Stalingrad - Germans that never surrendered

The question is how representative is this example? It doesn't include any civilians for one. Then there's the fact that it was the 50's when they were returning. Holding people prisoner for half a decade after the war was over doesn't constitute "merciful" or even good treatment IMO. Indeed it's proscribed by the Conventions of War.

 

"Many millions" agree with you? How many who weren't Soviets or communists at one point or another? How many who have had free access to objective histories for most or all of their lives. Remember the Soviets thought that history should serve the state accuaracy was less important. I think we are seeing the pot calling the kettle black here. We've listend to your opinion and marshaled very strong arguments against it. You have failed to refute any of them yet continue to restate your orignial position.

 

How has this gone on so long

 

I didn't think it would go this far either. Nice to see a reckless idea get steamrolled by an abundance of steady evidence and reasoned assessment though.

 

'Abundance of steady evidence' was generated after the war to justify re-armament of Germany. Shortly after the war Nazis have undergone a total makeover into good guys to support the strugle for global supremacy. What is the purpose of 'reasoned assessment' if the 'facts' were falsified?
Now, it is impossible to distinguish lies from half truths and genuine facts. That's why you are so puzzled with the existence of the other truth.

 

Not really dear Otto, if you don't judge just these two sentences isolated from their context, but that is almost of no relevance to our conversation. If I'm wrong I admit that and sincerely appologize but just for these two sentences and not a word more.

What is really imporant is that I have pointed towards the myth of "saubere Wehrmacht" created at the begiing of the Cold War. Soon after the war ended both the Western Allies and Germans have decided to sacrifise historic accuracy for conveniences from creating distorted picture of nations across the Iron curtain. Now it is up to the West to distinguish between own constructs and historic facts.I don't have such doubts.

Is it possible now to isolate propaganda from history? Well, some serious scholars have taken this problem seriously.

 

The discussion was never about the Clean Wehrmacht, Germany's crimes during WW2 are well documented. Rather it was about your "Red Army Ultimate Mercy" theory which is plain wrong.

As for the oxymoronic sentence that Otto astutely pointed out:
"Now, it is impossible to distinguish lies from half truths and genuine facts. That's why you are so puzzled with the existence of the other truth."

It's very convenient to ignore one truth (sentence 1), unless it is your truth (sentence 2)? You really cannot see the contradiction here? I literally laughed out loud reading that line.

I noticed the Beevor rape commentary was ignored, but I guess this truth is the one we need to ignore. Or maybe the women the Red Army didn't sexually assault were saved from rape by the Red Army, like the 6,000 remaining Germans the Russians saved at Stalingrad?

In my mind, the Red Army Ultimate Mercy Theory goes into the conspiracy theory category, along with the fake moon landing.

 

Wait wait wait...I thought we proved that Neil Armstrong was on a kids bouncy castle in the dark.

 

But why so intense?

 

Roberto of Axishistory forum's own translation of an article by Dr. Rüdiger Overmans that appeared in the June 2001 edition of the German history magazine Damals.

Worse than Death?

Of the 110,000 German soldiers taken prisoner at Stalingrad only about 5,000 came back home after the war. What were the reasons for this unparalleled mass dying?

