"Crimes of the German Soldiers" Topic

Debunking the Popular Myth of the "Clean" Wehrmacht

"Today, despite a rise in the popularity and publicity of neo-Nazis, most reasonable people disagree with the basic premise of Nazi ideology, if not all of its tenets. Despite this, there is a large number of reasonable people who have been tricked into believing and parroting the lies of German soldiers and officers, many of which were propagated into popular memory by Nazis and neo-Nazis outside of Germany after the war. One of the most insidious of these lies is the myth of the "Clean Wehrmacht," spread particularly by Wehrmacht members put on trial in Nuremberg.

The basic premise of this myth is that while the Waffen-SS and other branches of the government were committing horrific war crimes, the Wehrmacht were merely fighting the war and weren't informed about, much less involved in, any of the atrocities being committed in the name of Germany. These Wehrmacht members claimed they were Germans, but not Nazis. While it is true that the Wehrmacht was not officially affiliated with the Nazi party, its membership was full of Nazis and served the German state, which had essentially become interchangeable with the Nazi party by the time the war started, meaning that they killed and died to preserve the Nazi party. This alone could be considered a horrendous act worthy of condemnation from the tribunals at Nuremberg, but in truth, the Wehrmacht certainly did participate in numerous war crimes, on all fronts and from the very beginning of the war. As long as there were so-called "enemies of the state" around, the Wehrmacht would actively participate in their destruction…."
Main page
link

Amicalement
Armand

Propaganda and counter-propaganda.
No, the German Wehrmacht wasn't clean.
Neither were the French, Americans, Russians, nor British.

War is hell.

Ethnic groups murder other ethnic groups. Race is a factor, but not the greatest.

It has been such and will continue to be.

This is a garbage propaganda piece with a bad agenda.

Spit….

Joe Collins

As Joe notes a magnifying lens focused on any of the combatants in WWII would find many examples of war crimes.

Winners write the histories so can gloss over theirs.

Oh, please. Yes, all military forces commit war crimes (at least what has been considered a war crime over the past century or so), but lets not claim that the US, British, French, Italian or Soviet "armies" were the equivalent of the the Wehrmacht (and Japanese) in war crimes during WWII.

One can drum up a fair number of small individual or group crimes that Allied land forces committed (note that I'll leave the bombing campaigns out of this discussion as the article is about the Wehrmacht).

Where did any of the Allied troops commit genocide on civilians as units of the Wehrmacht did against the Jews? Which of the Allied armies murdered hundreds of thousands of German POWs as the Wehrmacht did of Soviet POWs? When Leningrad lost a million plus civilians due to the Wehrmacht deliberate attempt to starve the city in their attempt to destroy it, what is an Allied equal?

No military is prefect, but lets not pretend that the Wehrmacht did not organize and assist, from the highest levels of command and down ward, the murder of civilians on a massive scale on both the East and West Front. The Wehrmacht has been given a pass since WWII as it is always the SS being blamed for such actions.

No one's hands are clean in war, but some hands are far bloodier than others.

Dan

Russians?…. side by side with Germans in barbarity….

Amicalement
Armand

Dan Cyr,
You might want to read up on Soviet atrocities in Eastern Europe both during and after their alliance with Germany. As Stalinist genocide never aimed at 100% the deathtoll in pure numbers is lower than that found in German crimes, the small size of the targeted populations also keep the number of victims low compared to the industrialised mass murder carried out by the German state.

However when you look at the demographic impact of the Soviet crimes their scale become quite evident. The native populations of Estonia and Latvia have still not reached their pre-war levels. A closer study of the Soviet crimes also show that Soviet repression was no less deadly for the target groups. During the initial Soviet occupation the death rate among those arrested were 98%, that is on par with the death camps. Among the deported the death rate was 60% and among the men forced into the Red Army almost half were killed either during transport or while being worked to death as part of the "work battalions".

And where can I find the documents confirming your story? It is with the documents, not the stories of publicists, please.

The Demographics of Estonia and Latvia are easy to find online, Wikipedia has an easy to read page on both.
link
link

You can easily see the lack of complete recovery, the effects of what today would be considered ethnic cleansing and the large scale settlement of Russian colonists in the occupied countries. The Latvians were on the verge of becoming a minority in their own country by 1989. And in Estonia there are areas with few or no Estonians due to the Apartheid like restrictions enforced in some areas.

For detailed studies of the effects of the occupation you will have to use sources in Estonian or Latvian which I suspect you do not read. However the the intial Estonian study of the occupation is available in English here link
Population loss is on page 38-39

"When Leningrad lost a million plus civilians due to the Wehrmacht deliberate attempt to starve the city in their attempt to destroy it, what is an Allied equal?".

Siege warfare has been a tactic in use from pre-Ancient times, I suspect, and certainly from the Ancient period.

