even after my own numerous head traumas, I can still look up and see Don in his uniform in that picture with the familiar brownish hue that seemed to accompany that war. I'm a 60-year-old guy now and I just saw Don at a local hardware store before he and his wife made their move to Florida. I ran over to his car and knocked on his window and told him the story. It was a powerful moment for both of us. We smiled, shook hands and off he went. I'm sorry I've been so long-winded, but it was tough to cut short once I started to ramble.
The Japnese were worse than the Germans and that's saying something. Their experiments on Chinese civilians, men, women, children and new born babies is off the scale horrific.
Many of the men captured at Stalingrad had already been starved for some time so their was no way back for them as the damage had already been done to their internal organs .
My grandfather was in charge if prisons berween 1945-1949. He told me that Germans in the prisons were not united and didnt help each other to survive. The austrians or hungarian helped each other with food and other issues. The worked hard to rebuild Berlin, Dresden and other cities.
Most of the germans that surrendered at Stalingrad had succumbed within days or weeks of capitulation. Field Marshall Paulus was presented by the Russians at the Nuremberg trials to testify. He flat out lied on the stand stating that most of the German soldiers still in captivity were still alive and treated well. Knowing full well most had died from wounds, starvation, disease and cold. The west Germans never forgave him for that betrayal. He was released from captivity in 1954 and settled in east Germany till his death in 1957.
My uncle returned from WW2 in 1954 having been captured at Stalingrad, my Grandfather posted missing in 1943 died in a Russian prison camp, my grandmother finally found this out in 1958.
Your Uncle was very fortunate to survive and return to Germany in 1955. Most of the Stalingrad POW's died of disease and malnutrition quite soon after capture.
It should be noted that several million more survived the war, and among them, many did not return to Germany until 1955. It also should be said that at least 3 million Red Army troops died in German hands as a result of various abuses, including exposure to poison gas. Context is important.
War is so strange. Millions of Germans murder their way deep into a neighbor’s territory, then act like the victims when they’re stopped. I don’t see how the Soviets are the bad guys for giving them all the death penalty.
I’m with you. Unfortunately some of these soldiers were basically kids, forced to the front lines with no combat experience., near the end of the war. Germany was throwing numbers at a knowingly futile effort.
What is hard to put into account are the Germans that came back and died quickly after. I know many stories of friends and in a case within my family, where shortly after return the death came quickly. Either by disease or by suicide
The Russian prison camps during the 1st World War were horrific too. Nobody speaks of these but they cemented the idea of the bad slavic-asian people. Most of the German prisoners didn't deserve to die but let's not forget about the Soviet prisoners and the fact that a Nazi victory might have led to the total extinction of non-aric people from Spain to Vladivostok. All Soviet atrocities aside, we have to admit they fought for their lives.
0:18 Intersection of Gogolia & Ostrovskaya, in downtown Stalingrad. -The ruins on the corner are of the hotel across the street from the Univermag building. 0:40 Water tower uphill of the Stalingrad 2 railyard. This would have been in January or February, 1943. The Soviets are shelling from within Stalingrad. 2:26 These buildings were houses of specialists. They are still standing about a kilometer northeast of the Grain Silos. By Ogareva & Raboche-Krestyanskaya. 3:26 Ba-gra-tē-ŌN
They were not all 'executed'. Many were shot on the spot, if the capturing Soviet soldiers were very angry and embittered, but superior officers wanted the Germans alive so they could work and repair damaged or destroyed infrastructure etc. The majority of the German deaths were due to general maltreatment, poor hygiene and medical care in the camps and inadequate food intake. Some of this was due to deliberately malicious behaviour by the Soviet officials, but probably most due to the fact that food and medical care was prioritised for Soviet soldier, citizens and enemy prisoners bottom of the list.
Let’s not forget about the hundreds of thousands of surrendered Croatians massacred by the communists in Bleiburg, May 1945 (they were handed over by the English.) The survivors were then sent on horrific death marches back to their homes, most didn’t survive the journey.
I worked in an Armenian nursing home here USA - one Armenian told me he lived in Russia at at start of war - in 1st battle he was captured by Germans, then worked for them as interpreter, then when Americans landed he was shooting at Germans , family thought he was dead but they found him in the 1960’s working for General Motors in Detroit - he designed the Chevrolet impala, was given one when it came out, his paintings lined the halls of the nursing home - I have lots of stories like this talking to Armenians, getting to know them
My grandfather was a German solder in ww2 , he was captured by russia and spent five years as a pow in Russia. He said they made you work rebuilding roads cities etc but they eat almost as well as the Russians did .
Really Russia would not be here now if it wasn’t for the uk and USA Atlantic convoys lend lease allied bombing with out all that Russia would not have stopped the Germans
Most German soldiers captured at Stalingrad died of typhus, they had not been vaccinated and the USSR had no medicine either. That is why few POWs from Stalingrad survived. Otherwise a reasonable number did, and Stalin did not kill large numbers because he understood the value of the labor the POWs provided. But the USSR was starving too.
I was born in 1941.in sept 1940 in the first German air raid over london ,a bomb hit a shelter and killed a lot of civilians including my Dads 3 sisters and his mum. He lived to 99 but never really got over it.
@@chrisward7085 Germany did sign it, and mostly abided by it, but not with Russians, either because Russia hadn't signed it, or because they despised them by doctrine and propaganda and didn't care if they died. Of course, Hitler didn't care about the GC, but his armed forces did, because many were honourable, and because they recognised the reciprocity, and they were sufficiently united in this to resist Hitler. One small bright spark in a ghastly war. I fear that today's despots are as evil and stupid now as they were then.
@@colinelliott5629As you said. German soldiers, particularly the Wermacht more than the Waffen SS, generally obeyed the GC on the Western front. After battles in Africa, according to a British friend of my Grandfather, German and British officers exchanged radio messages to account for missing soldiers and find out who was dead, wounded or captured. In one case a captured British soldier was discovered to be the son of the owner of a large cigarette manufacturer. Always short of cigarettes the Germans offered his return for several cases of cigarettes. The British commander said he'd see what he could do. All the British soldiers turned in their cigarette packs. About 175 total. The German officer knew this was the best he could get and told his prisoner how he was going to be sent back to his unit for the 175 packs of cigarettes. Unbelievably, the British soldier apparently felt insulted and announced he was worth a 175 crates of cigarettes not 175 single cigarettes and refused to take part in the exchange! To the disappointment of the cigarette poor German soldiers (and probably the secretly held joy of the British soldiers who would keep their smokes) the British soldier in German custody would remain in a German prison camp until the end of the war! Sounds unbelievable but years later I found the story in a book about the British army in Africa.
Yes, important to state the historic reality that both sides treated POWs horrifically. And if anything, the Nazis started it by encircling & then mistreating millions of Soviet soldiers at the start of the War. The Soviets should've responded more honourably but the Eastern Front descended into 1 of the most inhumane wars ever fought.
@@eltongood2474 The USSR did not have the resources to provide Geneva Convention style treatment to German POWs. They had been invaded and the richest parts of their country had been occupied by the enemy. German POWs were sent to the awful GuLag camps and/or used to clean up and begin rebuilding the many cities and towns the Germans had deliberately wrecked as they retreated.
@@LeeZaslofsky Thats a bad cope out. My enemy did this, so i do the exact same thing and after it lets just pretend we only did it because of "bad economy". Because we are clearly the good guys, if we only had more ressources back then we would have fed them of course. Ya right dude. Just accept the fact that you were just as bad as the enemy, maybe even worse.
You must remember the context. The Nazis had a scorched earth policy. They burnt down villages and killed animals to leave people to die of cold and hunger. 26 million Soviet citizens were killed. This includes 3.4m Soviet POWs. It's no surprise the Soviets were very brutal towards their enemy.
@@daveyboy_ They're not movies. They're battles. Bloody battles fought between the US Marines and the Japanese in WW2. As bloody fighting as anything that took place on the Eastern Front.
@@daveyboy_ You didn't name any movies, and your post was about the hell on the Eastern Front. And there is indeed a movie about the Russian German war. It's a Russian made movie called "Come And See". It's on YT.
In the book The Fall of Berlin Anthony Beever tells of a train full of German refugees running from the Est and the Germans aboard telling of horror tales of what the Soviet soliders were doing to civilians. At some point a wounded soldier who was silently in a corner said somberly: If the Russians do to us only a fraction of what we did in the Soviet Union there wont be a single German left alive", It is in the book.
In 1939, it was the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that invaded Poland. In 1940, it was the Soviet Union that invaded the Baltic countries. In 1940, it was the Soviet Union that annexed parts of Romania. In 1956, it was the Soviet Union that invaded Hungary. In 1968, it was the Soviet Union that invaded Czechoslovakia. Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Hungary or Czechoslovakia did not invade Russia or the Soviet Union. No threat emanated from these countries. But these countries were attacked by the USSR/Russia. And they call the West, Imperialistic Pigs. Right. 1924 to 2024, who is the conquering imperialist?
you might want to read up on your history there bud ..ill help you with the basics operation barbarossa was not only germany ...it was a combined operation from armies from germany, romania, finland, italy, hungary and slovakia.. you see these armies invaded the USSR that resulted in a combined death toll of 25 million soviets! a modicum of respect might be in order
3 месяца назад
Na * zi b o t s at it again. Repeating cherry picked history and making it out of context. Tell us about Munich 1938 agreement. Tell us about PapecIip. And tell us who (USSR) actually won the war, almost single-handedly.
