Wednesday, November 6, 2019

In the East

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And I mean way to the east, we're talking former Soviet Union.

The Muse has gone missing, I've got search parties out, I've issued a BOLO* to local LEOs**,  and even have road blocks set up on all the roads leading to Kimball, Nebraska. (Not that I suspect Shaun, but well, yes, I do. Maybe he made her an offer, maybe he didn't...)

At any rate, she did leave a note which provided a link to some nice photos of a museum in Russia commemorating what they call the Great Patriotic War (Великая Отечественная Война) and which we in the West call World War II. (That link is under the opening photo which shows a small workshop in the old USSR with men working on a T-34. Note that the mannequins in the photo are life size!)

What we often forget (perhaps ignore) is that the fight against the Nazis was fought primarily in the East, mostly in the former Soviet Union from 1941 until 1944. The Red Army killed most of the Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Croatians, etc. that died in World War II. They also paid a heavy price as can be seen in the chart below.

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Yes, the Western Allies played a key role in keeping the Soviets supplied with everything from Spam to tanks, trucks, uniforms, and boots. We also kept the Japanese pretty damned busy as well, they did have early designs on Soviet territory in the Soviet Far East, though the odds of Japan taking on the Russian bear (again) after Khalkhin Gol were very slim and were probably a decisive factor in Japan's decision to move south, which led to Pearl Harbor and all the rest.

At any rate, the Soviet people suffered horribly, suffering at least 40 million killed and captured, including civilians. Most of the Soviet troops captured died in captivity, their POW "camps" were often nothing more than barbed wire enclosures in the middle of the steppe. To be quite honest, the Germans really didn't care if their Soviet prisoners died. (Not to mention the sheer number of those captured in 1941-42 would have overwhelmed even a more humanitarian foe than the Nazis.)

(Source)
Note that (Front) indicates troops actually deployed against the Axis,
it doesn't count those deployed elsewhere within the USSR.
I saw the next photo over at The Lexicans recently. I have rather a different take on it than my buddy Bill had.

A German child meets her father for the first time, 1956.
(Source)
The father in the picture was one of the last prisoners of war released by the Soviet Union in 1956. The USSR held a number of Germans from the end of the war in 1945 until as late as 1956, eleven years later.
The West German government set up a Commission headed by Erich Maschke to investigate the fate of German POWs in the war. In its report of 1974 they found that 3,060,000 German military personnel were taken prisoner by the USSR and that 1,094,250 died in captivity (549,360 from 1941 to April 1945; 542,911 from May 1945 to June 1950 and 1,979 from July 1950 to 1955). According to German historian Rüdiger Overmans ca. 3,000,000 POW were taken by the USSR; he put the "maximum" number of German POW deaths in Soviet hands at 1.0 million. Based on his research, Overmans believes that the deaths of 363,000 POWs in Soviet captivity can be confirmed by the files of Deutsche Dienststelle, and additionally maintains that "It seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that 700,000 German military personnel listed as missing actually died in Soviet custody". (Source)
Yes, I have some sympathy for the man in the photo, odds are he was a simple grunt, swept up by the draft, and went into the Soviet Union because he really had no choice. But he was part of a brutal regime which waged war on another brutal regime. He's probably lucky to be alive. War sucks, no matter how you cut it.

(Source)
But my sympathy for members of the Wehrmacht*** is rather limited.







* BOLO = Be On the Look Out
** LEO = Law Enforcement Officer
*** Wehrmacht, German Armed Forces, not including the SS

38 comments:

  1. While the sheer numbers of Soviet losses are staggering, some states occuppied by Germans fared even worse , population-percentage-wise...
    Poland:17%
    Lithuania:14%
    Latvia:12%
    Those who suffered both German and Soviet occupation fared the worst...
    Oh and Soviets killed far mor Germans tahn any other campaign before 1941, and only after D-Day Western allies started to catch up...

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    1. No one can deny the agony of Poland and the Baltic States, they suffered under Nazi AND Soviet occupation.

      Nor can one deny the heroism of the people in those nations who persevered through the dark years of Nazi and then Communist oppression.

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  2. In his book, "To Ride Shoot Straight and Speak The Truth", Col. Cooper details a story about a German that survived the Russian hospitality camps... by escaping. That man spent years getting back to Germany.

