The Blitz myth?

[MartinEden]

So, you don't think the German treatment of POW's and civilians early in the war, thousands and thousands of POW's put in giant pens and starved (see Alexander Werth "Russia At War: 1941-1945"), had an effect on the average Russian soldier? Werth asserts that the stories of escaped POW's hade a huge effect on them. Now, as to the validity of these POW's stories, I can't attest. But it is a reasonable point that if the Germans had treated Russian POW's and civilians better they might have won the war.

[JonS]

Sure it had an effect on the indiv sov soldier. But that's not what gets entire armies surrounded.

[Drift3r]

Originally posted by MartinEden:

So, you don't think the German treatment of POW's and civilians early in the war, thousands and thousands of POW's put in giant pens and starved (see Alexander Werth "Russia At War: 1941-1945"), had an effect on the average Russian soldier? Werth asserts that the stories of escaped POW's hade a huge effect on them. Now, as to the validity of these POW's stories, I can't attest. But it is a reasonable point that if the Germans had treated Russian POW's and civilians better they might have won the war.

The Soviets treated their own people who they freed from POW camps just as bad if not worse then the Germans. There is nothing like being freed from a German POW camp and then being put up on trail by the NKVD for treason because you were captured in combat.

As far as the Germans and pens go at least it had to do with not wanting to waste scarce resources on captured prisoners. The Germans didn't really feel the need to setup large well stocked detention centers because they didn't think the war would last as long as it did. They thought and were lead to believe that Russia would fall like a deck of cards. So why waste precious resources on elaborate holding centers if the war in the East would be over quickly ? Also you forget that many thousands of capture Soviet soldiers also switched sides and either worked in rear areas or were allowed to fight along side German units against their own comrades. In fact the most fanatical units in the German Army were not even German but ex-Soviet soldiers who had switched sides for many reasons.

Some for example switched sides because of racial and political/religious issues faced by ethnic non-Russian peoples ( Asian muslims and Buddhists in the Crimea for example ) who were treated horribly by Stalin and his cohorts before and after the war.

[Simon Fox]

Originally posted by Drift3r:

As far as the Germans and pens go at least it had to do with not wanting to waste scarce resources on captured prisoners. The Germans didn't really feel the need to setup large well stocked detention centers because they didn't think the war would last as long as it did.

Well they couldn't really be expected too, they were very short of food in 1941, the Germans. You couldn't expect your average fraulein on the street to give up a nice bit of cake just because some dirty Russki got himself captured. I mean the bleedin' Slavs were barely human, the prison camps were probably luxury compared to the 'orrible peasant huts they were used too. As for summary execution, well they were used to that with the NKVD and all, made 'em feel right at home I'm sure. It might have been more appropriate to keep 'em in zoos I suppose but I imagine there would have been a bit of trouble with the RSPCA on account of the conditions.

Of course you're right. Absolutely swarms of Russian prisoners elected to help the Germans out. Purely on ideological grounds of course, the choice between digging fortifications in sunny France or participating in experiments to test the limits of human endurance had nuffink to do with it. I challenge anyone to prove otherwise, stands to reason doesn't it, and don't bother posting any load of bollocks like that Nuremberg proceedings tripe. That were a fit up if ever there were one.

[Bigduke6]

Drift3R,

SNIP

Originally posted by Drift3r:

Two points:

1. Ethnic Tartars inhabited the Crimea in the 1940s, and they were either secular, or Muslims. The Tartars converted to Islam in the 14th or 15th century, I forget exactly. Before that the Crimean Tarters were animist, worshiping Mongol deities like Thunder, Lighting, Fire, and so on.

Buddhism never made it to the Crimea, and the Tartars never practiced the Buddhist religion.

2. Be careful about reading too much into Soviet non-Russian ethnicities serving with the Germans.

For instance, it is true that some of the nastiest units ever to fight under the Nazi banner were ethnic Ukrainians (the Dirlwanger Brigade comes to mind.)