3 месяца назад
Again, all the mentioned countries sided with Germany and also were siding with previous powers that invaded Russia through history. So, Red Army entering and occupying those countries equals imperialism? Not really, for sane people and those that know history not.
World War 2 was made possible by the Nazi Soviet pact, made by Stalin. That encouraged Hitler, to invade Poland. What was the Soviet Union's excuse for the raping, murders, and pillaging, carried out throughout all the Eastern, and Western European populations, unfortunate enough to fall under their control?
My father was one of Millions of Russian POW s. The combination of not even basic food and inhumane work conditions were killing 1 out of 2 men according to my father. They got beaten up 4 times a day. Sometimes they were tortured. The wardens in the Gulags were convicted criminals behaving perfectly like heavy criminals. If a German died his corpse was smashed with a heavy hammer- to make sure that nobody left the camps alive. The German POW s were working often with Russian convicts being treated even worse. Japanese POW s became the same treatment but in separate locations nearby. Each German POW was forced to sign crazy accusations on behalf of war crimes they never had commited. Standard sentence was 35 years of hard labour which was equivalent to a death sentence under the given circumstances. Before Stalins death not a single POW was released. My father served 6 years as a POW and the circumstances of his return were extremely lucky. He was wasted and sick to an extent that even his own mother didn t recognize him on sight. The Mountain village were I grew up and were my father worked as a customs officer and ski border patrol had a high percentage of Russian Ex POV s who stayed after the war as Stalin executed them as traitors when returning to USSR. Their kids were our school comrades. There was mutual respect. Each of our fathers knew what the other side had suffered. No fights, no hard feelings- just the nicest neighbours imaginable. Today this generation is buried in the same cemetery, once victims of their inhumane and greedy States and enemies. They are lying peacefully next to each other. Today there is fighting again in Charkow, Kursk, Brjansk Oblasts- all the places my father fought in the past. It appears to me that those places are cursed. Humanity didn t learn the slightest lesson out of the past!
ummmm....Stalin was a blood thirsty savage long before Hitler came into power and so was the Soviet army. All they needed was the permission which they got from the English and its allies!
@@guylindquist338says some nordic race guy whos grandfather was sitting somewhere in warm drinking tea. U have no idea what germans did to our people and slavs in general
In Ireland, we had a POW camp for airmen who had crashed, but being neutral we lumped the Germans in with the British and Americans. They were all forced to live together and had heated games of football. The guards didn't have weapons and were annoyed the Germans received an allowance from their embassy that was higher than the guards' wages. They mostly worked during the day in local farms or businesses and would organise dances at night in the local bars, which would turn violent if the Allies crashed a German-organised party or vice versa. A few Americans 'escaped' by hitch-hiking up to Northern Ireland, but were swiftly returned by the British authorities there. Once America entered the war, the Americans were secretly released, then the British too. A lot of the Germans then started attending University in Dublin and some chose to stay by the end - especially those who had married Irish girls during their time as 'prisoners'. Luck of the draw I suppose.
Since time immemorial warriors have known what is now labelled PTSD - it is a human reaction to terror. Each age gave it a name, so horrific it is that the collective memory seeks repeatedly to forget it. During WWII it was known as "shell shock". To find proof of this just watch the great movie Patton.
@ TheUntoldPast Your reading ability has improved an incredible amount. Virtually no sing song cadence. A little but not much. That looney sing song style drove me crazy. I will not delete your videos anymore.
The spoils of war can never justify the cost in human life, both mental and physical. It's always easier to calculate dead bodies. However, it's the dead soul that continue to ravage the survivor and his family, sometimes for generations.
The eastern front might as well have been the Mongols fighting the Goths, every story you hear is horrific, I remember seeing an interview with the D-Day veterans and one guy was saying how this young German was pleading to him to let them take him because the French MPs had him captured, he said he always regretted not helping that boy, because they most likely tortured him before execution.
We know that Russians were to b ex executed if they surrendered to the Germans and their families were on the sht list by Joe and the communists. Sure prisoners were treated better. Maybe only 900000 were shot when ammo wäs available. Duh.
@@EJisArete If you look at death rates for German POWs held by the Soviets by year, it was extremely high as a percentage in 1941, 1942, and 1943. It drops significantly in 1944 and 1945 when the Soviet Union was in better shape. Meanwhile the Germans consistently deliberately killed or worked to death and starved Soviets from 1941 to 1945.
@@georgefox4982 2,031,000 of the approximately 3,000,000 German POWs taken by the Soviets were recorded as released and returned to Germany. Your numbers are way off.
There is a video here on You Tube called Stalin's cannibal island. It spoke of a large group of people were arrested, loaded onto trucks and then boats and taken to an island on a big river and told to build a settlement. Except they were not given tools, supplies, food, and had to make do. Those that survived started eating the dead and even some people who were still alive. The video went on to talk about how bad life was all over the Soviet Union and how Soviets died in the camps and prisons. Of course, this was before the war. So, no surprise the Germans were treated poorly. One Germany's best pilots was on the Eastern front when the war ended. He led his squadron over to the West to escape the Soviets, some of them put their wives and girlfriends into the planes with them and flew to an American airfield. Wish I could remember the name of two movies. One was of a group of people in one of Stalin's Gulags. They managed to escape the prison but knew there was a good chance they would be caught if they fled towards cities. They walked South and crossed into Mongolia, then into China, and somehow made it to India. A German officer working in a mine in Northern Soviet Union also escaped and worked his way across the top of the S.U. He was helped by the kindness of strangers in food and shelter. He made it to Finland and onto Germany.
The Germans caused untold suffering in Poland & Russia .. they were cruel. They invaded Russia, Russians protected themselves, their fate was sealed. War is horrible.
Stop with this BS of Russians protecting themselves, They were cold blooded killers of millions without Germans, Brits and today US/NATO supposedly threatening them. In fact, they are very good at making enemies to "protect" themselves from.
Yes, the Soviets treated the captured Germans in an abysmal way, BUT, the Germans didn't act any better with captured Soviets. Not an excuse, but it has to be mentioned.
The H man ordered to starve the soviet POWs. Those men were murdered by starvation, on purpose. Almost 40 million soviets perish at the german invaders hands.
I wash you wouldn't use visual examples that don't coincide with the subject matter,that footage in the first couple of minutes of your vid was from France '44
In 2019, my family visited Volgograd and as part of our holiday, had a guide for the few days we were there. I asked about the high rate of deaths on German Prisoners out of curiosity. Our guide was adamant that the soldiers were treated well, but they had a lot of “stomach problems”…….
because most of the deceased German prisoners who died in captivity died due to exhaustion and illnesses received while they were surrounded in the cold before being captured. Russians treated German prisoners quite tolerably; German prisoners received almost the same rations as Soviet civilians
The Allies hanged Germans at Nuremberg, in 0art, for forcing POWS and others into slavery. Then the USSR went on to com mmit the same offence - no trials or executions for the criminals of the Purges or Gulags though!
The Soviets committed some of their own atrocities against an innocent country as well. They took their half of Poland with Germany in 1939 and never gave it back so in 1945 Poland took a bunch of eastern Germany (and "ethnically cleansed" Germans from there).
@@Rfxy Without researching it my guess would be what you are talking about would have been the ethnically German Sudetenland areas and maybe other areas of Czechoslovkia that Germany had annexed. Like I said I would need to research that to know what you are referring to. My point was that the video and some comments only looked at the USSR as innocent victims of German atrocities.
As Far As My Legs Can Carry Me is an account of a lone German prisoner put to work in a lead mine near the Bering Strait and who escaped all the way to Tehran in Iran. Another one is of four Poles who escaped from a Siberian labour camp all the way to India.
Best Ever books ( heavily censored in the West, but, funny, not so much in the East) are in the series of Sven Hassel. Sven show us the ww2 from the GERMAN side perspective. Probably THE best ww2 books ever. You have more than a dozen of them, with dark humor, cruelty of the war, misery from BOTH sides, and a heart touching friendship, sometimes, even between declared hard enemies ( soviets plot with germas to assassinate a SS criminal, or a soviet Politruc, in one book) : These books are a MUST in order to understand the horrors of the ww2, a war where rich man "fight" but poor man die... "Sven Hassel was the pen name of the Danish-born Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen known for his novels about German soldiers fighting in World War II. In Denmark he used the pen name Sven Hazel. He is one of the bestselling Danish authors, possibly second only to Hans Christian Andersen"
America, England, and France classified Geman soldiers as enemy fighters so that they didn't fall under the convention related to prisoners of war. Especially in France, many died also.
This video seems a bit biased to me. In principle, the Ribbentrop Molotov Pact was not a "ceasefire" as mentioned on this site, not least because there was no war between the two countries until then. What they did was a "Non-Aggression Pact". Most of the Red Army's POWs never returned alive. The Nazis deliberately starved 3.3 million prisoners, as well as a large number of civilians, through the "Hunger Plan", which aimed to largely replace the Slavic population with German settlers.
My Step Grandfather was a Taylor with small hands. He was stationed in Norway most of the times. For some days he was sent to Russia and captivated soon. He was forced to get coal from cold mines with bare hands and manual tools. Released back in 1953.
I had a wonderful naubough who in ww2 was held prisoner. By the Germans.And Russians he servived due to his incredible gymnastic skills and he was a professional football player.. Fitness n football saved his life he died 101 what a lovely guy
To execute the horrific execution plan against the Russian people the German Army recieved its full payment in the end. 1 John 2:11 “But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.”
