WarHistoryOnline: The Germans were surprised at how many Russian POWs they had in such a short interval of time. Almost 3,000,000 people suddenly fell into their responsibility in just four months after Barbarossa.
Like the Japanese and in fact just like the Russians, POWs were first captured, then they were marched on foot back to a labor camp. During Japan’s Bataan Death March, 17,000 men died at one rest stop.
It was in 1929 that the Geneva Convention at the League of Nations where international POW treatment standards were established. Prisoners were to be kept in surroundings and in care as comfortable as the guards. And no torture was allowed. Japan and Germany declined to sign the agreement. MORE
Was that an Obamacare rest stop?
And they were allowed in theaters negroes were denied.
I knew an old German soldier when I was stationed in Germany in the mid 80’s.
He was capture in Tunisia in May 1943 and was transported to the USA. He worked on a farm in Colorado as a POW and was ever grateful for it. He figured if he wasn’t captured, the odds were long he wouldn’t survive the war. He was able to spend some time in Canada after the war while Germany lay in ruins.
I didn’t read the article because I know many of the details and they are painful. What the Germans did to Red Army POWS in 1941 was cruel. I get they weren’t prepared for the numbers captures, but they didn’t even make an attempt to feed them.
Remember the show, Stalag 13? The truth of the matter was that it was more a representation of American POW camps here in the US rather than those in Germany. We have several old camps in North Louisiana and you will run across them when out hunting. The inmates routinely escaped and would shack up with local women then go back after awhile. They also were farmed out to work in the area. I think they had a really good war from what I have read.
There were several camps in Missouri, in fact when my brother and bride were married, they went to the camp near Weingarten to have the ceremony done by the chaplain. A lot of prisoners stayed after the war.
Quite some time ago (good grief, 1970?) I worked with a dispatcher who was a WWII B17 tail gunner and was shot down on his second mission over Germany; he spent 17 months in a POW camp.
He said the German guards weren’t all that bad, they also had it pretty rough w/r/t rations. But only half the camp was for Americans and Brits. The other half was for Russians. And they were put through hell. Bill and his mates would watch through the wire.
In Bill’s words, “What those guards put those poor bastards through…” and would just shake his head. Many never made it out alive.
“People thought of the POWs as Nazis. But half of the prisoners had no inclination to sympathize with the Nazi Party.” Fewer than 10 percent were hard-core ideologues, he added.
And yet, Jews, handicapped, and political enemies were rounded up and murdered by the millions in concentration camps, the Sudetenland got annexed, Poland got invaded, WW2 started, and millions died. There’s probably a lesson there, somewhere.
The lesson is that the few can control the many, as long as the many are too afraid to band together and oppose the tyranny of the few. Did not the Jews outnumber the people who were sending them to their deaths? Individual fear makes cowards of those who can least afford to give in to it.
If tyrants were resisted when they were weak, by all who would be threatened by them, there would have been no Hitler, no Stalin, no Mao Tse-Tung.
Such is the nature of mankind, that we will always be ruled by those who should be beneath us.
3,060,000 German military personnel were taken prisoner by the USSR and that 1,094,250 died in captivity ( 549,360 from 1941-April 1945; 542,911 from May 1945 to June 1950 and 1,979 from July 1950 to 1955) ~ Wiki
VietVet,
I’ve heard and read that if every New had a rifle, 20 rounds of ammunition, and the will to shoot, Hitler would be no more than a minor footnote in the German history books.
And I too, subscribe to that belief.
The early Jews didn’t know they were death camps until it was too late, Some even paid train fare to this “new, separate-from-the-other-Germans location” the Jews were to be taken to.
Many were fooled into compliance.
I’m sure many today would fall for it again.
‘Oh, the city is too dangerous and the Gov. is re-locating us (with threat of death) to an emergency location where we’ll be taken care of.’ ‘It’s to protect us from all the blacks and Jihadis shooting people in the city. It really is for our own good!’
Or a chemical attack on your city.
Or a dirty nuke suitcase bomb contaminating part of your city.
Maybe a tornado or hurricane wiped out part of it? Off you go to FEMA Camp. What’s your other choice? Hey! Where you going? Get back here! No one is allowed to be in this area without permission now! Blam! Blam! Blam!