The Real Reason German POWs Were Still in Soviet Camps 10 Years After WWII — It Wasn’t Just Revenge

Comments · 127

• MA

  @marcboblee1863 · 11 days ago

  The Soviets had no regard for the Poles in 1939, invading a sovereign nation, nor the Baltic States, carrying out mass excacutions, hypocrisy knows no bounds...

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• BH

  @bharat7917 · 11 days ago

  I'm surprised you didn't mention the Stalin factor. As long as he was alive (till 1953), there was no way those German soldiers were coming back.

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• HE

  @Heraclitus-z2j · 9 days ago

  This very well done and informative.  You should do a similar investigation into Americans who were captured by the North Vietnamese and then completely abandoned by the U.S. Government and never came home.

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• HO

  @howardjlogan · 11 days ago

  I've read where the Soviets kept around 25,000 American POWs they liberated from German POW camps.  They needed the Americans for the same reason they needed the German POWs...expertise and workmanship.  Stalin and the Soviet Union had no problem using people and knew that the western allies would look the other way during the Cold War.

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• ER

  @ericarbib4183 · 10 days ago

  According to a lot of movies in the 60s, 70s and 80s, there were in the URSS, a lot of POW camps,<br>for Germans, Italians, Spanish, Romanians, Bulgarians etc. All the countries that helped Nazi<br>Germany in WW2, payed a heavy toll, of human suffering and money price too.

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• NI

  @nicholasbeck1558 · 11 days ago (edited)

  A truly exceptional and critical inquiry into the fate of and reasons why the Soviet Union held on to German POWs after World War II.

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• TH

  @thehiddenledger-x2b · 11 days ago

  Here’s the uncomfortable question: if a prisoner’s release eventually depends less on his sentence or wartime conduct and more on what his government is willing to offer diplomatically, what is he at that point — a prisoner, a labor asset, or a bargaining chip? That distinction completely changes how I look at the final years of Soviet captivity.

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• HI

  @HistorysHiddenLogic · 9 days ago

  The most disturbing part is the transition from mass death to “useful” survival. Once the Soviet authorities realized that living prisoners could rebuild mines, railways and factories, their survival became an economic calculation. That is a chilling example of how human beings can be reduced to numbers in a system.

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• SH

  @ShashikantDhusia-j9j · 7 days ago

  This gives a broader insight to end of wars between countries, the social memory is shredded to rags.

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• GE

  @GeneHornung-g5p · 5 days ago (edited)

  There is something very important that wasn&apos;t mentioned in this video. Approximately one million former Soviet POWs and civilians served as auxiliary volunteers or combat units for the German army during WWII. Part of the reason was that Stalin and the Soviet regime largely viewed and treated captured Red Army soldiers as traitors who were guilty of desertion or treason. Soviet POWs feared their Soviet liberators more than their German captors. Stalin expected every soldier in the Red Army to fight to the death. There were other reasons, like being better fed, clothed, and sheltered, as well as receiving better medical attention. Nevertheless, many of these men felt that if they were &apos;liberated&apos;, they would be executed or sent to a labor camp. Their families were often punished as well. Stalin himself refused to exchange captured German generals for his own son, who eventually died in a German concentration camp.

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• GO

  @gottfriedheumesser1994 · 10 days ago

  Ignoring the state treaty between Austria and the Allies, signed on May 15th, 1955, is a major oversight in your account. Perhaps the Soviets wanted to reunify Germany in exchange for its neutrality, as they had in Austria. Austria&apos;s neutrality was not written in the state treaty, but it was agreed by handshake.

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• RA

  @ranjitchaudhury4521 · 11 days ago

  Very good video.

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