History: mortality of Soviet P.O.W.s was quite high

[Apollonian]

Mortality of Soviet Prisoners of War in German Captivity during World War II​

John Wear

Link: https://inconvenienthistory.com/11/2/6733

Why Germany Invaded the Soviet Union

Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 is widely interpreted by historians as an unprovoked act of aggression by Germany. Adolf Hitler is typically described as an untrustworthy liar who broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact he had signed with the Soviet Union. Historians usually depict Josef Stalin as an unprepared victim of Hitler’s aggression who was foolish to have trusted Hitler.[1] Many historians think the Soviet Union was lucky to have survived Germany’s attack.

This standard version of history does not incorporate information from the Soviet archives, which shows that the Soviet Union had amassed the largest and best equipped army in history. The Soviet Union was on the verge of launching a massive military offensive against all of Europe. Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union was a desperate preemptive attack that prevented the Soviet Union from conquering all of Europe. Germany was totally unprepared for a prolonged war against an opponent as powerful as the Soviet Union.

Viktor Suvorov, a former Soviet military-intelligence operative who defected to the United Kingdom in 1978, wrote a research paper titled “The Attack of Germany on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941” while he was a student at the Soviet Army Academy. Suvorov explained his interest in the subject by saying he wanted to study how Germany prepared for the attack so that a horrible tragedy of this kind would never happen again. The topic of Suvorov’s research was approved, and he was given access to closed Soviet archives.[2]

Suvorov discovered in the Soviet archives that the concentration of Soviet troops on the German border on June 22, 1941 was frightful. If Hitler had not invaded the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union would have easily conquered all of Europe. German intelligence correctly saw the massive concentration of Soviet forces on the German border, but it did not see all of the Soviet military preparations. The real picture was much graver even than Germany realized. The Red Army in June 1941 was the largest and most-powerful army in the history of the world.[3]

Suvorov writes in his book The Chief Culprit that Hitler launched his invasion of the Soviet Union without making reasonable preparations for the invasion. Hitler realized that he had no choice but to invade the Soviet Union. If Hitler had waited for Stalin to attack, all of Europe would have been lost.[4]

Suvorov also writes that both German and Soviet forces were positioned for attack on June 22, 1941. The position of the divisions of the Red Army and the German army on the border mirrored each other. The airfields of both armies were moved all the way up to the border. From the defensive point of view, this kind of deployment of troops and airfields by both armies was suicidal. Whichever army attacked first would be able to easily encircle the troops of the other army. Hitler attacked first to enable German troops to trap and encircle the best units of the Red Army.[5]

The German army quickly captured millions of Soviet soldiers after its invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler soon looked for help in feeding these captured Soviet POWs.

Stalin’s Betrayal of Soviet POWs

The Soviet Union was not a party to The Hague Conventions. Nor was the Soviet Union a signatory of the Geneva Convention of 1929, which defined more precisely the conditions to be accorded to POWs. Germany nevertheless approached the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) immediately after war broke out with the Soviet Union to attempt to regulate the conditions of prisoners on both sides. The ICRC contacted Soviet ambassadors in London and Sweden, but the Soviet leaders in Moscow refused to cooperate. Germany also sent lists of their Russian prisoners to the Soviet government until September 1941. The German government eventually stopped sending these lists in response to the Soviet Union’s continued refusal to reciprocate.[6]

Over the winter Germany made further efforts to establish relations with the Soviets in an attempt to introduce the provisions of The Hague and Geneva Conventions concerning POWs. Germany was rebuffed again. Hitler himself made an appeal to Stalin for prisoners’ postal services and urged Red Cross inspection of the camps. Stalin responded: “There are no Russian prisoners of war. The Russian soldier fights on till death. If he chooses to become a prisoner, he is automatically excluded from the Russian community. We are not interested in a postal service only for Germans.”[7]

British historian Robert Conquest confirmed that Stalin adamantly refused to cooperate with repeated German attempts to reach mutual agreement on the treatment of POWs by Germany and the Soviet Union. Conquest wrote:

When the Germans approached the Soviets, through Sweden, to negotiate observance of the provisions of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, Stalin refused. The Soviet soldiers in German hands were thus unprotected even in theory. Millions of them died in captivity, through malnutrition or maltreatment. If Stalin had adhered to the convention (to which the USSR had not been a party) would the Germans have behaved better? To judge by their treatment of other “Slav submen” POWs (like the Poles, even surrendering after the Warsaw Rising), the answer seems to be yes. (Stalin’s own behavior to [Polish] prisoners captured by the Red Army had already been demonstrated at Katyn and elsewhere. German prisoners captured by the Soviets over the next few years were mainly sent to forced labor camps.)[8]

The ICRC soon became aware of the Soviet government’s callous abandonment of their soldiers who fell into German hands. In August 1941, Hitler permitted a Red Cross delegation to visit the German camp for Soviet POWs at Hammerstadt. As a result of this visit, the Red Cross requested that the Soviet government permit the delivery of food parcels to the Soviet POWs. The Soviet government adamantly refused. It replied that sending food in this situation and under fascist control was the same as making presents to the enemy.[9]

In February 1942, the ICRC told Molotov that Great Britain had given permission for the Soviet Union to buy food for captured Soviet prisoners in her African colonies. Also, the Canadian Red Cross was offering a gift of 500 vials of vitamins, and Germany had agreed to collective consignments of food for POWs. The Red Cross reported: “All these offers and communications from the ICRC to the Soviet authorities remained unanswered, either directly or indirectly.” All other appeals by the ICRC and parallel negotiations undertaken by neutral or friendly nations met with no better response.[10]

The Soviet refusals to accept aid came as a surprise to the Red Cross, which had not read Stalin’s Order No. 270 published on August 16, 1941. This order stated in regard to captured Soviet POWs:

If…instead of organizing resistance to the enemy, some Red Army men prefer to surrender, they shall be destroyed by all possible means, both ground-based and from the air, whereas the families of the Red Army men who have been taken prisoner shall be deprived of the state allowance and relief.

The commanders and political officers…“who surrender to the enemy shall be considered malicious deserters, whose families are liable to be arrested [the same] as the families of deserters who have violated the oath and betrayed their Motherland.”[11]

Order No. 270 reveals Stalin’s great hatred for Soviet soldiers captured by German forces. It also reveals the danger to innocent children and relatives of Soviet POWs. Hundreds of thousands of Russian women and children were murdered simply because their father or son had been taken prisoner. Given Stalin’s attitude, the German leaders resolved to treat Soviet prisoners no better than the Soviet leaders were treating captured German prisoners.[12]

Mortality of Soviet POWs

The result was disastrous for surrendered Russian soldiers in German camps. Captured Red Army soldiers had to endure long marches from the field of battle to the camps. Prisoners who were wounded, sick, or exhausted were sometimes shot on the spot. When Soviet prisoners were transported by train, the Germans usually used open freight cars with no protection from the weather. The camps also often provided no shelter from the elements, and the food ration was typically below survival levels. As a result, Russian POWs died in large numbers in German camps. Many Russian survivors of the German camps described them as “pure hell.”[13]

One German officer described the conditions for captured Soviet POWs in the German camps:

The abject misery in the prisoner-of-war camps had now passed all bounds. In the countryside one could come across ghost-like figures, ashen grey, starving, half naked, living perhaps for days on end on corpses and the bark of trees…I visited a prison camp near Smolensk where the daily death rate reached hundreds. It was the same in transit camps, in villages, along the roads. Only some quite unprecedented effort could check the appalling death toll.[14]

By one estimate, 5,754,000 Russians surrendered to German forces during World War II, of whom 3.7 million died in captivity.[15] Another source estimates that 3.1 million Soviet POWs died in German captivity. The starvation of Russian soldiers in German camps stiffened the resistance of the Red Army, since soldiers would rather fight to the death than starve in agony as German captives. As knowledge of German policies spread, Timothy Snyder writes that some Soviet citizens began to think that Soviet control of their country was preferable to German control.[16]

The death of millions of Russian POWs in German captivity constitutes one of the major war crimes of the Second World War. However, much of the blame for the terrible fate of these Soviet soldiers was due to the inflexibly cruel policies of Joseph Stalin. A major portion of the Soviet POWs who died from hunger could have been saved had Stalin not called them traitors and denied them the right to live. By preventing the ICRC from distributing food to the Soviet POWs in German captivity, Stalin needlessly caused the death of a large percentage of these Soviet POWs.[17]

A Red Army sergeant who was captured by the Germans when he was dug out unconscious from the ruins of Odessa later joined Gen. Andrei Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army. The sergeant, who had been decorated twice, bitterly complained of the Soviet Union’s betrayal of its POWs:

You think, Captain, that we sold ourselves to the Germans for a piece of bread? Tell me, why did the Soviet Government forsake us? Why did it forsake millions of prisoners? We saw prisoners of all nationalities, and they were taken care of. Through the Red Cross they received parcels and letters from home; only the Russians received nothing. In Kassel I saw American Negro prisoners, and they shared their cakes and chocolates with us. Then why didn’t the Soviet Government, which we considered our own, send us at least some plain hard tack?.... Hadn’t we fought? Hadn’t we defended the Government? Hadn’t we fought for our country? If Stalin refused to have anything to do with us, we didn’t want to have anything to do with Stalin![18]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also complained of the shameful betrayal of Soviet soldiers by the Russian Motherland. Solzhenitsyn wrote:

The first time she betrayed them was on the battlefield, through ineptitude…The second time they were heartlessly betrayed by the Motherland was when she abandoned them to die in captivity. And the third time they were unscrupulously betrayed was when, with motherly love, she coaxed them to return home, with such phrases as “The Motherland has forgiven you! The Motherland calls you!” and snared them the moment they reached the frontiers. It would appear that during the one thousand one hundred years of Russia’s existence as a state there have been, ah, how many foul and terrible deeds! But among them was there ever so multimillioned foul a deed as this: to betray one’s own soldiers and proclaim them traitors?[19]

Repatriation of Soviet POWs

Stalin’s hatred of Soviet former POWs continued after the war. Stalin publicly warned that “in Hitler’s camps there are no Russian prisoners of war, only Russian traitors and we shall do away with them when the war is over.” Stalin’s position was supported at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, where Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill both agreed to repatriate “without exception and by force if necessary” all former Soviet POWs.[20]

Many of the Soviet prisoners who were to be repatriated to the Soviet Union after the war begged to be shot on the spot rather than be delivered into the hands of the Soviet NKVD. Other Soviet prisoners committed suicide so as not to be tortured and executed by the Soviets. A shock force of 500 American and Polish guards was required at Dachau to forcibly repatriate the first group of Soviet prisoners to the Soviet Union. What followed is described in a report submitted to Robert Murphy:

Conforming to agreements with the Soviets, an attempt was made to entrain 399 former Russian soldiers who had been captured in German uniform, from the assembly center at Dachau on Saturday, January 19 [1946].