    The eastern front was a literal meat grinder... The lucky ones died on the field...

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    1. An ideological struggle of truly epic proportions. Sheer terror for those caught up in it.

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    2. I never understood the idealogical struggle. Fascism and communism are closer than first cousins in my mind. I may a tad simplistic, but the differences are academic, like the difference between pink and whitish-red.

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    3. The Nazis were an ideology unto themselves. It wasn't a plan or a set of doctrines per se, unless you count the fevered daydreams of Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, a singularly unreadable treatise of hatred and spite. Communism was at least spelled out on paper in a pseudo-organized form. Nazism (not to be confused with Fascism, which was a very Italian thing) mostly was whatever Hitler said it was.

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    4. By 1939 (really pretty much within 2 years of taking over in,) Soviet Communism was very much what Stalin said it was. And he was not a nice man.

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    5. The lucky ones died in the field, instantly. :(

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  3. Two brutal regimes in Europe, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, along with the Empire of Nippon in Asia resulted in Total War that affected the globe last century, tens of millions died world wide. My father's family lost their home to the Commies in Slovakia when the war ended so it's personal to me. Man......starting the day this way is a downer. Aaaannd..... it's started snowing here now......expletive...expletive!!

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    1. Both regimes have much to answer for, as well as the militarists in Japan.

      Bastards all.

      We're supposed to see snow within the week, it's that time of year.

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  4. Adventure Girl and I will be out in Western South Dakota for a SAR exercise this weekend. She gets to tromp around in the snow. I get to ride in the back of a Cessna, try not to barf, and look out the window for our practice dummy.

    I'll keep an eye out to see if your muse has wandered that far North-West as well.

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    1. Most excellent. Thanks Aaron.

      When you fly overhead: If it's running, it's a Muse, if it's standing still - it's a well-disciplined Muse. (With apologies to Full Metal Jacket.)

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    2. Be careful. Endeavor to not become the practice dummy.

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    3. So yeah, don't fall out of the plane Aaron. 'Kay?

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    4. Thanks gentlemen. "Do not become the mission while on the mission" is definitely a constant goal for me.

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  5. Don't know if it's useful information or not, but my Muse was last seen at the local watering hole with a hot red-headed Muse bearing a striking resemblance to Tiffany Case. They were doing Flaming Wild Turkey Slammers and kicking all the farm boy's @$$es in eight-ball and snooker. I'd throw a big tantrum but most of my income comes from those farm boys who think they have mad pool skills and can easily defeat a mere Muse. Wealth distribution at its finest; the gubmint gives the farm boys your money, and they give it to me via the Muse middleman. "From each according to his income to Shaun because reasons." That Marx was on to something!

    Which takes us on to the meat of your brilliant post. You gave us at least a dozen snapshot perspectives of the war in the east and each one can consume a lifetime of cognition and emotion.

    The last image captures much of the tale for me. Millions of humans made a conscious decision to go, fight, and devolve into barbarity. Yet each was a human being in exactly the way I am a human being. Those who died, died as barbarians (or the victims of barbarity). Those who survived faced an unimaginably hard path back to civilization and the daily choice of whether to ferment in bottled savagery or to seek redemption.

    From my perspective of having made choices and taken actions which violate the core of my foundational principles I have a great deal of empathy for those soldiers in the East but no sympathy whatsoever. The war is done, just as my war is done. I freely give forgiveness to the individual human soldiers who fought, survived, and sought redemption. They could not ever shed the burden of their individual responsibility though, regardless of the seeming lack of civilized choices. Life is never fair, and that's a fact we all face. All soldiers who fight bear a similar burden, and in particular the soldiers in the East gave us a valuable cautionary tale. No one among us is immune to the siren song of barbarism. My Teachers encouraged me to forgive, but also to remember and seek to understand. As always, to act as if others are an end only, and never a means to an end.

    At the end of the day I stand with the soldiers, but it's complicated. We can never shed our burden but we can each in our own way atone, and that path is between the individual and his Maker. As we approach the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month these are good pathways for the thinker, I think. ;)

    Man, that's a lot of gobbledegook. I should delete it but I'll just turn it loose on the interwebs and let the bytes fall where they may.

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    1. I saw no gobbledegook, just your usual well-thought out, from the heart comment. Well said.