But for every ethnic Ukrainian fighting for the Germans there were at least 10, and probably 20 fighting for the Red Army.

Even Vlasov's ethnically-Russian forces were pretty small, when compared with the size of the armed forces fielded by the Soviet Union.

[Drift3r]

Originally posted by Simon Fox:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Drift3r:

As far as the Germans and pens go at least it had to do with not wanting to waste scarce resources on captured prisoners. The Germans didn't really feel the need to setup large well stocked detention centers because they didn't think the war would last as long as it did.

Well they couldn't really be expected too, they were very short of food in 1941, the Germans. You couldn't expect your average fraulein on the street to give up a nice bit of cake just because some dirty Russki got himself captured. I mean the bleedin' Slavs were barely human, the prison camps were probably luxury compared to the 'orrible peasant huts they were used too. As for summary execution, well they were used to that with the NKVD and all, made 'em feel right at home I'm sure. It might have been more appropriate to keep 'em in zoos I suppose but I imagine there would have been a bit of trouble with the RSPCA on account of the conditions.

Of course you're right. Absolutely swarms of Russian prisoners elected to help the Germans out. Purely on ideological grounds of course, the choice between digging fortifications in sunny France or participating in experiments to test the limits of human endurance had nuffink to do with it. I challenge anyone to prove otherwise, stands to reason doesn't it, and don't bother posting any load of bollocks like that Nuremberg proceedings tripe. That were a fit up if ever there were one. </font>

[Tagwyn]

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. God Bless the Red Army!! They carried the heavy water in beating the darn Nazis and I for one are thankful. Tag

[Wartgamer]

I think the Soviets played the armor development and deployment game best of anyone in WWII. They did it under tremendous pressure also.

[MartinEden]

It's testament to both the short-sightedness and the cruelty of the Germans that the Bolsheviks

were able to win the battle of the hearts and minds (so to speak) by default. The Germans had to be pretty bad for the average peasant to side with the mean ass Bolsheviks.

[Drift3r]

Originally posted by MartinEden:

It's testament to both the short-sightedness and the cruelty of the Germans that the Bolsheviks

were able to win the battle of the hearts and minds (so to speak) by default. The Germans had to be pretty bad for the average peasant to side with the mean ass Bolsheviks.

True or the repercussions of siding with the Germans also could of been just as bad. Like having your entire family sent to a gulag in Siberia to be worked to death.

[Bigduke6]

Drift3r,

First, you might explain on what grounds you thought the inhabitants of the Crimea were Buddhists, or admit you were wrong.

Second and a lot more importantly, the repercussions for Soviet citizens for with the Germans were brutal, but again you are imagining things when you writes an entire families were sent into the Gulag for collaborating with the Germans. That happened rarely and was far from the Soviet post-war general practice.

In fact, the post-Soviet legal system worked very hard to weed out collaborators and to punish them, and - within the admittedly iffy limits of Soviet law -the process was rather fair. The idea was to create public trial after public trial and get collaborators to admit their guilt, so they could be put away for long jail terms. With rare exceptions for espionage, after the war's end the Soviets stopped killing collaborators.

The legal process intentionally did not extend to the collaborators' families (assuming the members weren't collaborators themselves) so the relatives of collaborators could remain present in regular society, and carrying a visible stigma. This fit much better with Soviet policy of reminding the general Soviet population WW2 was a morally noble endeavor.

Think of kids shouting: "See, look at Fedya, he doesn't have a Dad because he collaborated with the Germans, let's beat Fedya up!" That's what the Soviet government wanted. Fedya never gets a good job, can't join the Communist party, can't shop in the special stores. He is in societyand tainted by the supposed crimes of his father.

If Fedya is in the gulag with his Dad, then the other kids lose a scapegoat. They have to pick on some one else, or maybe even start thinking about how Soviet society really sucks at producing toys, cool clothes, and interesting teenage entertainment.