When the soldiers of the 6th Army went into captivity at the end of January/beginning of February 1943, they were closer to death than to life. The supply situation of the 6th Army had already been difficult since the summer of 1942 due to the reduced transportation possibilities during the advance. Assuming a calorific need of a soldier in combat of 3000 to 4000 calories a day, this would have required a daily bread ration of 700 to 800 grams. Already in September 1942, however, a military physician estimated the actually issued daily rations to have a nourishment value of only 1800 calories, the daily bread ration being 300 grams – about three thin slices. When the 6th Army then had to be supplied from the air, the daily bread ration sank until Christmas 1942 to 100 grams, only soldiers able to fight still receiving 200 grams. In the course of January 1943 the situation worsened again – in the end only the fighting men received rations food rations at all, which lay below 100 grams of bread. The wounded and sick were not entitled to rations anymore. Although the picture shown here applied to most of the soldiers, there were a few who were quite well fed. This inequality, however, also resulted from the same cause, too little supplies. This because, after the 12,000 horses originally used by the 6th Army had been slaughtered and eaten by the troops, there were not enough means of transportation and fuel to supply the troops.
This deficit did not only affect the supply of food, but also that of combustion material. In other words: the 6th Army was not only hungry, if was also miserably cold. Additionally the insufficient sanitary conditions already in November 1942 led to the first cases of spotted fever, which many soldiers would die of later in captivity. [emphasis Roberto]
What made the soldiers nevertheless hold out until the end of January? The first main reason was the promise given by Hitler on 27 November 1942 that he would do all that was in his power to support them. The Head of the General Staff of the 6th Army, General Major Arthur Schmidt, coined the following verse: “Drum haltet aus, der Führer haut euch raus.” (“Hold out because the Führer will get you out.” The failure of the relief attempt and the interdiction to break out then made the confidence clearly go down towards Christmas. In the course of January the hope to be freed from the cauldron finally faded away. The most depressing event was Göring’s speech on 30 January 1943, which could also be heard in Stalingrad. In his address he compared the soldiers of the 6th Army with the fighters at Thermopylae, who had also fallen as their duty required. Only through this the soldiers realized that they had been given up.
It would be superficial to explain this late realization only with indoctrination and terror by the leadership. Desertion and capitulation were punishable by death, but who in the collapsing 6th Army of January 1943 could have provided for the execution of such orders? That there nevertheless were little signs of dissolution was on the one hand due to the hunger, which had long exceeded the state of a temporary deficiency and led to dystrophy. The symptoms thereof include, besides a general apathy, the total slowing down of all physical and psychological processes in a human being and the detachment from the outer world. And as the Red Army only after the capitulation offer of January 1943 went over to crush the cauldron from the west without too much of a hurry, the German soldiers at the other fronts of the cauldron could apathetically wait for what was to come.
The deeper reason for the soldiers’ holding out, however, was the lack of an alternative. In this respect it is necessary to understand the soldiers’ views and perceptions. Some of them had still been in World War I as active soldiers, while most of them had after the war read the accounts of those coming home from Russian captivity. Even if those accounts were exaggerated according to what we know today, the fate of German prisoners of war in Russia had been one of the harshest in the First World War. During the construction of the Murman Railway alone around 20,000 to 25,000 out of 70,000 employed prisoners of war had died. These were the images that National Socialist propaganda could successfully hark back to. Defection or capitulation was thus out of the question for German soldiers on the Eastern Front. Many expected Soviet captivity to be worse than death.
In the course of January 1943 the encircled increasingly had to contemplate the threat of capture, however. Committing suicide was often discussed, but in fact happened rarely. The capture itself in the end was the result not so much of a fight or an autonomous decision, but of a “natural process” experienced in apathetic passivity. The prisoners were mostly robbed, but the shootings expected by many nevertheless occurred only very rarely. What surprised the soldiers even more, however, was the treatment of the higher staff officers, but mainly that of the generals. Instead of treating them with especial harshness, the Soviets led them away together with their bags and servants in cars and by rail – all others had to walk, whether they felt in conditions to do so or not.