Not sure starving a city into submission really equates to "their attempt to destroy it", though I do get that a lot of people who didn't surrender might die because of that.

For the Western allies, you can see various examples which are similar, but using different tactics and weapons (not that I don't understand them in the overall context of WWII, and why those tactics came to be used):

RAF night bombing raids on various German cities – Hamburg, Berlin, Nuremburg, Dresden, and USAAC daylight bombing of those and other major cities, up to and including Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc., etc., etc..

For the Russians, Berlin stands out for their troops' barbarity at the end of the War, and the treatment they gave to Germany's women during and after their conquest there. No doubt, many other cities and civilians in them received the same treatment.

For a lot of the war, neither side took prisoners in many cases, and there are numerous reports of German and Russian units conducting "total war", meaning that few if any enemy wounded would be spared. Many German soldiers who were captured were subject to severe abuse and death too, at the hands of their Soviet captors. Given how Stalin treated many of his own countrymen, I can only imagine how he dealt with his enemies.

Stalin killed far more than Hitler ever did, and many of them were his own people.

The Japanese are also guilty of horrific crimes, though for some reason they seem to get a pass, despite some of the most horrific treatment of captured prisoners under their care.

Daniel S

Ethnic cleansing is the deliberate extermination or expulsion of an ethnic group. I will give you an example of Soviet ethnic cleansing – the Germans in East Prussia, Chechnya, the Crimean Tatars … These are real examples of the resettlement of entire nations carried out by the Stalinist regime. In the Baltic countries, the situation was completely different. No one set a goal to get rid of the local population. The struggle was against active anti-Soviet elements – this is a completely different reason. Ethnic cleansing has nothing to do with it.
Large demographic losses in the territory where wide and active hostilities took place twice, unfortunately, are natural. It is also necessary to take into account that as part of the German army and other armed formations fought:
150.000 Latvians
90.000 Estonians
50,000 Lithuanians.
After they were forced to flee from the advancing Red Army (often with families), these people also became part of the population decline. By the way, while fighting as part of the Soviet army, about 45,000 representatives of the Baltic peoples died (about 150-200 thousand Balts fought as a part of the Red Army). It is also necessary to take into account the 290.000 Baltic Jews killed in these territories by the Nazis (with the active support of the Nazi Baltic formations). In the territories of these countries, the Jews were almost completely destroyed.
Yes, a lot of Russians came to the Baltic republics after the war. But someone had to build a powerful industry in these countries. Were the inhabitants of the Baltic states infringed on their rights in comparison with the Russian inhabitants? They were forbidden to use their own language? Hindered obstacles in obtaining education or career growth on ethnic grounds? They were deprived of any rights compared to people of other nationalities? I do not know about it.

Thresher01

The problem is that the German command initially planned the destruction of Leningrad, along with all its inhabitants. Regardless of whether the city resists or not. And one more thing – in those territories near Leningrad that were captured by the Germans, the death rate from starvation was not lower than in the besieged city. The local population was simply deprived of supplies and stopped the supply of any food to this area, except as intended for the occupying army … It was just a deliberate murder of thousands of people.

After what the Nazis staged on the territory of the USSR, it is somewhat strange to accuse Soviet soldiers of hating the Germans. Yes – there were a lot of excesses. But millions of Soviet soldiers lost their wives and children killed by the Nazis (17 million civilians were killed in the USSR). They lost their shelter and all their possessions. And you accuse these people of cruelty? The command of the Soviet army did not encourage such actions. For rape and looting, military personnel were subject to execution or sending to a penalty military unit. And these punishments were widely used.

German prisoners of war in Soviet captivity died about 350 thousand. They were in Soviet captivity until 1955 (period 10 – 15 years). In the German captivity of Soviet prisoners of war 3 million died. They were in German captivity for 3-4 years. And you accuse the USSR of cruel treatment of prisoners?
However, the soldiers on their own initiative often destroyed prisoners of the SS. The reasons I have already described above. The war on the Eastern Front was not the same as in other places. Nazis waged war against the "subhumans", which were to be almost completely destroyed. And they used appropriate methods. This could not but cause a response.

And how much did Stalin kill in concrete numbers?

Yes, let us not forget the Holomodor…
(fascinating who some of the politboro members were during those years)
The near genocide of the Indigenous American Indians…
The conquering of Palestine by the Jews and the ethnic cleansing that followed…
The Armenian Genocide…
The list is long.

To quote the great philosopher Sturgill.
"But that's the way it goes, life ain't fair and the world is mean".

Joe Collins

Sorry Dan, particularly the Italians.

Ask the Ethiopians about how well they were treated by the Italian Army.

Or the Greeks or various other nationalities of the Balkans.

As to those in the Baltic States who fought with the Germans against the Soviets, considering that the Soviet Union had invaded their countries before WWII as they tried with Finland, the enemy of their enemy was an ally if not a friend.

