Crimes and Mercies (14 page)

The Soviet records are extremely precise. For instance, the 356,687 German rear-camp dead are tallied separately from the deaths of ethnic Germans (from, for example, other European countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia) and also from Austrians. In these latter categories 21,603 dead were entered.

The Russian Army military historian Andrei Kashirin also concluded that these figures from the CSSA archive were generally correct. In his opinion, the deaths totalled 423,168.
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The total deaths among the European prisoners between 1941 and 1952 were 518,480. Of those transported to the Soviet Union, all the names were recorded, with biographical data, date and place of capture, plus labour and medical records and death certificates for the dead. The Russians of today have nothing to hide.

It is now possible for the first time since 1945 to fit these records together with the German records to determine the number of German prisoners who died in Western camps. Beginning in 1948, German civil authorities in the American and British zones began to survey the country to determine how many prisoners were still in captivity or missing, not accounted for. The work went on for several years until October 1951, when the new West German government under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer deposited in the UN a nominal roll of over 1,100,000 names of soldiers still missing, presumed to be captive, according to the survey. In addition to the soldiers, another 300,000 paramilitary personnel and civilians had been taken. Most of the civilians had been seized by the Russians as substitutes for prisoners who had escaped during transport. The survey was about 94 per cent complete in the three Western
zones, but only about 30 per cent complete in the Soviet zone.
*
In effect it was saying that over 1.1 million German soldiers died in captivity, plus the missing 300,000 paramilitaries and civilians. No one before 1989 could account for more than 24,000 of these.
Close to one and a half million Germans were still officially
missing in 2007
.

Subtracting the proven Soviet deaths of Germans from the West German survey of the missing, we see that somewhere between 750,000 and 1,000,000 must have died in other camps, Polish, Yugoslavian, American and French. By far the greater number were held in and died in American and French camps. Approximately 600,000 to 900,000 died in American and French captivity. Many other Axis prisoners died in Western camps.

Thus the Soviet figures completely support figures published in
Other Losses
in 1989,
before
the Soviet archives were opened to the West. The research in the West has proven,
independently of
the Soviet figures
, the death total in the West. It is also true that the figures published in
Other Losses
in 1989 predicted what would be found in the Soviet archives if they should ever be opened. The prediction has proven true.

Both sides in the Cold War proved equally cynical in their lies about the prisoners. At first they simply covered up their own atrocities, but then they began to use the dead prisoners as medieval armies had once hurled corpses into besieged cities to spread plague. A typical exchange occurred during the first few years of the Cold War. Following American and British charges that the Soviets had abused their Japanese prisoners, the Soviets replied with accusations that the British and Americans had abused theirs. The Soviets upped the ante by throwing in charges against the Australians as well.
²⁶

The UK representative in the UN’s Third Committee, dealing with prisoners of war, ‘charged that the USSR had not only vio
lated specific agreements but had also infringed on the general principle to which it had subscribed by signing the Geneva Convention …’ Using very incorrect figures, the UK representative ended by saying that the Soviets still had almost two million German prisoners of war. (At that point, according to the NKVD records in the CSSA, the Soviets had well under one million.) A ‘voluntary registration carried out by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany ending in March 1950’ showed that 1,154,029 West Germans were still missing from their homes. A further 8,972 had similarly been listed by a registration of the people of the Soviet Zone of Occupation. ‘The last news of some 923,000 of that figure had come from the USSR or areas occupied by Soviet troops.’
²⁷
Thus the British lodged in the public mind the conviction that the nefarious Soviets were responsible for deaths that had actually occurred in the camps of Britain’s friends, France and America. Among the signal facts left out by the UK representative was that far more than 1,154,029 prisoners were missing from their homes, because the German survey was incomplete. As the disproportionately low return from East Germany shows, the West German survey covered mainly West Germans missing, not those from other areas, such as the lost German territories to the east, Romania, Italy and other important German allies.
²⁸
Far worse was the omission of the central fact that the so-called ‘last news’ from the ‘missing’ Wehrmacht soldiers was mainly an anti-Soviet fiction generated by the Allies themselves. This is clear from the statements of one of the senior German researchers, Dr Margarethe Bitter, who said of the survey done by the
Ausschuß für Kriegsgefangenenfragen
that the estimates of the location of soldiers who had gone missing were ‘more or less theoretical calculations’.
²⁹
This same flaw was reported clearly in the book
Gesucht Wird
by Kurt W. Boehme, showing that over 62 per cent of the last postal addresses of missing Germans had been recorded in 1944, or even as long ago as 1943.
³⁰
Given the panicky flight of Germans to the West at the very end of the war, which is apparent in the total capture figures of the Allies, these
‘last addresses’ are worthless. The Western Allies took in a total of about 8,000,000 German soldiers and civilians compared with about 2,600,000 Germans captured by the Soviets. Thus the Western Allies had taken around 73 per cent of the total prisoner catch, of whom they had so far recorded only around 24,000 dead. They were accusing the Soviets of 99 per cent of the purported deaths (or ‘missing’).

The defenders of Eisenhower and De Gaulle allege that the Adenauer government report showed that most of the missing prisoners were last seen on the Eastern Front and died in Soviet camps. This lie was being repeated even in the 1990s. For instance, the German historian Major Rüdiger Overmans said on page 159 of
Eisenhower and the German Prisoners of War
that, ‘Three-quarters of the disappeared were registered in the USSR or eastern or south-eastern Europe.’

I interviewed Dr Margarethe Bitter of Munich, who founded the committee that began the work which culminated in the Adenauer government’s report.
³¹
She told me that it was not true that the committee determined the location of the missing prisoners. She said, ‘We did not know where the missing prisoners were.’ Dr Bitter said this twice, once on the phone in French and then in person voluntarily into a tape-recorder in her apartment in Munich, in English and in front of a witness, in June 1991.
³²
Furthermore, in concentrating as they did only on missing Germans, the Western apologists were ignoring millions of prisoners from Hungary, Italy, Austria, Romania and ten other European countries who fought alongside the Germans. Of these, hundreds of thousands never returned home.