If you are going to talk about the Soviet Union, it behooves you to understand how the place was governed. The Germans goofed big time on that, and look what it got them!

You should also keep in mind that the war against the Germans was, taken throughout Soviet society as a whole, incredibly popular, and for practical purposes universally supported.

This is quite logical for a few reasons. First, I would say 1940s Soviets were at least as patriotic and proud of their country as most Europeans: after all, when the rest of the world went through an economic collapse in the 1930s, the Soviet Union experienced the fastest economic growth of any European country in the 20th century, plus literacy in Russia reached European levels for the first time in their history.

Matin Eden, that paragraph was for you. You are mistaken. The bolsheviks in general were popular. Certainly not with the kulaks and other minorities singled out for persecution, but in the society as a whole.The Bolsheviks did not win the hearts and minds of the Russians. They had them. The Russian people knew well that, for all its shortcomings, the Bolshevik regime was light years ahead of the Tsarist regime in terms of personal opportunity and living standards for the average citizen. The Tsarist regime was only two decades' dead in 1937.

I write that knowing full well about the show trials, gulag, purges, civil war, and famines. I am not trying to say the SU was a utopia.

But to argue the main reasons the SU's citizens fought the Germans because they feared the Communist apparat, and because the Germans committed a strategic error in their occupation policies, is to simply ignore the average Soviet citizen's basic identification with Communist society.

Second, this is of course not to say Germany's occupation policies didn't help. Besides systemically murdering for practical purposes all Jews, Gypsies, and card-carrying Communists it could reach, the German occupation put between three and six million Soviet citizens into forced labor, and the remainder had no rights. If the Germans wanted to shoot somebody, they did. If they Germans wanted to confiscate something, they did. If a German soldier decided that village girl was pretty, he could take her anyway he pleased, and she had no choice in the matter, and he would not be punished. The word for all that is slavery.

Not "Occupation by the highly professional Wehrmacht" or "Strict but correct German government of previously chaotic Soviet society, for which the simple Russians were grateful" or "Friendly relations between handsome blond German soldiers and attractive Slavic peasant girls and their rosy-cheeked grandmothers attired in colorful ethnic clothing." Slavery.

It wasn't too hard for the Soviet society to figure out who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.

Had the German occupation been benign no doubt more Soviet citizens would have collaborated, but that wouldn't have turned the bulk of the Soviet people into a bunch of Hitler-lovers. The Germans occupied France and the Low Countries for four years in a very moderate way. There was nevertheless next to zero French, Dutch, and Belgian popular support for Germany by 1944.

The German occupation of the western Soviet Union was far more brutal than their occupations in central and west Europe. The French and the Dutch were not enslaved. The Russians were.

Unless somehow Russians enjoy having their country occupied by foreigners a whole lot more than the French and the Dutch, there is zero reason to expect a "nice" German occupation of the SU would have been popular, or harmed the Soviet goverment's efforts to liberate the country.

Without pointing fingers, the argument that had Germany been restrained in its occupation policies in the SU somehow it would have won the "hearts and minds" of the Soviet population, is a classic Neo-Nazi arguement.

Arguments like that can stand only if the people making the argument are ignorant about the former Soviet Union and its people. It requires thinking of the Russians and the other nations in the SU as a monolithic, mindless, herd of cattle responding only to fear and threats; rather than as the living, breathing, thinking humans with all the hope and foibles of people anywhere. It also requires an almost complete lack of knowledge about the Soviet Union's history, and what the Bolsheviks - who were quite a nasty bunch - managed to achieve for average Soviet citizens.

[Wicky]

You praise the Soviets with faint damnation.

