Not to be Liquidated

[H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine] EDITOR’S NOTE: Below is a review submitted by H-German subscriber Paul Boytinck. While we are happy to provide information on this book to the H-German community, we should also note that the review is not part of our H-German book review project and was sent totally at Mr. Boytinck’s initiative.

We should also strongly caution those who might be considering replies or comments on this review that we aired a variety of opinions on this subject in May 1995 and we will not be reopening debate on it.

You may review past comments on the subject by using your WWW browser to go to this URL: gopher://h-net.msu.edu/11/lists/H-GERMAN/discuss/ve Submitted by: Paul Boytinck 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. 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.

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. 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.