All of these men refused to entrain. They begged to be shot. They resisted entrainment by taking off their clothing and refusing to leave their quarters. It was necessary to use tear-gas and some force to drive them out. Tear-gas forced them out of the building into the snow where those who had cut and stabbed themselves fell exhausted and bleeding in the snow. Nine men hanged themselves and one had stabbed himself to death and one other who had stabbed himself subsequently died; while 20 others are still in the hospital from self-inflicted wounds. The entrainment was finally effected of 368 men who were set off accompanied by a Russian liaison officer on a train carrying American guards. Six men escaped en route…[21]

The report ended: “The incident was shocking. There is considerable dissatisfaction on the part of the American officers and men that they are being required by the American Government to repatriate these Russians…”[22] Thus, for most Soviet POWs, being shot in a German concentration camp was preferable to being tortured and executed on their return to the Soviet Union.

A number of Soviet POWs held in British camps also committed suicide rather than being repatriated to the Soviet Union. The British Foreign Office carefully concealed the forced repatriations of Soviet POWs from the British public in order to avoid a scandal.[23]

Soviet POWs held at Fort Dix, New Jersey also resorted to desperate measures when informed they were to be repatriated to the Soviet Union. The Russian POWs barricaded themselves inside their barracks. Many of the Soviet POWs committed suicide, while other Soviet POWs were killed fighting the American soldiers attempting to take them to the ship bound for the USSR. The surviving Soviet POWs stated that only the prompt use of tear gas by the Americans prevented the entire group of 154 Soviet POWs from committing suicide.[24]

Conclusion

American historian Timothy Snyder writes: “After Hitler betrayed Stalin and ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans starved the Soviet prisoners of war…”[25]

Snyder incorrectly states that Hitler betrayed Stalin. Hitler’s preemptive invasion of the Soviet Union prevented Stalin from conquering all of Europe. Hitler’s attack was not for Lebensraum or any other malicious reason. This is why volunteers from 30 nations enlisted to fight in the German armed forces during World War II.[26] These volunteers knew that the Soviet Union, which Viktor Suvorov calls “the most criminal and most bloody empire in human history,”[27] could not be allowed to conquer all of Europe.

Snyder also fails to recognize that a major portion of the Soviet POWs who died in German captivity could have been saved had Stalin not called them traitors and denied them the right to live. Stalin prevented the ICRC from distributing food to the Soviet POWs held in German captivity, thereby needlessly causing the deaths of many of these Soviet POWs. Many Soviet POWs who survived German captivity were also brutally tortured and murdered by Stalin when they were repatriated to the Soviet Union after the war.

Notes

[1] For example, see Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York: Basic Books, 2010, p. xi.

[2] Suvorov, Viktor, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II, Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008, pp. xviii-xix.

[3] Ibid., p. xxi.

[4] Ibid., pp. 249-250.

[5] Ibid., p. xx.

[6] Tolstoy, Nikolai, Victims of Yalta: The Secret Betrayal of the Allies 1944-1947, New York and London: Pegasus Books, 1977, pp. 33-34.

[7] Ibid., p. 34.

[8] Conquest, Robert, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, New York: Viking Penguin, 1991, p. 241.

[9] Teplyakov, Yuri, “Stalin’s War against His Own Troops: The Tragic Fate of Soviet Prisoners of War in German Captivity,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 14, No. 4, July/Aug. 1994, p. 6.

[10] Tolstoy, Nikolai, Victims of Yalta: The Secret Betrayal of The Allies 1944-1947, New York and London: Pegasus Books, 1977, p. 55.

[11] Teplyakov, Yuri, “Stalin’s War against His Own Troops: The Tragic Fate of Soviet Prisoners of War in German Captivity,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 14, No. 4, July/Aug. 1994, pp. 4, 6.

[12] Ibid., pp. 6-7.

[13] Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York: Basic Books, 2010, pp. 176-177, 179.

[14] Strik-Strikfeldt, Wilfried, Against Stalin and Hitler: Memoir of the Russian Liberation Movement 1941-5, London: Macmillan, 1970, pp. 49-50.

[15] Tolstoy, Nikolai, Victims of Yalta: The Secret Betrayal of the Allies 1944-1947, New York and London: Pegasus Books, 1977, p. 35.

[16] Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York: Basic Books, 2010, p. 184.

[17] Teplyakov, Yuri, “Stalin’s War against His Own Troops: The Tragic Fate of Soviet Prisoners of War in German Captivity,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 14, No. 4, July/Aug. 1994, p. 6.

[18] Tolstoy, Nikolai, Victims of Yalta: The Secret Betrayal of the Allies 1944-1947, New York and London: Pegasus Books, 1977, p. 41.

[19] Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Vol. 1) New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974, p. 240.

[20] Tzouliadis, Tim, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, New York: The Penguin Press, 2008, p. 244.

[21] Tolstoy, Nikolai, Victims of Yalta: The Secret Betrayal of The Allies 1944-1947, New York and London: Pegasus Books, 1977, pp. 354-355.

[22] Ibid., p. 355.

[23] Ibid., p. 21.

[24] Ibid., pp. 325-326.

[25] Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York: Basic Books, 2010, p. 380.

[26] Tedor, Richard, Hitler’s Revolution, Chicago: 2013, p. 7.

[27] Suvorov, Viktor, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II, Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008, p. 58.


Author(s):
John Wear

Title:
Mortality of Soviet Prisoners of War in German Captivity during World War II

Sources: see above notes

Dates:
published: 2019-05-26, first posted: 2019-05-27 00:00:02

 

[Apollonian]

A Tale of Two German Snipers​

Link: https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/a-tale-of-two-german-snipers/

• June 21, 2019

Survival on the Eastern Front was perilous at best, especially in the role of the sniper.

By Phil Zimmer

The three Soviet tanks edged forward slowly as the drivers scanned for the concealed Germans that lay ahead. The lead tank suddenly clanked to a stop and swung its long barrel around. It looked much like one of Hannibal’s elephants with its trunk raised, sniffing the air before its planned lunge forward toward the hapless enemy.

The Wehrmacht troops were in a precarious situation. They lacked air support there as the Soviets mounted a heavy attack in mid-August 1943 along the length of the Donets Front in eastern Ukraine.

Antitank panzerfausts were not available to the 3rd Gebirgsjager (Mountain) Division, and the unit had few, if any, sticky charges to blow the tracks from the Soviet T-34 tanks. All they had were their wits and their bolt-action Mauser rifles against the three steel titans that loomed in front of them with scores of Red Army soldiers trailing.

Suddenly, the lead tank’s hatch opened about 10 inches and a head appeared with binoculars to scan the scene. Sniper Josef “Sepp” Allerberger brought the Soviet tanker’s head into the center of his scope, and at some 500 feet he squeezed off a round. A splat of blood hit the hatch as the head sank into the bowels of the tank.

That single shot marked the beginning of yet another wild melee on the Eastern Front. The tanks lobbed a few shots toward the German positions, but after a few minutes they gunned their engines and left the field to the exposed and largely doomed Soviet riflemen who did not fare well against the well-entrenched Germans.

The battle might have gone the other way had it not been for the young 19-year-old Austrian sniper who singlehandedly changed the course of the engagement by likely taking out the commander of the three tanks. His timely, well-aimed bullet negated the Soviets’ heavy initial advantage in firepower and maneuverability.

Snipers have often been “force multipliers” in warfare with their ability to take out key military leaders or crucial signal and communications officers. For example, the course of the crucial Battle of Saratoga in the American Revolution was dramatically changed when an American sniper killed British General Simon Fraser at a distance of some 300 yards. During the American Civil War, Union General John Sedgwick fatally fell to a sniper’s round at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House just after he remarkably stated the enemy “couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”

Allerberger and Matthaus Hetzenauer, another skilled Austrian sniper in the same division, were officially credited with killing more than 600 enemy soldiers during the Soviet advance toward Berlin in the latter stages of World War II. And their sniper totals did not include scores and scores of Soviets who fell to their rapid-fire machine pistol efforts during numerous determined and often foolish Russian frontal assaults.

LEFT: German sniper Matthaus Hetzenauer was credited with killing dozens of Soviet soldiers on the Eastern Front. Along with fellow sniper Josef “Sepp” Allerberger, the two were responsible for approximately 600 kills. RIGHT: Finnish sniper Simo Hayha was nicknamed “White Death” and killed more than 500 Soviet soldiers during the Winter War prior to the outbreak of World War II.

Both young Austrians received the prestigious Knight’s Cross for their efforts, and unlike most snipers they left rather detailed descriptions of their work on the Eastern Front. Most snipers, like Finland’s Simo Hayha—dubbed “White Death” for his more than 505 confirmed kills in the Winter War just prior to the start of World War II—were reluctant to discuss their work which many considered underhanded or unmanly.