"The local population was simply deprived of supplies and stopped the supply of any food to this area, except as intended for the occupying army".

That's how sieges work – Siege 101 tactics.

"After what the Nazis staged on the territory of the USSR, it is somewhat strange to accuse Soviet soldiers of hating the Germans".

I don't see that as strange at all. I can see why they would hate the Germans.

"Scholars" estimate that Stalin killed between 20 – 60 million people.

link

lkmjbc3

It remains to prove that the "Holodomor" is a conscious action of the Soviet government. Given that the famine was not only in Ukraine (still in Kazakhstan, Siberia and some other regions of the USSR), but also in purely Russian regions. And also, that hunger is not uncommon for Russia in the royal period – it will be very difficult to do. But the fact that this famine was largely due to the fault of the Soviet authorities is true. But error and intent are several different things. This point of view was shared by such American researchers as Alexander Dallin, John Archibald Getty and some others.

goragrad

Yes, they had the right to regard the USSR as an enemy. But did it give them the right to destroy a huge number of Jews and other civilians on the territory of the USSR? A war crime in this case is still a war crime. And why exactly these people represented the peoples of the Baltic states, and not those who were loyal to the Soviet government? Or there were none? Which one was more?

Thresher01

It seems you did not understand what I said. Hunger destroyed the population, which was located in the territory occupied by German troops. These people were NOT under siege – they were in the rear of the German army.

These assessments of scientists (by the way – many of these individuals are not scientists) were purely hypothetical assumptions. But now the Russian archives are open. All information available. The figures of the victims of the actions of Stalin were extremely exaggerated. Here are the results established according to the DOCUMENT (let's not forget that socialism is accounting and control. For the distortion of state statistics in the USSR, the direct road to the Gulag).
So, according to the widest estimates, about 5 million people were repressed in the USSR before the age of 1953. But! This means that 5 million people were shot, or imprisoned, or deported to another region, or dismissed, or expelled from the Communist Party, or deprived of voting rights or demoted (and this is also repression!). The death toll of them – 2 600 000 people (this is the maximum estimate). Of these 2.6 million:
799 000 – shot.
600 000 – died in the camps
1,200,000 died in various resettlement campaigns (from kulaks to deported peoples).
The population of the USSR for the accounting period is about 400 million people.
It should be noted once again that these are not average, but maximum estimates. Among these figures – there are not only victims of political repression. Here ordinary criminals, nazi collaborators, etc. are also considered. So far from all of them were innocent.

The data was published by the Russian scientist (by the way – the anti-Stalinist) Viktor Zemskov in the book "Stalin and the people. Why was there no uprising?"
link

Stalin's crimes were. There were many innocent victims. But to say that Stalin surpassed Hitler in this activity is a lie.

No clean hands … or very few … However, the Germans and IJFs were well known for their brutality. War crimes in large numbers and was policy in many cases for the Axis.

Not that that excuses anyone who committed war crimes and genocide. Before, during and after WWII. And as we see in some locations it continues …

Cuprum2, You seem to forget the Ukrainian famine that Stalin was responsible for, so you can add around 6-7 million deaths at his door from that alone.
link

There is none so blind as those who don't want to see:

As Joe notes a magnifying lens focused on any of the combatants in WWII would find many examples of war crimes.
Winners write the histories so can gloss over theirs……………………

Propaganda and counter-propaganda.
No, the German Wehrmacht wasn't clean.
Neither were the French, Americans, Russians, nor British…………….

There was only one of the WW2 Armies that had a specific order that allowed its soldiers to kill innocent civilians with impunity. The pathetic 'whataboutism' comes nowhere near excusing the industrialised and institutionalised murder of civilians and captives carried out by the German military in ww2.

For the Western allies, you can see various examples which are similar………………….. RAF night bombing raids on various German cities – Hamburg, Berlin, Nuremburg, Dresden, and USAAC daylight bombing of those and other major cities, up to and including Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc., etc., etc…
The problem with that argument is the bombing was within the rules of war whilst the deliberate extermination of civilians and captives was against the rules of war.

Huscarle

I have not forgotten anything. There was no "Ukrainian famine". Hunger was in many parts of the USSR. Here is a map of the death rate of the population in 1932-33, which exceeded the testimony of the previous, 1931, prosperous year. The red color and its intensity show a mortality rate that exceeded the normal, natural death rate of the population. Green – a decrease in the level of deaths compared with the previous, prosperous year (Central Asian regions are not shown conventionally – I took the map from work that concerns only Russia, Belarus and Ukraine). But in Central Asia there was also a big problem of crop failure and high hunger losses.

Changes in the death rate of the rural population:

Changes in the mortality rate of the urban population:

As you can see – the most serious problem of hunger really stood in Ukraine. But, nevertheless, hunger was extended to many areas of directly ethnic Russian territories.

