A
R e v i e w of
Karner,
Stefan. Im Archipel GUPVI; Kriegsgefangenschaft und
Internierung in der Sowjetunion 1941-1956. Wien;
Muenchen: Oldenbourg, 1995.This book
details the capture, executions, treatment and eventual
release of German prisoners of war in Russia. It is based
on materials found in different Soviet archives which,
formerly classified top secret and barred to public
scrutiny, have been declassified since the year 1990. It
is the first of several projected volumes to be published
under the aegis of the Ludwig Boltzman Institut fuer
Kriegsfolgen-Forschung located in Graz-Wien. The author,
Stefan Karner, is a Professor at the Institut fuer
Wirtschafts-und-Sozial-Geschichte of the Karl-Franzens
Universitaet located in Graz, Austria.
We must
first distinguish between the GULAG archipelago made
infamous by Solzhenitsyn and the GUPVI archipelago
described by Professor Karner. The first acronym stands
for Glanoe Upravlenie LAGerie (Hauptverwaltung fuer
Lager=Central Administration of the Camps) while the
second refers to Glavnoe Upravlenie po delam
Voennoplennych i Internirovannych (Hauptverwaltung fuer
Angelegenheiten von Kriegsgefangenen und
Internierten=Central Administration for Affairs relating
to Prisoners of War and Internees). Both of these
administrative units were, of course, subordinated to the
dreaded NKVD.
At
the heart of the matter is a great and engrossing
mystery: the virtual disappearance, without a trace,
of 1,400,000 German prisoners of war after the end of
World War II; and, if this otherwise admirable book
has a fault, it is that the statistical scope of the
issue, with all its potential for emotional tumult, is
not properly set and
defined.
You can
get a better sense of the overall issue by studying the
local memorials to be found all over West Germany. The
small, North German town of Friesoythe includes the total
of 76 missing and presumed dead. The equally small town
of Nellingen, near Stuttgart, gives the total of 44 men
who are missing as a result of World War II operations.
The Mahnmal located in the larger town of Kempten gives
astounding totals which effectively stopped me in my
tracks on a recent visit. It included the totals of 224
dead and 650 missing and presumed dead. By comparison,
the total of American MIA's in the Vietnamese Conflict
has been officially set at more than 2,200 for the whole
of the continental U.S.A.--and the hubbub and occasional
recriminations fill the airwaves to this day.
Professor
Karner believes that the 1,400,000 Germans died chiefly
on the Russian front. The problem is that at least one of
the central documents culled from the Soviet Archives,
the statistical report of Colonel Bulanov, Chief
of the Prison Division of the Ministry of Internal
Affairs, clearly states the total number of German
prisoners (2,388,443) and the total number of the German
dead (356,687) along with the capture totals and
mortality figures of Hungarians, Rumanians, Austrians,
etc. (p. 79).
If
the number of Germans missing and presumed dead stands
at 1,400,000 and the highest possible Soviet source
gives the total number of the dead at 356,687 then
clearly somewhat in excess of a million dead Germans
seem not to have died in the Soviet Union but may have
died, as James Bacque has
contended, on the Western (not the Russian) front as
captives of the French and the Americans.
Karner
deals with this possibility by arguing that the Bulanov
report is exclusively devoted to stationary camps,
hospitals and prisons within the Soviet Union, and that
the missing Germans died in that hellish interval between
their capture and their final transport to the 4,000
camps of the GUPVI scattered throughout the length and
breadth of the Soviet Union.
He cites
two top secret reports, one by Lavrentia Beria
dated December 30, 1942 (p. 40) and one by Lt. Col.
Dmitriev dated May 4, 1943 (p. 41) to support this
contention. In the first document Beria, the Commissar of
Internal Affairs, gives the reasons for the high death
rates among the Germans. They often suffered from hunger
before their captivity, or they were forced to march two
to three hundred kilometers to the next railway station
without adequate care and provisions, or the sick and the
wounded were, contrary to the existing Soviet regulation
that they were to be cared for in front-line hospitals
before their departure, were often forced to march in
their weakened state, with the result that one shipment
of Germans from the Don Front to the interior suffered
"approximately 800 deaths." (p. 40)
Colonel
Dmitriev cites the mortality figures suffered by 8,007
German POWs, of whom 1,526 died in the course of
transport, while an additional 4,663 died in the camp
itself in the ensuing six weeks from the consequences of
dystrophy (4,326), typhus (54), frost (162), wounds (23)
and other causes (98). (p. 41)
Karner
contends that the existence of numerous NKVD reports and
eyewitness accounts confirm that, despite standing
regulations to the contrary, the sick and the wounded
were transported over long distances--and that this
factor is one of the causes of the high death totals
PRIOR
TO REGISTRATION
(p. 39, emphasis supplied.] It should be pointed out
that this Russian practise, if true as alleged, was not
confined to the Russians alone.
Numerous
German eyewitness accounts--if not official American
reports--record that it was American practise to take
many classes of sick and wounded German POWs out of
hospitals, including the sick, the blind and the
amputees, and dump them in open air POW cages. An open
air field devoid even of tents is no sanatarium even for
veteran soldiers in otherwise good health. There are
reports, by entirely credible observers, of the presence
of blind and amputated Prisoners of War, including even
amputees with bloody stumps, in Ebensee, Helfta and
Rheinberg. It therefore follows that very vulnerable
prisoners were also found in American POW cages; that
they were exposed to the elements in early spring; and
that many of them died miserable deaths from the
complications of old wounds, exposure to the elements,
extremely low calorie diets and a polluted water
supply.
It is
Karner's belief that that approximately half of all
German Prisoners of War in Soviet hands never reached the
permanent camps of the GUPVI.