Allerberger, perhaps, left a more compelling firsthand account than Hetzenauer, who has been credited with 346 official kills, some 89 more than his fellow Austrian. But it was Hetzenauer, the highest scoring Axis sniper of the war, who left more detailed information on sniper techniques, training, and tactics—all told after he endured five years of captivity and forced labor at the hands of the Soviets. Both were fortunate to have endured the war at all because of the traditional heavy loss of snipers and the nature of the four-year-long bloodbath on the Eastern Front that took millions of lives on both sides.

Hetzenauer preferred a K98k Mauser rifle with a six-powered scope, while many German snipers preferred a four-powered scope on the Mauser. Occasionally he did use a German-built Gewehr 43, a 10-round semiautomatic rifle with a four-powered Zielfernrohr scope. The weapon was copied somewhat after the Soviet Tokarev self-loading rifle SVT-38.

Neither the Soviet nor the German self-loading rifles were ever capable of the accuracy of a bolt-action rifle. The bolt-action rifles had fewer moving parts and so could be fine-tuned by a skilled gunsmith to create the consistently accurate weapon needed by snipers. In close fighting, an SVT-38 type weapon, or perhaps even a machine pistol like the German MP-40, could prove invaluable for snipers and others when they needed a high rate of fire.

Ironically, the precise engineering and exceptionally close tolerances of the Mauser rifle occasionally proved to be its own shortcoming during minus 40-degree and lower temperatures on the Eastern Front, and the extended periods of freezes and thaws that often turned roads into canals of mud and coated men and weapons equally with the sludge. The Soviet Mosin Nagant rifles had more liberal manufacturing tolerances and came with lubricants that could better withstand Russia’s extreme cold. This made them a preferred weapon for many Germans, as well as most Soviet snipers. This was especially true of the prewar Nagants produced at Tula Arms Plant, whose history traced back to 1712 when it was founded by Tsar Peter I. Famed Finnish sniper Hayha logged most of his official kills over the iron sights of a Mosin Nagant. He contended that scopes too often fogged up in harsh conditions and the restricted view of a scope limited the weapon’s usefulness in close in situations.

Somewhere in France a well-camouflaged German sniper peers through the scope of his rifle. Sepp Allerberger modified an umbrella to hold brush collected on site to hide his position.

For his part, Allerberger initially preferred a captured Soviet sniper rifle, a Mosin Nagant with a scope, coupled with a semiautomatic Gewehr 43 for rapid, close-in support because of its 10-round magazine. Both snipers took great pains to prepare advanced hiding places for their sniper rifles, knowing that German snipers who fell into enemy hands would be faced with long, drawn-out torture and eventual death.

Allerberger was frank about the use of his Gewehr 43 when faced with large waves of charging Soviets. At times, the first two enemy waves were armed and the next two waves of men were instructed—because of a lack of weapons—to charge forward nevertheless and pick up and use weapons from their fallen comrades. Soviet machine gunners in the back, directed by the feared NKVD, or Soviet secret police, ensured that the orders were carried out for the Motherland.

Allerberger noted that by early October 1943 the Germans had come to realize that the Russians had an apparent nearly inexhaustible reservoir of manpower that was still often used recklessly against them. He recalled one battle during which waves of dead and dying Russians began piling up in front of German positions. They created near walls that succeeding Russian attackers had to climb up to get to the Germans. And Russian T-34 tanks further afield crushed the fallen bodies of the dead and wounded alike, “their bones snapping like dry wood” as the tanks clanked forward while riflemen ran out of ammunition and went at the enemy with bayonets and shovels.

Allerberger used his Gewehr 43 to shoot at the stomachs of the men in the attacking waves. As the men fell and screamed in prolonged and agonizing pain, it caused their comrades to falter and fall back. Hetzenauer also used those tactics, but he most often employed a German MP40 machine pistol in that role. Hetzenauer curtly contended that “snipers do not need a semi-automatic weapon” if they are employed properly as snipers.

Because of the fierce nature of the fighting on the Eastern Front, both sides did, on occasion, resort to armor-piercing, tracer, and explosive bullets. That was also true in the Winter War as Finnish sniper Hayha suffered a near fatal injury when an explosive bullet from a Soviet sniper took off part of his jaw and forced him into retirement.

Hetzenauer, for one, largely refrained from using tracers because it could help reveal a sniper’s location. He did use armor-piercing ammunition when going against Soviet machine gunners and observers who often worked behind armored steel loophole plates to help protect them while providing a small opening for observation and firing. Rather surprisingly, he also used outdated German antitank rifles (panzerbuchse) against bunkers and loopholes because of their high-velocity, armor-piercing ammunition. Hetzenauer insisted that he used explosive ammunition only for observation and to clear Soviets from thatched farmhouses by setting the roofs aflame.

In the United States and Britain, snipers were volunteers, but the Germans often took a good shooter from the front and sent him back to Germany for training, as occurred with Hetzenauer. There they were taught the finer points of shooting, as well as camouflage and deception.

Hetzenauer’s three and one-half months of official sniper training occurred during the second quarter of 1944 in a troop training depot in southern Austria. There he learned the necessity of patience and perseverance while he honed his shooting skills under the watchful eyes of experienced snipers. The students were expected to hit a small target without fail at 325-435 yards. He was taught how to estimate distances and use deception, making the best use of terrain, and employing dummies that could be moved about with ropes and equipped with rifles that could be remotely fired with wires.

Allerberger, already a successful sniper, was assigned in the last quarter of 1943 to a four-week training program near Judenburg, Austria, not far from his home. That was done with a wink and a nod from his commanding officer because it would give the young sniper a needed break from the killing and mayhem on the Eastern Front. He was often called upon by the instructors in sniper school to share his experiences. Many of the instructors had also served in that capacity on the Eastern Front. For his part, Allerberger was surprised by the school’s “shooting garden,” a miniature landscape complete with a village and roads where they had to shoot the “enemy” with small caliber sporting guns as they appeared in windows, doorways, and behind trees. Because of his frontline experience, he shined at those exercises. Throughout the training, the instructors revised and rebuilt the landscapes to make them more interesting and challenging.

These female Soviet snipers posed for the photographer with grim determination. Allerberger took out a group of female snipers firing at German soldiers from trees.

Allerberger’s sniper class was instructed to record their observations on terrain, weather conditions, and hits in notebooks that they carried with them. As an experienced sniper, he cautioned the need to encode their entries in case of capture because of the treatment snipers received at the hands of the Soviets.

During the war both sides made considerable use of deception, ranging from a helmet hoisted on a stick that only fooled inexperienced snipers on the other side to elaborate devices such as dummies that could appear to be smoking. Hetzenauer made a point not to use steel loophole plates because they were awkward in the field and rather vulnerable to enemy observation. He used German 6×30 binoculars for general observation and a small captured Soviet periscope while close to the enemy in no-man’s land.

Allerberger, for one, fairly early on developed an interesting way to use an old umbrella to assist with his camouflage efforts. He stripped away the cloth and used local plants and grass woven into the wire frame to provide local cover. It proved exceptionally functional and could easily be updated to conform to a specific terrain when he changed locations in the field.

But there was more to sniping that a keen eye and good training. Germans who came directly from training without firsthand experience in combat often managed to squeeze off 15-20 sniper rounds before being felled by an experienced opponent—and the Soviets had many of them. The invaluable experience of remaining exceptionally cool under fire and having carefully prepared a firing position with one or possibly more options for concealed “slipaways” often made the difference between life and death.

Allerberger would often crawl into no man’s land at night to prepare his holes in preparation for his own withdrawal when necessary. He often added hand grenades and trip wires to cover approaches to his hide. These could be used for protection or for distraction should he need to make a quick exit.

Experienced snipers also knew how and when to jump to a predetermined safe position in a move the Germans called the rabbit jump (hasensprung). Quick swerves and occasional double backs were often part of that move that required quickness, will power and nerves of steel. Less experienced snipers would often cringe in place, work to endure sustained, concentrated rifle, mortar, and artillery fire, and suffer the often deadly consequences.

Hetzenauer, Allerberger, and Haya were insistent that snipers should not position themselves in trees despite the fact that the higher elevation would provide a better view of the enemy. Such a position could rather easily be identified and isolated, preventing a sniper from slipping away to fight another day. Despite that common sense admonition, Allerberger did encounter one situation northwest of Bakalovo, where 11 men in the leading company were brought down within minutes by well-aimed head and chest shots. Then two company commanders were lost to explosive bullets when they rose to look through their binoculars. It was quickly apparent that the Germans were facing scores of Soviet snipers, something they had heard about but had never encountered.

Efforts to dislodge the snipers from the thick evergreens before them proved fruitless, and worse yet resulted in the deaths of several German machine gunners. The unit lacked artillery or even heavy mortars to dislodge the enemy, so everyone hunkered down until Allerberger made it to the scene. The Austrian sized up the situation and knew he had to get closer to better assess the situation. He took five grenade bags and filled them with grass, adding helmets and fake faces. He left those behind with assistants while he carefully crawled forward. When Allerberger gave the prearranged signal, the dummies were raised, and he could identify where the enemy snipers were lodged when the upper branches swayed from the pressure waves of the gunfire.

He then carefully crawled some 200 yards back to safety and informed his superiors of his plan of attack. He placed five machine guns in well-concealed positions and crawled forward yet again after relocating the men with the dummies. Once in position to one side, he signaled to his assistants, who raised the dummies slightly. When a sniper fired, he clearly identified the sniper’s position and fired while the German machine gunners laced the treetops liberally to cover the sound of his deadly Mauser. The Soviet snipers fell “like sacks” from their elevated positions. After a short period of time, Allerberger repositioned himself and the process started again. In total, he took out 18 enemy snipers within an hour.

After an extended period of quiet, the Germans cautiously advanced toward the forest and began collecting the enemy’s sniper rifles and equipment. As one stepped over a sniper’s apparent lifeless body, he discovered the face of a woman who had been shot in the chest. She suddenly pulled an automatic pistol from her jacket and squeezed off a round, nicking the German in the buttocks as he finished her off with his MP40.

