In my recent video on the Soviet Prisoners
of War in German hands, we saw the horrors
inflicted on Soviet POWs, and the death of
well over 3 million souls through deliberate
neglect, or outright murder. With some minor
variants, the sources I used for that video
were more or less in agreement. In this video,
there is no agreement. In fact, there’s
so little agreement, that even the question
of whether we can agree over the fact that
there isn’t an agreement is up for debate.
What we can definitely say though is that
the German and Soviet statistics are both
awful and are used by various authors to push
their particular narratives. This is why we
should probably avoid statistics when it comes
to things like history, or economics. But
since we’re already here, and nothing warms
the heart on a lovely summer’s evening more
than calculating death statistics, let’s
dust off the old abacus and start making math
teachers around the world cry.
According to German sources, 3,155,000 German
soldiers became captives in the Soviet Union.
Some have said it was higher than that - going
as high as four million - but claims that
high seem to have been guesses in the immediate
post-war period, so we can probably dismiss
them. In 1947, the ever-trustworthy Molotov
stated that over one million German prisoners
had been sent home, and another 900,000 remained
in Soviet custody. This was upsetting, because
the Germans in the 1950’s believed (or hoped)
that more Germans had been taken prisoner
than that, so they assumed that the remaining
one to two million missing men must have killed
in Soviet captivity by the Soviets. Later,
when the Soviet archives opened in the 1980s,
Soviet statistics confirmed that roughly 2,389,000
German prisoners had been taken by the Soviets
during the course of World War Two.
“They revealed that for once Molotov was
telling the truth.”
So basically, either 2,389,000 or 3,155,000
German prisoners had been taken, and the higher
amounts are actually missing soldiers assumed
to have been taken prisoner rather than killed
in action. Even the 3,155,000 figure may be
too high. And it seems that the German civilians
in the post-war era really hoped that fewer
Germans had died than had actually died.
“...the numbers of those missing after all
repatriations had taken place was around 1.3
million, suggesting that actual losses were
much higher than the official figures.”
So the evidence here suggests that German
casualties on the Eastern Front are probably
understated. As we’ve seen in previous videos
on the tank numbers and so on, the oh-so efficient
German record keeping wasn’t so oh-so efficient
at all. In fact, they often seem to downplay
their losses, just like most sides did in
World War Two. As an example of this poor
record keeping, we don’t even know how many
German soldiers there were with Rommel in
Africa during Operation Crusader - and that
was only roughly 120,000 men. We don’t even
know if the Afrika Division was even called
the Afrika Division or not, and that’s the
name of a division. If we don’t know that,
what chance have we got in figuring out the
actual number of men on the Eastern Front,
let alone how many men were captured during
the confusion of combat?
The point I’m making here is that both German
and Soviet record keeping standards are poor
to say the least. A lot of people will say
that the Soviet statistics are not trustworthy,
and gladly swallow whatever numbers the German
Third Reich made up. No, both sides are as
bad as each other and are completely untrustworthy.
Because of this, the number of men who made
it to the battlefield is incalculable, and
that’s before we even attempt to figure
out how many troops or tanks were lost, and
in what manner they were lost. So the bottom
line is this: the numbers are bogus to begin
with. And so it’s no wonder there’s debate
going on about this.
What we can say, however, is that most of
the German prisoners seem to have been taken
later in the war, if not in the final months
of the conflict. During Operation Barbarossa,
the invasion of the Soviet Union, just 30,000
German soldiers ended up as prisoners of war
in the Soviet Union. This makes sense, considering
they were on the offensive, which was largely
a success at the beginning at least. Both
German and Soviet records indicate that a
significant portion of German prisoners taken
in 1941 and 1942 were either shot or just
simply did not survive. For example, 180 German
soldiers were shot by Soviet troops at Broniki
on the 30th of June 1941.
“Soviet records indicate that 90 to 95 per
cent of German prisoners taken in 1941-2 did
not survive, for various reasons.”
But Bellamy also says that -
“This does not seem to have been the Soviet
high command’s intention.”
“The Germans captured a number of documents
which showed that the Red Army command was
trying to stop the killing of prisoners, which,
of course, confirms that it was happening.”
To cut a long story short, by 1942, the Soviet
high command had managed to get a grip on
their men and stopped them from executing
German prisoners of war. It seems that they
did this for economic reasons. German prisoners
could work in the Gulags, and their labour
was seen as valuable, at least by 1943. Many
German prisoners ended up constructing a major
railway between the Volga and Siberia, and
actually got paid for the work, although their
guards seemed to have pocketed a lot of the
money.