@@claudebuysse7482 -- Since I don't know exactly how many Russian POWs the Germans killed, I included 'if not more' in my post. No matter what the actual figure, any amount over 0 was too many.
My German grandpa was a prisoner of war in the US. He said these were the best years of his life. The US has a horrible human rights record but for Europe around that time they were a blessing. Without the US, especially if Stalin had gotten his will, Europe would probably a much less peaceful and prosperous place right now.
They were not executed, but deported. Just because Stalin was a butcher is no reason to charge him with crimes he never committed. Yes, the conditions in which they were held were horrendous, but 1) the population of the USSR was on the verge of starvation at the time, treating prisoners with care was not a priority 2) the conditions imposed upon Russian prisoners by yhe Germans were even worse.
What do you know about the 200K-300K British, American and Commonwealth POW's who were "liberated" By the advancing Russian armies and REFUSED TO REPATRIATE THEM BACK TO THEIR HOMELANDS!!! i'VE READ TWO BOOKS ON THIS AWFUL MATTER?
@makswais3012 i come from both West and East Europe. And that is just shit. All my ancestors went through ww2, and never have i heard of 200-300.000 western pow just disappearing
@@Dannyboy314 I mean deportations, population displacements were pretty comon back then. I know bc i live in eastern eu and most people there were at some point forced to move either by germans or soviets. As to the ally pow question i remember that during either east prussian or pomeranian offensives in 1944 there was incident where Soviet soldiers shot local townsfolk among them few Belgian or Danish POW's.
"Nobody could imagine that Adolf Hitler would invade the the Soviet Union", yeah, besides outlining the whole thing in mein kamph, and talking about it speeches for years... TOTAL SURPRISE...to Nobody But Stalin...
Apparently the original small Russian tanks had road wheels that the tanks could drive on with the tracks removed,designed to be used on paved German roads.Russia was preparing an attack on Germany?
@thuleeuropa - interesting. But there's lots of evidence that Stalin was going to do the same thing. Piles of documents, letters, journals. There's even a short film put together by Otto Skorzeny before he died in 1975. Now people may not trust that, but he is speaking as an eye witness and possibly a participant, i.e., a primary source.
If you destroy something how the F do you think there is enough food for POWs. The Soviet soldier did NOT have enough. The Civilians was starving. So if alot of nazis did die of hunger. What to expect? And if the Soviets where so cruel. Who come there is a Germany left today?
True and common sense logic, and basic education. Many muppets commenting here have no clue only on Leningrad, under siege for more than a year, over 1 million CIVILIANS died of starvation ...
Sth that shocked me was when I learnt that, before sending the prisoners off to the Gulags, Stalin paraded them through the streets of Moscow. Sadly, I cannot say that they didn't deserve that.
Remember that for the first 6 months of the German invasion there were 4 millions Soviet POW most of whom were starved to death in the German camps. An eye for an eye!
@@Malt454 The UDSSR started Wars in that TimeFrame too Dude and MASS Murdered People, they were not "BETTER" as the Nazi Germans but just more *inefficient* in their cruelty and lucky them they happened to be on the Side of the WW2 Winners
@@danv1324 - Yes, not sympathizing with the Naz!s, of course, just with the Germans who "happened" to somehow "be caught up in the war" while "defending their country" by attacking the countries of others. Germany went shopping for the war that it got, and just didn't like the results. This moral equivalency that some people now want to assign to all combatants just doesn't fly for me.
War is an evil and the responsibility of the evil lies with the commanders and decision makers and not with the soldiers. Those who are expressing negative sentiments about captured German soldiers are ignorant fools. These soldeirs fought because they obeyed the commanders being professional soldiers.
Survivability rates of SOVIET prisoners , in GERMAN camps was much , much lower . Compare the numbers , and you will find , over , and over , the Germans were worse . That must not be forgotten .
I was bourn 13yrs after ww2 and did not know anything it was not until 1970s a program came on british tv called the world at war depicting the rise of hitler but i could understand the actrosities commited by the germans and japanese i bear no anomosty towards the people of germany i have been there and found them froendly
Been documented that British and American ships returned Soviet soldiers rescued from German camps after wars end. The soldiers dutifully marched off the transport ships only to be systematically machine gunned right there and then.. as they came of the Allied ships. This was repeated Countless times as more than 20, 000 men were shot dead right in front of the allied sailors. Seemingly Stalin didn't want returnees who had glimpsed the Bright lights of the West.
This POW extermination pogrom is a fact. Early in WWII Stalin ordered all Russian POWs executed upon recapture. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_repressions_against_former_prisoners_of_war
There was an old fella called Viktor who owned a TV repair shop in our small rural town near the Welsh border. He lived with his wife above the shop. It was only fairly recently that I learned he had arrived from Latvia during or just after WW2. It turns out that he was there during the Nazi occupation but escaped because he didn’t want to fight for the Nazis nor live under Soviet occupation, and he made his way across Europe mostly on foot by night. He lost all contact with his family & friends but by some sheer fluke after reaching a safe area of Western Europe he came across the girlfriend he had become separated from in Latvia who had somehow also managed to escape. They were reunited and married, and there they were, 50+ years later, as an elderly couple running our local TV repair shop in this quiet little town on the Welsh border. After what they’d been through it seems like they needed a lifetime of quiet rural life together. I have two takeaways from that: the strength of the human spirit, and that youngsters should remember that the “boring” elderly folk around them were also young once, and in many cases overcame challenges that they could hardly imagine let alone have to experience for themselves.
Good story!
I knew a Pole,
who as a boy was sent to Siberia in 1940,
freed to Palestine in 1941 or 42,
joined the Polish army,
and was parachuted into German in 1945
with a radio beacon for bombers,
and orders
to guard it until bombers had passed.
With RDF ( radio direction finding ),
this was tantamount to suicide.
He was 16 years old.
/
beautiful fairy tale,
True, Latvia was never under Soviet occupation.
Latvia was part of the Russian Empire, then after the Russian Civil War it became a separate country,
and in 1940, after the struggle of the pro-fascist party bloc with the pro-Soviet party bloc of Latvia, the pro-fascist one won, which banned socialists, communists, etc. in the country, in response to this the USSR issued an ultimatum demanding the restoration of the rights of the communists. To which the President of Latvia agreed, and then the local communists came to power in Latvia, and then voted to join the USSR, where they were completely equal in rights with all other peoples.
This cannot be called an occupation at all.
And after the German invasion, some Latvians believed Hitler’s lies about the exclusivity of the Aryan race, and that Latvians, together with the Germans, should rule over the lower peoples,
and some local Nazi collaborators began to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, and Communists; there are still monuments to concentration camps in Latvia.
So your Victor most likely was a Nazi collaborator, participated in crimes, and then was afraid of justice, which is why he fled.
@@Quintus_Sertorius What nonsense, Latvia was under the control of various foreign powers (the State of the Teutonic Order, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden & Russian Empire) for centuries before gaining its independence in 1920 following the War of Independence. It was recognised as a sovereign state by Soviet Russia in 1920, by the international community in 1921 and adopted its own constitution in 1922. It was a sovereign state when in was occupied by Soviet Russia and incorporated into the USSR in 1940. It was then occupied by the Germans when they invaded Russia,, and seized back by the Soviets later in the war, in whose hands it remained until 1991 and the collapse of the USSR. You know absolutely nothing about the person I wrote about, who was just a teenager at that time, and your insinuations regarding his actions and motives are baseless and irrelevant, and twisted to support your own narrative.
@@justinneill5003 learn history.
Latvia never led a war for liberation, and for centuries was part of the Russian Empire,
it became independent during the German invasion of Russia in World War I, while Russia was in civil war.
The German occupiers demanded the independence of Latvia, to which the USSR agreed; the Germans were going to create a pro-German puppet out of Latvia and rename it the Duchy of Courland.
But the Latvians, friendly to the Russians, rebelled and eventually created Latvia, friendly to the USSR.
Read about the "Latvian riflemen".
Latvia was an ally of the USSR.
Then, before World War II, under the influence of Hitler and his ideology, pro-fascist parties began to form in Latvia, which came to power through terror and force, banned all left-wing parties, and began political purges.
The USSR put forward an ultimatum, to which the Latvian president agreed, and the left began to participate in the elections, and came to power, and then officially voted to join the USSR.
You just need to read the history.
What occupation are you writing about, read the definition of the word “occupation”.
Latvians had equal rights with any other people of the USSR, had their own government, like all republics of the USSR, this can never be called the definition of “occupation”.
Occupation is, for example, the seizure of Palestine by Israel, or when Poland occupied part of Ukraine and Belarus, the population there had fewer rights than the occupiers.
I really don't know anything about that man, and I apologize for making wild assumptions about his motives. It was too hasty on my part.
Amazing . Thanks for sharing.
My father told me a story once of my Uncle Viktor , he was captured in Poland when the Russians invaded in 1939 and sent to a camp in Russia , he escaped from the camp with a few other Polish men .They made there way down through Russia and Georgia and out to the middle East living off the land and finally joined the Free Polish Army where he fought against the germans for the rest of the war. He was a big strong man , very very quiet though after the war , just wanted to live the rest of his life in peace. RIP uncle Vik.
