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Great photos. I feel like we had a conversation about #25 before.Were average, low ranking German soldiers allowed to return to their homes immediately after the war, or were they detained/put to work elsewhere for some time? I noticed the one of the Germans tending to the cemetery.
A huge number of Germans in the hundreds of thousands to a million or more were POWs in Western Europe through the winter of 1945-1946 and beyond. Sources vary that tens of thousands to half a million died that winter. We know the French recruited SS veterans for their Foreign Legion to fight against the commies in Indo-China. High value types like Adolf Galland were held captive until 1947. The USSR did not release survivors until 1955.
My wife's grandfather did not return from SIberia until 1953 and he was captured just after Stalingrad fell. There was a POW camp in Oklahoma about 50 miles from where I grew up that did not get emptied until early 1947. In fact, that town now has many Germans living there who returned to the area after there release and married locals.
What was the point of keeping all those POWs? Was it just to thwart any potential effort to regroup an army of pocket resistance afterwards? It seems to me that the process of nation-rebuilding would require large quantities of men of the age that would have been fighting in the war.
What was the point of keeping all those POWs? Was it just to thwart any potential effort to regroup an army of pocket resistance afterwards? It seems to me that the process of nation-rebuilding would require large quantities of men of the age that would have been fighting in the war.
The point was revenge. The Russians used many of the POWs as forced labor just like the Germans had with Russian POWs during the war. If I remember right only 20%-30% of German POWs ever returned from Russian captivity.