Although it was the first time these Germans had encountered a squad of female snipers, they had heard of such units. In fact, the Soviets trained and employed more than 2,000 female snipers before the war was over. Many of the women proved tenacious and exceptionally accurate shots as they diligently worked to avenge the deaths of family and loved ones at the hands of the invaders.

Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the most successful female sniper in history, was dubbed “Lady Death” for her confirmed 309 kills that reportedly included 36 enemy snipers. She even conducted a goodwill tour of Allied nations during the war that included a stop at the White House.

At one point, Allerberger and marksman Josef Roth joined forces to deal with a Soviet sniper who had taken down a number of men and had made life miserable for Germans on the front lines. After hours of scanning the landscape and peering through binoculars, they discovered the man’s hide. He had ingeniously secured himself in an earthen cave dug through a dam.

The Germans needed to have the sniper show himself a bit further and decided to employ a large bread bag stuffed with a stick and grass with a cap placed on top. At a prearranged time, a third man raised the dummy upward. The Soviet fired, exposing his precise position, and the two Germans fired explosive rounds from two slightly different angles. A dull thud was heard in the cave, and then there was some rather hectic activity on the Soviet side as something was carried away. An unwary Soviet observer then lifted his binoculars to his eyes and paid for the error with his life. With that, the deadly sniper fire ceased from the Soviet side.

As the war progressed, the German snipers took on an even more crucial role in resisting the seemingly ever-growing Red wave. They were often left behind to slow or even stop the Soviet advances, if for only a few hours, while larger forces pulled back to safer positions.

Hetzenauer was captured in the Donets Basin area and spent five years as a laborer in Soviet captivity. He managed against all odds to keep knowledge of his sniper work from his masters, who had worked him down to some 100 pounds when released. Allerberger was more fortunate. At war’s end, he managed to elude Soviet troops and safely found his way home to Austria from central Czechoslovakia.

Author Phil Zimmer is a U.S. Army veteran and a former newspaper reporter. He has written on a number of World War II topics.

 

[Apollonian]

Stutthof: An Important But Little-Known Wartime Camp​

By Mark Weber

Link: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n5p-2_Weber.html

While Stutthof is not as well-known as other wartime German camps, a close look at the history of this important internment center is revealing. The patterns of deportations to and from the camp, and the treatment of inmates, both Jewish and non-Jewish, disclose some surprising features.

Stutthof (Sztutowo in Polish) was located 36 kilometers east of the city of Danzig (now the Polish city of Gdansk) in a wooded clearing near the Baltic coast at the mouth of the Vistula river. Hastily set up as an emergency internment center in September 1939, as German forces were subduing Poland, it was soon established on a more permanent basis, and in 1942 was officially designated as a concentration camp. (1).

In 1943 and 1944 it was considerably enlarged until it included three large sections encompassing an area 2.5 by 1.2 kilometers. The Stutthof camp complex eventually embraced several dozen smaller satellite camps spread across a large part of East and West Prussia. In addition to administration and general upkeep work in the camp itself, inmates were employed in nearby workshops and factories that turned out equipment and clothing for the German armed forces. Other internees worked in a camp brick factory and greenhouse, and on nearby agricultural projects, quarries, ports and airfields. Inmates could send letters and receive parcels. At the end of 1943, a new regulation prohibited punishment by beating. (2).

Until 1944 there were relatively few Jewish internees. Most of the prisoners were Poles. In the fall of 1943 several hundred Jews found in hiding in the Bialystok ghetto (after the suppression of the uprising there) were transferred to Stutthof. (3). Beginning in June 1944, large numbers of Jews began arriving at Stutthof from Auschwitz. The first shipment of 2,500 Jewish women from Auschwitz-Birkenau was soon sent on to several hundred factories in the Baltic region. Between June and October 1944, 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish women, originally from Hungary, arrived at Stutthof from Auschwitz. In addition, Jewish women originally from the Lodz ghetto also arrived at Stutthof from Auschwitz. (4).

During the summer and fall of 1944, as Soviet forces advanced toward the Baltic region, thousands of Jews, including Jewish mothers and their children, were evacuated to Stutthof from more than a dozen camps and remnant ghettos in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. In particular, Jews were transferred from the camps at Riga (Latvia) and Kaunas (Lithuania), and the ghetto of Siauliai (Lithuania) in July 1944. Most were evacuated by sea on scarce ships. (5).

During the second half of 1944, as Soviet forces continued their westward advance, the Germans transferred large numbers of Jews, including hundreds of Jewish children, from Lithuania and Estonia through Stutthof to Auschwitz. (6). Many of these evacuees were Jews who had earlier been deported to the Baltic region from Germany as part of the "final solution" policy of mass deportation to occupied Soviet territories in the "East." (7).

These transfers to Stutthof are difficult to reconcile with a German policy to annihilate Europe's Jews. If there had been such an extermination policy, it is particularly difficult to understand why Jews from the Baltic region -- all of whom were supposedly doomed -- were evacuated on Germany's overtaxed transportation system instead of being killed on the spot. The fact that many of the Jews evacuated by the Germans from the Baltic area to Stutthof were unemployable children is particularly difficult to reconcile with a general extermination policy. (8).

This new influx dramatically changed the camp's character. By late 1944, Jews made up about 70 percent of the inmate population. Russians constituted about 20 percent, and other nationalities made up the remaining ten percent. (9). The camp was divided into separate male and female compounds. Most of the inmates were reportedly young, above all Jewish girls and young women between the ages of 13 and 22. There was a separate barracks block for Jewish boys below the age of 17. As a rule, Jews did not have to work, although some were occasionally assigned to farm work on the outside. (10).

As a result of the chaos and tremendous overcrowding brought about by the worsening military situation, conditions in the camp deteriorated badly during 1944. Although new arrivals were routinely subjected to a quarantine period of two to four weeks, an epidemic of typhus broke out in the second half of the year. The death rate rose dramatically and reached a high point at the end of that year, when nine percent of the total inmate population reportedly died during December 1944. Besides typhus, inmates fell victim to enteric fever and hunger. (11).

Camp administrators did what they could under the almost impossible conditions to save lives. Hospital facilities for inmates were greatly expanded, and eventually took up a whole complex of barracks. Inmate physicians and nurses, as well as SS medical personnel, worked in these facilities, which were divided into 12 departments. Unfortunately, care for sick internees was severely limited by a serious lack of medicines and proper instruments. (12). In mid-January 1945, there were about 50,000 Stutthof inmates, about half of whom were in the main camp. There were 29,000 Jewish internees, including nearly 26,000 women. (13).

On January 25, 1945, with Soviet forces only a few kilometers away and the sound of gunfire audible in the distance, camp commandant SS Major Paul-Werner Hoppe, acting on higher instructions, ordered a general evacuation of internees to the interior of the Reich. Sick inmates, as well as a group needed to dissolve the camp, were to remain behind, he added. (14). Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer has acknowledged the difficulty of reconciling this evacuation order with an extermination policy. At a 1981 conference, he asked rhetorically: "What was their [the Germans'] intention? Why did the SS march these people away? ... Why did the commander of the camp in Stutthof give an order in January 1945 that everybody was to march except for the sick?" (15).

Coming as it did in the middle of winter, this mass evacuation in groups of fifteen hundred each was a terrible ordeal that claimed many thousands of lives. The ten-day march was carried out in snow and freezing temperatures, with very little food or adequate shelter. One Polish historian has estimated that 30,000 died during this evacuation trek. (16). One group of evacuees was rescued by Soviet forces in February 1945, but many in this group died after their liberation. (17).

Stutthof's prisoners were not the only ones to endure this terrible calamity. During this same period, hundreds of thousands of German civilians, most of them women and children, as well civilians of other nationalities, were slowly making their way westward in the snow and freezing weather. Many of these people also died during the winter trek. (18).

In March and April 1945, Soviet war planes repeatedly attacked the Stutthof camp. A bomb that hit the Jewish hospital on March 26, 1945, killed 28 and wounded 35. (19). During the following weeks, Soviet air and artillery strikes became more frequent. By April 20, 1945, a former Jewish inmate later recalled (20).

Stutthof was bombarded from the air and ground. The bombing went on day and night.... The Stutthof camp was enormous and from one end to the other it was burning down from the air attacks. Countless numbers of Katzetler [inmates] were killed by the bombs. I myself was lucky, because a bomb hit our ward and three-quarters of the sick were killed or wounded.

Evacuation by Sea

In late April 1945, with Stutthof now cut off from unoccupied Germany except by sea, it was finally decided to evacuate the 3,000 or so Jewish women still remaining in the camp. One inmate who was evacuated on a cargo ship later recalled her terrible ordeal: (21).

We sailed and sailed and went into ports many times. Which, I can't remember. But no port would let us stay because there was a yellow flag flying from the top, meaning the ship was supposed to be carrying people with contagious diseases on board. ...At every port, the captain declared that he was carrying women refugees and asked permission to unload them.

