anticapitalist #fundie

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We heard for many decades that the USSR's gulags were death camps, but the actual info from soviet documents showed about 95-97% survival ratings, and those killed include executed nazi soldiers, common alleged criminals, etc. Plus the massive spike in death tolls was in the middle of WW2- exactly when resources were limited & when any captured/surrendered Nazis were being executed. ie, we were all lied to. The USSR 1940s "courts" may have been a sham, but the same is true in the USA- ask anyone black.

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old comment by The Angry Dybbuk

The OP is a liar and an apologist trying to whitewash the gulags in service to a degraded political ideology.

Also, Soviet forces didn't always execute German POWs in the field. The victors marched and shipped their captives to places with no names; places where they'd tell you no you would disappear...and they were true to their word.

POWs were starved, tortured, and humiliated.

Captors neglected to feed their playthings on a regular basis. And when they did provide food, it was slop so dangerously spoiled that to eat it would merely hasten death - a situation that, as time went on, led prisoners who were cramped together on the feces-incrusted floors of their cells to eat...other things. People would die every day. Prisoners were sometimes desperate enough to drink their own urine or lick condensation off the concrete walls.

Gulags sometimes did function primarily as brutal prisons for Soviet nationals, of course: Soviet nationals sentenced for crimes not considered seditious to the state - murder, rape, etc. were all seen as less dangerous than an opposing ideology - could survive a few years of penal servitude to see "freedom" again.

But POWs? Not a chance in hell. The execution of captured enemies happens in every war. What the Soviets did, however...it often went so much further than mere killing.

Proof? Stalingrad: Aftermath.

Eat shit and die, OP.

old comment by ChrisBP747

@ The Angry Dybbuk

My maternal grandfather was a soviet POW. He was pretty young when he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in the last two years of the war. He was not sent to a gulag though, fortunately. The soviets actually planned to send back most of his age, but a very unfortunate birthmark gave them the impression that my grandfather could have been in the SS(which WAS a reason for them to send POWs to the gulags), removing a revealing tatoo before being captured. Since it wasn't clear he was kept in prison until seven years later, when an empathic doctor finally diagnosed it as a birthmark.

Not all soviets were monsters and not every POW was killed. But the gulags definitely were horrible death camps and the OP cites out of biased sources.

old comment by The Angry Dybbuk

@ ChrisBP747:

I'm genuinely glad your grandfather was lucky in this regard. His membership in the Wehrmacht the Heer, I assume; so, a soldier on the ground may have saved him from the brunt of Soviet hospitalitybut that may have been more closely related to where and when he fought than to whether he was Wehrmacht or a species of SS.

In some cases, however, Soviet leadership made little distinction between regular armed forces and Waffen-SS, nor in their treatment.

One example my “favourite”; I love ragging on the many hells of Stalingrad but I'll keep this one short is in how the Wehrmacht, alongside the Waffen SS and backed with a motley crew of NSDAP misfits some of them relegated to the "himmelfahrtskommando" because, Ha Ha’ which included members of the SS-TV who (a) requested a transfer while of questionable loyalty or (b) violated rules governing the behaviour of guards either through a collection of minor transgressions or for a more significant one that nonetheless didn't warrant immediate execution.

And as many were marked with bloodgroup tattoos,
early Waffen SS as well as SS-TV (who, though best known for running concentration camps, were capable of being called to active service).

Yes, the Soviets had a special hatred for the SS. That didn’t stop them from sharing their tender mercies with all their other captives:

The Soviets took about 110 000 prisoners after the Battle for Stalingrad ended.

5000 returned, almost all of them long years after the war was done.

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