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  6. Yeah, screw those Wehrmacht guys. But that does make me wonder what did we do with rank-and-file soldiers after the war? Free to go home or did some of them spend some time behind bars?

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    1. At the end of the war, uniformed enemy personal were placed in POW camps. In the West the soldiers were de-Nazified (we were looking for war criminals, we found quite a few), until a soldier was cleared, he stayed as a POW, behind bars if you will. In the East, the soldiers were marched east, to Siberia in many cases, where many perished from the elements, from Communist brutality, and from forced hard labor. Those who lived weren't repatriated for many years, as many as 11 years after the war.

      So in essence, the rank-and-file were kept behind bars for a very long time.

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  7. My views were greatly influenced by my father (CBI Theater) and my Uncle Ed (ETO, Aachen) and others who were Navy. There was one man I wanted to talk to but never got a chance. He had a Mitsubishi passenger van with a WA State Pearl Harbor Survivor license plate.

    There is evil, always a part of mankind, and organized evil. The common denominator seems to be labeling others that makes them seem as less than human. Example: Shillary's "Deplorables".

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    1. The evil always label their enemies and attempt to dehumanize them, it's a method as old as humanity itself.

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  8. Considering the evil perpetrated upon the world by the USSR before WWII (like the penetration and virtual ownership of the US State Department and the beginning of the control over US colleges and universities)(and the Finnish war, and exporting trouble to all sorts of places (shades of things to come..) (oh, and helping the Nazis rearm, never forget that)(oh, and the partition of Poland before Germany invaded, really never forget that...) and the evil perpetrated upon the world by the USSR during WWII (internment of US forces within the USSR)(forced slavery of captured troops (mostly starting on their Eastern Front, but spreading to the Western Front once they started capturing people) (the systematic elimination of intellectuals and strong personalities in captured lands in order to Soviet the places) and the evil perpetrated upon the world by the USSR after WWII (I could go on, but my fingers would get tired)... I still think it would have been better to not ever aid them during WWII.

    Considering the only time they ever came to our 'assistance' in the Pacific was to make a land grab at the last second after we knocked Japan on it's collective ass, and considering we could have had Berlin, maybe all of Germany before the Soviets got there (and think how much better the world would have been after that, just in Olympic medals...) I really think Roosevelt was a complete dumb-posterior of a donkey for ever aiding or trying to enter into fair treaties with that murderous regime.

    Shoulda let two killers kill each other.

    Yeah, lots of civilians woulda died... over there. What's that phrase y'all used to use here? Not my circus, not my monkeys. We had enough material to show the Soviets exactly how another A-bomb or two would work, without them having to spy on us. A little direct demonstration on Moscow and some of their industrial places (which wouldn't have been as built up if we hadn't helped them with materials or food) and the world would have been a nicer place, especially if we managed to flashburn Stalin and the Politboro.

    Am I sorry for these bad thoughts? No. Especially as I peruse all the evils that 'Socialism' and 'Communism' spread throughout the world. Cuba, Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, South Central Asia, Southeast Asia, China and here in the USA. We had a brief moment to smash that evil religion down from its strongest supporters and all we did was allow it to grow and fester. Now it's here. The fruit of all the evil bought by the USSR, showing in the control of our media, of our educational system, of our social services and as always our State Department, as we have how many candidates who openly espouse socialism and communism who wouldn't have if we had let the Eastern Front alone.

    What about all the photos of South Vietnamese tortured and murdered by Soviet-trained infiltrators? What about all those who died in the Hungary Uprisings. Who died in the Katyn Forest? Who died under Che and Castro? Under Stalin and his successors? Tortured, murdered, starved, beaten, ignored, stabbed in the back. And all those who died in Korea?

    The enemy of my enemy is only the enemy of my enemy. Just because my enemy is fighting them doesn't immediately give the enemy of my enemy a moral boost.

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    1. Post of the day Beans, you are awarded all the InterNets!

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    2. Without Hitler's invasion of Russia, things would have been very different.

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    3. Just because Hitler was stupid enough to head east didn't give us reason to help the USSR. At most, we should have warily semi-cooperated, maybe.

      Helping England? Yes. France, those ungrateful bastiges? Yeah, okay. Belgium and The Neatherlands? Yes. Free Polish in England? Heck Yeah!!!

      We should have helped Finland in their two wars against the USSR.

      Full support of the National Chinese.