Mit
der entscheidenden Wende des Krieges in Stalingrand
und dem sukzessiven Rueckzug der Deutschen Wehrmacht
und ihrer Verbuendeten 1943 nahm die Zahl der
aktenmaessig feststellbaren Kriegsgefangenen rapide
zu, obwohl etwa die Haelfte der Kriegsgefangene in den
stationaeren Lagern gar nicht mehr registriert werden
konnte: Sie waren zwischen ihrer Gefangennahme und der
Registrierung im stationaeren Lager, also noch im
Eingangsbereich des Archipel GUPVI, ums Legen
gekommen, verhungert, erfroren, total erschoepft,
schwerst verwundet oder weil die entsprechende
kaempfende Einheit der Roten Armee keine Gefangenen
machte, kurzerhand erschossen worden. (58)
The book
includes, on a quick count, some 81 pages of
illustrations; but there are not, needless to say,
illustrations of soldateska executing the German
Landsers. We have, however, a tendentious paragraph from
Harrison Salisbury, the Russian war correspondent of the
NEW
YORK TIMES,
which proves that the killings occurred--but under
special circumstances.
German
prisoners with dead eyes stumbled among the corpses
[in the Crimea], carting them off to endless
trenches under the tommy guns of sullen Red Army men.
I could not tell whether either Russians or Germans
knew what they were doing. [?] The Germans
moved like sleepwalkers. The hardest thing, they told
us, was the moment of surrender. Unless you were in a
big group, a hundred or a thousand, you didn't have a
chance. The Soviet tommy gunners just mowed you down.
The Nazis had been waiting for the boats to take them
off, the boats that never came. This was war and now I
understood it. War was the garbage heap of humanity.
It was shit and piss and gas from the rump; terror and
bowels that ran without control. Here Hitler's Aryan
man died, [sic] a worse death than any he
devised in the ovens of Auschwitz, anus open, spewing
out his gut until a Red tommy gunner ended it with a
lazy sweep of his chattering weapon. -- Salisbury,
Harrison E. A JOURNEY FOR OUR TIMES; A MEMOIR.
(New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 264.
Febrile
journalism makes for feeble analysis. The impassioned
journalist has undone the thinker. For Salisbury has not
witnessed war but a war CRIME,
and he cannot distinguish the one from the other without
the help of a nearby court. No self-respecting bartender
would concoct such nonsense. However, one of the points
about the passage is that it makes clear that these
executions--and war crimes--occurred under special
conditions. They were not inevitable.
Karner,
who has perhaps heard similar reports of drumhead
executions of German POWs by certain Soviet soldiers from
German and Austrian survivors, comes to the conclusion
that 356,687 Germans died in the coils of the GUPVI along
with another 161,793 Hungarians, Rumanians, Austrians,
Czechoslovaks, Poles, etc. More momentously, however, he
also concludes that the forces of neglect, cruel
indifference and disregard for the laws of war, led to
the deaths of an additional 500,000 to 1,000,000 Germans
in Russian captivity before these men (and women) reached
the (relative) safety of the GUPVI. (p. 178)
It
appears, then, that Karner is in the anomalous position
of assuming the existence of a
DUNKELZIFFER
[an estimated number of unreported or unrecorded
cases] to make his point that Soviet forces killed,
not the 356,687 of Colonel Bulanov's summary, but one
million men (and women) more than this total. Given the
somewhat limited evidence that Karner cites, the one
memorandum by Beria and the one telegram by Colonel
Dmitriev, it is not clear to me that the
DUNKELZIFFER
has
any credibility. In any case, these archives were
SECRET,
and they recorded the deaths of some 350,000 or so
Germans. Why should the Soviets have been reluctant to
adduce proof of the existence of still another 1 million
dead Germans? when the proof would merely moulder in
another archive declared off-limits for all time and
never see the light of day?
The book,
considered as a physical object, is magnificent in every
way. It is printed on photographic plate paper, and the
signatures are gathered and properly bound as once
ordained by Gutenberg. It is perhaps even comparable to
that other work on the fate of German
POWs,
JAHRE IM ABSEITS
by Ernst Helmut Segschneider (Bramsche: Rasch, c1991).
The numerous photographs and facsimiles are utterly
marvellous. They demonstrate that the coils of the GUPVI
were multifarious. Here we see German officers, heads
shorn and bald as billiard balls, attending a meeting of
the Antifa, and every face is uniformly wary, glum and
expressionless.
Here we
see some of the buildings put up by the German prisoners:
the Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in
Vilnius; apartment blocks in the Urals (Revda, Asbest,
Sverdlovsk/ Ekaterinburg); passport photographs of poor
Margarethe Ottilinger, the Austrian accused of
espionage and sentenced to 25 years of forced labor--and
her later return to Austria in 1955 on a train and on a
stretcher; photographs of German prisoners, heads shorn,
at work and even at play; photographs of numerous
barracks and perhaps even more numerous graveyards with
individual graves; photographs of Cossacks consigned to
the untender mercies of Soviet forces marching and riding
on the long bridge at Judenburg, Austria; photographs of
Germans who, convicted after certain show trials, of war
crimes, strung up on the gallows (Karner memorably
remarks that German soldiers were similarly convicted of
the crime of killing the Poles at Katyn, when we now know
with certainty, after Gorbachev's admission, that the
crimes were committed by the NKVD); but there are no
photographs of the serried ranks of the German,
Hungarian, Rumanian, Austrian and other dead.
Paul
Boytinck
Postscript.
The greater issue, and one we should perhaps discuss,
is the effect the opening of the Soviet archives has
had--and will have--on various facets of German
history.
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