Brutality of Stalin and the invading GERMAN ARMY

Stalin refused to believe a GERMAN invasion was imminent June 22,1941 and wouldnt listen to his generals. The generals

wanted to withdraw some miles from the front to allow time for a counter attack of the GERMANS. Stalin wouldnt allow that

and most of the Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground in the first day. Sheer folly on Stalins part. The Red Army won

in spite of him not because of him and then ordering soldiers to mass human wave attacks and some soldiers did not have

a rifle. They picked up a dead comrades rifle. The Chinese did the same thing in the Korean War.

On the other hand if the Germans had treated Russian soldiers and civilians in a humane way the Soviet Government

would have been defeated. However Hitlers regime viewed the russians as sub human and to be exterminated or treated

as their slaves. A lot of USA and allies have no idea of the massive battles on the Russian front. 8 million Soviet soldiers killed

and 20 million civilians.

 

I think you will find this discussed several times in existent threads on this forum.

 

The Germans couldn't afford to be nice to the Russians. They lacked the resources needed to be nice: food, money.
Actually they had to rob the Russians from their food, they had to enslave them to have any chance of victory.

 

I'm not convinced that is accurate. In the short term it may have looked that way to the Germans or simply seemed expedient and it fit with their ideology. The German high command in WW2 wasn't known for the quality their long term thinking either.

 

Its a known fact that USA and BRITISH soldiers interned in prison camps in Germany were treated better than RUSSIAN soldiers which shows

how the GERMANS viewed the RUSSIAN soldiers.

 

1) Please desist from shouting. Use of capital letters, is shouting.

2) Please don't start another thread, when there are already others covering these topics.

 

All right I will desist from using capital letters.

 

Rushing into battle with no weapon and taking it off a dead comrade is a myth. It was portrayed in Enemy at the Gates and people ran with it. Fiction.

 

I remember reading of it long before Enemy at the Gates came out. That's not to say there was any truth to it. The origin may have been in a speech of some sort extolling the bravery of the soldiers of the Red Army.

 

from Germany at War by David T. Zabecki:
all prewar planning clearly showed that the German supply system was not nearly robust enough for the vast spaces of Me Soviet Union. 'Therefore, the German military leadership decided to make the Ostheer (Eastern Army) live off the land to relieve the supply system, and ensure ensure the Reich's nutritional standards. At the same lime German leadership shifted from conventional warfare to a war of annihilation for this campaign.
Here, by living off the land, the troops took food from the Soviet civilian population, consigning large segments to starvation and thereby contributing to the Reich's criminal war. In reality, the German Army always required a substantial supply a food from outside of Soviet territories during the period 1941 1944.

A statement issued on 20 November by the chief of staff of the Army Group South, von Manstein:
The food situation of the fatherland makes it necessary that the troops largely feed themselves fiom the land and that in addition as great amounts as possible be put at the disposal of the fatherland. Especially in the enemy cities a large part of the population will have to go hungry. In spite of this, none of the goods which the fatherland supplies [sic!] at the cost of great privation may, out of wrongheaded humaneness be distributed to prisoners and [to the] population, as long as they are not in the service of the German Armed Forces.

Similarly someone had to replace the millions of German workers conscripted for the with the USSR. The war was planned to be short but wasn't - so someone had to replace them and quickly.
That someone was millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Russians.

 

The same was said of Russia already in the Great War. The rumour of Russian shortages of rifles was around long before that movie came out. It's the kind of stupid ill-will crap that gets spread around, like stories of mice in pizzas. With regards to WW2, it is definitely a fallacy. In four the years from 1937 to 1940 alone, the Soviets produced 4,5 million M1891/30 rifles in two factories (almost enough to arm their entire standing armed forces at the time). What happened after that? They accelerated production, producing 6.6 million rifles in those same two factories over the next three years. And that is just that one model of rifle. Ignoring all other rifle models they were experimenting with and allocated to the Red Army, prior to the War (SVT38, ...), and the Submachineguns, light machineguns, pistols etc.



And there was one thing the Soviets were good at, it was co-ordinating their call-up and redistributing the supplies needed.

 

Prior to the war though large quantities of food were requisition, at least from some areas, by the Soviets and used for their military and population centers such as Moscow and Leningrad which the Germans didn't need to supply. The German army in WWI also made some pretty substantial advances into Russian territory and didn't use anything near the same practices that I'm aware of.