Conditions in the Gulags were especially poor
at first and the Soviet authorities appeared
to be badly organized - which makes sense
since they hadn’t expected the sudden German
attack and hadn’t prepared for a sudden
influx of German prisoners of war. The situation
improved over time, although they worked between
10 and 12 hours a day, and got 600 grams of
bread and some potato soup, and maybe some
meat and vegetables now and then.
“They were not conditions designed deliberately
to exterminate the occupants of the camps,
for the labour power of prisoners was needed
to rebuild the Soviet economy.”
Despite what some Marxists in the comments
of my videos have claimed (that they were
nice holiday camps), the Gulags weren’t
lovely places to be. That said, the conditions
were certainly not like those that Soviet
prisoners suffered in German camps, as discussed
in the other video. There were deaths in the
Gulags - shock, and horror. The numbers I’ve
seen for the death of German prisoners in
Soviet custody are 356,000, 360,000, 363,000,
450,600, and 459,000. Again, the numbers are
based on bogus records, which means - yeah
there’s discrepancies.
And just to be as generous as I possibly can
be to the German sources, Rüdiger Overmans
went even higher. His number of 363,000 is
the confirmed number of German deaths in Soviet
hands, but he says that another 700,000 “missing”
prisoners could have been killed too. He has
said the figure could be as high as 1 million
German prisoner of war deaths in the Soviet
Union.
Ok, but this is clearly speculation. The fact
that there’s 700,000 “missing” German
soldiers in the first place indicates that
the German records aren’t accurate. It even
suggests that German casualties during the
battles are understated - which was also the
same conclusion Overy comes to, as we mentioned
earlier. It’s also playing to the idea going
around in the 1950s that lots more German
soldiers survived the fighting, and were just
in Soviet captivity, than they actually did.
The only evidence we seem to have for this
700,000 figure is the unreliable and understated
German casualty records and the hopes of the
friends and relatives of missing German soldiers.
So while it’s clear that they were killed
by the Red Army, that doesn’t mean they
were killed when they were taken prisoner.
It could be that they were killed in combat
and then simply not recorded as such by either
side, hence the discrepancy. Therefore, unless
more evidence comes along which definitely
proves that they all died in the Gulags or
something, then it would be wrong to conclude
that they even became prisoners of war in
the first place.
However, we’re not going to rule it out
completely, since there’s a chance it could
be true. So what we’re going to do now is
take both the German and Soviet figures for
German POWs, and compare them to the number
of prisoners who are supposed to have been
killed in Soviet captivity.
Again, the numbers are bogus, and so the calculations
we’re about to make are essentially pointless,
but we’re going to do them anyway for the
fun of it. And there’s plenty of evidence
that they’re bogus as demonstrated by the
ever-so-Keynesian Cambridge History of the
Second World War, volume 1. This exquisite
tomb uses the higher number for Germans captured
- 3,155,000 - and a low number for the number
of deaths in Soviet hands - 360,000. It then
concludes that there was a death rate for
German prisoners of war of 13.9%. This is
incorrect, because 13.9% of 3,155,000 is 438,545,
not 360,000. So yeah... Not only have I shown
previously that Cambridge’s economics history
contradicts itself, but Cambridge also can’t
do basic math.
So yes, we’re calculating made up numbers.
However, since they’ve all we’ve got,
why not mess around with them? Therefore,
we’re going to put the number of German
prisoners of war who fell into Soviet hands
at the top - the German 3.15 million, 3.06
million (which is Overmans’ specific number),
and the Soviet 2.38 million - and we’re
going to list the authors’ numbers at the
side. Overmans gets additional numbers because
he’s a bit special.
So now we’re going to calculate the percentages.
Ignoring the Overmans over-and-above-the-call-of-duty
number for a moment, the percentage number
of German prisoners of war who died in Soviet
hands is somewhere between 11 and 20 percent,
with a lot of the numbers at roughly 11.5
or 14.5 percent.
Oh, I forgot to add an extra column for Cambridge’s
two plus two is five so I’ll just add that
in now. I’d love to say that their number
was actually the average between two of the
other numbers and thus they were just being
clever, but no… no, they screwed up.
But this range is actually broader than what
the authors say. So if I highlight which number
the author favours, we can narrow the range
down even further. And we have Overy off to
a good start with his 14.90; Cambridge off
to the side having difficulties; Overmans’
first bringing up the rear at 11.86; whilst
Glantz and House reach an 18.86 coming in
first! But Fritz has fallen at the final hurdle
and failed to cross the finish line. Fritz
doesn’t state which of the 3.15 or the 2.3
million numbers he prefers and so had to be
put down and turned into sausages.
Therefore we can conclude that… well, nothing.
But I’m going to suggest that the number
of German POW deaths is low - probably around
14.5 percent of the total, and more likely
to be 360,000 or 450,000 in total.