There are many, many similar stories of the Poles during the war, and most will never be told. I had a Polish friend, naturalised British, who was lucky to have been interned in Austria, and then escaped down the Danube, and to England via the ME, but his sister and mother were arrested by the NKVD and deported to some God-forsaken place, and then separated. His sister was eventually repatriated, but no longer of sound mind. His mother? He never discovered what happened to her.
It's very doubtful that he managed to escape from a Soviet camp, when Nazi Germany attacked USSR in June 22, 1941, on the following month, the relations between Polish Gov in exile in London and the Soviet Gov "warmed up", Soviet authorities released many thousands Polish soldiers or officers, they had 3 oprions : 1) Join the Red Army 2) Join First Polish Army (backed by the Soviet) 3) Join Ander's army (Backed by the British). Your Uncle likely choose the 3rd option
I talked with a former German pilot who was three years a P.O.W. in Russia. He said that most German prisoners died in his camp. He was spared because he, as some others, fought in a German uniform but were from other countries. He said he survived because he was Hungarian.
interesting. hungarians were rarely taken prisoner.
My friend's father was a German POW in the care of the Russians until 1953.
He told me that their guards were just as hungry as they were.
This man was only about 5'7", but as tough as a £2 steak. He was moderately prosperous, and died at the age of 96.
One of the finest people I have ever met. At the time, my German wasn't good enough to go into much detail.
Today it is fashionable to lie about the USSR and Russians.
Goebbels' cause has been revived
Nazi
@@asocialsocialist2534 But your mother insists you are intelligent
"Care"
Tougher than woodpecker lips?
Canadian here. In the early 1960's we had a German student in our grade school. He was mercilessly mocked and physically abused by other students, simply for being German. I won't go into details, but I hope to this day that he is happy and loved.
I remember you !!
Canadian schools were really atrocious for bullying then, I don't know what they're like now but Polish jokes were common and after school fights were normal. The garbage they taught is pathetic and the apartheid system is more racist than anywhere else I can think of. Indoctrinated Canadians will try to defend the current segregation but they've been conditioned by propaganda their whole lives. I've found German people and culture far better in all regards.
Jews bullied him?!
@@auric-goldbugger Probably what he was told to do.
@@auric-goldbugger Grade school in the 60’s. He wasn’t even alive during the war. Lol you are pure comedic genius
My mother was a 13 year old refugee forced from her home in Silesia and made to go to The West her home having been taken over by Poles who had themselves been displaced in what was eastern Poland now Soviet Russia. On this forced march she witnessed thousands of German Soldiers some just mere boy being machine gunned into ditches. The Russians were very harsh victors and lets not forget they executed their own ex soldiers, the ones captured by the Germans. Stalin having deemed them traitors they were often sent to a gulag or shot outright.
I've read often of the execution of Soviet soldiers who had been prisoners of the Germans. Stalin declared them to be traitors for they had been captured instead of fighting to the death. It's just as horrible as the first time I heard about it. Russians didn't get to celebrate their victory over Germany for long with Stalin ruling the country.
My great grandfather died in a Russian prison camp in WWII. When some men came back to the town he was from in Austria they told my great grandmother that he died of dysentery in the camp.
About 4 million Russian pow s died in German camps mostly from diseases and starvation
'' Verderregger's.
My great uncle died as a POW in Russia in 1946. Horrific circumstances we found out many years later.
Anything you would like to share?
@@brycebell122 Your liver.
@@brycebell122 My original post went into more detail, but the channel censored it. Even so many years later it is still a touchy subject.
There is limited information available on the internet on how the Russians dealt with German POWs.
@@Curlyblonde I have read things over the years… horrendous things that are best left behind with history
Yes your uncle was a Nazi or was forced into it. Unfortunately during war the truth becomes very clouded and irrelevant. We all lost family members who were killed by the orders of others.
When we view today’s America Republican view points the same thing can happen again but this time our children will be conscripted and lead to their deaths for the MAGA few in power. Don’t be a fool and back the hidden agendas just like 80 years ago.
2.8 million pow. 12 million served in German army. 4 million kia. These are impressive numbers. Keeping in mind that the world population back was 1/4 of what it is now
read Invercargill town in w.w.1 botom of new zealand had 8,000 humans and 2,000 died in w.w.1.
There was a story of 3 Soviet POWs working in Germany along a railway embankment taking a break from their forced labor duties. A Reichsbahn railway engine was nearby idling in the switchyard. Nightfall began the small group of Soviets had little in terms of rations and huddled with each other to stay warm as night was approaching. Suddenly food started to be thrown to them from the railway engine. The engineer could be seen from the window crying and threw them the remainder of his food. It could be most likely assumed the engineer had lost his son on the Eastern front and wanted to do something correct and not witness any more suffering. He had already lost someone, possibly it was time for other parents not to lose theirs,
The war had taken so much from so many no matter what the nationality.
I went out with a German woman whose grandfather was the head of all railroad transport in Germany during the war. They knew exactly what they were doing, transporting people to Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
are you trying to rewrite history.
@johnzubil2875 are you saying history is objective lol?
@@mwbright A few knew what was was going, only a few.
This was not only humane but also brave by the engineer. My grandpa also shared his food rations with POWs forced to work in Germany. He was denounced and barely survived the ordeal that followed.
My mother had 2 cousins who fought in Stalingrad. One died in battle, the other survived Stalingrad and being a Soviet POW being repatrioted to Germany in 1955.
My grandfather was captured outside of Stalingrad and taken to Siberia. He received extra rations because he spoke 5 languages including Russian and always found a way to bribe the guards. Released in ‘51 he immigrated to America and become a successful real estate investor. He always spoke that the fat German officers died first and the thin, wiring men like him survived.
Very interesting. Crazy to think that a POW was in a position to bribe anyone, but it's also not hard to believe that the Soviet guards were also not well taken care of.
Cocky big guys underestimate thin and short guys, they should know the truth
@@frogstomp427 sure, they were weak ... Oh , in body fights they overcame the drugged SS .
Russians are superior fighters cowboy .
@@frogstomp427Russia has always been a brutal wasteland where people are reduced to rabid junkyard dogs fighting to the death over a scrap while the czars live in their mansions and exploit them all.
Nazi
One note to add. While the Soviets were by no means kind to prisoners the Stalingrad prisoners had a particularly high death rate because those that were captured had nearly starved before being captured.
50k taken only 5m ever returned
Yep, germans themselves wrote about it. Colourful picture can be found in Welz H. Verratene Grenadiere. Most of the Stalingrad pows were at the verge of death already.
Exactly. The Soviets were facing a manpower shortage across the country. They wanted to save as many prisoners as they could. The problem was that Germans in the city were on half rations from AUGUST!! They were starving throughout the fall. When they went into captivity the had no fat reserves and most importantly no potassium in their bodies. They could not digest what little food they had nor what they were given. The Soviets realized this in Kazakhstan and tried to stop the process but most were so far gone they simply died no matter the measures taken.
@@Scrat335 thats not what returning witnesses after the war said
@@WillyEckaslike There's a Ytuber called TIK who did an extensive series on Stalingrad. Good binge watching. Anyway, what do you expect them to say upon returning? I don't know what to think myself but I don't think the Soviets were nice in many cases. Considering what the Germans did to Soviet prisoners earlier what were we to expect?
The Germans did not treat Russian prisioners much better… It does not justify but it does explain …
Out of 5M the Wehrmacht took about 4M died in camps cause German leadership regarded them by ideology as Untermensch and so there was no need to feed them well. While on the other hand the Soviet captivity killed about 400K out of 4M German POWS they can consider this merciful act
@@gunchuikov9845 It is wonderful to talk with people from all over the world and seek the truth.
What we can learn from the past, if we can learn at all, is that wars must be avoided and, yes, and, There is a yes, the political decisions that will, in the short or long run, lead to war.
We are seeing, today, the youth of Russia and Ukraine die. Also, the initiation of a new conflict in Gaza, with terrorism, such as taking out a baby from a women's womb, while she was alive.
Humanity can do better.
There is a God.
Threre is truth.
There is a Natural Law.
The Germans executed Soviet women soldiers on the spot. Those were their orders.
@@gunchuikov9845 Not true. 3.3M Soviet soldiers died in German captivity out of 5M captured, still a horrific number but not 4M. Where did you get 400k deaths from? The accepted figure is 1.1M German soldiers dying in Soviet captivity, excluding Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, Finns, etc.
The Russians were doing this to their own people way before ww2
The percentage of men of 6th Army who died in Soviet captivity was extremely high, but this was not solely the Soviets' fault. Most of these men were severely malnourished upon capture, suffered from typhus, and other diseases and were completely exhausted from months of fighting. It has been concluded that Stalingrad aside, about 20% of German POWs were actually executed by the Soviets during and after the war, most of whom were Waffen SS. This number is actuay far lower than the number of Soviet POWs that were deliberately starved by the Germans, which was around 60%. If the Soviets had made the Germans pay back in full, not a single German POW would have have seen his homeland again. Not trying to paint a better picture of the Soviets here, they were absolutely brutal, but we should always try to get to the truth. (The percentages I named aren't pulled out of my ass btw, these are the numbers mentioned by Rudiger Overmans, a German historian who specialized on the eastern Front and David Glanz, an American Historian, who is an expert on the Soviet side of the war and who came to a similar conclusion as Overmans.)
To add to the picture, the Wehrmacht was utterly unprepared for the huge numbers of Red Army captured in the the first year of Operation Barbarossa. Care of prisoners was mostly nonexistent because of lack of supplies,.
