kvs Sat Apr 25, 2020 4:22 am
GarryB wrote:It is currently Anzac day here in NZ so I woke up at just before 6am and sat in bed and watched a video I had on my tablet about Stalingrad.
It showed interviews with surviving Soviets and Germans, and talked about the German soldiers going mad and practising cannibalism... it also mentioned when the Germans were taken away to camps that the Soviets were surprised... they expected 80,000 but there were three or four times that many taken into captivity and at that stage of the war they barely had the resources to feed and clothe their own people so the food options did not improve in captivity if you know what I mean.
This documentary was a Russian documentary translated into English for the western market, but having watched British documentaries on the eastern front I can honestly say when they mentioned cannibalism in Leningrad and other places they didn't mention the people responsible were driven mad and often had the choice to survive and eat what was available or to die and they chose to survive... a sort of Bear Gryls type mentality.
To be clear once the horses had been eaten the Soviet civilians trapped in Stalingrad had to stop asking where the meat came from too because as the lady interviewed said after the horses it was the dogs... and then the cats... and she said that with clear shame in her voice... because as she said the cats and dogs came to the people for protection from the cold... and the violence and noise of battle... eventually there were not pets left to eat... a terrible situation to be in...
There was a serious food shortage across the USSR in 1942 and that is when the gulag death rate hit is peak (20% of the inmates). This one time
peak was used in NATzO propaganda to claim that every year 20% of gulag inmates died from the 1930s to the 1950s. This BS claim is one of the
"sources" for the millions of dead at the hands of the commies lies still being spread around today. It is just as nonsensical as the claim that 14
million "Ukrainians" died during the Holodomor. (That would be close to half of Ukraine's population based on pre-revolutionary census data which
agrees with Soviet census data from the 1920s.).
I recall a series of Time-Life books on the war where they noted that 20% of Germans died in soviet POW camps. This was presented as Soviet
evil. The same hate propaganda BS. The Nazis made sure that 3.3 million Soviet POWs died in captivity by either death through exposure or
sending them to the ovens first in Auschwitz. Auschwitz was build by Soviet POW slave labour which was then processed by the facility.
Today it is popular in NATzO to make an equivalence between Nazi Germany and the USSR. This is pure guilt transfer. The Nazis were engaged
in all sorts of depravity against civilians and POWs (like the Japs in China) but in the USSR these same butchers were not being exterminated
in death camps and were being housed and fed when the food was available. If there was not food shortage in the USSR in 1942, there
would be much fewer than 20% German POW deaths in Soviet captivity. The fault for these deaths lies with Nazi Germany and not the USSR
for obvious reasons.