But time and time again they were turned away, although at one port some German soldiers gave them some bread. With almost no water or food, the ship drifted for eleven days from one port to another. During this terrible period, Allied planes twice attacked the unarmed vessel, killing many of the Jews on board. During a third bombing attack, which came while the ship was anchored outside of Kiel harbor and only a day before the arrival of British troops there, the vessel caught fire and sank. Many died in the flames or during the mad scramble to get on deck, and others drowned. One survivor recalls that all but 33 of the 2,000 Jewish women on board perished.(22)

The final evacuation from Stutthof took place on April 27, 1945. Under attack from Soviet warplanes, the prisoners were loaded onto several barges at nearby Hela harbor, which were then towed westward to territory still under German control. One barge, packed with sick inmates, was destined for Kiel. Others were taken to the port town of Neustadt near Lübeck.(23) One Polish historian has estimated that 3,000 of the Stutthof internees who were evacuated by sea lost their lives in the ordeal.(24)

Not all of Stutthof's inmates were evacuated. Hundreds who were not able to move were left behind in the camp, which remained in German hands as part of the fiercely defended Danzig enclave until it was surrendered to Soviet forces on May 10, 1945.(25)

Gas Chamber Allegations

Some historians have insisted that prisoners were killed at Stutthof in a camp gas chamber.(26) According to a 1985 statement by Munich's Institute for Contemporary History "more than one thousand" people were killed in a Stutthof gas chamber.(27) However, the evidence cited for homicidal gassings at Stutthof is meager and not very credible. The camp's "gas chamber" building, which is still intact, is a small brick structure about two and a half meters high, five meters in length, three meters wide. American historian Konnilyn Feig has written that it looks "almost like a toy." Polish officials have seriously claimed that the Germans gassed one hundred persons at a time in the chamber (that is, six or seven persons per square meter). Homicidal gassings with Zyklon were supposedly carried out intermittently between June and December 1944 in this chamber.(28)

Polish historian Krzysztof Dunin-Wasowicz believes that this building was neither designed nor built as a homicidal gassing facility. In an essay published in a semi-official work about the alleged homicidal "gas chambers," he writes that this building was built as a (non-homicidal) gas chamber for treating clothes. However, he goes on to claim that this it was sometimes also improvisationally used to kill people. ("Originally the gas chamber was built as a room for delousing clothing, and it continued to be used for this purpose, too, for as long as it existed.")(29)

Interestingly, the "gas chamber" building is not at all hidden or camouflaged, nor is it disguised as a shower. Therefore, if it had actually been used as a homicidal gassing facility, prospective victims apparently would have been under no illusion about the fate that awaited them. It is worth noting that the Germans in charge of the camp never made any effort to destroy or dismantle Stutthof's supposed "extermination facility," which is difficult to believe if, in fact, it had been a execution gas chamber. (30).

A West German court that heard "eyewitness testimony" about homicidal gassings at Stutthof declared in its 1964 verdict that "with regard to the gassings a positive determination was likewise not possible." Evidence given by several supposed witnesses of gassings was found to be dubious or not credible.(31) Raul Hilberg makes no mention of homicidal gassings at Stutthof in his detailed three-volume Holocaust work. Two other prominent Holocaust historians, Lucy Dawidowicz and Nora Levin, likewise said nothing about the camp's alleged extermination facility.

Estimates of Victims

According to Polish historian Czeslaw Pilichowski, director of Poland's "Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes," of the 120,000 people (Jews and non-Jews) who were ever interned in Stutthof or its satellite camps, 85,000 died. (32). Polish historian Krzysztof Dunin-Wasowicz has estimated that of the camp's 120,000 inmates, "about 80,000 of them either died or were murdered." (33). Another Polish historian gives a "conservative" estimate of 65,000 Stutthof victims. (34)

Altogether more than 52,000 Jews were interned in Stutthof and its satellite camps, according to Jewish historian Martin Gilbert and the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Only about 3,000 survived, they estimate, and add that perhaps 26,000 of the Jewish victims died or drowned during the evacuation in 1945. (35).

Although it is difficult to determine the actual number of deaths with any precision, in this regard it is important to keep in mind that the great majority of Stutthof's victims were direct and indirect victims of war, including thousands who lost their lives in Allied air attacks during the final weeks of fighting. As was also the case at Dachau, Buchenwald and other German camps, a considerable portion of those who died in the Stutthof main camp were victims of typhus and other diseases who succumbed during the final months of the war.

As we have seen, most Stutthof victims apparently lost their lives in the grim and hastily organized evacuations by foot or sea. As harsh as they were, these evacuations were not part of any killing policy. In spite of its high death rate, Stutthof was not organized or operated as an extermination center, and the many deaths there were not the result of any systematic policy or program.


Notes

1.Krzysztof Dunin-Wasowicz, "Stutthof," in: I. Gutman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 1421, 1423.

2.Krzysztof Dunin-Wasowicz, Oboz Koncentracyjny Stutthof (Gdynia: 1966), pp. 253-254 (English-language abstract); "Stutthof," Gedenkbuch (Koblenz: Bundesarchiv, 1986), p. 1772.

3."Stutthof," Encyclopaedia Judaica (New York and Jerusalem: Macmillan and Keter, 1971), vol. 15, p. 464; Martin Gilbert, Atlas of The Holocaust (New York: William Morrow, 1993), pp. 194-195.

4.Jean-Claude Pressac, Die Krematorien von Auschwitz: Die Technik des Massenmordes (München: Piper, 1994), p. 199. (In the earlier, French edition of this book, Pressac writes of the deportation of 40,000-50,000 Hungarian Jewish women from Auschwitz to Stutthof and surrounding area. Jean-Claude Pressac, Les Crémetoires d'Auschwitz: La Machinerie du Meurtre de Masse [CNRS Editions, 1993], p. 147.); "Stutthof," Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971), vol. 15, p. 464; Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust (New York: 1986), p. 686; M. Gilbert, Atlas of the Holocaust (1993), p. 194.

5."Stutthof," Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971), vol. 15, p. 464; Roman Hrabar, et al, The Fate of Polish Children During the Last War (Warsaw: 1981), p. 72; M. Gilbert, The Holocaust (1986), pp. 705, 722; Encyclopaedia Judaica (1971), vol. 6, p. 917; M. Gilbert, Atlas of The Holocaust (1993), pp. 200, 207, 208, 209; Benjamin B. Ferencz, Less Than Slaves (Harvard, 1979), p. 107; "Stutthof," Less Than Slaves (1986), p. 1772; Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), p. 985.

6.Y. Gutman and M. Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (1994), pp. 417, 420.

7.Justiz und NS-Verbrechen (Amsterdam: Univ. Press Amsterdam, 1968 ff.), vol. 20, p. 600, or p. 585-6 (Verdict in 1964 Tübingen case Ks 5/63).

8.R. Hrabar, et al, The Fate of Polish Children During the Last War (1981), p. 72.

9.Olga M. Pickholz-Barnitsch, "The Evacuation of the Stutthof Concentration Camp, Yad Vashem Bulletin (Israel), No. 17, Dec. 1965, p. 37.

10.Olga M. Pickholz-Barnitsch, "The Evacuation," Yad Vashem Bulletin, Dec. 1965, p. 36.

11.K. Dunin-Wasowicz, Oboz Koncentracyjny Stutthof (1966), pp. 252, 255; Olga M. Pickholz-Barnitsch, "The Evacuation," Yad Vashem Bulletin, Dec. 1965, p. 37; Justiz und NS-Verbrechen, vol. 20, p. 600; Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, German Crimes in Poland (Warsaw: 1946-1947), vol. 2, p. 112.

12.K. Dunin-Wasowicz, Oboz Koncentracyjny Stutthof (1966), p. 252.

13.K. Dunin-Wasowicz, Oboz Koncentracyjny Stutthof (Gdynia: 1966), pp. 253-254; "Stutthof," Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 15, p. 464.

14.Hoppe order, Jan. 25, 1945. Nuremberg document NO-3796.

15.Brewster Chamberlain and M. Feldman, eds., The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945 (Washington, DC: USHMC, 1987), p. 92.

16.K. Dunin-Wasowicz, Oboz Koncentracyjny Stutthof (1966), p. 257; Konnilyn Feig, Hitler's Death Camps (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), p. 202; "Stutthof," Less Than Slaves (1986), p. 1772; M. Gilbert, Atlas of The Holocaust (1993), pp. 216-217.

17.M. Gilbert, The Holocaust (1986), p. 783.

18.See: Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Expulsion of the Germans From the East (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska, 1989; 3rd rev. ed.), and, Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993).

19.M. Gilbert, The Holocaust (1986), p. 786.

20.Isaiah Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), pp. 322-323.

21.I. Trunk, Jewish Responses (1982), pp. 323-326.

22.I. Trunk, Jewish Responses (1982), pp. 323-326.

23.R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (1985), p. 985; O. Pickholz-Barnitsch, "The Evacuation," Yad Vashem Bulletin, Dec. 1965, p. 37; M. Gilbert, Atlas of The Holocaust (1993), pp. 228-229.

24.R. Hrabar, et al, Fate of Polish Children (1981), p. 74. See also: M. Gilbert, The Holocaust (1986), p. 806.

25."Stutthof," Less Than Slaves (1986), p. 1772; K. Feig, Hitler's Death Camps (1981), p. 203.

26.Eugen Kogen, et al., Nazi Mass Murder (New Haven, Conn.: 1994), pp. 190-193, and, in the original German-language edition, Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1986), pp. 263-266; The entry by K. Dunin-Wasowicz in the Encyclopedia of The Holocaust (New York: 1990), p. 1423, refers to "the camp's gas chambers" (plural).

27.Statement by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Hellmuth Auerbach), March 6, 1985. Facsimile in: I. Weckert, "Massentötungen" oder Desinformation, "Historische Tatsachen Nr. 24" (published by U. Walendy in 1985), p. 21.

28.E. Kogen, et al., Nazi Mass Murder (1994), p. 191 (in the 1986 German edition, Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, this is p. 263); Justiz und NS-Verbrechen (Amsterdam), vol. 20, p. 600 or p. 585-6 (Verdict in 1964 Tübingen case Ks 5/63.); K. Feig, Hitler's Death Camps (1981), pp. 192-193, 200; Central Commission..., German Crimes in Poland (Warsaw: 1946-1947), vol. 2, pp. 118-119.

29.E. Kogen, et al., Nazi Mass Murder (1994), p. 191 (in the 1986 German edition, Nationalsozialistische Massentötungen durch Giftgas, this is p. 263).

30.It has also been claimed that Jews were gassed at Stutthof with Zyklon in a rail car. See: E. Kogen, et al., Nazi Mass Murder (1994), pp. 192-193; Central Commission..., German Crimes in Poland (Warsaw: 1946-1947), vol. 2, p. 119.

31.Justiz und NS-Verbrechen (Amsterdam), vol. 20, p. 615.

32.Czeslaw Pilichowski, No Time Limit for These Crimes (Warsaw: Interpress, 1980), pp. 156-157.

