Porteroso said:
Canada2017 said:
Redbrickbear said:
Canada2017 said:
EatMoreSalmon said:
German POW's in Arkansas helped provide labor for local farms, including my grandfather's. My mother remembered them well. The ones she saw were not malnourished. I can't vouch for any Brit or French camps.
The abuse of German POW's occurred almost exclusively on the European continent. Eisenhower bares a ton of responsibility for what happened…….and the French were particularly brutal .
German POW's in camps located in the United States were treated extremely well . Many Germans wrote home to say they were better fed than civilians back in Germany . Reportedly black US army troops guarding the prisoners complained that locals treated the Germans better than them .
My material grandfather ran a Axis (mostly German/ but some Italian soldiers) POW camp near Mexia.
He respected the heck out of those soldiers.
We still have in the family a painting of my grandmother (grandfather's girlfriend at the time) portrait painted by a German officer who went to school for art in Hamburg pre-war.
My grandmother came on camp often to see my grandfather for lunch (basically dates)...and the guy went over to my granddad and asked if he could paint a head portrait of her. She agreed to sit for it and we still have it!
That is very cool.
My Dad's best friend after the war was a former German solder who surrendered to the Americans rather than the Russians . This guy ( his name was Paul ) then moved to the United States with his wife.
Paul told me all kinds of war stories from the German perspective . The one that made the biggest impression was Paul's account that the Russian civilians initially treated the invading German army as ' liberators from Stalin's brutality '. He said ' If we had just treated the Russian people decently we could have walked to Moscow unopposed '.
Yeah, that's crazy, right? Maybe people just want to be treated respectfully. Do you think the 6 million Jews thought so, or just the Nazi liberators of Moscow?
You are consistently clueless on almost every topic and rarely worth communicating with...but here goes.
Stalin had been executing thousands of his own people for years before the war. Intentionally starved to death 2-3 million and exiled tens of thousands to the Siberian gulags . When Russia occupied the eastern half of Poland early in the war Stalin ordered the immediate execution of over 6000 captured Polish officers. When the Germans discovered the mass graves Hitler had the international Red Cross investigate the site to confirm Russian complicity . Stalin was psychopath ........the Russian people were terrified of him.
Paul mentioned how over 400,000 RUSSIANS joined the German army. ( double checked this as I found it so hard to believe. BTW at the end of the war Stalin executed each and every one of these men )
I asked Paul what changed the attitude of the Russian people toward the invading German army .
' Our stupid SS units began rounding up villagers and executing them...by the thousands . So naturally they began fighting us to the death. '
BTW Paul also mentioned he always saw a huge amount of AMERICAN equipment captured from the Russians ...especially trucks and artillery pieces. Without such American aid Paul believed the Russian army would have collapsed .