And Eisenhower did not off a million in Germany after the war. Experts that get published might not be correct.
Barbarossa was launched because the Russians had amassed huge amounts of supplies and troops along the German border and Germany calculated the Russians were just days away from launching their invasion into Germany. There’s always key items an analyst will look for to determine if the enemy is preparing an invasion force or or otherwise so there was no doubt that a large invasion was coming which is why Germany had no other option but to strike first before the Russians could organize their forces. Germany’s preemptive attack worked and caught Russia completely off guard which saved millions of German civilians lives. Germany never wanted a war with Russia but the communists wanted all of Europe and saw Germany as the one country they had to defeat first and the rest of Europe would be easier to conquer. Finland and Spain managed to preserve their countries but it took a huge toll.
Tourists ?
@@echohunter4199, Yes, exactly what happened. Before anything the circumstances should be investigated. Same regarding the Russia Ukrain conflict.
I think the Japanese treatment of POW's was much worse than how the Russians treated POW's.
The Japanese were absolutely horrific
Or the how the Germans treated Soviet POWs
My uncle Peter was captured at Stalingrad and spend 7 yrs in one of Uncle Joe's holiday camps. He survived and made it back to Germany in 1950.
Yeah, the holiday camp where you chopped wood 12 hours a day in -30 or +30 degree weather, slept on a straw mattress in a freezing wooden hut with only a small fire for heating and ate rotten fish soup and stale bread every day.
@@tancreddehauteville764 Yes. He was being sardonic by calling it a holiday camp. Another big clue was referring to him as uncle Joe.
“Holiday Camp” 🤣
Uno dei pochi fortunati dopo inenarrabili peripezie.
I Russi solo a Stalingrado catturarlo 91.
I'm surprised they let him go after only 5 years war ended
WW2 has been the deadliest conflict in human history. The death toll was approximately 85 million of which most were civilians.
My two uncles died within months in autumn of 1942. Still recall the notification by the Nazis. We had no phone, a female neighbour called in and told my mother there was a phone call for her at the mixed business some 10 mins walk distant. We never had a message like this and I think my mother knew what was up. The first uncle died somewhere on the 'Ostfront' - Russia. From this report one might say he was lucky not being captured. Don't think a grave exists. He was an Austrian champion skier and mountaineer, friends with Heinrich Harrer, part of specialist troops, called 'Gebirgsjaeger', trained in mountain warfare, used as cannon fodder. The other uncle, very young, a mere 20, died in Norway. 6 years old at the time, I still remember my mother's expression when she went to take the phone call and when she returned. 2 months later - again. She then had to go and tell our grandmother.
Two wrongs make two wrongs.
My old boss had an Austrian uncle who was with Paulus. He was wounded and got put on a flight out of Stalingrad. He went on to survive the war. Very, very fortunate.
Was with Paulus? Probably a war criminal
My grandfather, Rudolph Ziegler, was captured in Stalingrad. He was a sniper-- the Russians were going to execute him on the spot, but my grandfather spoke fluent Russian so was spared for whatever reason. He became a POW and survived the ordeal. He was a small. wiry man. When he was released and returned home, my father (just a young boy) said he looked like a walking skeleton. No one recognized him. My father said he was a changed man, very harsh and violent in his upbringing of the children-- and rarely smiled or laughed. He refused to talk about his POW experience, and became very angry when asked questions about it.
Several Germanic immigrants to western Canada that i have worked with or friends parents came from the German areas of Poland or Russia ,started around 1918 then more in the 40s,Germans pushed west,Some spoke more then one language that was a great benefit to them.
@@paulwiegerinck528 This is interesting. I don't know a lot about my father's ancestors... have always wondered why my grandfather was fluent in Russian. Maybe this is a plausible answer. Thank you for your reply.
My Grandfather came from the Russian side of Poland. All my life I thought I was of Polish decent , until when I was.in the Army with some German soldiers who were with us for training and one tapped my name tag and said " Russian" and I said no Polish and he said ( much to my surprise) " No you are Russian.
He was still a NAZI
All the Soviet people were starving and working hard during WW2 and years after that. Do you think there was enough food for those who survived? My parents were kids then, and all that they remember from their childhood was hunger.
What is not taught in Russian schools is that food was plentiful in the USSR. The Germans occupied only the European part of the country, while the vast remaining areas of the Soviet Union were far from the war. There, agricultural production was at a sufficient level. Even in Leningrad, party members had huge supplies of food, but they did not want to give it to the population, because hunger was supposed to motivate the citizens to defend themselves fiercely - because the people had nothing to lose. There are interesting and shocking studies on this subject by historians, books and memoirs also written by Russians.
@@charlesgrant-skiba5474 do you think soviet people had fields in Siberia? And there were a lot of tractors or horses which could be used for agriculture? And millions of strong men to grow crops? No, thousands of villages were destroyed, women and kids were working hard but food was the biggest problem.
@@charlesgrant-skiba5474 lil bro think most of eastern Siberian Russia was habitable lol, it was the European Russia that was matter the most most
@@charlesgrant-skiba5474stuff like this is why Patten questioned if we fought for the wrong side.
@@charlesgrant-skiba5474 which party members had food, are you a liar?
How could hunger force the townspeople to defend themselves if thousands of them fell and died of hunger every day?
liar,
soldiers on the front line of defense were given 500 grams of bread per day;
hot shop workers - 375 grams;
other workers and engineers - 250 grams,
employees, dependents and children - only 125 grams of bread
the highest party member in Leningrad, Zhdanov, received 400 grams of bread per day.
American Harrison Evans Salisbury, who spent most of his career working for the United Press and the New York Times, came to Leningrad in 1944, he has a book about it.
We had an old Russian soldier who was captured by the Germans that lived in our neighborhood on Long Island NY. Once the war ended he was going to be sent back to Russia where Stalin had them sent to Gulags as punishment for surrendering. Luckily he was able to convince US solders he was Polish because he spoke that language too. Ended up going to the US. He told my dad he was able to talk himself out of a death sentence. MR. SMEARMO was a real nice guy to everyone. RIP.
War is hell. But for the vanquished, post war is triple hell. On our street in Dartmouth lived an English retired couple whom were missionaires in the Dutch East Indies in WW2. Somehow they both survived thier horrific treatment in a Japanese prison camp. They never ever spoke about it. I only came to this info after both had passed away in late 1970s. Sad.
As humans, especially from that era, they were far more likely to bury misery and horrific experiences than we are today. Of course, there are exceptions from either time period but in general that is fact. I had a relatively large morning paper route from around 9 to 17 years old. I had many vets among my customers. I even had the brother of a WW1 veteran. Even as a young kid I could stark differences among the various men. It wasn't until many years later that I was able to better understand each of them as I'd learn a little more about them, usually from their families. I still have the greatest respect for those guys, and they all treated me very well. My first and only hero was Don Soucy, the Vietnam vet whose family's yard butted up against the back of ours. His mother would babysit me when I was still in diapers. Everyday Terry would sit me down in the living room of their small cape. There, up on the fireplace mantle towards the right, was the formal service photo of Don before he shipped out. I stared at that picture every day. It was the earliest memory in my life and to this day, even after my own numerous head traumas, I can still look up and see Don in his uniform in that picture with the familiar brownish hue that seemed to accompany that war. I'm a 60-year-old guy now and I just saw Don at a local hardware store before he and his wife made their move to Florida. I ran over to his car and knocked on his window and told him the story. It was a powerful moment for both of us. We smiled, shook hands and off he went. I'm sorry I've been so long-winded, but it was tough to cut short once I started to ramble.
The Japnese were worse than the Germans and that's saying something. Their experiments on Chinese civilians, men, women, children and new born babies is off the scale horrific.
Brutal as the Japanese were, civilians interned in Indonesia and Malaya weren't that badly off in the spectrum of WW2 suffering.
Many of the men captured at Stalingrad had already been starved for some time so their was no way back for them as the damage had already been done to their internal organs .
My grandfather was in charge if prisons berween 1945-1949. He told me that Germans in the prisons were not united and didnt help each other to survive. The austrians or hungarian helped each other with food and other issues. The worked hard to rebuild Berlin, Dresden and other cities.
Thanks!
Most of the germans that surrendered at Stalingrad had succumbed within days or weeks of capitulation.
Field Marshall Paulus was presented by the Russians at the Nuremberg trials to testify. He flat out lied on the stand stating that most of the German soldiers still in captivity were still alive and treated well. Knowing full well most had died from wounds, starvation, disease and cold. The west Germans never forgave him for that betrayal. He was released from captivity in 1954 and settled in east Germany till his death in 1957.
My uncle returned from WW2 in 1954 having been captured at Stalingrad, my Grandfather posted missing in 1943 died in a Russian prison camp, my grandmother finally found this out in 1958.
Your Uncle was very fortunate to survive and return to Germany in 1955. Most of the Stalingrad POW's died of disease and malnutrition quite soon after capture.
It should be noted that several million more survived the war, and among them, many did not return to Germany until 1955. It also should be said that at least 3 million Red Army troops died in German hands as a result of various abuses, including exposure to poison gas. Context is important.
No one alive today can imagine the terrors of the eastern front! Many people were killed and murdered on both sides!
Young Americans better study the 20th Century. Their naïveté will allow that Century to repeat itself.
