There were about 91,000 Germans captured at Stalingrad of which 5,000 to
6,000 survived to repatriation.
In September 1955, Chancellor Conrad Adenauer visited Moscow and sought
the release of the WWII prisoners. On September 14th, he held a press
conference:
"...The Soviet Government-Mr. Bulganin and Mr. Khrushchev-expressly
declared during the negotiations that the Soviet Union has no longer any German
prisoners of war, but only 9,626 convicted war criminals-as the put it.
"All of them will leave the Soviet Union in the near future. They will
partly be amnestied and released; as far as the Soviet Union believes that
really serious crimes were committed they will be extradited to Germany to be
treated according to the laws of our land. I think this will ease a lot of
grief=not only of those nearly 10,000 people here in the Soviet Union but also
of the numerous relatives in our home country. Now I may also inform you
that Prime Minister Bulganin said to me-and he authorized me to tell you
this-that the entire action will be under way even before we have arrived in Bonn..."
91, 000 from the Stalingrad pocket alone. That was but one battle, made up primarily of the German 6th Army, along with its allies and auxiliaries. One then needs to add up how many more divisions - Wermacht and Waffen SS - were enveloped and swallowed piecemeal from 1943 thru 1945, over and beyond those killed outright in immediate reprisals, or due to having battle wounds and thus executed on the spot summarily.
There was also the rounding up of many divisions (and even armies) at the end of the conflict on the Eastern front. This included many simple Volkstrum units. Almost all "lost in captivity".
There's your holocaust.
Jb
Notes from The Chronological Atlas of World War Two
(by Charles Messenger, New York, 1989)
The Germans lost 110,000 killed during the battle and a further 91,000 were made prisoner. No details of the total Soviet casualties are available, but they were high. Of the Germans captured at Stalingrad, some were put to work rebuilding the city, while the others were marched east and ended up in camps from the Arctic Circle down to the borders with Afghanistan. Many died as a result of a typhus epidemic in spring 1943 and others of exhaustion and lack of food. Eventually only some 5,000 returned to Germany long after the war was over.
Gary Beard wrote:
There were about 91,000 Germans captured at Stalingrad of which 5,000 to
6,000 survived to repatriation.
In September 1955, Chancellor Conrad Adenauer visited Moscow and sought
the release of the WWII prisoners. On September 14th, he held a press
conference:
"...The Soviet Government-Mr. Bulganin and Mr. Khrushchev-expressly
declared during the negotiations that the Soviet Union has no longer any German
prisoners of war, but only 9,626 convicted war criminals-as the put it.
To liken the outcome of the Nazi war against Russia to the Holocaust warps the argument a bit. The Jews did not have the choices that the Nazis had in going to war. I doubt that anyone will deny that what happened to the German troops in the Russian campaign was terrible, but the Russian citizenry suffered quite a bit also.
This thread is very bitter and pointless in a genealogy-oriented site, and it is time to move on. Wars are never fair to everyone--or even anyone--so enough!
Unfortunately the history of wars are written by the winners. That leads to
much truth being lost about what really happened. Then when you have the
winners incarcerating and banning books by historians who disagree with
their assessment of the war, you are back to the winners becoming as bad, or
worse than the original authors of the war.
It's my opinion that the Russians would have been much better off if the
Germans would have defeated and controlled Russia for the last 60 years.
Jim