LogFAQs > #949990848

Firewerx posted...

And there's a perception that Stalin was an equal opportunities mass murderer; everyone in their right mind feared the knock at the door at midnight. Generally true, but some nationalities were at times singled out for harsh treatment.

Nevertheless, of the approximately 5.7 million Soviet prisoners, "3,300,000 had perished by the time the war was over." As if anticipating the counterclaim (which is supposed to alter one's appalled reaction), Evans immediately continues: "By comparison 356,687 out of about 2 million German prisoners taken by the Red Army, mostly in the later stages of the war, did not survive." Moreover, many died in Soviet camps from the same straitened circumstances the general population suffered. They starved; we starved; he, she, or it starved with happy uniformity. Even curtains at the windows grew thin.

One of the many shocks this book delivers is the readers realization that the killing is now to begin in earnest. Entire calvary brigades were now assigned the task of destroying Jews. One such group especially distinguished itself by shooting "more than 25,000 Jews in under a month." At first, executioners were not to waste bullets on women but simply to drive them into the Pripet Marshes, the greatest area of swampy woodland in Europe, where they might drown; however the Marshes were deep enough only for wading, so the women, like the men, had to be shot. The Germans were not to be slowed by these defeats. They found ravines, and in one called Babi Yar, after undressing and lying down neat rows the Jews were bulleted behind the neck to a total of 33,771.

Men cannot imagine such numbers. They can only perform them.

In some cases, Serbian prisoners would be used to collect from a fresh kill of Jews the contents of their pockets, and the soldiers would risk giving these people penknives to cut off ring finger. A handy chart, of which there are many, shows by means of variously striped shades the numbers killed in the area stretching from Vilna (248,468), from Minsk to Kursk (91,102), Kiev to Stalino (105,988) and Taganrog to Simferopol (91,678) during the years 1941-1943. Only once more shall I give in to outrage and cite another particularly instructive moment, in order to draw your attention to Hans Kruger, head of local security police in Stanislawow, Galicia, who threw a picnic for the shooters to enjoy between shootings, and oversaw the massacre, "with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a hotdog in the other..." You may think this picture is simply grotesque. There is another in which we see an officer at horrified by the sordid conditions in which some Jewish children were being held that he approved their immediate execution in order to spare them further pain. This exhibits a concern that might be expected for chickens.

Timing became important. Himmler had to bawl out one overzealous police chief in Riga who had a trainload of Berlin deportees killed too promptly...

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Trying to dunk since July 2020