Hitler's Rassenkampf in the East: The Forgotten Genocide of Soviet POWs

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Notes

Ueberschar, “The Military Campaign,” 143.

Velikaia Otechestvennaia Voina, 1941–1945 gg, vol. 4, 289.

Ellman and Maksudov, “Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War,” 674.

It is highly unlikely that Stalin actually uttered these words; in his biography of Truman published in 1992, David McCullough asserts that Stalin made the remark en passant to Churchill while discussing the opening of the second front. He cites as evidence Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko's The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny, which was published in 1983, but scholars are generally agreed that the remark comes from Erich Maria Remarque's Die Schwarze Obelisk which was published in 1956.

Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, 48.

Forster, “The German Army and the Ideological War against the Soviet Union,” 26.

Hamburg Institute for Social Research, The German Army and Genocide, 100.

North, “Soviet Prisoners of War,” 38.

Ibid., 39.

Hamburg Institute for Social Research, The German Army and Genocide, 142.

Werth, Russia at War, 635.

Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 415.

Werth, Russia at War, 636.

Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 218.

Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 416.

Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 290.

Calvocoressi and Wint, Total War, 456.

Hamburg Institute for Social Research, The German Army and Genocide, 142.

Stern, Hitler, 216.

Hitler, Mein Kampf, 654–55.

Quoted in Crowe, The Holocaust, 94.

Ibid., 103.

Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 543.

Ibid., 357.

Quoted in Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich, 131.

Forster, “The German Army and the Ideological War,” 15.

Ibid., 17. See also Noakes and Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945, 1086.

Ibid., 18.

Quoted in Crowe, The Holocaust, 197.

Ibid.

Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–1945, 114–15.

Streit, “The German Army and the Policies of Genocide,” 11. See also Czech, Auschwitz, 50.

Crowe, The Holocaust, 263–64.

Ibid., 232.

Hoess, Death Dealer, 134.

Ibid.

Ulrich, Hitler's Foreign Workers, 140. As late as April 1941 the Wehrmacht asserted that it had no interest in preserving the lives of Soviet POWs for forced labor.

Bohn, Reichskommissariat Norwegen, 377.

Megargee, War of Annihilation, 117.

North, “Soviet Prisoners of War,” 39.

Megargee, War of Annihilation, 118.

North, “Soviet Prisoners of War,” 40.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 4–5.

Bartov, The Eastern Front, 153.

Ibid., 154.

Klaus, Durch die Holle des Krieges, 453.

Veselovskii, Skrytaia biografiia, 76.

Clark, Barbarossa, 206.

Bartov, The Eastern Front, 110–16.

Ibid., 135.

Fritzsche, Life and Death, 148–49.

Werth, Russia at War, 709.

Crowe, The Holocaust, 425.

These were called Proverochno-fil'tratsionnyi punkty, or Verification Filtration Points.

Merridale, Ivan's War, 351.

Glavatskii, Rossiia, kotoruiu my ne znali, 1939–1993: khrestomatiia. According to a memo from the head of the GULAG, by 1944 the number of prisoners had fallen from 2.3 million to 1.2 million.

Ibid., 353.

Ibid.

Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 240.

If you cannot personally visit this resource at its Moscow location (57/6 Zemlianoi) you can access part of their database under “Vospominaniia o Gulage i ikh avtory” at <http://www.sakharov-center.ru>.

The testimonies of the great majority of Soviet soldiers taken captive by the Germans indicate that they usually asserted that they were wounded at the time of capture (and often unconscious as well); this evidently was what they had told their interrogators during the filtration process in a vain attempt to avoid the unwarranted stigma attached to their surrender.

Personal interview with the author, 22 December 2003.

All returning soldiers had to sign this form, in which they promised not to discuss anything they had seen in the West, such as the general level of prosperity, the neat and orderly farmsteads, etc. Even the prisoners who were released from the GULAG a decade or more after the end of the war were required to sign this document.

Bakanichev, Zapiski katorzhanina, 2–3.

Personal interview with the author, 22 December 2003.

Personal interview with the author, 22 December 2003.

Troitskii, Tiazhelye sny, 103. There is evidence to suggest that the relatives of those soldiers who had “betrayed the Motherland” were also liable to have some kind of punitive administrative action taken against them.

Ibid., 105.

Ibid., 110.

Ibid., 111.

Ibid., 113–14.

Ibid., 115.

This meant that there was an admixture of Russian and “Nordic” blood.

Ibid., 115–16.

Ibid., 120.

Ibid., 121.

Ibid., 122.

Ibid., 123–30.

Personal interview with the author, 15 November 2004.

Personal interview with the author, 21 November 2004.

Personal interview with the author, 3 December 2004.

Mueller, Die deutsche Wirtschaftspolitik in den besetzen sowjetischen Gebieten 1941–1943, 391.

Personal interview with the author, 3 December 2004.

Personal interview with the author, 3 December 2004.

Personal interview with the author, 4 December 2004.

Goebbels, Die Tagebucher von Joseph Goebbels, 497.

See Mulligan, “Reckoning the Cost of the People's War,” 27–48; and especially Vsenarodnoe partizanskoe dvizhenie v Belorussii v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny 1941–1944.

See Mueller, Hitlers Ostkrieg und die deutsche Siedlungspolitik.