About two thirds of the USSR’s 27 million casualties were civilians – that is, almost 10% of its prewar population. Had those percentages been applied to Nazi Germany, it would lost 8 million people – an order of magnitude than the 400,000 civilians it lost due to Allied strategic bombing, and the 600,000 who died during the expulsions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe (the vast majority of which were carried out by local authorities, not the Red Army or the NKVD).
About 3.3 million out of 5.7 million Soviet POWs died in Nazi custody (compared to 15% of German POWs in the half-starved USSR, and low single digit figures for Allied POWs in Nazi Germany). Had the Soviets treated its 4.2 million German POWs as harshly, with a death rate of 60%, the German number of military dead would have risen from 5.3 million to around 7.3 million. That’s not far off the figure of 8.7 million Soviet military deaths (9.2 million taking into account unregistered militia in 1941).
It’s now well known that Nazi long-term plans called for the eventual genocide of about 75% of the Soviet population, and the helotization/expulsion of the rest. If we count probabilities, assuming there was a 50% chance of Nazi victory over the USSR in 1941-42, and a 50% chance of Generalplan Ost being implemented in its full scale, that translates to around 200 million times 25% equals 50 million additional deaths. This means that in the average of all possible timelines, about 75 million Soviet citizens died, or 37.5% of its prewar population. That translates to around 30 million if these percentages are applied to Germany and its East European diaspora.
And yet for some people – for the most part, the most Rusophobic neocons and Cold Warriors, the more Nazi elements of the Alt Right, and deranged Poles and Balts who don’t quite realize what Hitler had in store for them – the Soviet rape of about 2 million women in Eastern Germany at the end of the war is supposed to be a really huge, defining war crime, even something that delegitimizes the overall Soviet victory.*
COMMENTS:
* IHR has interesting quotes (from mainstream sources) on the dynamics of the POW conundrum on the Eastfront:
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/teplyakov.html
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.
* In evolutionary terms the whole point of warfare is to crush your enemies (kill or enslave them) and take their women.
I see no reason to condemn either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union for their conduct on the Eastern Front here–except for Stalin starving an additional half million of his own people in order to prop up postwar client states.
The Nazis deserve credit for a grand and daring vision of expansion, though of course they bit off more than they could chew.
The Soviets were less ambitious, but in addition to scoring some pussy they solved their primary security challenge and carted off a lot of valuable physical and human capital.
If anything America and Britain should be condemned for squandering our blood and treasure for no gain at all.
* [Hitler] was simply concerned about the German prisoners, because unlike Stalin, he understood that under certain circumstances soldiers had little other options than to surrender, so he still considered German POWs of valuable racial stock. He was willing to care for Untermenschen if in return the Untermenschen cared for Germans.
When comparing POW casualties, circumstances need to be taken into account. The Germans planned huge encirclement battles, but didn’t plan how to feed the prisoners which must result (if successful) from such battles. This smacks of basically intentional genocide. On the other hand, it would’ve been possible to feed them by requisitioning food from the civilian population (the Germans had every right to do so), which probably would’ve resulted in more civilian deaths. I think we have to understand that the Germans didn’t think starving enemy civilians or POWs to death was a war crime – since in the First World War the allies illegally (at least, the Germans had thought it was illegal) foodstuffs were not let through the blockade, resulting in a famine in Germany, so the Germans thought that then starving civilians to death must be permissible. I don’t think they were totally unjustified, at least to an extent. Germany had food shortages (British civilians ate better than German civilians throughout the war, and the British starved to death a couple million Bengalis to do that…), and so why should they further restrict German rations only to feed Soviet POWs or civilians, when the Soviets refused to care for German POWs? In any event, German logistics were already overstretched, so feeding them from Germany or other parts of Europe was all but impossible.
On the other hand, treatment of Soviet POWs improved after they realized they needed more workers. But, their usefulness was still limited, because they were less trained and less disciplined than German workers. While German POWs were more useful to the Soviets: they were highly disciplined and reliable with better training than Soviet workers, so actually they were more valuable workers than Soviet workers themselves. This means the Soviets were highly incentivized to keep their POWs well-fed.