In Stalingrad there were not only German soldiers, however, but also members of a number of nations, both soldiers and civilians. Among these there were about 1,000 members of the Organization Todt (OT), among them civilian workers from Western Europe. Then there were Croatian and Romania units with about 1,000 and 5,000 soldiers, respectively, and a few Italians encircled in the cauldron. The numerically largest non-German group should have been the about 50,000 Russian “auxiliaries” and prisoners of war who as late as the end of January 1943 had surrendered to the German troops in the cauldron. Out of a total of about 250,000 encircled 25,000 had been flown out and 100,000 had perished inside the cauldron. Thus there were about 130,000 soldiers and “auxiliaries”, thereof 110,000 Germans, who went into captivity.
Especially precarious was the situation of the sick and wounded. Until 23 January 1943 planes had still managed to land in the cauldron, the heavily wounded and sick had to a limited extent been flown out. The less lucky had gathered in the ruins of Stalingrad next to the completely overcrowded hospitals. There was no such thing as regular medical attention; in mid-January even the command of the 6th Army admitted that it had lost track of the situation.
When the final collapse came the number of sick and wounded should have been around 50,000.
About the “handling” of the prisoners of war of the 6th Army there are so far no studies from the Soviet point of view, but the procedures of the Red Army can be clearly deducted from the existing accounts. As in Stalingrad and its surroundings there were neither habitable buildings nor usable railway connections, it was not possible to take away the tens of thousands of sick and wounded. In Stalingrad six “hospitals” were installed for them, the medical treatment and accommodation not being much different, however, from what it had been during the “cauldron time”.
The “healthy” were collected and put into march in groups of 20 to 500 headed by German officers to collection camps at the periphery or in the farther surroundings of Stalingrad. For the prisoners from the northern cauldron there were the camps Dubovka, Kissljakov and Frolovo, while those from the southern cauldron were mainly sent to the by far largest camp, Beketovka, about ten kilometers away from Stalingrad. The camp of Krassno-Ameisk, a little further away, mainly housed officers.
The term “march”, however, is an inappropriate description of the reality. An eyewitness saw it like this: “There they hobbled, numb, part of them supporting each other, guarded by only a few guards, in an endless row through the frosty, moonlit night”. Some of the collection camps, especially the largest, Beketovka, were only a day’s march away for a healthy man, but the prisoners’ health did not allow them to cover such distances. Thus the march to the collection camp lasted at least two days, often even longer, there usually being nothing to eat or to drink along the way. The nights were generally spent under open sky. What this meant in wintertime an eyewitness describes as follows: “Each morning the same picture: A part got up with their last strength, a black spot of dear remained behind.”
During the march it happened that the prisoners got hallucinations. If they then departed from the column, like to reach their “approaching saviors”, they were shot by the Soviet guards. What happened when someone lost his forces during the march an eyewitness describes as follows: ”Some sat or lay in the ditch by the road, calling or screaming for help, some were already quiet. Then we saw a covered-up figure approaching them, heard a dry crack – and knew enough.” These actions by the Soviet guards were seen also by the guards not as a crime but as mercy – the alternative to this quick death would have been slow freezing.
Once they arrived at the collection camps the prisoners did not encounter well-prepared accommodations, but makeshift-prepared barracks and factory halls. Often they had to content themselves with completely inadequate food. An eyewitness describes his experiences with grain not ground as follows: ”It is understandable that the individual grains cannot be digested by the weakened stomach and leave the body in the same state in which they have been taken in. The human excrements were washed out and the same wheat grains cooked again.” One of the consequences of this undernourishment which had been going on for about half a year and now worsened was cannibalism. Although there are no official investigations about this, there are accounts from several prisoner war camps about prisoners who were seen cutting chunks of meat out of the bodies of dead comrades.
During the “cauldron time” the soldiers, apart from the sick and the wounded, had been together only in relatively small groups. Now the massing of the prisoners in camps and their physical weakness created ideal conditions for the spreading of the already latently existing infectious diseases. The result was a mass dying the dimension of which maybe becomes clearest on hand of the following account of a survivor about a walk he took after his recovery: “Thus one day I sneaked around the barracks and found myself on the camp’s main street, of which I had no clear notion prior to my disease. At first I didn’t manage to distinguish what it was that I saw there. It all looked so different. I especially could find no explanation for the dams on both sides of the street, which extended for about 500 meters. Only when I got very close I noticed that it was simply dead. Corpses, which filled up the whole ditch and had been stacked in piles about one meter high along both sides of the road, waiting for the columns of cars that were to take them away.” After about a month of the 110,000 Germans who had been taken captive only 35,000 were still alive.[emphasis Roberto]