33.K. Dunin-Wasowicz, Oboz Koncentracyjny Stutthof (1966), p. 255.

34.Szymon Datner, et al, Le Genocide Nazi 1939-1945 (Warsaw: 1962), p. 218.

35."Stutthof," Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 15, p. 464; M. Gilbert, Atlas of The Holocaust (1993), pp. 195, 217.; According to Polish historian K. Dunin-Wasowicz, "Of the fifty thousand Jews who were brought to Stutthof, nearly all died." Source: Encyclopedia of The Holocaust (New York: 1990), p. 1423.


From The Journal of Historical Review, September-October 1997 (Vol. 16, No. 5), pages 2-6. (Slightly revised in August 2019.)

 

[Apollonian]

Stalin's War Against His Own Troops​

The Tragic Fate of Soviet Prisoners of War in German Captivity

By Yuri Teplyakov

Link: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/Teplyakov.html

At dawn on June 22, 1941, began the mightiest military offensive in history: the German-led Axis attack against the Soviet Union. During the first 18 months of the campaign, about three million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner. By the end of the conflict four years later, more than five million Soviet troops are estimated to have fallen into German hands. Most of these unfortunate men died in German captivity.

A major reason for this was the unusual nature of the war on the eastern front, particularly during the first year -- June 1941-June 1942 -- when vastly greater numbers of prisoners fell into German hands than could possibly be accommodated adequately. However, and as Russian journalist Teplyakov explains in the following article, much of the blame for the terrible fate of the Soviet soldiers in German captivity was due to the inflexibly cruel policy of Soviet dictator Stalin.

During the war, the Germans made repeated attempts through neutral countries and the International Committee of the Red Cross to reach mutual agreement on the treatment of prisoners by Germany and the USSR. As British historian Robert Conquest explains in his book Stalin: Breaker of Nations, the Soviets adamantly refused to cooperate:

"When the Germans approached the Soviets, through Sweden, to negotiate observance of the provisions of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, Stalin refused. The Soviet soldiers in German hands were thus unprotected even in theory. Millions of them died in captivity, through malnutrition or maltreatment. If Stalin had adhered to the convention (to which the USSR had not been a party) would the Germans have behaved better? To judge by their treatment of other 'Slav submen' POWs (like the Poles, even surrendering after the [1944] Warsaw Rising), the answer seems to be yes. (Stalin's own behavior to [Polish] prisoners captured by the Red Army had already been demonstrated at Katyn and elsewhere [where they were shot]."

Another historian, Nikolai Tolstoy, affirms in The Secret Betrayal:

"Hitler himself urged Red Cross inspection of [German] camps [holding Soviet prisoners of war]. But an appeal to Stalin for prisoners' postal services received a reply that clinched the matter: 'There are no Soviet prisoners of war. The Soviet soldier fights on till death. If he chooses to become a prisoner, he is automatically excluded from the Russian community. We are not interested in a postal service only for Germans'."

Given this situation, the German leaders resolved to treat Soviet prisoners no better than the Soviet leaders were treating the German soldiers they held. As can be imagined, Soviet treatment of German prisoners was harsh. Of an estimated three million German soldiers who fell into Soviet hands, more than two million perished in captivity. Of the 91,000 German troops captured in the Battle of Stalingrad, fewer than 6,000 ever returned to Germany.

As Teplyakov also explains here, Red Army "liberation" of the surviving Soviet prisoners in German camps brought no end to the suffering of these hapless men. It wasn't until recently, when long-suppressed Soviet wartime records began to come to light and long-silenced voices could at last speak out, that the full story of Stalin's treatment of Soviet prisoners became known. It wasn't until 1989, for example, that Stalin's grim Order No. 270 of August 16, 1941 -- cited below -- was first published.

-- Mark Weber

"What is the most horrible thing about war?"

Marshal Ivan Bagramyan, three-time Hero of the Soviet Union Alexander Pokryshkin, and Private Nikolai Romanov, who has no battle orders or titles, all replied with just one word: "Captivity."

"Is it more horrible than death?" I was asking soldier Nikolai Romanov a quarter of a century ago when, on the sacred day of May 9 [anniversary of the end of the war against Germany in 1945], we were drinking bitter vodka together to commemorate the souls of the Russian muzhiks who would never return to that orphaned village on the bank of the Volga.

"It's more horrible," he replied. "Death is your own lot. But if it's captivity, it spells trouble for many ..."

At that time, in 1965, I could not even vaguely imagine the extent of the tragedy which had befallen millions upon millions, nor did I know that that tragedy had been triggered by just a few lines from the Interior Service Regulations of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army: a Soviet soldier must not be taken prisoner against his will. And if he has been, he is a traitor to the Motherland.

How many of them were there -- those "traitors"?

"During the war years," I was told by Colonel Ivan Yaroshenko, Deputy Chief of the Central Archives of the USSR Ministry of Defense, in Podolsk near Moscow, "as many as 32 million people were soldiers, and 5,734,528 of them were taken prisoner by the enemy."

Later I learned where this happened and when. Thus, the Red Army suffered the most tragic losses in terms of prisoners of war in the following battles: Belostok-Minsk, August 1941, 323,000; Uman, August 1941, 103,000; Smolensk-Roslavl, August 1941, 348,000; Gomel, August 1941, 30,000; Demyansk, September 1941, 35,000; Kiev, September 1941, 665,000; Luga-Leningrad, September 1941, 20,000; Melitopol, October 1941, 100,000; Vyazma, October 1941, 662,000; Kerch, November 1941, 100,000; Izyum-Kharkov, May 1942, 207,000. People were taken prisoner even in February 1945 (Hungary), 100,000.

The same archives in Podolsk hold another 2.5 million cards "missing in action" -- two and a half million who never returned home. Experts believe: two million of them are still lying in Russia's forests and marshes. And about 200,000 must be added to the list of POWs. Proof? From time to time the Podolsk archives receive a letter from somewhere in Australia or the United States: "I was taken prisoner. Request confirmation that I took part in battles against fascism."

This person was lucky -- he survived. The majority, however, had a different lot. German statistics put it on record: 280,000 person died at deportation camps and 1,030,157 were executed when trying to escape or died at factories or mines in Germany.

Many of our officers and men were killed by famine before they reached the camps. Nearly 400,000 men died in November-December 1941 alone. During the entire war there were 235,473 British and American prisoners of war in Germany -- 8,348 of them died. Were our men weaker? Hardly. The reasons were different. In the West it is believed that the millions of our POWs who died in captivity fell victim not only to fascism but also to the Stalinist system itself. At least half of those who died from hunger could have been saved had Stalin not called them traitors and refused to send food parcels to them via the International Red Cross.

It can be argued how many would have survived, but it's a fact that we left our POWs to the mercy of fate. The Soviet Union did not sign the Geneva Convention concerning the legal status of prisoners of war. Refusing to sign it was consistent with the Jesuitical nature of the "leader of the peoples."

From Stalin's point of view, several provisions of the Convention were incompatible with the moral and economic institutions which were inherent in the world's "freest country." The Convention, it turns out, did not guarantee the right to POWs as working people: low wages, no days off, no fixed working hours. Exception was also taken to the privileges fixed for some groups of POWs. In other words it should be more humane. But greater hypocrisy can hardly be imagined. What privileges were enjoyed at that very same time by millions in [Soviet] GULAG prison camps? What guarantees existed there and how many days off did they have?

In August 1941 Hitler permitted a Red Cross delegation to visit the camp for Soviet POWs in Hammerstadt. It is these contacts that resulted in an appeal to the Soviet government, requesting that it should send food parcels for our officers and men. We are prepared to fulfill and comply with the norms of the Geneva convention, Moscow said in its reply, but sending food in the given situation and under fascist control is the same as making presents to the enemy.

The reply came as a surprise. The Red Cross representatives had not read Stalin's Order of the Day -- Order No. 270, signed on August 16, 1941. Otherwise they would have understood how naive their requests and offers were, and how great was Stalin's hatred for those who had found themselves behind enemy lines.

It made no difference: who, where, how and why? Even the dead were considered to be criminals. Lt.-Gen. Vladimir Kachalov, we read in the order, "being in encirclement together with the headquarters of a body of troops, displayed cowardice and surrendered to the German fascists. The headquarters of Kachalov's groups broke out of the encirclement, the units of Kachalov's group battled their way out of the encirclement, but Lt.-Gen. Kachalov preferred to desert to the enemy."

General Vladimir Kachalov had been lying for 12 days in a burned out tank at the Starinka village near Smolensk, and never managed to break out to reach friendly forces. Yet this was of no concern for anyone. They were busy with something else -- looking for scapegoats whom they could dump all of their anger on, looking for enemies of the people whose treachery and cowardice had again subverted the will of the great military leader.

We had to be "convinced" again and again: the top echelons of authority, the leaders, have no relation whatsoever to any tragedy, to any failure -- be it the collapse of the first Five-Year Plan or the death of hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the Dnieper. Moreover, these misfortunes cannot have objective reasons either, being due solely to the intrigues of saboteurs and the enemies of the progressive system. For decades, ever since the 1930s, we have been permanently looking for scapegoats in the wrong place, but finding them nevertheless. At that time, in the first summer of the war, plenty of them were found. And the more the better. On June 4, 1940, the rank of general was re-established in the Red Army. They were awarded to 966 persons. More than 50 were taken prisoner in the very first year of the war. Very many of them would envy their colleagues -- those 150 generals who would later die on the battlefields. The torments of captivity proved to be darker than the grave. At any rate the destinies of Generals Pavel Ponedelin and Nikolai Kirillov, mentioned in the same Order No. 270, prove that this is so. They staunchly withstood their years in the German camps. In April 1945 the [western] Allies set them free and turned them over to the Soviet side. It seemed that everything had been left behind, but they were not forgiven for August 1941. They were arrested after a "state check-up": five years in the Lefortovo jail for political prisoners and execution by a firing squad on August 25, 1950.

