Russian atrocities

Hi;
From the incredible journey of US Paratrooper Joe Beyerle; Exhibit on war-time story of Joe Beyrle opens in Russia | Russia | RIA Novosti ; after Joe escaped the Gestapo and moved East with the idea of joining the Red Army he hid out in a haystack with the idea of observing a forward Red Army unit and picking the right time to declare himself. While he watched the Red Army men killed an elderly Prussian farm couple and fed them to the pigs. The pigs were later eaten. Joe later approached the unit and was allowed to join-great bunch of warriors by his account-but the level of savagery reached on the Eastern Front had them engaging in some militarily dubious practices guaranteed to spur enemy resistance to a fanatical level.
JeffinMNUSA
PS. And the female Colonel who led Joe's Red Army tank unit had a memorable battle cry; "FOLLOW MY ASS AS IF YOU COULD HAVE IT!"

 

A German soldier on leave from Ostfront said to Mrs. Christabel Bielenberg:'If we are paid back one quarter of what we are doing in Russia and Poland, Frau Doktor, we will suffer, and we will deserve to suffer.'

 

Good Morning Tamino;
There is a telling true incident in the new Max Hastings book circa 1945 where some Berlin civilians are discussing what will happen when the Russians come. A bemedalled veteran speaks up "If they behave as we did there will be no Germans left."

 

Good evening Jeff!
Thanks for that loquacious quote. History should be built from these little but sincere personal stories, not from memoirs of defeated generals.
I wish you pleasant and peaceful weekend.

 

I was reading about Nemmersdorf the other day and read that among the victims there were 50 French and and Belgian pows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemmersdorf_massacre

 

I have been curious for along time what has happened to several Allied pilots who ended in the hands of the Red Army and "vanished"... I have made a thread on this in the questions section but it seems Stalin wanted to have hostages in case Patton is given free hands after Germany is beaten. There are witnesses for this as prisoners from Soviet prisoner camps have seen them. Still, not freed even after Stalin died.

 

I have some knowledge about French (Alsacian and Moselan ) soldiers, as welll as Luxembourg ones . Some were liberated by Stalin after De Gaulle claimed them in 1945. Others were freed later (if they survived)and others simply vanished. There are many threads on the web about their ordeal and yo ucan find them by googling "malgé nous" (we were forced) .I have no knowledge about what happened to Anglo-Saxons who landed in the Soviet Union.

 

found it !

The largest group of Americans imprisoned in the Soviet Union included more than 730 pilots and other airmen who either made "forced landings on Soviet territory" or were shot down on Cold War spy flights. Mr. Volkogonov was not specific on their fates but spoke generally about prisoners' being interned in labor camps, some being executed and others forced to eventually renounce their U.S. citizenship.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1992-11-12/news/1992317164_1_soviet-union-volkogonov-cold-war

 

Here's a study that was released about 10 years ago. Mostly Cold War incidents, but there's a good amount of WW2 content too. Interesting read regardless of how you view the quality of the sources.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=PJVB2sdI8bEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+gulag+study&hl=en&sa=X&ei=R6m5VOCFI86eyASGh4CgAQ&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

I read that when they would test their atomic bombs they would use their own soldiers (and I think prisoners also) as subjects to see the effects the radiation has on people, which resulted in a lot of them dying.

 

https://www.bbc.com/reel/playlist/the-arctic-capital-of-the-world?vpid=p09h9bvt

A family's destiny in one of Russia's largest gulags

Leonas Bogdanavichus was sent to the Vorkuta gulag, one of the largest and deadliest in the Soviet Union, as a prisoner, after hiding a Jewish couple in his café in Kaunas, Lithuania.

Told by his granddaughter Lyubov, the story of his family sheds light on the history of the town and of the country, with more nuances than we would expect.