Why Did The Germans Capture So Few Soviet POWs After 1942?
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- čas přidán 14. 10. 2022
- When Operation Barbarossa started, German soldiers captured large swaths of Soviet soldiers. This continued on until late 1942, but then suddenly became a trickle and never happened on the same scale again. Why? What changed? This video goes in depth on what happened in the Eastern Front conflict that would change the amount of Soviet POWs that the Germans captured.
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EXCELLENT WORK. | Well presented, documented, and illustrated report about PoWs.
Thank you very much for your nice comment! I wish others would watch this video, because it's been really neglected!
I remember reading the memoirs of a British PoW. There was a camp of Brit/US/ Commonwealth prisoners and a Soviet one next door... The British received Red Cross parcels and had enough food but the Soviets looked like Concentration camp inmates... The officer would pass food packages to the Soviets......
The Soviet Union was not a signature of the Geneva Convention. Germany and all the Western Allies were. The Soviet Union enslaved and brutally tortured their own citizens so the Germans weren't under any illusions about how the Soviets would treat German POW's. Most of the Red Army POW's that were "liberated" ended up in Stalin's gulags charged with treason. Those that died ended up being blamed on the Germans, just like all the Soviet civilians that were murdered by communist partisans for giving aid to the Germans and just like the murder of 16,000 Polish officers and intellectuals at Katyn Forest which the Western Allies knew for a fact were murdered by Stalin yet the Germans were charged for the massacre at Nuremberg.
At the beginning of their campaign they had 700.000 POW. Just look it up.
And they were woefully unprepared to deal with such a large number of prisoners. Typhus was the biggest killer of Soviet POW's.
"Blocking detachments"
A probable explanation is that many early captives either starved from neglect or were worked to death. The irony being latter German manpower shortage encouraged 'hilfswillige', which wasn't as successful as it might otherwise have been.
Elr James, yes, and that conclusion is totally logical too. If the Germans had simply treated their prisoners humanely, they may have had more Hiwis later. Thank you for your comment and watching!
@@EmersusTechthey were treated humanely. You've watched too many Spielberg movies.
By then the Russians realised exactly what German culture and civilization entailed.
Andrew Allen, yes, the Soviets were learning! Thanks for the comment and for watching!
It was the Soviet regime that murdered 40 million of it's own citizens and enslaved tens of millions more. They also exterminated the intelligentsia of every nation they occupied, such as the infamous Katyn Forest Massacre in which they systematically murd€r€d all the Polish military officers, poets, lawyers, nobles, priests, et cetera. Check out Solzhenitsyn's shadow banned book, "2OO Y€ars T0g€th€r".
On the other hand Germany has always been known as the "land of poets and thinkers".
You've watched far too many Steven Spielberg movies my friend. Let go of the hate....
5.7 million POWs is not a few but that was from 1941 operation Barbarossa
I have heard several possible explanations, and all of them could be true at the same time...
a) The Soviet Army had learned from its 1941 defeats and now was using far more flexible tactics then before,
b) The number of Soviet prisoners taken in 1941 was exaggerated (i.e. in this pocket there were ten divisions, at 15,000 men each that means we took no less than 300,000 prisoners!), perhaps for propaganda purposes, perhaps because no one kept accurate records, the Nazis weren't planning to keep them alive
c) The German Army had lost so many infantrymen than now the pockets weren't really closed tight and many Soviet soldiers managed to escape from them
d) From 1942 on Soviet soldiers knew what happened to those that surrendered to the Germans
Red Army soldiers, if they retreated against orders, were shot to death on the battlefield by NKVD men manning what were called "blocking detachments". Also all the Soviet POW's that were "liberated" ended up in Siberian gulags charged with treason. The tens of thousands of Soviet POW's that wound up in gulags and died were counted as having died in German POW camps. No Soviet numbers pertaining to the war can be trusted. The state motto was, "truth is a mere bourgeois illusion" for Pete's sake.
after '42 the Germans would have been on the back foot instead of surrounding thousands