"Stalin's last tragic acts in his purging of the military were the accusations of betrayal and treachery he advanced in the summer of 1941 against the Western Front commanders, Pavlov and Klimovskikh, and several other generals among whom, as it became clear later, there were also people who behaved in an uncompromising way to the end when in captivity." This assessment is by the famous chronicler of the war, Konstantin Simonov. It appeared in the 1960s, but during the wartime ordeals there was indomitable faith: the prisoners of war (both generals and soldiers) were guilty. No other yardstick existed.

International law states that military captivity is not a crime, "a prisoner of war must be as inviolable as the sovereignty of a people, and as sacred as a misfortune." This is for others, whereas for us there was a different law -- Stalin's Order No. 270.

If ... "instead of organizing resistance to the enemy, some Red Army men prefer to surrender, they shall be destroyed by all possible means, both ground-based and from the air, whereas the families of the Red Army men who have been taken prisoner shall be deprived of the state allowance [that is, rations] and relief."

The commanders and political officers ... "who surrender to the enemy shall be considered malicious deserters, whose families are liable to be arrested [just] as the families of deserters who have violated the oath and betrayed their Motherland."

Just a few lines, but they stand for the hundreds of thousands of children and old folks who died from hunger only because their father or son happened to be taken prisoner.

Just a few lines, but they amount to a verdict on those who never even thought of a crime, who were only waiting for a letter from the front.

Having read these lines, I came to understand the amount of grief they carried for absolutely innocent people, just as I understood the secret sorrow of the words Private Nikolai Romanov told me a quarter of a century ago: "Your own captivity spells trouble for many."

I understood why the most horrible thing for our soldiers was not to be killed, but to be reported "missing in action," and why before each battle, especially before the assault crossing of rivers, they asked one another: "Buddy, if I get drowned, say that you saw me die."

Setting their feet on a shaky pontoon and admitting, as it were, that they could be taken prisoner solely through their own fault, they mentally glanced back not out of fear for their own lives -- they were tormented and worried over the lives of those who had stayed back at home.

But what was the fault of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers encircled near Vyazma when Hitler launched Operation Taifun -- his advance on Moscow? "The most important thing is not to surrender your positions," the General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief ordered them. And the army was feverishly digging trenches facing the west, when panzer wedges were already enveloping them from the east.

General Franz Halder, Chief of Staff of the Wehrmacht's ground forces, made the following entry in his diary on this occasion: "October 4 -- 105 days of the war. The enemy has continued everywhere holding the unattacked sectors of the front, with the result that deep envelopment of these enemy groups looms in the long term."

Who was supposed to see these wedges? A soldier from his tiny foxhole or Stalin from the GHQ? And what was the result? Who was taken prisoner? Who betrayed the Motherland? The soldier did.

In May 1942, as many as 207,047 officers and men (the latest figure) found themselves encircled at Kharkov. When Khrushchev held power, it was Stalin that was considered to be guilty of this. When Brezhnev took over, the blame was again put on Khrushchev who, incidentally, had been merely warned by Stalin for that defeat which opened the road for the Germans to the Volga. But who then betrayed the Motherland, who was taken prisoner? The soldier.

May 19, 1942, is the date of our army's catastrophe in the Crimea. "The Kerch Operation may be considered finished: 150,000 POWs and a large quantity of captured equipment." This is a document from the German side. And here is a document from the Soviet side cited by Konstantin Simonov: "I happened to be on the Kerch Peninsula in 1942. The reason for the humiliating defeat is clear to me. Complete mistrust of the army and front commanders, Mekhlis' stupid willfulness and arbitrary actions. He ordered that no trenches be dug, so as not to sap the soldiers' offensive spirit."

Stalin's closest aide and then Chief of the Main Political Administration (GPU), Lev Mekhlis, the first Commissar of the Army and Navy, returned to Moscow after that defeat. And what did the soldier do? The soldier stayed in captivity.

There is no denying that no war can do without treachery and traitors. They could also be found among POWs. But if compared with the millions of their brothers in captivity, they amounted to no more than a drop in the ocean. Yet this drop existed. There is no escaping this. Some were convinced by leaflets like this one:

The Murderous Balance of Bolshevism:

Killed during the years of the Revolution and Civil War -- 2,200,000 persons.

Died from famine and epidemics in 1918 -1921 and in 1932-1933 -- 14,500,000 persons.

Perished in forced labor camps -- 10,000,000 persons.

Some even put it this way: I am not going into action against my people, I am going into action against Stalin. But the majority joined fascist armed formations with only one hope: as soon as the first fighting starts, I'll cross the line to join friendly troops. Not everyone managed to do this, although the following fact is also well known. On September 14, 1943, when the results of the Kursk Battle were summed up, Hitler explained the defeat by the "treachery of auxiliary units": indeed, at that time 1,300 men -- practically a whole regiment -- deserted to the Red Army's side on the southern sector. "But now I am fed up with this," Hitler said. "I order these units to be disarmed immediately and this whole gang to be sent to the mines in France."

It has to be admitted that it was Hitler who rejected longer than all others the proposals to form military units from among Soviet POWs, although as early as September 1941 Colonel von Tresckow had drawn up a plan for building up a 200,000-strong Russian anti-Soviet army. It was only on the eve of the Stalingrad Battle, when prisoners of war already numbered millions, that the Führer gave his consent at last.

All in all, it became possible to form more than 180 units. Among them the number of Russian formations was 75; those formed from among Kuban, Don and Terek Cossacks -- 216; Turkistan and Tatar (from Tataria and the Crimean Tatars) -- 42; Georgian -- 11; peoples of the Northern Caucasus -- 12; Azerbaijani -- 13; Armenian -- 8.

The numerical strength of these battalions by their national affiliation (data as of January 24, 1945) was the following: Latvians -- 104,000; Tatars (Tataria) -- 12,500, Crimean Tatars -- 10,000; Estonians -- 10,000; Armenians -- 7,000; Kalmyks -- 5,000. And the Russians? According to the official figures of Admiral Karl Dünitz's "government," as of May 20, 1945, there were the 599th Russian Brigade -- 13,000, the 600th -- 12,000, and the 650th -- 18,000 men.

If all of this is put together (as we are doing now), it would seem that there were many who served on the other side. But if we remember that only 20 percent of these forces took part in hostilities, that they were recruited from among millions of POWs, that thousands upon thousands crossed the front line to return to friendly troops, the brilliance of the figures will clearly fade.

One detail -- the Reich's special services displayed special concern over forming non-Russian battalions as if they knew that they would be required, especially after the war when whole peoples, from babies to senile old men, came to be accused of treachery. And it made no difference -- whether you were kept in a prison camp or served in the army -- all the same you were an enemy.

But the POWs themselves were not yet aware of this -- everything still lay ahead. The hangover after liberation would set in a little later. Both for those who themselves escaped from the camps (500,000 in 1944, according to the estimate of Germany's Armaments Minister Speer) and for those who after liberation by Red Army units (more than a million officers and men) again fought in its ranks.

For too long a time we used to judge the spring of 1945 solely by the humane instructions issued by our formidable marshals -- allot milk for Berlin's children, feed women and old men. It was strange reading those documents, and at the same time chewing steamed rye instead of bread, and eating soup made of dog meat (only shortly before her death did my grandmother confess she had slaughtered dogs to save us from hunger). Reading those orders, I was prepared to cry from tender emotions: how noble it was to think that way and to show such concern for the German people.

And who of us knew that at the same time the marshals received different orders from the Kremlin with respect to their own people?

[To the] Commanders of the troops of the First and Second Byelorussian Fronts [Army Groups], and the First, Second, Third and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts ...

The Military Councils of the Fronts shall form camps in [rear-zone] service areas for the accommodation and maintenance of former prisoners of war and repatriated Soviet citizens -- each camp for 10,000 persons. All in all, there shall be formed: at the Second Byelorussian Front -- 15 [camps]; at the First Byelorussian Front -- 30; at the First Ukrainian Front -- 30; at the Fourth Ukrainian Front -- 5; at the Second Ukrainian Front -- 10; at the Third Ukrainian Front -- 10 camps ...

The check-up [of the former prisoners of war and repatriated citizens] shall be entrusted as follows: former Red Army servicemen -- to the bodies of SMERSH counter-intelligence; civilians -- to the commissions of the NKVD, NKGB, SMERSH ...

J. Stalin

I phoned Col.-Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, Chief of the Institute of Military History under the USSR Ministry of Defense [and author of Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy]: "Where did you find that order? Both at the State Security Committee and at the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs they told me that they had nothing of the kind."

"This one is from Stalin's personal archives. The camps existed, which means that there are also papers from which it is possible to learn everything: who, where, what they were fed, what they thought about. Most likely, the documents are in the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The convoy troops were subordinate to this government department. It included the Administration for the Affairs of Former Prisoners of War. Make a search."

And search I did. Maj.-Gen. Pyotr Mishchenkov, First Deputy Chief of the present-day Main Administration for Corrective Affairs (GUID) at the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs, was sincerely surprised: "This is the first I heard about this. I would be glad to help, but there is nothing I can do about it. I know that there was a colony in the Chunsky district of the Irkutsk Region. People got there after being checked up at the filtering camps mentioned in Stalin's order. They were all convicted under Article 58 -- high treason."

One colony ... Where are the others, what happened to their inmates? After all, as many as 100 camps were at work. The only thing I managed to find out -- by October 1, 1945, they had "filtered" 5,200,000 Soviet citizens; 2,034,000 were turned over by the Allies -- 98 percent of those who stayed in Germany's western occupation zones, mostly POWs. How many of them returned home? And how many went, in accordance with Order No. 270, into Soviet concentration camps? I don't yet have any authentic documents in my possession. Again only Western estimates and some eyewitness accounts.