Now that the KGB archives openly refute the lies of Western propagandists, Allied apologists cast doubt on the KGB’s accuracy. They say that the Red Army did not record their captures at the front, but only in the rear camps. This they believe shows that the missing German prisoners, who they maintain went missing on the Eastern Front, were never acknowledged as captives by the Soviets. They say that nearly all of them escaped or died en route from the front to the rear
camps.
³³
As we have seen, this has been totally disproven by the historian G. F. Krivosheyev in his book
Without the Seal of Secrecy
, but once again, Western apologists prefer their ‘estimates’ to the hard evidence.

These same apologists also say that the Americans captured fewer prisoners than appear in American records. The effect of this is that the fewer the Americans took, the fewer who could have died. Major Overmans, writing in a book edited by the late Stephen E. Ambrose, who adored Eisenhower, claimed that the Americans took only 3.8 million German prisoners,
³⁴
whereas in fact the Americans in north-west Europe alone took 5,224,310 prisoners of all nationalities, according to SHAEF documents which have already been published. The Americans also took hundreds of thousands more prisoners in North Africa and Italy. Of the total – approximately six million – about 85 per cent were German, making a German total of more than five million. In fact, one senior US Army historian has written that the holdings of Germans in US camps in the summer of 1945 was 7,005,732.
³⁵

The effect of understating the prisoner catch of course is to minimize the deaths for which the army could be held responsible.
³⁶
Also, by limiting their defence of the army only to German prisoners, the defenders of Eisenhower and De Gaulle conveniently set aside the hundreds of thousands of Italians, Romanians, Hungarians and so on who also were held in lethal conditions for a long time. Many among these died as well.

Major Overmans, because of his high position in the historical service of the Bundeswehr, is an official spokesman for the German government on this subject, but it is clear that his undocumented assertions about American captures are contradicted by the prime source in American army documents.

It is equally clear from Soviet records that the Soviets, for an important part of the war, took into their rear (MVD) camps
more
prisoners than the Germans thought they had lost. This discovery destroys one of the prime sources used by Western propagandists during the Cold War, the series of books on war prisoners edited by Erich Maschke and published under the
control of the German government as the final official statistical summary.
³⁷

Maschke says that the Soviets still held alive 559,142 Germans at the end of 1944. He further estimated that by the end of April 1945, some 549,000 had died among all the prisoners caught to date. Adding the two together, we see that according to Maschke it is not possible that the Germans captured by the end of 1944 exceeded 1,108,000, whereas the Soviets actually recorded 1,248,000 Germans captured.
³⁸
And of course, not all the 549,000 who eventually died, according to Maschke, had died by the end of 1944. For our purposes, to illustrate the impossibility of Maschke’s estimates, we will take an estimate of 300,000 dead for the end of 1944. On this basis, the true comparison for the end of 1944 should be about 859,000 Germans captured, according to Maschke, as against 1,248,000 actually taken according to the Soviets.

Much more important for history is to compare the figures for missing shown in the OKW war diary with the Soviet actual capture figures. The OKW recorded on 31 January 1945 that the missing on the Eastern front totalled 1,018,365, whereas we have seen that the Soviets recorded 1,248,000 captured a whole month previously.
³⁹
Clearly, the Soviet figures are more dependable than even the OKW war diaries. For other periods of the war in the east, the results are similar. The Soviets consistently reported more prisoners taken than the OKW reported to be missing. In Soviet hands, there were no unreported prisoners, so there could have been no deaths of unreported prisoners.
⁴⁰

On the Western Front, the picture is far different. The Americans themselves, from Major General Milton A. Reckord to Colonel Philip Lauben, say that they failed to account for many scores of thousands of German prisoners both in transit and
even while they were held in fixed camps
. In one train transfer, over 20 per cent of the Germans were missing. In one takeover of camps by the French from the Americans, according to Lauben, it was possible that as many as 105,000 prisoners were missing out of 275,000 previously reported by the same Americans.
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The general truth of the Soviet capture records is confirmed in detail by the experience of Panzer commander Colonel Hans von Luck, a colleague and friend of Stephen E. Ambrose. Von Luck was captured by the Soviets in the winter of 1944–45, ordered by the Soviets to assume responsibility for disciplining his men and marched with them to the rear camp near Dresden. En route, some Germans escaped, but as Von Luck wrote, ‘The guards threatened to shoot me if further prisoners were to escape. But what was worse, they fetched civilians at random from the nearby villages to make up the number … I did not know unfortunately that the number of prisoners to be delivered had been precisely determined …’
⁴²

The Red Army practice was to telephone the numbers from the army camp to the NKVD rear camp ahead of time, which Von Luck did not know. Captain Harry G. Braun of the German navy also observed the same practice. Braun was captured by the Soviets near Stettin in the summer of 1945. He escaped through the bush, afraid that the Soviet guards would ‘come back with a search party, maybe even with bloodhounds. It wasn’t until much later that we found out we had no cause to worry. It was common practice for the Russians to simply go to the next village, grab the first two warm bodies they came across and then arrive at their destination with the correct number of prisoners.’
⁴³
This practice of the Soviets was also confirmed by Captain Galitski during a historical conference in May 1996, at Massey College in Toronto. That the Soviets lost hundreds of thousands of prisoners to death between capture and first documentation, thus accounting for most of the missing prisoners, is clearly a fantasy. Yet it is advanced to this day by historians of nominal repute who, when asked, admit they have no documentary sources whatsoever.
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