The brutality by NAZI German against USSR prisoners of

[SIZE=+1]The genocide of USSR prisoners of war in NAZI GERMANY[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-2]Soviet prisoners-of-war jammed into
one of the open-air POW camps, summer 1941.[/SIZE]
"Testimony is eloquent and prolific on the abandonment of entire divisions under the open sky," writes Alexander Dallin of the fate of these Soviet POWs. "Epidemics and epidemic diseases decimated the camps. Beatings and abuse by the guards were commonplace. Millions spent weeks without food or shelter. Carloads of prisoners were dead when they arrived at their destination. Casualty figures varied considerably but almost nowhere amounted to less than 30 percent in the winter of 1941-42, and sometimes went as high as 95 per cent" (Bartov, The Eastern Front, p. 110).

Many of the captured Soviet men were forced to walk "hundreds of kilometers" to their designated places of detention. Colonel Erwin Lahousen, a German foreign intelligence officer, wrote in October 1941 that "The columns of [Soviet] prisoners of war moving on the roads make an idiotic impression like herds of animals. The guard details ... can only maintain some semblance of order ... by using physical force.

Because of the physical exertion of the marches, the meager diet and poor conditions in the quarters in individual camps, prisoners of war often break down, are then carried by their fellow-soldiers [see the photo at the beginning of this document] or are left lying.

The 6th Army has given orders that all prisoners of war who break down are to be executed. Unfortunately, this is done on the road, even in towns ..." (Quoted in The Hamburg Institute for Social Research, The German Army and Genocide: Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civilians, 1939-1944 [New York: The New Press, 1999], pp. 100, 142.)


Conditions in the prison camps themselves were similarly atrocious. "There were no barracks or permanent housing. The camps were simply open areas fenced off with barbed wire. The prisoners had to lie in the sun, then in mud, and in the fall -- with temperatures as low as minus 30 degreees centigrade -- faced the possibility of freezing to death." (The German Army and Genocide, p. 142.) A Hungarian tank officer who visited one enclosure described it as follows: "Behind wire there were tens of thousands of [Soviet] prisoners. Many were on the point of expiring. Few could stand on their feet.

Their faces were dried up and their eyes sunk deep into their sockets. Hundreds were dying every day, and those who had any strength left dumped them in a vast pit" (Werth, Russia At War, pp. 635-36). Cannibalism was rife, and deliberate, according to Dallin: "German policy had caused, or at the very least had tolerated, the degradation of the prisoners -- and then held it up to its own people as something to be reviled, as something typical of a sub-human who could never be like Western man" (Dallin, German Rule in Russia, p. 415).

In his epic masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes the scene in one POW camp, with "the evening mist hoverng above a swampy meadow encircled by barbed wire; a multitude of bonfires; and, around the bonfires, beings who had once been Russian officers but had now become beastlike creatures who gnawed the bones of dead horses, who baked patties from potato rinds, who smoked manure and were all swarming with lice. Not all these two-legged creatures had died as yet. Not all of them had lost the capacity for intelligible speech, and one could see in the crimson reflections of the bonfires how a belated understanding was dawning on those faces which were descending to the Neanderthal

"Genocide" is defined as the intentional attempt to destroy an entire people simply because they are the people they are. So far, thank goodness, there has been only one case of genocide in history.

How can I alter the title to the Brutality inflicted on Russians prisoners of war NAZI Germany

How can I alter the title to the Brutality inflicted on Russians prisoners of war NAZI Germany

I think it waters down the evil of genocide when just any mass murder is called by that name. It is not merely a verbal matter. It is a moral matter.

The attitude of the Germans to the Russians and the Poles was Genocidal...There really is no other word for it... They were content to keep them as slaves, but if that meant slavery to death they were good with the idea...If you remove a person from their humanity, and remove them from their rights, what stands in the way of their deaths??? Nothing.... The Nazis went after Roma, and they were Arians too... They justified killing, enslaving, starving and general brutality for every one they did not have a reason to like...If they treated the Jews worse it was because they feared the Jews as an intelligent and to their minds unscrupulous and criminal people... They did not hate them as inferior, but usually feared them as mentally, and even culturally superior... Who today is safe from them who is not one of them??? Even the Jews have to look out for the Jews....Jews in Palestine from before Israel became a state have had to share the same fate as the Arabs, suffering a loss of rights and property... Was this what the Nazis so feared???

They were not insane??? Is that statement some kind of joke???What would you call it, tossing human beings in their ovens like so many potatoes... There was a method to their madness, but it was still madness...

Look; 40% of those killed in the Hollocaust were not Jews...

Sure, but as far as we can tell it was only the Jewish and Romany victims of the Nazis that were part of an attempted genocide.

So whilst a freemason, or homosexual, or communist prisoner of the Nazis was probably treated just as badly as a Jewish or Romany prisoner, they had the small comfort, at least, that their wives and children weren't necessarily suffering alongside them.

It was Jews and Gypsys murdered and abused 'as a folk' - whereas the other victims of the death camps were not victimised because of family ties relating to ethnicity, or a way of life, or culture.

That's not to say that what happened to them was not JUST AS BAD - but it wasn't an attempt at genocide. The son of a freemason might have to worry about coming under a bit of extra suspicion - but he wasn't necessarily imprisoned, abused or killed alongside his father.

I hate to mention it but he, Hitler, loved the Arabs and a certain amount loved him. He promised them liberty from the british and french empires. I wonder if he would have fulfilled their wishes, had he won? We definitely would not see Israel as a nation.