War is so strange. Millions of Germans murder their way deep into a neighbor’s territory, then act like the victims when they’re stopped. I don’t see how the Soviets are the bad guys for giving them all the death penalty.
I’m with you. Unfortunately some of these soldiers were basically kids, forced to the front lines with no combat experience., near the end of the war. Germany was throwing numbers at a knowingly futile effort.
Churchill knew his Germans. He said, "they're either at your throat or at your feet".
What is hard to put into account are the Germans that came back and died quickly after. I know many stories of friends and in a case within my family, where shortly after return the death came quickly. Either by disease or by suicide
I have a friend from Thüringen in Germany whose grandmother lost 8 brothers at the Russian front during WW2.
The Russian prison camps during the 1st World War were horrific too. Nobody speaks of these but they cemented the idea of the bad slavic-asian people. Most of the German prisoners didn't deserve to die but let's not forget about the Soviet prisoners and the fact that a Nazi victory might have led to the total extinction of non-aric people from Spain to Vladivostok. All Soviet atrocities aside, we have to admit they fought for their lives.
This logic goes both ways
Germanics were not Aryans but the Slavs were.
@@Albon29yd Source?
You have Alot to learn yet.
Read some more.
The mortality rate of Germans in Russian camps was lower than in English concentration camps.
WW2 is a reminder of how humans can treat each other, may such a thing never happen again
It already happened in the Balkans with Serbs and Croats who lived peacefully side by side for years .Then all hell broke loose.
@@lukecuxton1514 Will politicians listen?
@@aphilippinesadventure9184 Its not the politicians, its the people
It will happen again if people don’t. learn history like Americans, they even don’t know who won war 😂😂😂
@@Кан-ъ9б John Wayne won it.
0:18 Intersection of Gogolia & Ostrovskaya, in downtown Stalingrad. -The ruins on the corner are of the hotel across the street from the Univermag building.
0:40 Water tower uphill of the Stalingrad 2 railyard. This would have been in January or February, 1943. The Soviets are shelling from within Stalingrad.
2:26 These buildings were houses of specialists. They are still standing about a kilometer northeast of the Grain Silos. By Ogareva & Raboche-Krestyanskaya.
3:26 Ba-gra-tē-ŌN
They were not all 'executed'. Many were shot on the spot, if the capturing Soviet soldiers were very angry and embittered, but superior officers wanted the Germans alive so they could work and repair damaged or destroyed infrastructure etc. The majority of the German deaths were due to general maltreatment, poor hygiene and medical care in the camps and inadequate food intake. Some of this was due to deliberately malicious behaviour by the Soviet officials, but probably most due to the fact that food and medical care was prioritised for Soviet soldier, citizens and enemy prisoners bottom of the list.
Let’s not forget about the hundreds of thousands of surrendered Croatians massacred by the communists in Bleiburg, May 1945 (they were handed over by the English.) The survivors were then sent on horrific death marches back to their homes, most didn’t survive the journey.
I worked in an Armenian nursing home here USA - one Armenian told me he lived in Russia at at start of war - in 1st battle he was captured by Germans, then worked for them as interpreter, then when Americans landed he was shooting at Germans , family thought he was dead but they found him in the 1960’s working for General Motors in Detroit - he designed the Chevrolet impala, was given one when it came out, his paintings lined the halls of the nursing home - I have lots of stories like this talking to Armenians, getting to know them
My grandfather was a German solder in ww2 , he was captured by russia and spent five years as a pow in Russia. He said they made you work rebuilding roads cities etc but they eat almost as well as the Russians did .
This was cruel yet a harsh fact is Hitler tried the wrong dude, Stalin was the ruthless guy Hitler shouldn't have crossed.
Some say it was a preventive attack. Stalin was planning to attack germany first....
Really Russia would not be here now if it wasn’t for the uk and USA Atlantic convoys lend lease allied bombing with out all that Russia would not have stopped the Germans
War is a bitch and WWII was the worst. The Wehrmacht at the beginning of the was starved 3 million Russian prisoners. Revenge was incredible.
Most German soldiers captured at Stalingrad died of typhus, they had not been vaccinated and the USSR had no medicine either. That is why few POWs from Stalingrad survived. Otherwise a reasonable number did, and Stalin did not kill large numbers because he understood the value of the labor the POWs provided. But the USSR was starving too.
I was born in 1941.in sept 1940 in the first German air raid over london ,a bomb hit a shelter and killed a lot of civilians including my Dads 3 sisters and his mum.
He lived to 99 but never really got over it.
Imagine making war against a country that didn't sign the Geneva Convention...
Germany didn't sign the GC either.
@@chrisward7085 yes Germany was a signatory and they mostly abided by it in the west.
it's also ridiculous that geneva convention should by applied to aggressor.
@@chrisward7085 Germany did sign it, and mostly abided by it, but not with Russians, either because Russia hadn't signed it, or because they despised them by doctrine and propaganda and didn't care if they died. Of course, Hitler didn't care about the GC, but his armed forces did, because many were honourable, and because they recognised the reciprocity, and they were sufficiently united in this to resist Hitler. One small bright spark in a ghastly war. I fear that today's despots are as evil and stupid now as they were then.
@@colinelliott5629As you said. German soldiers, particularly the Wermacht more than the Waffen SS, generally obeyed the GC on the Western front. After battles in Africa, according to a British friend of my Grandfather, German and British officers exchanged radio messages to account for missing soldiers and find out who was dead, wounded or captured. In one case a captured British soldier was discovered to be the son of the owner of a large cigarette manufacturer. Always short of cigarettes the Germans offered his return for several cases of cigarettes. The British commander said he'd see what he could do. All the British soldiers turned in their cigarette packs. About 175 total. The German officer knew this was the best he could get and told his prisoner how he was going to be sent back to his unit for the 175 packs of cigarettes. Unbelievably, the British soldier apparently felt insulted and announced he was worth a 175 crates of cigarettes not 175 single cigarettes and refused to take part in the exchange! To the disappointment of the cigarette poor German soldiers (and probably the secretly held joy of the British soldiers who would keep their smokes) the British soldier in German custody would remain in a German prison camp until the end of the war! Sounds unbelievable but years later I found the story in a book about the British army in Africa.
Soviet treatment of German prisoners was horrific. German treatment of Soviet prisoners was horrific. FAFO.
Yes, important to state the historic reality that both sides treated POWs horrifically. And if anything, the Nazis started it by encircling & then mistreating millions of Soviet soldiers at the start of the War. The Soviets should've responded more honourably but the Eastern Front descended into 1 of the most inhumane wars ever fought.
@@eltongood2474 The USSR did not have the resources to provide Geneva Convention style treatment to German POWs. They had been invaded and the richest parts of their country had been occupied by the enemy. German POWs were sent to the awful GuLag camps and/or used to clean up and begin rebuilding the many cities and towns the Germans had deliberately wrecked as they retreated.
@@LeeZaslofsky are you really implying that if logistics were better the Soviets would have treated German POWs better? Thats clearly not true.
Almost 3 million Soviet POWs died in German captivity mostly from starvation.
@@LeeZaslofsky Thats a bad cope out. My enemy did this, so i do the exact same thing and after it lets just pretend we only did it because of "bad economy". Because we are clearly the good guys, if we only had more ressources back then we would have fed them of course. Ya right dude. Just accept the fact that you were just as bad as the enemy, maybe even worse.
Remember Katyn.
You must remember the context. The Nazis had a scorched earth policy. They burnt down villages and killed animals to leave people to die of cold and hunger. 26 million Soviet citizens were killed. This includes 3.4m Soviet POWs. It's no surprise the Soviets were very brutal towards their enemy.
You can never make a movie about the Russan German war. Nothing could come close to the hell it was.
Tarawa, Bataan Death March, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, come fairly close.
@@chriscampbell9191 what the hell do these to movies have to do.with Stalingrad ?
@@daveyboy_ They're not movies. They're battles. Bloody battles fought between the US Marines and the Japanese in WW2. As bloody fighting as anything that took place on the Eastern Front.
@@chriscampbell9191 well my post is about movies. So try and stick to the subject.
@@daveyboy_ You didn't name any movies, and your post was about the hell on the Eastern Front. And there is indeed a movie about the Russian German war. It's a Russian made movie called "Come And See". It's on YT.
In the book The Fall of Berlin Anthony Beever tells of a train full of German refugees running from the Est and the Germans aboard telling of horror tales of what the Soviet soliders were doing to civilians. At some point a wounded soldier who was silently in a corner said somberly: If the Russians do to us only a fraction of what we did in the Soviet Union there wont be a single German left alive", It is in the book.
In 1939, it was the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that invaded Poland. In 1940, it was the Soviet Union that invaded the Baltic countries. In 1940, it was the Soviet Union that annexed parts of Romania. In 1956, it was the Soviet Union that invaded Hungary. In 1968, it was the Soviet Union that invaded Czechoslovakia. Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Hungary or Czechoslovakia did not invade Russia or the Soviet Union. No threat emanated from these countries. But these countries were attacked by the USSR/Russia.
And they call the West, Imperialistic Pigs. Right. 1924 to 2024, who is the conquering imperialist?
Is Ra hell
Completely true and they have had a free pass
you might want to read up on your history there bud ..ill help you with the basics operation barbarossa was not only germany ...it was a combined operation from armies from germany, romania, finland, italy, hungary and slovakia.. you see these armies invaded the USSR that resulted in a combined death toll of 25 million soviets! a modicum of respect might be in order
Na * zi b o t s at it again. Repeating cherry picked history and making it out of context.
