Re: For Dr. Wigand Wüster
Surely Red Army could have provided better conditions for us . They knew that there would be a great number of prisoners and had several weeks of time for organisation . And it would have been of great propaganda value if they would have been able to present to the world 100.000 German prisoners from 6th army in good shape . I concide that the Soviets had a lot of problems themselves , but surely it was not inevitably that 95 % of us had to die during the weeks after surrender . I do not believe that there was a master plan for killing the prisoners , but there were a lot of local commanders who deliberately provided bad conditions , for example the useless death marches from Stalingrad to river Don and back , killing groups of wounded soldiers in the cellars , unsuitable "camps" like Beketovka or Dubovka , refusal of water and food and so on . I remember the report of a soldier , who was on a death train from Stalingrad to Uzbekistan : After more than 3 weeks on that train , only 6 from 100 prisoners in his railroad freight car were alive , 4 of them in such a bad shape that they died soon after arrival . He blames the train commander who refused to supply the prisoners sufficiently , even with water . Also , there were single Soviet soldiers , mostly not the fighters ,( who respected us ) , but supply soldiers , who comitted atrocities and murder to prisoners . When Stalin finally had realised that only few of the Stalingrad prisoners were alive , he issued orders to guarantee their surviving . On the other side , German Stalingrad generals were treated very distinguished . Paulus even got a personal adjutant . May be that is one of the reasons for his lies at the Nuremberg trial ( he said the Stalingrad prisoners all were well ) . By the way , I will not only blame the Soviets : The western allies provided similar bad conditions for many of their prisoners also ( think of the notorious "Rheinwiesenlager" and many other "camps" , that were only fenced in meadows or fields , without any protection against bad weather and without sufficient supply ) . And there is no excuse for the USA , at that time the wealthiest nation . ( You surely know Bacque's books on that issue ) .
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