Since March 1943 the prisoners of war were then taken from the collection camps to permanent camps. For the transport cattle cars were used. Depending on the distance and the handling of the rail transport, the ride took a few days to several weeks – like in the case of the further away camps Begovat and Astrakhan. An officer describes his transport to Jelabuga on the Kama as follows: ”In the wagon it was all dark, the slits were closed, nailed with planks and barbed wire, no light, nothing. Every other day they gave us 200 grams of bread and a dirty salt fish. No tea and no water …With great effort one of the slits had been opened a bit. With a cup we gathered snow.” When arriving at their destination the prisoners were often no longer in conditions to stand, but often still had to march a long way to the camps. The result of such living conditions was that of the 35,000 prisoners still alive, but weakened and sick anyway when the transports started, only 18,000 arrived at their places of destination.
Originally the purpose of the transports had been to bring the prisoners to their future places of work – in the case of Begovat this was the construction site of the Syr-Darja dam. Things happened differently, however, a part of the prisoners was still suffering from spotted fever or typhus, and the others became infected or got sick on the transport. Thus there was another mass dying. ”Soon most of the sick had fallen into apathy and were partially lying in agony. The task of the medics was to empty the five wooden buckets for the necessities and to sort out the dead. Only a few could get up from their sick beds and carry themselves to one of the available buckets. Often it happened that the so-called medics were themselves grabbed by spotted fever during their service and thus nobody was there to take out the buckets. They spilt over, and the excrements ran among the sick. These were lying in their own dirt anyway …”[emphasis Roberto]
These waves of disease affected the huge camps for the rank and file and the officer camps, such as Jelabuga, but not the VIP-camps Susdal and Krassnogorsk, where also the generals lived. While the living conditions in the VIP-camps remained unknown to the mass of the prisoners, however, the difference between “normal” supplies and those given to officers was visible every day. The food rations were only a little higher, for sure – but this difference could in a situation of scarcity that lasted for months mean the difference between life and death. The emotionally most important difference, however, was that the officers received tobacco.
At the end of May 1943 a considerable change occurred in all camps. In the meantime news of the mass dying of the “Stalingraders” had reached the Moscow leadership. Unlike the German leadership in the case of Soviet prisoners of war in Germany Stalin was not interested in the death of the prisoners. They should be used as means of propaganda and used as a labor force. Thus the food norms were increased and the prisoners actually fed better. Equally important it was that now the prisoners also had to be registered. Deaths from now on had to be immediately reported, increased mortality leading to inspections from higher up.[emphasis Roberto] Thus life in a certain way began to normalize, without a sufficient living standard being however achieved throughout the war.
How many “Stalingraders” lost their lives in this second period of captivity has not become exactly known. Presumably in the summer of 1943 of the 18,000 who arrived at the work camps no more than 10,000 were still alive. In quantitative terms their trace is lost in the following years in the general fate of the increasing number of German prisoners of war in Soviet custody.

If at the end we ask for the reasons for the extreme fate of the 6th Army, one aspect must be pointed out that cannot be exactly established chronologically and differed from prisoner to prisoner. Up to the mentioned speech of Göring the members of the 6th Army had more or less relied that “the Führer would get them out”. But now not only the 6th Army was at the end. The whole war seemed lost, the existence of Germany seemed to be at issue. For the mass of the prisoners this breakdown of all future perspectives represented a catastrophe without parallel. It deprived them of the will to live that was essential for survival.
The second main factor was the underfeeding in captivity. In this respect it would be wrong to assume that the Soviets allowed their prisoners to starve to death on purpose. Most prisoners of war could observe that the Soviet civilians were also hungry.[emphasis Roberto] A consequence of this deficiency, however, was that the Soviet guard personnel took away a part of the anyway scarce food supplies. This was due not to greed and eagerness for profit, however, but to naked need. Also the German personnel at the camp administrations did not behave differently – comradeship in a general, group-oriented sense did not exist in the first years of captivity. Here it was every man for himself. With medical supplies things were no different. Apart from rather few, who for instance wanted to take revenge for the loss of relatives, many merciful actions by Soviet medical personnel are known. But of course there were also both German and Soviet medics who traded medications instead of treating the sick therewith.
On the whole it can be concluded that, while most of the “Stalingraders” died, this was not due to an intention of the Soviet state leadership. On the contrary, the dying of the “Stalingraders” was what alarmed the Soviet leadership. In its last consequence the catastrophe of the 6th Army contributed to the prisoners later arriving in masses having a harsh, but by no means comparable fate.[emphasis Roberto] Another thing should also have become clear from the above account. If the army leadership had capitulated at Christmas 1942, when the relief attempt had failed, or at the latest accepted the Soviet capitulation offer at the beginning of January, the soldiers would still have gone into captivity hungry and freezing, yet by no means in such a desolate state as at the end of January / beginning of February 1943. Even though the effect cannot be exactly calculated, such a decision would certainly have saved tens of thousands of lives.[emphasis Roberto] As it was, of the 170,000 Germans who were lastly encircled in the cauldron and not flown out, only 5,000 came back home.
There were differences, however. Due to the Soviet preferential treatment of the generals and VIPs only a few died, and these usually of natural causes. Of the officers more or less half survived, whereas the proportion of survivors among non-commissioned officers and common soldiers was about two per cent.

