Quotes from Tony Judt’s Postwar

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Clarissa

February 17, 2014

Just a couple of quotes from Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 and then I promise I’ll put the book down and go grade some papers:

Since 1989 it has become clearer than it was before just how much the stability of post-war Europe rested upon the accomplishments of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Between them, and assisted by wartime collaborators, the dictators blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid.

Judt hates Stalin more than I hate vile freakazoids, so the reference to “accomplishments” is obviously sarcastic.

And some interesting factoids. Germans slaughtered most of their prisoners of war, but the USSR didn’t kill theirs:

The Soviets in their turn took 3.5 million prisoners of war (German, Austrian, Romanian and Hungarian for the most part); most of them returned home after the war.

USSR was more interested in killing off the Soviet soldiers who were the POWs in German camps than German POWs.

And this is something that in the FSU countries is an absolute taboo and is never discussed:

87,000 women in Vienna were reported by clinics and doctors to have been raped by Soviet soldiers in the three weeks following the Red Army’s arrival in the city. A slightly larger number of women in Berlin were raped in the Soviet march on the city, most of them in the week of May 2nd-7th, immediately preceding the German surrender. Both of these figures are surely an underestimate, and they do not include the uncounted number of assaults on women in the villages and towns that lay in the path of the Soviet forces in their advance into Austria and across western Poland into Germany.

There is a couple of very veiled hints in Solzhenitsyn’s novels, but nobody has dared to say this aloud: when you send people to fight in a war, any people, any war, you are turning the absolute majority of them into murderers and rapists.

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3 responses to “Quotes from Tony Judt’s Postwar”

AcademicLurker

February 17, 2014

I recently finished Anthony Beevor’s book on the battle of Stalingrad. The Soviet policy towards their own soldiers who became prisoners of war was horrible. Basically they were considered traitors by default. So if you somehow managed to survive a Nazi POW camp (which you probably wouldn’t, since they had a policy of deliberately starving prisoners to death), your reward was getting sent to a gulag to starve to death instead.

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1. Clarissa
  
  February 17, 2014
  
  Exactly. For decades after the war, people had to report if they or there relatives had ever been in the occupied territories, as if it were their fault that the Nazi troops were allowed to advance this fast. An absolute barbarity.
  
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J. Otto Pohl

February 17, 2014

It is true that a majority of German and other Axis POWs in the USSR survived the war to be repatriated. But, by some accounts it is a small majority. Officially the GUPVI camps registered 356,687 German POW deaths or 14.9%. But, this does not count those who died before ever making it to the rear to be registered in GUPVI camps. The German government estimates these losses due to the difference in those lost and those that returned to be over 1 million. For total European Axis POWs the number of registered dead in GUPVI camps 518,418 (also 14.9%) adding the one million missing you get 1.5 million deaths out of 3.5 million POWS or almost 43%. So technically the majority survived, but it was not a huge majority.

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