There are no documents confirming the artificial organization of hunger. This point of view is also shared by American scientists, whose names I cited above.

Hunger is the result of the coincidence of bad weather factors that occurred during the period of fundamental reform. This is an accident. Which, of course, does not relieve responsibility from the leadership of the country.

I seem to be reading about something similar with Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath. Who organized this famine in the USA? Stalin?

Only in Belarus, Nazi punishers completely destroyed 5295 settlements during punitive actions. 629 of them – along with the entire population, including all women and children.

Stalin was only part of the Genocide. The rest of the Soviet leadership is well known.

Sorry, not buying it. The Soviets were just as evil as the Nazis…perhaps more so. Their ideology plagues us to this day.

Joe Collins

Many people do not need the truth. It does not correspond to their perception of the world))) The cozy world of lies can be much more familiar and comfortable.
It is your right. But a world built on lies will one day collapse. As it happened with the USSR. If you do not want to know the truth – you can not make adequate decisions. You fool yourself.

Sorry cuprum2, histories I have read note that the Soviets were collecting and exporting food from the Ukraine at the height of the Holodomor.

Between that and not allowing Ukrainians to leave the region during the crisis it is more than bureaucratic errors.

Don't forget that 'crimes against humanity' can include more than just killing people. The large scale enslavement of people can count as that, too. Slave labor under the Nazis is usually thought of as factory workers, but it was far more widespread than that. Slaves worked on farms and as domestic servants. There wasn't a village or town in Germany that did not have slave laborers. No one was ignorant or innocent when it came to that crime.

Stalin was only part of the Genocide. The rest of the Soviet leadership is well known.
Sorry, not buying it. The Soviets were just as evil as the Nazis…perhaps more so. Their ideology plagues us to this day.

That is the way I know myself and many others in the West believe.

Don't forget that 'crimes against humanity' can include more than just killing people. The large scale enslavement of people can count as that, too. Slave labor under the Nazis is usually thought of as factory workers, but it was far more widespread than that. Slaves worked on farms and as domestic servants. There wasn't a village or town in Germany that did not have slave laborers. No one was ignorant or innocent when it came to that crime.

That appears to be true in many, many cases …

Once again, I take some satisfaction that no one is denying the nazi crimes. I wish I could say the same about communist apologist.

Leave the region? Have you seen the map? If people from starving regions come to a place where the situation is not much better, what will happen there, do you think?

I repeat once again – I have not yet seen the documents that prove the version that the famine was planned by the Soviet leadership. Where can I get to know them? You can say anything. But is there any evidence? I did not see them.

In April 1933, the export of grain from the USSR was completely stopped by the decision of the government. Also, the grain procurement system was completely changed. I can provide links to these documents without any problems. These documents indicate that the Soviet leadership fought against hunger and its causes.

By the way, what can you say about the famine in Bengal in 1942-43?

It is useless, Cuprum. I've seen this "Soviets-are-worse-than-Nazis" posts too often on these boards. And I have never seen here people who will be changing their positions, based on discussions we had here.
I'll provide one example to show how multy-layer is everything we're discussing.
From mother's side my grandparents were from Ryazan region.
My grandmother was from rich village, where overwhelming majority of peasants were "kulaks" or "serednyaks" – most of them had land and were heavy investing in getting the grain from it. she used to tell a very young me, how chinese merchants were coming to them and selling their silks, how the most popular fur coats there were from kangaroo fur!
My granddad was from another village nearby, which was very poor. Grandmother was always teasing him and saying that they were this bad bcs they were not working and were drinking way too much. Exactly in 1933, when the hunger hit the country, all grain was confiscated from grandmother's village. They were promised that they will get some back for crops. Almost everybody protested – it was not a rebellion, as it was in 20s, but it was enough to have practically all in the village stripped of their property – grain, goods, houses, stock, etc.
My grand-grand-dad had 6 children, so he was lucky that he was left with one of the horses, but they have lost everything. This campaign was carried by militia nd it was helped by poor from granddad village.
Grandmother's family tried to live with relatives and work in nearby village, then the epidemic and hunger reduced their 6 children to two.
They moved to Moscow and never returned back. Two years before the war she met my granddad and married him.
Their village never recovered, but it was still doing better than grandad village.
My grandmother from father's side lived in Lugansk in Ukraine. She also remembered the famine – they were getting some rations, that were made from grain, confiscated from rural Ukrainian areas.
The cities like Kiev, Donetsk etc, need to be fed. And during so-called golodomor, they were getting the food that was expropriated. People in the cities – in Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia – were saved while a lot of peasants died.
It was nothing new – for communists, city proletariat was more important as support than rural population. The same confiscation of food was happening during and after civil war, instigating large scale rebellions as in Tambov.