Even if it was the massive 1 million that
Overmans speculates, this pales in comparison
to the 3.3 million Soviet POWs who died in
the German camps. Even the highest percentage
of 41.85%, which even Overmans himself does
not use, does not compete with a death rate
percentage of 58% for Soviet prisoners in
German camps. And the likelihood of it being
that is much lower, since 14.5% seems to be
a more reasonable figure.
But I’m actually going to suggest that the
14.5% is also too high. Why? Because of Stalingrad.
Glantz says that Rokossovsky’s official
figure for the number of Axis soldiers captured
at Stalingrad was 91,000, while Paulus’s
was 107,800. He notes that Rokossovsky’s
estimate does not include men taken prisoner
prior to the 30th of January, which was around
16,000, making it closer to Paulus’s guess.
The NKVD numbers are similar to Paulus’
figure as well. So roughly 108,000 Axis troops
were captured at Stalingrad. Of these, only
around 5,000 made it back to Germany. Doing
some quick math, that’s a survival rate
of 4.63%. Which means the death rate for Stalingrad
prisoners was 95.37%.
Why? Because they were slowly starved in their
pocket for months prior to capture. We have
reports of men in the 6th Army starving to
death inside the pocket, so of course they
were near death already as the pocket collapsed.
And according to Beevor, just 5 percent of
the senior officers taken prisoner at Stalingrad
and 55 percent of the junior officers perished,
compared to over 95 percent of the lower ranks.
Why? Well, he says it’s because of the privileged
treatment that the officers received in Soviet
custody. I’d say it was because of the privileged
treatment that the officers received in German
hands. The officers got priority of food in
the pocket, and weren’t running around fighting
all the time like the lower ranks were.
“When prisoners were registered before departure,
many put down ‘agricultural labourer’
as their profession in the hope of being sent
to a farm.”
Or because they were hungry. And on the same
pages Beevor does say the prisoners received
bread and fish. So again, they weren’t deliberately
starved by the Soviets. More likely they were
starved before capture and then died as a
result, which is the conclusion I came to
in my “6th Army’s Rations at Stalingrad”
video. So the Stalingrad death ratio is 95.37%,
which is a-typical compared to every percentage
we’ve looked at in this video.
So Stalingrad is a special case. The death
rate was higher because the German soldiers
were starved before they surrendered and probably
died because of that, not through harsh treatment
in Soviet hands. Thus, since Stalingrad’s
death ratio is super-high through no fault
of the Red Army, then that means that all
our percentages here are wrong. They’re
too high. Stalingrad makes the percentages
go higher than they would otherwise be. So
we need to recalculate and take out the Stalingrad
numbers to get a more accurate assessment
of how the typical German prisoner would fair
had he fallen into Soviet hands.
And, here we are - the death percentage for
non-Stalingrad German prisoners who were captured
by the Soviets. 11.5% seems to be about right,
although it could be 8.5 or 15.4 as well.
Either way, much lower than the 58% of Soviet
prisoners of war in German camps. Even if
we went with the super-high Overmans 2 figure
of 39.33%, the Germans were treated better
in Soviet custody than Soviet prisoners were
in German custody. And interestingly, the
Axis Allied numbers are somewhat similar.
“A further 1,097,000 were captured from
the nationalities fighting at Germany’s
side… of whom 162,000 died.”
That’s a death percentage rate of 14.76%.
Again, much lower than the 58% suffered by
Soviet prisoners of war, and lower than the
95% of my brain cells which were lost as I
watched part of “Hitler: The Greatest Story
Never Told” recently. Seriously, how anyone
can sit through that rubbish without their
brains melting out their ears is beyond me.
Want me to review it at some point in the
future? Vote in the poll.
So, can we come to any conclusions here? Well,
it’s probably fair to say that the German
prisoner of war survival chance was much higher
than that of Soviet prisoners of war in German
hands, and that was because the Soviets didn’t
have a deliberate starvation policy, unlike
the Germans. Conditions weren’t great for
either side, but Soviet prisoners in German
camps definitely had it worse overall. What
we can definitely say is that statistics aren’t
reliable, and that all the numbers are made
up so the points don’t matter. That’s
right the points don’t matter, just like
your feelings when I say “No, I won’t
just stick to tanks”. We sometimes have
to use statistics, but we should avoid them,
especially when it comes to things like macroeconomics
or military statistics. If we do use them,
we should assume they’re not accurate and
could be subject to change or dismissal. What’s
more useful is a convergence of evidence and
a logical interpretation of history. If you
have a contradiction in history, it’s most
likely an indication of a distortion of history.
And big statistics are always contraditorary.
Thanks for watching, bye for now.