Tell us about Munich 1938 agreement. Tell us about PapecIip.
And tell us who (USSR) actually won the war, almost single-handedly.
Again, all the mentioned countries sided with Germany and also were siding with previous powers that invaded Russia through history. So, Red Army entering and occupying those countries equals imperialism? Not really, for sane people and those that know history not.
I lived in Leipzig after the Wall came down and was told by many that more German Soldiers died after the war than during it.
the soviets country was burned to the ground , millions died , I would have been pissed to, Germans are lucky to still have a country
True, 40 millions soviets perished, if the soviets have paid the germans in kind, will be no Germany today.
World War 2 was made possible by the Nazi Soviet pact, made by Stalin. That encouraged Hitler, to invade Poland. What was the Soviet Union's excuse for the raping, murders, and pillaging, carried out throughout all the Eastern, and Western European populations, unfortunate enough to fall under their control?
My father was one of Millions of Russian POW s. The combination of not even basic food and inhumane work conditions were killing 1 out of 2 men according to my father. They got beaten up 4 times a day. Sometimes they were tortured. The wardens in the Gulags were convicted criminals behaving perfectly like heavy criminals. If a German died his corpse was smashed with a heavy hammer- to make sure that nobody left the camps alive. The German POW s were working often with Russian convicts being treated even worse. Japanese POW s became the same treatment but in separate locations nearby. Each German POW was forced to sign crazy accusations on behalf of war crimes they never had commited. Standard sentence was 35 years of hard labour which was equivalent to a death sentence under the given circumstances. Before Stalins death not a single POW was released. My father served 6 years as a POW and the circumstances of his return were extremely lucky. He was wasted and sick to an extent that even his own mother didn t recognize him on sight. The Mountain village were I grew up and were my father worked as a customs officer and ski border patrol had a high percentage of Russian Ex POV s who stayed after the war as Stalin executed them as traitors when returning to USSR. Their kids were our school comrades. There was mutual respect. Each of our fathers knew what the other side had suffered. No fights, no hard feelings- just the nicest neighbours imaginable. Today this generation is buried in the same cemetery, once victims of their inhumane and greedy States and enemies. They are lying peacefully next to each other. Today there is fighting again in Charkow, Kursk, Brjansk Oblasts- all the places my father fought in the past. It appears to me that those places are cursed. Humanity didn t learn the slightest lesson out of the past!
The Soviets were looking for revenge and got it.. The German soldiers paid the price for Hitlers brutality
ummmm....Stalin was a blood thirsty savage long before Hitler came into power and so was the Soviet army. All they needed was the permission which they got from the English and its allies!
Lies about German brutality. The winners wrote the history. The most honorable army in the whole war.
@@guylindquist338There was no honor in the massacre of millions of innocent people and for supporting a genocidal maniac like Hitler
@@guylindquist338says some nordic race guy whos grandfather was sitting somewhere in warm drinking tea. U have no idea what germans did to our people and slavs in general
@@guylindquist338Yeah by killing 19 million Soviet civilians right ? And annihilating 10.000 villages in Belarus alone right ?
In Ireland, we had a POW camp for airmen who had crashed, but being neutral we lumped the Germans in with the British and Americans. They were all forced to live together and had heated games of football. The guards didn't have weapons and were annoyed the Germans received an allowance from their embassy that was higher than the guards' wages. They mostly worked during the day in local farms or businesses and would organise dances at night in the local bars, which would turn violent if the Allies crashed a German-organised party or vice versa. A few Americans 'escaped' by hitch-hiking up to Northern Ireland, but were swiftly returned by the British authorities there. Once America entered the war, the Americans were secretly released, then the British too. A lot of the Germans then started attending University in Dublin and some chose to stay by the end - especially those who had married Irish girls during their time as 'prisoners'. Luck of the draw I suppose.
Want to add that during and after the war no one knew of PTSD. Did not exist. There was massive rebuilding to be done. Look at the pictures of Gaza.
Since time immemorial warriors have known what is now labelled PTSD - it is a human reaction to terror. Each age gave it a name, so horrific it is that the collective memory seeks repeatedly to forget it. During WWII it was known as "shell shock". To find proof of this just watch the great movie Patton.
It's hard to feel bad for them after what they did, feel bad for those who were forced to fight though
@ TheUntoldPast Your reading ability has improved an incredible amount. Virtually no sing song cadence. A little but not much. That looney sing song style drove me crazy. I will not delete your videos anymore.
The spoils of war can never justify the cost in human life, both mental and physical. It's always easier to calculate dead bodies. However, it's the dead soul that continue to ravage the survivor and his family, sometimes for generations.
The eastern front might as well have been the Mongols fighting the Goths, every story you hear is horrific, I remember seeing an interview with the D-Day veterans and one guy was saying how this young German was pleading to him to let them take him because the French MPs had him captured, he said he always regretted not helping that boy, because they most likely tortured him before execution.
The Soviets did not execute one million German POWs. A significant number died of neglect but the Soviets also had very little for themselves.
We know that Russians were to b ex executed if they surrendered to the Germans and their families were on the sht list by Joe and the communists. Sure prisoners were treated better. Maybe only 900000 were shot when ammo wäs available. Duh.
The result of this neglect was predictable based on the millions of Russians who faced similar fates in previous years.
@@EJisArete If you look at death rates for German POWs held by the Soviets by year, it was extremely high as a percentage in 1941, 1942, and 1943. It drops significantly in 1944 and 1945 when the Soviet Union was in better shape. Meanwhile the Germans consistently deliberately killed or worked to death and starved Soviets from 1941 to 1945.
After the end of the war the Soviets took 4.5 million German men to work camps and various gulags just over one million returned
@@georgefox4982 2,031,000 of the approximately 3,000,000 German POWs taken by the Soviets were recorded as released and returned to Germany. Your numbers are way off.
There is a video here on You Tube called Stalin's cannibal island. It spoke of a large group of people were arrested, loaded onto trucks and then boats and taken to an island on a big river and told to build a settlement.
Except they were not given tools, supplies, food, and had to make do. Those that survived started eating the dead and even some people who were still alive.
The video went on to talk about how bad life was all over the Soviet Union and how Soviets died in the camps and prisons. Of course, this was before the war.
So, no surprise the Germans were treated poorly.
One Germany's best pilots was on the Eastern front when the war ended. He led his squadron over to the West to escape the Soviets, some of them put their wives and girlfriends into the planes with them and flew to an American airfield.
Wish I could remember the name of two movies.
One was of a group of people in one of Stalin's Gulags. They managed to escape the prison but knew there was a good chance they would be caught if they fled towards cities.
They walked South and crossed into Mongolia, then into China, and somehow made it to India.
A German officer working in a mine in Northern Soviet Union also escaped and worked his way across the top of the S.U.
He was helped by the kindness of strangers in food and shelter. He made it to Finland and onto Germany.
The Germans caused untold suffering in Poland & Russia .. they were cruel. They invaded Russia, Russians protected themselves, their fate was sealed. War is horrible.
Please pray for Palestinians.
Pray for Palestinians to live in their own land in peace 🙏🏻
@@readstalinswarofexterminat-r5g Yes indeed ..
Stop with this BS of Russians protecting themselves, They were cold blooded killers of millions without Germans, Brits and today US/NATO supposedly threatening them. In fact, they are very good at making enemies to "protect" themselves from.
War is old people getting rich and young people dying.
always was....
*bankers getting rich!
Yes, the Soviets treated the captured Germans in an abysmal way, BUT, the Germans didn't act any better with captured Soviets.
Not an excuse, but it has to be mentioned.
stick to the topic
We are truly the worst animal on the planet.
It doesn't compare to the 5 million Soviet soldiers who perished and starved as prisoners of war in the Reich. Never forget!
The H man ordered to starve the soviet POWs. Those men were murdered by starvation, on purpose. Almost 40 million soviets perish at the german invaders hands.
unfortionatly, this was obvious to happen after German otrosities
The commies had honed their skills on 40-50 million of their own Christians.....
The men responsible for horror and suffering of WW2 will be held to account. Their fate is unthinkable.
The men responsible are all dead. There is no afterlife so whatever punishment the were to receive they already have.
They have been held to account - well, some of them have. The ones on the allied side were not.
I wash you wouldn't use visual examples that don't coincide with the subject matter,that footage in the first couple of minutes of your vid was from France '44
This isn’t TV , get over it
@@NormFreilinger what does that mean,bit vague
In 2019, my family visited Volgograd and as part of our holiday, had a guide for the few days we were there. I asked about the high rate of deaths on German Prisoners out of curiosity. Our guide was adamant that the soldiers were treated well, but they had a lot of “stomach problems”…….
because most of the deceased German prisoners who died in captivity died due to exhaustion and illnesses received while they were surrounded in the cold before being captured.
Russians treated German prisoners quite tolerably; German prisoners received almost the same rations as Soviet civilians
I'm@@Quintus_Sertorius
Might want to mention the 3 million Russian prisoners who died in German camps?
Exactly. Wiki article "German atrocities committed against Soviet prisoners of war" describes it well.
The Allies hanged Germans at Nuremberg, in 0art, for forcing POWS and others into slavery.
Then the USSR went on to com mmit the same offence - no trials or executions for the criminals of the Purges or Gulags though!
