As you all may know, Febuary 3rd is the day the glorious Red Army retook Stalingrad from the germans, and captured over 160,000 troops under the leadership of General Zuhkov. Please post some pics of your best Russian and Eastern front German armor peices.
Its also the start date of the Death march into Stalins death camps
And my Daughter’s Birthday!
Feb 1st is my lads Birthday
Just 6,000 Germans survived.
You guys read that book Stalingrad by Antony Beevor??
Excellent book. One of my favorites.
Tells the story from both sides and tells of the brutality of both the Germans and Russians.
Most definitely an important day for the morale of the punished Red Army, at least at that point in time. I’m just in the middle of a course outlining the events surrounding the great patriotic war from both the German and Russian sides. It is said that conservatively, somewhere around 20, 000, 000 Russians died during WWII.
I wonder if we’ll ever really know how many of those “Glorious Red Army” troops died at the hands of “Stalin”? Semper Fi, mike
And how many died before WW2 when Stalin didnt trust the Army
or the farmers
or the Teachers
Doctors
etc etc
I’m just reading Russ Schneider’s “Siege - A Novel of the Eastern Front 1942”. The first chapter details the plight of Russian political prisoners in a gulag in eastern Russia who are marched hundreds of miles and then packed into box cars to travel to the front to fend off the Germans. Half don’t survive the trip west, and the rest that do are chained into bunkers and pillboxes to fire machineguns at the advancing Germans. Most of these prisoners didn’t survive either. Scary.
Jim
20 million per war in the 20th century. And you wonder why the Russians still don’t like the Germans.
yhea really
I’d hardly say the russians were innocent themselves
It is an excellent book. His book about the fighting in Berlin is also a must read.
I’d hate to be captured by either side and one can only imagine the hell they endured. According to one ref, out of 3.5 million German prisoners taken, 1.5 million died. On the flip side, 3.7 million Russians parished out of 5.7 million. What a gruesome campaign.
Actually, the number, when compared to the total fatalities, is fairly small. Out of those 20 million, most died PRIOR to the Russian counteroffensive to Barbarossa, and many were civilians of all types. Leningrad in particular was hit very hard, and many people died from hunger, disease, and other factors. I know that most westerners have an inert paranoia of all things communist and Stalinist, and don’t get me wrong, Stalin had his fair share of blood on his hands, but he was not the determining factor in so many Russians getting killed.
Also, as I said, the number conservatively was said to have been 20,000,000, but the figure really approaches close to 25 million. These are things that are seldom taught in schools here. It is sad to see so many people completely uninformed about some facts and events that have had such an important role in shaping the world that we live in.
I was meaning Stalin killed them before 1939 in his Gulags and firing squad
Winston churchill was in Russian on a viset when it was happening and still sided with Stalin
Yes I know what you meant, and I reiterate. Compared to hunger, desease, and other factors, Stalin’s death camps did not kill people in the millions.
Stalin was never the likeable type, but at the time, and up to pretty much D-Day, Churchill would have sided with the Devil himself. The Russian front was a godsend to Churchill as it created a wide, expansive front that drained the German’s resources and attention away from the west coast, thus away from England. During the closing years of the war, the Allies could not afford to NOT have Stalin on their side. At the close of the war, Russians had a STANDING army occupying foreign territory numbering in 12,000,000, which is basically the largest army, EVER.
Actually Stalin was largely responsible for the deaths of millions of people. We’ll probably never know exactly how many, but one could estimate about 32 million people were killed by Stalin. As a westerner myself Ive found we’ve recieved little if no education about the crimes comitted by Stalin. Everyone knows about the large numbers of jews killed by the natzis, but noone seems to remember the millions of ukrainians who died as a result of stalin, and the countless other people who died at gulags, and in stalins purges. Many people also seem to have forgotten about the “glorious red armies” cowardly attack on Finland, and Poland as well.
I think it is fair to say the all countries have had a share in blood letting in the past, but in my humble oppinion stalin was responsible for more deaths than any other single figure in history.
Dave