      Anyone left of center? Screw them. Let them die on the vine.

      By 1937 we knew how much damage the Soviet Communist/Socialist system could cause. We knew by 1939 how far they've infiltrated into our State Department, our Executive Branch, and how prevalent their spies were. They were never our friends, ever, never ever, not since we fought them from 1918 to 1920. Yeah, that's when we first knew the new 'Soviets' were scum and villeins.

      Support free nations fighting the Nazi scourge? Yep. Support Socialists who were fighting us while fighting the Nazis? Still don't see it.

      All that material, all those ships to transport the material, would have been better utilized by our side, or going to the Free French or better yet the Free Poles. Given to people who wanted freedom, not soviet slavery.

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    4. You do know that things were a lot more complicated than that, right?

      A future post is brewing.

      Thanks for that, BTW.

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    5. Always the what ifs.... At some stage Hitler and Stalin were going to clash. It was just a question of how and when. The rest is speculation. Such a clash would have inevitably involved the rest of the world at some point (In my opinion). Splendid isolation isn't an option and both sides are equally odious. Choose your sides please!
      As for books I would also recommend 'The End' by Ian Kershaw and 'Armageddon' by Max Hastings as accounts of the last days of the Reich.
      Retired

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    6. Quite true, letting Britain go down was never an option. Which could have happened had Schicklgruber not turned East.

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    7. Yes, I know the issue is more complex than that. But I do try to remind people how much damage the Soviet Union caused here in the USA before, during and after WWII. The Soviets were never ever our friends. They mistreated and imprisoned, for all intensive purposes our airmen who were forced to land there.

      And I can't forgive the administration at that time for supporting the useless Communist Chinese over the National Chinese.

      Not saying the Nazis were better than the Soviets.

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    8. Let me say it from the perspectiove of those who had the extreme unluck of living between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany:
      Yeah Western democracies could ahve sit this one out. But, this would probably mean one of much worse outcomes:
      Scenario 1:
      Germans unhindered by distracting Albion and Yankees, manage to get to Moscow, drop Students paras on Red Square (no Crete!) kill Stalin and Soviets devolve into rival warlords. By 1944 Germans have turned Europe into real Festung not paper one, they have access to Caucasus oil, and while not in position to invade UK, are almost impregnable to conventional warfare. Nukes are eventually used en masse in late 1940s, and if lucky Germans still dont have any. If unlucky, UK is a toast. And in nay case minor nuclear winter sets with untold millions suffering hunger as results. Oh and holocaust is finished to a T. In occupied Eastern Europe Poles and Yugoslvian nations line up next in queues to gas chambers.
      Outcome 2: Soviets muddle thru, spilling even more blood but they crush Germans, overrun defenceless Europe and sit atop of conquered continent down to French coast and Italy with even more hostile attitude than in our timeline. Then they have all the technological and industrial potential of Europe at their dispossal. Marcel Dassault and Werner vo Braun end up in Gulags designing weapons for Soviets.
      As much as I despise Soviets, they have traded our death sentence for lifetime prison from which we have eventually escaped.
      Oh and one more thing, some people around the net have made sport of hating president Wilson, from his intervention in the WW1 to the harsh anti-communist crackdown 1918-20. But Soviets from the very start of their reign were sending infiltrators wide and far in hope of global revolution.

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    9. Pawel, Poland definitely had the misfortune to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. A member of my athletics club in the early 70's was Polish. He and his family left in 1956 as they were persona non grata. He was also the first truly multi-lingual person I had met. French was used in his household routinely and he was fluent in German and Russian because, as he put it 'you're going to have to deal with them at some time in your life'. A lot of people forget that the old USSR and Russia think strategically and plan long term. They recruited 'agents of influence' while these agents were still at University and in their 20's knowing that some of these people would rise to positions of power in various institutions. Putin, as an ex-KGB operative thinks in the long term. As for your alternate scenarios, both are likely. Perhaps we are lucky things panned out as they did.
      Retired

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  9. I can not recommend this book highly enough. Save for the summer. Not a book to be read on long winter nights.
    Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder.
    http://timothysnyder.org/books/bloodlands

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    1. For those who don't really grasp the scope of the horror of those times, this book is a must read.

      Thanks for the link Stretch.

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Just be polite... that's all I ask. (For Buck)
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