SS
SOVIET POWS TREATMENT 1941
Captured Red Army men march to the rear. Most of the Soviet POWS captured in 1941 did not even make it to the camps in Poland. The German Army simply had not prepared/or cared for such massive numbers of prisoners. Here is an example of the attrition they suffered. It is hard to overemphasize how much these changing policies and…
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Soviet PoW and Polish and Soviet Civilians – The Holocaust?
Of the 5,700,000 Soviet soldiers who surrendered to the Germans during World War II, more than 3,000,000 were either shot shortly after capture, starved to death in prisoner of war camps, gassed in extermination camps, or worked to death in concentration camps. They are usually ignored in books about the…
Foundation gives voice to Nazi-era forced laborers
Many forced laborers became pariahs once they returned to their home countries. The Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation no longer pays out compensation to victims of Nazi forced labor in 2007. But it hasn’t stopped working to publicize the former forced workers’ suffering. The Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation…
The Cossacks
Operation Keelhaul – Betrayal of the Cossacks in Lienz The Cossacks were probably the most militarily skilled and loyal foreign volunteers of the Wehrmacht. In September 1942 the German cavalry General von Pannwitz started raising a complete division with Cossacks, by absorption of previous regiment-sized units like Kampfgruppen von Jungschultz,…
Vlassov’s Army
Russia was far from a monolithic structure. It contained numerous diverse ethnic groups, many of which had long histories of resenting Russian suzerainty and domination. Combined with the long standing hatred of Russia, the new Soviet regime was often even more hated, even by the Russians, so when the…
Organising Hell in the East
While the German armies had been desperately trying to carve out this new empire in the East, the tentacles of the SS and its various subsidiary organizations had been assiduous in their allotted task of securing the civilian population. In Russia their first move was to deprive the people of…
WAR OF ANNIHILATION
Hitler said on many occasions that his dreams of race and space inevitably would involve war with the USSR. Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union, was set for mid-1941. Even before it began Hitler insisted it was to be a Vernichtungskrieg, or war of annihilation unlike any other…