Worker replacement may have been necessary but it could have been accomplished in other ways as well and likely would have been to greater long term benefit.

 

I'm wondering if one could find references to it in pro lend lease propaganda. It would make a fairly compelling argument in that regard i.e. something to the effect of: "Our brave Red Army allies are so desperate for weapons that they charge German positions planning on picking up weapons of their fallen comrades to use. Support LL today".

 

Discussed this before; when withdrawing from an area, the Red Army grabbed as many of the able-bodied they could and shifted them eastwards. They did the same for horses, as well as stocks of grain.

This left large chunks of land with aged, infirm, or the very young, and a sore lack of seeds, and few horses. Then the Germans came foraging off the land, with literally millions of Red Army PoWs getting sent to the rear.

The farmers try to hide what resources they have left. The Wehrmacht has guns, needs food.

The European harvest in 1940 was particularly bad; and even Germans were on rations in '41. Poland and Greece were starving. Even France went hungry.

Nazis feared the starvation riots of the Great war, and were determined that no German would starve. The German advances into the Ukraine in 1917, didn't alleviate starvation in Germany, and the Russians had already been starving for years under their own regime, but that was due to the inability to adequately redistribute with the poor rail network. The Imperial Germans were on the Ukrainian land producing the food, not so much in Russia proper (and that they gave back pronto). The Soviets continued to have huge problems with food distribution for many years after conclusion of the Great War, Indeed, some would say they never solved the problem.

 

I wonder if there is some one who has been to Russia and talked to a Red Army veteran from ww2 ? Specifically human waves sent into battle and

not every soldier having a pistol, rifle, machine gun, etc. plus the NKVD machine gunning anyone retreating.

 

Agreed.

I also question the conventional wisdom on this. German thinking was based on two points, one it would be a short, victorious war and that after the war was won the local population (deemed unworthy of continued life) was a liability.

Green makes some good observations, yet they are not absolutes by any means. Germany had considerable numbers of young men at their disposal in their POW camps who could make up the manpower shortage in the occupied lands. Seed and horses are a problem, but the horses could be partially offset but added manpower, and more horses would only consume more available grain.

Employing more Russian POW labor would help offset the negative image of the occupation locally, and considering the large numbers of 'Hiwi's' employed in the east it wasn't entirely unthinkable in Nazi Germany. It would be interesting in to compare the situation in the Baltic's with that of Russia in general, if such data is available.

Much is made of food shortages within Germany, yet it did not seem to affect either its combat efficiency or its industrial productivity to a debilitating stage, so could not some seed stocks be allocated to the east in a effort to jump start food production with the aid of more POW farm labor?

 

There weren't any man power shortages in the occupied lands. Soviet kolkhozes and sovkhozes were reactivated by the Germans and their former workers ordered to return to work or else. They delivered bumper crops in 1941 and later years.
There were millions of of unemployed people in the occupied Poland, Ukraine, Belarus.

 

Red Army veterans are proud men, proud that they could serve their country. They are treated like demigods there.

Humans waves sometimes happened but they were mistakes of their inexperienced, poorly trained commanders. It wasn't like Stalin demanded them.

On the endless plains of Russia they frequently didn't have any other choice but attack frontally, and then it looked like a human wave but it wasn't.

The NKVD blocking detachments were a good idea, they stopped many panics among green, poorly trained Soviet soldiers. Their role wasn't to kill, but to stop panics.

 

I am reading a book called Stalingrad to Berlin the German defeat in the East . It mentions that Stalin had 2 generals executed for simply not being able

to over run German troops in their area. Stalin was a butcher and bad as Adolph Hitler if not worse. General Eisenhower let Stalin take Berlin because IKE

knew the costly casualties involved in block by block fighting in a city like Berlin. Stalin ordered Zhukov and Rokossovski to take Berlin and the Red Army

had 500,000 casualties.

 

"Human waves" were quite close to standard WW1 tactics everybody used, you cannot use very sofisticated tactics if you lack experienced junior leaders and believe in centralized control. Late war Soviet infantry was formidable on the attack but the tactics were not optimized for minimising losses, that would have required logistical and C3 capabilities an order of magnitude larger.