There is the issue of the very small percentage of Germans who survived captivity after being taken prisoner at Stalingrad. The issue is that they were already almost starved and/or frozen to death, and the Soviets initially underestimated the size of the German force caught in the pocket. They had no means of transportation (the trucks were needed elsewhere), so it was very difficult to get the prisoners to the nearest working train stations, usually they did it on foot. Many died already there, and frankly, I cannot see how anything better could be expected of the Soviets. Then the often very long train journey to POW camps followed, and the majority didn’t survive to reach the camps. Again, probably it could’ve been better organized, but realistically, it was very difficult and so unlikely of the Soviets to do so. At the camps, conditions weren’t that bad – as already per above, Germans were valuable workers, and so worth saving, but it was already too late for many.
There were actually similar considerations for the German treatment of Soviet POWs in the encirclement battles. Most Soviet prisoners fell into German hands already exhausted, underfed, thirsty, and even giving them water was difficult to organize. They had to be taken to camps or train stations on foot, in the exhausting heat, with a shortage of personnel to guard them, so it wasn’t exactly easy to care for them. Not that the Germans cared much, but still.
Hitler was a highly unusual dictator. His vision was a grandiose utopia of a huge Germanic empire from the Rhein (or a bit to the west of the Rhein) to the Ural mountains. It was to be populated exclusively by Germans, so they needed to get rid of the rest. Because the Slavs would presumably resent being deported from their ancestral homelands, killing them or starving large numbers of them to death was always an obvious solution, but the Nazis didn’t think much about it until 1941.
During wartime extreme solutions are also more likely and easier to implement. In peacetime, it’s more difficult – we cannot be sure, what the Germans would’ve done after victory. It’s even more difficult to imagine what they’d have done after Hitler died, which should’ve happened at one point in the 1950s or so. (I think it’s still not sure if he really had Parkinson’s or just a combination of some other diseases, stress, insomnia, etc.)
The holocaust was a bit different in that it always seemed realistic to get rid of Jews without murdering each one of them. However, as the war went on, it became slowly realistic to kill all of them. At the same time, Hitler thought (not totally without justification, but reality was way more complex of course) that it was the Jews who pushed the US to war with Germany. Therefore, he wanted to use European Jews as hostages against the US Jews. However, after the US (in his mind, US Jews) started to ratchet up their efforts against him (Lend Lease, the immediate and seamless extension of Lend Lease to the USSR, etc.), he started to turn the screws ever more on his hostages, starting to murder some of them in 1941 (some sporadic mass murder had happened before already), and finally deciding on killing all of them probably in December 1941. (By that time, almost a million had already been killed.)
Exterminating the Slavs would’ve been extremely difficult in wartime, and it’s questionable if they would’ve done that in peacetime when journalists and people move more freely, but who knows? Until the early 1930s, probably very few people thought that a regime could easily survive collectivization and a mass famine of its own making that the Soviet regime caused in the 1930s and actually remain stable or even stronger than before. But that’s what happened.
Stalin’s “scorched earth” tactics played some role here, since very little grain (or anything else) was left in the occupied western territories, so a famine was bound to happen. Why should the Germans care more for Soviet civilians than their “own” authorities?
* If your [Germany] country had won the war your eastern frontier would be at the Ural Mountains (why Hitler wanted to stop there I do not understand) and there’d be 200 million Germans today.
What’s not to like?
And from the Russian perspective, in addiction to the delight of victory, what could be more humiliating to the enemy than raping their women en masse? And certainly a nice little perk for long suffering Red Army soldiers.
* Everything that happened to Russians during World War 2 was deserved. When Russians chose Communism, they declared war against the human race. It was right and good at the time to kill every single communist and communist sympathizer in Eurasia. And that is still the right policy today. Communists have no right to exist and they should all be rounded up and lawfully and humanely euthanized.
* Russians did not “choose” communism. It was imposed on them by outside forces–the Jewish Bolsheviks, who were ruthless in their imposition of communism on the masses and the abolishing of religion and private property rights (except for themselves)…