I spoke to one such eyewitness on the Kolyma. A former "traitor to the Motherland," but then the accountant general of the Srednekan gold field, Viktor Masol, told me how in June 1942 in the Don steppes after the Kharkov catastrophe they -- unarmed, hungry, ragged Red Army men -- were herded like sheep by German tanks into crowds of many thousands. Freight cars took them to Germany, where he mixed concrete for the Reich, and three years later they were sent in freight cars from Germany across the whole Soviet Union -- as far as the Pacific Ocean. In the port of Vanino they were loaded into the holds of the Felix Dzerzhinsky steamship [named after the founder of the Soviet secret police], which had previously borne the name of Nikolai Yezhov, [a former] People's Commissar of Internal Affairs [that is, the NKVD or secret police], bound for Magadan. During the week they were on their way, they were given food only once -- barrels with gray flour, covered with boiling water, were lowered through the hatch. And they, burning their hands and crushing one another, snatched this mess and stuffed it, choking, into their mouths: most often people go crazy with hunger. Those who died on the way were thrown overboard in the Nagayev Bay, the survivors marched into the taiga, again behind the barbed wire of -- now -- their native prison camps.

Just a few survived and returned. But even they were like lepers. Outcasts. How many times they heard: "Better a bullet through your head ..."

Many former POWs thought about a bullet in the 1940s-1950s. Both when they were reminded from the militia office -- "you are two days overdue" (all the POWs were kept on a special register with mandatory reports on strictly definite days), and when people told them: "Keep silent. You whiled away your time in captivity on fascist grub ..."

And they did keep silent.

In 1956, after Khrushchev's report, it became possible to speak about Stalin. Former POWs were no longer automatically enemies of the people, but not quite yet defenders of the Motherland. Something in between. On paper it was one way, but in life everything was different.

Two years ago, on the eve of V-Day, I interviewed Col.-Gen. Alexei Zheltov, Chairman of the Soviet War Veterans' Committee. As befits the occasion, he was telling me with tears in his eyes about the holiday, about a Soviet soldier, an accordion in his hands, in the streets of spring-time Vienna. And I don't know what made me ask him, well, and former prisoners of war, are they war veterans?

"No, they are not veterans. Don't you have anything else to write about? Look how many real soldiers we have ..."

If Alexei Zheltov, the tried and tested veteran commissar, were the only one to think that way, that wouldn't be so bad. The trouble is that this philosophy is preached by the majority of the top brass. Both those who have long retired on pensions and who still hold command positions. For nearly 40 years we have been "orphaned," have lived without "the father of the peoples," but we sacredly revere his behests, sometimes not even noticing this ourselves.

Human blood is not water. But is has also proved to be a perfect conserving agent for Stalin's morality. It has become even thicker. It has not disappeared even after several generations. It lives on. And not infrequently it triumphs. Try and raise the problem of prisoners of war (even before me this theme was taken up on more than one occasion, so I'm no discoverer here) -- the reaction is always the same: better talk about something else. And if you fail to heed a "piece of good advice," they may even start to threaten: "Don't you dare!"

To whom should one address his requests? To the government or the Supreme Soviet? What beautiful walls of the Kremlin should one knock on to demand that soldierly dignity be returned to former POWs, that their good name be restored?

Suppose your knocking has been heard. They will ask: what are you complaining about? What resolution do you take exception to? Oh, not a resolution. You are only worried over the past? How strange ...

But it's even more strange that we still have real soldiers, real heroes and real people, meaning that there are also those who are not real. To this day our life is still like a battle front: by force of habit, we continue putting people in slots -- these on this side, others over there. There seems to be neither law nor Order No. 270 any longer, like there is no one and nothing to fight against, but all the same whatever was once called black may at best become only gray. But by no means white.

... May 9: the whole country cries and rejoices. Veterans don their medals and pour out wine, remembering their buddies. But even in this circle a former POW is the last to hold out his glass and the last to take the floor.

What then is to be done? What should we do to squeeze the Stalinoid slave out of ourselves?


About the Author

Yuri Teplyakov, born in 1937, studied journalism at Moscow State University. He worked as a journalist for the Moscow daily newspapers Izvestia and Komsomolskaya Pravda, and for the APN information agency. From 1980 to 1993 he worked for the weekly Moscow News. In writing this article, he expresses thanks to Mikhail Semiryaga, D.Sc. (History), "who provided me with considerable material, which he found in German archives. As for the documents of Soviet filtering camps, I shall go on with my searches." This article originally appeared in Moscow News, No. 19, 1990, and was reprinted by special arrangement in The Journal of Historical Review, July-August 1994 (Vol. 14, No. 4), pages 4-10.

 

[Apollonian]

'Do Not Respond': Did The Soviet Government Abandon Its WWII Prisoners? ​

Link: https://www.rferl.org/a/do-not-resp...ent-abandon-its-wwii-prisoners-/29217414.html

May 09, 2018 13:30 GMT
By Robert Coalson
Dmitry Volchek

As Russia's government pulled out all the stops on May 9 to celebrate the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany and to remember the estimated 25 million Soviets who died during the war, historian Konstantin Bogoslavsky was working to shed light on the fate of Soviet POWs "abandoned" by their own government.

The savagery of Hitler's war on the Soviet Union is widely documented, but many details remain elusive about the plight of Red Army prisoners.

Their exact number will never be known for sure, but estimates of Soviet Red Army soldiers taken prisoner during World War II range from 4 million to 6 million. About two-thirds of those captured by the Germans -- more than 3 million troops -- had died by the time their comrades captured Berlin in May 1945.

“ The Soviet Union was the only country that refused to cooperate with the Red Cross and did not even allow Red Cross delegations onto its territory."

-- Historian Konstantin Bogoslavsky

The archives of the Soviet People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs were recently digitized, and Bogoslavsky has been studying the wartime correspondence between the Soviet government and the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Geneva-based international organization that tried to aid prisoners, the wounded, and refugees during the war.

"Already on June 23, 1941, the Red Cross sent a telegram to [Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav] Molotov offering its assistance to the Soviet Union during the war," Bogoslavsky told RFE/RL. "Molotov confirmed his interest."

In the first weeks of the conflict, Germany and the Soviet Union both confirmed they would adhere to international conventions on the treatment of prisoners. However, it quickly became clear that neither side intended to keep its commitment.

In the first six months of the war, as the Germans raced across the Soviet Union to the outskirts of Moscow, more than 3 million Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner, often as a result of encirclement as Soviet officials refused to allow them to retreat or failed even to issue orders.

According to the archival materials, Bogoslavsky said, the Axis powers offered to exchange lists of prisoners with the Soviets in December 1941. Molotov's deputy, Andrei Vyshinsky, wrote to his boss that a list of German prisoners had been compiled and advised that it be released to prevent harm to the Soviet Union's reputation.

"But Molotov wrote on the message, '...don't send the lists (the Germans are violating legal and other norms),'" Bogoslavsky said. "After that, almost all the letters and telegrams received from the Red Cross...were marked by Molotov as 'Do Not Respond.'"

A request from the Red Cross to help Soviet prisoners, with the notation "Do Not Respond" in Molotov's hand.
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A request from the Red Cross to help Soviet prisoners, with the notation "Do Not Respond" in Molotov's hand.

The Soviet government adopted this policy as a result of a cold-blooded calculus.

"By the end of 1941, more than 3 million people had been taken prisoner, and one of the Soviet leadership's goals was to control this avalanche," Bogoslavsky said. "A Soviet soldier had to understand that if he was captured, he wouldn't be getting any food parcels from the Red Cross and he wouldn't be sending any postcards to his loved ones. He had to know that the only thing awaiting him there was inevitable death."

“ Stalin's government, in my opinion, was guilty of not giving moral support or material assistance to its own soldiers, who were simply abandoned."

-- Historian Konstantin Bogoslavsky

One Soviet document issued under Stalin's signature, the historian noted, asserted that "the panic-monger, the coward, and the deserter are worse than the enemy."

In addition, the Soviet government refused to allow any Red Cross representatives into its own notorious prison camps, where they might stumble on secrets of Stalin's prewar repressions.

"The distribution of food and medicine to prisoners was carried out by representatives of the Red Cross, and that would have meant allowing them access to camps in the Soviet Union," Bogoslavsky said. "The Soviet leadership was categorically opposed to that. Despite numerous requests, Red Cross representatives were never given visas to travel to the Soviet Union."

"Of course, the entire responsibility for the mass deaths of Soviet prisoners must fall on the leadership of the Third Reich," he added. "But Stalin's government, in my opinion, was guilty of not giving moral support or material assistance to its own soldiers, who were simply abandoned."

In March 1943, Molotov wrote a letter to U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union William Standley, who had forwarded an offer from the Vatican to facilitate an exchange of information about Soviet prisoners being held by the Germans.

"I have the honor of reporting that at the present time this matter does not interest the Soviet government," Molotov wrote. "Conveying to the government of the United States our gratitude for its attention to Soviet prisoners, I ask you to accept my assurances of my most profound respect for you, Mr. Ambassador."

Molotov's letter to U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union William Standley

During the course of the war, the Soviet government also refused to cooperate with the governments of German allies Finland and Romania on the prisoners issue. Soviet prisoners in Finland did receive Red Cross packages that were organized by a charity in Switzerland and distributed in Finland on a unilateral basis.

In 1942, Romania offered to release 1,018 of the worst-off Soviet prisoners in exchange for a list of Romanians being held by the Soviet Union.

"The Soviet leadership simply ignored that offer," Bogoslavsky said.

"The Soviet Union was the only country that refused to cooperate with the Red Cross and did not even allow Red Cross delegations onto its territory," he added. "Germany did not work with the Red Cross in connection with Soviet prisoners, but it did cooperate concerning those of its Western enemies -- the Americans, the British, and the French."

The misfortunes of many Soviet POWs did not end when the guns fell silent.

"It is a myth that all those who returned from POW camps were sent to the gulag," Bogoslavsky said. "The NKVD (Soviet secret police) set up special camps for checking and filtering returning prisoners. According to historian [Viktor] Zemskov, about 1.5 million former prisoners passed through the filtration process. Of them, about 245,000 were repressed."

Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting by RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Dmitry Volchek