3.5 million were murdered out of a total of 5.7 million
I don't think the creator of the video is denying Soviets didn't suffer. This is just a video about German pows.
So what??
The Soviets committed some of their own atrocities against an innocent country as well. They took their half of Poland with Germany in 1939 and never gave it back so in 1945 Poland took a bunch of eastern Germany (and "ethnically cleansed" Germans from there).
And poland took part of Czechoslovakia whats ur point?
@@Rfxy Without researching it my guess would be what you are talking about would have been the ethnically German Sudetenland areas and maybe other areas of Czechoslovkia that Germany had annexed. Like I said I would need to research that to know what you are referring to. My point was that the video and some comments only looked at the USSR as innocent victims of German atrocities.
What do you think happened to capture Soviet soldier during WWW2. They were sent to country clubs? Yeah right? No they died eating grass..
Lesson Learned. Never go back on your word.
Any good books of first-hand accounts of German prisoners in Soviet labor camps?
As Far As My Legs Can Carry Me is an account of a lone German prisoner put to work in a lead mine near the Bering Strait and who escaped all the way to Tehran in Iran. Another one is of four Poles who escaped from a Siberian labour camp all the way to India.
@@Albon29yd Thank you, Albon!
The German version So Weit die Fußen Tragen, an excellent movie
@@Albon29ydThe name of the one with the 4 Poles waking to India is “The Long Walk” by Rawicz
Best Ever books ( heavily censored in the West, but, funny, not so much in the East) are in the series of Sven Hassel.
Sven show us the ww2 from the GERMAN side perspective. Probably THE best ww2 books ever. You have more than a dozen of them, with dark humor, cruelty of the war, misery from BOTH sides, and a heart touching friendship, sometimes, even between declared hard enemies ( soviets plot with germas to assassinate a SS criminal, or a soviet Politruc, in one book) : These books are a MUST in order to understand the horrors of the ww2, a war where rich man "fight" but poor man die...
"Sven Hassel was the pen name of the Danish-born Børge Willy Redsted Pedersen known for his novels about German soldiers fighting in World War II. In Denmark he used the pen name Sven Hazel. He is one of the bestselling Danish authors, possibly second only to Hans Christian Andersen"
America, England, and France classified Geman soldiers as enemy fighters so that they didn't fall under the convention related to prisoners of war. Especially in France, many died also.
Nonsense. The UK treated German POWs in line with the Geneva Convention.
This video seems a bit biased to me. In principle, the Ribbentrop Molotov Pact was not a "ceasefire" as mentioned on this site, not least because there was no war between the two countries until then. What they did was a "Non-Aggression Pact". Most of the Red Army's POWs never returned alive. The Nazis deliberately starved 3.3 million prisoners, as well as a large number of civilians, through the "Hunger Plan", which aimed to largely replace the Slavic population with German settlers.
they did not have food for their own soldiers so the prisoners didn't receive any either
My Step Grandfather was a Taylor with small hands. He was stationed in Norway most of the times. For some days he was sent to Russia and captivated soon. He was forced to get coal from cold mines with bare hands and manual tools. Released back in 1953.
They didn`t participate voluntarily, my grandfather was one of them, when they refused they were executed.
Yes, for many of them, this is true
And it never ends well, either!
I had a wonderful naubough who in ww2 was held prisoner. By the Germans.And Russians he servived due to his incredible gymnastic skills and he was a professional football player.. Fitness n football saved his life he died 101 what a lovely guy
Not mentioned: The ratio of German prisoners surviving Soviet imprisonment was much higher than the ratio of Soviet prisoners in German camps!
To execute the horrific execution plan against the Russian people the German Army recieved its full payment in the end.
1 John 2:11
“But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.”
The Germans also murdered or worked to death hundreds of thousands (if not more) of captured Russians, so the brutality evened out.
No, the brutality compounded.
Millions not thousands...
@@claudebuysse7482 Not millions!
@@claudebuysse7482 -- Since I don't know exactly how many Russian POWs the Germans killed, I included 'if not more' in my post. No matter what the actual figure, any amount over 0 was too many.
@@gregb6469 Yes it's to many but you are living in a fantasy world. Only the dead see the end of war.
My German grandpa was a prisoner of war in the US. He said these were the best years of his life. The US has a horrible human rights record but for Europe around that time they were a blessing. Without the US, especially if Stalin had gotten his will, Europe would probably a much less peaceful and prosperous place right now.
German treated the Soviet prisoners horrible as well.
Yes - 3.5 million Soviet POWs were killed by the Germans.
They were not executed, but deported. Just because Stalin was a butcher is no reason to charge him with crimes he never committed.
Yes, the conditions in which they were held were horrendous, but 1) the population of the USSR was on the verge of starvation at the time, treating prisoners with care was not a priority 2) the conditions imposed upon Russian prisoners by yhe Germans were even worse.
What do you know about the 200K-300K British, American and Commonwealth POW's who were "liberated" By the advancing Russian armies and REFUSED TO REPATRIATE THEM BACK TO THEIR HOMELANDS!!!
i'VE READ TWO BOOKS ON THIS AWFUL MATTER?
Can you refer to the books??
Welcome to eastern Europe
@@makswais3012 he's just speaking shit. I want some proof.
@makswais3012 i come from both West and East Europe. And that is just shit. All my ancestors went through ww2, and never have i heard of 200-300.000 western pow just disappearing
@@Dannyboy314 I mean deportations, population displacements were pretty comon back then. I know bc i live in eastern eu and most people there were at some point forced to move either by germans or soviets. As to the ally pow question i remember that during either east prussian or pomeranian offensives in 1944 there was incident where Soviet soldiers shot local townsfolk among them few Belgian or Danish POW's.
"Nobody could imagine that Adolf Hitler would invade the the Soviet Union", yeah, besides outlining the whole thing in mein kamph, and talking about it speeches for years... TOTAL SURPRISE...to Nobody But Stalin...
Apparently the original small Russian tanks had road wheels that the tanks could drive on with the tracks removed,designed to be used on paved German roads.Russia was preparing an attack on Germany?
@@paulwiegerinck528 - Yes, but Stalin thought he had more time
@thuleeuropa - interesting. But there's lots of evidence that Stalin was going to do the same thing. Piles of documents, letters, journals. There's even a short film put together by Otto Skorzeny before he died in 1975. Now people may not trust that, but he is speaking as an eye witness and possibly a participant, i.e., a primary source.
If you destroy something how the F do you think there is enough food for POWs. The Soviet soldier did NOT have enough. The Civilians was starving. So if alot of nazis did die of hunger. What to expect? And if the Soviets where so cruel. Who come there is a Germany left today?
True and common sense logic, and basic education. Many muppets commenting here have no clue only on Leningrad, under siege for more than a year, over 1 million CIVILIANS died of starvation ...
Ask anybody from the former East Germany what the Soviet occupation was like !
@@skorner5798 Has already done that. Different opinions. One said. We brought it on ourselfs. Or rather, other grandparents did.
Sth that shocked me was when I learnt that, before sending the prisoners off to the Gulags, Stalin paraded them through the streets of Moscow. Sadly, I cannot say that they didn't deserve that.
Remember that for the first 6 months of the German invasion there were 4 millions Soviet POW most of whom were starved to death in the German camps. An eye for an eye!
..... Doesn't still make it right in the End Dude
@@JAGtheTrekkieGEMINI1701 - Don't start none, won't be none; I'm just fed up with all of this "poor German victim" nonsense.
@@Malt454 The UDSSR started Wars in that TimeFrame too Dude and MASS Murdered People, they were not "BETTER" as the Nazi Germans but just more *inefficient* in their cruelty and lucky them they happened to be on the Side of the WW2 Winners
@@Malt454 more people are buying the "poor german victim" mentality its so strange.
@@danv1324 - Yes, not sympathizing with the Naz!s, of course, just with the Germans who "happened" to somehow "be caught up in the war" while "defending their country" by attacking the countries of others. Germany went shopping for the war that it got, and just didn't like the results. This moral equivalency that some people now want to assign to all combatants just doesn't fly for me.
War is an evil and the responsibility of the evil lies with the commanders and decision makers and not with the soldiers. Those who are expressing negative sentiments about captured German soldiers are ignorant fools. These soldeirs fought because they obeyed the commanders being professional soldiers.
And they killed millions of civilians in the Soviet Union... Innocent guys right?
Survivability rates of SOVIET prisoners , in GERMAN camps was much , much lower . Compare the numbers , and you will find , over , and over , the Germans were worse . That must not be forgotten .
6 mil jews and 1 mil of others vs gulag 7 mills in total i guess its equaly shitty
@@KDH-o3v Soviets lost 27 million people because of GERMANS .
I was bourn 13yrs after ww2 and did not know anything it was not until 1970s a program came on british tv called the world at war depicting the rise of hitler but i could understand the actrosities commited by the germans and japanese i bear no anomosty towards the people of germany i have been there and found them froendly
Been documented that British and American ships returned Soviet soldiers rescued from German camps after wars end.
The soldiers dutifully marched off the transport ships only to be systematically machine gunned right there and then.. as they came of the Allied ships.
This was repeated Countless times as more than 20, 000 men were shot dead right in front of the allied sailors.
Seemingly Stalin didn't want returnees who had glimpsed the Bright lights of the West.
This POW extermination pogrom is a fact. Early in WWII Stalin ordered all Russian POWs executed upon recapture. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_repressions_against_former_prisoners_of_war