 

I am sure all the Poles buried in the Katyn Forest can speak of 'Russian Mercy' too...
Or all the Estonians and Lithuanians who were murdered during the 'Scorched Earth' policy...
Or the millions of women who were raped by Russians all across Eastern Europe...
And what about all the torture and mutilation carried out on prisoners by the Russians? Executing the wounded soldiers instead of capturing them? Not giving medical aid to wounded Germans in captivity?
I didn't realized Gulags were like being on vacation either.

Truly, a merciful Russian Army indeed.

 

Russian Army was a reflection of the regime that controlled it. Mercy was in short supply in Soviet Russia at that time.

Both - Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia were equally brutal and criminal Governments.

 

I would give the nod to Germany for most horrific and brutal. The Holocaust.

 

That is entirely correct.

Now, let's get back to the subject.

I do not know why people in absence of proofs constantly redirect attention to other subjects. Here we talk about the POWs at Stalingrad and then someone jumps in with Katyn. Perhaps because there isn't enough evidence to support wrong conclusions? Also, a rape is a bad thing but we should compare the Russian rapes to the German rapes, Russian treatment of Poles vs. German treatment of Poles etc. Then we may hope to approach some reasonable conclusions. Here, we should rather focus ourselves to direct comparison of Heer vs. Red army in category of treatment of POWs. Then we may draw some conclusions about why the Germans feared surrender to the Russians more than anything in the World and why would 11.000 German soldiers prefer to starve and freeze to death in rubble of Stalingrad rather than to surrender?

 

Why is Armstrong is the greatest man on this planet? : he walked on the moon , he is an outstanding trompet player and won the Tour de France

well, let's hope this will relax you guys a bit. In fact both the Wehrmacht and the red Army did bad and good things. It's all a matter of local initiatives and interpretations of the rules. There were good people on both sides and psychopaths too. Give power to an idiot and he'll want to prove he is the matter of the world. It's not a matter of nationality , it's a human nature. Why did some help or not?
We can download pics with nice actions from one army in one post and atrocities in from the other army and then vice versa, because atrocities were made on both sides . I can post pictures of Waffen SS helping out civilians, it doesn't mean they were nice ... Pictures taken out from their context are propaganda , not facts. . Same for the Soviet Soldiers wo gave soup to civilians. Maybe they were nice after their shift, maybe not ...

 

I know a lot about the flight to the moon: Tom Hanks almost did it but there was some trouble with the spaceship and Ed Harris saved him from certain death. But I'm not quite sure about Armstrong. Isn't he a bit too fat to fit into the spaceship, but he was an outstanding trompete player:
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJOxQEM3rXY[/media]

 

As stated in my post above:

"Some of them had still been in World War I as active soldiers, while most of them had after the war read the accounts of those coming home from Russian captivity. Even if those accounts were exaggerated according to what we know today, the fate of German prisoners of war in Russia had been one of the harshest in the First World War. During the construction of the Murman Railway alone around 20,000 to 25,000 out of 70,000 employed prisoners of war had died. These were the images that National Socialist propaganda could successfully hark back to. Defection or capitulation was thus out of the question for German soldiers on the Eastern Front. Many expected Soviet captivity to be worse than death."

 

In this case it's pretty clear. You postualted a situation that was pretty clearly fallacious (as well as off topic) and others presented much in the way of evidence (i.e. proof) that you were wrong. You now seem to be dismissing the whole thing as someone elses fault.

 

This thread has nowhere to go. The evidence has been displayed and the unanimity of the position is clear. It's one against the world. Although I applaud the effort Tamino, you have not given a shred of researched truth to your argument. Hence why you are not receiving support to your argument. It's time to tip your king.