In Gulag. A history:

In a leap of reasoning which was convoluted even by Soviet standards, the entire Volga German people were condemned, in Sept 41 on a charge of 'concealing enemies':

According to trustworthy information received by military authorities, there are among the German population living in the Volga area , thusands and tens of thousands of diversionists and spies who, on a signal being given a signal from Germany, are to carry out sabotage in the area inhabited by the Germans in the Volga... [However] none of the Germans of the Volga area have reported to the Soviet authorities the existence of such a large number of diversionists and spies among the Volga Germans; consequently the German population of the Volga area conceals enemies of the Soviet people and of Soviet authority in its midst.*

*Conquest. The Soviet deportation of nationalities.

The Volga Germans were "administratively deported' which is a fancy name for a simple procedure. There was no arrest, no trial, no formal procedure.

This happened also to 1.2 million Soviet Germans, 108,000 Poles, 90,000 Kalmyks, 70,000 Karachi, 390,000 Chechans, 90,000 Ingush, 40,000 Balkars and 180,000 Crimean Tartars.

Ironic as more Tartars fought against Nazi Germany in the Red Army than fought with the Wehrmacht.

In May 1944 31,000 NKVD personel deported 200,000 Tartars in 3 days to be packed to Uzbekistan - men, women and children and old people. Between 6,000 and 8,000 died before arriving.

The returning Soviet slave labourers and POWs if not shot, were kept in filtration camps, engaged in forced labour and many wound up in Gulags.

For the genuine collaborators the Soviet Authorities had to invent a new kind of sentence for actual war criminals : people who had allegedly committed real crimes. The katorga prisoners (60,000 by 1947) became the mainstay of a brand-new Soviet industry, Uranium mining and other short life expectancy hard labour projects.

Good ol' 'hard but fair' Uncle Joe

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

Second and a lot more importantly, the repercussions for Soviet citizens for with the Germans were brutal, but again you are imagining things when you writes an entire families were sent into the Gulag for collaborating with the Germans. That happened rarely and was far from the Soviet post-war general practice.

In fact, the post-Soviet legal system worked very hard to weed out collaborators and to punish them, and - within the admittedly iffy limits of Soviet law -the process was rather fair. The idea was to create public trial after public trial and get collaborators to admit their guilt, so they could be put away for long jail terms. With rare exceptions for espionage, after the war's end the Soviets stopped killing collaborators.

[ June 14, 2005, 08:50 AM: Message edited by: Wicky ]

[Bigduke6]

Wicky,

I had hoped I made clear I wasn't praising the Soviets. All I am trying to do is argue the people that lived in the country were patriotic, especially after the Germans attacked them.

As to the details:

1. The Tartars almost all were exiled to Kazakhstan, not Uzbekistan.

2. The number of Tartars exiled according to the Tartars' own accounts was around 440,000, of whom between 10 and 20 per cent died as a result of the journey east.

3. The ethnic minorities you mention persecuted by the Soviets totalled less than 2 million people, or in rough terms 1 per cent of the total population of the Soviet Union. If you get 99 per cent of your population loyal and willing to fight to the death, at the price of persecution of 1 per cent of your population, and you're fighting Hitler's Germany, I'd say you would have made the right move.

4. I'm not trying to whitewash the Stalin and his regime. Look where I'm posting from: Ukraine saw the worst famines in history, and Stalin was directly responsible for that killing. Absolutely returning POWs (slave laborers less) were persecuted by the KGB.

But that doesn't change the basic reality that the Soviet population was overwhelmingly loyal to the Moscow government in the face of foreign invasion, just like the Russians were when the French invaded and when the Swedes invaded.

Maybe that's a function of xenophobia, maybe it's because the country is so durn big, maybe it's because stubborness in the face of adversity is pretty deeply imbedded in eastern Slavic culture. But bottom line the Soviets were not the people Hitler made them out to be. The error, with which Hitler's generals almost without exception agreed, was that "untermesch Slavs" were a lot more resilient, clever, ruthless, and dangerous than Hitler and his gang imagined possible. Big mistake.

Come to think of it, that's perhaps the key difference between the Soviets and the Germans when it came to the East Front and blitzkrieg. The German General Staff woefully underestimated its opponents. The Soviets, in general, took the Germans very seriously.